Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

Off The Eaten Path

November 17, 2006

Every time he would make a trip to the grocery store my grandfather would say, "I guess I’d better buy some food. I haven’t figured out how to live without it yet." I think he was kidding, but I thought about that expression a lot the summer I worked in a restaurant. It wasn’t exactly a fast food place–it was one of those places where you sit down and get real utensils, so it wasn’t exactly "fast", but what they gave you wasn’t exactly "food" either. Mainly it was known for its breakfast and salad bar. Actually that was the only thing it was known for, the pride and joy of the place, or at least the pride. They had a big bottle of Joy, but the guy in charge of washing the dishes never used anything but hot water and a piece of fabric torn from whatever shirt he was wearing at the time.

But I digress. When I was hired, a college student with no restaurant experience who was only going to stick around for a few months, they naturally put me in charge of the breakfast and salad bar. Maybe they’d heard I had a lot of experience with bars but didn’t realize it wasn’t the kind you go to for breakfast, unless your idea of breakfast is a Bloody Mary.

But I digress. Working the breakfast and salad bar was the perfect job for someone in college, if your definition of "perfect" is broad enough to include "lousy". I had to come in five minutes before dawn to give the bar enough time to heat up so when the cook came in two hours later the containers that held the eggs and pancakes and sausage would be warm enough. The only people who came in earlier than I did were the guy who hosed down the parking lot, which is so important it had to be done even when it was raining, and the guy who put the letters on the outside marquee. The marquee guy was the only one whose job was worse than mine: he had to come in first thing every morning and put, "COME IN FR OUR BREKFAST BAR" on the marquee, and then come back in last thing every night and take the letters down. He had to do this because once he left the letters up overnight and vandals came and spelled, "A BACKBITER REFORMS FOR NU." I can’t tell you how much trouble this caused. The guy who hosed down the parking lot was from Finland, and, when he was done, always came in to have a cup of coffee and tell me I was very nice, which is the kindest thing anyone from Finland has ever said to me.

But I digress. While they were doing their jobs I was busy putting together the salad bar. The restaurant manual explained that the salad bar was to be set up first, and then the breakfast bar had to be put on top of it. That way after the breakfast rush was over the eggs and pancakes and bacon could simply be removed and the lettuce and sliced vegetables and salad dressings would be nice and hot in time for lunch. Also I had to make fluff, which was artificially processed whipped topping substitute mixed with the liquid from a jar of maraschino cherries. For some reason people ate this stuff. Actually one of the most valuable lessons I learned working there is that if you put it on a bar people will eat it. I once left my towel on the bar by mistake and came back to find someone putting syrup on it. The other valuable lesson I learned is that everything restaurants serve can be powdered. When I told people where I worked they would always say, "Oh, I love their gravy! How do they make it?" I would tell them it was a powder that came in a bag. No one would believe me, so I finally started photocopying and handing out the gravy instructions from the manual: "First shake the bag several times to make sure the cockroaches are evenly distributed." Pretty soon people stopped asking me about the gravy. I also learned never to eat at that restaurant again. In fact the whole experience was almost enough to put me off food entirely, but I never could learn to live without it.

I Left My Body To Science, But I’m Afraid They Turned It Down

November 10, 2006

So I got some blood drawn recently for an experiment. As much as I like advancing science I wasn’t looking forward to it because, from what I remember of the last time I had blood drawn, it was painful. Admittedly it wasn’t unbearably painful, but, strange as it may seem, I don’t like pain. I try to avoid things like jumping off buildings or setting my hair on fire or being jabbed by needles because, and maybe I’m mistaken, I think these things will cause pain. But then I don’t really know how painful getting blood drawn was the last time it happened, which was several years ago, because I was already in pain from what doctors ended up thinking might be a kidney stone. And I was in a hospital emergency room at four a.m. on Christmas Eve. If this had been a television drama about doctors the waiting room would be full of guys in Santa suits who’d set their hair on fire or jumped off buildings, all the doctors would be married to, and in the middle of divorcing, each other, and the entire nursing staff would be drunk. Fortunately life is rarely like television and, aside from my very worried wife, the only other thing in the waiting room was a video tape about spinal injuries that was unplayable because it looked like somebody sat on it. And although the technician who handled the X-ray machine told me she was hung over, which is one of those things you don’t want to hear from someone who’s about to bombard you with radiation, everybody was nice and professional and low-key and, after drawing some blood, they gave me some nice drugs that made the pain, and everything else, go away.

Then, about a week later, there was the sonogram. I can’t complain about that because it not only didn’t hurt, but they let me look at the monitor so I could see that my spleen looks exactly like Ed Koch. But I digress. Then there was the visit with my doctor. By then I wasn’t doubled over in pain anymore, but he was doubled over laughing that someone as young as me would have a kidney stone. I’m still not sure what he found so funny. Maybe it hadn’t sunk in yet how little time a really sick patient would leave him for playing golf. Fortunately he’ s not my doctor anymore, and since then I’ve never had a recurrence. In fact I haven’t had anything major. I’ve avoided disease and doctors and hospitals like the plague. I’ve even avoided the plague like the plague. And while I’m still not going to go stabbing myself with needles all the time I’m happy that this last time it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. The nurse was nice and professional and the best part is she wasn’t hung over.

Through A Glass By Acme

November 3, 2006

I love Daylight Savings Time. Or, more specifically, I love when it ends. I’m not such a big fan of the springing forward, but falling back into an extra hour of sleep is something I’m happy to do any time. Of course I don’t always get an extra hour of sleep, but since I’m awake and it’s the weekend I might as well sit around in my pajamas, eat cereal, and watch cartoons. Just because I’m an adult I don’t have to put away all childish things, right? And cartoons prepared me for adulthood, or at least for college. I’m not talking about the cartoons that exploded when I was a kid and that were designed solely to sell me crap–I eat cereal, but even when I was a kid I stayed away from any cereal that was based on a cartoon, or that had a cartoon based on it. Sometimes they both appeared so close together it was hard to tell which came first: the cheap, cloying doll, the cheap, cloying breakfast cereal, or the cheap, cloying cartoon show.

I’m talking about the classic cartoons: the Looney Toons. I think they even prepared me for adulthood, or at least college. I spent four years in college reading authors like Camus, Beckett, and Danielle Steele who went on and on and on about how life is absurd and we’re engaged in the futile pursuit of the unattainable. I kept thinking it sounded familiar, and then I realized that I’d seen it all before in all those Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons. "Waiting for Godot" would have been a lot better if it had been about two guys buying catapults and rocket-propelled roller skates from the Acme company.

But I digress. I’ve decided that falling back from Daylight Savings Time is such a good idea that we should skip the springing forward and just fall back. This will eventually put us in a weird state where the sun is up at midnight and noon falls in the middle of the night, but think about how much daylight we’ll be saving.

House on Haunted Hill

October 27, 2006

I’ve never been in a real, bona fide haunted house. Sure, there was something that lived in my closet when I was a kid, and I’ve been in houses where the doorknobs rattled, the lights flickered, and the walls oozed green slime dredged up from the depths of Hell, but those weren’t "haunted" so much as "built in the 1970’s", when green slime dredged up from the depths of Hell was a very popular insulating material. Once, while out cruising around late at night, my friends and I went in what someone claimed was a haunted barn. It was pretty scary when we were wandering around inside it and heard a strange sound that sounded vaguely like "gloot, gloot, gloot." It turned out to be a cow drinking from a trough. If you don’t think cows are scary in the daytime try meeting one in a dark barn in the middle of the night.

But I digress. There was a time when various youth groups would put on their own haunted house in a church basement or old house. These are a great fundraiser, if by "fundraiser" you mean "spending four-hundred dollars to make two-hundred dollars". Nowadays every theme park has its annual Hallowe’en festival where the scariest thing is the admission price, and there are the new professional haunted houses, set up in old prisons or out-of-business warehouse stores. If you want something really scary go to a warehouse store that’s still in business. A set of patio furniture for just twenty dollars? Shocking! Terrifying! Xiphosuran!

But I digress. You might have heard the urban legend about the haunted house out in a field in Nebraska, or maybe Nevada, or maybe Nigeria, some place that starts with ‘N’. This house, so the story goes, has thirteen floors and you pay fifty bucks to get in, or maybe it’s fifty floors and you pay thirteen bucks to get in, and if you make it through the entire thing you get your money back. Here’s the scary part: the house is so terrifying that no one’s ever made it all the way through. That sounds almost like the plot of an old horror movie: "The Refund That No One Ever Got", starring Dick Miller, Beverly Garland, and Charles Middleton as The Bald Guy. Filmed in glorious Consternation-o-Vision!

But I digress. When I was a kid there was a house in my neighborhood that I thought was haunted. The people who lived there were the Huns, who were pretty ordinary people, if by "pretty ordinary people" you mean "The Manson Family". They had twelve boys who made the gang from "A Clockwork Orange" look like Boy Scouts. They moved away and were replaced with a succession of people who never stayed more than six months but each new family that moved in brought a bigger, stranger dog. By the time I left the people living there had what looked like a haystack with ears. This "dog", if that’s really what it was, only barked once and all the windows in the neighborhood broke. It wasn’t the dogs, or their owners, though, that made me think the place was haunted so much as the house itself. It was tall and narrow with a high-peaked roof. The windows and door were placed to make it look like the house had a face, and if that wasn’t spooky enough the Huns, or maybe their predecessors, had decided that dark gray and brown was a nice color scheme. No one ever stayed around long enough to repaint it. It was a seriously creepy house from the outside. I never saw the inside of it. If I ever went inside I probably wouldn’t make it all the way through and would lose my fifty bucks.

The Tenth Planet

October 20, 2006

Every once in a while someone tries to sell me the Hot Rods of the Gods theory–the idea some time ago in distant history aliens landed on this planet and mated with humans or otherwise influenced our development. As proof they usually point to the pyramids, or at least in a random direction because they’re not always sure where the pyramids are, although they’re pretty sure the pyramids are somewhere East of here. Supposedly humans couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids, but why not? The way I see it the ancient Egyptians had a choice: they could either devote themselves to building monuments or they could figure out how to keep the sand out of their food. So they ended up toothless but with the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that’s still standing. What could aliens do for us that we couldn’t do for ourselves, aside from inventing drywall? And even if aliens did make us who we are it wouldn’t be all the aliens. Somebody has to stay home on Rigel Seven and cook the meals and dig the ditches while a select group went off to a small blue-green planet to muck around with the DNA of some chimpanzees, build the pyramids, paint the Mona Lisa, and invent Velcro. It would be the explorers, the inquisitive ones, the ones who couldn’t get real jobs–in a word, the scientists. I’m not knocking scientists. Scientists figured out how to pasteurize cheese, and this is a lot of fun at parties, but scientists also recently got into a massive argument over whether Pluto was a planet. Admittedly they didn’t clumsily shoehorn two completely unrelated things together like I just did, but I thought I’d distract you with a little stuff about aliens that I’ve had on the back burner for years then sideswipe you with my fury over Pluto becoming a galactic second-class citizen. Never mind that it doesn’t matter to anyone except Percival Lowell’s relatives whether Pluto’s a planet, a planetoid, an asteroid, or an aster.

Discovering a new planet is a reason to rewrite the textbooks, but shouldn’t Pluto get some credit for being a planet for most of the last century? Yes, it’s an oddball–which makes it like a lot of scientists. Obviously when they wrote the rules for planets they didn’t plan it very well. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune don’t even have a surface you can stand on. (I’ll take a moment while all those of you who are mentally thirteen make a joke about standing on Uranus.) They’re gas giants. So is my Uncle Harry, but I don’t hear anyone calling him a planet even though he believes everything revolves around him. But I digress. Scientists should know better than anyone else the dangers of baseless decisions and sloppy classification. For all we know there are aliens living on Pluto, and now that we’ve demoted it they might get mad enough to come down here and take back their pyramids.

Gene Shalit’s Wife [Part 3]

October 13, 2006

It’’s a two-hour drive to her mother’s house. She’’s not sure why she was expecting something more significant, some turning point like the ones in the endless string of Scandinavian movies Gene brought home seemed to revolve around. She’’s glad it was nothing more than a fall even if it worries her that the doctor wants to keep her mother for overnight observation.

The city limits rapidly give way to cornfields and radio static. She feel’s she’s escaped the world into a timeless place where the wheels of the car are spinning in air. She doesn’t mention this to the cop who pulls her over for speeding.

She calls Gene from her mother’s house and tells him she’’s decided to stay through the weekend. She’s brought with her a paper she’s been writing comparing Kashubian vampire legends and flying-head tales of natives of Rondonia. For years she’’s been writing papers on anthropology and folklore and submitting them to various journals only to have them returned with notes that say the papers aren’t what the editors are looking for or that they don’t have enough space. Most of them encourage her to try again, but she feels she’s spent her entire life trying again.

She goes to the movie theater where she and Gene had what she now considers their first date. It’’s still a movie theater, but part of the lobby has been converted to a video rental business. The greasy-haired boy behind the counter doesn’t ask for ID when she signs up for a membership, and she puts down her mother’s address on the form. She rents “Rear Window”, but when she gets home she discovers that her mother doesn’t own a VCR.

Fast-forward five years. Gene understands her decision to move in with her mother rather than making her mother move in with them. She doesn’t mind being a caretaker, and Gene spends a large amount of time away from home attending film festivals and conferences. At home he still occasionally reviews movies on the news, but there’’s less call for film critics. Most of his time is taken up with editing a film journal. Her time is spent either with her mother or answering phones in a customer service job. It pays the bills, but she’s exhausted. Gene sends her a book about the Kung people of Namibia and she barely manages to read a page a night.

During a checkup her doctor notices something unusual and orders more tests.

On the operating table she breathes deeply, taking in the smell of the plastic mask. Then someone leans over her. It’s her late father. He tells her it’s going to be fine, that it’s only a cyst. She thinks, He looks a little like Gene. She sees herself in fifteen years. She is an assistant in the local college and teaches English as a second language. She’s surprised to find this is what she wants.

Gene Shalit’s Wife [Part 2]

October 6, 2006

Part 2 – Parental Guidance Suggested

Her mother tells her the boy next door, the one she used to babysit, is going on a date and that it would be nice if she agrees to be a chaperone. She knows her mother is really trying to get her out of the house some time before her spring break ends and she goes back to college. It turns out the boy’’s girlfriend’’s older brother, Gene, is also chaperoning. Her mother jokes that they’re double-dating. The kids want to see “Jaws”. The theater’s smaller screen is running a series of Hitchcock films. Gene suggests that they let the kids go see their movie while the “adults” see “Rear Window”. She agrees. Gene is pleased. He asks her a little about herself–where she goes to school, what her major is. Gene goes to Columbia. He tells her he’s going to be a film critic. He’s so confident in saying this that she doesn’t know how to answer. She’s majoring in Anthropology because she doesn’t know what she wants to do and it was the first listing in the college catalog. She enjoys it. She even thinks she has a talent for it, although she thinks it might have been the same if she’d majored in Zoology. Gene starts talking about the genius of Hitchcock. She looks at him and thinks of a bullfrog she caught in the creek behind her house. She remembers that in early versions of “The Frog Prince” the princess doesn’t change the frog into a prince by kissing him but by throwing him against the wall. She is only twenty. She looks around the theater, and everyone there is older than she. She feels much older than she really is.

Gene is silent through the movie except once. There’s a scene of a man playing a piano with someone is standing behind him. Gene leans over and hisses in her ear, “”That’’s Hitchcock.”” She’s seen the movie three times already, but always on television, and she’s never noticed this before. She thinks Hitchcock looks a little like a hairless Gene.

Gene is driving. After he drops off the boy next door Gene turns to her and says, “”Would you like to go for a drive?”” She declines. He smiles and says, ““See you later, then.””

He calls her in late May. She’’s in the middle of finals. She’’s studying the Netsilik peoples. One of their gods is an angry abandoned child who sits at the bottom of the ocean causing storms. She imagines him as a big, fat infant pounding his fists on the black, silty ocean floor. She’’s so stressed she launches into this without giving him a chance to explain why he called. After she finishes there’’s silence. Then Gene says, ““Listen, would you like to go out while we’re both home for the summer?””

Fast-forward five years. She and Gene have been married for two years now. He’s been working as a feature writer at the paper and has finally gotten the chance to do film reviews. She works part time doing check out at the grocery store. One night they go see a film called “The Elephant Man”. Gene strikes up a conversation in the lobby with a man who, as it turns out, is a producer of one of the local television news shows. They discuss Kubrick, Kurosawa, and Ophuls. She feels lost. She looks at a small sign that says the Disney film “Alice In Wonderland” is being re-released.

After the movie Gene and the producer continue their conversation. Gene tells her he won’t be late. She takes the car home and spends the evening reading. She is studying Norse mythology.

Fast-forward five years. Gene has become something of a local celebrity, appearing regularly on both the local morning talk show and the evening news. He’s happy, but occasionally moody. One night as they lie in bed he tells her he’s given a movie called Summer Rental a glowing review even though he thought it was the most awful thing he’d ever watched. She tells him that what’s important is that he’’s successful, that he’s set goals for himself and has achieved them. Inwardly she berates herself for sounding like warmed-over graduation speech, and wonders, as she does on a regular basis, what purpose critics really serve. She’’s been taking a class in Egyptian mythology at the local college, but still hasn’t decided what she wants for her own future.

Gene spends a lot of time on the weekends watching movies. He tells her the VCR is an amazing invention, that it will revolutionize the film industry and give everyone a greater appreciation of film history. She only regularly watches television on Saturday nights. She watches an old British science fiction show called “”Doctor Who””. Several actors play The Doctor, an alien who travels through space and time saving the universe from other aliens. She thinks the culture of actors would be a fascinating anthropological study, but she doesn’t know any actors.

Of all the actors who play the Doctor her favorite is Patrick Troughton. He’’s small and clownish and absent-minded. He reminds her of Gene. Gene tells her Troughton was also in The Omen II and Sinbad: Eye of the Tiger. She watches these films, but doesn’t recognize the funny little man she’s accustomed to. She wonders what the real Patrick Troughton is like.

The same day she reads in the newspaper that Patrick Troughton has died she gets a call from her mother in the hospital.

To be concluded.

Gene Shalit’s Wife [Part 1]

Source: Wikipedia

September 29, 2006

Freethinkers Anonymous has been modified as follows. It has been formatted to fit this screen.

Part 1-Coda

There was a local writing contest that I entered for several years. Each year I managed to be a runner-up. I apparently made it through to the final round of judging, but always managed to fall short of third place. It became almost a badge of honor, so much so that I became afraid of winning. I would joke that I was, metaphorically, always a bridesmaid but never a bride. But I still hoped to win. One year, after I’d mailed off my submission, I had a strange dream that I was Gene Shalit’s wife. Gene Shalit is a movie critic who’s probably best known for his big moustache and wild, curly hair. I don’t know why, of all people, he percolated up from the depths of my brain. It’s also hard to explain what I mean when I say I was his wife. Sometimes in dreams I assume completely different identities; I become a different person with a different life history. Many cultures believe that, in dreams, we leave our bodies and can enter the bodies of others. I don’t buy that myself; it’s more like getting deeply involved with characters in books or movies or plays or television shows. We sympathize with and understand these characters sometimes even more intimately than the real people who are closest to us because their most private moments, though fictional, are on public display.

In the dream I, Gene Shalit’s wife, also entered a writing contest and also had a long history of being a runner-up. I told Gene this, and he laughed and said, “Well, move over Susan Lucci!” Susan Lucci, by the way, is a soap opera star who was nominated for a Daytime Emmy award approximately one-hundred and thirty-seven times before finally winning. I’ve said there’s no such thing as useless information, but knowing who Susan Lucci is comes darn close. I’d tell people about this dream and they’d laugh. What they missed was that, from my perspective, Gene Shalit’s wife was more tragic than comic. She and I shared the feeling of never being quite good enough, although my own wife was a lot more sympathetic than her husband seemed to be. Finally someone suggested that I should write a story abo ut Gene Shalit’s wife, and I realized that this character I’d briefly inhabited had a story, and that she deserved to have it told. Since I don’t know anything about Gene Shalit other than what I’ve told you, the story isn’t really about him or his wife, if he’s ever been married, but rather about the wife of a movie critic. I’m grateful to Mr. Shalit for bubbling up in my sleeping brain, maybe as a way of telling me that just because critics are paid for their opinions doesn’t necessarily make them more right than anyone else. And the same is true of contest judges. Ultimately, though, this is a work of pure fiction. I hope you’ll sympathize with and understand her, but remember that any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Milking It

September 22, 2006

This puzzler has been sent to me via e-mail by approximately 3,000 different people: Who was it that first looked at a cow and said, "I think I’ll squeeze those dangly things and drink whatever comes out"? What this misses is that cows aren’t the only animals that get milked by people. Goats get milked. Buffaloes get milked. I’ve even had buffalo cheese. Oddly enough it tasted like cow cheese. I half expected it to taste like chicken.

But I digress. Sheep, reindeer, and even camels get milked. In some places people even milk yaks. Have you ever seen a yak? In some places "yak" is a synonym for "vomit". If you’ve ever seen a yak it wouldn’t surprise you that sometimes the two places overlap. If you’ve ever seen a yak, or a camel for that matter, then suddenly drinking cows’ milk doesn’t seem that strange. At least cows don’t spit like camels, and, unlike yaks, they’re not covered with long, stringy hair that’s hiding who knows what kinds of bizarre parasites. My grandfather would never touch whipped cream because when he was a boy his family owned a cow that once ate onions before being milked. The milk, and the cream that came from it, tasted like onions. Given a choice between onion-flavored whipped cream, though, and anything that came out of a yak, I’d take ask for some strawberry shortcake with that whipped cream.

But I digress. People have been drinking milk for thousands of years, and the question of who first got the idea of milking cows isn’t nearly as interesting as the question of what other animals they tried before settling on a few select ruminants. All mammals produce milk for their young, so that includes dolphins, dogs, humpback whales, pangolins, platypuses, anteaters, rats, cats, lemurs, moles, voles, hyenas, and even tigers. Can you imagine trying to milk a tiger? It would certainly make the dairy industry more interesting, and you’d never have to worry about them eating onions.

Mad Cow

September 15, 2006

The Swiss government has issued warnings about cows. Apparently some hikers were getting a little too friendly with cows they met on their walks and were being attacked by the cows. Note that this is happening in Switzerland, so feel free to insert your own joke about men in lederhosen with enormous trumpets, cheese with holes, Heidi, chocolate, pen knives, banks, cuckoo clocks, neutrality, or Orson Welles. And remember when everybody who was cool had to have a Swatch watch? Now a "swatch" is no longer a watch but a tiny square of fabric that an interior decorator will charge you $1500 and two pints of blood just to look at. Whatever happened to Swatch watches? I know: watch makers realized gold was a more effective status symbol than day-glo plastic.

But I digress. I don’t understand how people are getting attacked by cows because, personally, I’m terrified of cows. Spiders and most other insects don’t bother me. And I’m the guy my neighbor calls whenever she sees a snake in her yard because she knows I’ll take it away and release it in the woods behind our houses. She’s nice enough to not kill the snake and, in turn, I’m nice enough to not tell her it’s probably the same snake each time. But I digress. You probably think of cows as cute and friendly because they’re big, slow-witted animals, but so are pro-wrestlers. Do you really want to run up and pet any of them you meet out in the wild? That’s what’s so idiotic about this: the instructions for dealing with cows sound like common sense instructions for dealing with almost any animal you meet out in the woods or while spinning around on a grassy knoll singing "The Hills Are Alive". The instructions include: don’t make eye contact, don’t wave sticks at them, don’t fondle calves. I find it strange that the Swiss will buy art stolen by the Nazis but frown on fondling calves, but I’ll keep that in mind the next time I visit Europe: if I want my calves fondled I’ll have to go to Amsterdam.

But I digress. The instructions also include this gem: "Give a precise blow to the muzzle of the cow when in absolute need." I don’t know how they define "absolute need". Maybe you’re supposed to understand intuitively when to sock a cow in the nose. The same advice was once given for dealing with sharks. A solid punch to the schnozz as a shark deterrent was first suggested by an experienced seaman named One-Armed Pete. Are we really supposed to believe that punching a cow is going to be any more effective than punching a shark? And cows are scarier than sharks. At least with sharks you can get out of the water. I once saw a cow floating in a river. The fact that it was no longer breathing didn’t make it any less disturbing, especially since I’d been swimming in that river about twenty minutes before. Between the cholesterol and the mad cow disease and now the attacks on hikers I’m beginning to think we should find some safer animal to make cheeseburgers out of. Like maybe pro wrestlers.