Henrietta, Texas, February, 1963: I’d been to classes in Midwestern University, but instead of coming home I’d visited with Bill and Dennis, so I’d missed supper. In some families, I suppose that would mean I didn’t get to eat, but my mother had kept food to make me a plate. Though she was a great cook, roast beef usually came out a bit dry. However, I was crazy about the rice and gravy that always rode along.

The gravy still sat in an odd-shaped heavy aluminum pot on the rear of the stove. She dished up roast beef, green beans, and rice, and started to pour gravy on top, as is proper. I held up my hand.

“That gravy’s not hot,” I said. She looked at me.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “it’s not.”

“The gravy,” she said, “is hot.”

“No,” I insisted, “I can tell.” She paused, then pointed to the stainless steel sink beside the stove.

“Hold your finger out,” she said, “just over the sink.”

Calling her bluff, I held my finger out over the sink. She grabbed the heavy pot and moved toward my hand, then paused. I held my hand steady, looking at her.

She glanced at me, and then poured some gravy over my finger.

Ow! It was hot! It burned like crazy!

San Francisco, 1982: At Network Answering Service on Geary Boulevard, the Operator was the key to our business. Training was extensive, they were called ‘OPs’, and there was a huge sign painted on the wall saying “Network OPs are Tops!”

But once you’d mastered the OP job, it can become boring. So when new jobs opened up, we cross-trained an OP, so they could have more variety, and expand their skills.

Emelia comes to mind. She sounds like a sweet and retiring kind of woman, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, she alternated working for us and smuggling cars into Nicaragra. Not guns, but cars. Why cars? I never understood this, but I’ve always been stupid at politics. How were the cars smuggled? I don’t know. What I do know is that Emelia looked pretty, but she was tough.

We thought immediately of Emelia when a position opened for the job of “Collector”, meaning somebody to call slow-pay clients, and bug them to pay. Emelia learned it quickly, but the next week she complained, “I can’t seem to get these folks to take me seriously.”

We decided to give her a tougher-sounding name; she became “Barbara Thorn”. Barbara Thorn had no further difficulties. Emelia said the same words, left the same messages, but got better results. Because of her new name, people responded differently.

Now … about bookkeepers. When a bookkeeper left, it took two months from placing the newspaper ad, to getting them interviewed, started at work, and trained on the job. I was the backup, so I was really glad when I could return to concentrating on my own job. But when I’d returned to my own job, clients would still ask for me. They wanted bookkeeping assistance, and remembered me from last time. Bummer.

Then one day, our new bookkeeper, Ron, vanished. (We found out later that while smoking grass and dancing in a club, he’d become highly paranoid, and so he took some LSD on the theory that it would calm him down.) At the time, we didn’t know where Ron was, only that he was gone. So I placed our newspaper ad, and, groaning, opened up the bookkeeping phones. “If you get any calls for Ron,” I told the OPs, “just put them through.”

A client called. “Ron?” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

That is how I became Ron the bookkeeper. A couple of months later, with a new bookkeeper trained, when people called and asked for Ron, they were put through to bookkeeping, and not to me. Everybody happy.

When the salesman, Henry, left San Francisco, I became Henry in sales. Over the years, I became several different people, because it permits you to stop being them later. When we sold the answering service, I kept the voicemail business, and used the identity of Harry, the manager. Customers wanting special deals would ask for the owner. “He’s not in,” I said, and returned to our standard terms. Life was good.

These days, I use my manager name (Harry), my legal name (Arthur), and my stage name (Traktor). Whenever a caller asks for one of these guys, it’s immediately clear whether the call is about voicemail, or personal, or about music.

Someone asked me recently, “How do you get so much done there, with only the three of you?”

“It’s easy,” I said, “We three have worked together so long that we act as one.”

Denton, Texas, 1965: I majored in engineering, but enjoyed English classes better, so I took a Creative Writing class, and then I was hooked.

Having no clue, I bumbled with artistic ferver. Like every young person, my every anguish of the past was high drama, so if I wrote about anything I knew, I couldn’t write worth a damn. No perspective. Ralph the Cat was a kind of accident.

One time over beer, my friend Lefevre had told me some stories about a cat. Thus, one day stumped for a story, I wrote these anaecdotes, and added some of my own. It wasn’t really a story. And, translated, my teacher’s comments said: this stinks.

I rewrote it, and it was one of those days when I pondered a certain scene, and then with lots of cigarettes and coffee going, sat down to write, and suddenly the characters just started talking, and I was typing as fast as possible, recording what they said.

After a bit of hashing, I’d created some characters, some interplay, a flashback opening, and a quirky ending. I don’t know how this stuff came. It fit no particular pattern.

The Avesta, our school literary newspaper, was run by John, who now is an editor at the New Yorker magazine. In New York. At the time, we submitted stories for the contest, to see who would win cash and be printed. The actual number one winner was asked to make story changes, and being a true artiste, he righteously refused. Thus my story squeeked into third place.

I won $25, and I still have it. Do you believe that? No? Well, you’re correct. I spent it long ago, probably immediately. I was an artiste, too.

Ralph the Cat made me a hero in the tiny world of Hob Nob. Just around the corner from my cool apartment, this was a cafe catering to students, the cool cafe for us artistes. The Hob Nob was run by gruff Mr. Burns, and his son Larry, whom nothing phased. “Crazy college kids,” he’d say.

One early morning I’d been up all night, and had no money because I’d spent it on cigarettes. I saw the bread truck parked on the empty street. When the man wheeled his cart out of sight, I nipped into the open door, and ran away with a loaf of bread. Larry Burns saw me. He just chuckled. Crazy college kids.

It was great, being a famous person at the Hob Nob. We all congratulated each other.

We were artistes.

San Francisco, 1975: For a year my life was really slow and relaxed. I was collecting unemployment, starting to get some bookkeeping clients, and reading about magic and meditation.

I lived cheaply, and grew a goatee. On Sundays, I’d ride my red Schwin 10-speed in the park with a girlfriend. We’d picnic. I have a photograph that shows the goatee. That day while slowing to a stop, I’d been unable to pull my foot free of the toe clip, and fell over, toward my front wheel. Not wanting to bend the spokes, I’d placed my hand onto the spindle of the axel, which, being pointed, had poked a hole in my hand. In the photo, I am dabbing at my hand with a kleenex and wearing a rueful expression. And, of course, my goatee.

I thought the goatee looked pretty good. I have some indian blood, and grow no whiskers elsewhere, so I cannot grow a full beard. My goatee was frizzy, and my cat Rosie used to bite it to show affection.

Some days I’d bus down to the San Francisco library and spend some hours there, looking things up, reading Consumers Reports. I cannot now imagine how I spent hours, but I did. This particular day I’d taken a picnic lunch consisting of a can of vienna sausages and a sourdough roll. I ate my picnic on the grass on the park across from City Hall, and in front of the Library.

That afternoon, riding home on the bus, I was daydreaming, when my eye was caught by a black-haired guy sitting a few rows up. He sat on the sideway bench behind the driver, so I could see his face. As my mind floated along, I kept coming back to this guy’s face and finally realized that he looked really stupid. He needed a haircut and he had a little goatee and somehow he looked like he thought he was really cool, and he looked like a jerk to me.

Then, with a sudden flash, I realized that he had a goatee just like my own!

When I got home, I shaved. That was the end of the goatee.

The Brazos River, Texas, 1952. Texas is flat and hot, and the river runs lazily through thousands of acres, trailing a forest of oak, hickory, mimosa, and spruce. Mesquite, too, out on the scorching plainlands.

On the banks, and beneath the trees, Camp Crucis. Although we were Methodists, I attended this Episcopalian Camp due to Father Herron, who gave the Episcopal services in a one-room stone chapel just inside the gateway of Henrietta’s graveyard. Every service a real Memento Mori.

He had a picture of Van Gogh’s “The Shriek” on his wall; he said he liked it. One time, coming to dinner with my mom and me, he brought a cucumber. Scouring its skin with a fork, slicing quickly, a dash of vinegar. Voila! Salad!

The man knew everything. He taught me a sentence in Spanish when we went to visit an old Mexican man who lived in a shack, with a vineyard, arrowheads in cases, and a vast comic book collection. Tengo mucho gusto en conocerle. I’m very happy to meet you.

Father Herron it probably was who told my mom about Camp Crucis. And off I went.

Bunkhouses separated the four tribes, as did our ages. My mother had marked everything with my name. I still have an odd pair of scissors, from Uncle Doc’s surgery, with my name scratched upon the blade. Those scissors went to camp, too.

But I was afraid and unhappy. I became sick to heart, and soon sick at stomach. The priests were baffled. Father Herron suggested beer. “It calms the stomach,” he said. So while the others finished lunch with rousing renditions of John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith, and the Worms song, I drank my beer.

Of course, then I was drunk. Father Herron took me on a walk, till it wore off. Along the path we came upon a buzzing, and a vast bee tree. He showed me how we could slowly walk right up to the buzzing hive upon the tree. All around us they flew, but no harm came to us.

He watched carefully, then suddenly reached out and snatched one. I was frightened. “Won’t it sting?”

He shook his head. “It’s a drone,” he said. I held the bee in my hand. A drone cannot sting; it has no stinger. He’d known it for a drone because it buzzed differently. I felt the bee walking around inside my closed fist; then I let it go.

That was fun, but the next day I was sick again. I was home-sick. They called my mother. She wasn’t happy, picking me up. She’d had unusual and elaborate plans with Pete, a boyfriend in Bowie. In our green 1951 Chevrolet, she took me to lunch in a town. I had chicken-fried steak, and we had “a good talk.” By the end of lunch, I felt better and had been successfully pep-talked to give it another go.

I was a flop at baseball, and felt scorched during the hike, but I stuck it out, met a friend named Pinky during the swimming, and saw Father Herron kill a rattlesnake.

About two o’clock in the afternoon, several boys called out in fright. They’d startled the snake during its siesta.

Untreated rattlesnake bite is only 3% fatal in adults, but severe danger to small boys. Father Herron followed carefully through the grasses, and then pounced!, grabbing it near the rattles. Quickly, faster than the snake could turn to bite, Father Herron lifted the snake and cracked it like a bull-whip.

The snake was dead.

We boys gaped in wonder. And now, fifty years later, I wonder, where is Father Herron today? Intoning Latin in a dim cathedral? Resting agog in the Old Priests Home? I’d rather think of him running the bulls in Paloma, or perhaps working undercover in a Chicago dive, or maybe wrestling alligators in the Everglades. Why not? He was a mighty man. Snakes couldn’t bite him, and bees didn’t sting him.

Henrietta, Texas, 1959: All my buddies were agog with Peter Gunn on CBS television. How could one guy be so cool?

With a Henry Mancini themesong featuring a jazzed-up boogie and a horn section, Mr. Gunn looked much like a skinhead of today except for the suit, tie, and wingtip shoes. He was always listening to jazz and smoking cigarettes, with his super-short hair, quiet manner, and the relentless interest of sultry women. Mr. Cool.

Later, he appeared in a movie that prominently featured his high-tech telephone answering machine, which was a reel-to-reel tape deck mounted in the wall. He was just too cool to have an old-fashioned answering service with a switchboard. This tape deck looked really neat in the middle of the wall of his living room.

And so, fifteen years later, this is probably why I bought the answering machine.

In the 70’s, when answering machines first came out — huge, bulky black boxes — they were regarded with suspicion. It’s mostly forgotten today that, at the time, reaching a machine instead of a human might be considered a kind of insult. Dehumanizing. Rude.

But I had seen Peter Gunn, so I knew how cool they were. I installed one for my Simple Simon Bookkeeping business, and it proved useful for the Thumbtack Bugle, too.

Not long after, Thanksgiving came around, and my mother and two brothers decided to give me a call. I came home and found the message.

My mother, clearly startled, is saying, “Hello? This is your mother. I’m just calling to wish you a …” here she paused, and sang the rest, “Happy Thanksgiving Day!“

As she fumbled to hang up her phone, I could hear my two young brothers in the background, puzzled because she’d begun talking, and then suddenly was hanging up; they were saying What? What is it? And just before the connection closed, I heard her voice.

“G**damned machine,” she said.

Huh? But it was so cool on Peter Gunn!