Vonnegut1 was one of those important authors who make you feel vaguely guilty, given that you’ve never read any of his stuff except maybe Slaughterhouse-Five. And while some of his stuff is dystopian or mildly sci-fi, where do I get off saying he, not Douglas Adams,2 is responsible for a sprawling sci-fi epic like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
Stay with me here: In 1965, Vonnegut published God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which included a lengthy excerpt from a fictional novel titled Venus on the Half-Shell, by a fictional author named Kilgore Trout.3
Kilgore Trout showed up frequently in Vonnegut’s work as a literary alter ego for Vonnegut himself, but Trout’s name was also a poke at Vonnegut’s friend, sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon:4 “I think it’s funny to be named after a fish,” were Vonnegut’s exact words (he may have been a great writer but apparently part of him never left middle school).
Another sci-fi author, Philip Jose Farmer,5 was so amused he snagged the Venus on the Half-Shell excerpt in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and fluffed it up into an entire book.
And so, in 1975, Venus on the Half-Shell hit the bookstores, just three years before The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began on BBC Radio. The byline read Kilgore Trout, but the author was really Philip Jose Farmer, using characters created by Kurt Vonnegut.
Got all that?
What does this have to do with Douglas Adams or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Adams was a huge fan of Vonnegut, for one thing. That’s not tantamount to plagiarism, of course. But if you’ve ever read, listened to or watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ll notice some startling parallels:
1. The Everyman Galactic Wanderer
Someone forgot to explain this to the cover artist.
Both stories follow the adventures of an everyday schlub snatched from his everyday schlub’s life into an intergalactic adventure. HHGTTG stars Arthur Dent, who worked in a small radio station before roaming the cosmos in a bathrobe.
VOTHS, on the other hand, stars Simon Wagstaff, a folk musician who likes wearing faded jeans and comfy old sweatshirts. He has curly dark hair, a big nose and looks a lot like Kurt Vonnegut.
2. The Earth Gets Destroyed by Bureaucrats
When Hitchhiker’s Guide begins, Arthur Dent is lying in the mud in front of his house, blocking the bulldozers that have shown up to demolish his house. At the beginning of Venus on the Half-Shell, Simon Wagstaff and his girlfriend are having sex on the head of the Sphinx in Egypt.
Oh. This would be a good place to explain that according to Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout was a hack who wrote a lot of thinly-disguised porn and was published mostly in adult magazines.
And Philip Jose Farmer was the perfect ghost writer for Trout, given that Farmer’s favorite themes were sex, religion, aliens, sexy religion, alien sex, religious sex, sexy religious aliens, alien religious sex, sex as worship, alien sex worship, worshipful sex with aliens—you get the idea.
Anyway, Arthur and Simon are both minding their own business when aliens show up and destroy the Earth: The Vogons blow the Earth out from under Arthur to build a hyperspace bypass, while in Venus on the Half Shell, the Hoonhors decide Earth is too polluted and clean things up by triggering a worldwide flood, a la Noah. Turns out they cleaned up Earth a few thousand years ago already but are unhappy things are already so dirty again.
3. Pursuing the Ultimate Question With Neurotic Robots in Stolen Spaceships
Arthur manages to snag a ride on a Vogon ship and later winds up roaming the galaxy on a ship called Heart of Gold, which was stolen earlier by one Zaphod Beeblebrox, looks like a giant running shoe, and is named after a Neil Young song.
Conversely, Simon leaves Earth on a Chinese ship christened Hwang Ho, which looks like a giant chrome penis and is named after the Yellow River (remember what I said about Philip Jose Farmer being a religious/alien sex fiend?).
Arthur is traveling with a small handful of human and alien friends, plus a neurotic robot named Marvin, who resents being a lowly maintenance robot when he has a brain the size of a planet, and Eddie, a shipboard computer who tries way too hard to be cheerful.
Simon’s on the go with Anubis and Athena, his dog and owl, plus a neurotic robot named Chorwktap, who has free will and far too much intelligence to enjoy being a sex robot (this doesn’t stop her and Simon from having lots and lots of sex anyway–ref. P.J. Farmer, the sci-fi sex fiend author, again). Tzu Li, the Hwang Ho’s computer, is just a computer, despite Chorktap spending all her free time trying to prove Tzu Li is self-aware but shy.
Our heroes have the fastest spaceships ever made and a universe to explore, so they set out for some answers:
“What’s the ultimate answer to, you know–life, the universe and everything?” Arthur wants to know.
Simon’s question is this: “Why were we created only to suffer and die?”
4. The Genius Vermin Secretly Running the Show
As they travel and enjoy various hijinks in pursuit of the truth, Arthur and Simon discover the Vogons and Hoonhors are just what they appeared to be at first glance: Clueless, careless and callous bureaucrats. It turns out there are masterminds behind the scenes who have been running things all along, hyperintelligent beings everyone mistook for harmless or annoying vermin. They don’t really mean Arthur or Simon any harm, but they aren’t exactly nice to them either–the vermin masterminds, it turns out, are using Arthur and Simon as part of experiments to answer the same ultimate questions.
In HHGTTG, Arthur discovers mice are the most intelligent beings on Earth. They’ve been manipulating science all along while pretending to be laboratory test subjects; in reality they’re pursuing the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Drink beer for all eternity with cockroaches? Meh. I’m fine with that as long as we don’t have to share glasses.
Simon, on the other hand, discovers a mythical alien race called the Clerun-Gowph, who accidentally populated most of the universe with messy scientific outposts that dumped waste products into the primordial soup of the planets they were studying. And the Clerun-Gowph, Simon is shocked to learn, are cockroaches.
This is a huge blow to the ego: Arthur discovers he’s nothing but a test subject in an experiment run by laboratory mice, while Simon realizes all life on Earth is just, as he puts it, the end of a process that started with cockroach crap.
5. The Planet-Sized Computer
Every seeker of truth needs an Oracle, and our heroes are no exception. In HGTTG, it seems Earth and all life on it were an enormous computer built in pursuit of the answer to life, the universe and everything (I know, I know — it was built to specifically help ask the question after another giant computer gave an accurate but useless answer — the point is that the whole planet is a computer).
When Simon, on the other hand, finally meets the Clerun-Gowph, he discovers they built a planet-sized computer to answer all the questions there are. Having nothing left to discover or learn, they decide to quit exploring/fertilizing the galaxy and devote themselves to drinking beer.
6. The Useless Answers (spoiler alert!)
At long last, our protagonists are about to learn the question to their ultimate questions. The problem is that in both cases, the answer is useless:
Arthur’s question: “What is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything?”
Answer: “42.”
Possible alternate answer: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Simon’s question: “Why are we created only to suffer and die?”
Answer: “Why not?”
Don’t give me that look. I said they were useless answers, didn’t I?
I know how to prove that men and women are fundamentally different:
Put a man and a woman into separate rooms alone with a new appliance—say, a bread machine—and watch what happens. The woman will make some bread. On the other hand—bear in mind that this is a brand new appliance, right out of the box—the man will take the bread machine apart to see how it works.
There’s a corollary here: I have a sermon/demo I’ve presented in various churches, wherein I break a stack of concrete blocks, then talk about how breaking concrete blocks with your bare hands is just exactly like becoming a Christian and going to heaven.
After I’d done it a number of times I realized that when I said looky here; I’m going to smash all these concrete blocks with my bare hands, the audience response is divided right down the middle between men and women:
I’m not sure what drives men to take things apart. Maybe some psychiatrist has it figured out. If so, I bet the psychiatrist is a man. Why? For the same reason psychology has traditionally been a male pursuit: Psychoanalyzing people is very much like taking them apart to see how they work.
I think the drive to take things apart is genetic, not learned. For instance, I saw a TV show once about Underwriters Laboratories. This company takes new products, disassembles them down into molecules to see how they’re designed, and then figures out ingenious ways to break them.
Underwriters Labs pays the guys in white lab coats you see on TV commercials who build a robot arm to open and close a refrigerator door 38 billion times in two weeks. All guys, mind you—you never see women in the commercials. These are the men who send cars hurtling into concrete walls at 90 miles an hour to see what will happen to the dummies inside.
I’ve often dreamed about working for one of those companies that blow up buildings so that they collapse into their own basements.
Oddly enough, their research has conclusively proven over and over again that the dummies (surprise!) get demolished. But for some reason, they still find it necessary to crash an average of 10 cars a week.
Don’t tell me it’s all about safety and research—these guys are having the time of their lives. I’m not sure why Underwriters Labs even bothers to pay them; most men would probably work there for free. I know I would.
I’ve often dreamed about working for Underwriters Laboratories. I’ve also dreamed about working for one of those companies that blow up buildings so that they collapse into their own basements (c’mon—you have, too, haven’t you? Let’s see a show of hands, guys … I knew it!).
My favorite destructive fantasy, though, involves working for one of the big auto manufacturers. Their research departments have teams that secretly buy competitors’ cars. Then they completely disassemble the cars and mount all the parts on sheets of plywood, which they hang in a warehouse.
You must understand, though—when I say they disassemble a car, I’m talking a level of disassembly rarely seen on this earth. If a butcher rendered a cow the way these guys take on a car, he would need 17 square acres of countertop. Every single part in the car is broken down completely: The door locks are taken apart into piles of tiny springs and wafers. The engine is transformed into a heap of pistons, rings, bolts, bushings, springs, valves and bearings. The starter motor is unwound to see how much wire is in the armatures.
Every hook, pin, screw, nut, bolt, gear, spring, bushing, staple, clip, clamp, strap and wire in the car is unfastened, until the engineers have thousands of parts to catalogue and mount on the boards. They even unstitch all the upholstery, separate glued-together pieces, and cut all the welds apart until they have the original pieces of metal that make up the body and frame.
They say this is done to help them better understand their competitors’ designs. But it sounds like a labor of love to me. I bet they draw straws to see who gets to take things apart and who has to do the paperwork.
Yep, I’d be really good at that sort of thing; I’ve always been a champion disassembler myself. When I was 8, my parents gave me a watch. I pried off the back to see how it worked (and my mother has never quite forgiven me). Since then, I have disassembled electric razors, toasters, an electric knife, radios, car stereos and tape decks, a variable speed drill, an electric guitar, a See ‘N Say, and anything else I could get my hands on.
Last year I sawed an 8‑foot-wide aluminum satellite dish in half.
When I was 19, I took the engine out of my car and put it back. It was so much fun I did it again a year later. Last year I sawed an 8‑foot-wide aluminum satellite dish in half (don’t ask).
I suppose (I said don’t ask!) I can understand why, when my parents gave me a bicycle for my 24th birthday, my mother looked me right in the eye and with a straight face said, “Now don’t go taking this apart to see how it works!” She needn’t have worried. Bicycles were kid stuff; I was in the big leagues by that time.
The all-time highlight of my deconstructionalist career was when I murdered a piano. My roommate, George, had bought an old upright piano for $100. This beast was made by a German company called Gulbransen, and it was so heavy it took eight people to move it into our house. I think moving one of the rocks at Stonehenge would have been easier. The piano’s wheels left ruts in the wood on our front porch, it was so heavy. In fact, I think the Germans designed that piano to hold pillbox doors shut against enemy mortar fire in World War II. It was that kind of heavy.
Anyway, after we all got hernias moving this battleship anchor of a piano, George discovered it had six keys that didn’t work at all. The remaining 82 were so far out of tune they made my dog howl when we struck them. George called a piano tuner, who came over, listened to the piano, and then left, laughing so hard he was drooling.
Needless to say, George didn’t want to take the piano along when he got ready to move out a year later. The problem was that he had no way to dispose of it, and he was too kindhearted to sell it to some other sucker—I mean, victim.
So while George was at work one evening, I decided to surprise him: I took the piano apart and put it in a Dumpster in a parking lot behind our house. I used pliers to cut the strings; a crowbar took care of everything else (champion disassemblers don’t need hundreds of tools; that’s for wimps like Tim Allen).
Over the course of an hour or so that night, my friend, Dave, and I stealthily carried the dismembered piano to the Dumpster, armload by armload. Finally, only two pieces were left: the back frame, which was made of huge oak beams, and the harp, a thick steel framework over which the strings had been stretched. These pieces weighed several hundred pounds each and were the only parts that were difficult to maneuver into the Dumpster.
The Dumpster squatted at the end of the alley like a land mine as George and I gleefully peered out the upstairs bedroom window.
George nearly had a heart attack when he got home and found nothing but a major dent in the carpet where his piano had been.
At 5 a.m. the next morning, George woke me excitedly. One of those trucks that picks up Dumpsters and turns them upside down to empty them was rumbling up the alley toward the Dumpster. The Dumpster squatted at the end of the alley like a land mine as George and I gleefully peered out the upstairs bedroom window.
The driver positioned the loader’s arms in the slots on the Dumpster’s sides and turned on the hoist. George and I clutched our sides with laughter as the truck’s engine roared—and nothing happened. The driver scratched his head and put the hoist into a lower gear. With the truck’s engine bellowing in protest, its suspension groaning and the hoist’s gears screeching, the Dumpster slowly left the ground.
As we held our breath, the Dumpster turned over, the lid flipped open and the harp and frame tumbled out into the truck’s bed, which—and I knew God loved me when I saw it—was empty. The harp and frame landed flat in the truck’s bed with a resounding, thunderous boom. The rest of the pieces slid out on top, crashing and rattling into a heap atop the frame.
The noise echoed up and down the predawn street; lights began appearing in windows. The driver and his helper staggered out of the truck, holding their ears, and climbed the side of the bed, no doubt thinking an asteroid had just landed in the truck.
They looked over the side of the bed in astonishment. I could hear them excitedly questioning each other: “How on God’s green earth did a piano get in there?” the driver said in amazement.
I closed my eyes and sighed wistfully, knowing I would probably never again experience a moment so sublime this side of eternity.
Back in ’82, I went over to my friend Rob’s house one summer day, and for some reason he had a black laundry marker and a bunch of letter stencils, and he wanted to put some slogans on some shirts.
For some reason—quite possibly the same reason Rob had a black laundry marker and a bunch of letter stencils—we were wearing identical gray tank tops, and this all reeked of portentous foreshadowings.
Alcohol may have been involved.
We had one T‑shirt each, so first drafts and revisions were out of the question. Despite alcohol’s possible involvement, we had to do some adulting and settle on our shirts’ messages.
So we sat down and watched an Incredible Hulk rerun titled “Metamorphosis,” in which Bruce Banner lands a sound engineer position for a punk rocker played by MacKenzie Phillips, because if you need a sound engineer, everyone knows you look for an expert in gamma rays and cellular biology.
Someone slips Banner acid, so of course he gets scared, and we get to enjoy the Hulk staggering around trippin’ balls while MacKenzie Phillips sings her earsplitting hit song “Necktie Nightmare” in front of a gigantic pair of high-voltage electrodes shooting perfectly safe 50-foot lightning bolts across the stage, and the also-stoned fans think it’s part of the show, so MacKenzie Phillips ditches her punk bonafides to turn into Amy Grant.
Meanwhile, we got to laughing so hard Rob fell off the couch and I almost wet myself.
After the Hulk was finished with “Necktie Nightmare,” and after more contemplation and discussion, along with more of the possibly involved alcohol, we settled upon messages to stencil on our shirts, making them T‑shirts that would have helped Bill and Ted’s music to bring harmonic balance to the universe much earlier if Bill and Ted had been wearing shirts with the most totally excellent and bodacious stencils we created
With our new world-changing T‑shirts finished, and after some more possibly involved alcohol, we decided we needed to get out there and let the world see them. The T‑shirts, that is. Not the impressive pile of empty beer bottles.
So we hopped into my car, aka the legendary Charles the Deep Breather, and engaged in one of our favorite pastimes: Driving around and drinking beer while enjoying music generated by the vigorous pelvic thrusts of the renowned Pioneer SuperTuner and lustily pumped out through the inimitable Jensen 6x9 Triaxials.
As we cruised up Topeka Boulevard, we saw that the Kansas State Fair was underway, so we parked and wandered around with a couple of warm, overpriced state fair beers rather than the cooler full of ice and ice-cold reasonably-priced beers waiting for us in Charles the Deep Breather’s back seat.
As we passed all the rigged games, a carny guy looking for someone to blow $80 to get a nasty-smelling imported teddy bear that was probably stuffed with asbestos accosted us.
Seriously? I mean yes, this is played for laughs on a TV show where everyone was in on the joke. But while teenagers can be abysmally stupid (watch any horror movie), no one would think an unshaven middle-aged carny with B.O. that could kill Godzilla was a nice fellow teen who wanted to discuss T‑shirts. Yeesh.
“Hey there, fellas!” he said.
Rob lit a cigarette and crimped an eye at him. “Yo.”
“Those are nice T‑shirts!” the carny guy said, looking as convincing as that “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme with Steve Buscemi, no doubt thinking the fellow kids said, “Why, there’s that groovy cat with the skateboard (or nasty-smelling teddy bear)!” rather than “Here comes Chester the Molester again–run!”
“DENTAL FLOSS TYCOON?” he said, pointing at me. “What does that mean?”
“It means I might be moving to Montana soon,” I replied.
“Oh, cool!” he said, the way you would say “Oh, cool!” to a guy carrying a chainsaw and wearing a space helmet who told you he was the lovechild of Carl Sagan and an alien from Proxima Centauri V, hoping to distract him long enough to make a run for it. “Does th—“
“Just to raise me up a crop of dental floss,” I interrupted.
“That’s inter—“
“With a pair of heavy-duty zircon-encrusted tweezers!” I interrupted again.
He gave up and turned to Rob. Apparently he wasn’t a Frank Zappa fan. The carnival guy, that is. Rob was a Zappa fan. Still is.
“What does PRO mean?” he said, sounding desperate.
Rob squinted at him again, taking another drag of his cigarette.
“Prostitute,” he drawled.
The carny guy turned on his heel and stomped away. I don’t know what got his dudgeon up; you’d think someone who travels with a carnival wouldn’t get offended at the word prostitute.
It wasn’t always like that, though. If you’re bracing yourself for a story about how I had to walk 10 miles to school barefoot, relax. What I mean is that you could buy T‑shirts when I was a kid that these days would make woke people pass out.
Take this charming, whimsical 1970s T‑shirt ad, for instance. Before Rohypnol, Jethro Tull T‑shirts were, alas, the only way a lot of guys could get laid.
The struggle is real.
Here’s the text:
Reprise leeringly invites you to win a T‑shirt that will
DRIVE THE GIRLS WILD WITH DESIRE!
You say you’re not making it with the local lovelies? That when you make Paul McCartney eyes at alluring little honeys in violet hip-huggers they respond by frowning and suggesting, “Jerk off, loser”? That even the offer of a seat next to you at a Led Zeppelin concert is insufficient inducement for a far-out nubie to spend part of the evening with you?
Then, fella, whatchoo need is a SUPER-OUTTA-SIGHT-JETHRO-TULL-T-SHIRT of the sort worn by the fullest-handed rakes everywhere.
These eye-catching sartorial groovies, which are guaranteed to reduce even the haughtiest of lovelies to a mound of hot pulsating flesh, are a divine shade of yellow designed to to flatter even the swarthiest of complexion, are the three-buttons-at-the-neck style recently made all the rage by your sharper English groups, appealingly reveal the wearer’s fashionably skinny arms (being short-sleeved) and feature an enticing likeness of sexy Tull leader Ian Anderson somewhere in the vicinity of the right boob. Available in the splendid sizes of medium and large, they may be worn with equal success by members of any sex.
We, in our customarily fiscally unsound way, are giving 1,000 of these wonder away. Free!
All you have to do to win one of your very one is: 1) fill our coupons below; and 2) give it back to us complete down to the exact playing time of the first side of Jethro Tull’s latest hysterically acclaimed album (surely you don’t expect us to give you something without first trying to trick you into buying something first), which information may be gleaned from the album’s label, which you have to remove the cellophane to get to.
So why don’t you in a real hurry send us the required so that we can rush you a Tull T‑shirt that’s certain to transform you overnight into a churning urn of burning funk.
I like Jethro Tull and I do have fashionably skinny arms, but I’m not sure I’d like Ian Anderson sitting on my right boob. Also, do I want to be a churning urn of burning funk? I honestly don’t know. A churning urn of burning funk might be a slick-talking studly chick magnet.
A churning urn of burning funk could also be an overflowing Porta Potty doused with gasoline and set on fire.
In ’77, when I was in Catholic high school—and I must emphasize that this was not just any Catholic high school, but Hayden Extremely Catholic High School—the math teacher, Sister Rose Celine, called a guy named Brian up to do a problem on the chalkboard.
Awww–how adorable!
Now Brian had been wearing a hoody all day because he was wearing a T‑shirt that said “Your Problem Is Obvious” on the back, along with a drawing of someone with his head stuck up his ass. He’d been collecting snickers and giggles all day from other students.
But now it was the last class for the day and it was pretty warm out, so he shrugged off the hoody and left it draped over his chair.
And when Sister Rose Celine called him up to do a problem, Brian forgot about the hoody.
Just as he was about to pass by Sister Rose Celine, he realized why the rest of us were stifling giggles and whispering “Pssst!” at him, and without missing a beat he pivoted 90 degrees to the right, facing Sister Rose Celine, and sidled up to the board. He filled out the math problem with his left hand, facing Sister Rose Celine all the while.
“Very good, Brian,” Sister Rose Celine said. “You may sit down.” Brian began sliding sideways back the way he came as the muffled snickers neared a crescendo. Sister Rose Celine glanced up at us, then at Brian. Being a math teacher, she put 2 and 2 together and stood up.
And because nuns are terrifying, Sister Rose Celine didn’t yell or throw things or grab a ruler or anything like that. All she did was to quietly say, “Stop.”
Brian froze in place; everyone else stopped giggling. We stopped breathing, in fact.
“Why are you walking sideways, Brian?” Sister Rose Celine said.
Brian said, “…eep?”
“Turn around,” she said.
Brian turned and showed her the back of his shirt. She studied it for a moment and said, “Class, you will work on the rest of the problems in your books until the bell rings and class is over.”
She walked to the classroom door, opened it, and waited. Gulp. This meant Sister Rose Celine and Brian were about to visit the principal, Father Ax, a visit. Dead man walking.
No, that’s not a joke. His last name really was Ax. Father Ax was the principal and the school’s boxing and wrestling coach.
Clarification: Father Ax was principal of Hayden East, which was in downtown Topeka, across the street from the state capitol. Hayden East was for 9th and 10th graders.
11th and 12th graders, on the other hand, went to Hayden West, which was across the street from Gage Park. And the Hayden West principal was (I’m still not making any of this up) Father Santa.
And I just realized Father Santa looked an awful lot like Principal Carter in the movie Porky’s, and that the actor playing Principal Carter was named Eric Christmas.
Okay, I’m having a panic attack here. I’m gonna go lie down.
Don’t let the teeth fool you. He’s not smiling; he’s baring his fangs.
I didn’t attend Hayden after 10th grade, so while I have no direct 411 to share about Father Santa, I suspect he was even scarier than Father Ax. But let’s get back to Father Ax:
Father Ax was about 5 1/2 feet tall, 3 feet wide, and weighed about 220 pounds, all of it solid muscle.
Father Ax was not the kind of guy to have an avuncular chat with a wayward student and invite the wayward student to come see him if he ever wanted to talk.
If Father Ax answered the phone instead of Liam Neeson in Taken, Father Ax would not threaten to kill the kidnappers. The kidnappers would drop dead the instant Father Ax picked up the phone.
The reason you hear all those jokes about Chuck Norris being so tough and also about how Bruce Lee killed Chuck Norris in a movie is only because they were both way too smart to even joke about fighting with Father Ax.
Father Ax had a large paddle in his office made of 3/4‑inch oak. It was labeled “Board of Education.”
Father Ax was a Vietnam vet, but he was not rumored to have been a Navy SEAL or in Special Forces or a sniper. Father Ax was rumored to have taken the Board of Education to Vietnam and singlehandedly ended the war in less than a week.
Father Ax had no interest in, patience for, or mercy upon any wiseass churnin’ urn o’ burnin’ funk T‑shirt, and even less for the student wearing it.
The next morning, everyone was whispering about poor Brian. No one knew what transpired in Father Ax’s office; Brian wasn’t talking about it and everyone else was afraid to ask, although we did notice Brian wincing whenever he sat down, so we assumed Brian had had a talk with the Board of Education.
Anyway, Mom and Dad had 4 children, but I was the only one they sent to Catholic school. I have no idea why.2
First Sister didn’t care; She’s three years older than me, so we never saw each other in school.
Thing 1 and Thing 2, on the other hand, are a year younger than me, so when I was sent off to Extremely Catholic school, they welcomed not having to say yes, that weirdo is our brother but he was adopted because his birth parents dropped him on his head a lot.
A little Extremely Catholic high school wouldn’t have hurt them, though. I mean, thanks to Sister Rose Celine and Father Ax and Father Santa, I stayed out of trouble (or was careful enough not to get caught). And thanks to Brian’s terrifying fate I especially avoided provocative T‑shirts (at least until after graduation).
Secular public school, on the other hand, deprived Thing 1 and Thing 2 of important, nurturing, eternal values; values like corporal punishment, sheer terror, and fluency in raunchy slang and raunchier T‑shirts .
And so one summer when they were maybe 13 or 14, Thing 1 and Thing 2 went to Worlds of Fun with some friends. Worlds of Fun was okay, but it was really just Acres of Fun.
Be that as it may, it was still fun, and that evening their friend’s mom dropped them off; they were sweaty, dirty, sunburned, overstimulated, greasy, and sugary from eating junk food all day. Job well done, Worlds of Fun.
Mom was sitting on the couch reading a magazine while Dad and I watched a movie. She said, “Go get a shower before you sit d…”
She trailed off as she glanced up and saw what Thing 1 and Thing 2 were wearing. They’d saved up their money and bought matching T‑shirts. And this is what was printed on their matching T‑shirts:
I laughed so hard it made me snort and then hiccup; Dad was shaking his head and trying unsuccessfully to look stern.
Thing 1 and Thing 2 were still looking happy, but a little puzzled.
Mom folded down the page she was reading, set the magazine down gently, and said very quietly, “Where did you get those shirts?”
Uh-oh. She sounded just like Sister Rose Celine. I’d forgotten: Mom and Dad had both graduated from Hayden Extremely Catholic High School in 1958. Back then, things weren’t as kind and forgiving and touchy-feely as they were 20 years later when I was there.
“We got them at Worlds of Fun,” Thing 2 said. “Um… is something wrong?”
“They had those shirts at Worlds of Fun? They let you buy those shirts at Worlds of Fun?”
Thing 1 and Thing 2 have this thing they do. They’ll glance at each other; maybe one of them will raise an eyebrow and the other one will shrug. It’s like all the hand signals in baseball, except instead of a short message like “Walk this asshole,” they exchange an ocean of info in the blink of an eye.
“Didn’t your friend’s mom say anything?” Mom asked.
Thing 1 and Thing 2 glanced at each other to discuss their strategy. It’s important to note here that Thing 1 is a practical, take-action type, while Thing 2 is more introspective and philosophical.
“Well, no,” said Thing 2. Meanwhile, Thing 1 quietly left the living room and headed down the hall.
“I see. Do you know what that means?”
“What what means? Oh, on the shirt? It’s, uh…”
By now Dad and I were desperately trying to keep straight faces. Mom glared at us for a second, and looking back I just now realized this situation was eerily similar to a famous scene in the movie Porky’s:
A group of horney—I mean, horny—guys were caught peeping into the girl’s locker room showers. One them sticks his, um—can we please call it a tallywacker?—he sticks his tallywacker though the peephole and almost gets caught by Girl’s PE Coach Beulah Balbricker.
Balbricker wants Principal Carter to arrange a lineup of naked teen boys so she can identify the scoundrel. Meanwhile, the Boy’s Coaches Goodenough, Brackett and Warren are desperately trying to keep straight faces as Principal Carter says no, a short-arm inspection is absolutely out of the question.
Coach Brackett says, “Mr. Carter, we can just call the police, and we have ’em send over one of their sketch artists. And Miss Balbricker can give a description. We can put up Wanted posters all over school: ‘Have you seen this prick? Report immediately to Beulah Balbricker. Do not attempt to apprehend this prick, as it is armed and dangerous. It was last seen hanging out in the girls’ locker room.’”
At which point everyone, including Principal Carter completely loses it, and Miss Balricker stomps out. I still admire Nancy Parsons, who played Miss Balbricker, for keeping a straight face. I would have had a stroke.
This all happened years before Porky’s was released. And it’s worth noting that Thing 1 liked Porky’s so much she had a personalized license plate saying “PORKY1” for a number of years.
But I digress. Thing 2 was trying to come up with a definition for horney that would would keep her and Thing 1 out of trouble, especially since they didn’t know what it meant anyway.
“It means,” Mom started. “It means, uh, well.. *ahem.* When someone is “horney,” it means they’re… um… sexual. I mean, excited in a sexual way.”
Thing 2 ruminated on that for a few seconds. “Sure, I’ve heard that,” she lied, “but it’s kind of like the word ‘crazy.’ There’s ‘crazy,’ where you see things and stuff, but it’s also like, you know, ‘wild and crazy guy.’”
“So what’s the other meaning of horney?” I managed to choke out between snickers. Mom glared at me again, and I realized I might have to explain how I knew what horney meant if I didn’t shut up. So I shut up.
Thing 1—who is, as I said, the practical take-action type—came back down the hall, saying, “Hey, what if we just wear them like this?”
She’d hitched her jeans up as high as she could, then tucked in the Smile If You’re Horney shirt so tight it was stretched out of shape, so instead of this:
It looked like this:
And we all—Mom, Dad, me, Thing 1 and Thing 2—we all lost it as thoroughly as the coaches in Porky’s.
It’s not fair. Whenever Thing 1 or Thing 2 got into trouble, they’d do something to make Mom or Dad laugh and they’d get away with it.
“Go take a shower,” Mom said, picking up her magazine. “Change clothes and bring me those shirts.”
Thing 1 and Thing 2 surrendered with dignity, glad they were off the hook.
And by “surrendered with dignity,” I mean “executed a strategic retreat to discuss flanking maneuvers.”
The next day, when we were all called to the kitchen for dinner, Thing 1 was last to arrive. She strategically executed a not-quite-late arrival, during which she showed up just as Dad was about to repeat Mom’s chow call, meaning everyone would be waiting to see what was going on.
She stepped into the kitchen, wearing the “Smile If You’re Horney!!” shirt that she’d been ordered to destroy, and said, “Hey Mom! How about this?”
She’d secretly rummaged through Mom’s sewing supplies and found some embroidered letters, one of which she’d sewn onto the offending shirt. And this is what it looked like:
Dad, who heroically managed to keep a straight face, said, “Smile if you’re CORNEY?”
Golf clap to Thing 1. I’m still in awe.
I don’t remember if Mom and Dad let Thing 1 and Thing 2 keep the shirts.3
You’ve heard this saying: “If you don’t like the weather in (wherever you are), just wait five minutes and it’ll change!”
This, my friends, is Fake News. I’ve lived in, or spent enough time in, enough states to get an idea what the weather is like: Oregon, Washington (State and DC), Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Florida (and Akumal, Mexico and Guangzho, Changsha, and Hong Kong in China).
But I grew up in Kansas1 Kansas is the only place I’ve ever lived that has weather, and I can prove it. To do so I need to talk about coffee:
Back some mumbledy-seven years ago, I worked afternoons at the state hospital and got off at 11. Depending on how much money we had, my friend Rob and I would either drive around and drink beer till the wee hours, or go downtown to Pore Richard’s, pay for one bottomlesscup of coffee each, and drink coffee till the wee hours of the morning.
Pore Richard’s was a restaurant and café where you could spend a lot of money on steak or lobster or other pricey munchies, or you could spend $1.25 on a cup of coffee and get refills until you started to vibrate.
Being broke, and given that Nintendo and iPhones and Android and X‑Box and restaurants with dozens of TVs showing every channel there is at ear-shattering volume were all years in the future, we had to find something else to do. So we’d talk and argue and talk with the servers and argue about things with them, all of which are alas becoming lost arts.
But most often we would whip out Road Notes and get busy.
Road Notes was a big 200-page college-ruled spiral notebook (several, in fact; I still have about 10 of them and I’m pretty sure there were more).
And upon the pages of Road Notes we would inflict song lyrics; goofy drawings; vignettes; short stories written back and forth between us, two paragraphs apiece; all manner of things.
One night I was noodling around in Road Notes and the Wham song—oops; I I mean the WHAM! gong—“Careless Whisper” come on the table jukebox, which meant someone at one of the other tables had dropped a dime in their table jukebox.
Then it came on again. And again. And again. Now, I like this song and I liked it back then. It wasn’t as bad as someone playing “What’s Up Pussycat?” over and over, but it was wearing thin. I sacrificed a dime from petty cash (aka the server-tipping cash) to play something else, but someone in the restaurant had just broken up with someone else and was drowning his or her sorrows in a tsunami of dimes to hog the jukebox.
Rob grabbed Road Notes from me and started drawing. A minute later he handed back a pair of drawings. One was a credible forgery of the old “Loose Lips Sink Ships” poster labeled “Careless Whisper,” except the soldier gabbing at his girlfriend had a bullhorn aimed right at Hitler and was blowing his hair and mustache off.
Next to that was a drawing of a bald woman, labeled “Hairless Sister.”
I said, “Hairless Sister”? Rob said, “Wait; don’t tell me you haven’t heard this. The “Hairless Sister” song? On Dr. Demento?”
I hadn’t, but I did later: “Hairless Sister” was a spoof of “Careless Whisper,” in which a high school guy’s sister shaves her head, and her brother is singing about how he’ll never go to school again, because an embarrassed mind can do no learning.
So I grabbed Road Notes back and drew an old woman yelling “Get me some pears!”, labeled “Pearless Spinster,” which set off a pretty damn good pun war, which ended like this:
After several more rounds, Rob drew a picture of Dee Snider with a corkscrew sticking out of a big lump on his arm. It was titled, “Twisted Blister.”
I looked at him and said “Twisted Blister”? You HATE Twisted Sister! What song is this, “We’re Not Gonna Lance It”? He snickered and said, “Your move!”
I made a few false starts and then inspiration struck: I drew a picture of a house with a tornado heading its way. There was another tornado on the other side of the house.
The first tornado was saying, “Hey, help me knock down this house!” The other tornado said, “Sure!”
I titled it Assisted Twister.
I pushed Road Notes back at Rob. He looked at Assisted Twister and started to laugh. So did I.
Before long we were both howling and falling out of the booth and trying very sincerely not to wet our pants and/or have asthma attacks.
So I—yes, I know it’s a horrible pun. But that was wh—What? Look, you had to be there. Anyway, we—okay, shut up and sit down. You don’t have to like a bad pun. You just have to respect its courage to be seen in public.
I went to college in Oregon; one day I was walking to a class with someone, and he said “You’re from Kansas? Weren’t you alla time scared of tornadoes?”
I said, “You’re from Portland in spitting distance of five volcanoes; ain’t you alla time scared of the floor being lava?”
If you live in Portland, you can’t wait five minutes for the weather to change. Portland doesn’t HAVE weather. All the weather folks on the news have to say is, “Forecast: damp. Current conditions: about to rain, raining, or just finished raining.”
Arizona’s just the opposite: The weather in Prescott Valley is always mild and sunny (unless you’re in Phoenix, where the weather is always boil-your-eyballs hot and sunny), except for it rains a few weeks late in the summer, which they call “Monsoon season,” like we’re in Tahiti.
But Kansas—Kansas has WEATHER. I remember trying to drive to work once, but it was so cold the transmission fluid was like molasses and the car couldn’t move an inch.
Later that same winter, on New Year’s eve I left work at 11pm and it was a balmy 75°. When the sun came up on New Year’s day it was 20 below zero, and a lot of people couldn’t get to work because the temperature extremes made a grain elevator explode, covering I‑70 with a 30-foot-high wheatdrift.
Later that spring I was attempting to dash from my car to my house during a nasty thunderstorm, and I took a racquetball-sized hailstone to the noggin that almost knocked me unconscious.
I’ve seen it cold enough in Kansas you could spit and it would freeze before it hit the ground. I’ve seen it hot enough that recently resurfaced roads softened up, leaving cars mired in asphalt.
Kansas folks are tough enough to deal with apocalyptic weather, but Kansas just doesn’t get any respect.
In Diamonds Are Forever, the evil villain Blofeld asks Bond, James Bond, how he should set about extorting the world with his giant space laser.
“I suppose I could destroy Kansas,” Blofeld says, “but it would take years for anyone to notice!”
Hyuk hyuk hyuk. But consider this: If Kansas was destroyed, all that real weather—frozen spit, boiling asphalt, Mama-said-knock-you-out hailstones and tornadoes, oh my—would have to happen in other states, where people talk about how the weather changes every five minutes but don’t have a clue what’s in store for them.
Think about that the next time you’re mocking Kansas with your hilarious Wizard of Oz jokes.
When I was 4 or 5 my parents had some friends over for a barbecue. Everyone was milling around in fine barbecue fashion, and then the radio played a song I’d never heard before. It was amazing! There was somebody laughing and then helicopter sounds, but it didn’t have any lyrics.
I planned to ask Mom and Dad what the song was, but they were busy doing things and I forgot.
A couple of days later Mom was putting something on the record player, and I remembered the barbecue and said, “Play The Helicopter Song!”
“The what?” Mom said.
“The Helicopter Song! There was a guy laughing and helicopters! And there weren’t any words!” Mom had no idea what I meant. I did, but I couldn’t describe it well enough. I gave up, frustrated.
A couple days later we were driving somewhere and the helicopter song came on the radio.
“That’s The Helicopter Song! That’s The Helicopter Song!” I yelled.
“That’s the song you meant?” Mom asked.
“Yeah! It’s The Helicopter Song!”
And it turned out that the helicopter song was… (drum roll])1
“Wipeout,” by The Surfaris.
Lemme ‘splain: When I was a kid in the early 1960s, we lived in Topeka, KS, about 7 miles north of Forbes Air Force Base. Aircraft often flew right over us coming to and from Forbes; usually heavier cargo aircraft; once everyone in Topeka got to watch a brand-new Air Force One land at Forbes for the first stop in its inaugural test flight, fuel up, and take off again.
This was much earlier, though; maybe 1967 or ’68. The war in Vietnam was raging along full blast, and we often heard large choppers flying thumping along overhead: long-range special-ops copters like the Sikorsky MH-53, aka the Jolly Green Giant, or Boeing CH-47 Chinook dual-rotor heavy cargo helicopters.
It happened often enough that I didn’t consciously listen to them, but they still made a hell of a lot of noise.
And so it happened that when I heard “Wipeout,” the long drum breaks, heavy on the bass and toms, reminded me of all the big choppers flying overhead.
I didn’t know how to explain this when I was so young. So years later, when I was in my early 20s, a friend of mine was showing me how to play “Wipeout” on guitar, and I suddenly remembered: THE HELICOPTER SONG!
I told Mom and Dad about it, but they didn’t remember any of this.
So either I’m hallucinating or The Surfaris tricked me.
Here’s the text:
