Boquet

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I moved around alot as a kid.  

My parents were divorced before I could crawl and by the time I was twelve I had lived in twelve houses and changed schools at every grade level.

The one constant through all of this disruption was that I would spend summers at my dad’s in Southern Oregon. So, when my mom told me at the end of eighth grade that we would be moving from Tucson to Seattle, I knew that once again I’d be spending the summer at my dad’s before starting high school in a new city come fall.

Yay.

I stepped off the plane at the Medford airport with my walkman over my ears, and a canvas side bag full of cassettes, just like I had done the year before and the year before that.

But when I entered the terminal, there was no sign of my dad.

It wasn’t that big of a deal, my dad was known for always running late. 

But when there was still no sign of him forty five minutes after I had picked up my luggage, I was starting to think this was more than just being late.

And when the last car left the tiny airport parking lot and there was only one taxi cab left, it was time to take matters into my own hands.

So I dug into my pockets for some cash that my mom had given me as summer spending money, and told the cab driver to take me not to my dad’s but to my friend's house about twenty minutes away, in the hills between Medford and Ashland.

The cab driver dropped me off at the mail-stop, and I huffed my suitcase down a half mile gravel driveway.

My friend lived on five acres that was split down the middle by a creek. On one side was forest land of Oak and Madrone trees, on the other side was open pasture with small a hill that the house sat on top of, surrounded by bowling ball sculptures.

His dad collected bowling balls from flea markets and then integrated them into the landscape in an ironic commentary of American kitsch. 

Scattered throughout the property, all you could see were urethane orbs of every color…stacked in the form of a pyramid, or hung from trees by fishing line, or posted on rebar like giant lollipops…

If Willy Wonka and the Big Lebowski bought a farm this is how it would feel. 

I knocked on the door, and my friend who had no idea that I was coming, greeted me like I had just been there the day before.

His mom had me call my mom and we tracked down my dad. As it turned out, my dad - who was a minor league baseball umpire - had a game that day and wasn’t expecting me to arrive until the following day.  My mom claimed no knowledge of this.

Obviously there was a difference of opinion between the divorcees, but what matters most is that during this disagreement, nobody told me where to go.

So, I hung up the phone, and I stayed at their house...for the entire summer.

Sure, I saw my dad on weekends when he didn’t have a game, but aside from that it was an entire summer basically doing what I wanted and when I wanted.

When we weren’t playing in the creek, learning to waterski, rafting down the rogue river, we would spend the evening binging the Joshua Tree album, or learning about new bands from his older sister. Sometimes we would go to the mall and hangout, or sneak into the theater to see pivotal movies like Die Hard or Full Metal Jacket.

On Labor Day weekend, his parents hosted their “Bowquet” party: bowling and croquet.

They hired a band, placed high top cocktail tables around the property, and free-spirited friends came over to play a made up game that parodied the high-brow pass-time of the UK. 

At the end of the summer, I got on a plane to Seattle, and when I landed I made my mom promise that we wouldn’t move or change schools during high school.

In two thousand twenty, fires swept through the Rogue valley, and destroyed thousands of homes including the home of that family.

I immediately reached out to ask how I could help. They said that everything was replaceable except for photographs. They had lost all documented memories.

As it turned out, I still had many of the holiday photo cards which showed them aging through the years on that very property.

And then I found a picture from that summer, with me, my best friend, and his dad…and I was reminded how grateful I was that at age fourteen, when I needed it the most, I had a second family that gave me perfect mix of freedom, stability, and bowling balls that I needed.

Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

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When I was in fifth grade, I convinced my single working mother that I was old and mature enough to stay home alone on a sick day from school.

The rub is that I wasn’t sick at all.

Taking a cue from the movie “E.T.”, I wanted to find out if the heating pad and thermometer trick really worked. 

As my mom got ready for work in the morning, I put the heating pad to my forehead and held the thermometer to the lightbulb and then when I heard her coming down the hall to check on me I hid the evidence. Sure enough, my head was hot and I had a fever of one hundred and two.

Reluctantly, my mom put the work phone number on the fridge and left at about 8:30 am. I peaked my head through the blinds as she drove away, and after counting to ten once she turned the corner, I determined that my plan had worked. 

My main motivation was so that I could stay home and watch television. We had just gotten cable TV for the first time - a whopping 8 channels of flicker free television. Feeling confident, I grabbed a bowl of snap, crackle, and pop and settled into the couch to binge Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction.  What I hadn’t counted on however, was that at 11 o’clock, all of the stations - even the cable stations - would switch over to talk-shows or soap operas. 

I had no interest in either.

So now it’s 11:30 AM and I am bored.

To occupy my time I actually chose to clean my own room.

As I was straightening my shelves, I came across a box of discarded and broken toys.  Inside was a silver wristwatch that I could never wear because the pin that holds the band to the watch face had fallen out and been lost. I figured I had some time on my hands so I decided I was going to fabricate that missing pin.

I went to my mom’s sewing kit and pulled out a standard stainless steel sewing pin. And then I brought the pin and the watch to the kitchen table and carefully measured exactly how long of a cut I needed to make.

We didn’t own tin-snips, or wire cutters, or anything like that. All I had was a pair of standard household scissors. So with one hand holding the pin, and the other holding the scissors, I clamped down as hard as I could. Nothing happened. It was clear I was going to need to put some effort into it.

I rested the bottom of the scissors on the edge of the table for leverage and put all my body weight onto the upper handle. And then…the laws of physics took over. The pin slipped out, and my finger took it’s place.

I saw blood on the wall before I felt a thing.

That’s how fast it happened.

To be clear, I didn’t chop off the entire finger. It wasn’t that gruesome. But there was a good couple of centimeters of flesh missing from the tip of my ring finger and I’m pretty sure that I could see bone.

You might think that I was screaming or crying, but there was no point. I was the proverbial tree in the forest with nobody around to hear me.  Or maybe you think I’m gonna call mom. Hell no. Mom thinks I’m home sick. I’m not about to blow my cover by calling her at work.

With blood flying everywhere, I ran upstairs to fetch a bandaid or some medical tape. I arrived at the medicine cabinet, but with only one good hand to work with, it was no use. I couldn’t open the damn package.

I decided to wrap my finger up about eleven times with toilet paper, as if it was gauze. 

It was useless. The blood soaked through the toilet paper faster than I could even apply it.

The next best thing I could think of was to fold over a washcloth, and then double cinch it with a rubber band like a makeshift tourniquet. This was better than the toilet paper, but as I sat there looking at the dark washcloth slowly saturate with blood, I was thinking to myself — “this can’t be sanitary”.

So I went to the refrigator, pulled out a bottle of beer, and proceeded to pour Miller Lite onto my hand.

Now I’m standing in the kitchen, my hand is throbbing from the rubber band, there’s blood stains on the wall and carpet, and my washcloth wrapped hand is dripping beer all over the place.

It was time to call in support.

With the good hand holding the bad, I delicately dialed the rotary phone with my pinky. 

When my mom answered the phone, I gave a blood curdling scream. Astronauts could hear me in space.

My mom raced home and took me to the hosptial.

The doctor properly cleaned me up with iodine, then put some real gauze and tape on, and shielded the entire finger with a protective sleeve. He chuckled when I told him that Miller Lite was a good sanitation solution.

We walked in the house at about three thirty in the afternoon and my mom sat me down in front of the tv to watch re-runs.

As my mom cleaned the house from the damage of the day, she praised me for how responsible I had been in the face of such danger.

She said I was “resourceful” in how I had tried to fix the watch.

And that I showed “maturity” for trying to bandage things by myself before calling her. 

And that I was “level-headed” when I called her.

She never asked me about the fever that I was supposed to have had when she left me six hours before. 

That’s when I realized: I had outsmarted my mom.

Which meant that as long as I could stay out of the hospital, my teenage years were gonna be a lot of fun.

my father's son...

The following was prepared for a live storytelling event told at StorySlam Oakland. As of yet, I have no recording.

———

Growing up, it was just my mom, me, and my older brother. Our parents had divorced so early that I don’t even have a memory of them being together.

My brother is nine years older than me so, naturally, I idolized him. And naturally, it had a huge impact on me. I absorbed all my tastes from being around my brother.

If my brother was going to listen to Blondie and The Talking Heads, that meant that I was going to listen to Blondie and The Talking Heads.

If my brother was going to be an artist, then that meant that I wanted to be an artist too.

And if my brother was going to refer to our dad by his first name, then I was going to do exactly the same. He wasn’t bad-mouthing our dad. He was just using the familiar rather than the formal name. So, I did the same.

There’s only on thing that can come between brothers.

Her name was Brooke.

She was a goddess.

And, by the way, I’m calling her Brooke here because, to me, she was Brooke Shields. This was 1980, at the height of Brooke Shields hoopla. I wasn’t old enough to have seen the “Blue Lagoon”, but I didn’t have to. I had Brooke in my household on a regular basis.

She would come to our house to study. They would go on dates together, and I got to tag along. And they were even in a school play together, where she and my brother kissed on stage.

Of course, this meant that I too had to kiss Brooke.

So one night, after finishing up my dose of evening television, my mom told me that it was time to go upstairs to have my brother read me a story and say good night. 

As fate would have it, Brooke happened to be at the house that night. They were up there.

Studying. 

Listening to Blondie.

Rehearsing for the school play.

Doing everything that I wanted to do.

This was my chance. I stripped down to my Yoda undaroos - just the skivvies, mind you, no tshirt - and marched up to my brother’s bedroom. When I got there, Brooke was sitting on the edge of the bed where I snuggled right up to her and handed her the storybook.

My brother rolled his eyes and went along things.

When the story was over, I asked Brooke for a goodnight kiss.  She leaned over and gave me a peck on the forehead. But then I said — “No, can I have a kiss like the one you gave to him on stage, in the play?”

My brother lost it. I had gone too far.

Because that’s when he blurted out:  “Oh my god, this is so embarrassing. Thank God I’m adopted.”

Adopted?

What the hell is he talking about?

Does this mean that my brother is not my brother?

I was devastated.

I ran downstairs, crying, and told my mom what he had said to me.  My mom sighed and then explained it for me.

It turns out that my mom had been married before my dad and when she married my dad, he adopted my brother who took the same last name. 

“So, technically he’s your half brother,” she explained.

I thought for a moment - so that’s why he calls him Butch!  

But still, something was bothering me.

Even though the family logistics now made sense, I could tell that for the first time, my brother had said something to deliberately get rid of me.  

I wasn’t gonna let that happen. 

I wiped my tears and made my way back upstairs.

This time however, I didn’t care about Brooke at all.

I went straight to my brother and gave him a hug and said:  “I don’t care if you’re adopted. You’re still my brother.”

About a year later, my brother graduated from high school and then went off to college.

I got over Brooke.

And over the next several years, it was just me in the house. During that time, I started to form my own tastes in music, and movies, and girls.

But to this day, I still refer to my dad by his first name…because that’s what my brother taught me.

Lessons from the Fish Bowl

When I was in high school, I worked at a fish-n-chips restaurant in Seattle called The Fish Bowl. It was a mom-n-pop restaurant that had been around for about fifty years. Something above Long John Silvers, but not quite Applebees.

I started when I was fourteen, which was below the legal working age in the state of Washington. When I requested an application, the manager asked “when do you turn sixteen?”. My response was “July”. I wasn’t lying. I just held back the fact that I wouldn’t turn sixteen for a full fourteen months.

I bent time.

I ended up working there for two years. I started with one shift during the week, and one on the weekend. It wasn’t exciting work - tumbling and cutting potatoes, washing dishes, cleaning tables in the dining room - but it was a paycheck, which I loved.

Eventually, I worked my way up to being a fry cook and a shift lead; the highest I could climb without being a manager which couldn’t happen because I was still in school.

Being a shift lead meant shutting down all the fryers, cleaning the restaurant, closing out the register, depositing the money in our safe, and locking up the restaurant for the evening. That’s a lot of responsibility for a sixteen year old kid, let alone one that weighs 120 pounds wet. But I had confidence. This was my world. I knew the place like the back of my hand.

I knew that Ash Wednesday and Good Friday were the busiest nights of the year. I knew that the best day to get a meal there was Thursday, when the fry oil had been seasoned by a day’s worth of use. Not too clean, not too dirty. I knew the regular customers by name. I knew that Mr. Morgan came in, smelling like whiskey, and always ordered his combo platter - 3 prawns, 2 fish - well done.

One Saturday night, after the dinner rush had died down and it was just myself and another worker, I was freaking out. The reason had nothing to do with Lent.

On this particular night my parents were out of town which meant that, according to the bylaws of adolescence, my friends were headed to my house and they were gonna destroy the place.

At about 9pm, I called my house to find out if anybody was there. Sure enough, one of my friends answered my home phone. The shouts of mayhem in the background fueled my anxiety.

I did the mental math. The restaurant didn’t close until 11pm. If I was lucky I would get home by 11:30. According to my calculations, my house would be trashed by 11:15. I would be too late. I had to do something.

If only I could bend time.

And then it hit me. That night happened to be the last night of Pacific Standard Time, which meant that after everyone went to bed at 2AM we would all “spring forward” to 3AM for Pacific Daylight Time. Well that’s an arbitrary time, isn’t it? I mean, nobody stays up to 2AM just so that they can set their clock forward. No, they go to be at 10, 11, or 12, and set it ahead then. Some just wait until they wake up the next morning. Its the one time of the year when everyone bends time.

I told my corworker the plan, which she agreed to as long as I signed off on the extra hour on the timecard. Big man of responsibility, I agreed. So we rushed through our closing procedures, we set the clock to forward, turned out the lights, locked the doors and drove away by 11:15, which was of course 10:15.

I raced home as fast as I could in my beat up VW Rabbit, listening to Big Daddy Kane, knowing for sure that I was going to arrive to find cars parked on the lawn, streams of toilet paper hanging from the trees, and a kid trapped under the glass coffee table. But when I pulled up to my house, the only people there were my two friends. Nobody else had shown up. Turns out my friends and I weren’t cool enough to throw a house party. With the crisis averted, we sat down to have some pizza and watch “Heathers” on VHS.

The next day, I had to be at work at 11am for the Sunday shift. I arrived at 10:45, walked into the break room to get my apron and work shirt, and my boss handed me my paycheck and said:

“This will be your last paycheck.”

He was firing me. I couldn’t figure out how how knew. I knew that my coworker wouldn’t have ratted us out, so when I acted surprised (“What? Why”? ) he explained.

“Mr. Morgan came in at 10:15 last night, wanting to get his Combo Platter.”

Damn you Mr. Morgan.

My boss explained how my I had risked the reputation of the restaurant, and betrayed his trust in me as an employee, and lectured me about about “responsibility”. I didn’t push back. I took it on the chin.

I told my mom that I had gotten fired for showing up late too many time. I couldn’t tell her the truth or else she’d know that I had had friends over.

Looking back, I realize that this was my first experience with work-life balance. Of course, that’s a concept didn’t exist back then.

But now, whenever a recruiter or hiring manager, asks me about my philosophy of work-life balance, I just tell them:

“Well, I promise I won’t close your business an hour early, but nights and weekend or for the family.”

Always.

Marion's cure...

Watch the following scene and ask yourself: “What is Marion holding to her head (and why)?”

Like most people, I have seen this movie a gazillion times and have naturally thought that she is holding shot glasses to her head.

But for some reason, the performance has confused me over the years. I could never understand -- "why is she holding shot glasses to her head? Her pose indicates some sort of emotional strife, so if anything she would just be holding her hands up to her head, not glasses."

Nevertheless, the scene moves on and it works. No harm done.

But then, low and behold, I recently read a version of the screenplay and there is a scene that happens right before this one -- between the customers leaving and Indy arriving — where Marion goes outside and balls up snowballs in her hands. Why does she do this?

Lawrence Kasdan's scene description says it explicitly:

Now…watch it again, without sound. Here it is, enlarged.

She is in fact holding snowballs in each hand. You can see drops of water fly off her screen right hand when she flings them down. And later in the scene (not present here), her shirt is wet from the melted snow that has dropped onto her blouse.

This recent discovery blows me away, for three reasons.

First, I love the character trait alone. The fact that Kasdan wrote a hangover cure into the script is pure brilliance.

Second, I’m intrigued by the production mystery. Clearly, Karen Allen and the art department we’re both informed of the hangover cure and told to use snowballs for her performance. But then what happened? Did they not shoot the other scene? Or did they decide that they simply didn’t need to shoot it?

And this brings me to what I love most…how the scene’s omission was solved for. To explain further, try to forget that you’ve seen this movie a thousand times and imagine you are a fly on the wall in the mixing phase of this film.

Everyone is here: Spielberg, Lucas, Michael Kahn (picture editor), and Ben Burt (sound designer/mixer). The film is up on screen and Burt and Kahn are discussing a “problem” with the sound effects for the moment, which peaks Spielberg’s interest.

Spielberg: “What’s the problem?”

Kahn: “We don’t have the scene before this. We never see her make snowballs.”

Lucas: “So what? Just put some sound effects on it. We don’t need to see her do it.”

Everyone looks to Burt. He remains silent, then a smirk of confidence comes across his face.

Burt: “Actually, I don’t see snowballs. I see shot glasses.”

Spielberg/Lucas/Kahn: “Shot glasses?!”

Burt: “Yeah. She just drank a guy under the table and has cleared the bar of shot glasses. She’s holding shot glasses.”

Kahn: “But Larry said they’re snowballs. Besides, we can SEE that they are snowballs.”

Burt. “No you cant.”

Kahn. “Yes, I can.”

Burt: “No you cant."

Burt adjusts the mix, and presses play.

The clip plays back, and now everyone in the room — the director, the producer, and the editor, all “see” shot glasses fly from Karen Allen’s hands.

Well done Mr. Burt. Well done.

And thank you Mr. Kasdan. Thank you.