From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume VIII

Introduction

This is the eighth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, and Volume VII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another.)

As with the last installment, these are taken from emails, back when I archived them as simple text files so that one day, when I was a celebrity blogger, I could mine them for tasty nuggets that would thrill my readers without requiring me to write anything new. How prescient, since the Internet was just getting started and blogs were not yet a thing…

March 14, 1995

The [HP] Vectra [computer] is still down at work. I found the setup disks and ran setup to check the CMOS settings. They were all okay; I don’t know what the problem is. I called tech support and when they heard what year the computer was, they said, “Oh, you’ll have to get in touch with our HP Classics department. The only problem is, the old geezers we’ve got down there can’t always hear the phone ringing.” Actually, I made that last part up. But there really is an HP Classics department, and they really don’t answer their phone.

May 10, 1995

I was in the company president’s office the other day having a big important one-on-one meeting, and the phone rang. The big boss got embroiled in a conversation, and you know, I’ve always really hated that. Am I just supposed to sit there in his office, contentedly watching him as he talks and as he twirls his hair around his finger in little curlicues that eventually match the phone cord, which is all twisted from his endless pacing? No way could I do that. But could I just leave? No—any motion towards the door and the boss is frantically gesturing for me to stay. What do I do? So I idly picked up three company-logo-embossed golf balls off of his desk and began juggling. And, sure enough, I dropped one, and it began rolling across the floor, and just when I was on my hands and knees retrieving it (in my $500 suit, of course) the boss got off the phone. I casually put the golf balls back on his desk and we continued our conversation. He didn’t seem fazed, so I guess he’s used to my behavior—and that can’t be a good sign. Will I ever grow up? It reminds me of how you got in trouble for your rubber-band fights at your first job out of college. You’ve really been an inspiration to me, you know.

January 6, 1996

I got a voicemail from my old boss, from [the job I’d quit about a month before]. He said the Vectra, which is the shared hallway computer, had crashed, and he had no idea what to do. They’re in a panic because it’s the only computer with CompuServe access. I had to laugh. I’d been warning people for months that the computer was showing signs of a bad CMOS battery and that its days were numbered. I even put a sign on it saying “Don’t turn me off or I’ll die.” Well, they should have listened. Asking for help now is like saying, “Well, the house burned to the ground. The fire department just finishing hosing things down. Did you say something a while back about smoke detectors?”

January 28, 1996

[To my brother Geoff] … I’ve been thinking lately about our Murray Street Station [San Luis Obispo] days. I still have that original microwave oven, and even one of those big plastic lidded pitchers we used to keep the refried beans in. Remember that awful Thanksgiving dinner at Sizzler? Man, those were the days. Remember all the Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple pizzas K— [the bike shop owner] used to buy us? And how great it was to get free pizza, but how sick we were of that variety? Like, it would be petty and annoying to complain, and yet we’d like pepperoni and mushroom so much better? I actually oddly miss those factory days, too. Sure, the work wasn’t so fun but I became fond of our routine, like how we’d stop at that grocery store (what was it called? Willie Bros, yeah, that’s it) and get Snickers bars to console ourselves because of the brutal cold wind facing us all the way home, every night? And how we used to rent videos at that one place 24/7 because the clerk was so fly? And the Lady Lee Deluxe Chocolate Fudge Brownie Supreme ice cream we’d split, just sawing the half-gallon carton down the middle? And all that cake? And our pushup and sit-up regimen, that made you so buff but never did anything for me? Man, I kinda miss those days.

February 9, 1996

Please retransmit your last email, with the attached article, in some other form than MIME (whatever that is), if possible. Or maybe you could use OCR to convert the article to plain ASCII text? Hmmm . . . I’m not sure Apple computers do ASCII. Or, you could fax the article to my computer, except I have no idea how to set it up to receive faxes, nor do I want to leave it turned on all the time. Then there’s the problem of screwing something up so that the fax answers the regular phone and deafens the hapless caller with its shrieking session-handshake protocol. (My modem came with voice-mail software, too, but I don’t think I want to mess with that, either.) Basically, I’ve got more computing power than a third world country, and no desire to use most of it.

April 24, 1996

We were in L.A. last weekend for a book festival, and Ray Bradbury and Geoffrey Wolff were both speaking. The lines for both were quite long and we worried we wouldn’t get in to either one. Wolff’s seminar, called “Memoirs,” seemed like the slightly less popular one and I thought I might have a better chance of getting into that, but it would mean giving up my spot in the Bradbury line. When I complained about my dilemma, one of the other people waiting in the line said, “Yeah, that’s a tough decision: you’ve gotta choose between the past and the future!”

I was doing my Marin Headlands loop today and I caught up to a pretty fit looking mountain biker. I passed him, and he immediately passed me back, and started hammering. I sat, bored, on his wheel for a while (it was pretty steep so I wasn’t getting too much benefit from drafting) and eventually I decided he was going too slow, and I passed him again. Well, this incited him further, and he took the lead again and started really jamming. Well, woe be to me, he simply rode me off his wheel. On a damn mountain bike! Knobby tires and everything! Man, that was humbling. I just couldn’t keep up. He took some time out of me, too, and finished the climb well ahead. Well, I was encumbered further by a couple of cars on the descent that followed, but on the next climb I blew by him. I was going so hard he couldn’t even get my wheel. I continued to hammer and basically never saw him again. I know they say he who laughs last laughs best, but still . . . he who is laughed at is still laughed at. Man.

June 18, 1996

With regard to your inquiry about bike frame geometry, I doubt there’s anything shallow about your Guerciotti’s head tube angle. My Guerciotti is the same model and only like a year older, and its head angle is like 74 degrees! Yours might be a bit more shallow than mine because it’s a smaller frame, and because you have a smaller penis than I do, but still, I’d expect it to be at least 73 degrees. In any case, this should have almost nothing to do with the way the bike climbs. What do you mean, the front wheel is “slow to move”? As far as I know, the only motion you want is for it to roll. And if it’s rolling too slowly, I would think that’s a fitness problem on your part. (The only other time I’ve heard somebody complain of something like this was when I sold my wife’s would-be-ex-stepmother-in-law a Bianchi and she said it handled “like a cow” when she got out of the saddle. We isolated the problem: low pressure in the front tire.) Anyhow, my Team Miyatas, all three of them, had shallow (73 degree) head angles and they seemed to climb just fine. Actually, they climbed like shit because they were heavy, but I had no problem per se with getting the front wheel to rotate.

June 30, 1996

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ALBERT ON NATIONAL TELEVISION

HERTOGENBOSCH, THE NETHERLANDS: American television audiences received a long-overdue treat today: Geoff Albert, one of the finest looking young individuals the free world has ever produced, graced the airwaves with several seconds of his normally elusive presence.

The footage occurred during routine coverage of the Tour de France bicycle race on ESPN, an American sports network. No sooner had Stage One coverage of the race begun than the camera panned over Albert—not just his face, but his entire body as well. The camera, held by a motorcycle-mounted cameraman, was giving a racer’s-eye view of the course, and thousands of screaming, hand-waving fans struggled to get into the picture. However, when the motorcycle approached Albert, it found him strangely aloof from the rest of the crowd—somehow closer to the road, and totally unobstructed. In the nonchalant style of someone accustomed to the spotlight, Albert made no move to draw the cameraman’s attention. He simply stood there, hands thrust in his back pockets, Pentax camera hanging around his neck … the very image of nonchalance. As the motorcycle passed him, his eyes tracked the camera. As an estimated 1 billion people watch Tour de France coverage worldwide, and the footage is the same across TV networks, so it is expected that millions of female viewers were instantly, and irrevocably, smitten. Also likely is that many millions of men grumbled enviously. One thing is certain: for those fleeting moments, nobody was thinking about the bicycle race.

Why Albert was so calm and unimpressed by his moment of glory is simple to understand: he is no stranger to celebrity, and would consider this episode more of a gift to viewers than to himself. Less easy to understand is why Albert commanded such a large spectating area in the otherwise totally packed sidelines. His twin brother Bryan, an expert on such matters, speculates that “Geoff probably forgot to wear his deodorant today.” Such an oversight is not hard to imagine; after all, both of the Albert twins have earned quite a reputation over the years for their casual approach to hygiene.

Network spokesmen predict that those precious few moments of footage will boost ESPN’s ratings and help secure many more years of cycling coverage on the network. Meanwhile, journalists everywhere are speculating that this year’s coverage is well on the way to winning numerous awards for its shrewd camera work.

Albert was unavailable for comment. And, with the Tour moving to Belgium tomorrow, it is unlikely that viewers will be given an encore. With three more weeks of racing ahead, it’s entirely possible that the racers, not this sole spectator, will begin to command the attention of sports aficionados. But for today, Geoff’s televised moment is the hottest news in cycling.

August 24, 1996

Wow, I just figured out how to hook the CD-ROM in my computer into my normal stereo. It works great—so it looks like I bought those new computer speakers for nothing. Oh well. Now I can play CDs, which I never could before. Only problem is, I only own two CDs and they were both freebies E— got from her work. I guess I can check out CDs from the library and tape them. (Of course I could buy some, but E— and I are trying to save up for a house, which is no easy thing to buy around here.)

December 17, 1996

At our company holiday party we had a “white elephant” gift exchange whereby you wrap up something that you don’t want, that somebody gave you as a gift, or that you can’t believe you ever bought, and you bring it in and put it on a table. Then everybody draws a number and the person with #1 chooses first. Now, #2 gets to either choose a gift or take #1’s gift instead (meaning that #1 gets to choose again). I brought this large cheese holder, ceramic, that’s basically a plate with a 4-inch tall cylindrical cover that goes over it, so you can store cheese at room temperature. It said “CHEESE” on it. E—’s mom gave it to us and E— never did like it. The person who got it, our receptionist, was totally stoked, I could tell. (She said later she was in total suspense the whole evening, hoping that nobody would take it away from her.) I stole our other receptionist’s Martinelli’s sparkling cider. The look on her face was one of absolute shock and unbridled grief. She was devastated. (It was one of the first gift takeovers of the day.) I felt so bad, I decided I’d offer to trade her later. She ended up with a pair of Christmas mugs, one shaped like a reindeer head and the other like a Frosty the Snowman head. They were just too hideous and she looked crestfallen all over again. I told her, “Look, I’m not willing to trade gifts, but I would like to just give you my Martinelli’s. The look on your face ... it was like I ran over your dog.” She insisted that I keep the cider; then, minutes later, the director of the entire western region (who got a Mag-lite, the lucky guy) reappeared after a brief absence: he’d gone out and bought the receptionist a replacement bottle of cider. Disaster narrowly averted. I hope my hostile takeover wasn’t career-limiting.

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Three Toasters

Introduction

This is a tale of three toasters. Any resemblance of any characters to real-life persons is, like, duh! Because everything below is true.

The Sunbeam

The Sunbeam was probably not the first toaster my family had growing up. We surely had some boxy, cheap toaster that flung the (usually burnt) toast up in the air like in cartoons. But very early in my childhood, when I was too young to timestamp the memory, my mom bought a Sunbeam. It ran the bread perpendicular to how all other toasters do it, which I always thought was a bit cheeky. It was also the first toaster I ever saw that lowered the bread slowly down, automagically, instead of you pushing down a lever like a cash register key. The toast rose slowly out of it as well. It looked a bit like this:

Like all toasters, it was capable of toasting bread properly under certain conditions. If the brownness setting was set just right and the toaster was cold, you might get a good result, but then the next pair of slices would be underdone because the heat detector mechanism was fooled by the ambient heat of the  rest of the toaster. (At least, that’s always been my theory.) So then, in frustration, you’d put the pale toast back in, and have another go but watching carefully, tediously, and then you move the lever to a darker setting for the next go, and so on (ours being a family of six). At the end, bored and frustrated and distracted, you’d forget to slide the adjuster back to any baseline, so the next time the toaster was used, when it’d be cold, it would of course burn the crap out of the bread. The Sunbeam wasn’t particularly bad in this respect; it’s just that I expected more. When we first got it, and I peered into it and saw the little springy-wire sensor that enabled it to lower the bread to save you the effort of pushing down on anything, I thought maybe this toaster was the special one that would always work right.

In junior high I read Good-bye, Mr. Chips, which took place at an English boarding school. The younger-year students would wait on the upper-year students, which included making their toast. This was before toasters so the bread was put in a little wire thingie and held in the oven (or maybe over some kind of flame, I don’t remember), so it was easy to burn it. The younger-year student would be flogged for burning the toast. The dialogue went something like this:

      “Henshaw, you little oik, you burnt my toast again.”

      “Sorry Rivers, I’ll try harder!”

      “I don’t like burnt toast.”

      “I won’t do it again!”

     “Wrong, oik. ‘I won’t do it again’ suggests you did it deliberately. You should have said ‘shan’t.’”

      [Paddling, cuffing, or ear-twisting ensues]

I didn’t tend to make toast for my older brothers, so they didn’t throttle me for burning it, but there were enough beat-downs in my childhood that I could certainly relate to the book. For much of my life I considered toast something that wasn’t worth the trouble.

But that Sunbeam toaster was built well and just kept turning out toast (burnt or not), decade after decade. So when I was visiting my mom this past week and she offered me an English muffin, I had that pleasant, familiar feeling of a family ritual being continued. Nothing ever changes, and you can go home again. I glanced into the kitchen to see the Sunbeam in action, and was surprised to see my mom toasting the English muffin in the oven, like at a boarding school. Because things do change: her Sunbeam burned up, along with virtually all of her other possessions, in a terrible fire a couple of years ago. For me to have imagined the Sunbeam doing my toast was just a habit, or perhaps some deep-down form of denial, I don’t know.

“Mom, why don’t you buy a new toaster?” I asked (perhaps insensitively). She replied, “I don’t really want a toaster. I don’t like toasters.” I can relate.

The hardware store toaster

One year, when I was in college, my dad almost forgot my birthday. I received no card or gift, but on the day he phoned me up. “I meant to buy you a present but I ran out of time,” he explained. “I was going to buy you a toaster. So let’s do this: go out and buy yourself a toaster, and then let me know how much it cost and I will reimburse you.”

I wasn’t exactly thrilled. I mean, why would he assume that I didn’t have a toaster, unless he knew I never wanted one? And, if he remembered that I had three roommates, why would he assume we didn’t have a toaster among us? And who asks his kid to run an errand for his birthday? This was especially inappropriate because all financial matters between my dad and me were routinely awkward and painful.

So, I wasn’t keen to go buy that toaster. Every time I burned my toast, I reasoned, I’d think about my dad and his ridiculous gifting scheme. So it became the kind of errand that just gets put off. And yet, through sheer weakness, I had some impulse to not let my dad down—some sense  of duty. But where do you buy a toaster? This was decades before Amazon, and I wasn’t about to BART into San Francisco and waste a lot of time wandering around a department store. I decided to ask my roommate M—, who, in addition to being probably the smartest guy I know, owned a toaster oven. I never used it (because I didn’t eat toast and didn’t know how to work the thing anyway) but I was frequently impressed to see M— actually cooking a steak in that bad boy. Unsurprisingly, he proved an excellent resource for my toaster investigation.

“Are you looking for something nice, or just some cheap, crappy thing?” he asked. I replied, “Oh, the cheaper and crappier the better.” He said any hardware store ought to have a cheap, crappy toaster. I worked right down the street from an Ace Hardware, and sure enough, I bought a barebones toaster there for like $8. It looked about like this, but was even cheaper and crappier.

Of course, by this point (two or three weeks after my birthday) it seemed silly to invoice my father for $8, because then when he (inevitably) didn’t manage to actually get over to the Credit Union to do the money transfer (because for some reason he wouldn’t ever write me a check), I’d be all bent out of shape over $8. So, the upshot is that my birthday present was a stupid $8 toaster I didn’t want, that became symbolic of the complicated, perennially strained relationship I had with my father. But don’t worry, this story has a very happy ending.

I’ll need to give some background first. Another roommate, J—, was basically the polar opposite of M—. I should probably try to be kind here but find I cannot: the simple fact was that J— was just a big dumbass. He was a rich kid, the son (he said) of a land developer, though we eventually found out the old man was a gynecologist, which for some reason embarrassed J—. J— loved to not only rock an actual Rolex, but to leave it lying around for us to gawk at and be envious of. And he played Nintendo all the time. It’s basically all he did. And it was always the same game, like he’d rather develop true mastery of one game than to try anything new. This was in the days when video consoles had to be plugged into the TV, which was in the living room, so we all had to witness his endless frustration with the game. He couldn’t go thirty seconds without shouting profanities at the screen. Eventually he’d get fed up and storm off to his room and play “Down In it” by Nine Inch Nails. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad song, but it gets old after like the 400th listening. And it boggled my mind that J— could be so simple-minded as to enjoy only this one song, to never want to hear anything else. And he had plenty of music; I once went into his room and counted his CDs, which numbered well over four hundred.

Oh, and when he blasted “Down In It,” it was freaking loud, because he had this giant stereo system, with the four-foot tall speakers with the really fat cables (as though electricity needed a lot of room to travel through). Actually, he had two stereo systems, because an identical one was in our living room. I think he said the systems cost thousands of dollars apiece. We were all permitted to use the living room stereo, but I never did. First of all, I didn’t own any CDs—just tapes, and even though J—’s stereo had a tape deck, it was the short-lived Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format, which never caught on because it was pointless, other than showcasing wealth and a taste for the cutting edge. Plus, I was afraid to go near that stereo. What if I damaged it?

Well, as luck would have it, I did manage to damage it. For some reason one day I needed to move one of those speakers, and I underestimated how heavy it was. I was partly holding it by one of the speaker covers, which couldn’t handle the stress and popped off. Some little plastic fastening bit was broken. Oh, shit! I almost considered wiping it all down to remove my fingerprints. No way was I copping to that—replacement parts for that stereo were way beyond my pay grade.

Needless to say, J— was livid. He was given to very loud orations to begin with, many of them unintentionally comical. For example, he was yelling at his sister on the phone once, due to some complicated matter involving their mom, and boomed, “Obviously it’s gonna take someone with more than half a brain to explain it to her—I already tried!” Another time he rousted me from my room because, for once in his life, he decided the bathroom needed cleaning. Our apartment had two bathrooms and J— and I shared one of them; I did all the cleaning whereas his sole contribution was putting one of those blue dye-infusing doodads in the tank. On this occasion he said, “We’ll do a coin flip. Heads I clean the bathroom, tails you clean the bathroom. Call it.” He flipped the coin and I just stood there. What was there to call? My silence seemed to piss him off. “Dude, you were supposed to call it!” he bellowed. “Try again: heads I clean the bathroom, tails you clean the bathroom. Call it.” He flipped the coin. I said, “Heads.” Now he looked confused, then dumbfounded. I could practically hear the gears mashing in his skull.

If his normal outbursts were annoying, his repeated indignant speech about the broken speaker became insufferable. “Look, you guys, somebody broke my speaker and somebody won’t even admit it. Somebody is lying. I mean, can’t you just admit it? Because here’s the thing: it’s not even the speaker I’m so mad about. It’s the principle of the thing.” He seemed to become addicted to this diatribe because he would trot it out again and again.

And that’s where the toaster comes in. One day, I got a wild hair and decided to actually make some toast. A slice of toast with peanut butter randomly seemed like a good idea. So I chucked the bread in there, pushed down on the little lever, and—nothing. No red-hot filaments, no charring of innocent bread. The toaster was dead as a doorknob. And I was stoked.

I waited until all four of us were together, and a couple girlfriends (including J—’s) for good measure, and then I confronted my roommates: who broke my toaster? Of course nobody fessed up because it’s kind of impossible to use a toaster wrong; it had spontaneously died. Or who knows, maybe it had never worked to begin with, cheap piece of crap that it was. I panned across my roommates, looking each in the eye. “Look, you guys,” I said, “somebody broke my toaster and somebody won’t even admit it. Somebody is lying. I mean, can’t you just admit it? Because here’s the thing: it’s not even the toaster I’m so mad about. It’s the principle of the thing.”

With the precision of a fine Swiss watch, the next step of the ruse clinked perfectly into place. “Yeah, exactly!” J— cried. “It’s just like with my speaker! It’s the principle of the thing!” Two of my roommates completely cracked up, while J— looked utterly nonplussed. As his incomprehension dragged out, I started chuckling too. His girlfriend, who’d heard the speaker harangue several times herself, whispered in his ear, and he stormed out of the room. That was so worth my eight bucks.

The Oster

Once I got married, a toaster was pretty much inevitable. No, we didn’t get one for a wedding present (not having done a bridal registry, which tradition I consider stupid and pointless), but went out and dutifully bought one. It was kind of a piece of crap, a Cuisinart or something (and everyone knows they only make food processors so they’d just slapped their rapidly declining brand on some generic thing). It died young. We got another, probably the same thing, and the only good thing about it was its mirror-like chrome finish, which could lead to the best kind of clowning around, which I managed to get a photo of.

That toaster also died—the sides actually came away from the base, it having been made no better than a Happy Meal box, following which we got yet another toaster which was fricking blue. Who ever heard of a blue toaster? I was starting to get fed up with my participation in this disgusting consumer culture where a never-ending series of poorly made products cycled through my home briefly on their way to a landfill, none of them costing much individually but giving me the vague feeling that if I ever realized how much I’d spent on them over time, I’d be pretty pissed. The days of my mom’s Sunbeam, which lasted like 45 years (and would probably still be going strong if it hadn’t burned up), are long gone. 

I don’t even know what happened to the blue toaster but one day, not so long ago, I was out for a walk with my wife and we came across this little number, which had been put out in someone’s driveway with a “FREE” sign:

I guess “little number” doesn’t really apply because it’s a pretty giant toaster. No more waiting around when two of us want toast at the same time. Plus, when you toast simultaneously instead of serially, you avoid the cycle of pale-and-then-burnt toast I described earlier. Best of all, the slots are long enough to toast a giant slice of San Luis Sourdough in one go, instead of dropping it in vertically, toasting one half, and then flipping it. I’ve come to love big sandwiches on sourdough, mainly because non-whole-grain bread is so notoriously bad for you with its sky-high glycemic index. When my dad was visiting many years ago and I made French toast, which I always make with slices of day-old Acme sweet or sour bâtard, he requested whole grain bread. What’s next? Whole grain croissants? Decaf? Near beer? Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a nice veggie sandwich on whole grain bread, but look at this bad boy:

But I mainly just love that this Oster toaster lasted long enough for somebody to get tired of it … that bodes well. After all, my mom’s most prized kitchen possession, a waffle iron that looked like it was made of sterling silver, she’d gotten at a garage sale. It made the hands-down best waffles I have ever had. It was so old it had a woven cloth cord, and lasted something like fifty years before it started catching fire. Actually, even after that my brother’s family continued to use it anyway for a year or two before, sigh, giving it up. Maybe a second-hand kitchen appliance is a good omen. And even if this Oster doesn’t give me years of decadent use, hey … don’t cost nothin’.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume I

Introduction

I’d say albertnet isn’t really a blog, per se, in the sense of a “web log” (i.e., diary or journal). I try to write essays, reports, or humor pieces that have a point other than simply documenting my life. (After all, who cares about my particular experience?) All this being said, I’m emboldened of late by recent published volumes of David Sedaris’ diaries, which people seem to like well enough, and by an account in The New Yorker of the upcoming publication of (part of) the journal of Claude Fredericks, a classics professor in the ‘50s whose output exceeded sixty-five thousand pages. Fredericks extols the virtue of on-the-ground immediate reporting of one’s experience; as the article explains, “A journal is a ‘living thing,’ he says; a novel is a ‘taxidermist’s replica.’”

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m publishing here choice snippets from old letters to my brothers, which I think can give the reader a flavor of the era during which I wrote them. These bits and bobs should be better than diary excerpts because at least I wrote them with an audience in mind, so I had incentive to make them good. This post comprises a handful, in chronological order; others will follow in these pages periodically. I’ve provided, for each snippet, the locale I was writing from.

January 26, 1989 – Isla Vista

My roommate S— came home today telling me that Joe, the owner (and sole employee) of MicroPro, where I bought my computer, was busted on a felony computer piracy charge. Joe was S—’s roommate here last year. S—was bummed about the news, of course, but also seemed a bit titillated. I myself was kind of worried, not so much for Joe, but for myself if anything goes wrong with the computer I just bought. S— tried all evening to call Joe, giving me the impression they were best buds or something. “He must be in jail!” S— ultimately concluded. But finally the phone rang and I picked up. Sure enough, it was Joe. I asked, “So, how’s everything going?” He said, “Oh, okay I guess.” I asked, “Are you calling for S—?” He said, “No, I actually called for you. This girl left a message for you on my machine. Her name’s Lisa. Let me give you her number.”

Now, as you can well imagine, I was pretty confused. A presumed felon, who we’d thought might be in jail, had instead called me to relay a message from some random girl. I took down the phone number and was about to ring off when Joe said, “By the way, I think I fixed your WordStar 4.0 program. It should work now. I’ll bring it by tomorrow.” By this time, Scott was practically ripping the phone away from me, bewildered and perhaps hurt that the big shot criminal hadn’t asked for him. I told Joe, “S— wants to talk to you. Should I put him on?” Joe replied, “Uh, well, I guess so.” (I reckon he gets as sick of S— as I do.) They talked for about thirty seconds, S— offering to give the judge a character reference.

You’re probably wondering about the girl by now. Gosh, this sounds like a spy thriller, doesn’t it? The elusive computer hacker, the nosy roommate, the mystery girl, and the microfilm (okay, MicroPro). Turns out when Joe moved out of this apartment last summer, he took the phone number with him—but somehow it’s listed as my number in the student directory. (I didn’t even know I was listed!) The girl, Lisa, is in my French class. I guess I’m flattered she reached out to me, because it’s not like I’m her boyfriend or anything (though I’ve been trying to insinuate myself into the role). She called because her cat got run over on Wednesday, so she was too distraught to come to class, and she needed the homework assignment for tomorrow. She’s had a run of bad luck lately: over the weekend, she fell asleep driving and crashed her car into a ditch, sustaining a minor concussion. I guess these are the perils of college life.

October 6, 1989 – Isla Vista

You know how you always wish you could get one of your bike crashes on videotape? Well, I did. I was cruising around on my mountain bike and reached this big concrete boat ramp that goes down to the beach. (I assume the ramp reaches the water at high tide.) There was a guy standing at the top filming with a little VHS camera, and I asked if it was cool for me to ride down. He said yeah, so I went down at top speed and then locked up the rear wheel and did all these sweet fishtails (showing off for the camera, I confess). What I didn’t realize was that there was like a foot drop-off at the end. But I figured no big deal, I still had plenty of speed, so I jumped off it and made a perfect landing, rear wheel first. Thing was, once the front wheel landed it bogged down in the sand and I was flipped right over the bars. I landed in tons of sand, and tucked and rolled, so it didn’t hurt at all. Like twenty people were out there sunbathing and they all cheered as I leapt to my feet and put my hands up in a victory salute. I wonder how many times the guy with the camera will watch that footage, laughing his ass off.

August 17, 1990 - Oakland

It’s kind of a trip living in Oakland. I mean, this place is huge. I’ve never lived in a big city before, but so far I like it. That said, sometimes the complexity of it all can be intimidating. Here’s an example. A couple of friends and I went to this Thai restaurant, and ordered this big fancy soup. It’s served in a ring shaped bowl, which has this chimney deal that comes up through the middle of the ring. A flame at the bottom of the chimney is supposed to keep the soup hot. Our waitress struggled to light it. Not that the chimney was the problem; she just had no idea now to strike a paper match. She was trying to squeeze the head of the match between the striking surface and the folded over book, and I half expected her to catch the whole book on fire, or inadvertently fling a burning match at me. She finally got the match lit, dropped it in the chimney of the bowl, looked at it with an air of uncertainty, and walked off. Remembering a waiter who failed to successfully light my flaming baked Alaska a few years back, I was pretty sure it hadn’t lit. I looked down the chimney of the bowl to see. Never, never do this. To my horror, it ignited very suddenly and the ensuing fireball completely engulfed my face for a split second before I pulled my head away. The bright blue flame extended a good six inches past the top of the chimney!

I could smell burning hair. Fortunately there were mirrors on the wall and I ran over to survey the damage. Sure enough, my eyebrows had been singed. It really doesn’t look very good. At least I don’t have the shoulder-length hair I was sporting last summer. If I did, I’m sure it would have caught fire and I would have burned to death, right there in the restaurant. I can envision my last dying moments: my life flashes before my eyes as the hapless waitress fumbles stupidly with the fire extinguisher, eventually giving it up and returning, with a shrug, to the kitchen.

I wasn’t very pleased with the whole situation, so I dipped the tablecloth in the flame and very quickly the entire table was on fire. We were out the door and running down the sidewalk when the massive explosion hurled us to the concrete. (Okay, I’ve exaggerated quite a bit about my response, but the part about my eyebrows is 100% true.) I’m going to have to be more careful until I’m accustomed to the sophisticated cuisine of the big city.

November 19, 1991 - Berkeley

So help me God, I’m going to make this the best letter I’ve ever written. This is my goal. It has been stated. Were it possible, I would get you a few sandwiches to munch on while you’re reading. Anything to make this a special time for you. I would do that for you. I would.

Jesus, Geoff. Just think of all the letters I’ve written, always just writing along, knowing that I’m not being graded, you won’t send it back with all the errors circled, little arrows to show where I left out something I should have put in, no general comments like “Little or no relevant material. See me.” No, it’s a simple job, I just write for a change, nothing to get stressed out about. But who says that’s good enough? Things are gonna change. You’re my brother, after all, and you deserve at least as much hard work as a stupid TA who’s paid to write tetchy little comments like “watch your pronouns” in my margins. (Why should I watch my pronouns? Are they misbehaving? Do I need to take them outside?)

Ah, but I also have selfish reasons for wanting to write well. I want to be a great writer someday. No matter what I write, it is nothing more than a stepping stone towards this goal. Writing this letter, or indeed anything, is just a chance to polish my style into the one which will propel me to fame, fortune, and maybe a gig on “Hollywood Squares” or “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” So I must confess that through all my correspondence I have only been using you. And that’s not right. This is your letter, not an exhibition of the literary machine I am trying to build: a machine that so far requires eighty tons of coal, a tanker truck of natural gas, twelve gallons of premium unleaded and eight D-cells just to produce passels of pointless pages of trite, trifling text. It’s a machine you would expect the military to build. Tons of money, marginal promise, dubious worth to future generations. All unacceptable. So I’m going to double down and improve my letters. They will henceforth be of the highest quality I can muster.

Maybe a running account of my latest exploits isn’t the right approach. Perhaps I need to look back over my past, determine the most salient events, and recount them as vividly as possible, while framing them in the context of why they were so formative. I’ll try that out. Here goes:

That summer ended childhood. I hoped there would be work in San Luis Obispo, my new home [during my gap year before college]. Every day is the same: I collect the paper and move swiftly through it, starting with the comics. Charlie Brown is about to get laid for the first time. Nancy finally put a good one over on Sluggo and they say he’ll never walk right again. Garfield has slumped over on the fence, killed by a clock thrown at him. Now, on to the Classified Ads: unspecified work for Ernie Ball under the title “day laborer.” A data entry job in Grover City, a fifteen mile commute for $5 an hour. Dishwasher at Sizzler. Well, so much for that. What else is here? A letter to the editor insists that for all Sarah Riordon’s trouble at the free throw line, she is a valuable asset to the Mission College Prep team. Front page: REAGAN SAYS “EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY.” Yeah, now if he could just solve unemployment, starting with mine. I head down Foothill to Spirit Cycle Works. Jay, the obese head mechanic, is sitting on a stool popping plastic bubble wrap in the vise. Garrett is cussing about a bottom bracket adjustment he can’t get right. You’re reaming a seat tub, violently, viciously, a tyrannical grin on your face as you subvert the soft metal to your will. I would take a job here for two bucks an hour, just to work with you. But Spirit isn’t hiring.

It was fun hanging out with you for that year, but I couldn’t ever act excited about it, nor can I reminisce fondly about it now. Maybe it’s because I was un- and under-employed and needed to act cynical. I wonder if you saw through my cool front. (I never did.) But was this front my own idea, or was I unconsciously mimicking your own tough guy act? The thing is, you veer between hard-boiled and almost cloyingly nostalgic. Which one is the real you? Let’s admit it, you yourself are, and have long been, a hard dude to try to figure out. And “figure out” implies that there is an answer, which there is not. There is no solution in the back of the textbook for Geoff Albert. He just is. You just is. We just is.

August 18, 1992 - Berkeley

Let me tell you a little story about my roommate A—’s brother, Robert (I think it is). He’s been couch surfing here for weeks, and even stocked the kitchen with all his own food. He had the cheek to label it all so we won’t steal any. His stash consists mainly of hot dogs, cold cuts, Oreos, white bread, and milk. This guy has no idea how to cook. He prepares a hot dog by putting it, raw, on a slice of bread and microwaving it for thirty seconds (just until the bread’s hot).

Well, one night A— had cooked himself a meal (some weird South American thing) and offered his brother his leftovers. Robert hemmed and hawed, as if put off by the notion of secondhand food, or perhaps by the cuisine being outside his norm, and finally asked us what nearby restaurants delivered. He wasn’t interested in pizza so I suggested a few takeout places within cycling distance. “The bike is kind of what I wanted to avoid,” he said, peering down forlornly at his big belly, which sagged down below his belt. Okay, so no leftovers, no pizza, and nothing beyond walking distance. For a guy who doesn’t even have a place to live, he sure does seem picky.

Finally I thought of a barbecue place like four blocks away. A— explained how to get there, but I guess Robert wasn’t satisfied with the directions so he asked us for a map, which my other roommate eventually produced. After studying the route a while, Robert finally embarked on his daring solo mission. Well, like half an hour later he came back empty-handed, looking totally grief-stricken. Apparently a street hoodlum spotted an easy mark and grabbed the bag of food right out of Robert’s hands! Poor dude was too upset at this point to go buy more, and settled for a couple more hot dogs.

Is there any moral to this story? Yeah: don’t be a dork.

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From the Archives - Robin Killed Off!

Introduction

What’s up with all these comic book movies? They’re coming out constantly. I had to sit through Thor recently, because my wife has a thing for Chris Hemsworth. (I went along because Thor also stars Natalie Portman.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, this movie was pretty much unwatchable. We fast-forwarded through all the non-Earth scenes, which was like three quarters of the movie, and were still bored out of our skulls.

Curious about how this comic book movie thing got going, I decided to check out the original Batman from 1989. This film, more so than the Superman from 1978, seemed to spawn all these others. Superman was kind of nerdy and clearly targeted at kids, whereas Batman was evidently trying to be hip—and something adults could watch.

So: was the 1989 Batman any good? No. It looked pretty good but my wife and I found it really tedious. Clearly the movie industry is on to something, though, because these movies are undeniably popular. Batman was skillfully marketed and pulled in more than $40 million in its first weekend (vs. the mere $7.5 million that Superman made). Since Batman, there have been 20 movies based on DC comics and 47 movies based on Marvel comics. Maybe some of these are pretty good, but I think the bigger point is the crossover appeal: they draw in current teenagers for the obvious reasons, but also appeal to people my age who dug the comic books as kids and are prone to nostalgia.

As uninterested as I am in comic book movies, I was crazy about Batman as a kid. Watching the Batman movie awoke a dim memory I had of writing an essay about the Dynamic Duo some thirty years ago. And look, here it is now!

Robin Killed Off – October 29, 1988

When I was a little tyke, four or five years old, my life revolved around cowboys. Not real cowboys, who spend all day herding cows across the desert on a long drive, but the ones that spent all their time shooting at Indians or bad guys. The Lone Ranger was my favorite. I just thought it was so cool that he wore two belts, one to keep his pants up and the other for his gun holsters (or “holsterns” as I ignorantly called them). I had a Lone Ranger coloring book that showed him making his silver bullets, with the mold and everything. Too cool! Silver, the Lone Ranger’s white stallion (or “white-a-stallion,” in my benighted jargon) was just the most magnificent beast on the face of the earth.

I wore a cowboy hat for about two years straight. Nobody ever saw my hair during that period. I even wore that hat in the bathtub. When my kindergarten teacher told me to take it off, I refused. She went and got the school principal, and when he tried to take it away from me, I bit him. Everyone in my family remembers that hat and my cowboy fixation, but might not remember what replaced my “cowboy days.”

It was Batman who took over my imagination after cowboys inevitably got stale. Batman was so noble and good, yet so rock-‘em-sock-‘em tough, that he was a natural replacement. He didn’t have a horse, but he had a really cool car, a cool boat, and of course the Bat Cave.

Besides being strong and bold and good, the Lone Ranger and Batman had something else in common: a sidekick. The Lone Ranger had Tonto, and Batman had Robin. This seems like a wise arrangement. Sure, the hero is the greatest and all, but it’s also nice to have someone to relate to. Perhaps by seeing ourselves in the sidekick, we get to admire the hero in another way: he’s kind of like a cool big brother. For the humble among us, it’s hard to imagine ourselves being truly heroic, but we could relate to at least tagging along and helping out here and there. It’s hard not to love the underdog who’s always doing his best and sometimes even saves the hero’s bacon.

So imagine my shock and chagrin today when I read the following headline on the front page of the “Calendar” section of the L.A. Times: “Holy Finale! Comics Hero Bites The Dust.” Accompanying the article was a graphic illustration of Batman carrying a charred, shredded, blood-oozing corpse, who apparently had been Robin. The caption read, “Batman carries tattered body of Robin, as Dynamic Duo is halved.”

What the hell?! Nobody is supposed to die in the comics, at least nobody good! The Lone Ranger never killed or even badly wounded an outlaw—he just gave him a lecture and put him in jail. On the Batman TV show I used to watch [the original colorized series from 1966], Batman never hurt anybody, and neither did Robin; they just worked the bad guys over for a while and then surrendered them to the authorities. It was just enough action to be exciting without being crude or traumatic. Even the bad guys weren’t that bad. I remember an episode where the Joker tied Batman and Robin to a buoy with a bomb connected to it. Before leaving them to their fate, the Joker—strumming a guitar—sang them a little farewell song (and then gave them ample opportunity to get away unscathed).

But here, plain as day, Robin was flat-out dead. And he didn’t died of pneumonia, either. I quote from the article: “Robin is killed off in next week’s issue of Batman comics, blown to bits—BAM!—by a bomb planted by Iran’s new ambassador to the United Nations, who turns out to be another of Batman’s old foes, the Joker.”

That’s disgusting! The picture in the comic is even more revolting! A fella doesn’t even see such carnage in rated R movies! Since when is this appropriate fodder for kids’ imaginations?

I’m reacting to more than just the age-old gripe against exposing kids to violent images. Consider this: the Dynamic Duo, for almost fifty years, have been more than just characters—they’re real heroes to these kids. Every time the Dynamic Duo was in a bind in one of those wacky TV episodes, I’d be on the edge of my seat, pulling with all my heart for the two, just like a grownup watching his home football team in the grips of a key drive. Have 7-year-olds really changed, to where they can take a hero’s death in stride?

But the most hideous aspect of this tragedy is that the Joker didn’t really kill Robin: the kids themselves did it. The article says, “According to a spokesman for D.C. Comics, which publishes Batman, Robin was killed off by readers by a vote of 5,343 to 5,271 because he was considered a ‘twerp’ and a ‘little brat.’” To me this looks like another triumph of a big kid over his annoying little brother. These modern too-cool kids seem to have stopped caring about the underdog. Where kids once humbly related to the lesser character, now they have no use for him.

Look, I know comic books mainly exist to entertain, but was there really anything wrong with a small dose of didacticism? Is it just hopelessly nerdy now to try to steer kids in any positive direction, like supporting an underdog? Is it more important to give them what they want—i.e., to let them vote on the fate of a character—than to tell them the story the creators want to tell? What’s next? Do readers get to vote on everything?

It’s not that I consider myself some societal watchdog, some sociological scold. More to the point, I guess I was always heartened at the very existence of a weaker character. I always knew I’d never be Batman, but could see myself as a possible Robin. I loved that a powerful, cool man like Batman could respect Robin for what he was, despite what he wasn’t. In other words, I am acutely aware that I’ve been cursed with all the traits that got the Boy Wonder killed. It seems now that anyone lacking a huge chest, fistfighting prowess, and outsized bravado is nothing more than a twerp. The Robins of the world don’t seem to have a chance anymore. When the next generation is voting to have Robin killed, I fear for society and I fear for myself.

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