Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • 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 Teen Who Had It All Figured Out

    The Teen Who Had It All Figured Out

    I was sure my teenage bodybuilding quest would bring me fame and fortune. Signs of my impending greatness seemed everywhere. Not only had I developed an unusually muscular physique for a seventeen-year-old, but I also believed I possessed extraordinary networking abilities that boded well for my future as a world-famous bodybuilder and tropical gym entrepreneur. After all, while ordinary teenagers worried about algebra quizzes and acne, I was training alongside professional athletes and cultivating what I considered elite social capital.

    At The Weight Room in Hayward, for example, I worked out regularly with John Matuszak, the massive NFL defensive end known to fans as “The Tooz.” For reasons still unclear to me, Matuszak had taken a liking to me, and I interpreted this as further confirmation that destiny had marked me for greatness.

    Between sets of bench presses, T-bar rows, and seated behind-the-neck presses, we sang along to whatever soft-rock ballad drifted through the gym speakers. Watching the Tooz and me harmonize with Nicolette Larson singing Neil Young’s “Lotta Love” was one of those surreal spectacles only the late 1970s could produce. There we were surrounded by clanging iron, ammonia salts, sweat puddles, and steroidal aggression while two men built like escaped Vikings serenaded one another with tender California pop lyrics.

    People often spoke fearfully of Matuszak’s temper, but during our workouts the atmosphere felt less like an NFL locker room and more like a chemically enhanced Kumbaya retreat.

    Television could not adequately prepare you for Matuszak in person. He was a biological event. Standing close to seven feet tall and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he somehow appeared lanky and gigantic simultaneously, as though his limbs had been stretched by industrial machinery. He wore his beard and long hair with the wild authority of a mountain outlaw, and his pale predatory eyes possessed the fixed intensity of a hawk searching for movement in distant grasslands.

    One afternoon he sat beside me on a bench while the gym speakers played England Dan and John Ford Coley’s syrupy anthem “Love Is the Answer.” The sentimental lyrics appeared to offend him on a molecular level. He slowly curled his lips, looked at me with utter disgust, and muttered:

    “Bullshit.”

    Then he lay beneath four hundred pounds on the bench press and began repping the weight with terrifying force, repeating the word between repetitions as though contempt itself had become a pre-workout stimulant.

    In addition to networking with John Matuszak, I cultivated what I considered another crucial professional alliance: my relationship with local fitness legend Joe Corsi. In the bodybuilding ecosystem of the San Francisco East Bay, Corsi was practically a minor deity. He sold more supplements, weight-gain powders, and fitness equipment than anyone in the region, and his credentials appeared unimpeachable to my teenage mind because he had once appeared alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger on an episode of The Streets of San Francisco. To me, this television appearance elevated him beyond ordinary humanity and into the sacred cinematic realm of bodybuilding aristocracy.

    Corsi owned a fitness store next door to The Weight Room, and he frequently wandered into the gym to observe the lifters like a seasoned jungle naturalist inspecting promising wildlife. He was already in his late sixties, but he dressed with the flamboyant confidence of a retired nightclub vampire who had recently discovered Nautilus equipment. His uniform consisted of a sleeveless black one-piece jumpsuit in the style of Jack LaLanne, complete with a gold zipper pulled halfway down to reveal a thick mat of black chest hair. His arms remained impressively full and vascular for a man his age, though gravity had begun its slow negotiations with his triceps. His hair was dyed a shade of black so aggressive it looked chemically weaponized. His eyebrows were equally dark, thick, and glossy, giving him the appearance of a man who had personally declared war on aging and refused to surrender despite mounting evidence.

    Overall, Corsi resembled a geriatric Dracula who had traded bloodlust for protein powder.

    Whenever he saw me training with Matuszak, he showered me with praise. He said I had “world-class structure,” “exceptional symmetry,” and “champion potential.” At seventeen, these remarks struck me not as casual gym flattery but as contractual prophecy. I became convinced that Corsi would soon sponsor me in the same way Joe Weider had sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger. Any day now, I imagined, trucks would begin arriving at my mother’s house delivering crates of supplements, industrial tubs of protein powder, and enormous butcher-paper-wrapped T-bone steaks intended to fuel my ascent to bodybuilding immortality.

    When this glorious sponsorship materialized, my mother would finally understand that I was not joking about bypassing conventional adulthood altogether. College would be exposed for the pointless detour I knew it to be.

    Unfortunately, my mother remained skeptical.

    After I graduated from high school, she badgered me daily about my future with the persistence of an IRS auditor.

    “What exactly are you going to do with your life?”

    “I already told you,” I said confidently. “Joe Corsi is going to sponsor me.”

    She would stare at me for a moment, then deliver the kind of devastating realism only a financially stressed mother can summon.

    “Well,” she said, “this morning I opened the front door to get the newspaper and I didn’t see a pile of T-bone steaks on the porch. You sure you’ve got a lock on this?”

    Of course, I was sure. What I lacked in viability, I made up for with cocky, self-righteous rectitude.

  • How I Earned a 4.0 at an Educational Daycare Center

    How I Earned a 4.0 at an Educational Daycare Center

    Contrary to the stereotype of the dimwitted musclehead grunting his way through life on canned tuna and narcissism, I earned straight As in high school. The achievement sounds impressive until one examines the intellectual rigor of the institution awarding those grades. Like many public schools of the era, my high school had been academically diluted to the point that a 4.0 GPA carried roughly the same prestige as successfully operating a vending machine.

    One of my classes was called “Money Matters,” a title suggesting perhaps a sophisticated introduction to economics, finance, or capitalist theory. In reality, we spent the semester learning how to balance a checkbook and calculate simple household budgets using arithmetic so elementary it barely rose above first-grade math. Entire afternoons disappeared into worksheets featuring percentages and fractions designed less to challenge the intellect than to sedate it gently. The class felt less like education and more like institutional babysitting with fluorescent lighting.

    Even then I sensed something unsettling beneath the surface: the school system was not especially interested in cultivating thought so much as containing adolescents for eight consecutive hours while their parents worked and briefly recovered from the psychic exhaustion of raising them. Public education functioned as part classroom, part warehouse, part state-sponsored parental relief program. The unspoken social contract seemed obvious: Send us your children all day and we will supervise them long enough for you to survive suburban adulthood.

    Then there was “Popular Lit.”

    The title itself implied engagement with literature, but the course possessed all the academic seriousness of a motel lobby magazine rack. There were no lectures, no discussions, no tests, and no evidence that intellectual life had ever visited the room. For the entire semester, we were instructed to read any three library books we wished and submit three one-page book reports. The astonishing part was that reading the books appeared entirely optional. Students scribbled incoherent nonsense onto the forms, fabricated plots outright, or submitted what looked like fever-dream hallucinations written five minutes before class. It made no difference. As long as paper changed hands, an A materialized.

    The teacher presiding over this educational necropolis was a woman in her sixties who seemed to regard student interaction as an unfortunate workplace hazard. Each day she instructed us to perform “quiet reading” while she sat at her desk reading magazines, paying bills, clipping her fingernails, and radiating terminal disengagement.

    She had the spectral appearance of someone slowly dissolving under fluorescent lights. Her skin was ghoulishly pale. Long strands of dyed black hair hung around her face in greasy disarray. Her lipstick was so dark it resembled bruising, and beneath her eyes hung swollen bags suggesting decades of insomnia, cigarettes, disappointment, or perhaps all three simultaneously. Regardless of temperature, she wore heavy wool coats infused with the stale odor of old sweat, dust, and bodily exhaustion.

    Had you encountered her wandering the campus without context, you would not have guessed she was an educator. You might have assumed she was a homeless drifter scavenging for half-eaten cafeteria burritos near the dumpsters behind the gymnasium. Yet there she sat, entrusted with shaping young minds while silently retreating from humanity one magazine clipping at a time.

    My classes were so intellectually anemic that I often felt I had accidentally enrolled in a continuation school for juvenile delinquents who had been court-ordered to remain indoors until adulthood. Nothing about the curriculum suggested that the faculty envisioned us becoming lawyers, professors, scientists, or members of any recognizable professional class. The educational ambition seemed far more modest: teach us to obey instructions, arrive places on time, avoid armed robbery, and eventually settle into some blue-collar occupation or low-wage service job without setting anything on fire.

    The atmosphere carried a quiet institutional fatalism.

    Even the teachers seemed aware that the entire operation functioned less as an incubator of intellect than as a containment strategy for restless suburban adolescents. One afternoon, I overheard a teacher mutter to a colleague in the hallway with all the weary cynicism of a defeated bureaucrat: “We’re training them to become burger-flippers.”

    The remark should have depressed me. Instead, I found it oddly irrelevant.

    The teachers’ low expectations, their contemptuous resignation, their assumption that only a tiny remnant of us might someday attend college—all of it bounced harmlessly off my adolescent delusions because higher education was never central to my grand design in the first place.

    I had no dream of becoming a respectable professional.

    I intended to become an international bodybuilding celebrity.

    While the school system quietly prepared students for shift work and manageable disappointment, I was privately envisioning a far more glorious future in which I would win Mr. Olympia, achieve worldwide fame, and operate a lavish tropical health club somewhere in the Bahamas where bronzed tourists and muscle celebrities would sip protein shakes beneath swaying palms while admiring my development under ideal Caribbean lighting conditions.

    In other words, while the school trained future burger-flippers, I was preparing to win the Mr. Olympia to set me up for a lifelong career in tanning oil and narcissistic transcendence.

  • 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.

  • What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    On a bright spring afternoon in Southern California in 1998, my college writing class was dissecting evil with the clinical confidence of people who believed it could be contained in literature. We were discussing The Painted Bird, a novel so saturated with human cruelty that it feels less like fiction and more like a dare. The room hummed with theories—evil as social construct, evil as pathology—until my students quietly dismantled the abstraction. They believed in evil not as metaphor, but as presence. Ghosts. Demons. Things seen and not forgotten.

    One single mother spoke of something that crawled beneath her bed at night. She said it plainly, without theatrics, which made it worse. Another student, a nurse in her forties who worked long shifts at UCLA, waited until after class. “I have a story,” she said, as if announcing a diagnosis that required privacy.

    She didn’t look like someone given to fantasy. She was compact, practical, her thick glasses enlarging eyes worn down by long hours and human frailty. Her stories usually involved difficult patients or her childhood in rural Louisiana—earthbound things. But as she began, her voice shifted, acquiring a distant cadence, as if she were tuning into a frequency not meant for daylight.

    She was six or seven at the time, roaming the backwoods with her cousin Carmen. No supervision, no schedule, no adult intervention. Their days were filled with the idle cruelty of children left alone too long—tormenting small animals, inventing games that escalated from mischief into something darker. There were no witnesses, no consequences, and so no brakes.

    Until one afternoon.

    They were inside the farmhouse, a sagging structure with a porch that complained with every step. The screen door creaked open. A man walked in and sat down in the living room as if he owned the place.

    But he wasn’t a man.

    She struggled to describe him without sounding ridiculous. He wasn’t clothed, but that detail felt irrelevant. His body was covered in coarse, matted fur. His skin—if it could be called that—had the pallor and texture of a rodent. Behind him trailed a long, muscular tail that slid along the floor and flicked against the doorframe like a living whip. He looked like something assembled from nightmare logic: a giant rat that had decided to stand upright and enter a house.

    The girls didn’t run. They couldn’t. Fear locked them in place, as if the room itself had thickened.

    He began to speak.

    For hours—she was certain it lasted hours—he sat in that chair and talked. His voice was low and abrasive, as if it scraped its way into the room. He told stories about the things he had done, the damage he had caused, the harm he had perfected. Time lost its structure. The afternoon stretched into something shapeless and suffocating.

    Then he turned his attention to them.

    “I’ve seen how bad you girls are,” he said. “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing.”

    And then he began to list their offenses. Not generalities—details. Every small cruelty, every secret act they had committed when no one was around. Things no adult had witnessed. Things no one could have reported.

    “I’m going to recruit you,” he said. “I’m going to make you mine.”

    The threat didn’t rise in volume. It settled into the room, thick and toxic, like something you could breathe in and never fully expel. His eyes stayed on them the entire time, unblinking, patient, certain. He described what would happen if they continued, not in vague moral warnings, but in precise, almost administrative terms—consequences rendered as inevitabilities.

    The girls sat frozen, their bodies no longer their own.

    And then, as casually as he had entered, he stood up and left. The tail followed him out like an afterthought, sliding across the threshold and disappearing into the heat.

    Silence rushed back into the house.

    Carmen finally whispered, “Did you see that?”

    My student nodded. Speech had abandoned her.

    From that day forward, their lives snapped into alignment. No more cruelty. No more experimentation with harm. They went to church. They prayed. They obeyed. Not out of virtue, but out of fear sharpened into obedience. Whatever had visited them had not suggested a path—it had enforced one.

    I would have preferred to dismiss the story as delusion, but that option didn’t fit the teller. This was a woman trained to assess reality, to separate symptom from fabrication. She spoke without embellishment, without the slightest interest in persuading me. She wasn’t selling a story; she was reporting an event that had rearranged her life.

    It unsettled me more than I expected.

    At the time, I was living alone in a condo in Redondo Beach, the kind of place that feels harmless until night gives it edges. One evening, I had a dream about the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only this version had shed all pretense of cowardice. He chased me, snarling, his face twisted into something feral and wrong.

    I woke up, but the dream didn’t fully release me.

    At the foot of my bed, I felt it—presence. Not a thought, not a leftover image, but something that occupied space. The lion-man sat there, immense, silent, undeniable. Fear pinned me in place. Breathing became an effort, as if the air itself had thickened in protest.

    In that moment of terror, the dumbest thought came over me: What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s visited by an evil entity at 2 a.m.?

    After several long seconds of thinking about my rhetorical question, I forced movement into my body. I stood, walked up the stairs on unsteady legs, poured a glass of water like someone performing a ritual they barely believed in. When I returned, I flooded the room with light, turned on the television, filled the silence with noise until the presence thinned and finally dissolved.

    Like pain receding from a crushed hand—slow, stubborn, but eventually gone.

    What stayed was the recognition.

    This was not my first encounter with that particular demon. Ever since the age of five, I had carried a pathological terror of The Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion, played by Bert Lahr with such unnerving desperation that the performance ceased to feel theatrical and crossed into something infernal. Every year when the movie aired on television, I experienced the same ritual dread: excitement curdled into panic. I wanted to watch the film because everyone watched it, because it was supposedly magical and wholesome and woven into the fabric of American childhood. But I could not look directly at the Lion’s face. Not for even a second.

    There was something about the grotesque architecture of that mask—the swollen cheeks, the creased forehead, the frantic eyes flickering through the narrow slits—that convinced me I was not looking at a costume but at a leak from another realm. To glimpse him was to receive unauthorized intelligence about what demons in hell actually looked like. Other children saw a lovable neurotic feline. I saw a panic-stricken emissary from the abyss.

    The Cowardly Lion colonized my dreams for years. I would wake in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, my heart jackhammering against my ribs. But waking up offered no relief. The nightmare did not end when consciousness returned; it merely changed venues. I could still feel the Lion in the room with me. Sometimes I sensed him sitting on the edge of my bed in the darkness while an icy current climbed my spine vertebra by vertebra. My chest tightened. My breathing became shallow and frantic. I was certain I would either suffocate, faint, or be dragged bodily into some spiritual sewer beyond childhood comprehension.

    Eventually I buried these terrors beneath the sediment of ordinary life. Or so I thought.

    Then came the summer of 1984. I was twenty-two years old and asleep one morning when I dreamed I was sprinting across a vast field toward a circle of flames. Beyond the fire stood an oasis shimmering with impossible beauty, a place radiating peace, love, and release from whatever unnamed anguish had dogged me since childhood. I knew with absolute certainty that if I could pass through the flames, I would arrive somewhere transformed.

    But just as I approached the burning circle, the Cowardly Lion stepped directly into my path.

    The effect was instantaneous. My body failed. Terror seized me with such total authority that I could no longer run. Worse, I could not scream. My mouth opened, but only muffled animal noises emerged while my lungs constricted so violently I thought I would suffocate inside the dream itself.

    Then came the truly impossible part.

    I awoke.

    At least I believed I awoke.

    I was lying flat on my back in bed, fully conscious, staring into the dim morning light of my room when I began to rise. Slowly. Smoothly. Silently. About a foot above the mattress.

    There was no drama to it. No spinning. No celestial music. Just the hideous calm of impossible physics.

    For what felt like ten seconds, perhaps longer, I floated there suspended above the bed in absolute terror before descending gradually back onto the mattress.

    I lay frozen afterward, unable to decide which possibility frightened me more: that I had actually levitated or that my mind had finally snapped under the pressure of its own private mythology.

    Naturally, I told no one.

    Who admits such things? Madmen? Cult leaders? Future occupants of padded rooms?

    So the experience became another sealed chamber inside me, another secret shoved into psychic storage beside the Lion himself.

    Then, years later, when I was thirty-seven, one of my nursing students casually described being visited in dreams by a grotesque rat-man figure. The moment she spoke, the old terror returned in full force. The Lion-Man rose from the graveyard of memory and stood before me again, and with him came the sickening recollection of floating above my bed in the summer of 1984 like some frightened counterfeit saint in a low-budget religious hallucination.

    Peeling back these memories feels less like reflection and more like excavating radioactive material. What occurs to me now is that humanity divides itself into two broad species. First are the literalists, the hard-material people who believe the physical world is the entire inventory of existence. What can be measured, photographed, weighed, biopsied, and touched is real. Everything else is sentimental fog generated by weak nerves and overheated imaginations. For these people, reality is a Home Depot aisle of concrete objects. No mystery. No metaphysical leakage. No shadows moving beneath the floorboards of ordinary life. What you see is what you get.

    I used to train with one of these specimens back in my teenage bodybuilding days, a granite-headed materialist named Falco Labroni. One evening we attended a church youth spaghetti dinner where a sweating youth pastor was passionately explaining salvation, heaven, hell, and eternal judgment between bites of garlic bread. Falco listened with the same skeptical expression he reserved for mail-order ab machines. Finally, he interrupted the sermon to announce that he would refuse to believe in heaven or hell unless Jacques Cousteau personally explored both places in a submarine and returned with film footage.

    Falco was what I now call a Film-in-Hand Absolutist.

    No footage, no faith.

    If Satan could not be captured on 16mm color film while smoking a cigar beside a lava pit, Falco wasn’t buying it. To him, metaphysics without documentation was merely indigestion wearing a choir robe.

    Then there is the other category of person—the unfortunate tribe to which I belong. These are the people cursed with imaginations porous enough to let other realities seep through. We sense shadows where others see empty rooms. We suspect hidden dimensions pressing faintly against ordinary life like faces against frosted glass. We dream vividly, feel presences, glimpse symbolic patterns, and occasionally become convinced the universe is leaking messages through nightmares, coincidences, music, illness, or memory. These people do not require film because the experience itself brands them from the inside.

    For us, life is never merely literal.

    It is layered.

    Ambiguous.

    Haunted.

    The world arrives wrapped in penumbra. Every object casts not just a shadow but the suggestion of another kingdom attached to it. A hallway at night is never just a hallway. A face can become an omen. A dream can feel more historically significant than an actual afternoon.

    Unfortunately, once you belong to this category, you never fully return to the clean reassuring geometry of materialism. You can pretend. You can teach freshman composition, pay your taxes, discuss cholesterol numbers, and shop for sensible shoes at Costco. But somewhere in the back chambers of your mind, the Lion-Man still breathes softly in the dark, waiting for the lights to go out.

    Looking back now, I see 1998 as my Lion-Man Year, the year the shadow world stopped politely knocking and simply let itself inside. My nerves were frayed, my concentration was dissolving, and my mind drifted through ordinary life as though half of it were trapped in some invisible underworld. Inevitably, this absentmindedness led me to commit one of academia’s unforgivable sins: I lost my university key.

    This catastrophe required me to report to a college administrator whose emotional warmth suggested she had once been rejected by both the priesthood and the prison system for being excessively severe. The moment I explained my predicament, her face hardened into a mask of institutional disgust.

    “The one thing,” she said slowly, as though speaking to a parole violator, “that a college instructor does not do is lose his key.”

    She looked me up and down not as a fellow employee but as a suspicious transient who had wandered onto campus carrying a forged faculty ID and a duffel bag full of stolen microscopes. Her lips curled with contempt as she informed me I would need to drive to a remote outpost on the edge of campus called Plant-Ops and pay cash for a replacement.

    Cash only.

    Naturally.

    Because nothing says “modern institution of higher learning” quite like a disciplinary pilgrimage to a bureaucratic wasteland requiring physical currency, shame, and emotional self-flagellation.

    Mortified, I drove eastward away from campus civilization. At first the road was paved, lined with ordinary buildings and signs of human order. But gradually the asphalt surrendered to dirt, potholes, rubble, and terrain better suited for Cold War tank exercises. My car bucked and lurched violently as though objecting to the mission itself.

    The landscape became increasingly apocalyptic.

    Tumbleweeds rolled across the path. Cow skulls appeared beside the road like decorations from a satanic rodeo. Buzzards circled lazily overhead, apparently alerted that some weakened academic had wandered too far from the faculty lounge and was nearing collapse.

    I no longer felt as though I were in Southern California.

    I felt I had crossed into a parallel dimension where failed instructors, cursed livestock, and bureaucratic shame went to die. The air itself seemed infected with rumors of evil.

    Then came the smell.

    As I approached Plant-Ops, a chemical stench engulfed the car—a nauseating cocktail of glue, industrial paint, mildew, overheated machinery, and cow manure baking beneath the sun. The odor struck me with such force that I became dizzy. My skin grew clammy. Sweat collected beneath my collar. I was convinced I either had a fever or had accidentally driven into the outer perimeter of hell’s maintenance department.

    Part of me wanted to turn the car around immediately, flee home, collapse into bed, and abandon the entire miserable enterprise. But I was too close now. The replacement key had become more than a key. It was absolution. Redemption stamped in metal.

    So I sat there gripping the steering wheel, breathing through waves of nausea, wiping sweat from my forehead like a condemned man approaching the gallows. Then I took a deep breath and drove forward into the wasteland.

    After driving for what felt like several geological eras, I finally saw Plant-Ops emerge from the heat shimmer like a hallucination summoned by exhaustion and institutional shame. The structure sat alone on a wasteland of gravel and dust, a dilapidated hangar that looked less like a university maintenance facility and more like the final headquarters of a collapsing dictatorship.

    The oversized shack had been assembled from enormous sheets of tin and aluminum that appeared to be barely holding together through a desperate alliance of rusted screws, crooked nails, and divine neglect. Every gust of wind threatened to peel the building apart and scatter it across the desert like the world’s saddest deck of cards. The metal walls were coated in a grotesque patina of stains, corrosion, and industrial runoff that resembled toxic sludge bubbling up from the underworld itself. It looked as though Satan’s HVAC department had subcontracted the job to the lowest bidder.

    The entire structure radiated bureaucratic doom.

    This was not a place where things were repaired. This was where broken things came to surrender.

    Reluctantly, I stepped out of my car and began trudging across the gravel toward the hangar. Each footstep felt ceremonial, as though I were approaching some punitive tribunal reserved for the absentminded and spiritually unwell. The smell intensified with every yard I crossed—a nauseating fusion of chemicals, mildew, scorched metal, industrial glue, wet dirt, and something faintly organic, as though livestock had died nearby and been left to ferment beneath the sun. My stomach pitched violently. I fought the urge to vomit, faint, or simply curl into the fetal position beside a tumbleweed and surrender to my fate.

    Inside, I encountered the caretaker of this infernal outpost.

    He was a short, hostile little man with thick glasses, a bushy gray mustache, and black wisps of hair clinging desperately to his bald scalp like spiders trapped in tar. He wore a grease-splattered work apron that looked as though it had absorbed forty years of mechanical despair. Standing over a scarred wooden workbench, he glared at me with bulging amphibian eyes while eating cold SpaghettiOs directly from the can. The fluorescent light above him cast a morgue-like glow across his cadaverous face. He looked less like a maintenance worker and more like a cemetery groundskeeper who moonlighted as an interrogator.

    I explained that I had lost my university key.

    Without sympathy or ceremony, he demanded twenty dollars in cash upfront. Then he grunted toward the key machine.

    “Don’t ever lose your key again,” he muttered.

    He paused, then gave a dry laugh.

    “And if you think dealing with me is bad, wait till the guy replacing me next week. He makes me look like a picnic at the beach.”

    The remark amused him enormously. He opened his mouth wide enough for me to glimpse rotten teeth stained the color of nicotine and despair. It was the laugh of a man whose personality had been slowly pickled in bitterness, isolation, and fluorescent lighting.

    Then his expression changed.

    He studied me more carefully now, concern pushing aside suspicion.

    “You don’t look so good,” he said.

    “The smell,” I blurted weakly.

    That made him laugh again.

    “I’m used to it,” he said. “But you better lie down. Cot’s over there.”

    He pointed toward a filthy army cot near the workbench with an index finger sporting a blackened fingernail thick as tortoise shell.

    I thanked him with the dazed politeness of a fever patient entering surgery and stumbled toward the cot. The canvas sagged beneath me as I collapsed onto it, drenched in clammy sweat, and watched him begin making my replacement key.

    The key-cutting machine crouched in the corner like a dormant execution device awaiting orders from the state. It was enormous, greasy, and coated with decades of metallic filth baked into its surface like industrial scar tissue. Iron filings glittered in the grime like black snow. Above it hung a single exposed bulb flickering weakly, as though even electricity struggled to survive inside Plant-Ops.

    The old man fed the blank key into the machine and yanked the lever.

    Instantly the contraption erupted awake.

    The sound was catastrophic.

    A metallic shriek tore through the hangar with such violence it felt capable of stripping paint from bone. The grinding wheel screamed against the brass with the tortured howl of some living creature being dissected alive. Sparks burst outward into the darkness while gears rattled and chattered with arthritic fury. The machine did not sound manufactured. It sounded enraged. Ancient. Biological.

    The noise penetrated my feverish skull until I no longer believed a key was being cut. It felt as though judgment itself was being engraved into metal.

    And then it happened.

    In the middle of that infernal screeching, my body began to rise.

    Slowly.

    Smoothly.

    I lifted a foot—perhaps two feet—above the cot.

    Terror detonated inside me. I tried to scream, but paralysis sealed my throat shut. I could neither move nor cry out. I floated there helplessly while the machine screamed like an industrial banshee beside me.

    In my terrified state, I mumbled, “What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s levitating in some demon’s lair?”

    The old handyman glanced over casually.

    “Almost done,” he said.

    There was no shock in his voice. No alarm whatsoever. He regarded my levitation with the mild indifference of a mechanic watching a customer’s tire pressure fluctuate. It was as though hovering terrified college instructors were simply another routine inconvenience at Plant-Ops.

    “There,” he announced a moment later. “Finished.”

    At those words, my body slowly descended back onto the cot.

    The smell no longer bothered me. In fact, I suddenly felt calm—eerily calm—as though some fever had broken or some invisible tribunal had decided to spare me.

    The handyman handed me the new key.

    I thanked him, staggered back outside, and escaped the haunted hangar with the gratitude of a prisoner released from a penal colony.

    From there I drove directly to a hardware store and bought the most indestructible keychain apparatus I could find: Kevlar tether, reinforced reel, industrial belt loop, military-grade nylon. I clipped the thing to my belt like survival equipment for a man preparing to cross hostile terrain.

    Because by then the keychain no longer represented mere organization.

    It was a tether to reality itself.

    A safety line.

    A guarantee that I would remain anchored to the ordinary world and not drift loose again into those shadow realms waiting patiently beyond the edges of consciousness.

    What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if at any moment he can become untethered to faraway places from which he can never return? 

  • The Ghost Story That Ruined My Archives

    The Ghost Story That Ruined My Archives

    I have been writing short stories for decades, which is another way of saying I have spent a large portion of my life producing evidence that enthusiasm and achievement are not the same thing. The cruel part is that I have improved. The older I get, the better I write, and the better I write, the more my earlier work begins to look like juvenilia wearing a fake mustache.

    Recently, I wrote a ghost story and morality tale called “The Ghost of Sid Briggs,” and to my surprise, it pleases me. That is rare. It made me think of the writers I revere most, especially John Cheever and Haruki Murakami, masters of the strange domestic wound, the moral haunting, the ordinary world with a trapdoor under it.

    So I became hopeful that I could add my ghost story to my long list of stories I’ve written over the years. I thought: Maybe I have a dozen stories buried in my archives. Maybe I can exhume them, clean them off, tighten the sentences, give them a new spine, and assemble a collection worthy of my literary heroes.

    Then I looked at the list. The verdict was swift and merciless. I did not have a dozen stories. I had only one that was the result of several rewrites over the last decade. I finally reached the point that it feels fully formed. I titled it “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.” It is a coming-of-age ghost story about a charismatic young bodybuilder and pathological liar whose life ends absurdly and tragically from a bee sting at a California lakeside beach. Narrated by a fellow young man who is both fascinated and repelled by Sid’s relentless self-mythologizing, the story explores male vanity, performance, fraudulence, and the seductive narcotic of reinvention. After Sid’s death, the narrator becomes haunted by recurring dreams in which Sid walks across a twilight lake to confess that, in his dying moments, he saw the life he might have lived had he abandoned narcissism and embraced love, family, humility, and spiritual truth. The ghostly visitation transforms Sid from beach peacock into cautionary prophet, warning the narrator against wasting life on performance and illusion. Decades later, the narrator continues to wrestle with Sid’s lesson through music, memory, and storytelling, realizing that some men are destroyed not by evil ambitions, but by the desperate need to become a dazzling fiction in the eyes of others.

    This is the one story that meets my current standards. The rest are not dead, exactly, but they are certainly not fit for public life. They would require major reconstruction, literary surgery, perhaps a full identity transplant. Otherwise, back to the dustbin they go, where they can continue their quiet service as compost for better work.

    The clarity over my literary work is sobering. My imagined collection collapsed into a single respectable survivor standing amid the wreckage, blinking in the light. I am not sitting on a hidden treasury of finished stories. I am sitting on a storage unit full of drafts, impulses, false starts, and prose-shaped weather systems. But at least I know the truth. Better that than the narcotic delusion of believing I possess a polished body of work when what I really have is a small literary junkyard with one decent house still standing.

    My literary challenges made me think this morning about my piano compositions. All my best songs point toward some buried autobiographical story. They are not merely melodies; they are emotional crime scenes. Each one seems to contain a memory, a wound, a comic humiliation, a ghost with unfinished business. Perhaps that is the spine I have been missing. Perhaps the stories should grow out of the songs.

    “The Ghost of Sid Briggs” began that way. It was first a piano piece, one I spent months composing, and the story emerged from it after many failed versions, false entrances, and narrative detours. The music held the emotional truth before the prose knew what to do with it.

    I am reminded of the old saying: Life is short, and art is long. At sixty-four, after writing short stories since 1981, I have only one story worthy of a collection. One. If I work hard and avoid wasting too much time congratulating myself for my own seriousness, perhaps I will have three or four before I reach my expiration date.

    This should depress me, and in some ways it does. But it also steadies me. I would rather possess one story that meets my standards than two dozen half-baked literary casseroles masquerading as finished work. A real story has architecture, pressure, mystery, and necessity. A failed story is often just a journal entry wearing a dinner jacket.

    So yes, I am humbled by my limitations. But I am also oddly buoyed by the clarity. The standard is no longer vague. I can see it now. And if most of my work fails to meet it, good. At least I know where the mountain is.

  • 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.

  • Bridge and Tunnel Bodybuilders

    Bridge and Tunnel Bodybuilders

    We were teenage bodybuilders in the East Bay—Hayward, San Leandro, Castro Valley—territory that might as well have been stamped unfit for human company by San Francisco standards. In the city, we were a contaminant. The girls would look at us with elegant disdain, lips curled, and whisper “Bridge and Tunnel,” as if we had crawled through some damp subterranean artery to trespass upon their polished world.

    We did little to disprove their assessment. We spent our afternoons at Lake Don Castro, 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.”

    “Meat,” Falco said, referring to his door-to-door sales job of premium cuts of meat—a scheme so vague it sounded like folklore.

    “I’m on crutches,” Bull said. “I’m not selling rib-eyes and Cornish game hens.”

    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. 

  • The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    I bought a used Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman for $100, though I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I was buying its more sophisticated cousin—the Multiband-6 GW-9300—listed at $200. When the package arrived, the truth was stamped plainly on the caseback: G-9300. No atomic sync, no nightly communion with Colorado—just a solid, stubborn quartz soldier. My heart sank with the dull thud of a man who realizes he’s paid twice the price for half the feature set.

    I contacted the seller, assuming incompetence rather than malice. His inventory was 99% clothing; this was not a man who spent his evenings debating radio signal strength and solar charging rituals. I offered him a dignified exit: refund me $100 and I’ll keep the watch, or take it back for a full refund. His first move was to offer $80, which was optimistic in the way that a man hopes you won’t notice arithmetic. I declined gently and reiterated my willingness to return the watch. That sobered him. He apologized, agreed to refund the full $100, and we both avoided the bureaucratic headache of returns.

    I could have pressed harder. There’s always a way to extract a little more when the other party is off-balance. But squeezing a man who’s clearly trying to piece together a living from eBay listings feels less like savvy and more like moral corrosion. You squeeze out a few more dollars but lose your soul.

    In the end, I kept the watch, opened ChatGPT for a tutorial, and in two minutes had it set and behaving like the reliable instrument it is. No atomic precision, no midnight syncs—just time, ticking along with modest competence. The transaction, briefly absurd, resolved itself into something tolerable, even instructive. I paid for a mistake, corrected it, and walked away with a working watch and an untroubled conscience.

    Not every deal needs to be a conquest. Some are better as small acts of grace and kindness.

  • I Am Verbosaurus Rex

    I Am Verbosaurus Rex

    At exactly 8:00 a.m.—as reliably as a Swiss watch with a Costco membership—I entered my Torrance Trader Joe’s, continuing a ritual that has endured since 2005. Fifteen minutes in, I found myself in the pasta sauce aisle beside two sisters in their sixties, both with jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who have seen things. Then it came: a disturbance from the frozen food aisle.

    At first, I told myself it was the usual retail banter—clerks sparring, voices raised in mock aggression, the choreography of workplace camaraderie. That illusion lasted about three seconds. The tone sharpened. The volume climbed. This was no jovial joust. This was a kerfuffle in its purest, most unrefined form—the kind of word baseball announcers used when fists replaced fastballs.

    The dialogue, once decipherable, repeated itself with the stubborn clarity of a broken record:
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged a look of shared alarm—the silent agreement that this was not the sort of morning theater one expects while contemplating marinara. Around us, employees formed small, murmuring clusters, like villagers sensing a storm that rarely visits their town.

    I never saw the alleged cougher—the phantom menace—but I did see his accuser. He entered our aisle still simmering, muttering fragments of outrage like a man replaying his own highlight reel. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties, performing that unmistakable gait: the lat-spread strut, shoulders flared as if perpetually stepping onstage. He carried a bag in each hand like ceremonial weights. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Strong,” as if to remove all ambiguity.

    The shirt was soaked through, suggesting a recent campaign at the nearby UFC gym. He had not yet exited warrior mode. His face attempted a look of righteous fury, but it flickered—betrayed by the faintest hint of self-awareness. The room was not applauding. It was recoiling. The performance of dominance had misfired, and in its place lingered something less heroic: the spectacle of a man who had mistaken volume for authority and muscle for gravitas.

    For a moment, I caught a trace of chagrin in his expression, like a balloon losing air in slow motion. Still, he clung to a hardened stare, perhaps hoping to salvage dignity from the wreckage.

    As for me, I became invisible. I adopted the ancient survival tactic of the grocery store: benign neutrality. Eyes forward. No recognition. No acknowledgment. The last thing I needed was to be drafted into this man’s private war.

    At checkout, as the affable clerk scanned my items with the serenity of someone blissfully unaware of the morning’s drama, I felt the urge to recount the scene. It had all the ingredients of a fine anecdote—conflict, absurdity, a man yelling about respiratory etiquette in the frozen aisle. But I hesitated. The bodybuilder might still be somewhere in the store, prowling, listening, ready to defend his honor against anyone who dared narrate it.

    Perhaps next week, I’ll tell the story. Though by then, in a place like Trader Joe’s, the tale will have already spread—whispered from aisle to aisle, passed between cashiers, and filed away as one of those rare moments when civility briefly cracked, and the frozen peas bore witness.

    My opportunity to tell the story would be wasted because it would be old gossip by then. 

    I walked out of Trader Joe’s pushing ten canvas sacks of groceries and a quiet resentment: I was not the man who got to tell the story of the raging bodybuilder. That distinction had slipped through my fingers, and the loss exposed something less flattering than disappointment. It exposed me as a gasbag—a man who doesn’t merely enter a room but attempts to annex it, to colonize the airspace with stories, gossip, and one-man comedy routines delivered with the full-body enthusiasm of a failed vaudevillian.

    I don’t just want to tell a story. I want to stage it. I want gestures, timing, voice modulation—the whole theatrical apparatus. I want to leave scorch marks on the memory of my audience, to become, if only for a moment, the most vivid thing that has ever happened to them. Not a storyteller, but an event. Not a man, but a headline.

    Which is to say: I am Verbosaurus Rex. I am a  conversational apex predator that survives by devouring silence and leaving behind a trail of exhausted listeners. I do not speak so much as expand, inflating every passing thought into a full-bodied monologue with the confidence of a man who believes the room has been waiting all day for my commentary. Questions are merely launchpads, pauses are tactical errors, and other people’s sentences are polite suggestions to be overrun. The Verbosaur, such as myself, does not intend harm; I simply cannot imagine a world in which less of me would be an improvement.

    And that impulse, when examined in sober light, looks less like charisma and more like hunger. Primitive man told stories around the fire to make sense of the world and to warn others about the tiger in the tall grass. I, on the other hand, seem to be reenacting Barnum & Bailey in the produce aisle, hoping that if I juggle enough words and land enough laughs, I might briefly convince myself that I matter.

    As a Verbosaur, I resemble the great, haunted figure of Larry Sanders—the talk show host who, after basking in the glow of studio applause, goes home to watch himself on television, scanning his own performance for proof that he was enough, and finding, with grim consistency, that he was not.