Short Circuits Read online

  And a mental picture just formed in my mind as I thought of the Titanic and the fate of all our little boats. The image is of a full moon in a cloudless sky glinting on the vast, dark, calm surface of time, on which a few small buckets float. I hope they are mine.

  * * *

  FLOTILLA

  You may have noticed that I’m rather fond of similes and metaphors for life and the human condition. They are constantly bubbling to the surface of my mind, unbidden.

  Some time ago, I posted a blog comparing life to a leaky little boat, with each of us bailing frantically to stay afloat. Today, perhaps more inspired by my Navy videos than the leaky boats blog, another bubble broke the surface. I suddenly found myself envisioning stock footage from a WWII era newsreel, looking down through the clouds on a huge flotilla of naval ships. Carriers, destroyers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, battleships, support vessels of every description, tankers, troop ships…hundreds of them, spread over miles and miles of the ocean’s surface, each individual vessel moving in the same direction and at the same speed, toward the same destination with the same goal. It was also one of those optical illusions where one moment you see it as a unit (the flotilla), and the next you see the individual ships which constitute it.

  And that, I thought, is a pretty good analogy for how humanity works. We are as diverse as the ships of the fleet, yet are all sailing through the sometimes stormy sea of life, each one a totally unique individual, operating both individually and as part of a vastly larger whole.

  In a wartime flotilla every ship is subject to attack and sinking by the equivalent of unseen submarines or air strikes. And when one ship is stricken, the others steam on, not oblivious, but unable to do anything. In the each-of-us-a-ship analogy, however, we sail together toward a horizon which none of us—no matter how big or small—will ever reach. As those who have sailed beside or at various distances from us for years slip beneath the waves, we sail on because we have no other choice than but to do so. And as we ourselves are torpedoed and sink, as inevitably must happen, the rest of the fleet continues on, our place in the flotilla taken up by another ship.

  I’d like to think of myself as a carrier, of course…a proud, awe-inspiring, majestic flagship of one of the many battle groups of the fleet. But I am probably, in reality, a little grey destroyer patroling the perimeter of the fleet, cutting resolutely through the turbulent seas, plunging headlong into gigantic waves only to rise up in a huge spray of water washing over my bow.

  There are, both in naval fleets and in life, priorities—probably more clear in ships than in people. In the navies of the world, it is the carriers which must be protected at all costs. The rest of the fleet is expendable. In human terms, world leaders…rightly or wrongly…are the carriers: the people they lead are the rest of the fleet. But regardless of our designation, place, rank, or role in the fleet, the important thing is to recognize that we each do have one, and each of us has a purpose it is our responsibility to fulfill with dignity and honor.

  Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

  THE LIFE OUTSIDE

  CARS

  Please don’t ask me where these things come from…I honestly haven’t a clue. But this morning I was thinking about cars and the memories evoked by them.

  When I was very young, I collected pictures of cars…cut them out of magazines. Not sure now what I did with them, but I was fascinated by them. Each year’s new models were a cause of excitement. I probably got this from my dad, who I don’t think ever had a car for more than a year. Mom used to joke that whenever the ashtrays got full, dad would go looking for a new car. He actually won one, once…a little Nash Rambler, as I recall, though I don’t remember the details of how he won it.

  About the time I learned to drive, Dad had a huge bathtub-shaped Nash and a Crosley, a teeny little car which never caught on in behemoth-on-wheels-crazy America. I remember trying to cross-wire it so I could take it for a drive whenever my folks weren’t around. The trouble with cross-wiring would be that shortly after I had the car running and moving, the wires would come uncrossed. And I remember that one time, after showing it off to my friends, I started to drive away, but they lifted the rear end off the ground and I couldn’t…there, rear wheels spinning crazily in mid-air.

  I do remember being totally humiliated when my best friend, Gary, came over to my house the day he got his driver’s license. I was of course green with envy that he had gotten his license first, and when my dad said, “Well, you’ll have to take Roge out with you and teach him to drive,” I could have crawled under the carpet.

  Still before I got my license, my folks and I went to visit my grandfather, who had a small farm, around which he was making a dirt road. While my folks were inside visiting I decided to take the Nash for a drive down the road. Dad had made the mistake of leaving the keys in the ignition, so I just got in and took off. I was tooling along probably faster than I should have through Grandpa’s corn field when the road took a sharp turn to the right and ended abruptly, about fifty feet further, in a huge mound of dirt. Not able to stop in time, the car shot up the mound of dirt and balanced there, like some giant teeter-totter, all four wheels off the ground.

  My dad was not pleased.

  Dad saw to it that I traded cars almost as often as he did, and I can’t really count the number of cars I had while he was still alive. I had a tinny little green Henry J while I was in college, a snazzy little red Ford convertible while in Chicago, a huge Buick convertible while in the NavCads, my grandpa’s equally huge Dodge after he died, which I had when I moved to California, a monstrous ‘68 Dodge Station Wagon I inherited after Dad died, and my all-time favorite, a little grey 1978 Toyota I bought off the showroom floor in Los Angeles and had for nearly 18 years. No one other than me ever drove it, and I loved it. Even after it died, I kept it, hoping irrationally to have it restored.

  For awhile I had a large Mercury Marquee LST I bought from my cousin Jack after the Toyota gave up the ghost, and when it in turn died, I bought my current car, a 1999 Chevy Metro also bought off the showroom floor and of which I am also very fond. (At 43 miles per gallon, what’s not to love?)

  To me, a car has always been primarily a means to get from point A to point B. I’ve never been big on bells and whistles and all those things over which other people drool and from which Detroit has made huge fortunes.

  But as I look back on many of the cars in my life, they come attached to indelible memories. I sure wish I could walk out of my dorm at Northern and get into that little Henry J and drive home to Rockford for a weekend with my folks.

  Sigh.

  * * *

  FIRST JOBS

  All my life I have considered work to be a necessary evil, and I was reflecting the other day on my earliest adventures in the working world. For me, that began in 1958, when I graduated from Northern Illinois University with a B.A. in English—one of the most economically worthless degrees known to man, unless one plans to teach. I did not plan to teach. I immediately moved to Chicago to take on the world.

  My very first after-college job was with the Olson Rug Company, whose triple claim to fame was: 1) “Olson Rugs are reversible”; 2) “We use your own wool”…which meant if you sent in a sack of wool from your pet sheep, Olson would supposedly use it in making your new rug…a bit impractical, but people actually would send in hair from their beloved dog, and Olson would accept it; and 3) “Olson Rugs do not burn”…but they did smolder.

  The Olson Rug Factory was something of a Chicago landmark. It was huge, and it featured on one corner of its property, a really beautiful garden with waterfalls which was a great tourist attraction…a precursor of the much larger Bush Gardens which came later. It attracted people from all over the area, and my folks and I had come all the way from Rockford when I was a kid to see it.

  I was assigned to a two man department devoted to responding to customer inquiries, some of which I’ll get to in a moment. This was in the da
ys long before what we now recognize as computers, but we did have available to us an absolutely-state-of-the-art behemoth of a machine which could seat two people, as I recall and which was, in effect, a great-great-grand-uncle of a computer. It contained probably 25 “stock” paragraphs dealing with the most common questions sent in. So I would sit there and type in: “Dear Mrs. Smith: #1, #14, #8, #4, Type” (yes, type, as on a built-in automatic typewriter). Very rarely I’d have to actually compose a paragraph for which there was no stock response.

  Several things kept me amused. One was collecting the names of some of the people who wrote in. There was Peachy Poff, Mitzpah Frau, Quo Vadis Cone, and Placenta Palmer…and I swear I did not make those names up. Who could?

  And the inquiry letters were often a delight. We received many along the lines of the following:

  Dear Olson Rug Company:

  My wife and I entertain a lot, and if you will provide rugs for our home, we will tell everyone they are Olson Rugs, and your company will benefit greatly from increased sales.

  Uh huh.

  But my favorite letter was from a woman also asking for free rugs, in exchange for which she would give us THE SECRET. She had, she explained, “tried to give it to the Sheriff, but he was sitting on two chairs.”

  We passed, though I always did rather wonder what THE SECRET might have been.

  I lasted at Olson for approximately a year, then found a job—probably because I could clearly read the “Dead End” signs with Olson—with an insurance company in the Loop where I was, inexplicably, some sort of insurance adjuster. I have absolutely no recollection now of what I did or why I even thought I might have any interest in being an insurance adjuster (which, as it turns out, I did not). But it did get me started as an editor, when I suggested that the company really needed an in-house monthly newsletter, and they agreed. It was called “Hear Ye” and was an incredibly amateurish affair with a hand-lettered title, and produced by mimeographing on regular 8 ½ x 11 paper…but at least it was white paper, and not the yellow lined notepaper. I did have my standards.

  I was with the insurance company for probably a year and a half, then moved onward and upward to Duraclean International, a rug and upholstery cleaning organization which sold cleaning franchises in several countries, where I was associate editor for their house organ, the Duraclean Journal. (Probably my sterling service with Olson rugs may have influenced their decision to hire me.)

  I really found a home there. Very nice people, and I had the opportunity to travel around the country to conduct seminars for groups of franchisees.

  The only drawback was that I lived on Chicago’s near north side, and Duraclean was located in the suburb of Deerfield, which was quite a trek. Even that would not have been too bad, but I had to cross, as I neared my work, the Illinois Central’s commuter rail tracks. And every single morning, no matter if I was 10 minutes early or 13 minutes behind schedule, a commuter train would wait until it saw me coming, then race down the tracks just in time for the gates to lower before I reached them. (A coincidence, you say? I don’t think so.)

  I was with Duraclean for six years…actually the longest time I ever spent on any single job…and I left only when my partner and I broke up and I decided to move to California. But that’s quite another story, which we shall get to anon.

  * * *

  JOBS FROM HELL, PART I

  My first job in Los Angeles was with a small public relations firm in Beverly Hills, whose major clients were two land development projects. The boss was, as best I can recall (I seem to have tried to blot out a lot of memories of him), apparently gained whatever success he had by strict adherence to one rule of business: his clients could do no wrong; his employees could do no right. All credit was his, all the work and any blame fell to his employees.

  Paydays were Friday, and though the work day was supposed to end at 5 p.m., checks were almost never out before 5:45 on Friday evening. He had, perhaps not surprisingly, a rather high employee turnover rate.

  Of the two land development projects, one was the then-new Lake Havasu City in Arizona, the other near Tehachapi, California about a hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles. I was more involved in the latter than the former, though I did have the distinct pleasure of being roped into an occasional foray into the Arizona wilderness.

  Every weekend, a Lockheed Constellation airliner would be chartered to fly prospective property buyers from Los Angeles to Lake Havasu City, as part of an absolutely free, “no obligation” package offered to those interested in getting in on the ground floor of this amazing new Eden. Actually, Lake Havasu City was at the time largely undeveloped desert, its only attraction being the much-touted London Bridge, which had been hauled stone by stone from England to span a largely man-made river. But it looked nice in the brochures. The few model homes available for inspection had front lawns comprised not of grass but of green-painted pebbles. But again, in a photograph, who could tell?

  I never was quite sure what I was supposed to be doing there, other than to make sure nothing got too far out of hand.

  The plane would leave at 10 a.m. on Saturday, and was scheduled to return at 8 p.m. that same evening. “Scheduled” was the operative word. The minute the plane landed, the prospective home/land owners were descended upon by a horde of salespeople hired for their specific ability to never take “no” for an answer. If 8 p.m. approached, and there was a prospective customer who had not yet signed on the dotted line, the plane would not leave the runway until they had. It was rare to return to L.A. much before midnight.

  But it was the Tehachapi development I look back on with curled toes. The development was called “Golden Hills” only because, as the sun was going down over the parched, dried grass of the undulating, deadly-dull landscape, the brown could be considered, by someone with a vivid imagination, as having a golden glow which lasted maybe five minutes before it was just brown again.

  The developers had created a small, two or three acre man-made pond in the midst of the development, and had surrounded it with lush foliage which must have cost a fortune to maintain.

  Our assignment was to produce an informational sales brochure, the cover of which was to feature a handsome couple on horseback in front of the pond which, shot from a low angle, looked far, far larger than it actually was.

  In preparation for the brochure, the boss demanded we find out everything we possibly could about the Tehachapi area and its history. After days of intensive research, we presented a thick stack of materials to him for his approval. He flipped through our several days’ work in fifteen seconds, looked at us scornfully and said: “I don’t see the average rainfall figures for 1947.” I beg your pardon?

  Since we worked on salary, to be sure the boss got his money’s worth, he would inevitably come up with some way to have us work Saturday, primarily riding shotgun on the Havasu City flights. But at one point, in preparation for some ground-breaking ceremony or other, I was assigned to escort actress Pat Priest, who played the niece on the popular The Munsters TV show, to Tehachapi by private plane. It was the one and only pleasant experience I can remember of my entire term of employment with the redoubtable Laurence Laurie & Associates.

  Out of space. As they say....To Be Continued.

  * * *

  JOBS FROM HELL, PART II

  Today’s episode of Jobs from Hell joins our hero as he girds his loins for a work trip to beautiful Tehachapi, California for a photo shoot for a brochure to draw unsuspecting land buyers into the spider’s web.

  For reasons I could never understand, I got the assignment to accompany the boss, his statuesque girlfriend Inga, a truly hot male model, and his female counterpart to Golden Hills. The models had been selected, I’m sure, because they fit the beautiful image of the beautiful development, and apparently for their ability to sit on an unmoving horse without falling off.

  Though the models had never met before, they took an immediate shine to one another, as
heterosexuals are wont to do. The boss was too preoccupied with impressing Inga to notice though I, as fifth wheel, was very aware of everything.

  The boss, ever aware of propriety, had his own room at the motel; Inga and the female model were to share a room, as were I and the male model—a prospect I looked forward to even knowing that he was irredeemably straight.

  All went relatively well until after dinner, during which Inga and the boss played little courtship games, the male and female models sat gazing rapturously at one another, and I tried to convince myself I was in some sort of existentialist movie. After dinner, as we headed for our rooms, the male model approached me and announced that he and his newfound girlfriend would like to spend the night together, and that Inga agreed that I could sleep in her room.

  Have you any idea of the degree of enthusiasm with which I greeted this whole prospect? But he pleaded and I, unused to resisting the pleas of male models, gave in.

  So, to Inga’s room and to bed.

  6 a.m. A knock on the door: “Time to get up, sweetheart,” my boss called. Inga got out of her bed and hurried to the door. The minute she opened it, the boss strode in. Hearing him at the door, I had pulled the covers over my head and prayed for death.

  A moment later, I felt a hand on my shoulder: “Time to get up, honey,” he said.

  I will leave to your imagination the look on his face when I sat up. Betrayal! Debauchery! Boinking the boss’s girlfriend right under his nose! Shock!

  He stormed wordlessly out of the room, followed by Inga, leaving me to get up and get dressed. I’m not sure how I got through breakfast, but let’s just say the atmosphere was a tad strained.

  Finally, about noon, I’d had it, and told the boss I wanted to talk to him. Now, whether he knew I was gay or not I don’t know, but this was at a time when you could be fired in the blink of an eye if it was thought you were. So I couldn’t very well just say, “Hey, don’t worry about Inga: I’m gay.” Instead, I told him that I had come up there to work, I explained the circumstances (as I’m sure Inga must have, as well), and that children’s games were for children. He merely looked at me.