beautiful, funny, sad & true

checker:  Hey, were you in here earlier tonight?

me:  Nope.

checker:  Hunh. . .’cause there’s someone who looks just like you.

me:  I’ve heard that before, actually.

checker:  You have a doppul—what’s that word?

me:  Doppelganger.

checker:  Oh, yeah. . .’doppelganger.’  He looks exactly like you, but he was wearing a blue shirt.

me (wearing a multi-colored striped shirt):  Crazy!  But yeah, I’ve heard that I have at least one in town.  My main doppelganger is from Massachusetts, though.

checker:  (long, awkward pause) Well, Mr. [my last name], you saved six dollars and forty-nine cents.

me:  Excellent.

checker:  Have a good evening.

me:  Thanks, you too.

In the early 1980′s, the longest-lasting and most revolutionary new product was not the Rubik’s Cube, the tiny stuffed Garfield doll, or even MTV—it was the personal computer that would go on to change the world.  A closely related product that was also created around that time was the video arcade game. Home video games, like the Atari 2600, or even the quaintly archaic Pong, had existed for a number of years by then, but video arcades were a new and exciting phenomenon. Pinball was for old people; video games were for us kids.

The grocery stores near our house both had a couple games each, but the nearest serious video game parlors were Pizza World (which at the time of this entry is the current location of El Portón, an excellent Mexican restaurant) and Nob Hill Lanes, a bowling alley with a smaller but more unusual lineup of games, including a 2-player Ms. Pac-Man console, which was—and still remains—my all-time favorite video game.

I loved Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man so much that I bought the ‘strategy guide’ books about how to beat the games.  I even carried my little red portable cassette recorder to the arcade with me and recorded myself playing the games.  I took the tapes home and listened to them in headphones, imagining how the game play went, and trying to re-enact it in my little mind’s eye.

One day, we got a new refrigerator, and it came in a gigantic cardboard box. When it stood on end, it was the size of a video game, which gave me and my brother a brilliant idea: LET’S MAKE OUR OWN PAC-MAN MACHINE.  That’ll be great, we thought. Now, all our friends in the neighborhood won’t have to go to Pizza World or Nob Hill Lanes to play, they can just come to our front yard. And we’d be rolling in money!  Yakima wasn’t anything like Silicon Valley (either then OR now, quite frankly) and besides, I was ten and my brother was six, but at least we had imagination and determination.

The contraption we made is one of the things I really wish we taken at least one picture of.  It was absolutely ingenious, but surprisingly difficult to describe.  Follow me closely.  Here’s the type of original Pac-Man machine we were trying to emulate.

We stood the refrigerator box vertically, and then drew a Pac-Man maze screen in magic marker on the top half of the box. I think my brother drew the side panels, and we collaborated on the name plate that said, “PAC-MAN” on it. Directly underneath the ‘screen’, we placed a smaller cardboard apple box, which was for the joystick and coin slot. We cut a slot for people to insert quarters, and we sculpted a heap of clay into a joystick and plopped a golf ball on top of it.  Voila!

So now it looked good, but it didn’t do anything yet; we had to figure out how to bring it to life. We knew that one of us would have to be inside the box, but we struggled to come up with a workable solution. I think it was Mom who had the idea of using a box knife to cut a rectangular ‘track’ hole along a section of the maze we had drawn, and then we could stick a magic marker through the hole and tape a cardboard Pac-Man to the end of it to move him through the maze.  So that’s what we did.  The Pac-Man kept falling off the end of the pen, though, so it took a while to figure out how much electrical tape to stick him on with.  For the machine’s sound, I had all those cassettes I’d been making for weeks, so I put some batteries in the cassette player and brought it in the box with me.

We were ready to go.  We ran up and down the street, yelling, “Pac-Man!  Play Pac-Man!”  We cajoled everyone to give it a try, and somehow they all went along with it.  When someone put in a quarter, I would press the Play button on my tape recorder and the introductory song would play, followed by the sound of game play.  The person would grab the golf ball joystick and move it around as best they could, and I would move the marker with the Pac-Man on the end of it through the maze route, randomly.  Some people actually played this thing multiple times, but most realized right away that they weren’t actually able to control the Pac-Man at all, and that they’d spent the same amount as if they’d played the real game.  I think the box lasted only a few days, until the novelty wore off, both for us and for our friends.  But, like I said, I would dearly love to see a picture of that bizarre homemade contraption.

Since we’re on the subject of Pac-Man, once when my brother and I were at an arcade playing the game, a slightly younger kid we didn’t know (or maybe we did; I don’t quite remember) came up and said, very quickly and dramatically, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was this maze?  And there was all your favorite food and you just couldn’t resist?  And then you CHASE it?  And then when you get there, you EAT it?  That’d be awesome.“  My brother and I stifled our laughter and kinda said, “Sure, yeah. . .awesome—” and turned back to our game.

Portland has a ‘vintage’ arcade down in Old Town, and every once in a while, I like nothing better than to plunk a couple of quarters down and spend an hour or so in an attempt to get the new high score on Ms. Pac-Man, and occasionally I even get it.  You’ll know if I do, by the way, since I like to use the pseudonym Mr. T, so if you see ‘MRT’ on the high score list, that might very well be me.  Be all that as it may, I was very glad when that arcade opened, because that meant that all those skills I’d honed as a kid weren’t going to lie dormant anymore.  I would hate to think I wasted all that time on frivolous endeavors.  I can rest assured, though, because there’s still something to be said for hand-eye coordination, and running through a maze with your favorite food that you just can’t resist.

There’s also something to be said for the old video games from the ‘golden age’ of the early to mid-1980′s.  Despite their simplicity, they were captivating in a way that more modern games absolutely are not.  If you  haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing them, I urge you to arm yourself with a handful of quarters (most of these games, if they’re still around, still only cost a quarter to play, amazingly) and give some of them a try.  I know you’ll be glad you did.

The building I live in is inhabited entirely by very busy professional musicians, and we seem to have a bit of a reputation in our neighborhood.  This evening, while I was loading the accordion and the acoustic guitar into the car for tonight’s show, a woman I’ve never seen before was walking along the sidewalk and noticed what I was doing.

“Are you going to a gig?” she asked.

“Yup,” I replied.

“I hope you’re able to be self-supportive from your contributions to the group.”

I was dumbfounded, taken completely by surprise.  “Thank you for that,” I finally managed to stammer.

What an amazing thing for her to say.

Synchronicity is a term that was coined by Carl Jung to describe an ‘acausal connecting principle’, which is the short way of explaining a situation in which two unrelated events have an almost preternatural link, in a way that was unknown at the time of the first event.  That sounds confusing, but it’s really a beautiful idea, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience it a handful of times, and here’s my favorite example.

When I was a kid, I used to have a green Huffy bike that was really heavy and cumbersome.  Some of the other kids had BMX bikes, and they could race around, pop wheelies, and catch air off of ‘sweet jumps’ with ease.  (That’s a Napoleon Dynamite reference, by the way.)

My tank of a bike made such stunts laughably difficult, although they did happen occasionally, albeit with a little help from my friends.  One kid named Sean who lived across the street claimed to have bionic powers.  This was in the late 1970′s, after all, and the Bionic Man TV show was in full swing.  Sean was notorious for claiming the powers whenever he would throw a football for a slightly longer distance than normal, or run extra fast, but his favorite thing was to stand in the middle of his yard and gesture at the two large trees in it.  “I can pick up this tree in this hand,” he would say, “and that tree over there in my other hand.”

“Well, let’s see you do that,” my brother and I said.

He would hold his arms out and flex his fingers before he poked at his wrist and said, “Hunh.  My bionics don’t seem to be working today.”

“Oh, man, that’s a shame,” we said.  “We wanted to see you lift up the trees.  Maybe next time.”

That being said, one day all of us were riding our bikes in circles, jumping off curbs and trying to pop wheelies, and after numerous tries, I finally was able to get the front wheel of my Huffy off the ground at the precise moment it needed to be lifted, and the front wheel sailed into the air.  I kept it aloft for quite some time, and I was elated.  When the wheel found its way back to the ground, I pushed backwards on my pedals, stopped my bike, and shouted with glee.  “Hey, everybody, did you see that?  Oh, man, that was super high!”  Most people cheered and said that yes, they’d seen it, but Sean was having none of it.

“Did you see me go like THIS right before you pulled up on the handlebars?” he asked, making a sort of throwing motion with his arm.

The rest of us kinda looked at each other, and I said, “Uh, no, I didn’t see that.”

“Oh, well, I transferred my bionics to you, and that’s what gave you the strength to do that.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, trying not to laugh.  “Thanks!”

After much cajoling of my parents, I finally got a new bike when I was about nine years old.  I’d been looking at it for months in a catalog I’d gotten from the Schwinn store.  It was a Tornado, and it was love at first sight.

I don’t remember exactly when I got it, whether it was for my birthday or For No Reason, but I loved it, and I rode it everywhere.  It was quite an improvement over the clunky Huffy.  Suddenly jumps and wheelies were no problem, and I could skid around the slippery sidewalks at CatholicSchool like a pro.  A handful of us clipped playing cards into the spokes of our wheels with clothespins, in order to make our bikes sound like hot rods.  Incidentally, I think it may be time to clip a card or two into the wheels of my new bike and race around the neighborhood, just to see what kind of a reaction I get.

In true BFS&T fashion, I told you that story so that I can tell you this one, and this is where the synchronicity factors in.

One day, my brother and I were playing football in the front yard, like we did often.  On this particular day, we were in full uniform, with pants, jerseys (he wore a Seattle Seahawks jersey, while I was partial to the Pittsburgh Steelers), knee pads, shin guards, shoulder pads, and helmets.  We were quite well decked out, I have to say.  So we’d been playing for a while that afternoon, when I got the sudden urge to ride my bike.  Normally I would have gone inside to change out of my football uniform first, but this time I chose to climb on my Tornado and zoom away in full regalia.  I thought I should just leave my helmet and everything on; I’m not sure why.

I had been riding for fifteen or twenty minutes, when the thought occurred to me, Why didn’t I take all this stuff off?  I must look like a complete idiot.  I’m going home right now and changing. About one second after I had finished that thought and turned toward home, my handlebars slipped ninety degrees sideways, and my bike fell to the ground.  I flew through the air for a couple of seconds, flipped over onto my back, and my head slammed down onto the cement sidewalk much harder than it had any right to.

I lay there dazed, looking up at the sky, completely unhurt.  I suddenly realized how glad I was that I’d chosen not to change out of my football helmet, and I rode home with newfound vigor.  I don’t think I told my mom what happened, because I didn’t want her to worry.  Nothing had happened to me, after all, so why bother her with a non-issue?  But I never forgot, and I got a bike helmet pretty soon after that incident.

By way of a summary for this entry, here’s a video of the Police, tearing it up in 1984 (I’m guessing it’s 1984 by what they’re wearing), when they were at the absolute top of their game.  This, naturally, is the song, “Synchronicity I.”

Here’s another story from the TMI Files, and it’s quite possibly the most. . .um. . .risque of the bunch of stories.  If that’s not something you feel comfortable reading, or if you’re at work, I encourage you to skip over the next few paragraphs and start reading again at the fifteenth paragraph, which is a good bit and takes place on Halloween.

Like I’ve said in the last couple of these stories, there’s a certain age during which young kids are curious about nudity and romantic feelings, but it only lasts for a certain amount of time before puberty happens and changes everything.  The last of these of ‘innocent’ experiences for me was when I was ten years old, and it naturally involved GirlUpTheStreet, who will henceforth be known as WonderWoman.

At the end of our street in Yakima was (and still is) a fairly good-sized Catholic school and church.  Next to that is a fairly good-sized lawn and baseball field, and next to THAT is a fairly good-sized football stadium, with fairly good-sized bleachers.  All of us kids spent countless hours around the school, though none of us went there.  They had a large log toy on the playground, and the school’s sidewalks were paved with smooth and slippery cement, which made for some excellent bike riding and skidding around all of the corners.  Another of our favorite endeavors was to sneak underneath the chain-link fence and into the stadium, day or night.  Sometimes we would play football, sometimes we’d play hide-and-seek, sometimes we’d just roam around.  This isn’t the interesting part of the story yet, and it’s also not the location of my final innocent tryst with WonderWoman.

I told you about the school and the stadium because A) it’s such a huge part of the setting for our neighborhood stories, and B) there was a network of fruit warehouses to the south and to the east of the stadium.  The one to the south (which has since been divided up and developed into Glenwood Square) is where my brother and dad and I witnessed a Volkswagen Bug stall on the train tracks and nearly get crushed, but the one to the east is the one in which FinalInnocentTryst occurred.

During the day, the warehouse was a hive of activity, and none of us was brave enough to speak to any of the ragged, scruffy men who worked there.  After hours, the place was full of great places for kids to play.  There were countless fences to climb under, and boxes of fruit to throw at each other, and large wooden pallot boxes to hide in.  The boxes became our favorite places, because not only could we hide, we could also see through the cracks of the boxes to see if anyone was coming.

Late one afternoon, WonderWoman and I decided we wanted to go to the warehouse and check it out, since it was a weekend and there was nothing going on over there.  We climbed under the fence and walked through the warehouse.  We’d been there many times with the whole group of kids, and each of us had gone separately a million times, but this was our first time going there together.  We’d been holding hands palm-to-palm the way ten-year-old kids do, without the fingers interlaced.  Suddenly we heard a noise and a door opened at the far end of the warehouse, letting a sliver of daylight into the dark warehouse.  This can’t be happening, we thought. There’s never anyone around on weekends.

Two men came through the door, and our hearts leapt into our throats.  We ran toward the door at our end of the warehouse, pushed the door out and sprinted toward freedom.  The men heard our footfalls and yelled, “Hey, you kids get outta here!”  They turned and started to chase us out.

The gate was too far away, and we knew we’d never be able to squirm under it before the men caught us, so we ran to one of the pallot boxes and jumped inside.  Breathing heavily from our sprint, we peered through the cracks in the box and saw the men come out the door and half-heartedly search for us.  They were about thirty feet from us, and they had no idea we were there.  We didn’t want our loud breathing to give away our hiding place, so we kissed.  A lot.  Even after the men went away.  We decided that we quite enjoyed being trapped in there.

“Here, let’s do something else,” she said in her let’s-pretend-we’re-married voice.  She slid her pants down to her knees and motioned for me to do the same.  Having done that, we sat down next to each other, close enough that our posteriors were touching, and kissed some more.  This was a whole new level for both of us, since we hadn’t ever really kissed before, and certainly not like that.  She rose up to her knees and said, “Let’s touch.”

“Okay,” I said, and rose up to my knees in front of her.  We were kneeling a baby’s arm-length from each other with our pants down.  We kissed again, quickly, just once, and she reached out to touch the tip of my penis with her first two fingers.  She kept them there, ever so gently, and was fascinated to watch tumescence in action.  She moved her index finger from the tip to the base, and back to the tip.  Now it was my turn.  There was a line on the skin of her lower abdomen from the elastic at the top of her underwear.  I touched that line, and slid my finger slowly down.  I didn’t put it inside her, because that wasn’t something that we would have done at that time.  I just touched her gently from top to bottom to top, in the same way that she had done to me.

By this time, it was starting to get dark outside, and we thought we should get back home.  We gave each other one last long kiss and, still kneeling, embraced and pulled our bodies together.  Neither of us had experienced anything that magical before, and we held each other there for a very long moment.  Afterwards, we stood, pulled our pants back up and found our way to a new place where the gate was unlocked, so we just walked right through and out to the street toward home.

We had our pants pulled up, but unzipped slightly, so that they’d stay up, but we still had the feeling of intimacy that it created.  We were holding hands in that non-interlocked way again, until she found a discarded piece of garden hose in someone’s yard, picked it up, and started blowing into it like a trumpet.  Suddenly we we saw a couple of the neighborhood kids at the end of our street.  They saw us, too, and started running in our direction.   I quickly zipped my pants up.  “Your pants,” I said, “Get your pants!”  She laughed, dropped the hose and reached for the zipper on her pants.  She had a bit of difficulty, but got them zipped just as the kids arrived.

“What’re you guys doing?” they asked.

“Nothing,” we said, giving each other Significant Looks.  All of us walked home together, and I don’t think any of the other kids was the wiser.

WonderWoman moved from my neighborhood not long after that, and she went to a different school, so I didn’t see her again until Halloween of the following year, by which time I was eleven and she was ten.  She and her older brother came by our neighborhood to trick-or-treat and say hi to everybody.  They arrived a bit late, maybe ten o’clock at night, and my brother and I were already practically asleep in our bunk beds.  My mom let them in and got us up to say hello, cause she knew we’d be disappointed if we missed them.

My brother got up first and went in to say hi.  I straightened up my Oakland Raiders pajamas and walked out a minute later.  We exchanged the usual pleasantries and good-to-see-yous, but after a while it got a bit awkward.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it was just because we all hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, or maybe it was so late at night that we were all a little groggy, but we gave them some candy and said thanks-for-coming-by-and-stuff, and they went on their way again.

I turned back to walk into the bedroom, and that’s when I noticed that the fly on my pajamas was open, and that the tip of my little penis was poking out, and it had been out the entire time.  It was as if it, too, was saying hello to the girl it missed.  I smiled to myself, tucked it back into my fly, and crawled into bed.

That’s the last time I saw her.

Sometimes, I wonder what became of her.  I’m sure she’s old and fat and married with kids now, like so many other people our age are, but I’ll never forget her as she was back then, and I’ll never forget some of the moments we shared.  They’re still imprinted in my brain, and that stuff happened over three decades ago.

Love, it would seem, conquers all; even such seemingly insurmountable forces as time and an otherwise rapidly fading memory.