Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
The place to be
Humans are meme* sponges, and none are spongier than children. In first grade, I got infected by the fame meme. I vanted to be a star.
If only Cintra Wilson had been a playmate on my street; she might have inoculated me against the fame virus. As it was, I fell under Hollywood’s spell. I saw a want ad in the TV guide for child actors and I bit.
When I was four or five, I spontaneously broke into song at our local pizza parlor, where they had a real live piano man. I belted out “Home on the Range”; I was the original karaoke maven. (My wife would call it budding exhibitionism, and she’d be right. Hmm. Exhibitionism. Isn’t that what blogging is all about?) Bottom line, I loved having an audience.
As I recall, I got a job from my first casting call, a major role in James Whitmore’s upcoming TV series, My Friend Tony (January to September, 1969). If you follow that link, you’ll learn the following:
When he was in Italy shortly after the end of World War II, John Woodruff was almost pick-pocketed by a very young street hood named Tony. Years later, a fully grown Tony arrived in America to join John as half of a private-investigation team.
I was that very young street hood! See? I’ll bet you always wondered where you’d seen me before.
I only had to do one thing for this role: pick James Whitmore’s pocket. I recall that Whitmore was a royal creep who couldn’t be bothered to learn my name (I was ‘the kid’). I also recall that in the story boards for my scene, everything appeared in silhouette. I figured the drawings had to be in silhouette because the director hadn’t met me yet and didn’t know what I looked like.
When the show finally aired, the whole family watched it. There I was in the opening credits — where I would be week after week for the show’s whole run — a tiny silhouette in the uppermost fifth of the screen trying to pickpocket a slightly larger silhouette.
Fame. But it got better. Before long, I would find myself sitting nearly naked in Eva Gabor’s lap.
You know, I’ve always wondered why I can’t ever manage to catch MY episode of Green Acres on television. The answer is easy: six seasons, 170 episodes. As best I can tell, mine is episode 145, “The City Kids”.
Here’s my Green Acres insider FAQ. Since the kids at school only ever asked me two questions, this will be short.
Q: Did you meet Arnold the Pig?
A: No, I did not get to meet Mr. the Pig.
Q: So I bet you think you’re pretty cool, huh?
A: Well, yes, actually —
Q: Dontcha, punk, ya little shit —
A: Okay, the Q&A is over now . . .
For Green Acres, my role required that I run around the Douglases’ living room with a giant candle holder and get myself stuck up the Douglases’ chimney. (Is there something oddly phallic about that, or is it just me?) Once I’m stuck up the chimney, the other kids tug on my legs to pull me out, and they pull off my pants by accident. When they finally get me out, my face is all smudged with soot.
Hmm. Are you laughing yet?
After the director got himself a satisfying take, I ran off the set. My main thought was to get my pants back, but Eva Gabor intercepted me, plopped me on her lap, cooed madly at me, and tried to wipe my face clean.
My mother was no help at all. She was so ecstatic to find me giving Eva Gabor a lap dance that she hung about, basking in Eva’s starlight, gushing how much she loved her in Gigi.
I’d really, really like to say I grabbed myself a bit of stellar action, a fistful of Hooterville Hooters, as it were, but sadly, I was embarrassed as hell sitting half-naked in some strange woman’s lap. Yet another example of me passing up an opportunity to score.
So: did I go on to become the youngest Brady? Did I get to play Eddie’s father’s son, or the littlest Munster? No, although I could have become a model for the star of MTV’s The Head:
Yup, I became a nine-year-old creep, a genuine prick. Couldn’t understand why the other kids weren’t as impressed with me as I was.
I may be misremembering this, but I think the camel-back-breaking straw came the day our teacher announced that a boy in one of the other first grade classes had died in a dune buggy accident. I waved my hand, and when the teacher pointed to me, I said, “Well, at least he’ll get his name in the newspaper.”
Based on that, my parents decided that this fame thing had gone a bit too far. That was the end of my acting career, except for my starring role in our first grade class’s production of Chicken Little.
Weird thing is, I never really missed it.
D.
*”Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life.” – from Meme Central.
Better definition: memes are infectious thoughts or ideas. “Blueberries are blue” is not a meme. “M-m-m-my-Sharona” is (if you hum it and get other folks to hum it, too). Courage is not a meme, but a code of chivalry is. Religion is the Typhoid Mary of memes.
P.S.: Bare Rump is back. I thought about having her meet up with Seymore Butts on his casting couch (what — you don’t think Seymore would be interested in a hot new actress named Bare Rump?) but Karen says Bare Rump has too much integrity to appear in a porno. Ergo, Bare Rump’s Diary remains PG-13 (weeeell, occasionally R) for the time being.
Sex, but not the good kind
I woke up with a headache this morning, then made it worse by working on my NiP for four hours. I’m deep in editing hell (fixing plot holes, setting up deus so they ain’t ex machina in the last fifty pages, that sort of thing). Fortunately, the manuscript will, by tomorrow afternoon, be up to snuff.
No, that does not mean I’m sending it out. It means I’m willing to print it out so I can begin my hard copy edit. Yippee!
Bottom line, I had serious literary brain freeze a moment ago trying to come up with a topic for today’s blog. My best idea was to take the top ten search topics at Technorati and use them in my own version of the Aristrocrats Joke*. The trouble with that idea is (1) I really don’t want to exploit Cindy Sheehan, and (2) the Aristrocrats Joke is filthy enough that I would surely alienate half my readership or more. (I think I’d be down to Maureen and Gabriele ;o)
Instead, I asked Karen, “What old story of mine haven’t I told yet?”
Without one second’s pause: “Male pelvic exams in medical school.”
God I love her.
Rummy Exaggerating
If you’re in the mood for edification, Karen will soon be posting the first installment of her capsule history of Afghanistan.
Has everyone left who is going to leave? Good. I’m assuming the rest of you want to hear about the teaching of male pelvic exams to naive medical students.
First, let me assure you that we did not practice on one another. Heavens, no. We’d never be able to look at each other afterwards. Homophobia is rampant among male medical students, as my tale of Fred has previously demonstrated.
Instead, the school enlisted the assistance of a corps of seasoned men, doubtless gathered by trolling Polk Street with a bullhorn. Heterosexuals do not volunteer for this job. Undoubtedly, this boosted the anxiety of Fred and a few of my other friends, but they sucked it up (so to speak). Like other medical students, they well understood the meaning of the phrase “requirement for graduation.”
We divided up into mixed-sex groups of four and met privately with our volunteers in small classrooms. One by one, we pulled on our gloves and practiced palpating our volunteer’s penis and testicles. (“That’s my epididymis. That’s normal. If you feel any other bumps down there, that would be bad.”) We each finished our round-the-world journey with a visit to Mr. Prostate. Our volunteer was great; Fred Rogers was never this patient.
Afterwards, we compared notes. Fierce howling and gnashing of teeth from Fred’s group told me that something special had happened there. I approached and heard the story retold for everyone’s benefit.
“He . . .”
“Yes?”
“He . . .”
“Go on!”
“He said . . . he said, ‘Oh, my. Look at that. I have a little drip.'”
Yes, we all recovered from the trauma.
D.
*If you simply must here a version of this joke, follow the link, and download the South Park version. As I understand it, this is one of the least offensive versions of the joke, but you will still be offended. You’ve been warned.
Sociobiology of Boobage 101
In 1983, Vincent Sarich taught a course at Berkeley called “The Evolution of Human Behavior.” He let us know on the first day that the class was experimental. He had some rough ideas about course content — some things he wanted to talk about, a handful of ideas he wanted to share.
Sounded like good clean fun, and we really did have a blast, too. Professor Sarich (that grizzly teddy bear on the left) was good to his word. He talked, we listened — and argued with him, of course.
For a final exam, he asked us to write three short essays on topics of our own choosing. They had to be somewhat relevant to the course, but beyond that, we were on our own. My three topics:
Genius, a maladaptive trait
Why are hiccups contagious?
The Road Warrior: a sociobiologic perspective
I got an A+.
Funny thing, though. I’ve only retained two things from that class. One is a concept: the Tragedy of the Commons (see the Wikipedia article here, or the original article here), which suggests that folks will always choose their own self interest over the common good, even to their ultimate detriment. If you’re curious about this, I recommend you start with the Wiki article, since it is shorter than the original article and has considerably more perspective.
The other thing I learned in Professor Sarich’s class is why men love cleavage. “I want to talk about breasts today,” he said, except that with his slight speech impediment it came out “breashts.” “Why are they so appealing?”
The traditional sociobiological interpretation is that large breasts are desirable because they translate to well fed babies. Sociobiology was big back then. Still is, for all I know. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s the basic idea. Our behavior is ruled by our genes, and in particular, our genes’ desire to pass on more of themselves to the next generation. “But,” you argue, “genes are not sentient.” Pshaw! Genes don’t have to be sentient to find ways of furthering their own interests.
Back to boobs. Professor Sarich contended that the sociobiologists were wrong. Men don’t love breasts because they want well fed babies. Men crave hooters because of a cross-wiring problem. You see, men get boobs confused with butts:
always gave me wood.
It’s gotta be true.
D.
Sex Ed, self-taught
I was never what you would call slow. Dense, maybe, but not slow. I chased girls at two, stole kisses at five, and copped feels at eight. Despite my forwardness, I didn’t understand what it was all about until high school.
At three, I asked my mother where I came from. “Ask your father,” she said.
My father has never been one to lie, but he’s never been a talkative cuss, either. When I asked him, he pointed to my mother’s middle and said, “From there.”
Huh? From her belly?
Back to my early misconceptions in a moment. My Dad never sat me down for the Big Talk. Instead, when I was eight, he took me to the library and pointed me in the right direction. I checked out David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* with my father’s blessing.
The trouble with this book: it assumes its reader has a decent fund of sexual knowledge to begin with. In those days, you couldn’t find words like cunnilingus and fellatio in the dictionary (not our dictionary back home, anyway!) Masturbation sounded like a worthwhile avocation, but damned if I could figure out how I was supposed to do it. As for cunnilingus, I only knew about one hole Down There, and it baffled me why anyone would want to get his tongue anywhere near it. (In my ignorance of the vagina, I had discovered the rim job.)
Some time in junior high, I learned about vaginas. No pictures, mind you. I gleaned additional useful information from Xaviera Hollander‘s book Xaviera! (sequel to The Happy Hooker). My sexual education would have been complete if Xaviera! had had pictures.
Somewhere along the way, I acquired some very romantic notions about sex. Intercourse would have to be with a girl I loved. We would spend all night together and wake up in each other’s arms. I also vowed that I would not see my first vagina in a nudie magazine (we’re not talking bush, by the way — I’d seen that in the movies when I was five). Rather, I would see my first vagina in the, erm, flesh.
Stubborn as I was (I made good on those promises), I refused all opportunities to examine hard core smut magazines. Still, I was curious as hell. This led to some uniquely twisted dreams.
You women, you don’t know how lucky you are. You’re surrounded by phallic images. You probably learned to recognize a penis before you ever examined your own package with a mirror. I’ll bet you never had a nightmare wherein you pulled down a man’s pants and discovered . . . fill in the blank.
Among other things, I dreamed of broken lightbulbs, sliced watermelon, pigeons. A baseball. Or maybe it was a softball.
Back to three-year-old me. My Dad has just pointed to my Mom’s belly. “From there.”
“From there? From where?”
“Down there.”
“From her belly?”
“Yeah,” he said. “From her belly.”
“But there’s no hole there.”
“Sure there is.”
So I racked my teensy brains. What hole? The only hole I knew about was the belly button hole. I’d discovered it not long before, and found out I could seriously tweak my parents by coloring in my belly button hole with a ballpoint pen. My father even tried to spank me for it, and stopped because I kept laughing. He dubbed me “Iron Ass” after that.
The belly button hole? I had to protest my disbelief.
“But it’s too small!”
“It gets bigger,” he said, and left it at that.
At last, I knew where babies came from.
*But your father wouldn’t tell you.
Intelligent design meets the Hanukkah lobster
Poor Mrs. Heimburger. What do you do when the smallest first grader in your class has the biggest mouth? She couldn’t get it through my skull that she had twenty-three other kids to watch over (yeah, class sizes were that small back then). God bless her, she tried her best to let me be me: the constant center of attention.
Come Christmas time, my big mouth got me into trouble. I told Mrs. Heimburger I was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas. She invited me to the front of the class to tell everyone the story of Hanukkah.
Uh-oh. I didn’t know jack about Judaism, but she didn’t know that.
Like Odysseus, I was a man (well — kid) who was never at a loss. I took the front of the classroom and for the next several minutes held forth on the miracle of the Hanukkah lobster. (That’s not a mound of spinach on his head; it’s a yarmulkeh.)
When those kids eventually learned the story of Hanukkah, they must have realized I was talking out of my ass. I like to think I helped foster a healthy degree of skepticism in each and every one of them.
That’s why we should be teaching “intelligent design” in our schools. If we only teach the truth, how will kids ever recognize the lies? Worse still, they’ll never perceive the lies which are commonly taught in the American classroom, such as: the Californian Missions helped Native Americans; Manifest Destiny was a good thing; the Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
Here’s an idea: let’s teach critical thinking skills to our kids. And let’s begin by teaching them the difference between tenets of faith and scientific hypotheses. Let’s give them the tools they need to see “intelligent design” for what it is: a flabby attempt to dress up religious belief in scientific clothing.
Class motto: Doubt Everything.
Class mascot: the Hanukkah lobster.
D.
PS: I’m not the only person who wants his crazed beliefs taught in the classroom. Thanks to Kate Rothwell’s blog for pointing to the Flying Spaghetti Monster website. And this bloke is way ahead of me in marketing: check out his Cafe Press line of products, too.
Becoming Human
Let’s say you know this young woman named Angela. Perhaps she’s the niece of your best friend. Angela’s a good kid — never arrested, never even got drunk. Always so serious, too.
You weren’t at all surprised to hear she’d been her high school class valedictorian, or that she’d been accepted to a top university. You’re getting used to hearing regular reports of Angela’s greatness. Roundly praised by her professors; gets straight As, and finds time to do volunteer work; has a boyfriend, but she’s so focused on her studies that their relationship may be in doubt.
Lately, you’ve been hearing some disturbing things about Angela. She fell in with a different crowd, a group that’s taking up all her time. Her mom is worried sick about her. Says Angela lives on fast food and Twinkies, stays up to odd hours with her nose buried in books of arcane lore, never talks to her old friends, and rarely talks to her parents. When her mom does manage to get her on the phone, Angela seems distracted, and often uses language no one can understand. She’s learning so much from her teachers, she says; and yet her mother sees her drifting farther and farther away.
Her parents had their 20th anniversary last week, but Angela missed it. Said she was too busy to even remember to send a card. Her college boyfriend? He’s history. Angela won’t even return his phone calls or letters.
It gets worse. Her parents hear she’s doing things to people now. Hurting them, often with casual nonchalance, and joking about it afterwards with her friends. She has an almost religious fervor when she discusses her experiences — with dead bodies. She goes up to perfect strangers, asks them highly personal questions, then touches them in inappropriate ways. And she has the nerve to call this a history and physical.
The strange thing about this 22-year-old memory: I’m not sure how much of it is real and how much is imagined. I’m certain the woman was present throughout the professor’s third-person run-down of her history, but I don’t remember if she disrobed. But to me, it felt like she’d been disrobed. Is that why I remember it that way?
I also recall wanting to run after her to apologize. I doubt I was the only one who felt that way. A room full of 80 first year medical students on their first day of school, and not one of us ran after her.
I’m not the only one to see medical school as a form of cult indoctrination. This link goes overboard, I think, but the author raises several valid points. Nor is the problem limited to medical school: all graduate programs may share this to some degree.
That Day One Grand Rounds exercise was not accidental. Head first, we were thrown into the objectification mind set. These are not fellow human beings; they’re patients. You care for them, but don’t let yourself care about them (except in the most generic sense of caring). You develop calluses, but you must never appear callused. Empathy is not one of your better human qualities; it’s a healing tool, and it can be honed if you make a deliberate effort.
Most humans don’t touch dead bodies, let alone carve them to pieces. Most humans don’t ask strangers personal questions, step inside their personal space, touch them in intimate places, stab them with needles, cut them with knives.
But us folks in health care aren’t most humans.
Imagine walking up to someone who is barely an acquaintance — perhaps you’ve talked with him five or six times in the past, but never for more than five or ten minutes — and having this discussion with him:
“Your cancer has recurred. Unfortunately, you now have a decision to make. You could undergo a painful and maiming operation which will leave you forever changed, and you might still die from your cancer. You could let the cancer kill you, but it’s an ugly death by slow suffocation or, if you’re lucky, a quick hemorrhage. Or you could kill yourself.”
Many doctors skip this conversation. They tell their patient what they should do and leave the second and third options to the patients’ imagination. I was taught not to dictate to my patients, but give them all the information necessary for them to make a choice. Consequently, I’m sometimes obliged to have the above conversation, more often than I’d like.
But — damn it — it isn’t natural.
Other times, I want to hop off the rope, run after that young mother with breast cancer, and apologize to her. Like any normal human being would do.
D.
Hey, don’t be a girlie-man!
This weekend is the final push. One way or another, the novel ends tomorrow. I wrote 3400 words today (not a record, but close), and wept, or at least sniffled, through most of it.
But I cry easily, especially when I have a cold (and I do). As a kid, I remember weeping over a rerun of All in the Family, one of the episodes where Archie and the Meathead have some sort of rapprochement. That I can understand; crying over commercials still baffles me.
There came a time towards the end of my grad student days when my boss, Larry Kedes, insisted I do one last S1-mapping experiment before he’d let me defend my thesis. Hey, here he is right now!
Doesn’t he look like a nice man? Well, I didn’t think so at the time. Larry had just left Stanford for USC, so I had to spend winter break down in Los Angeles to get one stinking experiment done. That was the longest Karen and I had ever been apart — oh, boo-hoo-hoo, enough already. Point is, I got the work done, and when I developed the autoradiograph and saw that pretty black smear right where it was supposed to be, I called Karen and cried over the phone.
To me, it made perfect sense to cry. This little black band meant that the last seven years were drawing to a successful close. I’d get the damned PhD, for whatever that was worth (not much, as it turned out). I could say to myself: You didn’t give up. You stuck with it. You made it work.
For someone with self image problems, this was a big deal.
As the title of this piece suggests, Karen’s reaction was — well, let me be polite and use the word ‘incredulous’. I think the comments, “What’s the matter with you?” and “You’re crying over that?” came up a few times. Growing up, my wife emulated Mr. Spock. What else is there to say?
None of this bothers me anymore. The way I look at it, I have two good reasons to cry over this novel. One, it has taken me over two years to write it, and I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Two, the ending is sad, and I feel like a total heel doing this to my characters.
Okay. Think I’ll go bawl my eyes out over a Britney Spears video.
D.
I’m sorry. Do I look like a white supremacist?
Sometimes I wonder about that swastika birth mark on my forehead. Most folks recognize it for what it is: a Harry Potteresque stigmata, proof of my postnatal brush with the ultimate anti-Jew. Others see it as a sign of shared values.
It must be there, that swastika. How else can I explain yesterday’s patient, a guy who felt it necessary to complain about the Mexican Problem in Southern California? Or any of the dozen patients who, over the years, have bitched to me about all the Mexicans and Asians in our state? What do I say to people like that? (“Mr. Dickwad, I’d like to introduce you to my Japanese-American wife and my half-hakujin son.”)
The Rulez Part Deux
In 1929, Bronislaw Malinowski published The Sexual Life of Savages. Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, was an early pioneer of ethnographic field work. He (or perhaps his publisher) also knew how to title a book to move it off the shelves, but that’s neither here nor there.
Malinowski’s Trobriand islanders are gone now. Even in 1929, you could have legitimately asked how closely Malinowski’s analysis corresponded to reality — ethnographer bias, and all that lot. Nowadays, his work lies somewhere between history and fantasy.
I mention this because I’m about to do a mini-Malinowski: report on the sexual mores of a culture as described to me by one informant (yes, I’m sure M had several) regarding a people long since transformed by time and history: the French, circa 1955. Furthermore, I’m remembering this conversation twenty-two years later. How accurate is this? The sexual proclivities of Tolkien’s elves may have a firmer basis in reality.
The Rulez
A while ago, I mentioned how I broke some key rules when I courted Karen. My faux pas didn’t trash our budding romance, and may have even helped things along. For me, that proves something: there are no rules. Rules are bullshit. At least, they were in 1982 when I came a-courting, and I can’t believe things are any better today.
But wouldn’t it be nice if there were rules? What could be better than a universally agreed-upon code of behavior to ensure that no one would be humiliated, ever again? Or is it unnatural for men to think about the rules when we’re used to thinking with our jewels?