THE JEFF GRIMSHAW COLUMN ARCHIVE

WINTER CAMP

"Have you ever heard some guy say "Go camping in the winter! Are you out of your ever lovin' mind?" Well, maybe, but only if you don't know how to camp in the summer and aren't prepared for the differences between warm- and cold-weather camping... Summer weather is kind and forgives poorly prepared and trained campers, but winter is cruel and unforgiving. You can get by with improper gear and inexperience when the mercury is above 40 degrees, but it can be pretty miserable when it's below freezing... Sounds like winter camping isn't so hot, doesn't it? Well, it isn't as far as the temperature is concerned, but it's real hot in the fun, adventure, and satisfaction that comes from knowing you can take care of yourself outdoors under extreme conditions..." -- From the Boy Scouts of America Fieldbook, 1967.

Virtually all of the camping and hiking we did in Troop 11 took place in the fall and the spring. Our winter activities were limited to weekly meetings at the Methodist Church, and the Klondyke Derby, a council-wide cross-country sleigh race that took place on a Saturday morning in February. The adult lack of enthusiasm for outdoor winter fun was due to the fact that, as the excerpt from the Fieldbook above indicates, in the winter it gets cold, and adults don't like being cold. Kids stay can warm outdoors in the winter by having snowball fights and running around like idiots, but adults are pretty much stuck with standing around in surly, miserable groups, taking surreptitious naps from the flask, and wishing they were inside.

But we badgered our Scout Master relentlessly, and finally a winter camp-out was scheduled. It was going to take place in two stages: in stage one, we would hike into the woods and actually pitch tents in the snow (yeah!); in stage two, we would break camp and hike onwards to Mr. deYoung's cabin, and spend a more comfortable night inside, but still in the woods.

During stage one, it was about 10 degrees out and the snow was nearly two feet deep. We quickly discovered that if you dropped anything smaller than a Volkswagen into the snow, was gone forever. Setting up the tents was like one of those dreams, where no matter how fast you run, the finish line keeps getting farther and farther away. We had to dig down to the bare ground in order to drive the tent stakes, and the bare ground was so hard the stakes bent. We had cans of food, but the snow had eaten our can opener long ago. We dined on potato chips and marshmallows, which were indistinguishable in taste until they thawed in your mouth for at least 30 seconds. "Winter is the perfect time to start a bird's nest collection, boys," said Mr. deYoung, who brandished an example of same retrieved from the crotch of a nearby tree. We blinked at him. Night fell. There was some sort of attempt to get a campfire started. My most vivid memory of the ensuing 10 or so hours: needing desperately to get up and go to the bathroom, and not doing so because it would have entailed getting out of my sleeping bag, which was almost warm.

Come morning, to our horror, Mr. deYoung had planned "activities." There was some sort of snipe hunt, and then a spectacular game of 'capture the flag.' If memory serves me, neither team won. After lunch-- somehow Mr. deYoung breached the cans, and kindled a fire-- we struck camp and made for the cabin. With hot food in our stomachs, our spirits were absurdly high and we sang ("Theme from Fireball XL-5") as we trudged through the woods. Eventually we stumbled across a road-- which had actually been plowed! -- and followed this directly to the cabin. As the building came into view, a car cruised alongside us.

"Hey, Freddy," called the driver. "Right on time!"

"It's post time!" responded Mr. deYoung. The car stopped at the cabin, and Mr. deYoung went to speak to the occupants. He tossed one of the kids a key to the cabin. "You boys go on in," he said. "Be right there."

We crossed the threshold and dropped our packs and collapsed on the wooden floor. We didn't realize how tired we were until we stopped moving. Moments later, Mr. deYoung stuck his head in the door. "Boys, I'm going into town to pick up some supplies. I'm gonna get some decent grub for us. Can I depend on you to warm this place up?"

"You bet!"

"Atta boys. I'll be back in two shakes."

A good-sized fireplace dominated the room, but the cast iron log carrier contained only a few hunks of kindling, and a small hatchet. We could hear the wind screeching across the top of the chimney. Now that we'd been inside for a while, it was clear the temperature wasn't much warmer than the outside. "There's probally a wood pile out back," said someone. We forced a couple of 11-year-olds to check. They couldn't find it. A couple of older kids went out, also failed. It was growing dark.

At some point we realized this was a TEST. Mr. deYoung was gone for a very long time-- later we learned he had attempted to draw an inside straight, dropped a substantial piece of change, and was trying to get even. It was getting colder and colder. "Hey-- I got it!" said someone. "It's lookin' us right inna face-- look at all this crappy wooded furniture!" It made perfect sense-- fireplace, no woodpile, small hatchet, crappy wooden furniture.

In short order, we had reduced the crappy wooden furniture to fire wood, stacked it in the fireplace in a classic criss-cross pattern, and then...

And then nothing, because Mr. deYoung had all the matches.

We huddled together in the dark, told stories about cattle mutilations and cannibals, and waited for Mr. deYoung to return.

When he walked in the door with two bags of groceries, he said, "It's freezing in here!" and turned on the thermostat. Then he clicked on the light.

I give him a lot of credit for not dropping the groceries.

MUSIC FOR BLADDERS

I don't know how many songs there are about hearts, but I know there are too many. Songs about breaking hearts, cold cold hearts, stolen hearts, I gave you my heart, etc. Not to mention songs that just MENTION hearts. My heart skipped a beat. My heart stood still. And if they were actually about HEARTS, you know, those wacky and wonderful muscles that pump the blood through our bodies, that would be one thing. If Tony Bennett really left his HEART in San Francisco, and now he had to get it back fast or he'd drop dead, that would be a song to remember. I'd buy that song. That would be a song to make you THINK. "Geez, how's he singing if his heart is some place else? Is he hooked up to a mechanical pump of some sort?" But no-- I forget what the hell he actually did leave in San Francisco, if anything, but it definitely wasn't a heart. I left an Evergreen/Black Cat paperback called "Brick Red-- Her Lusty Adventures" there in 1969. I had about 3 chapters to go and I never found out how it ends. It's been driving me nuts.

But anyway.

Now, I realize that most songs nominally about hearts are actually about love. Still, even when writing a love song, it's possible to say HEART and actually mean HEART. There's an old Abe Burrows song that goes "You put a piece of carbon paper under your heart / And gave me just a copy of your love." It's a love song, but it's also a HEART song; I mean, if the carbon paper is a real piece of carbon paper, the heart has got to be a real heart. And who ever heard of a METAPHORICAL piece of carbon paper? I don't know how the girl in the song manages to pull off this carbon paper / heart trick, but you can bet it's something to see.

Real or metaphorical, it's time to give the heart a rest. For one thing, this whole heart-is-the-seat-of-emotions thing is just a TAD out of date. When they transplanted that chimp's heart into that guy around 15 years ago, he didn't ditch his wife and head for the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo with a box of chocolates and a Johnny Mathis tape. According to an article I read recently in the World Weekly News (which certainly would have reported on the chocolate box thing if it had happened), TOP SCIENTISTS have located most human emotions, as well as many thoughts, and also big globs of gray stuff that looks like macaroni salad, in the BRAIN. Yet song writers never say "I left the convoluted mass of brain matter, in which are contained my feelings for you, in San Francisco."

Or maybe they do, but not when they're writing a song. Yet 'Brain' is at LEAST as easy to rhyme as 'Heart.' Pain. Stain. Chain. Great Dane. Drain. Vein. Jack LaLane. It practically writes itself!

But it's not going to happen. As long as people keep writing love songs, they're going to keep dragging out the old heart. So the question is really: how many more love songs do we need? I have to admit it is a big, wide diverse world. There are literally billions of people out there. But I think you'll agree that 8, or at most 11, love songs would pretty much cover the whole range of humanity. After that-- and we're WELL past that-- it's time for songwriters to move on to other emotions and other internal organs.

With this in mind, I turned to the best friend of the weekly columnist with a deadline two hours away and 400 words to go: The Internet Search Engine. I went looking for songs about various internal organs, and I think I have stumbled across the Wave of the Future.

I had not much luck with lungs, kidneys, livers, spleens, or stomachs; nothing doing with the pancreas, or either the large or small intestine.

But BLADDERS...

I came up with EIGHT SONGS about bladders. Or at any rate, eight songs with 'bladder' in the title. (And also a group called "Bladder Bladder Bladder," but they don't sing about bladders, so they aren't really germane to this discussion). I listened to each bladder song, in an effort to figure out which emotion the bladder was associated with. I think we can safely ignore "Seal Bladders" by an artist who identifies himself only as "MIKE!," since only human bladders need concern us here. We can also ignore most instrumentals and go directly to the top four bladder songs, which are: (4) "The Bladder" by Alain Lemay and Micheline Allaire, of Quebec. Says here: "...The Sacred Temple was written to stimulate and harmonize different parts of the body." I don't know what The Sacred Temple is, but when I read stuff like this I immediately lock all the house up tight and string tin cans across the back door just in case. (3) "Bladder Hostility" by desktop science, of Austin, Texas. I have NO idea what's going on in this one. The words appear to be 'found sounds' sort of tossed into the mix around 5 minutes in: ". . .you sayin' that you're not tryin' to be silly, but you are." "If you choose to be silly, be silly." "If you choose to be serious, be serious, but do what it is YOU want to do, and what's pleasing in your eye." "Thank you. Bye" "No comment." I'm not sure which speaker is the bladder, but it's probably one of them. (2) "Bladder" by Gurgleburger, of the UK. I'm sure THIS one features a talking bladder. This bladder-esque voice keeps going "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?" while the keyboards play a goofy little tune in the background. Then it just stops. (1) "Bladder (What Shall I Do?)" by R. Stevie Moore, of Bloomfield, New Jersey. Now, you're probably thinking I'm prejudiced because this is a quasi-local artist, but the fact is THIS IS THE GREATEST BLADDER SONG EVER, and, as with all the other bladder songs, there's no mention of a bladder in it. I'd venture to say that one of the defining characteristics of Bladder Music is the refusal to mention an actual bladder in the course of the song. Anyway, this one is the HIT. Great guitar hook, driving rhythm, and two voices, one of which might or might not be a bladder, I guess. Probably the one in the background with the Bergen County accent. But it's a terrific song. It's the first masterpiece of Bladder Music. I have seen the future of Bladder Music, and its name is R. Stevie Moore.

We are clearly still in the dawn of Bladder Music, and we haven't quite figured out which emotion it's hooked up with. What's more, we probably don't want to know. What we really want to know is how "Brick Red: Her Lusty Adventures" ends.

I do, anyway, but I bet I never find out.

NIGHT OF THE MUSHROOM

"I got us invited to a New Year's Eve party," said my friend Barry. "Lots of girls gonna be there."

"Hang on one second," I said, and I put down the phone and quickly tightened the cap on the soda bottle I had been drinking from. I slammed the bottle onto the kitchen counter. It was a 32-oz bottle, and I flattened around 40% of the cockroaches that had been doing a hoochie-koochie dance on the remains of last night's attempted meat loaf. A year earlier I couldn't have done it, but now soda came in plastic bottles. O Brave New World!

"...only thing is," Barry was saying when I retrieved the phone, he having as usual completely ignored my request to hang on, "the neighborhood is really kinda bad. 13^th Street and Avenue C..."

"Yow," I said. I was on 10^th St. and Avenue A, which was about a minute and a half from the site of the party, and 99.9% of the world's population would figure I was in the same neighborhood, but I was not in the sane .1 % who realized that three blocks north and 2 blocks east it was a whole different world. The surviving cockroaches in my apartment were still hiding out; on 13^th Street, they would have wrestled the soda bottle out of my hands and stuffed me inside it. Or vice versa. It was a tough neighborhood. About 4 years earlier I had been at the infamous 'Puerto Rican-Canadian Unity Day' debacle, when my friend Sam Konkin (Canadian) had held a party in his 13^th St. apartment, to which he invited the neighborhood (Puerto Rican), via a large banner hung out of his window proclaiming 'PUERTO RICAN- CANADIAN UNITY DAY--FREE BEER.' The neighborhood did not attend, but a passing motor cycle gang (ethnic heritage unknown-- in fact, I'm not 100% sure about the species) did. We escaped to the roof next door via Sam's bathroom window. The gang would have followed us, but they were all too fat to fit through the window. I wasn't real anxious to revisit the scene.

Still, there were going to be lots of girls...

"...and Yvette says we should bring our guitars."

Well, that settled that. During this phase of my life (to be covered in Vol. 3 of my autobiography, "Grimshaw: The Grotesquely Stupid Years") I never passed up an opportunity to play the guitar and sing at a party, especially when Barry, my some-time songwriting partner, was also going to play the guitar and sing. I wasn't exactly good, but Barry was really terrible, so I figured I would sound like Django Reinhart in comparison. This was one of my many misfigurings during that golden age.

Around 10 PM on the big night-- unseasonably warm for midwinter-- Barry stopped by my apartment, I tuned both of our guitars, and we walked to the party, which was on the 6^th floor of a six-story walk-up. There were about 25 or 30 people on hand. I didn't know anybody, and Barry only knew a couple of people. We mingled, we ate crackers, we tried to talk to girls. At some point we took out our guitars, and people began requesting songs, none of which we knew. "We write our own material," said Barry, and all interest in us immediately died. It was like we had suddenly become transparent. While Barry strummed aimlessly, I told the story of Puerto Rican-Canadian Unity Day, figuring it would go over pretty well, as it had occurred on this very block. A couple or three people who were unable to get away from us because of the crowding listened to the story, including our hostess, Yvette, who was attractive, and her room mate, Terry, who was downright pretty. "That's such a cool story," said Terry. "Hey-- it's too crowded in here to hear your cool songs. That story gives me an idea. Why don't we go up on the roof?"

"It's kinda chilly," said Barry. I stomped on his foot.

"Great idea," I said.

"Yeah!" said Yvette. "We might even be able to see the ball drop on Times Square from there."

"I'll get a couple of cans of beer," said Terry.

So the four of us wormed our way to the door of the apartment and out into the hall, and from there to the little stairwell that accessed the roof. It was chilly, but not uncomfortable. "Look," said Yvette, "Times Square!"

"Wow, can we really see it?"

"Look!"

"I think that's the clock tower in Union Square," I said.

"I think so, too," said Barry.

When we turned around, we were alone, and the door was locked. We could hear giggling on the other side. Which grew fainter and fainter.

"They'll come back in a couple of minutes," I said. "They probably went to get some, uh, chips or something. Look--" I pointed to a paper bag. "They left the beer."

Barry looked inside the bag. "Hey-- these are cans of mushroom gravy!"

Somehow the idea that they had left us on the roof with cans of mushroom gravy made the situation seem far crueler than if they'd just left us on the roof with nothing at all. We stomped on the roof from time to time but it didn't disturb the party, which got very loud somewhere around midnight. We figured they would surely come back for us once it was officially the New Year. They did not. At one point Barry screamed incoherently for about 10 minutes, but that sort of thing was pretty common on East 13^th Street and it attracted no attention. I hunkered down near a heat duct and got some sleep. I came awake when I heard the unmistakable sound of a beer can tab being popped. "MUSHROOM GRAVY?!" I yelled, and hurled myself across the roof at Barry. The open can spun away, it's contents briefly describing a foamy arc against the East Village sky.

"I was afraid if you knew it was beer you'd drink yourself into a stupor and freeze to death," Barry said. I tried to wrestle the bag with the remaining can from him. It bounced off the roof and landed in the back of a pick-up truck parked at the curb. We stared at each other. At some point we fell asleep. We woke up sometime after dawn, when the truck started up. We hung over the side of the roof and watched our beer roll down the street, in the direction of the FDR Drive. "Happy New Year," said Barry.

I don't remember when or how we got off the roof, but we aren't there any more, so I'm sure we did.

EDIBLE XMAS TREE

Calvano's dad was a cautious man, so it took us about an hour to tie the Christmas tree to the roof of his car. We used a clothesline, which was passed over the tree and through the open windows of the car over and over and over. Calvano's dad sat behind the wheel and directed everything; I sat next to him in the front seat and when the end of the line came through my window, I passed it to him, and he passed it outside to his son, who passed it over the top of the tree and through down through my window again. Mr. Calvano was neat as well as cautious: we made sure that with each pass, the new strand of rope lay neatly against the previous one, with no messy overlap. Slowly, over our heads, a new, lower ceiling made of rope slowly edged its way towards the rear of the car. "Geez," said Picarillo, who sat in the back seat. "You know what this looks like? A GIANT PAIR OF CORDUROY PANTS. Only white." Picarillo loved talking about his pants. Mr. Calvano looked pained. "You know what? I GOT a pair of white corduroy pants!" Mr. Calvano looked even more pained. But the clothesline ceiling eventually came to an end-- there was still a foot and a half of the original ceiling exposed by the back window, and Calvano the Younger climbed in through the back window. He had to, because the rope secured all of the doors. We rolled up our windows as high as they would go-- not far enough, since it was about 10 degrees out-- and Mr. Calvano lurched into gear. To make sure the tree didn't slip its bonds when we hit an irregularity in the asphalt, Mr. Calvano drove home at a brisk 7 miles an hour. We were about 8 miles from the Calvano homestead. On the Pompton Turnpike, where Mr. Calvano somehow made his way into the fast lane ("This is the safest lane, boys, because those eighteen wheelers aren't allowed here..."), we quickly acquired a festive train of furious honking drivers. The guy behind us --the vein in his forehead visible even from my position in the front seat-- screamed dementedly for a full 5 miles, but the words were drowned out by his own honking.

When we arrived, many minutes, hours, perhaps days later, it took us a very long time to get the tree off the roof. We had to repeat the entire process of snaking the rope through the window and over the tree, this time in reverse. Mr. Calvano forbade the use of Picarillo's Scout knife. He was not only cautious, he was thrifty, and that clothesline had "given many years of good service, and has a good many years of service left in it." (Following the spring thaw Picarillo and I swiped that clothesline and burned it. It was one of the three most satisfying experiences of my life.) We set the tree up in the Calvanos' den, and then Mrs. Calvano gave Picarillo and me brownies. Your average brownie recipe is pretty hard to screw up, but Mrs. Calvano was an amazing cook and managed to produce, time after time, cookies, cakes, and (alas) brownies that tasted remarkably like electrical insulation. Don't ask me how I know that.

Picarillo prided himself on being able to eat and enjoy anything more edible than a cinder block, but Mrs. Calvano's brownies defeated even him. We both made "mmm-MMM" noises and then crammed our brownies into the soil of the potted plant by the door as soon as no one was looking. Mrs. Calvano saw our empty plates and said, "My, you boys made short work of those brownies. Here, have some more! We've got plenty! I love to see boys with such a good appetites!" "Oh, gee, we're STUFFED, Miz Calvano! Please! Please!!"

We set to work helping the Cleverness trim the tree. First a string of lights was wound around the tree, then the Christmas garlands, and finally the individual ornaments-- many of them in the family for decades. Some of these were the old blown glass figures, and some were the newer reflective globes, and all of them instantly turned into powder if you breathed on them. Then we finished up with the candy canes. There was a box of candy canes, and while we were looking for suitable branches, Picarillo said, "these look almost like REAL candy canes."

"They are real candy canes," said Calvano.

Picarillo was dumbfounded. "That's incredible. Gee. Christmas tree ornaments you can EAT."

Mrs. Calvano held up a dark little Santa with a loop of wire coming out of his head. Now that we looked at him carefully, he was obviously chocolate. "Oh, there's plenty of Christmas tree ornaments you can eat," she said. Now, what she meant, of course, was: There are many EDIBLE Christmas tree ornaments. However, Picarillo understood her to mean: you have our permission to eat the Christmas tree ornaments. The distinction is subtle, perhaps, but it made all the difference between Picarillo eating every candy cane on the tree while the rest of us were in other room watching the Andy Williams Christmas Special on TV, and Picarillo NOT eating every candy cane on the tree while the rest of us were in other room watching the Andy Williams Christmas Special on TV.

It took the Calvanos a day or so to realize that the candy canes were gone, and another day or so to figure out where they had gone. No one was exactly incensed, but it was felt that Picarillo should replace the candy canes. He agreed to this, more or less. "I'm really sorry, Miz Calvano. Do the new Christmas Ornaments you can eat gotta be EXACTLY the same as the old ones?" No, no, of course not, she told him. Fatal words, as it turned out.

The next day Picarillo arrived and replaced the candy canes with beef jerky. Each strip of beef jerky-- still in the cellophane-- had a bright red ribbon tied around it. They probably supposed to be bows-- a few of them were-- but most were square knots. Mrs. Calvano allowed Picarillo to hang them on the tree, and at the end of the holiday season, she had Calvano shellac the beef jerky. They were hung on the Calvano Christmas tree for many years thereafter. They probably would have lasted longer in the cellophane than with the shellac. But of course the shellac wasn't hadn't been applied to preserve the beef jerky strips. It was just to keep Picarillo from eating them.

WHITE LIGHT

I need a new pair of glasses. It's not that my prescription has changed drastically (though it has) or that my frames are a touch out-of-fashion (in point of fact they are so far out of fashion they are on the verge of being back in fashion). It was the lenses, which have taken such a beating from the microscopic particles in the atmosphere that they are criss-crossed with countless scratches. These scratches are so tiny that they are invisible to the naked eye-- well, my vision is so bad that everything smaller than Minnesota is invisible to my naked eye-- but that they exist is beyond doubt. When I look at a point of light, it flares immediately into a little asterisk. When I look at a lot of points of light at the same time, I see so many asterisks that it looks like the Readers Digest transcription of the lyric sheet for the last Eminem album. And when I was walking down Bridge Street in Milford at 11 PM recently, I saw enough asterisks to expurgate the next 20 Enimem albums.

These asterisks were courtesy of the Christmas lights festooned along Bridge Street, both on private dwellings and on public works. There were jillions of them, and amazingly, they were all white lights. Of course white Christmas lights aren't white white, like the paint used to delineate cross walks. They're the color of white wine, which is to say, a delicate shade somewhere between bone white and pale amber. In aggregate these lights-- some hanging from the sills like icicles, some outlining doorways, some curling around lamp posts or trees-- are really lovely. If anyone had stapled a strand of blinking red and green lights over the door, the effect would have been as tasteless and shocking as someone wearing a necktie with florescent letters reading KISS ME IN THE DARK, BABY to a funeral. And let me tell you, I'm never going to do THAT again.

The lights of Bridge Street were not just pretty; the effect was absolutely tasteful.

Which is the whole problem.

Since when is the holiday season about TASTEFUL? For countless generations it has been about bright, multi-colored flashing lights. It's been about big plastic and / or aluminum trees with so much glowing junk on them that they look like an aerial view of Las Vegas (or would, if Las Vegas were built on a very large tree). It's been about unbelievably garish outdoor displays on the front lawn, illuminated by so many searchlights people driving past think a new mall is opening. And now we've got these WHITE LIGHTS everywhere, and we're in serious danger of forgetting what Christmas is all about.

I'm not opposed to good taste; far from it. But it needs to be kept where it belongs, which is definitely someplace or other, but not here. Good taste is so tasteless. I don't mean in the GOOD sense of tasteless, like the aforementioned glow-in-the-dark tie, but in the bad sense, like stuff that has no taste. Like vegetables that have been boiled too long, or certain kinds of cardboard.

I'm not saying that there's no place at all for white lights at holiday time. Far from it. In the town where I grew up, there was a family which covered its entire house with white light bulbs every Christmas. There was not a square inch of this house not covered with light bulbs. Was it tasteful? Nope. It was INCREDIBLY tasteless. They couldn't have made their house any more tasteless without ripping off the aluminum siding and upholstering he exterior walls with checker-pattern polyester. Result: the house SCREAMED Christmas. So white lights can work, but you need a lot of them, and the electric bill must be murder.

Other folks in my hometown were able to achieve a staggering level of tackiness without employing a single light bulb, white or otherwise. The Moncato family, for instance, used to erect a holiday display on their front lawn that remains unique in my experience to this day: LIFE SIZE cardboard cut outs, mounted on plywood, of the Three Wise Men, as well as various Hanna-Barbara cartoon figures such as Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, all sort of teaming up, sacred and secular icons alike, to wish everyone a happy holiday. And just a few blocks away there was a dentist who would stuff a Santa Claus suit with old newspapers, slap a beach ball on top for a head, and stick this grotesque figure in an obsolete dentist's chair out on the curb in front of his office. And the bigger and gaudier the beach ball, the more Christmas-sy it was. (I feel confident in making that judgment; the average beach ball usually lasted less than a week due to the large number of BB guns in the neighborhood, so over the years I saw a lot of beach balls on top of Santa).

Well, I feel the point has been made. Now you must be asking: but what can I (that is, YOU) do to restore a proper level of crassness and near-psychotic tastelessness to the Christmas season?

First of all, we need MORE COLORED LIGHTS. Lots of flashing and blinking. And not merely standard Christmas lights, either. Garnish neon signs, especially advertising various brands of beer, would be a good start. Lots of ugly plastic crap on your roof, lit up by two or three different searchlights with different colored gels, is always an excellent addition to any household. If the objects (Santa's sleigh, for instance) develop cracks, effect repairs with LOTS OF DUCT TAPE and try not to be overly neat about it. Redoubled blobs of silver tape are very festive.

Down at ground level, take a tip from the Moncatos and set up lots of large figures. Mix two-dimensional cut outs with three-dimensional objects, such as discarded department store mannequins. These later can be "Christmas-ed Up" up the simple addition of a Santa hat and bright green boxer shorts. And don't be in too much of a hurry to pack everything away when Christmas is over. Your neighbors will want to enjoy the sight as long as possible. Let's say mid April.

It's not too late to salvage this holiday season. But we've got to get started now, before another precious tradition is lost forever.

UNCLE TUG'S POOL

In late September of 1981, my Uncle Tug drained his swimming pool for the winter, as he did every September.

In the early spring of 1982 he drove down to Vic's Pool Center, discovered that the price of a box of chlorine tablets had increased by 5 bucks, and vowed that he would never-- NEVER-- pay that kind of extortionate price. A lesser man might have driven down the road to Frank's Pool Center in the hope of finding a better deal on chlorine tablets, but Uncle Tug felt he had done enough driving for one day, and simply never refilled the pool.

He repainted the bottom, from the traditional sky blue to a sort of camouflage pattern of greens and browns. "It's for the birds," he explained. "They expect this thing to be full of water, it's all blue like water, they come swoopin' in like a B-1 bomber, and then I gotta scrape 'em off the cement. Breaks my heart."

Next he purchased a large fishing net from a local sea food restaurant (they didn't actually catch fish with it, it was strictly for decorative purposes) and draped this across the deep end of the pool. At first he tried to complete the camouflage effect by sticking tree branches and hunks of bushes into the net, but as the food and foliage rotted, it began to attract insects and other things he didn't particularly want around.

So he removed the debris and went with plastic: he dragged the cardboard box containing his plastic Christmas tree out of the attic, and tossed the various branches onto the net. This looked pretty cool; some of the branches even had ornaments wired to them, since Uncle Tug felt wiring and unwiring all that stuff every year was a waste of time.

Then he moved his lawn chairs and a little table into the pool and under the net, and bought several heavy-duty extension cords so he could watch TV and have a small refrigerator and a couple of fans down there. As the summer of 1982 progressed, he made various alterations in what he had come to call his "bunker." For instance, it turned out that the fishing net was not much protection against rain, even with all the plastic Christmas tree branches in it, so Tug bought a big beach umbrella. He borrowed a big rubber plant from my mother, placed it next to his lounge chair, and jammed the beach umbrella into the rubber plant's flowerpot. When it rained, he would open the umbrella. Of course, when I say he 'borrowed' the rubber plant, I'm using his terminology; my mother didn't find out she'd lent him the plant until he called up and said, "I got that big, dopey looking plant of yours."

"The rubber plant?" said my mother.

"The one that looks like one of those Dr. Seuss plants."

"Are you holding it for ransom?"

"Nah. Just hanging on till the rainy season is over." The rainy season lasted until later that afternoon, when I was dispatched to bring back the rubber plant. Tug went out and bought his own big flowerpot. Uncle Tug (who had now spent several hundred dollars to keep from shelling out 5 extra bucks for the chlorine tablets) went into the bunker every morning with his foul smelling cigars and didn't emerge until dark. From time to time a Christmas ornament would work itself loose and smash on the cement. "In the event of The Big One-- I'm talking Dub-a-yoo Dub-a-yoo Three-- I figure I'm sitting pretty," he said on more than one occasion.

Sometime around 1995 or 6 Uncle Tug lost interest in the bunker (or perhaps stopped worrying about The Big One) and the pool sat there, unfilled and uninhabited. The fishing net had been removed and packed away in the garage, with the plastic tree branches (with the remaining ornaments) still caught in the mesh. The TV, which didn't stand up very well to the weather even with the umbrella up, had long since passed away, and the furniture was gone, and the camouflage pattern on the pool bottom, while still visible, had begun to flake quite a bit. Uncle Tug talked about filling in the pool and starting a garden.

Then this week, I received a flier in the mail:

Visit the Actual Labyrinth

(Maze)

Where the Minotaur (Guy with Bull head)

Lived in BC

Recently moved from

original location in Greek or egypt

To NJ

Admission $3.00

There was an address, which happened to be Uncle Tug's.

"Uncle Tug," I said, when he picked up the phone, "I got this flier--"

"That's your cousin Low-Low," he said. "His idea. I just supply the labyrinth."

"Where's this labyrinth?"

"It's the POOL. Wadda ya think? Low-Low cut up some cardboard boxes and stapled 'em together and made a sort of a maze down there. It looks pretty, uh..."

"Stupid?"

"Yeah. He's trying to get the grammar school in town to take the kids here for a class trip. He's gonna give 'em a 50% discount if they come up with 100 kids or more."

I then did something I swore I would never do-- I called Low-Low.

"What I can't figure out," I said, "is how you came up with the idea. I never had you pegged as an aficionado of Greek mythology. Or anything else ending in 'ology.' "

"Saw a show about th' Minotaur on TV," he said. "Ever'thing just kinda clicked."

"Discovery Channel?"

"Cartoon Network. There was a guy with LAMB LEGS, too," he said. "But he wasn't in the labyrinth."

"How's business?"

"Not so hot yet. It's December, you know, so out door exhibits like this tend to suffer a little."

"What happens if business doesn't pick up in the spring?"

"Just hate to see that pool go to waste," said Low-Low. "If the labyrinth doesn't work out, I'll think a something." Ominous pause. "I got a lot of ideas," he said.

CAKE MIX

I had just begun to draft this week's column when the phone rang. It was my daughter Emma, and her friend Compton. The conversation that ensued is presented here for the edification of my readers. Well, actually it's presented here because I accidentally deleted the real column.

E: Dad? We just wanted to express our opinion about, about--

ME: We?

E: Compton is on the line, too. Say something, Compton.

C: Hello?

ME: I'm writing my column, girls, so I--

E: Well, we were-- this is FOR your column...

ME: Uh--

E: It's ARNOLD. In his new movie, he...

C: I thought you we were going to talk about the cake mix party.

E: We are. But first I want to get the Arnold situation taken care of.

ME: Cake mix?

E: I'll get to the cake mix.

C: She wants chocolate, and I want vanilla.

ME: Wait, let me write that down...

E: Never mind that yet. We are UPSET because Arnold has boobs and neck rolls.

ME: I'm sorry?

E: THIS is what has got us upset.

ME: I take it the Arnold you're talking about is Arnold Schwarzenegger?

E: Yes.

ME: Just wanted to be clear, since your cat is also named Arnold...

E: My cat is NAMED after Arnold Schwarzenegger.

ME: I remember. Now, Arnold-- the non-cat-- has... did I get this right? Boobs and neck rolls?

E: Yes. In his new movie.

C: I didn't notice.

ME: You didn't notice the boobs, or the neck rolls?

C: Either.

ME: Okay. Now, I'm not sure about the neck rolls, but didn't Arnold always have boobs?

E: He used to have pecs.

ME: Aren't pecs basically male boobs?

E: Not at all. Pecs are not DROOPY. Arnold's pecs have become droopy.

ME: Well, he must be well over 50 now.

E: But he doesn't look it. He's still HOT. Except for the boobs.

C: And the neck rolls.

ME: I thought you didn't notice the neck rolls.

C: I didn't. But if they're there, they would not be hot.

ME: Well, what can I, in my capacity as a member of the working press, do about this situation?

E: Arnold needs a lift.

ME: A boob lift.

E: Yes.

ME: He needs more plastic surgery, you're saying.

E: HE HASN'T HAD ANY PLASTIC SURGERY.

ME: So you think the sudden absence of wrinkles in the movie ERASER was the result of what?

C: It was Avon Skin Cream.

ME:????

C: You apply it and the wrinkles disappear.

ME: Oh, that stuff. Isn't that basically Preparation H?

E: That's disgusting.

ME: Well, that's what I heard.

E: And another thing is, the back of his head looks mangy.

ME: Mangy.

E: Like he's losing hair in the back. I mean the back back back.

ME: Hold on, let me write that down... 'back back back.'

E: The FAR back.

ME: uh-huh.

E: Not where you usually get a bald spot, but down where the neck grows into the back of the skull.

ME: The neck grows into the back of the skull. That sounds really painful.

E: Anyway, those are the issues as we see them.

ME: I'll see what I can do. It sounds like Arnold is falling apart, all right. No other problems with the movie, aside from the way Arnold is decaying before your very eyes?

E: The movie was fine, otherwise. Except Arnold didn't take his shirt off.

ME: Wait a minute. If he didn't take his shirt off, how do you know his pecs are drooping?

E: You could see it through the shirt.

ME: I seem to remember he did take his shirt off in the movie.

E: No, he wore a muscle shirt.

C: The problem could be the quality of the shirt.

ME: Quality... of the... shirt... Well, I think that about covers the situation. What was it you were saying about cake mix?

E: I'm having a cake mix party. All my friends hate cake, but we love cake mix. So we're just going to make cake mix and eat that.

C: Brownie mix is even better than cake mix.

E: That's ridiculous. Brownie mix is too thick.

C: That's GOOD.

E: You totally don't grasp the whole IDEA of mixes.

C: That is so not true. Banana bread mix is the worst.

E: That's absolutely right.

ME: So you agree on banana bread mix.

E: Yes.

C: Bananas are gross.

E: No they aren't. Just the banana bread mix.

C: I hate the taste of bananas. I had some banana flavored Chapstick once. It was horrible.

E: Why did you have banana flavored Chapstick if you hate bananas?

C: Somebody GAVE it to me.

ASK THE NEW THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY

A word from the management:

After an extensive search, we have managed to find a replacement for the Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy. Get well cards for the old Thanksgiving Day Expert Guy can be sent care of this paper, and will be forwarded to him at the rest home where, we are certain, he is making a complete recovery. Since we would not like to see this situation repeated again, we would request that you observe the following rules when writing to the NEW Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy. (1) Please stay on topic. (2) Do not send in gratuitous insults. For that matter, do not send in ANY insults. (3) Keep it short. And now, your letters, and answers from... THE NEW THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY

* * * *

DEAR NEW THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY:

You stink. The old Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy stunk, too, but you stink more.

(signed)

Terry

Another word from the management:

The above is precisely the sort of letter we do NOT want to see. It is both off topic and insulting. On the plus side, it is short. But that is not much of a plus, frankly. And it does not even ask a question. The whole point of having a column entitled "ASK the Thanksgiving Day Expert Guy" is, you ask questions, and the Thanksgiving Day Expert Guy answers them. We would have thought this was self explanatory, but apparently not. We will no longer print letters that are not framed as questions. This should eliminate the pointless invective that has been plaguing this column for so long. And now, over to you, New Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy!

* * *

I'm pleased and delighted to be here. It's kind of daunting, being asked to step in for a distinguished figure such as the old Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy, especially given the tragic circumstances under which he was forced into retirement. But I fully intend to do my best to live up to the high standards he set (before he, you know, ran into those problems) and I look forward to serving the needs of all the Ask the Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy readers. Thank you.

DEAR THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY:

How come you stink so bad?

(signed)

Erry-tay

DEAR ERRY-TAY:

I will answer this question, even though it isn't really a question, it is just an insult with a question mark at the end. I will say the same thing to you that I would have said to Terry, who wrote the letter above to which I was not permitted to reply. I refuse to be drawn into an insult match with readers. This is the mistake my distinguished predecessor made, and I will not make this mistake. I will just ignore letters like this. Do not even bother sending them in, because I'm not going to answer them. Don't waste your time. Space in newspapers is precious, and it shouldn't be wasted in saying the same things over and over and over, especially when they (the same things) didn't need to be said in the first place. So just forget about it.

* * *

DEAR NEW THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY:

When did the Thanksgiving Day Parade get started?

(signed)

History Buff

DEAR HISTORY:

This is an excellent question. Every year, the Thanksgiving Day Parade gets started at approximately 8:00 AM, up by the Museum of Natural History. Thanks for writing.

* * *

DEAR NEW THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY:

Um, I meant how long has the Thanksgiving Day Parade been going on.

(signed)

History Buff

An entirely different question, but still good. It lasts for about three hours. It would be much shorter, but it keeps stopping so that various Broadway Show casts and marching bands can perform their specialty acts for the cameras in Herald Square. And of course, occasionally it is delayed by malfunctioning balloons.

* * *

DEAR NEW THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY:

How do they select the balloons for the Thanksgiving Day Parade?

(signed)

Wants to know

DEAR WANTS:

Competition, as you might guess, is brutal. Over 25,000 balloons enter contests at the local level, where they are judged on the basis of size, colorfulness, flammability, and poise. The talent, swim suit and evening gown competitions are given the most weight. The winners of the local contests go on to compete at county, regional, and state levels. Extensive background checks are made of all balloons reaching this point, to prevent any recurrence of the 1983 Parade, when compromising photos of the Bullwinkle balloon appeared in Rubber World Monthly. Finally a few dozen or so winners are selected, always including Underdog, a cartoon character whose show has been off the air for over 30 years.

* * *

DEAR NEW THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE EXPERT GUY:

Do you have Prince Albert in a can?

(signed)

Yrret

DEAR YRRET:

There is no point in sending in letters of this type. As I said above in my response to Erry-tay, I will not even deign to answer things like this. It is off topic for one thing, and for another, I am informed that it is the set-up to a very old joke. Not only that, but it makes no sense because you're supposed to PHONE this question to a drug store. Only it such an old joke they probably won't even know what you're talking about, since I doubt that most drug stores carry Prince Albert (a pipe tobacco) these days. (The way the joke works, you call up and ask if they have Prince Albert in a can. Then if the druggist says 'yes', you say 'Well, let the poor guy out!' and hang up). So it would seem that the 'joke' is on YOU, Yrret. The New Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy is not going to fall for this kind of thing and waste all his space on nonsense when there are serious Thanksgiving Day Parade questions to be answered. The Old Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy let you bums get under his skin, but that's not going to happen with The New Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on The New Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy. He is not going to let his column degenerate into an endless rant like the Old Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert Guy. This kind of thing is like water off a duck's back to the N.T.D.P.E.G. He just ignores it, is the way he handles it. So forget it. No point in trying to get him upset. He's as cool as a cucumber.

ELECT ION SP ECIAL

MY FURROWED AMERICANS...

Because of the current constipational crisis, come this January something or other we may not have a dully-erected precedent. In order to prevent this occurrence from outcoming, I have agreed, after searching my heart and my medicine cabinet, to accept the office of President of the United States, should anyone offer it to me. For one think, I can not see how I, as a weekly humor columnist, could refuse to swerve when my country needs me, and for another, I can not see much of anything since my daughter drank about half the bottle of Hawaiian Punch that was in the refrigerator even though I told her not to, and then filled up the bottle with cough medicine so I wouldn't figure it out. Shortly afterwards I drank about two liters while watching an NFL game. As a result of this I am (1) seeing very bright colors, some of which talk, and (2) losing brain cells at a prodigious rate. Thus I should be fully qualified to lead the Free World soon. Thus I should be fully qualified to lead the Free World soon. Thus I-- *smack* Excuse me, my needle was stuck.

Americans are entitled to know what their new precipice intends to do for the upcoming four years. They may rest easy. I will do absolutely nothing. My philosophy is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it; and if it IS broke, don't fix it either." Same thing applies to slapping a coat of paint on stuff. It is only the POWERFUL COAT OF PAINT LOBBIES that keep pushing us to paint things over and over, when everybody knows stuff looks much cooler when the paint starts to flake off and you get weird animal shapes and faces and things. That is the first thing my administration will provide. Third, we will also not propose any legislation. Ideally we will replace both houses of congress with a large cage of marmosets. We know the risks; too many marmosets, and they will go nuts and start trying to bite each other in the head. But we believe these risks are worth taking, although we forget why. Another thing we forget is, what is the name of the actor who played Sergeant Carter on "Gomer Pyle USMC"? It's on the tip of my tongue. No wait, that's a piece of pretzel. In any case, if you know, please send the answer to: PRESIDENT GRIMSHAW // 1600 PENNSYLVANNIA AVENUE // WASHINGTON DC. Write "Please Hold For Arrival" on the outside of the envelope.

On second thought don't send it there. Because we will also in our capacity as president NOT move into the White House but stay right here in our apartment. We could put the Presidential Seal up behind the couch. We could, in fact, use a new couch, since the upholstery on the old one was pretty much ruined when we nodded out after drinking the most of the bottle of Hawaiian Punch and about half of the rest of it went all over the cushions. We are saying 'we,' incidentally, because the effects of the accidental cough medicine overdose appear to have caused us to split into TWO PEOPLE, one of which is me and the other of which is this kind of iridescent monster-type guy, exactly as in the Japanese movie "The Manster." Let me clarify that: 'exactly' is the wrong word, because in "The Manster," the Manster starts out as an eyeball growing on the guy's shoulder which then blossoms into a head with big teeth, and so on, and that is not what happened here. And I do not understand how it is that when the guy splits into two creatures, one man, one Manster, both of them are wearing pants. Nonetheless, OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH JAPAN MUST BE STRENGTHENED. But first they must stop making these stupid NORMAL movies and go back to making movies like "The Manster" and ones about giant monsters (such as MOTHRA). Also really good was "Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla." The spot where the paint is peeling over there looks like a little duck.

So much for foreign policy. I must now address DOMESTIC ISSUES. Since I will be staying in this apartment, I will require very little in the way of domestics. One could stop by once a week and straighten up the place. Maybe twice a week if it turns out The Manster is a slob, which is certainly a possibility. The worst thing is the gunk in the kitchen drain. It's really gross and I don't want to deal with it. If the domestic could just take care of that, it would be a big help.

Over the corpse of the next few days, the Manster and I will be working out our economic policy, our stand on education (which we favor in the event the life of the mother is threatened), and the decision about who is responsible for replacing the toilet paper when it runs out. And so on. In addition, the Manster and I shall be slowly moving our hand back and forth in the air, because it leaves this really neat rainbow after-image.

On a more solemn note. It must be admitted that the 'I-agree-to-be-president' routine is one of the most obvious bits in the world and in all likelihood, every humor columnist in America is going to take a whack at it this week. I myself did it before, back in 1996. The Manster and I would like to assure the public that OUR 'I agree to be the president' routine is in fact the best one. Because this column does not appear until Thursday, other humor columnists (some, we believe, working without the aid of the Hawaiian Punch-Cough Medicine mixture) (Of which we are running very low) may see print with their versions before we do. This is appalling, and speaks directly to the issue of HUMOR COLUMNIST DISENFRANCHISEMENT. I call upon my fellow humor columnists to think of the good of the country, and withdraw their "Okay-I'll-Be-The-President" columns. SOMEBODY around here has got to start acting like a grown-up. And I promise you-- it's not going to be me.

I have just had another swig of the Hawaiian Punch bottle and my transition team is beginning to take shape on the back of my retina. These trusted advisors-- Elisha Cook, Jr., Poppin' Fresh, and a talking waste basket-- will ensure an orderly transition from the living room back into the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the Manster and I would like to thank you for your time and interest, and we have agreed to be president as long as the cough syrup holds out. FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!

MEAT LOAF

There was apparently a meat loaf surplus, because the lunchroom had served it 6 times in 10 days. By Day Five of what was starting to look like The Era of Eternal Meat Loaf, things began to get ugly. There was a queue, grim but orderly, which made it kind of eerie, of kids moving directly from the serving line to the garbage can, where slab after slab of meat loaf was being deposited. If you closed your eyes, you just heard sshhhooom--poot! sssshhhooom--poot! as the meat slid down the plastic liner of the can and hit the (ever-diminishing) bottom.

"What's everybody doing that for?" asked Picarillo. "This is really good meat loaf."

"Here, have mine," said Calvano.

Picarillo nodded appreciatively, unable to convey his thanks any other way because his mouth was full. He seemed unconcerned that Calvano had picked up the meat loaf slice with his bare hand and given it a good squeeze before depositing it on Picarillo's plate. Hence it tapered in the middle and bulged at the ends, like a dog biscuit.

On Day Six, meat loaf slices took to the air.

It should go without saying that one or two entr饳 went flying across the lunch room during any given lunch period, even at the best of times, but this went well beyond that. It was as if a clumsy hunter had stumbled into a duck blind full of sleeping ducks, and, panic-stricken, they all took to the air at once, flying off in every direction, quacking insanely. Only instead of ducks, they were slices of meat loaf, and there was no quacking. (Well, there was some quacking, but it wasn't the meat loafs, it was David Stickle, doing his Burgess Meredith imitation). And of course, with ducks, once they take off in a panic, they tend to get away as fast as possible and keep going until they're out of sight, so if you can avoid a duck collision for about 10 seconds, you're home free. But the meat loaf slabs would fly, hit something, and then immediately find themselves airborne again. If meat loaf slices had the structural integrity of ducks, there's no telling how long the blizzard of tomato sauce-coated meat and breadcrumb would have continued, but after three or four voyages they completely disintegrated. Every kid on the lunchroom was covered with fragments of meat loaf. There was the silence that comes after a great commotion; no talking, just the sound of labored breathing, and Stickle cackling "Quack-quack-quack! Very clever, Boy Wonder! Quack-quack-quack!" The teachers emerged from beneath the tables and, after a hasty conference, announced that everyone in the lunchroom was getting detention. Except Picarillo.

He was the ONLY kid in the lunchroom with meat loaf on his plate. In fact, Picarillo had three slabs of meat loaf on his tray, which had been salvaged from the meat tornado-- perhaps literally plucked from the air. Calvano later suggested that Picarillo might have intercepted and devoured as many as five other slabs before the fracas ended.

The following Tuesday, all of the kids in Lunch Period 3 were the subject of a harangue from our belov養principal, Mr. Yorkowsky.

"Something happened last week... something so... disappointing... that I hardly know where to begin... I hardly know what words to employ to describe it... Perhaps one word will suffice... anarchy."

"Who?" whispered Picarillo.

"Ann somebody," said Calvano.

"Annie Oakley, stupid," I said. "The girl cowboy."

Mr. Yorkowsky continued: "...as the poet Yeats said: 'The center will not hold... mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...' "

"Mayor Ann Archy?" said Picarillo. "A girl mayor? What's he talking about? Can they do that, have a girl mayor?"

"Don't be an idiot," said Calvano.

"Well, what's he talking about?"

"I dunno." I glanced over at Mr. Schoppe, the gym teacher, who appeared to be as confused as we were; he caught the eye of his female counterpart, Miss Henderson, and then, cocking an thumb in the direction of Mr. Yorkowsky, mimed taking a swig from an imaginary bottle. This didn't clear things up for me at all. But soon Mr. Yorkowsky abandoned Yeats: "Last week, the children in Lunch Period Three engaged in a revolting exhibition. DESPITE the fact that children are STARVING in many parts of the world, they threw their lunch food at each other like so many SAVAGES. They-- who is making that QUACKING sound?-- they disgraced themselves. And they have been punished. They have all been given two weeks of detention. But. Just as POOR behavior needs to be punished, GOOD behavior needs to be rewarded. ONE boy in lunch period three did NOT engage in this ORGY of FOOD WASTE. One boy stood alone against what the poet Yeats called, uh, MERE ANARCHY. Would... [he glanced at an index card] MICHAEL PICARILLO please join me on stage?"

"What'd I do?!" whispered Picarillo. "I thought I WASN'T in trouble! What's he saying??"

"He said you did something that got the mayor really mad," said Calvano.

"Huh? Huh? The girl mayor?? I didn't KNOW!" Our homeroom teacher was urging Picarillo to get up and head for the stage. Picarillo's head was swiveling around, as he tried to find some clue about what was going on somewhere. Picarillo's eyes bugged out and his panic seemed to redouble as our homeroom teacher lead him up to the stage. There was thunderous applause from the student body, surely sarcastic in intent.

It's hard to imagine a greater stigma than being singled out as The Bestest Boy in the Sixth Grade by the principal, and as Picarillo stumbled up the steps to the stage, there were probably scores of kids making a mental note along the lines of 'Note: Make Picarillo's Life a Living Hell Starting Today'. Mr. Yorkowsky stuck out his hand.

Picarillo screamed.

Mr. Yorkowsky jumped back. Picarillo cried, "I DON'T EVEN KNOW THE MAYOR! I DIDN'T MEAN TO EAT ALL THE MEATLOAF! I WAS JUST HUNGRY! I DIDN'T KNOW YOU COULD HAVE A GIRL MAYOR!"

Then he threw up.

The applause now was even more thunderous then before and this time, I have no doubt, it was completely sincere.

"I was wonderin'," my cousin Low-Low said, "did you buy anything last week?"

"Yes," I said. Now, if anyone else had asked me that question, I would have continued with something along the lines of 'why do you ask?' Low-Low is not anyone else, though, and what I desperately wanted to do was hang up the phone on him. Unfortunately, this was not a phone conversation; I was at my father's house, standing on a ladder cleaning leaves out of the rain gutters. Low-Low was at the bottom of the ladder. I was trapped.

"Th' reason I'm askin'," he said, answering the question I had been afraid to ask, "is I need some more receipts. Watch out. Almost hit me with that buncha wet leaves."

"Geez, I'm really sorry," I said. He was about 8 inches to the left of where I had aimed. I made a mental adjustment and balled up some more leaves.

"I need receipts for each day of the Series."

"What do you mean, receipts?" I had given up. Clearly there was going to be a conversation regardless of whether I contributed or not; there was nothing I could do about it, but I figured if I plugged the correct questions into the correct pauses, it might go a little faster.

"Little pieces a paper? With like a price on it, and a date?"

"Yeah, I know what receipts look like. What kind of receipts? I mean, receipts for what?"

"Wall. It doesn't really make that much diff'rence. The absolute BEST kind would be receipts from the George Washington Bridge, or the Turnpike. But anything is okay, 's long as it doesn't say what it's a receipt for."

"But it's got to have a date."

"Nah. It's okay if there's NO date, but if it's got a date, it's gotta be for a Series Day. Ack! Hey, you almos' hit me AGAIN."

"I'm really sorry," I said. "You moved."

"If I HADN'T a moved, it would a hit me square inna head."

"Gee, I guess so. Well, anyhow, I'm fairly sure I bought some things last week. I don't know if I kept any of the receipts, though. What are you paying?"

"Payin'?"

"For the receipts."

"Wall." Low-Low has been starting sentences with the word 'wall' for about 30 years. For a long time I assumed it was simply the way he pronounces 'well,' but about 2 years ago we were in a restaurant together (something that will NEVER happen again, by the way) and when the waitress asked him how he would like his steak prepared, he replied, "Wall, I'd like to have it well-done." That seemed to shoot the 'wall = well' theory right out the window, and I've been at a total loss ever since. Anyhow, he went on: "I wasn't actually plannin' to pay for them. I mean, you were jus' gonna throw 'em out, weren't you? See, I-- AACKK!"

"Oh geez," I said. "What a mess. That kind of landed right smack in the middle of your head, huh? Hey, you better go in the house and clean up."

While Low-Low was inside, I scuttled down the ladder and went over to his car to see if I might accidentally dump a few bushels of smelly wet leaves in the back seat or something, but he had locked the doors. My father, who left the house a few seconds after Low-Low entered it (Low-Low takes up a lot of space), wandered over. I explained what I was doing, and he offered to get a wire hanger from the house to facilitate access to the car interior, but then Low-Low came out and we abandoned the plan. Or postponed it.

"Unca Jim," said Low-Low, "You mind if I borrow these receipts?"

"What are they?"

"They was in the grocery bags. They got the right dates on 'em."

"Say no, Dad. I don't know what he's doing, but whatever it is, if they can trace those receipts back to you, there's probably jail time."

"Don' be silly," said Low-Low. "This is strictly legit."

When my father and I stopped laughing, Low-Low said, "I'm sellin' SUBWAY SERIES COLLECTIBLES."

"I'm going downtown and buying some donuts," said my father.

"You are? I could go fer one of the ones with pink frostin'."

"I'm not really going downtown," said my father. "I thought we were just swapping non sequitors."

"Nah, I'm not swappin'... whatever they are. I'm SELLIN'. Subway Series Collectibles." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a very ratty looking piece of paper, upon which was written:

SUBWAY SERIES COLLECTIBLES.

Get 'em while they last

Actual TICKETS, etc.

Purchased on Days 1-4 of 2000 World Series

Call [Low-Low's phone number]

"Gonna drop this off at the paper in a little bit..."

"You have unused World Series Tickets?" asked my father.

"Wall..."

"How much are you selling the tickets for?"

"They're sorta already gone."

"In the sense that you never had them?"

"Wall..."

"So these receipts would be the 'etc.' noted in your ad?"

"Wall..."

"Low-Low, you've still got some of those disgusting leaves stuck in your hair," I said. "Lemme brush them off."

"Hey, watch out-- some of 'em went down the back a my neck, it feels like."

"Geez, I'm really sorry," I said, thinking of the ones that missed.

"So how 'bout some of those receipts?"

After we stopped laughing Low-Low left, which was pretty much the idea, but later my father said that if we'd told him 'yes,' we probably would have had time to get the car open while Low-Low was rooting around the house for receipts.

We're kicking ourselves now.

I'd had to go to the bathroom, and while I was there, the phone rang. "Phone!" cried Mulberry Street Joey Clams. At the Custom Neon Sign Shop I was supposed to answer the phone, because I had what Mulberry Street Joey Clams called "a good phone-side manner." When I picked up the phone, I would say "Custom Neon Sign Shop, Jeff speaking. How may I help you?" Although Mulberry Street Joey Clams wanted me to say 'how CAN I help you,' rather than 'MAY,' he still conceded that it was better than picking up the phone and saying "What?!" which is how he answered the phone. Also, I had reasonably legible handwriting, so if a customer ordered a sign, I would write down what the sign was supposed to say and we would be able to read it later. This may not sound like an especially rare skill, but Mulberry Street Joey Clams did not possess it and hence valued it very highly. Which is why he was screaming "Phone! Phone! Phone!"

But it was useless; I was where I was, and I was going to be there for a while, thanks to the slightly undercooked porcitto ham I'd had for lunch.

When I finally emerged, Mulberry Street Joey Clams was sitting back in the swivel chair, totally spent. It had indeed been a customer-- our first in at least four weeks-- and Mulberry Street Joey Clams had transcribed the words we were supposed to preserve forever in neon. The words were legible, because he had printed each letter two inches high, on a sheet of legal sized paper, and the effort had exhausted him.

The letters spelled out...

Well, I'm not 100 percent sure what the letters spelled out, because the next morning Mulberry Street Joey Clams put a cup of coffee down on the middle of the paper and a few moments later the coffee leaked through. All we could read was "For Mau [big brown blot shaped kind of like the USSR] ony."

I was fairly sure it said:

"For Maureen--

I told you I'd put

your name up in lights

Love

Anthony"

But Mulberry Street Joey Clams, while agreeing that was more or less the gist of it, insisted that the actual message was supposed to rhyme. He also thought the first name was "Maura" and the second name "Antony."

"Well," I said, "Call the guy up and just tell him you're double-checking the spelling of the names or something. Where's his number?"

He pointed to the USSR, right about at the spot where you would normally have expected to find Leningrad in those days.

"Okay," I said, "so when we get his check, he'll have his name on it and probably his phone number, but even if he doesn't, it'll have his address on the envelope."

This served to calm him down considerably. He scrutinized the blotch. "I know its gotta rhyme. It's prob'ly like, 'For Maureen / I told you I'd put yer name in lights / er, you queen.' "

"Didn't you think the name was Maura?"

"Don't be a jerk. What rhymes with 'Maura'?"

"Uh," I said. "Well, when we get the check..."

But the following day we arrived at the shop after lunch to find an envelope jammed under the door. It contained a money order and a note, which read: "Here's half the money for inv. # 0541 [the numbering on our invoices began at 0536]. I'll pick up Tues. and bring balance. (signed) A. " No address, no phone number, no name.

The name on the 'from' section of money order said "A. P." and the address was blank.

"Okay," said Mulberry Street Joey Clams, "Let's not panic. Let's think about this. He stuck it under the door, so he must live someplace around here. At least somewhere in the city. First name Anthony or Antony. Last name starts with a P. Okay. So how many Anthony or Antony P guys can there be in this town? What's the population, maybe 8, 10 million? So maybe a million Ps, which is a very popular last name letter. Awright. So. And out of all those, HALF of them are chicks. So we're already down to half a million people at most. And of those, only ONE in TWENNY FOUR has a name starting with A. Which comes to..."

"20,833.3," I said, looking up from the calculator.

"Okay, we're gettin' there. How many ANTHONY P guys do you think?"

"Several thousand more than I'm even gonna think about calling," I said.

"Don't turn into a WOMAN on me," he snapped. "Think. Think. How many guy first names start with A?" We came up with about 60, figuring diminutives like 'Al' (which we listed six or seven times, counting it as a different name depending on whether it was short for 'Alan' or 'Albert' or 'Aldous' or whatever) and "Arn" and the ever-popular "Ap" (I forget what this was short for, but Mulberry Street Joey Clams swore he knew two Aps.) Working under the assumption that all 'A' names were evenly distributed, we divided 20,8033 by 60 and arrived at 347. "Now. You take 173 names and I take 174 names, and we start calling. We'll probably hit the guy in ten minutes."

I flat out refused to do this. We glared at each other. Someone rapped on the door. Mulberry Street Joey Clams sprang up and threw the door open.

There was a kid dressed as Spiderman standing there with a plastic pumpkin. "It's Halloween!" cried Mulberry Street Joey Clams. "We got no candy! We can't stay in the store with the lights on calling people if we got no candy! They'll soap our window!"

"Trick or treat," said the kid.

"Gimme your candy," said Mulberry Street Joey Clams. He jammed his hand into his pocket and came up with a 5-dollar bill. "Here, gimme the pumpkin!"

"Whoa! Thanks mister!"

"Yeah yeah, go nuts, get outta here." He grabbed the pumpkin and shut the door, but even before the door was closed his eyes bugged out. "Hey! There's only TWO CANDY BARS in this thing!"

"It's only 4 'clock," I said. "The kid's just starting out."

Mulberry Street Joey Clams shot out the door and tried to catch the kid, but the kid had a half a block lead on him.

"Kid's too fast for me. Hey-- are you EATING the candy bars?"

"I saved one for you."

We exchanged some harsh words. I seem to recall there was an attempt to bite off my nose. Another trick or treater showed up, got the remaining candy bar, and we made a candy run to the corner grocery, which had no candy, so we bought a bag of potato chips and each of the next few trick or treaters got a single potato chip. The rest of them didn't get anything, because we ate the rest of the bag ourselves. They soaped our window. Neither of us would phone any of the Ant (h)ony Ps in the Manhattan White Pages. We decided to throw the dice and go with 'Maureen' and 'Anthony,' which turned out to be half-right.

Anthony P refused to give his girl friend Maura the sign or to pay the balance of his bill and it turned out his father was a friend of Mulberry Street Joey Clams' uncle, so we actually had to refund his deposit. It was a dark day for the Custom Neon Sign Shop but at least we got to keep the sign, which was really beautiful, if I do say so myself.

The first day I went to work at the ID Bureau, I was given a brief tour of the office ("Now this over here is the file cabinets.... this is another buncha file cabinets...") and then assigned a desk where I was supposed to bring the file cabinet drawers (they were tiny drawers, used for storing index cards) while I was checking the jury duty lists to make sure no convicted felons were being chosen to sit in judgment on their peers.

The second day I was there, one of the older guys took me aside to "show me the ropes."

"Now, right over here, this is where we fingerprint the customers--" customers in this case being the folks who had been arrested-- "and take their pictures, front and side view. You'll probally get to do some of this, on account of Joe Billings who usually does it is going on vacation in a couple weeks. See, the fingerprints go in one a these cards, and the pictures go up here on the same card, and then ya take it over here to the LAMINATOR."

The Laminator: 25 or so years later, I type that out and can't help picturing Arnold Schwarzenegger, but in fact there wasn't much resemblance. The ID Bureau Laminator looked much like the ones you could find in the vestibules of super markets at that time, next to the gumball machines. There was a crucial difference, however: it cost something like a dollar to laminate your driver's license in the super market; at the ID Bureau, you could do it for FREE. Well, not free, but at taxpayer expense, which was even better.

"Now, with all these cards and laminators and so forth, I guess it's pretty obvious that... Lemme put it to ya this way: someday some friend a yours is gonna ask ya for a fake ID..."

My eyes probably bugged out at this point. This had simply not occurred to me.

"You're gonna be tempted to just walk over here and print one up and give it to your buddy as a favor--"

"No, I--"

"Hey, it's human nature. But don't do it. What you do, you just tell 'em..."

"I'll tell 'em for GET it!"

"Nah. Tell them it's 25 bucks. Cash."

I opened my mouth to say something-- I don't remember what-- but I was again waved to silence.

"Well, wait a second, I if you want to take somebody's check, that's up to you-- but I work strictly cash. You keep five bucks. I get 20, is how it works. That's the way I do it with everybody-- it's not like I'm stiffin' you because you've only been here a coupla days. Billings, he's been here since 1951, he just gets 5, too. And doesn't kick about it, because it's a good deal. Five bucks for doing nothing, basically."

"Uh--"

"Now. You might be tempted to charge your buddies 30 bucks and keep 10. Nothing I can do to stop you, but I advise against it. Everybody else charges 25. Your buddies find out you're charging 5 bucks above the standard rate, they ain't gonna be your buddies any more, you know what I'm saying? And ya gotta ask yourself-- is it worth losing friends over a lousy five bucks?"

"Uh--"

"Ya can't put a price on friendship. Well, you can, but my feeling is it's more than 5 bucks. A lot more. If you could get 500 bucks for one of these cards, I'd say go for it. But here's the thing--" At this point an avuncular arm was draped around my shoulders-- "If a guy's got 500 bucks... I mean a young guy, you know, one a your buddies... odds are, he's got something on the ball, right? So you tell him a fake ID costs 500 bucks, he'll know right off the bat you're puttin' the screws to him, and he'll just take his business elsewhere. You know what I'm saying?"

"Uh-huh."

"So instead of making 5 bucks you made zip-- and you lost a friend. And this kind of friend, with 500 bucks in his pocket, he's the kind of friend ya wanna KEEP..." The conversation, such as it was, continued in this vein for another ten minutes or so, and then my would-be mentor wandered off to spread his special brand of cheer in some other corner of the ID Bureau. I decided immediately that I would not be selling any fake IDs-- or doing anything else that would require me to come into contact with this guy.

However, since my table was adjacent to the Laminator, I did MAKE a lot of fake I Ds. Mine were doubly fake, since not only did they have no legal status, they were for people who did not exist. They had names like "Mad Dog Kowalsky" and "Ricky Bokasokalokamokatokawoka." Since these people did not exist, I had no photos to affix, so I drew pictures. Many of my people had more than two eyes, and meat cleavers stuck in their heads. In fact, even when I wasn't making my fake-fake IDs, I was drawing guys with 3 eyes and meat cleavers on the blank cards. And a really incredible looking giant cockroach.

The actual fake ID s, by the way, were not driver's licenses or anything or the sort; they were simply official looking cards, slightly modified versions of the information cards on convicted felons which I was theoretically checking through all day long. One side listed the name, address, and date of birth, and the other side had an official looking 'ID Bureau' seal on it (The Laminator could add that at the same time it was laminating).

One morning towards the end of my tenure, I arrived at work to find the Laminator had been moved across the room. I couldn't think of a plausible reason to complain, so I didn't mention it, but the Fake ID tycoon went out of his way to show me why it had been removed from my vicinity. Without uttering a word, he took four or five cards from his pocket, all perfectly acceptable looking IDs, until you turned them over, and saw that the ID Bureau seal had been stamped not on a blank card but on a drawing of a guy being bit in the head by a werewolf, or something along those lines.

"I had to refund their money."

I was going to say 'didn't you check the cards before you handed them over?' but decided, I think wisely, against it.

From time to time over the years I've wondered whether there might be other fake IDs out there with my drawings on the back, so far unnoticed. If anyone's got an ID with a drawing of the giant cockroach on it, I'll pay 25 bucks for it.

REFUND

"The soda machine didn't gimme no cup," he said.

"And what would that be in your hand?" asked Chuck, the manager.

" What does it look like? It's a cup."

"And where did you get it?"

"The soda machine!"

"I see. Well, thanks for stopping by, it's been a pleasure," said Chuck, who gently ushered the guy out of the office, locked himself in, and conducted the rest of the evening's duties, such as they were, via intercom.

The really devilish thing about this particular mechanical malfunction was it's intermittence: you could go 5, 10, 20 perfectly sequenced transactions before the machine decided to drink the soda itself and present you with a nice clean cup with which to remember the occasion. Still, by the third or fourth day, even Chuck had to admit there was some sort of a problem. He hung the 'Out of Order' sign on the soda machine and notified the main office of the situation.

Those of us who were ushers ignored the sign, or perhaps you might say we took it as a challenge. We figured the odds were somewhere between 5 to 1 and 30 to 1 in favor of getting a soda for a quarter, so we fed the machine all night, went to the bathroom frequently, and eventually, to make things interesting, hit on the idea that the first guy to get an empty cup for his quarter had to spring for the sack of White Castle hamburgers which had become a last-show-of-the-night tradition for the Park staff. At this point in history a sack of White Castles didn't cost a whole lot more than the empty cup, anyhow.

The more or less non-stop use of this supposedly out-of-order soda machine did not go unnoticed. One of the folks who noticed it brought it to Chuck's attention. "You know," he said, "it seems to me that you've got quite the little racket going on here. A soda at the candy stand costs 35 cents, and a soda from the soda machine costs 25 cents, so I guess it's good business practice to declare the soda machine is busted and force everybody to buy from the candy stand, huh?"

"Actually, sir--" Chuck was one of those people who had the ability to call you 'sir' and make it sound worse than if he'd called you a rancid sack of rat droppings-- "the soda machine IS out of order."

"Seems to work okay for the ushers..."

"Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just eats your quarter. So you see, sir--"

"It seems to me, sir--" the guy shared Chuck's virtuoso 'sir' talent -- "that you owe me ten cents, since I bought my soda at the stand while under the false and misleading impression that the soda machine was out of order."

"Actually--"

"ACTUALLY, if I don't get my ten cents, I plan to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. Sir."

"Well, in that case...." Chuck held his hands out before him, palms up, in the classic, 'well-I-guess-I-have-no-option-left gesture-- "I'll get the forms for you to fill out."

"FORMS?"

"You'll need to fill out the standard 'customer complaint form,' and also the 'request for refund form.' And I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to sign a waver, as well."

"A waver."

"You're asking for a refund because the soda machine is out of order, and I need you to sign a waver stating that the machine is clearly labeled out of order."

"The machine is NOT out of order, that's my whole point!"

"Exactly. So I need you to sign something explaining to my employer that you didn't believe the sign. That IS the case, isn't it?"

"That makes it sound like I didn't believe the sign so I put a quarter in the machine and lost the quarter-- and in fact, I DIDN'T put the quarter in it, I went to the candy stand!"

"Exactly. I'll go get the forms."

"I just want my ten cents!"

One of the candy girls, who was watching all this with an entranced expression on her face, said "Wait." She dug into her pocket. "Here. Ten cents. Be my guest."

"I don't want YOUR money," said the customer, "I want MY money, from the THEATER."

"I'll get the forms," said Chuck, "and Sandy, do me a favor and write a little note explaining that you offered to give the gentleman the ten cents, and he refused to accept it."

"Okay."

"I DID not refuse to accept a refund, I--"

"Refused to take it because it was offered by a candy girl," said Chuck.

Sandy pulled out a sheet of notebook paper. "Can I just say I tried to give him his money but he wouldn't take it?"

"Make sure you say he INSISTED that the money not come from a GIRL. No, say from a 'female,' that sounds more..."

"Report-like," said Sandy.

"Yes."

"Is 'insist' two esses or a 'c' and an 's'?"

"Two esses," said Chuck, "but you could say 'demanded.' 'Demanded the money come from... not come from...' Let me see... REFUSED to take it from a FEMALE, DEMANDED that a MAN give it to him."

"Don't think I don't know what the game here is," said the guy. "I wouldn't take the ten cents from HIM either." Him being me.

"You want me to give you the ten cents?" I said.

"Don't give him a penny, Jeff. This is really something. You know, the ushers here make minimum wage."

"I don't want HIS money!"

"What's wrong with his money?" asked Sandy. "Just because he's only an usher doesn't mean he's like DIRT." I was touched, I have to admit.

"Jeff," Chuck said to me, "before he starts shaking down the other customers, could you go in the office and get the forms for this gentleman to fill out?"

"You haven't heard the last of this," said the guy, shaking his finger and then stomping out into the night. And a good thing, since none of the forms I was supposed to get from the office existed. The disgruntled customer did not, as far as we were able to determine, file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, but we had Sandy's report framed and hung in the office. The soda machine was repaired about 10 days later, and just in time-- I was going broke springing for all those White Castles.

The Greatest Diner in the World

FIXING THE OLYMPICS

ASK THE HALL OF FAME EXPERT GUY

O BRAVE NEW WORLD

You're In For It Now!

Back to School Sale at the Custom Neon Sign Shop

Conversation Piece

The St. Patrick's Day Parade

SHOP CAT

ASK THE BABY NAME EXPERT GUY