Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • The Kindness of Strangers

    The Kindness of Strangers

    At five years old, I already understood the fundamentals of method acting: total immersion, psychological transformation, and the sacred obligation to remain in character no matter how inconvenient it became for nearby adults. I learned these principles not in drama school but at the swimming pool of the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, California, where I regularly transformed myself into my favorite aquatic superhero, Namor the Sub-Mariner.

    Once I entered the kidney-shaped pool’s shallow end, ordinary reality ceased to exist.

    I was no longer a skinny little boy with chlorine-reddened eyes and cheap swim trunks.

    I was Prince Namor: mutant monarch of Atlantis, enemy of surface corruption, and scourge of all underwater tyrants.

    Most notably, I was frequently locked in mortal combat with Attuma the Barbarian, the savage warlord whose destruction of civilization depended almost entirely on my failure to remain submerged long enough to stop him.

    This created enormous tension with my parents.

    After several hours in the water, they would stand poolside pleading for me to come inside for lunch while I ignored them with the grave seriousness of a man defending the planet from annihilation.

    But clearly they did not understand the acting process.

    Once fully inside the psychological architecture of Namor, I could not simply snap back into suburban childhood because someone had prepared a peanut butter sandwich. Transformation of this magnitude required commitment. The role consumed me completely.

    My toes had shriveled into pale wrinkled prunes.
    My lungs burned with chlorine fatigue.
    My fingers looked partially embalmed.

    None of this mattered.

    I was Prince Namor.

    And what kind of superhero abandons a life-or-death struggle against mutant warlords merely to eat lunch beside the pool?

    The fate of humanity demanded sacrifice.

    Besides, peanut butter sandwiches seemed embarrassingly trivial when Atlantis itself hung in the balance.

    On dry land, I transformed into Captain America, flexing imaginary super-soldier muscles while battling the evil Red Skull in defense of freedom and civilization. Like Captain America, I too fought Nazis.

    The difference was that Captain America fought fictional Nazis.

    I encountered what appeared to be real ones.

    Their son was a boy in my kindergarten class named Teddy Heinrich, who lived nearby at the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose, California. Teddy possessed the smug confidence of a child who had absorbed adult ideology without remotely understanding its implications. At five years old, he spoke about Nazis the way other children spoke about baseball teams or superheroes.

    “My grandfather was SS,” he once bragged proudly. “My dad says the Germans were the bravest soldiers in the war.”

    At the time, I barely understood what the word “Nazi” meant. I was too young even to understand that on my mother’s side I was Jewish. My entire understanding of Nazis came primarily from watching The Sound of Music, where it was fairly obvious that the men wearing swastikas were “the bad guys” threatening the escape of the singing Austrian family.

    So hearing Teddy praise Nazis with cheerful admiration bewildered me.

    After school I sometimes visited Teddy’s apartment, where we watched Superman and The Three Stooges reruns in the living room. We could not watch those programs at my apartment because our television lacked a UHF antenna, a technological deficiency that in 1960s childhood carried the emotional weight of economic sanctions.

    Teddy’s parents struck me immediately as strange.

    They rarely emerged from their bedroom and seemed oddly ancient compared to the other adults at the Royal Lanai. Most of the time they remained secluded in the master bedroom like gloomy aristocrats hiding from daylight after some unspecified European scandal.

    Teddy’s father unnerved me the most.

    He wore black suits constantly—even while lounging at home—and possessed a large severe face that looked carved from exhausted stone. I never once saw him smile. Not a grin. Not a smirk. Not even the brief involuntary twitch of amusement normal human beings occasionally produce.

    He looked like a man perpetually preparing to deliver grim military news.

    Teddy’s mother was equally unsettling in a quieter way. She wore bifocals low across her pale nose, gingham dresses buttoned high at the collar, and kept her dark hair wound tightly into a bun that seemed designed less for fashion than emotional containment. She carried herself with chronic nervousness, as though awaiting the arrival of some invisible catastrophe only she could perceive.

    What struck me even then was how little Teddy resembled them.

    They both had dark hair.
    Teddy was blond.

    At five years old, however, I lacked the sophistication to pursue the discrepancy very far. Perhaps, I reasoned, they were simply old enough to dye gray hair darker. Childhood logic is remarkably accommodating when television is available nearby.

    And honestly, once Superman appeared on the screen and the Three Stooges started poking each other in the eyes, I found myself sufficiently distracted not to dwell too deeply on the unsettling atmosphere hanging over Teddy Heinrich’s apartment like stale cigarette smoke and unresolved history.

    One afternoon while Teddy and I sat watching Superman reruns in his apartment, he suddenly informed me in a hushed, excited voice that his father possessed an authentic Nazi SS uniform.

    The announcement thrilled him.

    He practically vibrated with anticipation as he led me toward the hallway closet like a child preparing to unveil hidden treasure. Throwing open the closet door, he revealed a black military tunic hanging carefully inside beside the unmistakable red armband emblazoned with a black swastika.

    The thing radiated menace. The black fabric looked both severe and theatrical, like a costume designed for authoritarian nightmares. I stared at it with the cautious fascination children reserve for objects they know are somehow dangerous but do not yet fully understand.

    Teddy, meanwhile, beamed with pride.

    “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. 

    At that precise moment, Teddy’s father suddenly opened the bedroom door.

    He glanced first at us, then at the SS uniform hanging exposed in the closet. His expression tightened instantly. Without stepping fully into the hallway, he spoke in a low, muffled voice heavy with irritation and unease.

    “Teddy,” he said sharply. “Put that back and don’t take it out again.”

    Then he retreated into the bedroom and slammed the door shut.

    The entire exchange lasted perhaps ten seconds, but even as a child I sensed something strange moving beneath the surface of that household—some mixture of shame, secrecy, nostalgia, and unresolved darkness that none of us possessed the vocabulary to articulate.

    A few days later Teddy and I lay sprawled across a large grassy area beside the white cement walkway connecting the Royal Lanai apartments to the swimming pool. It was one of those bright California afternoons where the sunlight felt so intense it seemed capable of bleaching reality itself.

    Teddy carried a large magnifying glass.

    Nearby, a slow-moving Jerusalem cricket crawled through the grass. The creature looked grotesque and vaguely artificial, less like a living insect than some oversized rubber prop abandoned by a low-budget science-fiction film.

    Teddy crouched eagerly over it.

    Using the magnifying glass, he concentrated the sunlight into a tiny burning beam and began trying to roast the insect alive.

    I kicked near the cricket to make it scurry away. Whatever else I was at five years old, I apparently drew the moral line at insect torture.

    Undeterred, Teddy redirected his attention toward a nearby block of wood. Squatting over it with intense concentration, he demonstrated how the magnifying glass could be used to burn shapes into the surface. Soon he was carefully scorching swastikas and the word “Nazi” into the wood with all the absorbed seriousness of a miniature artisan practicing calligraphy.

    He took obvious pride in this ability.

    And before long, I learned how to draw the symbols too.

    At home, I began sketching swastikas on scraps of paper simply because the design fascinated me visually. The shape possessed a harsh geometric boldness that appealed to my young mind in the same way superhero emblems and comic-book insignias did.

    Eventually my mother discovered my drawings.

    “Who taught you this?” she demanded.

    “Teddy,” I answered innocently.

    Her reaction was immediate.

    “Don’t draw those anymore,” she said firmly. “Those symbols are terrible.”

    So I stopped drawing them at home.

    But at school I still doodled them occasionally, not out of ideology or hatred—concepts far beyond my comprehension—but because at five years old I was attracted to dramatic symbols without understanding the monstrous histories attached to them.

    Children often imitate power long before they understand evil.

    One afternoon Teddy and I were again sprawled across the broad grassy area near the Royal Lanai swimming pool while he crouched over a wooden block with his magnifying glass, carefully burning swastikas into the surface with the concentration of a medieval monk illuminating sacred text.

    The California sun blazed overhead with enough force to make the scorched symbols smoke faintly.

    “My mom says those are bad,” I told him.

    “They’re not bad,” Teddy replied immediately.

    “I’m not allowed to draw them anymore.”

    He looked at me with sudden contempt and sneered:

    “What are you? A dumb Jew?”

    At five years old, I did not fully understand what a Jew was. I certainly did not yet understand that on my mother’s side, I was Jewish myself. Nor do I know whether Teddy even understood the full implications of what he was saying. My last name sounded aggressively Irish, and I doubt either of us possessed much grasp of theology, ethnicity, or twentieth-century genocide.

    But something primal inside me reacted instantly.

    Some instinct deeper than comprehension suddenly informed me that a line had been crossed.

    Before I consciously processed what was happening, I attacked him.

    I launched myself at Teddy with astonishing ferocity, drove him backward into the grass, straddled his chest, and began punching him repeatedly in the face while clawing and pinching at his cheeks with the blind fury of a tiny berserk animal.

    Blood appeared almost immediately.

    What remains strangest to me all these years later is not merely the violence itself but the sensation accompanying it. I experienced the attack almost as an out-of-body event, as though I were hovering several feet away watching another version of myself carry out the assault.

    I was too young to grasp the historical weight behind Teddy’s insult.
    Too young to understand antisemitism.
    Too young to comprehend inherited hatred.

    Yet somehow my body understood before my intellect did.

    Oddly, Teddy barely fought back.

    He seemed frozen beneath me, almost passive, absorbing the beating with stunned helplessness while I continued raining blows onto his face.

    Eventually I stopped, stood up, and walked home without telling my mother what had happened.

    About an hour later there was a knock at the front door.

    Teddy stood outside beside his mother.

    Even from across the room I could see she was furious. Her lips were pursed tightly, and her pale face looked pinched with outrage and humiliation. Teddy’s face was swollen, scratched, and mottled with cuts and welts.

    My mother instructed me to wait silently in the kitchen while she spoke with them at the front door.

    From the next room I could hear Teddy’s mother listing the injuries one by one in her heavy German accent while insisting my mother examine the damage carefully.

    At one point my mother interrupted in disbelief.

    “Did my son really do all this?”

    “Yes,” Teddy’s mother replied sharply. “He did. I was afraid Teddy might need stitches. I do not think your son should play with him anymore.”

    My mother agreed.

    Then Teddy and his mother left.

    A few moments later my mother entered the kitchen and asked calmly why I had attacked him.

    I explained that Teddy had been burning swastikas into wood and had called me “a dumb Jew.”

    What struck me even then was that my mother seemed far more disturbed by Teddy’s remark than by the actual beating.

    She never punished me.

    And in the strange moral logic of childhood, this made perfect sense to me. In my five-year-old imagination, I had defended my mother—a Jew—against a Nazi boy and his Nazi family.

    I was not a violent child.

    I was a superhero protecting civilization from evil.

    ***

    My superhero powers had limits. This became painfully clear shortly after my younger brother was born and my mother descended into what I would later understand to be severe post-partum depression, followed by a cascade of other mental illnesses that gradually transformed our household into an emotional triage unit disguised as suburban family life.

    I remember the day with grotesque clarity.

    I was six years old, walking to Katherine R. Smith Elementary School with three neighborhood boys while trying desperately to convince myself that everything in my life remained normal.

    Normally, the promise of a Hostess Fruit Pie or pink Sno Ball created the kind of lunchtime anticipation usually reserved for carnival rides and Christmas morning. But not that day.

    That morning my Captain Kangaroo lunchbox emitted such a catastrophic odor that the boys walking beside me kept demanding to know what had died inside it.

    The smell was indescribable.

    Not merely unpleasant.

    Apocalyptic.

    It rolled out of the lunchbox in hot invisible waves like a chemical weapon drifting across the sidewalks of suburban San Jose.

    Finally, unable to endure the interrogation any longer, I stopped near the open field separating the Stop & Go Market from the school grounds and reluctantly opened the metal lunch pail.

    What we discovered inside looked less like spoiled food than evidence recovered from a maritime disaster.

    The tuna sandwich had escaped its plastic baggie and detonated throughout the interior of the lunchbox. Blackened tuna sludge mixed with rancid mayonnaise coated every surface. Oily dark streaks smeared across the tin lining like exploded brain matter from a low-budget horror film. Rotten juices had soaked everything: the apple, the orange, the Hostess pie, the napkins, the entire ecosystem of my lunch.

    The stench was so violent all four of us recoiled simultaneously.

    One boy stared into the lunchbox with horrified fascination.

    “How could you eat that?”

    I shrugged weakly.

    Another kid asked:

    “Did your mom actually pack this?”

    Again I shrugged.

    What could I say?

    At six years old, I lacked both the vocabulary and emotional sophistication to explain maternal psychological collapse through the medium of contaminated tuna.

    So I simply closed the lunchbox, and we continued toward school while carrying what now amounted to a portable biohazard device.

    Once inside the classroom, I placed the offending lunchbox alongside the others in the designated coat closet.

    This proved disastrous.

    Shortly before lunch, the school conducted one of its regular Cold War “Duck-and-Cover” drills in preparation for inevitable nuclear annihilation. When the alarm sounded, we all crawled beneath our desks waiting for instructions over the PA system while imagining Soviet missiles streaking toward California.

    Then the smell began spreading.

    Even beneath our desks, Mrs. Corey suddenly wrinkled her forehead and began sniffing the air with mounting alarm. Around the room, students pinched their noses and made exaggerated gagging noises while trying to identify the source of what now smelled like a corpse liquefying inside a fishing boat.

    Mrs. Corey looked genuinely distressed.

    “Did someone soil themselves?” she demanded.

    Then, after another cautious sniff:

    “Or did someone bring a dead animal into this classroom?”

    The room erupted into nervous laughter and theatrical choking sounds.

    At this point, the boys who had walked to school with me betrayed my secret instantly by pointing toward my lunchbox in the coat closet.

    Mrs. Corey approached it slowly and cautiously, like a bomb technician nearing unstable explosives.

    She opened the lid.

    Then froze.

    The expression on her face suggested she had just peered directly into the sulfurous mouth of hell itself.

    Finally she looked up at me.

    “Did your mother pack this?”

    I nodded.

    Mrs. Corey winced in a way that seemed not merely judgmental but generational, as though she were silently condemning my parents, grandparents, and entire ancestral bloodline stretching backward through history.

    Without another word, she snapped the lunchbox shut and handed it to the teacher’s aide with instructions to remove it from the classroom immediately.

    Then, turning toward the class, she announced solemnly that my food was “unfit for human consumption” and requested volunteers to donate individual items from their lunches so I would have something to eat later.

    The humiliation was total.

    By lunchtime I had no appetite whatsoever.

    While the other children ate and chatted around me, I sat alone on my blanket avoiding their curious glances and trying not to think about the rotten tuna, my mother’s unraveling mind, or the possibility that something inside our family had already begun quietly collapsing long before anyone knew how to name it.

    The rotten tuna turned out to be more than a humiliating school incident. It was an omen, a foul-smelling prophecy leaking from a child’s lunchbox before the full catastrophe revealed itself.

    That afternoon when I walked home from Katherine R. Smith Elementary School and entered our bottom-floor apartment at the Royal Lanai, I expected the usual tableau of suburban motherhood: my mother folding laundry while watching Let’s Make a Deal, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich waiting for me on a square of paper towel beside the wrinkled San Jose Mercury News, and the reassuring drone of daytime television floating through the apartment like background oxygen.

    Instead, the apartment was silent.

    Not calm.
    Not peaceful.

    Silent in the wrong way.

    The television was off.
    My sandwich was missing.
    Even the air itself seemed motionless.

    My baby brother slept quietly in his crib while the stillness pressed against the walls with unnatural weight.

    I called out for my mother.

    No answer.

    I called again, louder this time.

    Still nothing.

    Finally I entered her bedroom and found her lying motionless in bed.

    At first I assumed she was simply taking a nap, but something about the depth of her sleep frightened me immediately. Her breathing was loud, heavy, and mechanical, as though her body had detached itself from ordinary consciousness and sunk into some unreachable underwater chamber.

    I shook her shoulder gently.

    Nothing.

    I shook harder.

    Still nothing.

    I kept telling her to wake up, but she remained utterly inert.

    A few minutes later Nina arrived.

    Nina was the housekeeper my father had hired after my mother’s post-partum depression began unraveling her life. Normally Nina radiated warmth and gentleness. She possessed the soft patience of someone who had spent years caring for troubled people without demanding much in return.

    But the moment I told her I could not wake my mother, her entire demeanor changed.

    She rushed into the bedroom, bent over the bed, and began shaking my mother violently while calling her name with rising panic in her voice.

    Then suddenly Nina started slapping her.

    Hard.

    The sound shocked me.

    I began crying instantly.

    At six years old, I did not understand emergency response. I thought Nina was angry at my mother for refusing to get up. Seeing sweet, maternal Nina striking my mother across the face shattered something inside me.

    Nina then called our neighbor Holly, who rushed into the apartment moments later. Together they struggled to pull my mother upright while shouting directly into her face with escalating desperation.

    Nothing worked.

    At Nina’s suggestion, Holly fetched ammonia and began splashing it beneath my mother’s nose. The chemical smell filled the room so aggressively it burned my eyes and forced me backward several feet.

    I could not understand how anyone could remain unconscious through that kind of assault.

    Even then, part of me sensed that something terrible had happened, though I lacked the emotional vocabulary to identify it.

    Eventually Holly decided I should not remain inside the apartment.

    She instructed her two sons—Ricky, a third grader, and Greg, who was in my first-grade class—to take me outside to the apartment playground.

    So the three of us walked slowly toward the sandboxes.

    As we crossed the apartment grounds, I turned around for one quick glance at our building.

    That was when I saw the ambulance.

    Neighbors had gathered nearby in small anxious clusters, their faces tight with curiosity and concern. Adults stood whispering to one another while staring toward our apartment entrance.

    I still did not fully understand what was happening.

    I did not know the ambulance was for my mother.
    I did not know she had overdosed on sleeping pills.
    I did not know she had attempted to end her life.

    And most tragically of all, I had no idea this would not be the last time.

    I was in a state of shock so severe that my senses became grotesquely amplified. Smells, especially, attacked me with unbearable intensity. The moment Ricky and Greg deposited me into the apartment playground sandbox, the odor of damp sand rose into my nostrils with such force I thought I might vomit on the spot. My body felt weak and gelatinous. Every movement required effort. All I wanted was to lie down somewhere cool and still and disappear into unconsciousness.

    It was not until many years later that I understood what had happened physiologically. Shock lowers blood pressure. It drains the body of energy. It creates nausea, dizziness, and a heavy floating lethargy that makes the world feel unreal. At six years old, however, I simply believed something inside me had broken.

    I begged Ricky and Greg to help me out of the sandbox.

    Instead of finding me a bench or someplace to rest, they insisted we wander aimlessly around the apartment complex. The walk became one of the longest ordeals of my childhood, though in reality it probably lasted no more than thirty minutes. Every smell felt magnified. Every footstep exhausted me. The sunlight itself seemed oppressive.

    Still desperate to collapse somewhere safe, I then learned from Holly that I would nevertheless be attending the first-grade Christmas pageant that evening.

    The sheer cruelty of childhood logistics astonishes me in retrospect.

    So there I sat inside the school auditorium while my nervous system continued quietly imploding. I told Mrs. Corey I was too tired to sing, and to her credit, she allowed me to remain seated among the parents instead of standing with the other children on stage.

    At least now I could sit down.

    But I still felt close to vomiting.

    The singing only intensified my nausea. There was one song in particular—“The Twelve Days of Christmas”—that became almost hallucinatorily unbearable. It is a song apparently designed by sadists, a musical accumulation of escalating repetition in which each verse piles upon the previous one like psychological water torture. First turtle doves. Then drummers. Then maids. Then lords. Then pipers. The thing expands endlessly until it feels less like a Christmas carol than an administrative inventory recited by an emotionally unstable accountant.

    Midway through the performance, Mrs. Corey noticed my deteriorating condition. She quietly led me beneath her desk, wrapped me in a blanket, and allowed me to curl into myself while the song continued lumbering onward through what felt like geological time.

    That night I did not sleep in my own bed.

    Someone—presumably my father—arranged for me to stay with our elderly neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Whirey, who lived next door to us at the Royal Lanai apartments. They appeared to be in their seventies, ancient by childhood standards. Mrs. Whirey possessed precisely the sort of anxious, fluttering voice one would expect from a woman perpetually worried about overcooked pot roast, neighborhood emergencies, and the collapse of civilization itself.

    Unlike me, she understood far more about what had happened to my mother.

    She kept asking whether I was all right, whether I needed food, water, blankets, company, reassurance—anything.

    But I needed only one thing.

    An oval rug.

    In front of Mr. Whirey’s recliner sat a large oval area rug patterned with concentric rings of gray, blue, and burnt orange. The moment I settled onto that rug with my red Tonka truck, I refused to leave it.

    I drove the truck endlessly over the colored ovals in hypnotic repetition.

    Back and forth.
    Back and forth.

    The rug became my psychological fortress. The boundaries of those woven ovals felt safer than the rest of reality. I studied the fibers with desperate concentration, as though shifting my attention elsewhere might cause my entire mind to splinter apart.

    Mrs. Whirey repeatedly encouraged me to move around the house.

    I refused.

    The rug was now my nation-state.

    The only interruption came when Mr. Whirey settled into his recliner to watch his favorite television program, Gunsmoke. Before reclining backward, he smiled warmly at me and asked:

    “Do you like Gunsmoke?”

    I nodded politely.

    “Everyone likes Gunsmoke,” he said with the confidence of a man making a theological declaration rather than discussing television programming.

    The next morning Mrs. Whirey entrusted me with an important task.

    She handed me a dollar and instructed me to walk to the nearby convenience store and buy a loaf of Roman Meal bread because, as she stressed repeatedly, Mr. Whirey ate only Roman Meal. She made me repeat the name several times to ensure I understood the gravity of the assignment. Then she carefully reminded me to obey the traffic lights and look both ways before crossing the street.

    When I returned successfully carrying the correct loaf and the proper change, she reacted with enormous delight.

    And suddenly I felt useful again.

    Like Namor the Sub-Mariner completing a vital mission for humanity.

    In my fragile six-year-old logic, I drew immense comfort from the idea that as long as I continued purchasing Roman Meal bread correctly and returning exact change, I would remain worthy of shelter and protection. Whether I ever saw my mother again almost seemed secondary to proving I could “earn my keep.”

    After about a week at the Whirey residence, my mother was transferred from the hospital to a mental institution for chronic depression, while my father struggled to care for my infant brother alone. It was decided I could no longer remain at the Royal Lanai apartments.

    So I moved to my grandparents’ house in Long Beach and attended first grade at Lowell Elementary School from January through June of 1968.

    Nearly a year passed before my mother was released from the institution and I lived with my parents again.

    But nothing ever truly returned to normal afterward.

    From that point on, I lived with the constant expectation that catastrophe was waiting just beyond the horizon. I became fretful, hypervigilant, and anxious in ways that would follow me deep into adulthood.

    Yet whenever I revisit those memories, one figure rises above the darkness with astonishing clarity:

    Mrs. Whirey.

    A stranger who opened her home to a frightened little boy and tried, in all the modest ways available to her, to make him feel safe.

    Years later, thinking often of her kindness, I composed a piano piece in her honor titled “The Kindness of Strangers.” It is a phrase so overused it has nearly collapsed into cliché. But Mrs. Whirey restored meaning to it for me.

    And for that, I will remain grateful for the rest of my life.

  • The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    My parents liked to remind me that before IBM rescued my father with a job offer and transplanted us from Florida to California, we were so poor they sold blood to hospitals to help feed me. This family anecdote was repeated with the solemn gravity of frontier folklore, as though I had survived the Donner Party rather than early childhood. We lived in military housing in Gainesville called Flavet Villages, a collection of dreary barracks-style tenements that seemed permanently damp, exhausted, and spiritually defeated. Cockroaches crawled openly along the walls beside my crib as though they too paid rent and felt entitled to common areas.

    Nearby sat an alligator swamp whose odor drifted across the housing complex with biblical hostility. Around dawn and twilight especially, the air became thick with a feculent stench that smelled like Satan’s compost bin after a seafood boil. The swamp seemed less a natural ecosystem than a punishment assigned to the poor. Everything about Flavet Villages communicated scarcity, mildew, resignation, and the understanding that comfort belonged to other people living elsewhere.

    Then came the phone call from IBM.

    Just like that, our trajectory changed. My father packed us into a late-1950s Mercury and drove westward toward what had not yet become Silicon Valley but was already beginning to hum with technological ambition and California mythology. We rolled down Highway 101, exited at Tully Road in San Jose, and arrived at what, to our eyes, looked less like an apartment complex than a tropical resurrection.

    The Royal Lanai apartments embodied that distinctly mid-century California fantasy in which ordinary suburban housing attempted to impersonate a Polynesian resort through sheer landscaping optimism. The place radiated the confidence of an era convinced that lava rock, palm trees, and decorative stonework could transport middle-class renters into an exotic island paradise situated conveniently between a supermarket and a freeway exit.

    Dark volcanic rocks framed the walkways. Palmettos and fan palms swayed above flowerbeds bursting with oversized sunflowers and dense tropical greenery. The buildings themselves were decorated with rough lava stone and jagged field rock embedded into the stucco, as though cooled magma had erupted directly into suburban San Jose. Sprinklers hissed across the landscaping in the evening light while the California sun reflected warmly against the black volcanic stone.

    Compared to Flavet Villages, the Royal Lanai felt impossibly glamorous.

    We had crossed from swamp funk to Polynesian fantasy.

    From cockroaches to lava rock.

    From survival to aspiration.

    And though we were still renters living in an apartment complex beside a busy road, to my parents it must have felt as though IBM had not merely offered employment but delivered us personally into the American Dream wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and carrying a briefcase.

    The monthly pilgrimage to the manager’s office to pay the rent filled my mother with a kind of triumphant delight. She treated the occasion less like a financial obligation and more like admission into respectable civilization. Before leaving the apartment, she would proudly hold up the giant green circular keychain embossed with our apartment number, the metal house key dangling from it like a sacred relic proving we belonged at the Royal Lanai. Then she would invite me to accompany her on the journey as though we were visiting royalty rather than paying one hundred dollars for another month of tenancy.

    The rent itself seemed magical in its perfect roundness: exactly one hundred dollars. Not ninety-eight. Not one hundred and seven. One hundred dollars precisely, as if the evenness of the number confirmed the elegance of our new life beneath the palms and lava rock.

    At five years old, I found these expeditions endlessly fascinating because nearly everything at the Royal Lanai felt luxurious compared to the swampy deprivation stories my parents told about Florida. The manager’s office in particular possessed the aura of a tiny tropical embassy of abundance. Behind the desk sat Betty, the matronly apartment manager, smiling with the patient warmth of a woman who had seen thousands of tenants pass through her domain and knew exactly how much the place meant to young families trying to ascend into middle-class respectability.

    Inside the office stood a humming water cooler beside neat stacks of tiny paper cups that I treated with almost ceremonial reverence. Nearby sat a glass jar overflowing with sugar cubes, and Betty always assured me they were mine for the taking. This struck me as extraordinary generosity. To a small child raised on stories of blood-selling poverty and cockroach-infested tenements, unlimited cold water and unrestricted access to sugar felt like evidence that we had entered a realm of unimaginable prosperity.

    The Royal Lanai seemed less like an apartment complex than a perpetual vacation for ordinary people. Everything shimmered with promise: the tropical landscaping, the black lava rocks warming beneath the California sun, the palms rustling overhead, the miraculous availability of chilled water and refined sugar whenever my childish whims demanded them. In my mind, paradise was not complicated. Paradise was a paper cup of cold water, two stolen sugar cubes melting on your tongue, and a giant green keychain proving your family had finally escaped the swamp.

    The monthly rent at the Royal Lanai took my parents a while to psychologically absorb. One hundred dollars a month may sound quaint now, but to them it carried the emotional weight of financing Versailles. To diffuse their anxiety, they invented an elaborate family joke that my mother might soon have to supplement my father’s IBM salary by returning to her former career as a flaming sword swallower in the circus.

    According to the mythology they constructed for my benefit, my mother had toured the circus circuit in Alaska before meeting my father. She was apparently a celebrated performer capable of swallowing blazing sabers while balancing on elephants or dangling from trapezes over crowds of drunken laborers eating salted peanuts. To authenticate the story, my parents explained that my mother remained close friends with the circus CEO herself, a powerful woman named Mrs. Dimes, who spent her days inside a cramped trailer-office counting ticket sales with ruthless concentration.

    “Do you want to hear Mrs. Dimes counting the tickets?” they would ask me with theatrical seriousness.

    Then they would direct me toward our heavy avocado-green rotary telephone and instruct me to dial P-O-P-C-O-R-N.

    What I did not understand, of course, was that this connected me to Northern California’s famous “Popcorn Lady,” the automated time service whose calm robotic voice announced the time every ten seconds. My parents convinced me this was Mrs. Dimes tallying circus receipts somewhere deep inside carnival headquarters while deciding whether my mother needed to return to sword swallowing in order to save the family finances.

    For a while I found the whole thing mesmerizing.

    I imagined Mrs. Dimes sitting beneath a dangling light bulb in a smoky trailer counting endless piles of tickets while tigers roared outside and exhausted clowns smoked cigarettes beside cages. The fact that my mother possessed a direct line to the upper management of the circus filled me with awe. It made adulthood seem precarious and theatrical at the same time, as though our entire middle-class existence hung by a thread and one poorly considered supermarket purchase could force my mother to pack her bags and rejoin the carnival economy.

    At first, the game amused me.

    Then one evening, something shifted.

    Perhaps I had become old enough to detect the real anxiety lurking beneath the comedy. Perhaps the repeated references to money finally penetrated my five-year-old understanding. Whatever the reason, the thought of my mother leaving us to join the circus suddenly struck me as horrifyingly plausible.

    I began sobbing uncontrollably.

    The image of her disappearing into some distant caravan of sword swallowers, ticket counters, and exhausted acrobats overwhelmed me completely. My parents immediately abandoned the Mrs. Dimes routine and never played the game again.

    But by then the damage had been done.

    Even at five years old, I had absorbed the terrible adult knowledge that paradise could be lost, that money was fragile, and that somewhere beyond the lava rocks and palm trees of the Royal Lanai lurked the possibility that your mother might have to run away and join the circus to pay the rent.

    It was then that I resolved to prepare myself for the inevitable by joining the circus alongside my mother. If financial catastrophe struck and Mrs. Dimes summoned her back beneath the big top, I would not remain behind abandoned at the Royal Lanai like some emotionally shattered civilian. No. I would reinvent myself as the Strongman: a towering muscular brute in leopard tights capable of snapping chains across his chest, bending steel bars, and hoisting wild animals above his head while astonished crowds applauded beneath clouds of cigarette smoke and popcorn dust.

    My spiritual mentors were not priests or philosophers but superhero comics. The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Prince Namor became my prophets of muscular transcendence. Their impossible physiques convinced me that strength was not merely aesthetic but salvific. Muscles could rescue families. Biceps could repel humiliation. Triceps might even keep your mother from disappearing into itinerant circus labor.

    I therefore began training with whatever equipment the apartment provided. My parents’ heavy lacquered ceramic ashtrays became dumbbells. Luggage became resistance equipment. Every object in the apartment was reinterpreted through the feverish logic of childhood bodybuilding ambition. Somewhere between the lava rocks and the sunflower gardens of the Royal Lanai, I became convinced that physical strength was the answer to economic instability, emotional terror, and perhaps existence itself.

    Then came the Charles Atlas ads.

    Those advertisements struck me with the force of religious revelation. There was always the same tragic spectacle: a scrawny weakling being publicly humiliated at the beach while some square-jawed bully kicked sand in his face and stole his girlfriend with the efficiency of a hostile corporate takeover. But then the runt discovered the Charles Atlas system, trained with evangelical discipline, and returned transformed into a muscular avenger. The bully was defeated. The girl was reclaimed. Cosmic balance was restored. Civilization itself seemed to exhale in relief.

    The moral architecture of the universe suddenly became clear to me:
    Train hard. Build yourself. Never surrender. Muscles are destiny.

    This, I believed, was the true American Dream—not suburban comfort or upward mobility, but the ability to transform fear and humiliation into brute force through relentless self-improvement.

    If things became desperate enough, I could save my family.

    I could become the Strongman.

    My mother and I would travel the circus together, inseparable beneath the glow of carnival lights. We would swallow flames, bend steel, astonish crowds, and most importantly, pay the one-hundred-dollar rent on time. We would not be poor swamp people from Florida anymore. We would be winners.

    Thanks to an early literary diet of children’s books, superhero comics, and Charles Atlas advertisements, I grew up convinced that sheer grit and industriousness could conquer virtually anything. My optimism floated through childhood with absurd buoyancy, like a kite somehow suspended in a windless sky by pure American self-help mythology. I had absorbed the sugary gospel of Captain Kangaroo and internalized the moral propaganda of The Little Engine That Could with cult-like devotion. “I think I can” was not merely a line from a children’s story. It was my private war cry. Positive thinking plus relentless effort was supposed to produce triumph, prosperity, admiration, and perhaps eventually heroic forearms.

    Or so I believed.

    Then came October 16, 1967—twelve days before my sixth birthday—the evening my worldview suffered catastrophic structural failure while watching my beloved The Monkees. The episode was titled “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling,” and it detonated inside my young psyche like a philosophical pipe bomb. Until then, I had believed life operated according to comic-book justice: work hard, improve yourself, defeat the bully, reclaim the girl, restore cosmic order. But this episode introduced me to a far darker force, one nobody had warned me about because I was still too young to grasp the terminology.

    Irony.

    Not ordinary disappointment. Not bad luck. Irony—the grinning sadist of human existence that waits until you have exhausted yourself climbing the mountain before informing you the mountain has moved.

    The episode features my slender, goofy hero Micky Dolenz being publicly humiliated by Bulk, a grotesquely muscular beach tyrant played by none other than Dave Draper, a man built less like a human being than a refrigerated side of beef. Bulk steals Brenda, the bikini-clad beach goddess, directly from Micky’s orbit while radiating the effortless confidence of a man whose chest measurements could destabilize nearby weather systems.

    Desperate to reclaim his dignity, Micky joins Weaklings Anonymous and submits himself to a punishing training regimen worthy of Cold War experimentation. He lifts weights the size of Buicks. He gulps down fermented goat milk curd, a substance that appeared to possess the texture and emotional flavor profile of liquefied despair. Worst of all, he sells his drum set to finance his transformation, placing the future of the Monkees themselves in jeopardy. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of self-improvement.

    And why?

    Because the Charles Atlas narrative promised salvation.

    Suffer now. Train hard. Become magnificent later.

    Micky returns to the beach transformed into a muscular Adonis, his arms swollen, his confidence restored, fully prepared to reclaim Brenda and reestablish moral equilibrium in the universe.

    But then Irony arrives carrying a baseball bat.

    During Micky’s transformation into Hercules, Brenda has grown bored with physical brutes. Muscles are now gauche. Predictable. Vulgar. She has pivoted dramatically toward intellectualism and now desires a frail, pencil-necked pseudo-scholar whose chief accomplishment appears to be reading In Search of Lost Time at the beach while ignoring sunlight and human joy. The new object of her affection sits there clutching Proust with all the erotic magnetism of a graduate seminar on French memory theory.

    Apparently, somewhere between Micky’s bench presses and fermented goat secretions, the cultural winds had shifted.

    Bodybuilders were out.

    Pretentious literary anemia was in.

    As I watched Micky’s heartbreak unfold onscreen, my own little heart cracked alongside his. Every lesson I had absorbed about hard work, perseverance, and self-discipline suddenly felt suspect. The universe, I realized, did not necessarily reward effort. You could labor heroically, endure humiliation, drink industrial quantities of goat sludge, and still discover that reality had changed the rules while you were busy training.

    The revelation devastated me.

    It was like discovering that Santa Claus was not merely fictional but actively mocking you from behind the curtains of existence.

    After that episode, childhood optimism no longer felt trustworthy. The clean moral geometry of comic books dissolved. From then on, I wandered through life carrying the vague existential sadness of a tiny philosopher betrayed by television comedy. Somewhere deep inside me, Micky Dolenz was still standing on that beach holding his rebuilt muscles while Brenda walked away with a man reading Proust.

  • The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Sid Briggs, a thirty-five year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Sid was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Sid paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Sid would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday, Sid arrived at the man-made beach with a new blonde draped at his side, each one somehow more dazzling and surgically assembled than the last, as if he were upgrading girlfriends through a mail-order catalog of California delusions. They’d toss a Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the imported sand, laughing too loudly, performing youth and leisure for anyone within eyesight. Sid treated the entire shoreline like a stage set built exclusively for his mythology.

    That was when the lies began breeding like bacteria in warm water.

    He inflated his real estate career into the legend of a ruthless young mogul when in reality he was little more than a glorified rent collector for his father’s properties. He claimed to hold a business degree, though everyone knew he’d been booted out of community college after throwing a volcanic tantrum over not getting the campus radio disc jockey position. In Sid’s version of events, he wasn’t a failed student; he was a misunderstood prince denied his throne.

    Then came the aristocratic nonsense. According to Sid, his bloodline could be traced back to Belgian nobility. Somewhere, apparently, stood a family estate complete with a coat of arms, ancestral portraits, and a sacred genealogy book displayed in a special foyer like the Dead Sea Scrolls of mediocre white privilege. The more he lied, the more intoxicated he became by the sound of his own inventions. You could watch it happen in real time. One fabrication fed the next until he drifted into a narcotic haze of self-creation, trapped inside a fantasy version of himself that felt more pleasurable than reality ever could.

    By that point, the women were almost incidental. The true seduction was the performance. Sid didn’t lie to get the conquest. The lies were the conquest.

    I was eager to hear Sid’s lies because, if I’m being honest, I possessed a small talent for self-mythologizing myself. Watching Sid perform his fabrications was like studying my own bad habits through a carnival mirror. I wanted to observe what happened when a man fed himself a steady diet of invented grandeur and then mistook the swelling for genuine substance.

    My greatest obstacle to catching every word was the bees.

    The grassy knoll above the beach was infested with tiny white flowers, and the flowers, in turn, were infested with bees drunk on pollen and purpose. Their buzzing rose and fell in thick waves, sometimes louder than Sid himself. I’d lean forward in my beach chair, squinting through the sunlight, straining to catch the choicest portions of his nonsense as if I were listening to bootleg radio transmissions from a collapsing dictatorship. One moment I’d hear fragments about Belgian aristocracy or shadowy business deals, and the next moment the bees would surge into a collective electric hum, swallowing entire sections of his fantasy whole.

    Oddly enough, the interruptions improved the stories. The missing pieces forced my imagination to collaborate with Sid’s dishonesty. His fabrications became serialized entertainment, half confession and half hallucination, drifting across the hot afternoon air with the smell of Coppertone, cut grass, and imported saltwater.

    ***

    To be called “Bridge and Tunnel” in 1970s San Francisco was not a description; it was a diagnosis. It marked you as a provincial organism, a life-form that had migrated from the East Bay—Hayward, San Leandro, Castro Valley—regions the city regarded as a kind of cultural quarantine zone. By San Francisco standards, we didn’t simply live elsewhere; we existed at a lower altitude of refinement.

    My teenage bodybuilding friends and I would cross the Bay Bridge like contaminants slipping past a border checkpoint, only to be received with the sort of polished contempt reserved for the uninvited. The girls—urban aristocrats of posture and irony—would glance at us, lips tightening into a surgical line, and murmur “Bridge and Tunnel” as if naming a disease. The implication was clear: we had not arrived so much as oozed in, crawling through some damp civic artery to stain their carefully curated world.

    We did little to disprove their assessment. We spent our afternoons at the lake, marinating our skin in tropical bronzing oil with the reckless confidence of men who believed melanoma was a rumor. Between sets of posing and flexing, we argued with prosecutorial intensity over the great philosophical question of our time: Ginger or Mary Ann. This was not idle chatter. This was a loyalty test. Imagine a bare bulb swinging in a concrete cell, a man with broken teeth asking you to choose. Your answer wasn’t right or wrong—it was a measure of your authenticity.

    In truth, there was one answer: Mary Ann. Ginger was spectacle—too lacquered, too deliberate. Mary Ann had gravity. Especially in cut-offs. She was the apex until Daisy Duke arrived and raised the stakes, turning denim cut-offs into doctrine and ushering in a new era of televised exhibitionism.

    Bull, however, took these matters beyond reason. We didn’t realize the depth of his devotion to Gilligan’s Island until KTVU quietly removed it from the schedule. He responded as one might to a death in the family. He kicked his mother’s Sony Trinitron while wearing combat boots—an act of passion undermined by poor planning. The television survived. His shin did not. We spent the afternoon at Eden Medical Center watching him bleed through a makeshift bandage.

    We offered no sympathy.
    “You made us miss Pec Day,” Falco said.

    “And forget donkey calf raises,” I added. “You’re benched for a month. Congratulations.”

    Bull slumped in his chair, a chastened creature with curly hair and wounded pride. “Mary Ann’s gone,” he muttered, staring into middle distance as if mourning a lost lover.

    “At least there’s Jeannie,” I said.
    “Barbara Eden never lets you down,” he replied.
    “And Charlie’s Angels,” I added.

    Bull kept a poster of Farrah Fawcett in his room. Once a week, he arranged protein pills on a velvet pillow beneath it, as if offering tribute to a benevolent deity of blonde perfection.

    Reality intruded. His mother, unimpressed with his theatrical grief, demanded repayment for the damaged television. He had already failed a security job test at Gemco. He was supposed to run up a staircase while holding a fire extinguisher in fewer than fifteen seconds. He gave up midway, keeling over and trying to catch his breath.

    “What does it profit a man to have bulging muscles if he is not functional?” I asked.

    “Shut up, loser,” Bull snapped.

    He had rank—he and Falco were seniors; I was a sophomore with a loose mouth and poor instincts for hierarchy.

    Now, with a bandaged leg, he faced a new problem: no job, no training, no progress. Falco, ever the strategist, offered his usual solutions in single-word fragments.

    “Refrigeration.”
    “I failed that test three times.”
    “Take it again. Cold air builds muscle.”

    Bull shook his head. “Fifty bucks a test.”

    As always, we retreated into fantasy. We would win international bodybuilding titles, open a gym in the Bahamas, and spend our days in Speedos while sunlit goddesses delivered protein drinks in coconut shells and validated our existence. Bull embellished the vision with architectural details and swimsuit specifications. He looked almost peaceful.

    Which is why I had to ruin it.

    “And maybe,” I said, “while you’re selling memberships, you’ll run into Mary Ann.”

    “Shut up, loser,” he said again, clutching his leg.

    The pain had sharpened. Not just the injury—the realization. One impulsive kick had cost him weeks of training, a job opportunity, and delayed the imaginary migration to a tropical paradise where everything made sense and nothing required discipline.

    For the first time, Bull looked less like a future champion and more like what he was: a kid being forced to accept the fact that the Bahamas were postponed indefinitely. Accountability had arrived early. 

    Our concern for Bull evaporated the moment Sid Briggs burst through the ER turnstile, a spectacle wrapped in gauze and self-regard. His right hand was bandaged into a blunt white cudgel, as if he’d lost a fight with a plaster cast. The rest of him, however, was in peak exhibition form: cut-offs surgically trimmed, a white tank top clinging to a torso that glistened with oil. Whether he’d applied it before or after entering the ER was unclear, but the principle was not—Sid Briggs did not enter public space without proper lubrication. His neck carried enough gold chain and oversized pukka shells to suggest he had just taken first place in a luau dance-off, and he wore the prize with priestly seriousness.

    Sid’s hair was sun-bleached into submission, his mustache aggressively bushy, and his cheeks sucked inward, as if he were practicing for a portrait no one had commissioned. He looked pleased with himself in the way only a man can who has mistaken persistence for success.

    He recognized us and approached with theatrical urgency, holding up his bandaged hand like a prop. “Nasty bee sting,” he said, as if recounting a battlefield injury. He’d been tanning at Lake Don Castro when the incident occurred. The doctor, he reported, had warned him about a possible allergy: future stings could escalate, even turn life-threatening. 

    “The lake is a bee magnet,” I said.

    Briggs rolled his eyes at me with the practiced contempt of a man who has never allowed facts to interrupt his narrative.

    “As if I’m going to stop tanning at Don Castro,” he said. “That is my home, bro.”

    We laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was airtight. Sid Briggs without Don Castro would be like a peacock without a parking lot—technically possible, but existentially absurd. He lived there in spirit: beside the snack bar, beside his Playmate cooler, white Frisbee at the ready, launching pickup lines with the confidence of a man who believed rejection was a clerical error. Even now, the word “disco” conjures him for me—bronzed in Speedos, snapping his fingers to KC and the Sunshine Band as if rhythm itself were part of his personal brand.

    As he spoke, he sucked in his cheeks and scanned the room, locking onto a blonde nurse with the focus of a guided missile. “Well, amigos,” he said, adjusting his posture to maximum visibility, “I need to get back to the beach. The ladies are waiting.”

    He patted Bull on the shoulder—carefully, as if blessing a lesser mortal—wished him a speedy recovery, and strode back into the sunlight, a man convinced that even a bee sting was just another opportunity to be seen.

    ***

    About a month later, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Sid in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Sid’s methods among the drone of buzzing bees. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Sid give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Sid began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Sid’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Sid was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Sid died on the spot.

    I was never the same after Sid died. The whole thing lodged inside me like a splinter beneath the skin. I obsessed over the details of his death with the unhealthy devotion usually reserved for unsolved murders and failed romances. I had nightmares. I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. The grassy knoll, the imported sand, the Frisbees arcing against the sky—all of it felt contaminated now, like the set of a sitcom where somebody had quietly died backstage.

    About six months after Sid’s death, a peculiar dream began visiting me with unnerving regularity.

    In the dream, my friends and I gathered at the lake at twilight for a wake. We sat around a bonfire drinking cheap beer while the last ribbons of orange light dissolved across the water. Then someone would fall silent and point toward the horizon.

    There was Sid.

    Far out on the lake, he appeared as a small silhouette walking across the water toward us with calm, impossible strides. No thunder cracked. No heavenly choir sang. He simply kept approaching, closer and closer, until he reached the shore, brushed lakewater from his pant legs, and sat beside the fire as casually as a man returning late to a barbecue.

    That was when he told us about his final moments.

    The paramedics were working frantically over his body, he explained, when suddenly he looked upward and saw the counterfactual version of his life—the life he might have lived had he not spent decades performing for strangers like a peacock drunk on its own feathers. In that vision he was no longer prowling the beach with pickup lines and fraudulent pedigrees. He was a husband. A father. He walked peacefully along the shoreline beside a woman who genuinely loved him. Four children orbited around them in bursts of laughter while two rescue dogs exploded through the surf in ecstatic loops.

    Everything glowed with an unbearable softness.

    The sky was pale blue, not dramatic enough for cinema but beautiful in the way honest things often are. Sunlight fell gently across the water as though the world itself had abandoned judgment. Somewhere in the distance there was music—not literal music, but the emotional equivalent of it, the kind that arrives when your nervous system finally unclenches after years of pretending.

    And in that impossible stillness, Sid turned toward God.

    Not toward status. Not toward women. Not toward applause. Toward God.

    He begged for another chance. He promised he would abandon the counterfeit life and live honestly at last. It was as if existence itself had paused to offer him one final rehearsal for redemption. For the first time in his life, he experienced something that required no performance whatsoever: peace stripped of vanity. Beauty without spectators.

    Then the bee venom reached his heart.

    That was the cruelty of it.

    Just as he believed grace had opened a door for him, his body failed. The bee won. Sid Briggs—master raconteur, counterfeit aristocrat, beach peacock, human smoke machine—died mid-negotiation with eternity.

    Around the bonfire, dream-Sid spoke to us without swagger, without embellishment, without the narcotic glaze of self-invention. He told us he was not a man to imitate but a cautionary tale with suntan oil on it. A fraud. An impostor. A man who had spent so much time manufacturing an image that he neglected the architecture of an actual soul.

    He made us swear we would not waste our lives chasing the same hollow performance.

    And once we promised him—once he was convinced we understood—he rose quietly from the fire, walked back across the water toward the horizon, and disappeared into the dark.

    A few years later, when I took music theory in college, I carried that dream with me to the piano. I tried to process Sid’s death the only way I knew how: by turning grief into melody. For nearly two years I worked obsessively on a composition called “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.”

    Almost fifty years later, I still play it.

    The notes have never dulled. Neither has the warning hidden inside them.

    Some performances do not end with applause or redemption. Some end with collapse. Too little truth. Too much theater. And no encore.

  • Tuna on the Cheek, Blood on the Screen: Review of “Send Help”

    Tuna on the Cheek, Blood on the Screen: Review of “Send Help”

    When I watched Send Help two nights ago, I kept waiting for the horror to announce itself with a straight face. It never did. The film opens in a fluorescent office where Bradley Preston—an heir in a blazer, a man-child in executive drag—struts through a company he inherited the way one inherits a bad habit. His confidence is all surface tension: glossy, brittle, and one sharp object away from collapse. From the first scene, it plays less like a fright fest and more like a comedy that knows its punchlines will land harder if they’re soaked in blood.

    The supporting cast speaks fluent “bro,” a dialect of buzzwords and chest-thumping that echoes the bleak satire of In the Company of Men—only here the jokes move faster and the air is less suffocating. Early on, the movie tips its hand with a small, perfect humiliation: Linda Liddle, a socially awkward office worker with Survivor dreams, approaches Bradley with a chunk of tuna clinging stubbornly to her cheek. He can’t hear a word she says. The camera betrays him—cuts to a close-up of his eye, deranged and hypnotized by that fleck of fish like it’s a moral crisis. The gag is surgical. It reduces Bradley to appetite and Linda to spectacle in a single, merciless beat.

    The degradation doesn’t stop there. Bradley and his phalanx of bros revel in their own language, a lexicon designed to inflate mediocrity into swagger. Then the film detonates its premise: a flight to Thailand, a thunderstorm, a crash, an island. Suddenly the hierarchy flips. Bradley’s confidence evaporates in the salt air, and Linda—quietly competent, long dismissed—becomes indispensable. Her survival skills, once a punchline, turn into the only currency that matters. The movie sharpens into what it always wanted to be: a comedy of reversal, where a cocky lightweight is schooled by the person he spent years underestimating.

    Yes, there’s horror here—gore, shocks, the occasional indulgence in spectacle—but it all feels enlisted in the service of the joke. The violence doesn’t deepen the dread; it punctuates the satire. The film moves briskly, with clever turns that keep it buoyant where LaBute’s film sinks into a kind of moral tar. And yet the two works feel like distant relatives: both obsessed with cruelty, both fascinated by the theater of male arrogance, both willing to strip their characters bare. The difference is that Send Help has the decency to laugh while it does the stripping—and in that laughter, it finds its edge.

  • Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    Kings, Echo Chambers, and the Cost of Believing in Your Own Myth (college essay prompt)

    In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and Ari Aster’s Eddington, characters pursue power with a confidence that borders on delusion. What begins as bold ambition gradually mutates into hubris, and ultimately into a distorted relationship with power itself. In Kipling’s story, this transformation is dramatic and mythic, culminating in a literal fall from godhood. In Eddington, the transformation is more diffuse and contemporary, shaped by media ecosystems, ideological certainty, and the intoxicating feedback loops of modern influence.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you compare how both works portray the dangers of unrestrained ambition and the intoxication of power. In your analysis, consider how each work defines “power,” how characters justify their rise, and how their environments either reinforce or challenge their sense of authority. You should also examine how hubris manifests differently in each work—whether as overt self-deification or as a quieter, more insidious certainty—and how these differences shape each narrative’s resolution.

    In developing your argument, you may consider the following questions: Does power corrupt in the same way across different historical and cultural contexts, or does it simply adapt to new environments? Is the downfall in each work caused by external forces, internal flaws, or a combination of both? To what extent are the characters victims of their circumstances versus architects of their own collapse? Support your claims with specific evidence from both texts, and be sure to include a counterargument that challenges your interpretation before offering a rebuttal.

  • A College Degree in Applause

    A College Degree in Applause

    When Oprah Winfrey signed off for the last time, she offered a distilled insight after decades of televised confessionals and couch-bound catharsis: beneath our surface differences, we all want the same thing—to be heard and, more importantly, to be affirmed. Not merely listened to, but validated, as if our words must pass through some invisible tribunal and emerge stamped: This life matters. This mind is not wasted inventory.

    She was right, though even that admission feels like an understatement. The appetite for validation is not a polite preference; it’s a metabolic demand. We don’t just want to speak—we want to land. We want our sentences to strike the listener with enough force that they nod, recalibrate, maybe even quote us later as if we were a minor authority in the ongoing project of making sense. We want to believe that our thoughts improve the room, that our presence upgrades the conversation from background noise to something resembling signal.

    Of course, the engine driving this hunger isn’t entirely noble. Scratch the surface and you’ll find insecurity jittering beneath the skin, narcissism preening in the mirror, tribal instincts scanning for applause from the right audience. We want to be right, but more than that, we want to be seen being right. Yet it would be too easy—and too smug—to reduce this to vanity alone. There’s another current running underneath. Human beings, for all their posturing, are wired for cooperation. We build moral systems, knowledge systems, entire civilizations on the premise that sharing ideas might actually improve the collective condition. So the same impulse that craves applause also aspires—sometimes sincerely—to contribute something of value. We may be peddling clichés, hallucinations, or the occasional insight, but the urge to be heard persists like a drumbeat.

    After nearly forty years of teaching writing, I’ve had a front-row seat to this performance. I’ve enjoyed the privilege—let’s call it what it is—of having a voice that people were required to listen to. Now, as that authority begins to fade at the edges, I’m left examining the machinery that made it feel necessary in the first place. My students will tell you they’re here for practical reasons: a degree, a job, a paycheck that doesn’t insult them. Fair enough. But beneath that utilitarian script, I suspect another motive is quietly at work. They want to matter intellectually. They want their ideas to carry weight, to be received not as filler but as substance.

    I can see it because I can reverse-engineer myself at eighteen. Put me back in that position—blank slate, open catalog—and I’d choose political science without hesitation. Not because it guarantees employment—it doesn’t—but because it offers a stage. A chance to sound sharp, to read densely, to write with the kind of authority that might make a professor pause and think, there’s something here. The fantasy isn’t wealth; it’s recognition. Money pays the bills, but it doesn’t applaud. It doesn’t lean forward when you speak.

    And without that recognition—without the sense that your mind registers on someone else’s radar—life begins to feel like static. Content generated, scattered, and forgotten. A digital smear. Noise mistaken for presence.

    Which is why so many of us operate under a quiet affliction I’d call Intellectual Visibility Panic: the nagging fear that no matter how carefully we assemble our thoughts, they will evaporate on contact—unheard, unvalued, and unremembered. It’s not dramatic enough to ruin your day, but it’s persistent enough to shape your choices. It nudges you toward certain majors, certain careers, certain performances of self. It whispers that time is running out, that if you don’t establish your voice soon, it will dissolve into the background hum.

    And so we speak. We write. We posture. We refine. Not just to communicate—but to leave a trace strong enough that someone, somewhere, might stop and say: that was worth hearing.

  • Weaklings Anonymous and the Gospel of Disappointment

    Weaklings Anonymous and the Gospel of Disappointment

    Like millions of Americans, I was taught that The Brady Bunch wasn’t just a sugary sitcom fantasy—it was a blueprint for how families should work. Polyester-clad harmony, avocado-colored kitchens, and life lessons that landed with the gentle thud of a sitcom laugh track. But why, decades later, does the Brady house at 11222 Dilling Street remain one of the most photographed homes in America? Why has the show’s popularity only exploded since its 1974 cancellation? And most baffling of all—why do people still worship at the altar of Sherwood Schwartz’s pastel-hued utopia?

    In The Way We All Became the Brady Bunch, Kimberly Potts excavates this cultural phenomenon, tracing its roots to Schwartz’s other fantasy fiefdom—Gilligan’s Island. Both shows peddled the same delusion: you could toss together any group of mismatched personalities, and through teamwork, pluck, and a catchy theme song, everything would turn out just fine. In reality, unresolved resentment doesn’t dissolve neatly before a commercial break, and a shared kitchen doesn’t magically make step-siblings love each other. But Schwartz wasn’t interested in reality—he was selling optimism in Technicolor.

    Sherwood Schwartz was America’s high priest of idealism, a man who saw divorce rates skyrocketing and decided to counterprogram with an unshakably cheerful alternative. His blended family would work, dammit, and they would thrive in a sun-drenched suburban utopia filled with pep talks and hugs. 

    I was raised on a steady diet of optimism—the kind ladled out with a smile and a moral. Captain Kangaroo read The Little Engine That Could as if perseverance were a law of physics. Comic books ran Charles Atlas ads promising that a few earnest reps with a dining chair would convert me from sand-kicked weakling into a suburban Hercules. The message was simple and intoxicating: try hard, get strong, win life.

    Even then, a small, skeptical voice whispered from the back row. I owe that voice to The Monkees.

    October 16, 1967—the day irony introduced itself with a slapstick flourish. I was five, planted in front of a Zenith, watching “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling,” blissfully certain the universe kept its promises. Then Micky Dolenz—my favorite Monkee—was humiliated on the beach by Bulk, a Speedo-wrapped monument played by Dave Draper. Bulk didn’t just flex; he annexed. He took Brenda—the beach goddess—as if she were part of the trophy case.

    Micky’s response was textbook American faith in self-improvement: join Weaklings Anonymous, submit to punishing workouts, and chug something resembling fermented goat sorrow. He sells his drum set to finance the transformation. The montage promises redemption; the protein slurry promises absolution. The contract seems clear: suffer now, triumph later.

    And then the script commits treason. On the eve of Micky’s muscular revenge, Brenda has a revelation—muscles are passé. She abandons Bulk for a bespectacled reader of Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust outcompetes pecs. The beach crowns a new champion: not the strong, not the striving, but the well-read.

    I remember the exact sensation—like a floor giving way under a small, unsuspecting life. The lesson landed with the grace of a dropped anvil: effort does not guarantee outcome. You can sweat, sacrifice, and swallow liquefied goat tragedy, and still lose the girl to a man who wins by turning pages. I didn’t have the vocabulary for irony, but I felt it enter my system—cool, patient, and permanent.

    Yet the story planted a second, more stubborn truth: the heart does not consult the intellect. Intellectually, I absorbed the lesson—life is not a ledger; virtue doesn’t always pay. Emotionally, I defected. I still wanted to look like Dave Draper. In the mind of a five-year-old, the world offered a clean binary: become Draper or remain a tomato skewered by four toothpicks. The moral could lecture all it wanted. The body had already cast its vote.

  • The Night My Biceps Filed for Divorce

    The Night My Biceps Filed for Divorce

    My pride as a lifelong bodybuilder—still clinging to relevance in my sixties—met its demise one evening on the couch, where I lay in a slovenly posture and glazed-over eyes while watching the movie Road House. Calling it a film feels charitable. It’s more like a glossy shrine to the male physique, starring a Jake Gyllenhaal so surgically chiseled he looks as if Michelangelo started carving David, lost patience, and decided to make him punch strangers for a living.

    Gyllenhaal plays a brooding bouncer in Key West, a man whose job description consists of protecting a bar and its luminous owner, played by Jessica Williams, from the usual parade of cinematic degenerates. This inevitably summons the film’s apex predator: Conor McGregor, who appears less like a human being and more like a shaved grizzly bear that discovered performance enhancers and never looked back. Veins bulge with the enthusiasm of overinflated garden hoses. His performance oscillates between feral animal and man who hasn’t blinked since the Obama administration, and it’s oddly mesmerizing.

    The plot is a rumor—thin, fleeting, and functionally irrelevant. A stranger rides into town, restores order with his fists, and exits in a cloud of testosterone and broken cartilage. But let’s not pretend narrative is the point. The camera worships muscle with the reverence of a Renaissance chapel. Biceps gleam. Lats ripple. Every slow-motion shot feels like a commercial for pre-workout powder and substances that come in unmarked vials. This isn’t storytelling; it’s a two-hour flex.

    Somewhere between Gyllenhaal’s forty-seventh shirtless entrance and McGregor’s latest snarl—delivered like a man hydrated exclusively by rage—I reached for my phone. Not to check the time. To search McGregor’s diet. Because this spectacle doesn’t entertain; it indicts. It shines a harsh fluorescent light on your own soft edges and whispers, You, sir, are a sentient pudding cup.

    At sixty-two, I knew I wasn’t about to carve myself into Gyllenhaal’s likeness. But I was still in the fight—kettlebells in the garage four days a week, the exercise bike on the others. My diet remained high-protein, though compromised by opportunistic snacking. The result: less Greek statue, more a compact, perspiring version of Larry Csonka in a Hawaiian shirt, lingering too long at the Grand Wailea buffet.

    I entertained fantasies of becoming a skinny version of myself. Replace kettlebells with yoga. Trade meat-heavy sandwiches for two plant-based meals a day of steel-cut oats, bell peppers, and tofu. But a chorus of old convictions intervened: maintain the protein intake, preserve the muscle, defend the territory. Five servings of “bioavailable protein” a day. No surrender. Somewhere along the way, fitness had ceased being about health and hardened into doctrine.

    I hadn’t competed since finishing runner-up in the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco, but the mindset endured: life as contest, existence as proving ground. That belief wasn’t accidental. It was inherited. My father—infantryman turned engineer—treated life like a problem to be solved and a battle to be won.

    In the early 1960s, stationed in Anchorage, he found himself competing with another suitor—John Shalikashvili—for my mother’s affection. When Christmas interrupted the contest, my father refused the ceasefire. He cut his holiday short, intent on beating his rival back to Alaska. His vehicle—a pale 1959 Morris Minor—chose that moment to revolt, its fuel system failing with impeccable timing.

    Lesser men would have conceded. My father reached for ingenuity. Lacking a proper part, he improvised with a prophylactic and a paperclip, fashioning a grotesque but functional fix. It was absurd. It was desperate. It worked. He made it to Seattle, boarded the ferry, and arrived in Alaska forty-eight hours ahead of his rival.

    Nine months later, I entered the world—the byproduct of competitive instinct, mechanical improvisation, and what must surely be the most unorthodox application of latex in automotive history. In that moment, my father didn’t just win a race. He set a standard: adapt, outmaneuver, prevail. And decades later, as I sat watching sculpted demigods on screen, I realized that standard was still quietly running my life.

  • One Pose After Another

    One Pose After Another

    In her essay “The Popcorn Resistance of ‘One Battle After Another,’” Hope Reeves announces her lineage with the solemnity of inherited doctrine: she is the daughter of two members of the Weathermen, the radical group that inspired the film’s insurgents. What follows is less a review than a grievance. Reeves objects that Paul Thomas Anderson’s rebels are not revolutionaries but caricatures—“deranged agitators” who seem to exist only to detonate things and themselves. Where her parents possessed, in her telling, a rigorous political philosophy—a diagnosis of America’s ailments and a plan for cure—Anderson offers chaos without a syllabus. The film, she complains, squanders its moment on spectacle. It refuses to function as a generational bugle call. It gives us handsome actors, grotesque enemies, and no promise of redemption.

    The complaint reveals more about the critic than the film. Reeves commits a projection error dressed as moral seriousness. She presumes the movie’s job is to ratify her preferred politics and then faults it for failing to salute. This is not a failure of the film; it is a failure of categories. Anderson is not staging a seminar in revolutionary theory. He is staging a wake for our appetite for performance. His rebels are ridiculous on purpose—left and right alike—because the subject is not ideology but cosplay: the human need to wear a cause like a costume and mistake the costume for a self.

    In Anderson’s world, commitment looks less like conviction than intoxication. The characters lurch from pose to pose, from slogan to slogan, as if chasing a high that keeps evaporating. The cycle is the point: one performance after another, one hit after another, each promising meaning and delivering only momentum. Politics here is not a program but a habit—tribal, theatrical, and chemically gratifying. We are not persuaded; we are stimulated. We do not think; we refresh.

    Reeves wants a call to action. Anderson offers a diagnosis. He shows a culture that confuses noise for purpose and ritual for agency, a culture that keeps returning to the stage because the stage is the only place it feels alive. The film does not rescue its characters because rescue would flatter us. Instead, it holds up a mirror and refuses to blink. It is not the movie Reeves wanted. It is the movie that understands the room.

  • “I Am the Frogman”: The Last Shout Before the Door Seals

    “I Am the Frogman”: The Last Shout Before the Door Seals

    I’ve spent more than a decade documenting my watch obsession on YouTube—a pursuit that begins as hobby and ends, if you’re not careful, as behavioral conditioning. You think you’re making videos. You’re actually being trained. The algorithm dispenses rewards and punishments with clinical indifference: views, comments, silence. You adapt. Of course you adapt. That’s the job now.

    The trouble is that the algorithm has no interest in truth, balance, or restraint. It prefers spectacle. It rewards the emotional range of a teenager who’s just discovered caffeine: hyperbole, dread, euphoria, FOMO, regret—delivered with the urgency of a man announcing the end of civilization via bezel insert. You wake up one morning and discover you’ve succumbed to Algorithmic Persona Drift—a slow mutation in which your public self becomes a louder, shinier, more hysterical version engineered for attention rather than accuracy.

    Feed it, and it feeds you back. The cycle tightens. Every video must be more decisive, more apocalyptic, more “this changes everything.” You produce manifestos. You narrate epiphanies. You analyze your own obsession with the intensity of a man dissecting his own heartbeat. The result is predictable: you become a caricature of yourself—recognizable, marketable, and faintly absurd.

    If you can tolerate that, the system will reward you. The numbers rise. The revenue trickles, then flows. You build a small empire out of controlled exaggeration. But there comes a moment—quiet, unwelcome—when you no longer recognize the man delivering the lines. The performance has outgrown the person. At that point, the decision presents itself with unpleasant clarity: keep feeding the machine and let it finish the job, or step away and salvage what remains of your voice.

    That’s one exit.

    The other is less dignified. You don’t leave; you are expelled. The causes are familiar—burnout, self-disgust, ennui, health—but the most decisive is also the least negotiable: age. You wake up one day and realize the tempo has changed. The rhythms that once animated you now sound distant, like music leaking from another room. The new release, the hyped drop, the celebrity of the week—none of it lands with the old voltage. Mortality has entered the conversation and lowered the volume.

    You try to resist. You tell yourself enthusiasm is a choice. But the gap widens anyway. You find yourself oddly relieved that you no longer care about bracelet articulation or dial gradients or the fever dream that the “perfect collection” is one purchase away. The brotherhood reveals itself for what it always was: half fellowship, half support group. You no longer feel the urge to compare scars from impulse buys, to laugh at the madness, to whisper—half-serious, half-hopeful—that this watch will finally cure you.

    For me, the separation was unmistakable. Twenty years dissolved into a blur of rotating bezels and contingency divers. Then, at sixty-three, something tapped my shoulder. Not a crisis. A correction. The obsession didn’t die; it simply lost its authority. Desire dimmed, replaced by a quiet recognition that watches are exquisitely engineered ways of losing to time.

    The feeling calls to mind a scene from Battlestar Galactica: a traitor sealed behind glass, the airlock hissing, the crew watching with solemn finality. Not melodrama—procedure. That’s aging. Not tragic, not cruel—inevitable. At some point, those still inside the illusion of endless tomorrows begin to edge away from those who have seen the horizon contract.

    A pane descends. It isn’t hostile. It’s accurate.

    You tap the glass, wave, try to rejoin the cockpit of youthful urgency. You even lift your wrist—your hulking G-Shock Frogman—and make your case. “Look,” you want to say, “I’m still in it.” But the seal has set. Reentry is not part of the design.

    What remains is less dramatic and more demanding: dignity. Accept the season you’re in. Build meaning instead of inventory. Offer something useful to those still racing ahead, even if they don’t yet see why it matters. They will. Everyone does, eventually.

    The algorithm fades. The noise recedes.

    And you are left, at last, with a quieter, harder question: not what you want next—but who you intend to be without the applause.