Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  for someone to ease the pain

  All my life I've waited

  for someone to take the blame

  ~ from Calling Your Name by Janis Ian

  I reached for the switch on the band saw.

  ~~~~~

  Then I woke up with a crowd forming around me.

  And I was in my own backyard.

  ~~~~~

  It turns out that my next-door-neighbor had seen me fall out of the storage building I use as a workshop and had called 911 when I didn't get up after a few seconds.

  ~~~~~

  Once, long ago in college, working in Little Theater, I'd had a light bridge lowered to set the fresnels for Blithe Spirit, just after the Christmas semester break. Some idiot had left a hot male 220 plug loose, and as I reached up to the iron bridge, it dropped against the bar. I'd felt that, all over, and I jumped backwards about 15 feet.

  A crowd started for me, but I let out some truly blazing oath that turned the whole stage violet-indigo blue and they disappeared in a hurry. Then I yelled at the guys and girl in the technical booth to kill everything onstage, and spent the next hour making sure nothing else wasn't where it shouldn't be…

  That's while I was working 36 hours a week at a printing plant, going to college full-time and working in the theater another 60 hours a week for no pay. I was also dating a foul-mouthed young woman named Susan who was brighter than me. Eventually something had to give—it was my stomach (an ulcer at 20) and my relationship with her.

  She came back into the theater later that day, and heard about the incident and walked up to me and said "Are you happy to see me, or is that a hot male 200 volt plug in your pocket?"

  That shock, the 220, had felt like someone shaking my hand at 2700 rpm while wearing a spiked glove and someone behind me was hammering nails in my head and meanwhile they were piling safes on me…

  When I'd touched the puny 110 band saw, I felt nothing.

  Then there were neighbors and two EMS people leaning over me upside down.

  "What's up, doc?" I asked.

  "How many fingers?" he asked, moving his hand, changing it in a slow blur.

  "Three, five, two."

  "What's today?"

  "You mean Tuesday, or May 6th?"

  I sat up.

  "Easy," said the lady EMS person, "You'll probably have a headache."

  The guy pushed me back down slowly. "What happened?"

  "I turned on the band saw. Then I'm looking at you."

  He got up, went to the corner of the shed and turned off the breakers. By then the sirens had stopped, and two or three firefighters and the lieutenant had come in the yard.

  "You okay, Pops?" he asked.

  "I think so," I said. I turned to the crowd. "Thanks to whoever called these guys." Then the EMS people asked me some medical stuff, and the lieutenant, after looking at the breakers, went in the shed and fiddled around. He came out.

  "You got a shorted switch," he said. "Better replace it."

  I thanked Ms. Krelboind, the neighbor lady, everybody went away, and I went inside to finish my cup of coffee.

  ~~~~~

  My daughter Maureen pulled up as I drank the last of the milk skim off the top of the coffee.

  She ran in.

  "Are you alright, Dad?"

  "Evidently," I said.

  Her husband Bob was a fireman. He usually worked over at Firehouse # 2, the one on the other side of town. He'd heard the address the EMS had been called to on the squawk box, and had called her.

  "What happened?"

  "Short in the saw," I said. "The lieutenant said so, officially."

  "I mean," she repeated, "Are you sure you're alright?"

  "It was like a little vacation," I said. "I needed one."

  ~~~~~

  She called her husband, and I made more coffee, and we got to talking about her kids—Vera, Chuck and Dave, or whichever ones are here—I can't keep up. There's two daughters, Maureen and Celine, and five grandkids. Sorting them all out was my late wife's job. She's only been gone a year and a month and three days.

  We got off onto colleges, even though it would be some years before any of the grandkids needed one. The usual party schools came up. "I can see them at Sam Houston State in togas," I said.

  "I'm just real sure toga parties will come back," said Mo.

  Then I mentioned Kent State.

  "Kent State? Nothing ever happens there," she said.

  "Yeah, right," I said, "Like the nothing that happened after Nixon invaded Cambodia. All the campuses in America shut down. They sent the Guard in. They shot four people down, just like they were at a carnival."

  She looked at me.

  "Nixon? What did Nixon have to do with anything?"

  "Well, he was the President. He wanted "no wider war". Then he sent the Army into Cambodia and Laos. It was before your time."

  "Daddy," she said, "I don't remember much American history. But Nixon was never President. I think he was vice-president under one of those old guys—was it Eisenhower? Then he tried to be a senator. Then he wanted to be President, but someone whipped his ass at the convention. Where in that was he ever President? I know Eisenhower didn't die in office."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "You stay right here," she said, and went to the living room. I heard her banging around in the bookcase. She came back with Vol 14 of the set of 1980's encyclopedias I'd bought for $20 down and $20 a month, seems like paying for about fifteen years on them…. She had her thumb in it, holding a place. She opened it on the washing machine lid. "Read."

  The entry was on Nixon, Richard Milhous, and it was shorter than it should have been. There was the HUAC and Hiss stuff, the Checkers speech, the vice-presidency and reelection, the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the loss, the Senate attempt, the "won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more" speech, the law firm, the oil company stuff, the death from phlebitis in 1977….

  "Where the hell did you get this? It's all wrong."

  "It's yours, Dad. It's your encyclopedia. You've had them 20 years. You bought them for us to do homework out of. Remember?"

  I went to the living room. There was a hole in the set at Vol 14. I put it back in. Then I took out Vol 24 UV and looked up Vietnam, War In. There was WWII, 1939-1945, then French Colonial War 1945=1954, then American In 1954-1970. Then I took down Vol II and read about John F. Kennedy (president, 1961-1969).

  "Are you better now, Daddy?" she asked.

  "No. I haven't finished reading a bunch of lies yet, I've just begun."

  "I'm sorry. I know the shock hurt. And things haven't been good since Mom… But this really isn't like you."

  "I know what happened in the Sixties! I was there! Where were you?"

  "Okay, okay. Let's drop it. I've got to get back home; the kids are out of school soon."

  "Alright," I said. "It was a shock—not a nasty one, not my first, but maybe if I'm careful, my last."

  "I'll send Bill over tomorrow on his day off and he can help you fix the saw. You know how he likes to futz with machinery."

  "For gods sakes, Mo, it's a bad switch. It'll take two minutes to replace it. It ain't rocket science!"

  She hugged me, went out to her car and drove off.

  Strange that she should have called her husband Bob, Bill.

  No wonder the kids struggled at school. Those encyclopedias sucked. I hope the whole staff got fired and went to prison.

  ~~~~~

  I went down to the library where they had Britannicas, World Books, old Compton's. Everybody else in the place was on, or waiting in line for, the Internet.

  I sat down by the reference shelves and opened four or five encyclopedias to the entries on Nixon. All of them started Nixon, Richard Milhous, and then in brackets (1913-1977).

  After the fifth one, I got up and went over the reference librarian, who'd just unjammed one of the printers, and she looked up at me and smiled, and as I said it I knew I should not have, but I said "All your
encyclopedias are wrong."

  The smile stayed on her face.

  And then I thought here's a guy standing in front of her; he's in his fifties; he looks a little peaked, and he's telling her all her reference books are wrong. Just like I once heard a guy, in his fifties, a little peaked, yelling at a librarian that some book in the place was trying to tell him that Jesus had been a Jew!

  What would you do?

  Before she could do anything, I said "Excuse me."

  "Certainly," she said.

  I left in a hurry.

  ~~~~~

  My son-in-law came over the next morning when he should have been asleep.

  He looked a little different (his ears were longer. It took a little while to notice that was it) and he seemed a little older, but he looked pretty much the same as always.

  "Hey. Mo sent me over to do the major overhaul on the band saw."

  "Fuck it." I said. "It's the switch. I can do it in my sleep."

  "She said she'd feel better if you let me do it."

  "Buzz off."

  He laughed and grabbed one of the beers he keeps in my refrigerator. "Okay, then," he said, "can I borrow a couple of albums to tape? I want the kids to hear what real music sounds like."

  He had a pretty good selection of 45's, albums and CD's, even some shellac 78's. He's got a couple of old turntables (one that plays 16 rpm, even). But I have some stuff on vinyl he doesn't.

  "Help yourself," I said. He went to the living room and started making noises opening cabinets.

  ~~~~~

  I mentioned The Who.

  "Who?"

  "Not who. The Who."

  "What do you mean, who?"

  "Who. The rock group. The Who."

  "Who?"

  "No, no. The Rock group, which is named The Who."

  "What is this," he asked. "Abbott and Hardy?"

  "We'll get to that later," I said. "Same time as the early Beatles. That…"

  "Who?"

  "Let me start over. Roger Daltry. Pete Townsend. John Entwhistle. Keith—"

  "The High Numbers!" he said. "Why didn't you say so?"

  "A minute ago. I said they came along with the early Beatles and you said—"

  "Who?"

  "Do not start."

  "There is no rock band called the Beetles," he said with authority.

  I looked at him. "Paul McCartney…"

  He cocked his head, gave me a go-on gesture.

  "…John Lennon, George Harri…"

  "You mean the Quarrymen?" he asked.

  "…son, Ringo Starr."

  "You mean Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe," he said.

  "Sir Richard Starkey. Ringo Starr. From all the rings on his fingers."

  "The Quarrymen. Five guys. They had few hits in the early Sixties. Wrote a shitpot of songs for other people. Broke up in 1966. Boring old farts since then—tried comeback albums, no back to come to. Lennon lives in a trailer in New Jersey. God knows where the rest of them are."

  "Lennon's dead." I said. "He was assassinated at the Dakota Apartments in NYC in 1980 by a guy who wanted to impress Jodie Foster."

  "Well, then, CNTV's got it all wrong, because they did a where-are-they-now thing a couple of weeks ago, and he looked pretty alive to me. He talked a few minutes and showed them some Holsteins or various other moo-cows, and a reporter made fun of them, and Lennon went back into the trailer and closed the door."

  I knew they watched a lot of TV at the firehouse.

  "This week they did one on ex-President Kennedy. It was his 84th birthday or something. He's the one that looked near-dead to me—they said he's had Parkinson's since the Sixties. They only had one candle on the cake, but I bet like Popeye these days, he had to eat three cans of spinach just to blow it out. His two brothers took turns reading a proclamation from President Gore. It looked like he didn't know who that was. His mom had to help him cut the cake. Then his wife Marilyn kissed him. He seemed to like that."

  ~~~~~

  I sat there quietly a few minutes.

  "In your family," I asked, "who's Bill?"

  He quit thumbing through the albums. He took in his breath a little too loudly. He looked at me.

  "Edward," he said, "I'm Bill."

  "Then who's Bob?"

  "Bob was what they called my younger brother. He lived two days. He's out at Kid Heaven in Greenwood. You, me, and Mo went out there last Easter. Remember?"

  "Uh, yeah." I said.

  "Are you sure you're okay, after the shock, I mean?"

  "Fit as a fiddle," I said, lying through my teeth.

  "You sure you don't need help with the saw?"

  "It'll be a snap."

  "Well, be careful."

  "The breakers are still off."

  "Thanks for the beer" he said, putting a couple of albums under his arm and going toward the door.

  "Bye. Go get some sleep." I said.

  I'll have to remember to call Bob, Bill.

  ~~~~~

  Mo was back, in a hurry.

  "What is it, Dad? I've never seen Bill so upset."

  "I don't know. Things are just so mixed up. In fact, they're wrong."

  "What do you mean, wrong? I'm really worried about you now, and so's Bill."

  I've never been a whiner, even in the worst of times.

  "Oh, Dad." she said. "Maybe you should go see Doc Adams, maybe get some tests done. See if he can't recommend someone…"

  "You mean, like I've got Alzheimer's? I don't have Alzheimer's! It's not me, it's the world that's off the trolley. Yesterday—I don't know, it's like everything I thought I knew is wrong. It's like some Mohorovic discontinuity of the mind. Nixon was president. He had to resign because of a break-in at the Watergate Hotel, the Democratic National Headquarters, in 1972. I have a bumper sticker somewhere: "Behind Every Watergate Is A Milhous." It was the same bunch of guys who set up Kennedy in 1963. It was…"

  I started to cry. Maureen didn't know whether to come to me or not.

  "Are you thinking about Mom?" she asked.

  "Yes," I said, "Yes, I'm thinking about your mother."

  Then she hugged me.

  ~~~~~

  I don't know what to say.

  I'm a bright enough guy. I'm beginning to understand, though, about how people get bewildered.

  On my way from the library after embarrassing myself, I passed the comic-book and poster shop two blocks away. There were reproduction posters in one window; the famous one of Clark Gable and Paulette Goddard with the flames of Atlanta behind them from Mules in Horses' Harnesses; Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie in The Road To Morocco, and window cards from James Dean in Somebody Up There Likes Me, along with Giant and East of Eden.

  I came home and turned on the oldies station. It wasn't there, one like it was somewhere else on the dial.

  It was just like Bo—Bill said. The first thing I heard was The Quarrymen doing "Gimme Deine Hande". I sat there for two hours, till it got dark, without turning on the lights, listening. There were familiar tunes by somebody else, called something else. There were the right songs by the right people. Janis I. Fink seemed to be in heavy rotation, three songs in the two hours, both before and after she went to prison, according to the DJ. The things you find out on an oldies station…

  I heard no Chuck Berry, almost an impossibility.

  Well, I will try to live here. I'll just have to be careful finding my way around in it. Tomorrow, after the visit to the doc, it's back to the library.

  Before going to bed, I rummaged around in my "Important Papers" file. I took out my old draft notice.

  It wasn't from Richard Nixon, like it has been for the last 32 years. It was from Barry Goldwater. (Au + H20 = 1968 ?)

  ~~~~~

  The psychiatrist seemed like a nice-enough guy. We talked a few minutes about the medical stuff Doc Adams had sent over; work, the shock, what Mo had told the Doc.

  "Your daughter seems to think you're upset about your environment. Can you tell me why she
thinks that?"

  "I think she means to say I told her this was not the world I was born in and have lived in for 56 years." I said.

  He didn't write anything down in his pad.

  "It's all different." I said. He nodded.

  "Since the other morning, everything I've known all my life doesn’t add up. The wrong people have been elected to office. History is different. Not just the politics-battles-wars, stuff, but also social history, culture. There's a book of social history by a guy named Furnas. I haven't looked, but I bet that's all different, too. I'll get it out of the library today. If it's there. If there’s a guy named Furnas anymore."

  I told him some of the things that were changed—just in two days' worth. I told him it—some of it anyway—was fascinating, but I'm sure I'd find scary stuff sooner or later. I'd have to learn to live with it, go with the flow.

  "What do you think happened?" he asked.

  "What is this, The Sopranos?"

  "Beg pardon?" he asked.

  "Oh. Oh. You'd like it. It's a TV show about a Mafia guy who, among other things, goes to a shrink—a lady shrink. It's on HBO."

  "HBO?"

  "Sorry. A cable network."

  He wrote three things down on his pad.

  "Look. Where I come from… I know that sounds weird. In Lindner's book…"

  "Lindner?"

  "Lindner. The Fifty-Minute Hour. Bestseller. 1950's."

  "I take by the title it was about psychiatry. And a bestseller?"

  "Let me start over. He wrote the book they took the title Rebels Without A Cause from—but that had nothing to do with the movie…"

  He was writing stuff down now, fast.

  "It's getting deeper and deeper, isn't it?" I asked.

  "Go on. Please."

  "Lindner had a patient who was a guy who thought he lived on a far planet in an advanced civilization—star-spanning galaxy-wide stuff. Twenty years before Star Wars. Anyway…"

  He wrote down two words without taking his eyes off me.

  "In my world," I said, very slowly and carefully, looking directly at him, "there was a movie called Star Wars in 1977 that changed the way business was done in Hollywood."

  "Okay." he said.

  "This is not getting us anywhere!" I said.

  And then he came out with the most heartening thing I'd heard in two days. He said "What do you mean we, kemo sabe?"

  Well, we laughed and laughed, and then I tried to tell him, really tell him, what I thought I knew.