The Foggy Man

Summer in rural Kansas is loud.

Well, at least it was loud when I was a kid growing up there. Not because of the people or the cars or the whatnot. In rural Kansas there are no people and there are no cars. They do have whatnot, but the whatnot is usually very quite and well behaved.

Summer in rural Kansas is loud because of the bugs. Billions and billions of bugs.

I don't know what they're called. I wasn't really paying attention in school. Crickets or chiggers or cicadas or pinatas or pilates or something like that. All I know is that those mofos were loud.

And we had a lot of other kinds of bugs that weren't necessarily loud, but they were still bad. I don't know why they were bad. Like I said, I didn't pay attention in school. Or at home for that matter. I just know that there were bugs, and the bugs were bad. The reason I know the bugs were bad is because of the Foggy Man.

Here's how it would work...

You'd be inside your house with your family trying to watch Little House on the Prairie. And you'd be saying to each other:

"DID ANYONE HEAR WHAT MICHAEL LANDON JUST SAID?!! I CAN'T HEAR ANYTHING BECAUSE OF THE BUGS OUTSIDE!!!"

"WHAT?! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! WHAT DID YOU SAY?!"

"HUH?! I CAN'T HEAR ANYTHING!!! TURN UP THE VOLUME! I NEED TO KNOW WHY HALF PINT IS CRYING!"

"WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!! SPEAK UP! IT'S TOO LOUD BECAUSE OF THOSE FREAKING BUGS!! WHAT HAPPENED TO HALF PINT?!"

And then some neighborhood kid would come running into your house, shouting, "THE FOGGY MAN IS HERE! THE FOGGY MAN IS HERE! COME QUICK! IT'S THE FOGGY MAN!"

The Foggy Man was a guy who worked for the city and drove this thing around town during the summer, spraying some noxious kind of poison into the air. It was DDT or HTD or HGH or PST or ESP or something like that. I don't really know. I didn't really pay attention in school.

So every kid in town would come running out of his house and we'd all run after the Foggy Man. I don't know why we were excited. I think we all believed he might have ice cream.

But that's what we would do. Run behind the Foggy Man, dancing and shouting and sucking in all of his deadly plumes of smoke that would fill the air. It was like a bunch of retarded kids running through the streets of London on May Day.

And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that our parents were crazy for letting us all chase the Foggy Man like that. You're thinking that we're all lucky we didn't get sick and die.

Well, I happen to think that parents today make too big of a deal over protecting their kids. They practically make them all put on flak jackets before they drive them over to some ultra safe, soft patch of grass and watch them play their little gay soccer games.

We didn't do that kind of thing when I was a kid. We played in empty lots full of rocks and dirt and stickers. We ran face first into trees. We drank scalding hot water out of the hose. We dove for footballs in the middle of the street. And yes, we ran behind the Foggy Man. And I'll tell you what, it never did any of us one bit of harm. I mean, all those years of inhaling deadly toxins, and look at me. I'm perfectly fine. No side effects whatsover ljlsidkkkkkkkkks ljdioisdj

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Dirty Sanchez Mexican Restaurant

From what I can tell, there seems to be no shortage of utter stupidity when it comes to the restaurant industry. Therefore, you would think that a job in a restaurant would be the perfect place for me to live out the rest of my days. Surprisingly though, I have worked in a restaurant only once in my life. But the experience was enough to keep me out of that line of work until the end of time.

I was 15 years old, and it was my first official job where I had to fill out an application and a W2 form. For weeks I had been watching the classified section in the newspaper, looking for some job that I could do without harming myself or others. Days passed. Weeks passed. It seemed as if I would never find a job. Every day, I saw the same positions listed in the classifieds…

Registered nurse: Probably not for me, even though I don’t think you need much experience to be a registered nurse in Kansas. My mom was a registered nurse, and everybody always said she was very good at it. However, one time I sprained my wrist badly after falling down on roller skates. What I was doing on roller skates is an absolute mystery. I have no business putting on roller skates. Anyway, my mom made me a homemade splint out of those Styrofoam things that you get from the grocery store when you buy ground beef. When she was finished, I just looked at the Styrofoam splint for a few seconds with a mixture of obvious disappointment and confusion. It looked kind of like my pathetic project for the science fair. Then I looked up at her as if she had just forced me to start wearing eye shadow. “Where’s my cast?” That’s what I wanted to know. “I want a real cast that people can sign and I can hit Ted with.” No, I wasn’t going to be a nurse. Too much science involved, and besides, you have to care about people.

Auto mechanic: There were a lot of ads for this. Yeah, sure, I’m gonna be an auto mechanic. I can’t even get the baseball cards to stay in the spokes of my bicycle wheels.

Farm implement sales: Huh? What’s an implement?

I was about to give up, but then one day, there it was…

Help Wanted: Part-time dishwasher. Dirty Sanchez Mexican Restaurant. No experience necessary. Apply in person.

It wasn’t really called Dirty Sanchez Mexican Restaurant. I just can’t remember the real name. But Dirty Sanchez Mexican Restaurant seems to fit.

I rode my bicycle over to the restaurant, walked inside, and timidly asked about the open position. I talked to a lady who was in her 50s. She looked sort of Mexican to me, but not authentically Mexican. She looked like a fake Mexican. And she was kind of cranky. Maybe that’s what it was. Most Mexican people I’ve met in my life have been friendly and shy. But she was a cranky Mexican. After asking me a couple of questions, she went into the back and returned a minute later with an application.

Filling out a job application has always been an experience that I dread. I constantly make the same mistake on job applications and interviews. I always answer a question with exactly what I perceive to be the truth at the moment. Because if I lie, I know they will be able to tell right away. I’m a horrible liar. I’ve never learned the secrets of marketing myself and hiding the embarrassing, raw facts of my existence. I just say whatever comes into my head—whatever seems to be accurate. You can probably see how this might be a problem for me.

Filling out a job application is especially hard when you’ve never done it before. What do you put down in all the little empty spaces? Sitting at the counter at Dirty Sanchez Mexican Restaurant, I filled out my application kind of like this…

EDUCATION:

• Sacred Heart Catholic School (first grade through sixth grade)
• Colby Junior High School (seventh and eighth grade)
• Colby High School (I just started)
• I also have to go to CCD at church.

GPA: Yes, I think so.

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY (LIST MOST RECENT JOB FIRST):

• Babysitter. There were these people and I babysat their kids.
• Picked vegetables and stuff for this one weird guy.
• Janitor. I helped my dad clean his office at night.
• Lawn mower. I mow yards sometimes. Ours and Lucille Curtin’s.
• Looked for criminals whose pictures are at the post office. Never mind.

SKILLS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

• Science Fair (Participant)
• Weebelos (I went to the first meeting, but I didn’t go back. I didn’t get it.)
• I can draw sort of.

REFERENCES:

• My dad
• Lucille Curtin
• Mikey Woodall

After I handed the application back to her, I was certain the cranky fake Mexican lady was going to turn me away. But I must have written something in the application to impress her, because she hired me on the spot. It was probably the part about Weebelos.

Every day when I walked into the restaurant, there was a mountain of dirty dishes with half-eaten Mexican food waiting for me. It was disgusting. I would hold my breath as I scraped the food into the trash and washed each dish. It was almost as bad as cleaning up dog barf on a carpet. It wasn’t quite that vile, but often when I was scraping a plate, I found myself turning my face quickly to the side and involuntarily making little puke noises.

I also had the habit of frequently spraying dishes at the wrong angle, so that water and food particles would splash all over my face and clothes. No matter how many times I did this, I could never seem to remember to avoid doing it the next time.

At the end of the night, it was my job to mop the kitchen floor with some kind of cleaning solution that is used only in Mexican restaurants and nuclear power plants. Half of the cleaning solution went onto the floor, and half of it went onto me.

Mopping. How come they don’t have any classes in school for that? I could have used a few lessons in mopping. To this day, I still don’t know how to do it properly. When I finish mopping, there are usually a bunch of non-rinsed, sudsy puddles everywhere. If I weren’t afraid of being yelled at, I would probably try to run a hose into the house and spray everything down.

After I had been working at the Dirty Sanchez Mexican Restaurant for a few weeks, they gave me the additional responsibility of helping the cook on Thursday nights. The reason—Thursday was prime rib night. Why they had prime rib night in the Dirty Sanchez Mexican Restaurant, I have no idea. But they did. The problem was that the cook was so busy making burritos that he didn’t have time to watch the prime rib. So they trained me to cook the prime rib. Well, actually “cook” is a pretty strong word. They showed me how to cut the meat and set it on the thingy. I was supposed to leave the meat on the thingy for a certain amount of time, depending on whether the order was for a rare, medium, or well-done piece of prime rib. When an order for prime rib came in, I would cut the piece of meat, put it on the thingy, and then stand there staring at the meat and counting. That’s what I would do—stare and count.

Meanwhile, the cook would make the other dishes while singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which is quite possibly the dumbest song ever recorded. For the rest of my life, I will not be able to hear that stupid song again without thinking of Mexican food and prime rib.

Every once in a while, the cook would say something like, “Hey Paul, when you’re done with that, I need you to…” Before he could finish, I would put my hand in the air and quickly say, “Not now. I’m counting… 48 hippopotamus, 49 hippopotamus, 50 hippopotamus, 51 hippopotamus…”

At the end of each night, I would call home and ask my older sister to come pick me up. She hated to pick me up, mostly because of the stench coming from my body. As soon as I opened the car door and hopped inside, my sister would look at my clothes soaked in nuclear power plant cleaning solution and particles of Mexican food, and she’d say, “Oh my God! You stink!” Then she’d open up the window and stick her head out of it like Lassie while she drove me home. Every night she’d say the same thing, as if it were a huge surprise that I reeked. “Oh my God! You stink!” Head out window, drive home, bitch and complain.

Yet another part of my job was to bus tables. It was a good way to let the customers smell me too. One day, as I was busing tables, I saw a friend from school in a booth on the other side of the room. He was sitting with an older girl who I didn’t recognize. Now, this particular friend and I had a sort of unique greeting that we always gave to each other. I don’t know how or why we started this greeting. It’s just one of those dumb rituals that kids come up with. When we passed one another in school, we would raise our eyebrows really high without saying anything, and then lower them. Then we’d say something like, “Hey man, what’s up?” “Nothing. What you doin’?” “Nothin. What you doin’?” “Oh nothin’. What you doin’?” “Nothin’.” “Okay, I’ll see ya later.” “Yeah, see ya later.”

So when I saw this kid across the room, I raised my eyebrows really high as soon as he looked in my direction. But he didn’t raise his eyebrows back at me. I took the dishes back to the kitchen, thinking he just hadn’t seen me.

A few minutes later, I went back out to the dining room for more dishes. Again, I raised my eyebrows at him. Again, he didn’t do anything. He just turned back to the girl and whispered something.

The third time I walked out to the dining room, I again loaded dishes into my tub and raised my eyebrows at the kid when he saw me. This time, he and the girl looked at each other. They seemed to be somewhat horrified, while giggling nervously. I took a step forward to get a closer look. That’s when I realized it wasn’t my friend at all. It was just some kid I had never seen before who happened to look a lot like my friend. From his perspective, I was this dorky kid covered in water and shredded beef who kept walking out from the kitchen and coming on to him with Village People bedroom eyes.

I grabbed my tub and rushed back into the kitchen. The embarrassment that I felt was so great that I couldn’t return to my dishes for about 10 full minutes. I just stood over the pile of dirty plates and silverware, breathing heavily like I had just found out I was going to be audited by the IRS. And I didn’t dare to leave the kitchen again that night until the doors were locked and the cranky Mexican lady turned out the dining room lights.

A couple of weeks after that, I quit. Not because of the pseudo-gay misunderstanding, but because I didn’t know how long you were supposed to keep a job. I was tired of smelling like a Mexican dumpster every night, and to me, 2 months seemed like a really long time to keep a job. So I quit. And I have never raised my eyebrows to another human since then.

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Science Can Kiss My Ass

I hate science. I hate everything about it. Always have, always will. One day, I will go to my grave still not knowing what an electron is or how to dissect a frog. And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care now, and I won’t care then… because I’ll be dead, just like the frog.

I’m told that science is very important. And deep down, part of me realizes that this is true. But it’s usually hard for me to see exactly why science is important. It’s similar to when I hear people say things like “Country music is great” or “I love coconut!” Yeah, okay fine, have it your way. I give up. I know I’m outnumbered. I know that everyone else on earth feels that way about country music and coconut, so it must be true. But I can’t help thinking that every country musician sounds like someone is twisting his nose with a pair of pliers while he’s singing, and coconut shavings taste like hair.

Maybe the reason I have such a hard time believing that science is important is because no one has cured a damn disease in forever. The last disease they cured was polio, and that was back in the year 1372 BC. Jonas Salk found the cure, and the last time somebody named their child Jonas was back in Bible times when people talked to whales. That’s how I know it’s been a long time. People don’t name their kids Jonas anymore. (Actually, now that I think about it, that name does sound just fruity enough for someone to start using it again.) All I know is that I want scientists with names like Albert and Carl and Galileo and Madame. But all the people with names like that are now dead. And these days, we have scientists with stupid names like Kaitlyn and Conner and Cheyenne and Brianna. I don’t want someone named Brianna trying to cure my brain cancer. Someone named Brianna should be working at Hooters or Nordstrom. Let’s review: Carl=Scientist, Brianna=Bimbo.

I suppose if I ever accidentally have children, I’ll be expected to give them trendy names that are just as stupid as everyone else’s kids’ names. I’ll have to carry my kids around in some stupid pouch thing like I’m a marsupial. And people will come up to me and say, “What are your kids’ names?”

And I’ll have to look them straight in the eye and say, “Chutney and Dill Pickle.”

“Which one is which?” “Chutney is the one that smells like feces, and Dill Pickle is the one that smells like urine.”

As far as I can tell, the main contribution of science these days is to provide painfully obvious studies that are used by CNN whenever there’s a really slow news day. Every time it seems like things are relatively quiet in the world, you can just bank on the fact that a CNN anchor will come on the air and say something like, “A new study today suggests that Americans are fat.” Well smack my ass and call me Brianna, but I could have looked out my window and told you that!

Science and I have never gotten along well, especially in school. I would have gladly taken 15 additional English courses if it meant I could skip one science class. If the principal had come up to me back then and said, “Paul, we can get you out of science, but first you’ll have to drink this giant vat filled with a bag lady’s cellulite bile and coconut shavings,” I would have said, “Where’s the straw?”

Believe it or not, in most other subjects, I wasn’t too bad of a student. But in science… My God, in science I was often used as an example for the other children. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for the science teacher to stop class and make everyone gather around behind me in the lab: “Okay everyone, over here for a minute. C’mon, quickly now. Okay, I want everyone to look at Paul’s chemicals and Bunsen burner? This is a perfect example of what not to do. Now, who can tell me at least five things that Paul has done to make himself look like he’s mentally retarded?”

On the first day of my eighth grade science class, the teacher told us that we were each expected to turn in an insect collection at the end of the semester. That’s right. In my spare time, the teacher wanted me to actually turn off the television, go outside, and look for bugs. Not only that, but I had to catch and kill the bugs without squishing them. Not only that, but I had to find a bunch of different bugs that were fascinating to people born with the science gene; they couldn’t all be the same kind of bug. Not only that, but I had to identify each and every bug that I tracked, captured, and murdered. And I couldn’t make any of it up. This was going to be an issue.

To this day, none of this makes any sense to me. Why did I have to catch bugs? I still don’t get it. How has this helped me at all throughout my life? It hasn’t. And that’s another good reason why I don’t have kids. Because one day, little Chutney and Dill Pickle would come home and complain about having to do their insect collection. They’d say, “Why do we have to collect bugs? How is this going to matter at all in life?”

If I were a responsible parent, I’d say, “C’mon now. It’s not so bad. And besides, you need science. You need to collect bugs. Believe me, you won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a decent job without knowing how to catch bugs.”

But I know I wouldn’t be a responsible parent and say that. I’d probably say something like, “I know, it’s stupid. School is stupid. Look, here’s $20. Just pay the gay kid to collect your bugs for you.”

“What gay kid?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you have a kid in your class who is really neat and tidy?”

“Yeah. Conner.”

“There ya go. Conner’s gay. Pay him to catch your bugs.”

If I had to go back to the eighth grade and take science again, that’s what I’d do—pay the gay kid. We had a gay kid in our class. Of course, none of us knew at the time that he was gay. We all just thought that he was nice and well-coordinated. But he was gay, and let me tell you, he had the most dazzling bug collection you’ll ever see. The kid had a million different bugs—many that looked like they came from Africa—and they were all neatly pinned behind a glass panel and scientifically identified with tiny signs perfectly written in calligraphy.

Of course, the gay kid started working on his bug project from day one, and over time he meticulously created a collection worthy of the Smithsonian Institute. I, on the other hand, forgot all about the bug collection until the night before it was due. So I went over to Mikey Woodall’s house, because I knew that he would have forgotten about the project too.

Mikey Woodall and I turned on his porch light, stood on a chair with empty peanut butter jars, and trapped as many moths as we could. Then we filled our jars with gasoline to kill the moths. We wrote “Moths” on our jars (in order to identify the insects, as required) and took the bugs to school the next day. On the way to school, I walked with my head down so that I could spot more bugs. By the time we arrived at school, I had added a grasshopper and a few ants to my jar of moth gasoline.

I did not win the grand champion ribbon, and neither did Mikey Woodall. Did I mention that I hate science?

The next semester sucked too. On the first day, the teacher told us that there would be a science fair at the end of the semester. We were expected to be creative and enter an innovative science project that would be graded by a panel of judges. It would count for 50% of our grade. This was going to be an issue.

First of all, God only knows why they call this thing a “fair.” There are no rides, no carnies, no corn dogs, no tractor pulls, and no rodeo princesses. It’s just a bunch of little loser kids in a gymnasium with cardboard science projects that are complete crap. If you ask me, they’ve got some nerve making you think that you’re going to get corn dogs at the end of the semester.

Each day that semester, I walked home from school and watched The Brady Bunch, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C., Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres, The Munsters, My Three Sons, The Beverly Hillbillies, Happy Days, Three’s Company, Leave it to Beaver, Gilligan’s Island, M*A*S*H, The Carol Burnett Show, The Muppet Show, and whatever else was on television that particular night. The day before the science fair, I started working on my project, so I had to skip one or two of my shows that night.

So, how does one decide on a science project? Well, if you’re in a normal family, you probably have your mom or dad help you. But if you’re in my family, you go to the bookshelf and grab the World Book Childcraft Encyclopedia thing that was written in 1942. Then you flip through the pages until you find a project that requires the least amount of time, effort, and intelligence. So after 5 minutes of scanning the pages, I settled on my science fair project—A Glass Tube Thing.

To tell you the truth, I don’t even know what this thing was supposed to be. A telescope maybe? A prism? I have no idea. And I didn’t even care. I just know that it could be made with two empty cardboard toilet paper spools, some glass, and tape. Some projects that I found in the Childcraft book required dozens of items and had a lot of steps. My project had only a few items and steps. That’s why I picked it. I didn’t even really care if it worked. Hell, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if it worked anyway. I just wanted it to be over.

The toilet paper spools and tape were easy. I just had to unwind and throw away a bunch of toilet paper, which took only a few minutes. The glass was a bit more difficult. I needed three pieces of glass, and they were all supposed to fit snugly inside the toilet paper spools. To be honest, I don’t know how I ended up with the glass. Most likely, I broke a pair of binoculars and used the glass from it. The important thing is that I had my three pieces of glass, and not one of them fit snugly inside the toilet paper spools. So I crammed cotton balls into the gaps and used some of the tape to hold it in place… sort of. By the time I was finished, I had the most pathetic, crappy, stupid looking science project in the entire school. But at least it was ugly too.

Apparently, the judges couldn’t figure out what my science project was either. Needless to say, I didn’t win the grand champion ribbon. I think I may have gotten one of those brown “Participant” ribbons. (By the way, this is also how I envision heaven and hell. I think that when you die, you get into a long line. At the end of the line, you’re either given a purple grand champion ribbon, a blue first place ribbon, a red second place ribbon, or a brown “Participant” ribbon. Those who are given a grand champion, first place, or second place ribbon are sent to heaven. And the people who are given a brown “Participant” ribbon are sent to hell. Guess which ribbon I’ll get.)

As if that wasn’t bad enough for my scholastic science career, there was a little matter of dissecting frogs. Usually it was just the girls who had a problem with the frog autopsy, not the boys. Boys were supposed to like cutting into dead animals to see what was inside them. Not me. I wanted no part of that dead frog. And yet there it was, lying on the table in front of me, waiting to be sliced open. This was going to be an issue.

Twenty-twenty hindsight has taught me one important lesson about dissecting frogs: You should do whatever it takes to team up with a lab partner who is very likely to grow up to become a serial killer. They’re good at this stuff. And the way you spot a serial killer is you look for a kid who is quiet and has a good serial killer name, preferably one with a murderous middle name—like John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Theodore Bundy, Jeffrey Ladle Dahmer, Jack The Ripper, The Hillside Strangler, and so on. You have to close your eyes and imagine Tom Brokaw talking about the kid murdering a van full of nuns: “Today, John Franklin Tate was sentenced to 5 years probation for hacking up a van full of nuns.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have anybody named John Franklin Tate in my class. I always thought that Donald Stoltz had a good serial killer name, but I didn’t know what his middle name was. It could have been Donald Hector Stoltz (good serial killer name) or Donald Marie Stoltz (bad serial killer name). It didn’t matter anyway, because he wasn’t in biology with me. And besides, I didn’t know about the advantages of dissecting a frog with a serial killer at the time.

I found myself at the lab table with another kid who looked like he was dreading this experience almost as much as I was. Our teacher, Mrs. Hennigh, lifted the lid off a big tub and this hideous odor filled the room. Then she began walking from table to table, lifting dead frogs out of the tub with tongs and placing one in front of each pair of students. It was as if she were a waitress, walking around a restaurant offering second helpings to diners: “More dead frog? How about for you, sir? More dead frog?”

I estimated that Mrs. Hennigh weighed about 58 pounds. She was so small and wispy that I thought, I’ll bet I could just flick her in the head with my fingers, and she’d get a concussion. Then they’d have to take her to the emergency room and I won’t have to deal with this dead frog. But before I could act on that impulse, she was standing beside us, slopping our dead frog onto our table.

She gave the entire class instructions. Then she left us to conduct our autopsies by ourselves, while she walked about the room and watched us. My partner and I looked at each other with despair.

He asked, “You wanna cut into it first?” I said,

“I’m not cutting it. You cut it.”

“Hurry up! She’s almost to our table! Pick up the blade and cut it!”

“I’ll take notes. You cut the frog.”

“No way,” he said. “We both have to do it. C’mon, cut it!”

“Look at me.” I said it just like Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, years before the movie even came out. “No, I mean it. Look at me. I’m not touching that thing. You can do what you want, but I’m not cutting it. I’m willing to take be flunked over this. Are you?”

Just before Mrs. Hennigh reached our table, he grabbed the blade and made a vertical incision from the frog’s head to its legs. Mrs. Hennigh walked past us, and my lab partner continued cutting open the frog guts. After a minute or two, he said, “God, that smell! That formaldehyde! It’s awful!”

“I know,” I said, putting my hand over my nose. “I wish someone would fart in here so that it would smell better.”

My partner and I didn’t know what we were doing. We were trying our best to draw a picture of the frog’s guts and label each part, but it all just looked like a little messy glob of goo to us. The lungs looked just like the heart, and the heart looked just like the stomach, and the stomach looked just like the ovaries, and the ovaries looked just like the soul, and the soul looked just like the spleen.

Toward the end of the class, Mrs. Hennigh stopped by our table and said, “So, how are you boys doing?”

“Okay,” said my lab partner.

“Uh huh? Well… tell me what you learned,” she said.

My partner and I gave each other confused looks. Then we turned our eyes back to Mrs. Hennigh.

“Well, what did you learn?” she repeated.

Finally, I cleared my throat and said, “It died of strangulation.”

She gave us a C (which does not stand for “grand champion”).

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Making the Baby Jesus Cry

When the movie Rocky was released, I was not allowed to go see it. But I did see some clips from the film on television, and it didn’t take long before I was obsessed with the idea of hitting someone in the head.

I imagined taking my fist and burying it as hard as I could into somebody’s cheek, hard enough to knock them down and into a state of unconsciousness. It just seemed like such a great concept at the time. Of course, I realized that it was also something that would probably make the baby Jesus cry.

Making the baby Jesus cry is something that I’ve always been good at. When I was just a little boy, someone once said to me, “Don’t do that, Paul. It makes the baby Jesus cry.” I don’t remember who said it. Most likely, it was a large nun at my school. All I know is that the fear of making the baby Jesus cry has always stayed with me. It also created a very bizarre visual in my head every time I did something wrong.

I was only about 7 years old when I was first warned about making the baby Jesus cry, so my only frame of reference for an image of heaven was a combination of drawings I had seen and our living room at home. So I imagined the baby Jesus up there in heaven, surrounded by clouds and sitting on thick, yellow shag carpet with that show Shazam! playing on the television in the background. The baby Jesus would be holding a rattle filled with Holy water and bawling His little head off because I had left the door to the fridge open that morning.

And then I would remember all of the other bad things I was constantly doing and I would think, Wow, the baby Jesus must be crying nonstop up there. I’ll bet He has one constant, monster headache—all because of me.

Hitting someone in the head with my fist was definitely on the list of things that would make the baby Jesus cry. No doubt about that. But I knew this was something that I had to try.

So I went to look for Ted.

I found him in his room and said, “Hey, let’s box!”

“What?”

“C’mon. It’ll be fun. Like on Rocky. Boxing is fun. You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to.”

“C’mon, you do too. It’s fun.”

“We don’t have any boxing gloves,” he said.

“I already thought of that.”

I ran out of the room and seconds later I was back with an armful of socks. “Here, put these over your hands. They’re just like boxing gloves.”

So we each put six pairs of socks on each hand and went downstairs to the living room to re-enact Rocky.

I imagine boxing is probably better if you’re angry with the other person. But I wasn’t angry with Ted, not at that particular moment anyway. He hadn’t done anything to make me irritated. Ted was a very nice boy. Ted was probably the nicest boy you would ever meet in your life. But I was in the mood to hit someone in the head to see what it was like, and Ted happened to be the only person in the house younger than me.

So we stood there facing each other in our living room with several pairs of white socks on our hands. Ted was pretty reluctant, but I convinced him that it was all for a good cause. Then I said, “Okay, you ready? Round 1. Ding! Ding! Ding!”

Although I was two years older than Ted, he was my size, maybe even a little bigger. On paper, it seemed like a pretty even match. But I knew that I had a psychological advantage. I was his older brother. I had intimidation on my side. There was no way I was going to lose that fight, and we both knew it.

I started dancing and circling around the room, jabbing at the air like I had seen Muhammad Ali do on television. Ted looked like… Oh, I don’t know what Ted looked like. Ernest Borgnine maybe? If Ernest Borgnine were 8 years old, this is exactly what I imagine he would look like if he were boxing an older brother while wearing white socks on his hands. Ted’s heart was just not into this at all.

“C’mon! Try a little bit!” I yelled.

“I am.”

“No, you’re not!” Then I started hitting him in the head. It felt absolutely great!

I hit him in the head probably 10 or 12 straight times before he finally retaliated. And when he decided he had had enough, he smacked me with every ounce of his 8-year-old force dead on my nose.

That is not a pleasant feeling—getting hit on the nose—even if the punch is cushioned with six pairs of socks. To me, getting hit on the nose, or running into a door with your nose, or falling down and creaming your nose on the pavement, is about as bad as smacking your crazy bone (or is it funny bone?) on a table. It just plain sucks.

Fortunately for me, my little brother Ted has always had a very kind heart. He paused long enough for me to back away and recover… I regained my composure. I rubbed my nose, and I straightened up.

And then I proceeded to absolutely clobber and annihilate Ted to end Round 1 and pretty much the entire fight.

We both bent over, sucking air. Ted took the socks off his hands and said, “I have a headache.” Then he went upstairs.

Today, my little brother Ted is a Catholic priest. He is Father Ted…

There is absolutely no way I am not going to hell for this.

And the baby Jesus cried.

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Bilbo the Lactater

“Well, I’ve never actually been on a tractor before, but I’ve seen them many times on television.” Those are the words that I uttered in my phone interview with Bilbo the Lactater many, many years ago in a time I like to call “the 1980s.” His name was actually Richard, and he was a farmer, but Richard the Farmer doesn't sound as elegant as Bilbo the Lactater.

I actually told him that my only experience with tractors was seeing them on television. And that’s why I have never been good at job interviews, because I always say exactly what is on my mind at the moment. I once interviewed for a job at a video rental store, and when the manager asked me why I was looking for a job, I honestly replied, “Boredom.”

My little brother Ted, who for some reason had big-time farming contacts in Northwest Kansas, had put me in touch with Bilbo the Lactater. Bilbo the Lactater needed someone to help him plow his fields and work the wheat harvest. I wanted the job, first of all, because I needed money to buy Skittles. Second, I wanted the job because the work sounded very easy and boring. Third, I wanted the job because it paid five dollars an hour, which would probably put me into the top ten list of the richest people in Colby, Kansas.

I then told Bilbo the Lactater all about my extensive work experience of mowing lawns and babysitting children.

Bilbo listened, grunted, and then finally said, “Well, there’s not much to it. You just drive the tractor around in a big square, plowing up the field. The cab is air conditioned and has a radio, so it’s pretty comfortable. Not like the old tractors we used to have.”

Air conditioning and a radio. That sounded good.

“Well, I’m sure I can do it,” I said.

That was a lie. I had no idea if I could do it. But I figured that plowing a field couldn’t be too much different than mowing a lawn. And as far as I knew, there were no sprinkler heads for me to chop off out in a field.

There was a pause on the other end of the phone.

“Well, okay then,” he finally said. “You got the job. Be here tomorrow at 6 a.m.” 

And just like that, I had been hired to operate a $150,000 piece of machinery with little or no supervision.

On my first morning of work, Bilbo the Lactater drove me down some dirt roads for a few miles until we came to a field covered in weeds. Nearby, there was a gigantic green tractor, with a big plow thingy hooked to the back of it. We climbed up into the cab of the tractor, and he explained to me how to start and operate it.

“It’s pretty much like driving a car,” he said. “Just call me on the CB when you get close to finishing, and I’ll come get you and lead you to another field. Do you know how to work a CB?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “I saw Smokey and the Bandit four times.”

He nodded and crawled out of the cab. I waited for him to get into his pickup and leave. But he didn’t leave. He just sat behind the steering wheel waiting for me to start plowing.

I wanted him to leave so badly. I never wanted anything so much in my life. I just didn’t want him to see me start driving the tractor, because I had no idea what would happen. But he didn’t budge.

So finally I started the tractor, put it into gear, and started moving. The tractor jolted forward for a few yards and abruptly stopped, jostling me into the steering wheel. All I was missing was a “Caution: Student Driver” sign on the back of the tractor.

I started the tractor once more. It jolted again, but this time I managed to keep it going. I turned the wheel and headed in the direction of the field that I was supposed to plow.

Suddenly, I heard screaming coming from the CB.

“What are you doing?! You’re driving on the milo! Don’t drive on the milo! Get off the milo!”

Bilbo the Lactater just kept yelling this over and over through the CB. And as he became more and more upset, the pitch in his voice rose higher and higher, until he sounded to me exactly like Dino on “The Flintstones.” That’s how I could always tell when I was in big trouble—when I could no longer understand words like “milo” and “stop” and “tractor” and it all sounded like Dino yelping, “Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba!” I soon learned that whenever Bilbo the Lactater went, “Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba!” the best thing I could do was to freeze all my muscles immediately and wait for the sound to go away.

So as I drove the tractor and listened to Bilbo the Lactater screaming at me through the CB, I came to the conclusion that driving over milo was a bad thing. Having lived in Kansas my entire life, I had heard the word “milo” often and knew it was some sort of crop, but I never cared to learn more than that. I didn’t know what milo looked like. As far as I could tell, I was driving over weeds. But according to Bilbo the Lactater, this pathetic-looking stuff that I was crushing was milo, and apparently I had plowed up $20 worth of it within my first few minutes on the job.

I looked at Bilbo the Lactater’s purple face and sharply turned the wheel in the direction he was pointing. After a few seconds, I was apparently plowing where he wanted me to plow, because the “Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba!” started to subside.

I finished my first trip around the field, and I saw Bilbo the Lactater driving away in his pickup. So I decided that it was time to start screwing around with the radio.

I had my choice between about 5 country stations, a top 40 station, and the radio station at Colby Community College. I had actually worked at the college radio station once for a few short weeks. Over the Christmas break, they let local high school students work as the disc jockeys while the college students went home. It sounded fun at first, but I soon determined that being a disc jockey was not the career for me. During one memorable shift, the needle on one of the two turntables broke and I didn’t know how to fix it. So every other song I played was just a bunch of scratching noise. This went on for a couple of hours until someone finally drove to the radio station, walked in, and fixed the needle for me.

Although the college station was supposed to play the “cool” music, I didn’t really want to listen to the community college DJs because they all sounded like they were speech therapy patients. So most of the time, I chose the top 40 station, which played the same 7 songs over and over. And for 8 or 9 hours every day, I plowed crooked lines in remote fields and listened to…

     Sister Christian, oh the time has come

     And you know that you're the only one to say, OK

     Where you goin', what you looking for

     You know those boys don't want to play no more with you

     It's true

     (Drums)

     You're motoring…

And people wonder why suicide is the third leading cause of death for those between the ages of 15 and 24.

Every day that summer, it seems that I did something very wrong on that farm. One day, I was plowing a field and suddenly the tractor wouldn’t go forward anymore. It was stuck in a mud hole. So I put the tractor in reverse a few feet, then I went forward again. I did this for several minutes until the rear portion of the tractor was completely buried in a giant mud pit. Then I picked up the CB.

“Um… Bilbo? I mean, Richard?”

“Yeah.”

“The tractor won’t go.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, it’s kind of stuck… in the mud.”

“I’ll be there in 20 minutes.”

The only thing I could do was sit there in the mud and listen to…

     My name is Luka

     I live on the second floor

     I live upstairs from you

     Yes I think you've seen me before

     If you hear something late at night

     Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight

     Just don't ask me what it was…

I almost nodded off right in the middle of “All I Need” by mega pop/rock superstar Jack Wagner when a loud piercing noise came from the CB.

“Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba!”

Apparently, burying a $150,000 tractor in the mud is not appropriate behavior in the work environment.

Neither is getting a barbed wire fence stuck in the plow thingy and completely wrecking 300 feet of fence. That’s exactly what happened about a week later. I was just driving along in a field, minding my own business, getting a massive headache while listening to…

     Caribbean Queen

     Now we're sharing the same dream

     And our hearts they beat as one

     No more love on the run…

When the tractor started to slow down really fast. I looked back over my shoulder and saw a huge tangled mess of wood and wire stuck in the plow thingy. I picked up the CB.

“Um… Richard?”

“Yeah.”

“The tractor won’t go.”

“What’s wrong?”

Very long pause.

“What’s wrong?” he asked again.

“There’s something stuck in it.”

“What?”

Very, very long pause.

“A fence.”

“Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba!”

That was the longest summer of my life. And the two weeks of wheat harvest was the absolute worst period of all. It was like a concentration camp, without the matching uniforms. Every day I had to be on the farm at 5 a.m. Bilbo the Lactater yelled at me nonstop until 9 p.m. Then I would drive home and collapse on the bed in my filthy clothes until the alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. so that I could do it all over again.

The only good thing about harvest was that Bilbo the Lactater had to hire an additional person to drive the truck carrying the harvested wheat to the grain elevator. He hired Lonnie Melvin, a nice kid a year behind me in school who I liked a lot. Lonnie was a very good golfer, but I didn’t know a lot about him beyond that. It turns out that the idea of Lonnie driving a big wheat truck made about as much sense as me driving a $150,000 tractor. But I was really glad Lonnie was there, because his presence meant that Bilbo the Lactater had someone else to yell at besides just me.

One day, Lonnie’s shaky voice came over the CB.

“Um… Richard?”

“Yeah.”

“Something happened.”

“What’s wrong?”

Pause.

“The truck is on its side in the middle of the road, and the grain is in a ditch.”

Very long pause.

“Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba!”

There is absolutely nothing you can do at that point, except turn the volume on your radio way, way up…

     Sister Christian, oh the time has come

     And you know that you're the only one to say, OK

     Where you goin', what you looking for

     You know those boys don't want to play no more with you

     It's true

     (Drums)

     You're motoring…

************************************

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Babysitter Extraordinaire

One day when I was 14, my oldest brother Mike phoned me from his house somewhere in the United States and said, “Hey Paul. Do you want a job?”

My first instinct was to say, “God no. Why would anyone want a job?”

Even by that age, I had already experienced more than my share of jobs, and I hated them all—partly because I was incompetent, and partly because I have the work ethic of a deceased hippy. For me, the perfect job was, and always has been, one where I don’t have to do anything. But I hadn’t come across a job like that yet…

Starting when I was 11, my dad made me mow Lucille Curtin’s yard every Saturday for years. Each week, I spent 3 hours of my life mowing her lawn in 105-degree weather. Each week, she gave me 7 dollars. And each week, I accidentally chopped off about 15 dollars worth of sprinkler heads, which my dad had to replace.

My dad also made me go with him each night to clean his company’s offices. During the day, he was their bookkeeper, and at night he was the janitor. He took on the additional job because we were Catholic and needed the extra money so that we could continue to contribute to the earth’s overpopulation problem. I really hated that job. I used to go through the employees’ desk drawers and throw away their cigarettes, just to break up the monotony.

Another older brother, Dave, once got me a job working with him and my little brother Ted at some crazy guy’s ranch. I mean this guy was really creepy. For some reason, he always seemed to be driving a different car each week. And now that I look back, he seemed exactly like the type of whacko that you would see on CNN—the kind of guy who would be arrested for luring young boys to his ranch so that he could watch them rub mayonnaise all over their naked bodies. But we never made it to his mayonnaise room; instead, he made us go out into the fields and pick his crops by hand. Then we would go back to his rickety-ass trailer, and he would feed us carrots and disgusting meat (probably the hindquarters from other young boys that he killed with a hoe). I don’t remember how much I got paid, but it definitely wasn’t enough.

So when Mike asked me if I wanted a job, I wasn’t too excited. I liked the idea of money, but I simply didn’t want to have to do anything.

Mike told me that the job was babysitting. Apparently, his best friend needed a babysitter for his two little kids, and Mike told him that he would ask me if I was interested, because he knew that I never did anything on Friday and Saturday nights. I was reluctant.

“You really don’t have to do anything,” Mike told me. “The kids are so young, they’ll be in bed by the time you get there. All you have to do is sit there and watch television.”

Television? I’m in!

So every few weeks, these people would call and ask me if I was available on a particular Friday or Saturday night. They would pick me up and take me to their house. For 5 or 6 hours, I would sit on their sofa, watching television and playing Donkey Kong. I also found their stash of licorice and ate most of it each time I babysat. I would always leave one or two pieces in the bag, thinking they wouldn’t notice.

This went on for months and months. Never once did I see a kid. I assumed that they were in the house, judging from all the pictures on the walls, but I never actually saw them in the flesh, until one night…

About 1:30 a.m., a door to a bedroom opened and out walked this little blonde boy (somewhere between the age of 2 and 9 years). He stopped suddenly as he caught sight of me sitting on the couch, flipping through the channels, trying to find naked people on HBO. We both stared silently at one another for a good 10 seconds, like we had both just encountered Bigfoot and were too shocked to speak.

Then, just when I was about to say something to him, he opened his mouth and started projectile vomiting. The little kid just yacked all over his pajamas and the carpet.

“Oh crap!” I said as I jumped off the couch.

This really startled him because he then darted backwards a few steps, with tears starting to form in his eyes.

“It’s okay! It’s okay! It’s okay!”

I just kept saying that.

“It’s okay! It’s okay!”

Quickly, I guided him into the bathroom, careful to keep a full arm’s length away from him as he barfed his weight in Count Chocula cereal.

Not having the first clue what to do next, I instinctively rubbed his back a couple of times like my mom used to do when I would barf up my Count Chocula cereal. By this time, he was in full crying mode. Puking and crying, puking and crying.

The crying didn’t bother me as much as the idea of cleaning up the vomit. I absolutely wanted nothing to do with that.

So as the kid continued his cycle of puking and crying, I started to run my options through my head:

• Option 1, I could flee the scene.
• Option 2, I could hand the kid a towel, tell him to get back in his bed, and then flee the scene.
• Option 3, I could go back to watch television and when the parents got home, I could pretend that I had been asleep the whole time and was astonished to see that barf was covering the west side of the house.
• Option 4, I could do the responsible thing and clean up the mess. Then I could ask for a huge raise when they came home… No, on second thought, that wasn’t going to happen.
• Option 5, I could hide behind the refrigerator, waiting for them to come home, and then I could murder the entire family.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to choose because just then, the front door opened and the kid’s mother walked in.

“What happened?” she asked as she walked toward barfing boy and me.

“Oh, he got sick or something,” I said as the kid pressed his puke-covered pajamas against her leg.

She started to comfort the pathetic little thing, telling him it would all be okay, gently stroking his hair.

I really didn’t know what to say, so I just blurted out the first thing that came into my mind. “So, did you have a good time?”

She didn’t say much as she took 5 dollars out of her purse and handed it to me. Then I went out to the car, and my brother’s friend drove me home.

I never babysat for them again.

But for some reason, from that time onward, I had it in my head that any job working with children was easy money. So I didn’t hesitate 6 or 7 years later when my brother Dave and his wife asked me to babysit their little boy Andrew (who was somewhere between the age of 2 and 9 years).

I didn’t expect to make any money, but I did expect it to be easy. Unfortunately, there was one big drawback to babysitting Andrew. Unlike the barfing boy, Andrew was awake the whole time that I babysat him.

Andrew really was a well-behaved little boy, and for the most part, babysitting him was very easy. However, he was at the potty training stage. I am not familiar with the details of the potty training stage. I’m sure that I went through it myself once, but thank God I can’t remember anything about it. All I know is that, in the potty training stage, the toilet has a special seat attachment so that the kid can do his thing without needing a pulley system.

I was a junior in college at the time, with too much homework for my own good. So I was in a complete state of concentration, trying to write a paper on some nonsense subject, when I heard something to my right. I ignored it at first, but then I heard it again.

I turned and saw Andrew, who was standing at the edge of the couch, holding his crotch, and squirming up and down and back and forth. And he kept saying, “I gotta go. I gotta go. I gotta go.”

“Okay,” I said, turning back to my paper. “Hold on just a minute. Let me finish this paragraph.”

How was I to know that you should never try to finish a paragraph when you’ve got a little kid holding his crotch? They don’t teach that in college.

“I gotta go. I gotta go.”

“I know, Andrew. Hold on, okay.”

“I gotta goooooooo.”

“Okay already. Hold on, will ya.”

But then I heard it, saw it, and smelled it. Andrew not only had to pee. Andrew had the runs. Andrew had the runs bad.

I threw my books aside and managed to grab Andrew just before “it” started running from his legs onto the off-white carpet. I ran through the house and down the hallway, holding him as far away from me as possible. I can only imagine what we looked like.

I like to think that it resembled some kind of warped version of Battle of the Network Stars… My job was to sprint with this diarrhea child and hand him off to Parker Stevenson, who would run through some tires on the ground and then toss Andrew over a ledge and into the arms of Adrienne Barbeau, who would run across a patch of grass and put him onto a slide, and then Andrew and his diarrhea would slide all the way down until Grant Goodeve would grab him and jump in a swimming pool, where he would carry Andrew on his head through the water, and then he would hand him off to Lyle Waggoner, who would jump over a pit of jello and sprint to the finish line, where they would be interviewed by Howard Cosell in his yellow jacket.

Just as we reached the bathroom, “it” started to hit the floor. I quickly, but carefully, helped Andrew out of his clothes.

Then I saw the potty training seat attachment lying on the floor next to the toilet. I frantically grabbed it and tried to place it on the toilet, telling Andrew the entire time, “Just hold it! You gotta try to hold it!”

Andrew stood there with this horrified look on his face, as if he were watching me perform some kind of wartime Nazi atrocities with his potty training seat.

And he couldn’t hold it. I know he tried, but he just couldn’t. It was like watching a human geyser.

I grabbed him under the arms and lifted him up to the toilet, but his foot hit the seat. So now I’m holding this kid in the air over his crooked potty training seat, which is barely balancing on top of the toilet. And all I could do was try to move him around so that “it” would somehow go through the crooked potty training seat and into the toilet. Throwing the bean bag through the clown’s mouth at the county fair was definitely much easier than this.

By the time it was all over, the vast majority of “it” was on the floor, walls, and kid.

I don’t remember much after that. I know that I cleaned it all up because everything was back to normal when my brother and his wife came home. I just can’t recall any details of the cleanup. I must have experienced some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, like soldiers sometimes get after a firefight or dropping an atomic bomb on a Japanese city.

I never babysat for them again either.

And now you might understand why people who know me never ask me when I’m planning to have children of my own. It’s not that I hate children (which I do); it’s just that I don’t have a good enough work ethic, and I certainly don’t have enough corks.

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My First Business Failure

Today as I was eating Skittles and drinking Dr. Pepper, I was pondering the many, many ways in which I am very much like Abraham Lincoln…

• Abraham Lincoln was born in the Midwest; I was born in the Midwest.
• Abraham Lincoln had to live without electricity; I had a dad who was always turning off lights.
• Abraham Lincoln fought the Indians; I fought the Indians.

Then there's the biggest similarity of all. Abraham Lincoln failed in business and politics about 826 times before he finally succeeded. Similarly, one time I ran for class president and was beaten by Robert Disberger, so I know exactly how Abraham Lincoln felt. Plus, there are all my business ventures that just dried up like dog turds on a hot sidewalk in August.

My first attempt at starting my own business was a criminal investigation services company that I launched. My business partner's name was Mark Jarmer. I really thought we had a good chance at success because we were two of the brightest kids in the 4th grade at Sacred Heart School.

The business started out smoothly enough. We spent some time gathering our resources—things you simply must have in order to operate a criminal investigation services company. Naturally, the first thing we did was go over to my house to get my mom's metal bread box. Then we went over to Mark Jarmer's house and gathered all the pencils and paper we could find. Phase 1 was completed. We were ready for Phase 2.

We hopped on our bikes and rode 6 blocks to the post office. We took our pencils and paper, went inside, sat on the cold post office floor, and copied with amazing precision all of the pictures of the criminals on the wall. Then we rode back to Mark Jarmer's house and placed all of the pencil drawings of the criminals in our company's filing cabinet (i.e., my mom's metal bread box). End of Phase 2.

Now came the tough part. The part with all the blood, sweat, and tears, but the part with the “payoff.” Phase 3.

We took the pencil drawings back out of the filing cabinet (we figured leaving them in the filing cabinet for a half hour was long enough). Then we got back on our bikes and rode 5 blocks to Fike Park. And then…

We looked for criminals.

We looked for hours, day after day. One time, we thought we had identified a man who was wanted by Federal authorities for tax fraud. But it was just a guy who worked at the grain elevator next to the park.

Eventually, our company took a downward turn. We never made a cent. I don't know what went wrong.

It was just the most depressing feeling. And the only person who knew how I felt was Abraham Lincoln.

************************************

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