Forward into the Past

I first met Pen-Elayne in 1977 at a Jewish singles event in Carteret, New Jersey that was one of the worst social events I ever attended.  It was at the home of a thirtysomething guy who lived with his elderly mother.  All I remember is a bunch of people sitting glumly on couches, except this funny, chatty woman across from me.  It was not the match that the group had in mind, but I think we both recognized kindred weirdo spirits, and we became friends, regularly revisiting that evening and snarking about it far longer than it deserved in our life stories.

I'm not sure how we lost touch, but we did for a couple of years, until I ran into her at yet ANOTHER Jewish singles event, this one populated with FAR more interesting people, and we reconnected once again.

I was shy and introverted, and Elayne was a force of nature.  An imposing figure, she was completely  socially unaware, chatty, ferociously verbal, and with next to no boundaries at all, took over every room she was in.  No one could resist the Force that was strong in that one, even if they tried. This time, our friendship outlasted the end of the singles group, which was discontinued by the YM-YWHA that sponsored it because we weren't producing any Jewish marriages and resulting babies, but were more interested in just having fun.

Through Elayne, I learned about fan culture.  Today, fan culture is so mainstream that movies based on comic books are propping up the movie industry, huge conventions of fans of various types exist in every city in the country, guys like Kevin Smith can become successful filmmakers, and movies based on the Lord of the Rings trilogy (a.k.a. the geek cred holy books) win Oscars, but in the early 1980s, when we reconnected the first time, it was something I knew nothing about.

I was never into comic books OR science fiction, which are still the core of fan culture.  I got tired of comic book movies after the first "Iron Man," though Mr. Brilliant went to every one of them until he became ill. But Mr. B will come into this story later. 

I knew that fandom was about Star Wars and comic books and it seemed to me, as a Very Serious twentysomething who at the time thought I just wanted to work in a creative industry and live like a Cosmopolitan Girl, being taken to nice places by elegant men in three-piece suits, culminating in an Appropriate Marriage, to be kind of silly. I never did become part of the pop culture part of fan culture, but I sort of flitted around the edges of it with Elayne and our friend Anni. 

Most fans are smart weirdos who have at least at some point felt that we have been put here by mistake; that we belonged on some other planet where everyone has a finely-honed sense or irony, finds humor where others don't, and can talk endlessly about just about anything. I never adopted fandom through Elayne, but at long last I recognized who My People were. My mother wanted My People to be a Jewish doctor, lawyer, dentist or CPA (in order of desirability) who would marry me and support me in the style to which SHE wanted to be accustomed. I was so symbiotically bonded to my mother in those days that I had convinced myself that was what I wanted too -- until Elayne's world taught me that there was one I fit into much better.  But our weirdo world didn't just go one way.  Elayne brought fan culture to the table, and I brought my own weirdo pop cultural touchstones, like Allan Sherman, Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer records, and most importantly, the Firesign Theater. In the late 1970s, we were, in our own way, the Jay and Silent Bob of Union County, New Jersey.

Inevitably, the rabidity of fan culture would enter the extant world of fanzines. Triggered by the 800-pound gorilla that was Star Wars, fanzines exploded, popping up everywhere. By 1988, fan culture had spawned the Church of the Subgenius (arguably the Mother Of All Weird Pop Cultural Touchstones), and its founder, Ivan Stang, had published High Weirdness By Mail, a "directory of the fringe -- mad prophets, crackpots, kooks and true visionaries."  In other words -- MY kind of people. There are still zines around today, with an entire web site devoted to the ones around today; a stubbornly low-tech relic in a high tech world.

In 1980,  Elayne began publishing a zine called Inside Joke that started out in the obscure area of Uncle Floyd fandom, which gradually evolved into one of "comedy and creativity." 

There were no personal computers in those days, and certainly no desktop publishing software. Publishing like this meant paste-ups -- cutting out typed text, arranging it, and attaching it to other pieces of paper with glue sticks.  Headline fonts meant buying rub-off letters in craft stores , creating the headlines on paper and pasting them on the paper above the text.  Publishing a zine was a labor of love and time, and Elayne did it EVERY SINGLE MONTH for a decade.

By the fall of 1981, Elayne had convinced me that I should write for Inside Joke. I don't recall feeling an urge to write before then, though I'd always had an easy time writing papers for school.  But Elayne convinced me to write book reviews, which then turned into other articles, and presaged the kind of writing I would do years later, when in 1998 I would start doing online movie reviews, and in 2004, I would start that other place.

One day in late May of 1983, Elayne dragged me out of the house because it was time to run off the latest edition of Inside Joke.  I'd had a run of incredibly bad boyfriends and even worse dates, and after the previous night, in which a first date consisted of listening to a guy cry over his ex-wife and talk about his experiences with EST, I'd decided that finding a Special Someone was never going to happen for me. This knowledge had me barely able to get out of bed, but Elayne is the irresistible force that can move the immovable object, and I reluctantly agreed to go.

So Elayne, Anni and I sat in Elayne's car across the street from Siggy's Bar in Fort Lee, New Jersey on a Saturday, bitching about men and waiting for some guy named Steve, who worked for a market research firm and had access to high-speed collating copiers, to arrive by bus.  I pointed out a very handsome young guy, sauntering across the street in a yellow striped polo shirt and white cargo pants, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and said "See that guy?  That guy thinks he's God's gift to women."

The bar formerly known as Siggy's

And then That Guy got into the car.

That Guy, fall 1983, smoking and looking very much like he did on that day in May.

I will never know if Elayne was doing a shidduch that day.  She doesn't have a photographic memory of that day the way I do.  But I vividly remember rattling off one weirdo pop cultural touchstone after another -- from the ones I mentioned above, to the surreal genius that was Ernie Kovacs, to the 1969 New York Mets season, to the WMCA Good Guys -- the DJs on the AM rock 'n' roll station that in the 1960s was the "cool" one to listen to.  If I'd had better self-esteem, I might have noticed that That Guy's eyes were lighting up with each weirdo pop culture reference we had in common. But I think it was that we both remembered Gary Stevens, the evening WMCA DJ, and his imaginary sidekick The Woolyburger, that sealed the deal.  You see, when I was a kid, we had a poodle that we'd named Woolyburger.  She was the best dog I ever knew.  But Gary Stevens went off the air in 1968 when Woolyburger the poodle was only three, and for the next eleven years, I had to explain to people what her name meant.  This became especially difficult in my early teens, when people tended to think it was about pubic hair.

But That Guy, a.k.a. Steve, a.k.a. Mr. Brilliant, knew who the Woolyburger was.  And the rest is history.

Gary Stevens with the Woolyburger in 1965

 

Elayne and I lost touch again after a while.  I'm not sure why.  I think that when Mr. B. and I got married, and we went from dead-end jobs to careers and we became homeowners, our pop culture weirdo status became less noticeable even to us. Elayne kept moving further out in Brooklyn and Anni moved to Reading, PA, and I suppose it was inevitable.  Elayne followed Inside Joke with Four Alarm Firesignal (a.k.a. Falafal), a  new fanzine devoted to the Firesign Theatre alas now consigned to the dustbin of history.  Later on, we both started blogs, and then there was Facebook, and well, we became friends again, hopefully permanently this time, though we live even more miles apart now. Elayne is one of the few people in the world who even know that Mr. B. ever even existed, never mind having this shared memory and such a huge role in my life. But those days in the 1980s were good times.  They were zany and creative and ironic and fun and Elayne is a true American original.   

 

We may not be able to return, but we can look behind from where we came, and I'm thrilled to let you all know that you can too, because Inside Joke -- all ten glorious years of it -- are now available in PDF format for all time.  IJ is a time capsule, but more than that, it's a reminder of when long-form writing was cool, It wasn't about clicks or monetizing or being followed on Twitter.  It was just a bunch of weirdos screaming into the void, hoping other weirdos would read it and find kindred spirits.

 

See you in the funny papers.

 

Inside Joke, December 1984

 

John Oliver and the Rare Medium Beef

Last Sunday, John Oliver did a devastating segment on an industry that preys on the emotions of troubled people.  No, I'm not talking about the purveyors of fake cancer "cures", I'm talking about psychics.

Full disclosure:  I have paid an animal communicator.  Twice.  Both were times when Maggie, my little white cat, was deathly ill and I had no idea what was wrong with her.  The second time was three months after Mr. Brilliant had died.  A stubborn upper respiratory infection had seemingly morphed into a horrible skin disease which manifested as suppurating, crusty sores on first her ears, then her eyelids, her paw pads, and her anus.  I'd had to approve Mr. B. being taken off of life support just three months earlier, and now my beloved babycat was deathly ill and three vets had not been able to tell me what it was.  Maggie was 15 and my head told me it was time but I was unsure if it really was time or if it was just me having run out of gas and just wanting it to be over. 

I don't even remember what this animal communicator said.  There were things that resonated, but I can't tell if she gleaned the things she said from what little information I gave her or if she really can telepath with animals. I do know that she didn't tell me "Maggie wants you to know that it's time to go."

I'm on the fence about these animal communicators. I know that I was pretty desperate when I enlisted the one I did. 

I've never understood people who AREN'T in a life crisis who go to psychics.  A friend of mine went to a party where they had a psychic (which says it all right there), and the psychic said to her "I'm seeing the name 'Steve'."  Well, who DOESN'T know someone named Steve, especially in our age group?  And have you EVER seen a psychic who doesn't tell a bereaved person "S/he wants you to know that s/he loves you very much."  This isn't rocket science.

It's not that I don't believe that the dead can communicate with us, at least for a while.  If you've ever had what I call "dream-visits", you know that they are very different from "dreaming about" the person who died.  In the latter, the person never died or comes back from the dead.  Those are just dreams, and they are obviously about wish fulfillment.  In dream-visits, you both know that they are dead.  They FEEL different. 

Almost 30 years ago, a work colleague was killed when he was hit by a train.  He was a lovely man and his secretary adored him. She was a devout young Catholic who believed in heaven and hell and nothing else -- until the dream visit, when he visited her in the courtyard of the building they worked in and told her that he was OK and she should not be sad...but that he had to leave now.  About 20 years later, I thought about that when his widow showed up on an episode of "Hoarders," a show where the worst hoarders are almost universally people who have never come to terms with the death of a loved one or a divorce.  I think about her sometimes and wonder how she's doing now.

After my mother's husband died in 2000, I had dream-visits almost every night for a month.  In each one of them, he would ask me, "Where's your mother?"  Through that month, he became less sick with every visit.  Whereas in the first visit he was sallow, thin, in pajamas and a bathrobe the way he was when he died, by the time the visits stopped, he was back in jeans and flannel shirt and healthy.  But every time, it was "Where's your mother?"  It was as if he was trying to visit HER, but for whatever reason was unable to.

When my mother died, there were two dream visits, though they took a while.  In the first one, she was in the assisted living residence that she'd been in for a few months before she died 36 hours after going home.  I was shocked that she was still alive, and said "You're going to be so mad, Mom...we thought you were dead and we got rid of all your stuff!  She just patted me on the arm and said it was OK.  We chatted for a while, and she was as calm and happy as I'd ever seen her.  And suddenly I blurted out, "I miss you, Mom.  Not very much, but I do miss you."  And I waited for her to fly into one of her patented rages, but she didn't.  She just patted my arm and said "It's OK."  In the second one, we were sitting on a bench in the cemetery, she was wearing the clothes she was buried in, and we were just chatting about -- I don't even know what.

Mr. Brilliant took a LONG time to visit, and I was sure it was because he hated me -- hated me for not staying 24 x 7 in the ICU at the local hospital that botched his care at the end, hated me for working through that final illness, hated me for letting them stick tubes in him at all, hated me for choosing to let him go instead of letting them cut a hole in his throat for a trache and put a gastric feeding tube into his belly. (I still wrestle with all that, and I always will).  Then one day I was in the shower and I felt this wave of his rage, but I knew it wasn't directed at me; it was directed at his parents -- a rage that had come out after he'd stopped self-medicating when he was ill and which had terrified him.  And I started to cry and said "You have to let it go.  You have to forgive them.  They won't let you move on until you forgive them."

A few days later, I smelled cigarette smoke in the house. A lot of it.  I don't smoke.  I went outside, thinking perhaps our neighbor was sneaking a smoke, as he did sometimes.  No smoke smell outside.  This happened three times.  After the third time, I said "You know, you'd think you could find a way to let me know you're here that wouldn't piss me off."  The next time, I smelled pot.  A lot of it.  The good stuff he used to smoke in Jamaica -- green and loamy and sticky.  The smell was so strong that someone outside would have to be smoking a spliff the size of a cigar to make it smell that much in the house. 

I'd have dream visits too, where we were just talking, though I never remembered when I woke up what we talked about.  The last one was when I was in Prague for work in 2015.  In the dream, Mr. B. was there with me.  We were just talking; that seems to be what happens in these visits, no matter who it's from.  Suddenly I realized that his skin was peeling.  It was little half-moon-shaped peelings.  I said, "You really need to put some moisturizer on that,  you know."  And he said "No, it's just that there's only so long I can incarnate before this happens.  I have to go now."

And that was the last one.

I've seen him since then.  I saw him in the A&P parking lot in New Jersey once.  I saw him at the airport here when I came to look at the house I now live in.  I know those sightings weren't him, but how do we know they can't use other people's bodies to manifest momentarily?  He's been in this house twice.  I see him as a shadow, always in the dark, always at night.  I know it's him because the shadow is tall.  I guess he can't incarnate anymore.  And that's OK.

They say that if you see a penny on the ground, it's a "penny from heaven."  They say that if you see a cardinal in your yard, it's your dead spouse, to which I say that if the cardinal I always see in my yard is Mr. B., I wish he wouldn't bring his new girlfriend and set up a nest here right in front of me. 

The bottom line for me is this:  You don't need psychics.  I have no doubt that there are people whose perceptions are ticked up a notch or two.  But those are not the people charging you a hundred bucks to tell you that your dead mother loves you.  Those people have access to Google and MyLife and Spokeo and a host of places where they can find out about you long in advance and know that you have a friend named Steve.  Or that your mother died in 1997.  But I've experienced enough to believe that yes, we DO go on in some fashion.  I've always envisioned it as being like the movie "Defending Your Life," where if you don't get it right you have to keep doing it until you do...and you have a trial to determine if you got it right.  Maybe I honed into Mr. B's trial that day in the shower and told him that he had to forgive his parents or he couldn't move on.  Or maybe it was just me begging him to forgive ME for the ways I failed him.  I don't know.  I do believe, though, that if we're open to the possibility, they do speak to us.  They don't need a middleman.

 

But here's what I do know:  I know that we just don't know.  The dead have the answer to the question that most of us go through life wondering about.  And some middle-aged woman from Long Island is not going to be able to answer it for us.  We just have to wait till we get there.  And hope that they're all waiting for us there.  Including the pets.  And that they haven't run off with Meryl Streep.  Because, well, who the hell can compete with Meryl Streep? 

And here we go again

This time her name is Christine Blasey Ford.  This time she wasn't harassed on the job, she was sexually assaulted while in high school, by yet another man seeking to ascend to the high court partially so that he can reassert government (male) control over women's bodies.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

I don't know many women to whom something like this has NOT happened.  It happened to me.  I wrote about it any number of times at the old place, but for those who don't know, here it is:

It was the fall of 1974.  I was doing a lot of partying at frat houses at a nearby college.  I was never stumbling drunk, because in those days, most of what was available at frat houses was beer, and I really did not like beer.  But I would get tipsy enough to get flirtatious and when I got flirtatious I ended up in bed with people I might not have otherwise.  Or maybe I would.  After all, I was not one of the pretty girls to whom the guys flocked.  There was a boy at my school who had already branded me as "The Evil Troll" for no good reason at all. So yes, there was a certain amount of nihilism in what I was doing -- "If that's how the game is played, that's how I'll play it."  I was hanging around with other girls who were doing the same, so I did it too. 

I had met the boy in question the summer before at a bar my friends and I used to go to.  He was attractive, went to said nearby school, drove a cool sports car, and he offered to drive me home, which I accepted.  He drove me home, and was a perfect gentleman.  I don't remember if I went on a date with him, I might have.

I ran into him at a frat party that fall, and agreed to go to his room.  Had I been more savvy, or less nihilistic, I would have realized that a guy whose frat house bed is on a raised platform with a desk underneath, and at one end of the bed was a full bar, and along the wall was a high-end stereo system, was not just inviting me back to listen to music.  I might have had sex with him anyway.  But I stupidly climbed up into the loft bed, and the next thing I knew I was being held down, pinned by my shoulders, and told that I was either going to "put out" or my clothes would be torn off and thrown out the window.

He wasn't joking.  So, like most women who are assaulted, I put my mind someplace else until it was over.  I wasn't about to challenge him.  I knew someone who had gotten drunk the semester before, gone off with a guy she had a crush on, and woken up naked in a frat house bed.  All of her clothes were gone except her coat and shoes.  She walked back to our campus in the dead of winter wearing nothing but her coat.  I think the coat was dark green. 

I was not about to follow in her footsteps.

After it was over, I gathered up my clothes and drove back to campus.  I remember thinking "That was a really stupid thing to do."

I did run into the boy again, at another frat party -- the last one I ever went to, because I heard "whispers" when I walked into the room.  I remember walking up to the boy and smacking him HARD across the face (not an easy feat, he was about a foot taller than I was), then turning around and leaving.  As I left, I heard laughter and knew it was not directed at me.

I never went to a frat party again.

The following semester, I met someone at my school and was with him until I graduated.  He was a year behind me and I broke off with him after graduation.  The relationship had grown stale by that time and it was the best thing for both of us.

I went on to live a normal life, including a normal sex life.  I know that seems like TMI, but it's important.  I met Mr. Brilliant when I was 28, and the rest is history.

For me, it was an unfortunate incident partially caused by my own incaution, an incident from which I learned that the sleeping around I was doing was NOT satisfying, it was NOT empowering, and I was getting what in 1974 was known as "a reputation."  It may have been 1974, but it was a provincial area of Pennsylvania, and the "double standard after the fact" was in full flower.  I never thought of it as a sexual assault until much later.  I thought of it as something dumb that I did.  The thought of "pressing charges" would never have entered my mind, and if it did, what would have happened?  I went to the boy's room willingly, and that would have been all anyone needed to know. 

I've been hard on Certain Bloggers who decades later insist on defining themselves as "survivors of rape."  I have never, and still don't, define myself as a "survivor of rape."  I don't have "triggers" -- at least not about an incident that happened 44 years ago.  It really didn't affect my life all that much.  Perhaps I was just more resilient than some people, or perhaps even with my lousy self-esteem, I recognized that a jerk in a frat house didn't define me.  Or maybe it was the slap.  I don't know.  I don't care.

Now if I heard that the boy in question was a Supreme Court nominee, would I feel an obligation to come forward?  Hell yes.  Would I have the guts?  I don't know.  What I do know is that what happened to Christine Blasey when she was 15 happened to me, with a different perp, when I was 17.  And I'll bet it's happened to one hell of a lot of women. many of whom have gone on to put it aside and go on with their lives. 

I don't know how many girls/women that boy went on to assault because of his feeling of privilege, that he had a right to stick his dick into any woman who came to his room,  I suspect I was not the only one.  I also suspect that he went on to get married, have a career, have kids, coach his son's little league team, take his daughter to soccer practice.  Maybe he's still married.  Maybe he became a drunk and had affairs.  I don't know.  Here's what I do know:  I know that sexual assault is not the natural order of things.  I know that even then there were boys who recognized that no meant no and that a girl can go to your room to listen to music.  And that is why it matters.  That is why what Brett Kavanaugh did in high school matters. It also matters because this is a man who detailed graphic sexual questions he thought Bill Clinton should have to answer.  This is a man who has called contraceptives "abortion-inducing drugs."  This is a man who kept a 17-year-old girl from having an abortion EVEN AFTER she had fulfilled all the legal requirements.

I don't know if Brett Kavanaugh still assaults women.  But his documented track record sure tells me that he'd still like to.