A True Story

Mr. & Mrs. Eldred Whipple of Grand Oak Falls, Nebraska saw the flashing banner while checking their e-mail.

Be on a Reality TV Show!

Eldred clicked it by accident, and then six new browser windows opened in quick succession. He blinked at the flurry.

Myrtle fetched her reading glasses. Eldred turned on the desk lamp. They squinted at all the rules and regulations.

Winners Flown First-Class to Hollywood, CA!

They couldn’t print the forms so Myrtle copied them, word-for-word, on the Underwood typewriter. Then she and Eldred sat around the old iron stove and asked each other the questions. The forms were eighteen pages long. The questions were designed to tell the producers what type of people they were, and whether they’d be interesting to watch on TV.

How long have you and your partner lived together?

“Do we count the years I was out in Korea?” Eldred said.
“I think probably,” Mildred replied.

What is the most difficult thing you and your partner have accomplished together?

“Filling out this damn form,” Eldred snorted.

Myrtle wrote their answers in the blanks in her careful, looping script.

“Go ahead and finish mine,” Eldred said, shrugging into his slippers and heading off to bed.

What one thing would you change about your partner?

Myrtle’s pen hovered over Eldred’s form.

“I wish she let me help out more around the house,” she wrote.

**

They came in from chores a few nights later and Myrtle noticed that the forms were still sitting on the kitchen table.

“When does it have to be postmarked?” she asked Eldred.

They raced into town in the old truck. The post office was almost closed. George Simmons had just shut off the porch light.

Eldred blocked the front door with his truck.

“Eldred, you old sumbitch,” George said.

He took the envelope from Eldred’s hand and tossed it behind the counter, towards the mail bin. Then he bolted the front door, took up Lenny’s leash and led the old hound to the truck.

**

There was no response from Hollywood in the next day’s mail, nor the next.

Eldred and Myrtle watched network television every night after chores. Excited announcers promised the new season of reality television, new twists and fresh ideas for America’s viewing enjoyment.

Myrtle looked up from her cross-stitch. “Isn’t that the one we applied to?”

The announcer promised that “you’ve never seen reality as extreme as this.” He said it was “the ultimate in reality competition.” He said there would be roadkill eating, bikini marathons and the hourly elimination of contestants. He said it was a reality show without the cumbersome trappings of reality.

The Whipples were very excited.

“You’d think we’d have heard something by now,” Myrtle said.
“That’s how these things work,” Eldred said. “They’ll probably show up on the porch any day now, cameras and all that, and then we’ll be on TV.”

Myrtle started wearing her hair in curls all the time, even when doing chores.

**

The first episode was a two-hour special that aired on a Tuesday night. The Whipples weren’t on it.

George Simmons found the Whipples’ application on the floor behind the mail bin. He didn’t tell them. He didn’t want them to know what an incompetent postmaster he was.

He set the envelope on a shelf back with the dry goods and stared at it through his entire lunch, every day, one hand idly scratching Lenny's head. Lenny didn't judge him.

**

Incredibly, the Communist Chinese attacked Grand Oak Falls, Nebraska.

They dropped paratroopers into cornfields by the thousands. Their plan was to start in the center and spread outwards, like chocolate syrup in a glass of milk.

Every one an only child, every one armed to the gills, every one bent on corporeal destruction without regard for individual self-preservation. They began by burning the wheat fields.

The sky bronzed with ash. The Whipples woke to an apocalypse.

Eldred pulled on suspenders and straightened his bowtie. Myrtle hurriedly pulled the curlers from her hair, tossing them anywhere.

George Simmons was on Page 14 of Myrtle’s application. He heard a thronging. He looked up. Pulled up his pants and exited the bathroom. Stepped on Lenny's tail. Lenny turned his arthritic neck and bit George in the calf.

The Communists had overrun the store. The dry goods were gone. The wet goods were wet. The walls were collapsed into the street.

The town was burning.

Regimented ranks of AK-47 muzzles marched over the cornstalks. Eldred and Myrtle stood proudly on their front porch. Napalm rained on their livestock. Burning flesh filled their lungs.

“It’s a shame, in a way,” Eldred said.
“Shh,” Myrtle said.
“Take me three weeks to rebuild that shed,” Eldred said.
“We’re going to be on TV,” Myrtle said.

The Communists arrived at the Whipples’ front porch.

“Would you like some juice or milk before we begin?” Myrtle asked them.

The Communists in the front ranks traded a glance.

“Don’t mind her. Welcome to Grand Oak Falls,” Eldred said. “So, what do we do?”
Myrtle leaned close to him and whispered in his ear. “I think our reactions are what make good TV,” she said.

Eldred nodded. He took three steps down the front porch, socked a Communist in the jaw, wrenched the AK-47 from his grip and mowed down a dozen of the suckers before they piled on him like a quarterback.

Myrtle grinned. Her cheeks glowed. They’d probably use this footage in the promos.

Homeland Security

There’s a lot of things you can’t do at airports – joke about bombs, for example, or brag about the sly way you snuck the porcelain howitzer past the metal detector. One thing you can do in abundance, though, is watch and observe people.

Airports are a distinctly middle-class haunt, like Robinsons-May. There are no homeless people at the boarding gates, no crudely hand-lettered sign asking for spare change as you avert your eyes, crossing onto the jetway; neither are there quadrillionaires spooking the waiting area, wearily reshouldering the free duffel bag from the bank or glowering through a magazine. (Though I was on a plane with Ben Stein once. He was in first class, and neither glowering nor begging.)

It can be a game:

When the guy I’d pegged as an Unreal Tournament maven and devoted Slashdotter sighed, pulled up his dark socks above his worn sneakers and started leafing through Wired, I was vindicated.

It was surprisingly easy to pair up yin and yang, to assign arbitrary partnerships to passengers and thus construct balance in the universe. The doughy English professor with the stuffed notebook, abandoned hair and herringbone coat fit like a lumpy socket into the too-thin, too-blonde, too-tan Mexico veteran one-upping her fellow travelers (“Did you have those people trying to sell you stuff everywhere? Yeah? We didn’t.” “Well, sure we did – until we got back to our resort. So isolated. No cell phone service, no ATM – nothing.”

The loping, dew-chinned guy yanged into the yin of what may have been either a pregnant midget or an obese child.

The off-duty skycap offered me half an orange. I refused, though I was starving. A second later I wondered if maybe I made a mistake. A look clouded his eyes, like I’d offended him. I’d soon learn that his culture was enough different from mine that it was a real possibility.

Him: “I’m from Fiji Islands.”

He went on to tell me, in an accent that was just short of incomprehensible although his fluency was excellent, all about starting out as a flight attendant, moving all over and finally settling in L.A. “For my kids’ education. My son is a doctor, now, in Vancouver. My daughter is a senior at UCLA. She skipped a grade.”

He then goes on to tell me about his two wives. Apparently in Fiji you can have up to four.

“Two wives, eh?” I say. “Do they know about one another?”

“They are sisters,” he says.

Seems that he married a girl – his first wife – and she got pregnant. (Perhaps the pregnancy led to the marriage; his accent meant I got about every fourth word.) As per the culture, she went to stay with her parents during her pregnancy, and he was visiting her every weekend. The 50-mile trek to see her began to take its toll.

So by the time my friend’s kid was born, he was smitten with his wife’s 16-year-old sister. If he left his wife, since she had a child she wouldn't be beating suitors away with a stick, and thus would have to live, husbandless, with parents or family.

So, in a brave show of manliness and responsibility, he eloped to America with the 16-year-old.

He laughed. “You got to do it, you know? What am I gonna do? She’s pregnant, you know, I hadn’t had sex for so long.”

The wife, in shame, lived with his brother. I think the brother may have eventually married her too, or else one of her other sisters. “He said he wants to marry her, but I said you don’t want that, you know?” His brother and his wife didn’t visit him in America. It was only after he went back to Fiji for his father-in-law’s funeral that they decided it would be okay to visit.

He described his other brother, who was a good thirty years older than him and who lived in Australia. The brother had eight kids. I got the impression that Fijian women pop babies like L.A. women pop pills.

He still owns property in Fiji. He was a landowner, a farmer, a padròn. When his kids finish their education, he says, he’ll go back to Fiji and live like a king. For now, he works three jobs to put his daughter through college, refusing her offers to work and help support herself. “Just go to school,” he tells her.

Now, he says, his sibling wives go shopping together in L.A.

Observing people:

Her: “I travel a lot, so I’m really good at trying not to talk to people.”
The guy that’s picturing her naked: “Yeah?”
Her: “The most exciting thing I saw was Tom Skerritt on a plane once. He was old.”
Him: “Heh, cool.”
His eyes flick to her breasts when she turns her head. He’s trying to be genial.
She leans back, reaching for the railing. Misses it. Slowly tumbles backwards over her suitcase. He offers his hand. She doesn’t take it.
Her: “So, which would you rather do, act or write? Or produce?”

Someone, anyone in L.A.: “So, what do you do?”
Anyone else: “I’m an actor.”/“I’m a writer.”
Me: “Hearing those words makes me want to kick you in the head. I don’t know why. But best of luck.”

From now on:
Anyone: “So, what do you do?”
Me: “I’m an embalmer.”
Anyone: “Really?”
Me: “I take things, pump out their blood and prop them up, stiff and well-dressed, for you to file by and admire. No, wait – I’m in advertising.”

Ai Dios Mio

If you ever watch Spanish TV (and who doesn't?), then watch for Robbie Kneivel jumping his motorcycle over 10,000 clean dinner plates. I might be in the commercial, awesome cholo 'stache and all. For my trouble, I got enough Dawn liquid dish soap to last me 163 years (by my admittedly conservative calculations). I stole a case of the soap, then came back and found that they were giving away bottles as prizes at the crappy carnival booths they'd set up. Man, people wanted that soap.

Quote from one of the ADs, as I was walking to the parking lot with a case of soap on my shoulder: "Hey, that's all coming back, right?"

Me: "You bet."

Where did he think I was going with it?

Done This Already

Have you ever had a dream in which you recall an event that never happened?

It happens to me all the time. The other night I had a particularly vivid dream - I mean crying, screaming, gut-wrenching stuff - and the drama revolved around the discovery of something I'd done years in the past.

And when I woke, and I realized it was all a dream, I incredulously asked myself "Does that mean that [event] didn't actually happen, years ago?" It took about an hour to wake up enough to realize that no, it didn't.

Now, of course, looking back lucidly, it's quite obvious that it was all part of the dream. But to remember something so clearly, and to have such a sense of the passage of time - having a memory that was solidly planted at a particular place in the past - makes one wonder about all of one's beliefs.

If all it takes is to be in the dream-state to suddenly bring about new, fabricated memories, experiences that are no less real in the emotional responses they provoke for being fiction, and most bizarrely, perfecly concrete thoughts, feelings and occurrences that rapidly and surely vanish from the mind as easily as one opens one's eyes in the morning ... then what gossamer catalyst would it take for our waking beliefs, emotions and experiences to suddenly be proved fiction - or worse, vanish entirely?

I don't know. But I think I might have an idea about something else.

I think our memories are tagged, if you will, with a sort of date-stamp. Things that happened yesterday are filed ahead of things that happened last year, and so on. And in a dream, which is already full of fiction, one particular fiction is tagged with an artificial mental date-stamp and the mind files it away, in order, between graduation and the Grand Canyon.

I think déjà vû is the same thing. I think it's just the same sort of artificial date-stamp, applied in error to short-term memory. Vonnegut called it "bad chemicals". Just some weird synaptic misfire. Immediate memory is interpreted as long-term memory.

Sometimes, when I get déjà vû, I try and 'remember' ahead of schedule, see if I can predict what's about to happen. I don't recall ever being successful.