Westbury Hotel, San Francisco, 1974: One evening, as I was working the graveyard shift with Henry So, the night auditor, I had the phone to my ear and noticed something very odd.

“Henry!” I called out. “Did you hear the angels sing?”

Henry, slim and dapper in his charcoal suit with vest, put down his Benson & Hedges cigarette, and said no, he’d not heard the angels sing. Actually, what he said was “Whaaaa?”

So I showed him, and I’ll share this wonderful secret with you, too. After all, it’s the season of love, right?

Here’s what you do. Pick up your telephone and hold it to your ear.

But don’t dial anybody. Don’t press the touch-tones. That will stop the angels from singing. You must just hold the phone very gently to your ear without touch-toning.

Listen very quietly. Listen very carefully.

You will hear the angels singing.

San Diego Hilton, 1984: I had learned it a few years earlier, from Polaris the Magnificent, who was a performing magician.

Polaris, dressed in a longish purple robe and a tall, conical hat, stood upon the flat stage at the Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory mall, outside on a warm Spring day, and there he mystified young children, and the rest of us.

I set my helmet down on the bench, and watched the show. The motorcycle was safe enough, chained to a parking meter nearby. I figured that if somebody was strong enough to lift the moto above the parking meter, they deserved to steal it, so I relaxed and that Polaris was really great.

And afterward somehow we struck up a conversation, as he was packing up his magicabelia, and later we met some buddy of his at a Mission Street tacqueria, and while sitting around the table over beers, the buddy said “Show him the bubbles.”

Polaris the Magnificent, with a knowing glance, tapped the side of his nose and then produced from his battered knapsack a bottle of common bubble-fluid, a small plastic ring for blowing bubbles, and a couple of plastic straws of different sizes.

And there on the table at La Chomperia, he created assemblies of bubbles that boggled the mind.

The thing was to blow bubbles inside of other bubbles, and to blow bubbles adjoining other bubbles. If their relative sizes were just right, then at the place where they touched each other, they’d form a flat plane. That is, if you had two bubbles of similar size and you could suspend both of them on two wetted straws, then where the two bubbles touched each other would be a flat common boundary.

The effect of two bubbles is interesting, I suppose, but the wonder comes when you assemble three or four or more bubbles. In some cases, you can create geometrical shapes between the bubbles: shapes like a pyramid, a square, and others.

Amazed and marvelling over another beer, I finally bid Polaris the Magnificent and the buddy a fond fairwell, and motored off to some other adventure, and never saw them again in this lifetime. Ah, but the memory remained.

And thus it was, some years later that, married and attending a trade-association convention in San Diego, that Polaris the Magnificent brought me fame and fortune.

The answering service industry has a surprising number of large people. Maybe it’s different now. But then it was startling to see so many overweight owners of answering services. Perhaps because it is a business where you sit all day, talking on the phone?

And at that convention it happened that after the big dinner on the final night, when my then-wife Lori and I entered the dance contest, performing the jitterbug which we’d learned from Oz at the Avenue Ballroom, we won. I not sure it was our skill; it may have just been the comparison with the other, more ponderous dancers. Or maybe we just did well that night. Later, we fell out over the jitterbug, but that’s another story. That night, we shone, and we won.

The prize was an electronic box called a “Call-Diverter”, which we used in our business, and it was worth about $200, so that was a swell prize.

And then they announced the Bubble Contest.

Boy, was I prepared!

As everybody else tried to think of something to do that would make their bubble look different from any other bubble in the room, I begged two tiny cocktail straws from folks at our table, then soaped a clean bread plate.

With just a bit of knitting my brows in recollection, I was able to assemble three bubbles so that a pyramid was formed between the three. Amazing! Mirableu!

I won the contest handily, and standing before the crowd and the admiring eyes of my wife, I happily accepted the prize which was $100 and another Call-Diverter device. But as I stood before the laughing crowd, who clapped madly, a guy from the back yelled out. “No fair! No fair!” he called, “He cheated!”

In a flash, I knew just how to respond. I held up the plastic straws for all to see, and yelled back.

“Whadda ya mean?” I said, “Just standard bubble tools.”

San Francisco, 1980: Network Answering Service had been running along fairly well, but then the hepatitus struck.

Bill the drunk came down first, then lanky Ed, followed in quick succession by lots more. And so it was, that particular Saturday, there were no operators able to work, to answer the phones for our 300 clients.

Early in the morning, I sat at the phones, alone, waiting for the world to wake up.

We’d just got settled into our new office on Geary Boulevard. Later we would add another table and another 300 clients, Lori would join me, I would invent the Line Seizer device, and we’d buy a voicemail company. But just now, none of that had happened.

Operators were called OPs, because we abbreviated everything, kind of as a style thing. Our motto was “Network OPs are Tops!”

Normally, two OPs worked as a team, sitting across from each other with phones in the middle and message racks to the side. This was a system that Bob and I developed, way back when.

Today, nobody sat across from me. I didn’t know how this would work. And now the calls started coming in. One wave. Another. And another. It was getting real hectic, and now somebody was banging on the door downstairs. Open during the week, on the weekend it was locked, so I ran down the stairs to open it.

It was my friend Dennis. I dashed back up the stairs, and he followed, curious at my behavior.

Dennis and I had met as writers at the San Francisco Writer’s Workshop, and had stayed friends through his cab-driver and photographer phase, and through my Simple Simon Bookkeeping, and Thumbtack Bugle phases. Several times I’d borrowed money from Dennis for my schemes, and, by the simple expedient of repaying him, we’d stayed friends.

I don’t recall why he’d come by; he was just on the way to somewhere else. I pointed to the chair across from me.

“Have a seat,” I said. He sat down. He started telling me about something, but suddenly I got an idea.

“Here, Dennis,” I said, “Put this on your head.” He stared puzzling at the Plantronics headset. It’s a small plastic hoop that goes over your head, with a tiny plug to go into your ear, and a thin microphone before your lips. I looked Dennis in the eye.

“Dennis,” I said, “How would you like to be OP for a day?”

“Sure!” he said.

I showed him how to answer the phone, gave him the brief version of what to say, how to mark the message down, and how to file the messages in the message boxes.

Just in time, for here came a big wave of calls.

Some hours later, I sent him to the liquor store with cash for sandwiches for lunch. Towards the end of the day, more sandwiches for the evening meal. Toward closing time at midnight, we sat back between the few calls, and shot the breeze.

Dennis had just dropped by, but he stayed for a week, answering calls every day. One day, clowning around, he fell off his chair, and put his elbow through the window pane. He wasn’t hurt, and I called a repairman to come and fix it, while Dennis and I, bundled up in coats against the cold draft, kept answering phones. Dennis was so apologetic.

“I am so sorry,” he said, for the tenth time. I smiled.

“Dennis,” I said, “If you like, you can break out every window in the place.”

What a pal!

Marina Green, San Francisco, 1976: My friend Dennis, who invented the Taxicab Theory of Life, had got himself a kitty. It was small and gray, with wide-open eyes, and it bounced and bounded around the tables and the chairs.

Dennis always lived better than I did. I thought it was because he got free money, but it may have just been that he had better taste. His father had created a metal-fabricating and manufacturing business back in Chicago, and after Dennis emerged from the Peace Corps he received checks, which I envied, though of course I’d already had my turn.

He drove an older BMW, and he had a small apartment, kept as neat as himself, right at the end of a short street that pointed straight at the Marina Green, giving him a view of the Bay, a block away.

We fell out, for several years. It was because of his cat.

He didn’t know much about cats, but he thought it was cute.

It was cute, as it pounced from hiding. In fact, he’d taught it a game. Dennis would walk from point A to point B in his apartment, as we all do, and the game was that the kitten would pounce from hiding and bite and scratch at Dennis’s ankles. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Very funny.

I actually didn’t like the game much. I’d gone over to Dennis’s to get his help in doing some Big Research for me regarding my plan to start an answering service. He did the Big Research for me, but in my ignorance, I put the numbers together all wrong and came to amazingly wrong answers. But when I started the answering service it worked out anyway, so perhaps my abysmal ignorance didn’t matter.

While Dennis and I discussed the Big Research, the kitten leapt and bit my ankles, which I didn’t enjoy all that much.

For one thing, the kitten was growing. Let us now pause in contemplation of the perfect words of Mr. Ogden Nash …

The trouble with a kitten is that
It soon becomes a cat.

Ogden hit his head right on a nail there.

A week later, when I’d returned to visit, after some coffee and conversation, I suddenly realized that the cat wasn’t around.

“Where’s kitty?” I asked.

“Oh, I got tired of him biting me,” he said.

“So where’s kitty?” I asked.

“I took him out and set him loose over at The Presidio,” he said. The Presidio was an vast and luxurious army base in a park-like setting in the northern corner of San Francisco. It contained miles and miles of woods and empty hills, criss-crossed with army roads. I was stupified by what Dennis had said.

“What??”

He looked at me in puzzlement, and repeated his words. I was outraged.

“You know he’ll die?” I demanded.

“Why, no,” Dennis said, “He’ll catch mice and things.” I couldn’t believe he was so ignorant, so, so … stupid!

“No, he won’t catch mice and things!” I said. “He doesn’t know any of those things. He’ll first starve, and then wander into a road and get run over.” Dennis looked at me in puzzlement. He couldn’t understand my dismay.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought he’d be fine.”

“Why did you do that?” I pressed.

“I got tired of him biting my ankles,” he said, “and finally I’d just had enough of it.”

“But you taught him to do that!”

“Well, I didn’t mean any harm.”

I stood up, grabbed my coat, and left in a fury. I then refused to talk to Dennis for about three years.

Over time, slowly, I realized he had, in fact, meant no harm. Caused harm yes, but meant none. He was just ignorant. He didn’t know.

So are we all, all the time, ignorant of this, ignorant of that. With a motion of the wrist, we wreck an automobile, bring destruction, even death. With an unknowing word, we crash vast castles of dreams for others. With a silence, we fail in our love for another.

Dreaming and fragile, onward we stumble, dangerous dwarves on the Yellow Brick Road.

What happened this week back in 1850?

California became a state.
The state had no electricity.
The state had no money.
Almost everyone spoke Spanish.
There were gun fights in the streets.

So basically, it was much like California today, only the women had real breasts.

San Francisco, CA 1976: When the lady came to drop off the flyers for the play, her car had a problem starting again, so I went downstairs and helped get it going. The flyers were for a play about the tribulations of black folks.

After she paid me to distribute the flyers, she said she liked my southern accent, and offered me a part in the play: a slave trader.

I thought, Why not?

I went to the audition, and got the part.

The play was set in the time of the underground railroad, and I was to play an over-the-top redneck of wretched disposition who flew off the handle. I flew off the handle. Did it well.

After a week’s rehearsal, the play opened. It even got good reviews. But it became clear that I didn’t want to be an actor: It was interesting while learning how to do it, but who would want to do the same old thing night after night?

The lanky actor who played The Preacher disagreed. “Not at all,” he droned in his deep voice, “That’s the challenge. Being able to create it brand new very night.”

Hmmph. Not my cup of tea. But no problem. This play was only for the one performance.

I wouldn’t have missed it though, because at the final rehearsal, two very strange things happened.

. . .

I’d shucked my motorcycle jacket in this little room where we waited. It was a semi-dress rehearsal. We all wore black trowsers and a white shirt. My boots were OK.

While we were waiting, the male lead, a large black man of great charm, said something, and somebody else said, “Yo’ mama,” and there was a great laughing, which puzzled me tremendously. He saw the look on my face.

“It’s a kind of insult thing,” he said. “You insult somebody and their mother. For example …”

And then he blistered into the most amazing rapid-fire diatribe against me, calling me all kind of names that were at once confusing, irritating, and hilarious. Then he turned to insulting my mother.

“Your mama,” he said, “Your mama so fat she use the equator for a belt! Your mama so ugly she got to sneak up on a glass of water to get a drink! Your mama so mean her smile got arrested by the police!”

All the black actors rolled around. I’d never heard anything like it. Wierd!

Then we went to rehearse the play. And when we got back, my motorcycle jacket had disappeared. It wasn’t just missing; it had been stolen.

In my shirt sleeves, angry and depressed and shivering, I rode home to Third Avenue, and put the motorcycle away. Back up in my room, I warmed up with a glass of tea, then became depressed further, realizing that my green smoking material in the fancy box and my clever folding pipe were in the jacket pocket, along with my little notebook of things to do.

I looked out my window, and riding high above the victorian across the street, the full moon peeked down through misty strings of cloud to shine moonlight on my face. I smiled.

“Ms. Moon,” I said to the moon, “I sure do like my jacket. And if it’s gone, well, that’s the way it happened. But I sure would be grateful to have my jacket back.”

Ms. Moon smiled down at me.

A few minutes later, the door buzzer went off from downstairs. I wasn’t expecting anyone but buzzed them in, and, looking out at the hallway, was surprised when the cop came up the stairs with my jacket.

He asked me if I was me. I said yes. He asked me if it was my jacket and I said it was. He asked me what happened, and I told him how it disappeared from the rehearsal room. He told me how it came to him.

“My partner and I were driving along near the auditorium, and this guy was walking and when he saw us, he took off. That made us curious, so we followed, and then he ran down an alley, threw off the coat, and climbed over a fence.

“Your name is in the little book, and when we investigated, it didn’t seem like you were that guy, so here you are.”

I thanked him and he left.

In the pocket, my little book, and the little pipe, and the fancy wooden box for the smoking material. The smoking material was gone, but how much can one ask of the police?

I said, “Thank you, Ms. Moon.”

Henrietta, Texas, 1955: The Kiwanis Minstrel Show was coming to town, or at least to the high-school gymnasium. The basketball floor was covered with row on row of folding chairs, and ticket-sellers encamped at the rear doors.

I had an important job, operating the spotlight, and sat alone in the high bleachers. During rehearsals, I watched as a young schoolmate, Robert Bell, stuck a nail into the electrical circuit, so as to feel the jolt. Nobody stopped him. Who cared if he fried?

Just as the television show “Amos & Andy” has disappeared, and never emerges among the late-night reruns, so has the Minstrel Show disappeared. Of course the original ones toured the South once apon a time, and Lenny Sloan resurrected the “Three Black and Three White Minstrel Show” in San Francisco during my early answering service days. In fact, Lenny was my client, and now that I think about it, if I recall right, he still owes me money!

But back then, in my home town, this was the Kiwanis Club, masters of disguise.

My stepfather, Dr. Strickland, wearing blackface and a bow-tie that lit-up, he was in the show. My uncle, Dr. Hurn, with a bow-tie he could bounce up and down with his adams apple, he was in the show. Houston McMurray, our pompous town lawyer, was just perfect as “Mr. Interlocuter.”

Mr. Interlocuter was a well-dressed white man in the Minstrel Show. His job was Master of Ceremonies, and he would play straight man to the various pseudo-black actors as they delivered their gags. The entire chorus, in blackface makeup, would deliver songs, and background harmonies for solo singers.

In one skit, using a thick dialect considered very humorous, Dr. Hurn sat at a table, and at a knock on the door, admitted a patient, who in an even thicker dialect said that he was having woman troubles. The trouble was that his wife was pregnant, again, and he couldn’t afford to feed any more children.

The doctor gave him some pills which should stop the problem, but in the next scene the patient was back. The pills had failed, the fit had come on him, and the wife was pregnant, again, with yet another chillun.

This time the doctor took him behind a screen for an operation, and the man staggered out. But alas! In the next scene, the man, sheepishly knocking on the door, told the doctor that the operation had failed.

The doctor, now stern, said they’d have to “remove the cause of the difficulty”, and over the man’s protests, performed another operation behind the screen. The fellow was hardly able to walk from the room.

Even worse, in the next scene he was back and his wife was yet again pregnant. Now the doctor really had to think.

“Hmmmm,” said the doctor. “Appears we been operating on the wrong one!”

Ha ha ha ha ha. That one brought the house down.

After the show, when all the audience had gone, and the gymnasium was just an empty floor covered with folding chairs, there was great hiliarity among the actors. Grease paint was in their blood now. A flask was passed around. Some went down to the coffee shop to laugh and drink coffee. Dr. Hurn went to the hospital to do his rounds, still wearing his costume, bobbing bow-tie, and blackface makeup.

“Lordy!” said the nurses.

“My word!” said the patients.

My Uncle Doc, Dr. Hurn, he just bobbed his bow-tie, and didn’t say nothing.

[THIS JUST IN]

Mr. Wang Qin
HanG Seng Bank LTD.
Des Voeux RD. Branch
Central Hong Kong, Honk Kong. [HONK?]

Good day,

Let me start by introducing myself. I am Mr. Wang Qin credit officer of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd. I have a concealed business suggestion for
you.

[VERY LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY]
Before the U.S and Iraqi war our client General. Ibrahim Moussa who was with the Iraqi forces and also business man made a numbered fixed deposit for 18 calendar months, with a value of Twenty millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars only in my branch. Upon maturity several notice was sent to him, even during the war early this
year.

[NO ANSWER ON THE PHONE]
Again after the war another notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later find out that the General and his family had been killed during the war in bomb blast that hit their
home.

[MONEY JUST LYING AROUND]
After further investigation it was also discovered that Gen. Ibrahim Moussa did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the paper work of his bank deposit. And he also confided in me the last time he was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in my bank. So, Twenty millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars is still lying in my bank and no one will ever come forward to claim
it.

[MY VIEWS ABOUT THE GUBBAMINT]
What bothers me most is that according to the to the laws of my country at the expiration 3 years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Hong Kong Government if nobody applies to claim the
funds.

[YOU LOOK LIKE MOUSSA TO ME]
Against this backdrop, my suggestion to you is that I will like you as a foreigner to stand as the next of kin to Gen. Ibrahim Moussa so that you will be able to receive his
funds.

[I’VE GOT A LAWYER. TRUST ME.]
I want you to know that I have had everything planned out so that we shall come out successful. I have contacted an attorney that will prepare the necessary document that will back you up as the next of kin to Gen. Ibrahim Moussa, all that is required from you at this stage is for you to provide me with your Full Names and Address so that the attorney can commence his
job.

[WELCOME TO THE MOUSSA FAMILY!]
After you have been made the next of kin, the attorney will also fill in for claims on your behalf and secure the necessary approval and letter of probate in your favor for the move of the funds to an account that will be provided by
you.

[RISK-FREE]
There is no risk involved at all in the matter as we are going adopt a legalized method and the attorney will prepare all the necessary documents. Please endeavor to observe utmost discretion in all matters concerning this
issue.

[YOU ONLY GET 25%]
Once the funds have been transferred to your nominated bank account we shall share in the ratio of 70% for me, 25% for you and 5% for any expenses incurred during the course of this
operation.

[ACT NOW!]
Should you be interested please send me your private phone and fax numbers for easy communication and I will provide you with more details of this
operation.

[IN OUR BANK, WE LIKE TO USE FREESERVE EMAIL]
p.s REPLY ME AT; wang_q7@fsmail.net

[KISS ME, YOU FOOL]
Your earliest response to this letter will be appreciated.

[YOUR PALSY-WALSY]
Kind Regards
Mr. Wang Qin