Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (21 page)

We are not spoon-benders, I tell my wife, and others like her, not flim-flammers, but scientists and engineers, scholars and teachers and builders, fathers, many of us, and mothers. We wait like any line of people at a pay phone: impatient, hopeful, polite. What will he say when he calls? We can only imagine. It may not sound like English—it may not be English. We still have much work to do in the areas of clarity and amplification. On a typical recording, “soulmate” sounds like “sailboat,” “father” may be indistinguishable from “bother,” “Nathan” might come through as “nothing.”

Still, we wait. We listen like safecrackers, we listen like sleuths. We remember the words of those listeners who came before us, the brave ones who started this whole thing.
Stay on the station, tune in correctly. Here it is summer, always summer! Soon it will work everywhere!

TED MECHAM may be the first member of the Class of ’66 to retire. I met him and his beautiful wife Kathy at a Buccaneers game in Tampa Bay in October. His investments in sugar refining and South American cattle have paid off handsomely. Any secret? “Yes,” says Ted. “In and out, that is the key.” Also in Florida, I saw JIM HASLEK and BILL STEBBINS. They left their families behind in Columbus and Decatur, respectively, to tune up a 1300-hp open-class, ocean racing boat, Miss Ohio, for trial runs near Miami. The racing season is set to open there in December, and Jim and Bill (famous for their Indy 500 pilgrimages) are among the favorites. JOHN PESKIN writes to say, sad to relay, that he has been sued by BILL TESKER. Bill, general manager at the Dayton office of TelDyne Industries, claims he gave John the idea for a sitcom episode that John subsequently sold to NBC. It all took place more than a decade ago and is more than I can believe.

RALPH FENTIL, handling the case for Bill, made it clearer. Ralph is director of Penalty, Inc., a franchised California paralegal service, which helps clients develop lawsuits. “This is a growing and legitimate consumer-interest area. We encourage people to come in, we go over their past. It’s a potential source of income for the client. We let the courts decide who’s right and wrong.” Hmmm. RICHARD ENDERGEL phoned a few weeks ago from Houston, under arrest for possession of cocaine—third time since 1974. Richard thinks this is it. Unless a miracle happens he is looking at 15 years or more for dealing in a controlled substance.

STANFORD CRIBBS, mangled practically beyond recognition in an automobile accident in 1979, took his own life on March 19, according to a clipping from the Kansas City Star. His former roommate, BRISTOL LANSFORD, has fared no better. Bristol was shot in the head by his wife’s lover at the Lansfords’ vacation home outside Traverse City. ROBERT DARKO of Palo Alto (where else?) sends word he is moving up very quickly at Mastuch Electronics, and to thank DAVID WHITMAN. David, of Shoremann, Polcher & Edders, Los Angeles, specializes in celebrity and personality contracts. Bob Darko is the sixth middle-management executive hired in David’s Free Corporate Agent draft. “Corporate loyalty is something from the fifties,” says David. “I want to market people on a competitively-bid, short-term contract basis, with incentive and bonus clauses.”

Tell that to STEVEN PARKMAN. He has been living on unemployment benefits and his wife’s income from a hairdressing concern since April of last year—with four kids. FRANK VESTA is certainly glad his job (in aerospace planning with General Dynamics of St. Louis) is holding up—he and wife Shirley had their ninth—a boy—in July. GREG OUTKIRK has grim news—daughter Michelle rode her thoroughbred Arabian, Botell III, off the boat dock in front of their Waukegan home in an effort to make the animal swim. It drowned almost immediately. DENNIS MITFORD, owner of a well-known Nevada wh---house (no class discounts, he jokes), reports an unruly customer was shot on the premises in October by his bodyguard, LAWRENCE ADENSON. Larry, who served in Vietnam, says the publicity is awful. He may go back to New York—after Denny officially fires him for the violence. Violence is no stranger to BILL NAST. His wife turned up in terrible shape at Detroit General Hospital two months ago, the victim of Bill’s hot temper. Four hours in surgery?

JACK ZIMMERMAN’s second wife and two children by his first wife visited over Easter. Sue ZIMMERMAN was a 1978 Penthouse Pet. Jack is managing her modeling career, his entertainment career, and raising the kids. Kudos, Jack. TIM GRAYBULL is dead (of alcohol abuse) in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he taught English at the university. (Please let the editor of Alumnus know you want to see Tim’s poems in a future issue.) ALEX ROBINSON won’t say what films he distributes, but hints broadly that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” even in that area. The profit margin, he claims, is not to be believed. I’m reminded of KEVIN MITCHELL, who embezzled $3.2 million from Sperry Tool in 1971. He periodically calls from I-know-not-where. Kevin was home free in 1982, with the expiration of the case. DONALD OVERBROOK—more bad news—is in trouble with the police again for unrequited interest in young ladies, this time in Seattle. JAMES COLEMAN called to say so. Jim and his wife Nancy are quitting their jobs to sail around the world in their 32’ ferroconcrete boat. Nancy’s parents died and left them well-off. “We were smart not to have kids,” Jim commented.

HAROLD DECKER writes from Arkansas that he is angry about Alumni Association fund-raising letters that follow him everywhere he goes. “I haven’t got s---, and wouldn’t give it if I did.” Wow. NORMAN BELLOWS has been named managing editor of Attitude. He says the magazine’s 380,000 readers will see a different magazine under his tutelage—“aimed at aggressive, professional people. No tedious essays.” Norm’s erstwhile literary companion in New York, GEORGE PHILMAN BELLOWS (Betsy BELLOWS and George are living together, sorely testing that close friendship from Spectator days) reports Pounce is doing very well. George’s “funny but vicious” anecdotes about celebrities appear bi-weekly in the fledgling, nationally-syndicated column. “At first the humor went right by everyone,” says George, feigning disbelief. “George is an a--h---,” was GLEN GREEN’s observation when I phoned. Glen opens a five-week show in Reno in January (and he will see to it that you get a free drink and best seats in the house). Another class celebrity, actor BOYD DAVIDSON, has entered Mt. Sinai, Los Angeles, for treatment of cocaine and Percodan addiction.

Dr. CARNEY OLIN, who broke a morphine habit at Mt. Sinai in 1979, thinks it’s the best program in the country. Carney says he’s fully recovered and back in surgery in the Phoenix area. THOMAS GREENVILLE’s business brochure arrived in the mail last week. He has opened his fifteenth Total Review salon. Tom combines a revitalizing physical-fitness program with various types of modern therapy, like est, to provide clients with brand-new life paths. Some sort of survival prize should go to DEAN FRANCIS. MBA Harvard 1968. Stanford Law 1970. Elected to the California State Assembly in 1974, after managing Sen. Edward Eaton’s successful ’72 election campaign. In 1978, elected to Congress from California’s 43rd District. It all but collapsed like a house of cards last fall. A jealous brother-in-law, and heir to the Greer fortune, instigated a series of nasty suits, publicly denounced Dean as a fraud, and allegedly paid a woman to sexually embarrass him. Dean won re-election, but the word is his marriage is over—and Phyllis Greer FRANCIS will go to court to recover damages from her brother. A sadder story came to light when I met DOUGLAS BRAND for drinks after the Oklahoma game last fall. Doug’s wife Linda went berserk in August and killed their three children. She’s in prison. Doug says he used to bait her to a fury with tales of his adulteries and feels great remorse.

BENJAMIN TROPPE has been named vice president for marketing for Temple Industries in Philadelphia. BERNARD HANNAH is new corporate counsel in Conrad Communications, Atlantic City. HENRY CHURCH was killed by police in Newark for unspecified reasons. Well-known painter DAVID WHITCOMB moved to Guatemala and left no forwarding address. (Dave?) FREDERICK MANDELL weeps uncontrollably in his crowded apartment in Miami Beach. JOEL REEDE lives in self-destructive hatred in Rye, New York. JAY LOGAN has joined insurgency forces in Angola. ADRIAN BYRD travels to the Netherlands in the spring to cover proceedings against the Federal Government at The Hague for Dispatch.

GORDON HASKINS has quit the priesthood in Serape, a violent New Mexico border town, to seek political office. ANTHONY CREST succeeds father Luther (Class of ’36) as chairman of Fabre. DANIEL REDDLEMAN continues to compose classical music for the cello in Hesterman, Tennessee. ODELL MASTERS cries out in his dreams for love of his wife and children. PAUL GREEN, who never married, farms 1200 acres in eastern Oregon with his father. ROGER BOLTON, who played professional baseball for nine years, lost his family in flooding outside New Orleans and has entered a Benedictine monastery. (Paul Jeffries, 1340 North Michigan, Chicago, IL 60602)

27

Dear Stephen Hawking

Samantha Hunt

Dear Stephen Hawking,

Tell me I can forget the laws of gravity, not be coy with you.

It’s true. I am expanding every night when the stars come out. I am expanding across the United States because I’m hungry Stephen. I’ll call you Stephen or
Stephana
or
chou-chou
, and the night sky is rising in my stomach like yeast.

This expansion is the nestled way Africa and South America once slept as spoons, the uncleaved slate that was your rocky body and my sandy self. Because, as you,
lapin
, told us, if the universe is expanding then for one brief moment there was a singularity, you a cell of me, me a cell of cellulose or quartz or hydrogen or Chicago or you.

Describe all space and time sweetly, generally, relatively. I await your words in packets, in waves. Because I dreamed,
petit
, of a black hole which vacuumed all we said. Each, “Umm Mr. Hawking, umm,” or, “Speak up!” or “Can you repeat the question?” every word sucked clean like a bone. They fall into the densest space and are thought lost forever but emerge, emitted as energy shouting, “Love. Love. Love,” or “E=mc
2
.”

Bear this out even to the un-edge of your imaginary time and slowly, even love’s O and the V, even energy’s M and the C will find themselves at distances the postal system hasn’t traveled in an entire lifetime, greater than the distances starlight has spanned since Kepler was a boy.

In the beginning there was a oneness. If time ends, it will end because the oneness became a twoness. So remain distant,
ma coeur,
and resonate singularity in the space between you and me, down illimitable corridors that without wrinkle, without waste are only the second of a synapse. Whisper, “I,” or whisper, “You,” or “envelope” or “the news at 10” and expand.

Tonight, in our briefer history, I am a woman on a Minnesota porch spilling out onto a sheet of airmail. Every word and letter I get secured to paper or allow from my mouth, opens up, distributes me more evenly in the universe so that eventually, randomly, generally, relatively one letter, an A or a T from me will gently brush the downy skin of your cheek.

Yours truly,

28

National Treasures

Charles McLeod

In which the Seller
commodifies his dissent
, listing for the first time this previously uncollected compendium of National Treasures, the delimited choices most chiefly informed by the Seller’s belief that each person is a country unto themselves, and possesses a record of conflict and treaty, has customs and boundaries and scandals and ways—that every small piece of the self is worth something, and too that the Seller is broke, and can no longer afford the small storage unit off the Queens Midtown Expressway, Exit 15, and for nearly two months has been receiving, per voicemail, threats from said storage unit’s owner, a Sikh, one Mr. S. Bedi who has promised to heave all of the Seller’s belongings out into the street, and so then this cyber-boutique
sui generis
, its governing tenets lying ultimately between Organic Nationalism and Dynastic Hegemony, between amour de soi and amour-propre, an emporium that’s sought to accommodate too much, and whose ruler now seeks to sell off part and parcel. These items are priced to move.

Lot of Children’s Winter Clothes: Two Parkas, Eight Ski Hats, 4 Pair Mittens, Two Pair Sorrel Boots, Child Sizes Ten and Six, Respectively.

Born in Buffalo to middle-class parents, September 1975, my younger brother followed me from my mother’s womb some twenty-seven months later. We lived mid-block, between a divorced beat cop and a semi-professional painter named Janine Bench, who was in her fourth decade while I lingered in pre-pubescence. Winters were maelstroms of snow; there were consistent stints of no electricity, and people began buying firewood prior to Labor Day. I can recall watching Miss Bench painting by candlelight; the bedroom that I shared with my brother, James, had a window that looked out at her studio. My neighbor was a gaunt dishwater blonde with mild features, save for a rather pronounced chin, which made her profile unintentionally comic. She was naturally attractive but put little stock in her physical appearance, spending most of her time around the house in the same cocoa and pink velour robe, a neck-to-feet item that she rubber-banded the left sleeve of when applying paint to canvas. I imagined her rich, even though she lived right next to us and we were most certainly not rich, my mother working clerical at a Federal Building downtown and my father teaching math at Grover Cleveland, the public high school I would later attend. Miss Bench herself worked days at Oliver’s, one of Buffalo’s standout restaurants. I realize now that the reason I thought her wealthy was that her lifestyle was different than most people’s, that she was most generally “other,” an idea I was fascinated by: that there was always the anti-, the un-, lurking nearby, stockpiling. I spied on her whenever I could.

Nearly all these people have passed from this world: the beat cop got shot, Miss Bench had a stroke, my brother jumped off the roof of a building five blocks from Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. My mother, too, is gone; she bought Kents by the carton, vowing always to quit. During one no-power stint in deep winter, I was sent down the block to procure more of these, the corner store, per a generator, open through the worst. Miss Bench was at work and did not lock her door and I had failed to keep my curiosity (innate) quelled sufficiently. That is, I turned the handle and went inside. Miss Bench’s front room held no furniture; she utilized the space as an ersatz gallery—paintings hung everywhere, large canvases in grays and blues and browns. Later I would realize these as poor imitations of the “Ab-Ex” tradition: destitute impostors of the work of Kline and Klee, lots of lines and boxes, the hues chosen most certainly influenced by the torpor of Buffalo winters. I took nothing and left, not realizing that my boots (the larger-sized Sorrels listed above) had tracked in snow from Miss Bench’s front steps, thereby indicating that a stranger had entered her house. Through high school she offered me only terse waves and sideways glances, acts that left me feeling wholly guilty, despite the fact that I had done nothing, really, wrong.

Starting Bid: $9.99

VHS Recording of Rogers and Hammerstein’s
Oklahoma
, as Performed by the 1987 Sixth Grade Class of Phelan Academy. 72 Minutes. Shot with a Panasonic Dual-Head Hi-Fi Camera.

Being in education and realizing that the extent of Reagan’s concern, in regard to public schools, hovered somewhere between “fuck” and “you,” my father enrolled me at Phelan Academy, a nonsectarian private institution that sat on the east end of Buffalo’s west side. I attended Phelan from third through eighth grade. In the fourth grade, a librarian stabbed another teacher upon discovering the tryst between the stabee and the librarian’s wife. The following year an ex-Bills linebacker wandered onto campus, high on PCP. (Later, while a sophomore at SUNY–Albany, I would better attempt to understand my brother’s own addictions by trying this exact
receptor antagonist
in a friend’s dorm room. The effects upon my person were not dissimilar to
swimming in drool.
)

There was a second performance of this musical that was not taped, performed at some other school very deep in the ghetto, a place that I cannot remember the name of. I and my classmates, less concerned about performing with any legitimacy sans the attendance of our parents, had located in the men’s dressing room
a bright orange inflatable ball
, which was taken by me or one of my cohorts from said dressing room and released onto the stage during a meager rendition of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” To say our chaperones—comprised of three teachers, including the drama teacher, an aged hippy with the first name of Splendor—were indignant would not do justice to the rage that they held inside them, and had to keep holding inside them for the full of the play, until the production was over, at which point a half-dozen of us were repaired to a vacant classroom and beaten savagely, boxed around the ears and held over knees and spanked, the latter of these minor tortures both painful and embarrassing, as we were really too old for this particular mode of punishment. I can only imagine how this meting-out later affected the sex lives of my cohorts, but in regard to myself I now admit fully a predilection for slapping firmly the bare rear of every single partner of intimacy, of raising my hand and then lowering it, and thereby leaving upon a half-dozen individuals misdirected acts of revenge. Opening and Closing Credits Included. Intermission partially edited out, though as the camera comes back on you can see clearly my brother, age nine, stop, for just a moment, in front of the lens. Slight wear marks in this section of the tape due to repeated pausing. Performance itself is unflawed.

Starting Bid: $4.99

Lot of 2 (Front and Rear) State of New York License Plates, 1973–1986 Era. Plates are Gold with Blue Letters: 8675-NMS. Stickerless: Window Validation. Front Plate Creased (See Below).

Unable to afford Phelan for the final stage of compulsory schooling, my parents enrolled me at Grover Cleveland High School, some ten blocks from Lake Erie and the Canadian Border. Occupying a full city lot, the school, erected in 1913, is in the Colonial Revival Style of the period: symmetrical façade, pediment supported by pilasters, voussoirs, etc. Steel-framed, with a stone red-brick and terra cotta exterior, this cupola-with-spire topped hellhole is where I would first make the acquaintance of one Frederick Ames Kemper, cast, like myself, in a non-speaking role in the drama that was Grover Cleveland’s junior varsity football team. The misery of the bus rides to away games is, in some ways, indescribable: I was lithe and asthmatic, and tormented with a sort of passion I can only term Roman. Everyone smelled like wet, dirty socks. But there also in that rage-drenched miasma (a Bosch canvas on wheels), Frederick: flaxen-haired, halcyon, a toiletries bag filled with Top 40 cassettes on the seat beside him, his Walkman headphones over, always, his ears. Frederick had made a name for himself even prior to his arrival at Grover Cleveland per the advanced utilization of his pronounced kleptomania: that is, Frederick Ames was a semi-professional thief. He lived in a creepy Victorian too near the Dewey Thruway, his father a gravedigger for Forest Lawn Cemetery and his mother, nebbish, a shut-in with a penchant for strays. Frederick’s skin was almost diaphanous: he looked like a cave-thing, bleached or otherwise improperly pigmented, and in this way propagated the Gothic bleakness that seemed inherent to his bloodline. I adored him and he knew it and, slowly, let me become his friend. On weekends we traveled by bus to Buffalo’s Downtown, robbing most frequently the strange and cluttered “everything” shops that all urban centers seem to possess. We took cameras, silk pocket squares for men’s suits, shoe polish, coffee mugs. Frederick often worked with his Walkman on, perhaps to make him look more casual, perhaps to keep some part of himself from analyzing what the other part was doing. My job was to talk, to distract: Frederick and I were cousins, arriving in Buffalo from Pennsylvania to stay with relatives who, it seemed, had forgotten to collect us from the bus depot. With strange men who smelled of booze or smoke or curry, I pored over neighborhood maps in the Yellow Pages while Frederick filled up his bag. I realize now that Frederick made the more severe looting excursions without me; he came to school dressed, for a freshman, to the nines: new Jordans, gold jewelry, a full-length sateen Bills parka. For spending so many weekends together our small talk was minimal, and consisted chiefly of single sentences uttered by Frederick while we waited for the bus:
My dad killed a cat with a shovel last night
, or
my mom thinks the moon is an eye
. Implied in such statements was the fact that I would never see the inside of Frederick’s home, and only once did he see the inside of mine, being invited, by my parents, over to dinner the winter of that freshman year, the five of us eating chicken, green beans and mashed potatoes in silence. Afterward, over a dessert of chocolate pudding, Frederick had commented on how bright our house was. You like the blue, my mom had said. (She had recently painted the kitchen.) No, Frederick had said, I mean you guys turn on a lot of lights.

Our sophomore year Fredrick began to steal cars. Sometime over summer his mother had been moved to a state-run facility, and with her departure went the dearth of parenting Frederick received. Absent until lunch, Frederick would drive by the front of Grover Cleveland in a pilfered Skylark or Impala, his wan face glum. On what was to be the last balmy night of October, Frederick showed up at my house past one in the morning, waking me with bottle caps thrown at my second-story window. Frederick was drunk, and had a Porsche. I’d clothed and eased down the trellis in silence. We drove around some in the warm night air; the car’s leather smelled new, and even at twenty-five miles an hour, it was clear what the Porsche’s engine was capable of. At my feet was a half-finished six-pack of Labatt’s Blue. Where’d you get the car, I asked. This world’s spent meat, Frederick said back. We sped up, taking the neighborhood’s turns more sharply, and I understood at that moment that I was okay, and Frederick was not. Three blocks from Grover Cleveland we passed a cop heading in the opposite direction, and shortly there-after Frederick ceded what was left of his quickly-eroding calm. He upshifted then lost control, the car hopping the curb and hitting a spruce some ten yards from the high school’s front doors. Stunned but conscious we sat in the smoking wreck, looking at each other. Frederick’s head had connected with the steering wheel; one side of his face was already swelling, and above his eyebrows was wet red blood. He looked like a member of a war fought a long time ago. Then Fredrick told me to run. The Porsche’s shotgun door was bent in its frame, and I had to kick at it repeatedly to exit, sprinting down a side street and watching, peripherally, porch lights turn on, the homes’ owners awoken by the din of the impact. A mile later I stopped, out of breath and almost losing my night’s dinner. I turned to see how far Frederick was behind me, but no one was there.

The next morning, at breakfast, all was explained: the superintendent had made the cursory round of phone calls to high school faculty, and I came downstairs, freshly showered, to find out that Frederick was apprehended at the scene, and awaiting sentence while he lay, casted, on a gurney at Kaleida General. The cop we’d passed the night before had found Frederick behind the steering wheel, his leg broken, the Walkman’s play button punched in. I never went to the hospital to visit him, believing such a trip would incriminate me. Frederick was sent to a detention center north of Syracuse; he did not return to Grover Cleveland and my heart, a coward’s heart, was thankful for this. That night my father took us all out for dinner—a rare occurrence, and the significance of which was not lost on myself. On the trip home he strayed from the standard route, driving by the scene. The Porsche was still there. Buffalo is a poor city and damage control occurs slowly; the car had been unstuck from the tree, but no wrecker had yet to tow it to impound. It’s awful what happened there, my dad said. It sure is, I answered. Are all families’ secret thoughts Venn diagrams? Things that overlap and do not? That night I snuck back down the trellis. In my jeans pocket were two screwdrivers, borrowed from my father’s garage workbench. Frederick, if you’re out there, I have the Porsche’s license plates. Convo me and I’ll take down this listing. These items belong to you.