The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

A White Sport Coat, and Rocket Fuel

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Henrietta, Texas, Easter Sunday, 1958: I have Easter finery, and it is a white sport coat. At age twelve, this seems especially neato to me, because that Marty Robbins song about the White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation is still playing on the radio.

Usually, on school days, like my friends, I wear Levis or Lee Riders with a sport shirt. Because it is so cool to do so, I wear black loafers with white socks. Bobby Mitchell. has explained this to me, and he is a great fashion plate.

Bobby, Eddy Frank, Billy Ray, and several others are studying rocketry, and building rockets from aluminum tubes, hacksaws, wood, and gunpowder. Most of these rockets do not work, but we’re not giving up!

Today, however, I’m wearing Easter finery and sitting in my room, bored, because I’m dressed and ready for church, and the rest of my family is still getting dressed.

So that’s why I was fiddling with the rocket fuel.

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Sponging at the Girl’s Dorm

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North Texas State University, Denton Texas, 1962: When several of us lived in a house in Shady Shores on Lake Dallas, there was kind of a “girl gang” who came to visit.

Jan was round and pretty, and she liked Hardy.

Jill was thin, clever, and funny, and I liked her.

Shayna was mature, beautiful, and she liked Paul, who was actually engaged to someone else, though that didn’t seem to interfere much.

They’d all show up at the lake house. We laughed a lot. I remember nights with a bonfire on the beach, a lot of beer. I remember driving to some dive up the road where, again, we drank a lot of beer. I grew sleepy and closed my eyes and pretended to be blind for a while.

“Come on, blind man!” Shayna said, “Stay with us!”

She was Jewish, daughter of a well-to-do Dallas family who owned a milk company. I didn’t know much about being Jewish and asked questions. She said they didn’t believe in the Devil, and so I asked if she would sell me her soul.

She said she would.

We wrote up a contract

So I bought her soul, for five pieces of silver, writing up the contract on my typewriter, an impressive red IBM Selectric I’d inherited from my stepfather’s office.

She took the five dimes and signed the contract. So I have owned Shayna’s soul for many, many years, because I kept the contract safe in my red box of important stuff.

The red box stayed with me through college, Dallas, St. Louis, England, Los Angeles, Texas, and San Francisco. There were a lot of documents in there, transcripts, and government cards, and drawings, and other stuff, including Shayna’s soul.

Meanwhile, back in those college times, I turned to crime

But this is getting ahead of myself. Back at North Texas, the next year I got a tiny apartment across from the English building, and I rarely saw the girl gang. There was always a blitz of study right before Christmas Holiday, and unlike my friends, often I didn’t go home right away, but rather stayed in my quiet apartment.

The campus was empty and thoughtful, the weather clear and chill. Restful, it was, though I had no money. One night I spent the last of my cash on cigarettes rather than supper, and in the morning, I woke up hungry.

Down on the corner in the early morning light, I saw the bread truck, parking to deliver to the Hob Nob. As the driver went inside, I crept from the bushes, jumped into the back of the truck, stole a loaf of bread, and ran.

As I glanced behind me, I saw Larry Burns, the young man who operated the Hob Nob, standing in the back doorway. He was watching me and laughing. Damn!

Pondering starvation

Holed up with coffee and bread and cigarettes, pondering starvation, I remembered that, during the holiday vacations, the cafeterias of all the dorms closed, except for one. The same dorm where the girl gang lived.

So I called on them about lunchtime, and then discovered that any dorm students stranded on campus over the holiday took meals there in the girls’ dorm. I walked into the dining room between Jill and Jan. Lunch!

Free lunch! Lots of lunch! Plenty! Free!

The cafeteria ladies, seeing so many unfamiliar faces, just assumed I lived in one of the dorms, and fed me along with everyone else.

I went back every day.

Ah, those good times …

That was the last time I saw the girl gang. Things happened, and you lose track.

And twenty years later, in a flat overlooking Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, where I lived in a small room at the back of Network Answering Service, I found Shayna’s soul stored carefully in the red box.

Through her family’s milk company in Dallas, I located her, married long since and living on the coast north of Los Angeles. I called her.

She didn’t remember that I owned her soul. She hadn’t missed it. We hadn’t much to talk about. Things had changed.

After the phone conversation, since I had her address, I mailed her soul back to her.

It was the least I could do.

On This Day: Joe Bob Briggs Explains ‘Yee-HAW!’

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Mount Shasta, CA, December 31, 2006: Recently, when Adrienne was writing our Christmas cards, she asked me how to spell ‘Yee-HAW’. If you live in a foreign country and do not know, this is something that Texas people like to yell out; it connotes extreme enthusiasm. For example, in the movie Dr. Strangelove, when Slim Pickens rides the H-Bomb, he yells, “Yee-HAW! Yee-HAW! Yee-HAW!” This signifies his happiness in the moment.

Since Adrienne is from the East Coast, she didn’t know how to spell it, and so I told her. But that got me to thinking …

Where did Yee-HAW come from?

Where did ‘Yee-HAW’ come from? What is its origin? Did it come down to us through the ages, or was it just something that some cowboy yelled out one day while riding a wild horse, and somehow it caught on?

Naturally, these questions made me think of Joe Bob Briggs — the best drive-in movie reviewer in the greater Grapevine, Texas area — who is a veritable font of crucial information that we sorely need in these troubled times. If anybody would know, I reasoned, it would be Joe Bob Briggs, who is a close personal friend of mine. So I asked him.

Here is his answer …

“Yee-Haw derives from the Middle English “yee,” which became “ye” by the time of the King James Bible, a formal second-person pronoun normally used only in the singular but occasionally, when conjoined with qualifiers (“ye ungodly swine”), acceptable as an adjectival plural as part of an interjection.

“The word “Haw” was a borrowing from late 10th century Hungarian, a crude epithet used by soldiers to describe a rural imbecile (possibly a distant cousin of “harrow” or “harrower,” applied to those who till the soil, who were overwhelmingly illiterate in the Middle Ages).

“The words “yee” and “haw” were never used together until 1478, when a farrier in Long Sutton, among the eastern fens of Lincolnshire, was accosted by angry sugarbeet farmers whose draft animals had been quarantined by the Duke of Rutland upon pain of taxation necessary for the upkeep of Belvoir Castle. To defend himself from the angry mob, he quickly extracted iron bits from his furnace with a blacksmithing tong and hurled the fiery missiles at the luckless yeomen.

“When they began to scatter, the farrier execrated them with curses, including, at the point of his maximum excitement, “Yeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaawwww!” — the strict meaning of which would be something on the order of “you worthless lice-infested buffoons,” but of course given a sanguine connotation by the fact that the farrier was exultant and triumphant.”

“I thought everyone knew that.” — Joe Bob Briggs, www.joebobbriggs.com

Thank you, Joe Bob. As this year winds down, as a prediction for the new year coming in, I would add only this —

Yee-HAW!

Ozymandias

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Tomb of Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Henrietta, Texas, Spring 1962: As seniors, when the fresh air of Spring energized our blood, our thoughts turned lightly to painting our name on the town’s water tower, as is proper.

The culprits were the usual suspects, that is, Eddy Frank, David Gee, Billy Eugene, myself, and as I recall, also Donny Burkman, and Billy Ray. Two cars of us, so we parked in the next block so as not to arouse suspicion.

Earlier in the day, at Moore’s Hardware I’d found a spray can with paint of a delightful orange color. “King George,” I muttered to myself, “will be able to read that without his spectacles.”

We’d driven around first. In theory this was to see where the town cop was. In actual fact, we’d mostly sat in our cars in the bright lights of the Lo’ Boy Drive In, where we drank cokes. However, the cop did drive by, heading out on Highway 287. He’d probably turn around in a mile or so, but that was our chance, so we peeled out from the drive in and sped to the north of town, and parking in the next block, we eased our quiet selves through the darkness, as stealthy as buffaloes.

The water tower sat on a city block all by itself, on a huge bare lot. No fence, just grass and weeds. In the dark, looking up, it looked much larger. And much higher.

“Well,” said mild-mannered Billy Eugene, “Let’s go.”

“Pretty tall,” said David Gee.

“It certainly is tall. Yes it sure is,” said Donny Burkman.

“Well,” said Billy Eugene, “Let’s go.”

So we did.

On the south side, the metal ladder ended some distance from the ground, but with a leg-up from David Gee, and a bit of scramble, up we went, in single file. At first it wasn’t so bad. Kind of neat. You could see over the roofs of the houses! Things looked completely different.

About halfway up, it seemed … not quite so fun.

Looking up, past the boys ahead, the top seemed far away. Looking down, past the boys below, the ground seemed even farther. What if the ladder is weak? What if it came loose? What if Eddy Frank fell on me? What if …

But there was nothing to do, except to keep climbing. The spray can of paint, stuck in my belt, was poking my stomach. My hands began to ache. I whined to myself quietly.

But in a while, the top grew nearer, then close, and then some boys were over the edge onto the catwalk. I came to the edge and carefully clambered onto the catwalk, with hands grabbing my arms and belt. “Whoa!” I said.

The metal catwalk ran around the cylinder of the water tower, with a three-foot rail attached. With any sense at all, a person wouldn’t fall off the catwalk. I said this to myself several times. “Hang onto the rail,” said Billy Eugene. He was normally far less an outlaw than the rest of us, but perhaps this was just his type of crime.

About then, someone spotted the cop car coming up the road, and we all scuttled around to the far side of the tower. There in the dark we hid till he’d passed by. We knew that he’d likely continue north, past the last few houses and past the rodeo grounds, past Petticoat Hill, and past the reservoir, before turning around. “We’ve got ten or twelve minutes,” said Billy Eugene.

So we got busy.

Arraying ourselves on the two sides of the tower most visible from the main road, we began our work. Oddly, nobody had given much thought to what to paint. “Seniors of 62!” someone yelled. “Seniors of 1962!” I cried.

I popped the top from the spray can, held onto the rail behind me, aimed the can, and pressed the button.

A cold spray covered my nose and chin.

Oops.

In the dark, I peered to see which direction the spray thing pointed, but couldn’t see a thing. I turned the can about half way, tried again, got it sideways and felt the cool spray going off the the right. “Jesus, watch out!” someone growled. I tried turning the can, felt it slippery, felt it slip and spin, heard it clatter and roll, and then a long silence. It was gone.

OK, then. That went pretty well.

In the meantime, other boys had better luck, and it was time to skedaddle.

Carefully we circled to the ladder, and with lots of helping hands getting in the way, each of us climbed over the lip of the catwalk onto the ladder, and in hasty caution, climbed down the ladder, in a stifled horror that any minute the cop could show up with his searchlight.

But he didn’t, and we skulked through the darkness, climbed into cars, and made our getaway. They’d never catch us now, we laughed. Then the others caught sight of my chin.

Haw haw haw haw haw!

I peered into the mirror, and saw in the shifting light of the passing streetlights that my chin was now a bright orange. After riotous laughter at my expense, the others soon became concerned. This orange paint was a definite clue. And my chin was kind of a liability. “You got to clean that off,” said Billy Eugene. “We’ll go to Mitchell’s.”

Mitchell’s Truck Stop, out at the west edge of town, sold gas throughout the night, had bunks and showers for truckers, and ran an all-night cafe. There, after a Saturday Night date, after you’d taken your girl home, you were supposed to go to Mitchell’s Cafe and order Chicken Fried Steak. I know I did. It was always the perfect ending for a perfect evening. It was the spot to be.

Now just in case you ever find yourself at Mitchell’s Truck Stop Cafe, let me make a suggestion: Order the Chicken Fried Steak. You will first receive a bowl of salad, consisting of iceberg lettuce and tomato wedges, and an orange squeeze container. This is garlicky French dressing. Then you’ll get a plate with chicken fried steak, covered with white cream gravy splashed over french fries, and a red squeeze container of ketchup. Squeeze both ketchup and more French dressing over the gravy. Now you’re set. Man oh man!

However, on that night, for the first time, I headed for the gas station instead of the cafe. For the first time, I saw the bathroom in the gas station. Smelled it, too. Whoah!

I tried to wash off the orange paint with soap and water. No good. That was real good orange paint. The night attendant looked at me oddly, but found me some Ajax cleanser. There, with paper towels from the dispenser, water, and generous doses of the abrasive cleanser, I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. And scrubbed. And scrubbed.

My face grew redder and redder, and began to burn, but the orange paint finally showed signs of giving up the battle. After another twenty minutes of painful scrubbing, I resembled a burn victim, but my skin was merely red, not orange.

Now that my fellow criminals no longer feared my being seen, they were in an expansive mood.

“Wanna get some Chicken Fried Steak?” asked Billy Eugene.

This sounded swell.

Next door we trooped, and filled the great big round booth in the corner, and ordered up, laughing and recounting our adventure. The food, when it came, was somehow even better than on other nights. The perfect ending to a perfect evening.

We thought about tomorrow, and how people driving by the north road would look up. They’d see “Seniors of 62” and “Seniors 1962” painted in big letters. Haw haw haw haw haw!

We had made our mark.

Forever.

Cajun John

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Henrietta, Texas, 1959: John P. was a thin, wiry guy a year older than me, with a nervous air and a perpetual smile. His family was from Louisiana, with a mild Cajun accent. John signed up for Latin class, and was forever lost. I helped him some, and we became friends, though he was alien and odd.

The story goes that one day John climbed up onto the Coca Cola truck, with the intent to steal a case of cokes, while the Coke man was inside the A&P grocery store. But the Coke man came wheeling his handtruck out the rear door, and caught John atop of the truck. The Coke man scowled.

“What are you doing on that truck?” he demanded.

John didn’t even blink. “What truck?” he said.

Once John invited me to [Read more…]

This Newfangled Daylight-Savings Time

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Changing the Time of Day?Dallas, Texas, Spring 1966: Living in Dunia Bean’s apartment on Gillespie street, I worked at the Cabana Hotel. The Cabana is a clone of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, complete with over-sized statues of Venus, David, and the rest of the crew. Inside, a vast two-story lobby with greenish marble floor and a round sunken area with sofas enough for a football team.

Overlooking this magnificance, our front desk where I worked with Dick and Earl, dignified alcoholics. Dick taught me how to get big tips at crowded times, and Earl as a young actor fought swords with Errol Flynn in the movie Captain Blood. That was a while back.

But this was in the spring, and for the first time since the war, Texas was going to have Daylight Savings Time. We were all abuzz.

Paul the Bellman was a portly fellow, balding and gabby. He made big tips because he knew about health food and horoscopes. This was years before such things were popular. His most popular health food remedy was honey and vinegar; he’d recommend it for almost anything.

On the way to the elevators with the guests, he’d ask about their birth-date and provide predictions and prescriptions all the way to the room. Then I suppose it just seemed wrong, to the guest, to tip miserly to the fellow who’d taken such an interest in their fortunes and their health.

Paul the Bellman was very opinionated, and also had an annoying habit of slapping his hand down on the bellman’s marble-topped desk when he was about to speak. This made a loud pop. I think it was his version of banging the Judge’s gavel before pronouncing sentence.

So, while we were all discussing this radical new change, Daylight Savings Time, and how we would set our clocks before we went to bed, Paul returned to the bell desk.

Slap! went his open palm on the marble desk. “Well,” he said, “I know what I’m going to do.” We all stopped talking. He continued. “I’m going to set my clock for one a.m., and then I’m going to wake up, and set it ahead to two a.m.”

We all stared in incomprehension. “Why, Paul?” I asked.

“That way,” he crowed, “I won’t lose an hour’s sleep!”

I grinned. “But Paul,” I said, “If you’re awake when you move it forward, won’t you lose an hour’s wake?”

He pondered this. “Naw,” he said, “You can’t lose an hour’s wake.” We all nodded.

Slap! went his palm on the desk. He scowled. “But those guys better watch out,” he said.

We looked at each other. He went on.

“Because when they’re changing the time, they’re messing with the sun,” he said. “And they’d better not go messing with the sun!”

Thus came Daylight Savings Time to Texas.

A Voice From the Past

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ghost in the machine
nameless, timeless … speed of light
and when is a loss?

July 1, 2003, San Jose, California: Although I am seated at my desk in San Anselmo, right now in San Jose hundreds of my 800-numbers are being fitted into a seven-foot cabinet inside the switching room of a long distance company.

It has been a very techno day; and to my shock I have just heard from my very techno friend Harvey, who died several years ago.

Moving those telephone lines was the final step of the Bloggard Migration Strategy (BMS).

Why migrate? Marin County, where we live, is perhaps the most expensive place in California. To buy the modest house we rent would cost over $700,000. In Montana or even a hundred miles north of here, this house would cost perhaps $150,000. So we decided to move.

In preparation, I consolidated all my local voicemail and 800-number voicemail lines into one place. Because their machine-support will no longer require my personal touch, Adrienne and I are now free to relocate, because I can operate my voicemail office, and my megatar workshop, anywhere.

As I tested telephone lines, I found one I’d forgotten. Some years previously, shortly before he died, my techno friend Harvey Warnke got a voicemail account from me.

Harvey was a unique spirit. Self-educated, he’d learned electronics working in the planetarium, then learned to design the light shows that appeared in the early days of Haight Ashbury psychedelic rock shows. He worked on movies, too.

If you’ve seen the remake of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, in one of the later scenes there is the meow of a cat; that was Harvey’s cat, whom he named Shi*ty Kitty.

If you saw the movie War Games, in the final war-room scene you saw the huge screens that show missiles launching all over the world; It was Harvey who made those huge screens with their flashing images.

Long ago, he and I traded a project. He designed relays and sensors for the Line Seizer device I built for Network Answering Service, and I in turn did the software programming his Counter Intelligence device, which counted frames of film on a film-editing table for splicing movies. It was a grand time. Harvey was a brilliant engineer, who drove a turbo-charged motorcycle at vast speeds. He was always laughing, always fun.

He was a part of life, a part of my life, and it was a good time.

But his death came suddenly.

He’d contracted some kind of virus, and the virus, invading his heart, made his heart very large and very weak. And then one day, his heart stopped.

At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to delete the voice mailbox with the recording of his voice. I forgot it was there, until now.

Sitting here at my desk in San Anselmo, calling into the machine, suddenly I hear my friend talking.

“Hi, this is Harvey,” he says, “I’m not here right now. Leave me a message, and I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

His voice has survived the years and the equipment changes. He promises to return calls, but he will not.

His voice remains, in the machine.

And you know what?

I still can’t erase it.

The Skydivers

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Skydiving Wallpapers - Top Free Skydiving Backgrounds - WallpaperAccessMidwestern University, Wichita Falls, Texas 1963: My big plan was to become an engineer, because I thought a slide-rule would look good with my glasses. And so I was in the math class.

The professor was a large, languid fellow with an embarrassing habit of scratching himself absentmindedly, spreading chalk dust on his pants.

On this particular day, he was chalking a proof on the blackboard. “Let’s assume such-and-such,” he said, and then described five or six steps, “and then as you can see, the result is so-and-do.”

Except that something was wrong.

I’m no whiz at math, and I had to struggle and focus. But it just didn’t look right. Something was wrong. The proof and the class ended at the same time, but I remained sitting, going over it.

Me and Bill and Dennis Thought Something Was Off

To my left, Bill the ex-marine with crisp black hair still in a crew cut. To my right, Dennis with wavy long blonde hair. They were staring and pondering, too. All the other students had left the room. The professor looked at the three of us.

“A question?” he asked us.

“There’s just something …” began Bill.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

“It’s this,” said Dennis. “If your original assumption is correct, then the proof is correct. But if not, then the conclusion is wrong. The proof is circular.”

Professor ‘Fessed Up

The professor smiled a slow, warm smile. “Well, now,” he said. “That’s exactly correct. The real proof requires calculus, which I can’t use here. But without giving a proof, students just don’t understand it. So we use this one.”

Haw haw haw haw haw!

We Started Becoming Pals

Over coffee, I met the boys. They were older. Bill had just finished his Marine stint; Dennis an army tour. Both had been in Japan. “Ohio,” they said when meeting; I think it means hello. “Gomenizai,” they would say, “I’m very sorry.”

Haw haw haw haw haw!

Next semester we shared a drafting class. At that time, there was an adventure with a girl, she missed a period, and I was all uptight. They just laughed. “A woman is not a close-tolerance machine,” said Dennis.

Huh? I had no clue what he meant.

“He means,” Bill said, “that most likely you got nothing to worry about. Just relax.” They thought my expression funny.

Haw haw haw haw haw!

And Then … the SkyDiving Adventure

I neither relaxed nor thought it funny, but they were right, as it turned out. After drafting class was lunch. Over burgers, Bill was talking about El Toro Marine Base, and about skydiving. Really?

By the following week, Bill had found a place where we could go skydiving. It cost $50. Dennis said he was in. I did, too. Bill handed me a piece of paper: a release. “Since you’re eighteen,” Bill said, “you need to get your parents to OK this.” I said OK.

In the evening, I handed the paper to my mother and stepfather. My mother didn’t know quite what it was, and my stepfather seemed uncertain. I explained that it was perfectly safe, and that you just jumped out of an airplane. It was really fun, like flying, and you had a parachute.

They looked at the paper. They looked at each other. They looked back at me.

Haw haw haw haw haw!

 
 

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