Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (12 page)

Here are a few words for the class of 2001:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Vonnegut went on to give them earnest advice—like: “Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.”

He also urged them to “floss” and “stretch.”

Be careful whose advice you buy. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

Now, the thing about this charming piece by Kurt Vonnegut is that
it wasn’t written by Kurt Vonnegut.

It was written by a newspaper columnist in Chicago called Mary Schmich. Some unknown person had started sending it around as a speech by Vonnegut. According to Schmich, “It went to Italy and France, to Israel and Brazil, to places I didn’t know had electricity. Even Mr. Vonnegut’s wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, received it, e-mailed it to several friends, then asked her husband: Why didn’t you tell me you spoke at MIT? He said: Because I didn’t.”

Somebody said it was one of the most widely distributed pieces of e-mail in the history of the Internet.

But after only a few hours of bouncing around the world, it was identified as a hoax.

As soon as Vonnegut told a caller he
hadn’t
written it, in a flash, the Internet was flooded with retractions. By the end of one extraordinary day, vast numbers of people had accepted and then rejected a worldwide hoax.

And that’s what makes this Internet event a great image for the age in which we live. There are probably just as many lies going around now as ever before, but these days they’re traveling at the speed of light. There are just as many people who want to fool you into thinking they’ve got it all figured out for you, but now you don’t have nearly as much time to think it over.

And with the help of an engine for repetition that works on a scale unheard of in the past, the lies stick. People are
still
sending around the talk, thinking it was written by Vonnegut. I was sent a copy just last week.

It’s a delightful piece of writing. But if it’s presented as if it were by someone other than the person who wrote it, it steals that person’s good name and gives itself a certain credibility before it has a chance to earn it honestly. So, as good as it is, it’s a cheat. At least in the way it’s offered to us.

So, you may be thinking, Big deal. It’s just a few good jokes. But think about it…it could be selling you anything. It could be a cult religion that could separate you from friends and family, or a quack medicine that could leave you paralyzed, or bogus political information that causes you to elect a numbskull to the presidency.

God forbid.

Being able to know what’s true and what’s a lie is more urgently needed these days—and a lot harder to do—than ever before.

Now, more than ever, you need the wisdom of a trusted parent, partner, or friend to remind you of what counts. Now, more than ever, you need to know who you are and what you believe in.

Who you are is a tough one…because most of us have many people inside us. But in your finer moments you aspire to things that make sense in the long run. Even while you’re enjoying a momentary distraction, somebody in you knows that down the road there’s going to be something that will take some hard work. And that when it comes your way, you won’t be able to wing it…you’ll have to be prepared. That’s the somebody who’s the best and smartest you. That’s the one who knows that the deepest pleasures come from learning how to do something difficult and that it’s worth putting in the time to learn it.

Let yourself be all the yous you are, but don’t let them crowd out the smart one.

As for what you believe in, your values really are not so much what you
say
as what you
do.
The more you bring those two things in line with each other, the easier it may be to get where you’re going.

You may tell yourself you’re going to Chicago, but it’s hard to get to Chicago if you keep buying tickets to Las Vegas.

I think we don’t realize how important time is. When we couldn’t communicate at the speed of light, we probably didn’t think about it that much.

But things do take time. Chemical reactions take time. Mourning a loss takes time. In fact, all the transitions in our lives take time. Getting in shape, physically or mentally, takes more than a weekend, no matter what they tell you in the brochure.

It takes time for a species to adapt to changes in the environment, and that’s what makes us one of the most dangerous animals that ever lived. We can make changes in the environment that are so rapid that nature doesn’t have time to replace the species we kill with others that are adapted to the alterations we’ve made in their habitats.

Now, although I think that knowing who you are and what you value and taking the time to look before you leap are all good ideas, that doesn’t mean I know exactly how to do it. I don’t want to kid you into thinking I’ve done it, it’s a cinch. I’m still working on it, still trying to figure out how all this fits together. But this is what
I
aspire to. And I thought I’d pass it on.

So, as you make the transition from this page in your life to the next chapter…I wish you health, happiness, resilience, love, laughter, patience, cash, strength, smart friends, and plenty of time.

Maybe these few ideas will help start you on your way. I don’t think it can do any harm to try them.

But if all else fails…floss, and wear your sunscreen.

Chapter 11

Winning the War on Winning

When I gave the eulogy for Vinegar, my grandchildren’s dead rabbit, I laid to rest something that had been gnawing impudently at my insides like Bugs Bunny on a carrot since I was a boy. Too often, I had needed to win, to come out of the game ahead—sometimes even if I wasn’t in a game.

When I was eight, I would go with a friend on Saturdays to the Hitching Post Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to see a double feature of westerns and serials. But my life had been changed the night before one of those Saturdays by seeing Danny Kaye in
Up in Arms.
I had laughed so hard, I wanted to see it again and skip the westerns. My friend was reluctant to miss the serials at the Hitching Post. If we skipped a week of serials, we’d be lost in the continuing story and we’d never catch up. I didn’t care. Danny Kaye thrilled me. I cajoled my friend for almost an hour with no results. Finally, I had a solution. I put a tin can on the sidewalk.

“Whoever kicks the can the farthest gets to pick the movie.”

Tired of arguing, he agreed, and we each took a turn at kicking the tin can down the sidewalk. His kick went a good ten feet past mine. “Okay,” I said. “That’s fair. Let’s make it the best two out of three.”

He looked at me sideways. “And then we let the winner pick?”

“Right.”

Bang. His kick landed the can ahead of mine. Again.

“Good,” I said. “Three out of five.”

“We just did two out of three.”

“Three out of five. And that’s it.”

But that wasn’t it, because the kid could just kick the hell out of a can. That didn’t stop me, though. I went back to cajoling. At the end of the afternoon, we were still arguing and we never got to see any movie that day.

Two or three years later, I was embarked on winning with another boy my age. He was larger than me, but gentle and good-natured. He was Japanese, and a few years earlier, during the war, he had been interned in a camp. While he was living in barracks instead of the home where he was born, I was seeing war movies where the people who looked like me fought against people who looked like him. Inspired by the war movies, I liked to get into mock fights with him, and we would wrestle on the grass in front of my house. He didn’t really want to wrestle, but in those days you made your own entertainment, and there wasn’t much else to do. One day, I got him in an armlock, and after a moment, he let out a sound of pain. Instead of letting him go, I applied more pressure. In my mind, this wasn’t real. We were in a movie. Having him under my control made me feel clever and powerful. When I did let him go, he looked at me with eyes that were focused like dark, flat disks.

“You hurt me.”

It was then that I realized he had actually felt something. He wasn’t just a prop in a movie. But that was only an early glimmer of my being able to understand that suffering could take place outside myself. It would be a long time before I could actually feel compassion. Meanwhile, I looked forward to winning and the sense of power it gave me. As good as power feels, it can lead to some regrettable actions. One of them is hard to think about, even now.

If I could go back and do it again, I would not have shot my pet rabbits dead when I was eleven years old. I was only a boy, and I didn’t understand what those three ear-splitting minutes would be like, but it has stuck with me ever since.

For reasons I can’t remember now, my parents allowed me to have a .22-caliber rifle. It was long and slim, with a weighty heft. It made a solid clicking sound when you worked the pump action. Uncle Frank, my mother’s brother, lived with us and worked at teaching me to respect the gun.

It was one of the few things he worked at. A strike that lasted nine months had put him out of his job as a carpenter at Warner Brothers, and he never was able to get other work. He said it was because no one would hire a man who had been in jail. He had been arrested as a young man for passing counterfeit money and jailed for a few weeks. He told me one morning, as he stirred his coffee slowly, that he had taken the rap for his wife’s brother and had suffered for it ever since.

Uncle Frank was in his late thirties when he came to live with us. My father, who was acting in movies at the studio, managed to get him the first job my uncle had held in years. He had a broom of white hair and the easy manner of an older person, and he spoke in a language of the street I’d never heard before. He once made a loan to someone he’d just met: “I taken a liking to him,” he said, “so I turned around and handed him a three spot.” He was a decent person, but I was never really sure he would have preferred going to work every day to sitting at home dreaming and telling stories. His imagination was vivid to him. He could become excited to the point of losing his voice when talking about panning for gold. He invited me to help him build a sluice box for washing gold-bearing gravel out of a riverbed, although I don’t remember his ever actually using it, since there was no evidence that the gravel contained any gold.

But he did work at training me to respect the rifle. He would sit with me in the evening, solemnly taking it apart, reaming out the barrel, and rubbing the inner parts with gauze and sweet-smelling oil until they shone.

During the day, I would roam the eleven-acre ranch where we lived and the mountains that ringed it, looking for things to shoot at. I liked the idea of hunting, although the thought of eating a dead wild animal repelled me. I was attracted to the idea of aiming at things and, if possible, killing them, the way they did in the war movies. The soldiers in those films didn’t
eat
the dead Germans and Japanese, they just killed them and then laughed and congratulated one another. It seemed like an agreeable way to pass the time.

But I never was able to sneak up on anything expertly enough to get off a shot at it. Once, at dusk, I was with Uncle Frank up by the stable. The pungent smell of eucalyptus wafted up from the dead leaves under our feet as we walked over to where I heard birds chattering. They had collected in the tall trees for the evening. If only I could scare them off their perches, I’d have some targets to fire at. I started throwing rocks up into the branches. The birds weren’t budging, so I tried larger rocks. Finally, I picked up a stone the size of a small brick and threw it straight up, watching where it went.

Where it went was straight back at my face. It split my lip and pushed my front tooth back into my mouth. Uncle Frank put his thumb and index finger in there and eased the tooth back into place, telling me not to worry, it would be all right.

In the dark, we walked back down the gravel road to the house as I bled. I was worried about what my mother would think. She was excitable. Actually, she was more than excitable—she was schizophrenic and paranoid. But I didn’t know that then. I just knew she reacted to even ordinary things in a big way. When we came into the kitchen, she saw me covered with blood, saw her brother holding the gun, and screamed, “My God, you’ve shot him!”

Frank was angry with her. “Jo! Will you stop? You always think the worst.”

She screamed back at him, and they argued for a while while I dripped onto the floor; then they put ice on my face. Later in the week, a dentist cut into my gum and removed the root of the tooth where it had broken off. He took out the dead nerve and bleached the tooth, but eventually it turned blue, and I had to keep having it bleached every few years. I was losing parts of my own body in pursuit of the hunt, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage I caused. Until the afternoon of the rabbits.

I had been given a couple of white bunnies as an Easter gift. Uncle Frank and I built cages, where I would stand and observe them for hours. They had a habit that, at eleven, I found fascinating. The male would hop onto the female and jitter rapidly for a minute or so, and then he would fall over on his side as if he were dead. It would take him a good ten minutes to come back to life. Then a few weeks later, there would be more rabbits. It went on like that until there were twelve of them. We were busy building cages. But within a few months, disease hit them, an infection that made their ears swell to three times their size. I felt sorry for the animals because it seemed to me they were in pain. I was tearful when we called in a vet and he said there was nothing he could do for them. They’d have to be destroyed.

But then my eleven-year-old brain made one of those decisions that seem so much better at the time than they do a few minutes later.
They have to die,
I thought,
so why not shoot them?
I could put them out of their misery
and
have a chance to kill something. I told Uncle Frank what I wanted to do, and he didn’t discourage me. He even helped me take them out of their cages and put them on the ground. I still wonder why he didn’t warn me about what might happen. Maybe he couldn’t foresee it, either.

The rabbits stood on a patch of dry land, hardly moving except for the twitching of their noses as they sniffed at the dusty dirt. I raised the rifle, took aim, and began firing. I wasn’t prepared for what the force of the bullets would do to them. They flew up into the air and flopped back onto the ground. Some didn’t die right away, and I had to shoot at them again. I was missing them completely or just wounding them. As the bullets hit the arid ground, a small cloud rose up. I was shocked at what I saw through the haze of dust and fear, but once I’d wounded them, I had to keep going. Rabbits have no voice, but they were making a squealing sound that made me cringe. I was frightened, and I began to cry. I wanted it to be over, but the more I pulled the trigger, the worse my aim was and the more damage I caused. Finally, they were dead and the dust settled. The rabbits lay still on the bloodied ground. I handed the rifle to my uncle. Neither of us spoke.

That night, we sat at a small wooden table in the rumpus room and I watched him clean the rifle as he always did: emptying the ammunition, swabbing the barrel, cleaning and oiling the action. Then he reloaded it. I watched as each bullet went in. Then he put on the safety and handed it to me.

I carried the rifle upstairs and laid it on the top deck of my bunk bed. A few minutes later, after brushing my teeth, I looked at the rifle and tried to remember if my uncle had loaded it. I had watched him, but I couldn’t recall. I was pretty sure it wasn’t loaded, but I wanted to be certain, and I chose the worst way to find out. I undid the safety, pointed the rifle at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger, expecting to hear an empty click. Instead there was a bang, and I was staring at a hole in the ceiling.
Oh, my God,
I thought, my heart pounding. I stared at the hole for what seemed like minutes, and then I paced the room, telling myself I didn’t just do this stupid thing. But every time I looked up, there was the hole in the ceiling.

I went downstairs and told my parents what had happened. They hadn’t heard the noise, but I could tell from the deadly calm in the way they received my news that I had just done something monumentally bad. They took the gun and said that Uncle Frank would make sure the bullets were removed safely and told me to go back to bed and not dwell on it.

Upstairs, as I lay in bed, I stared at the hole in the ceiling and couldn’t sleep. Finally I got up and, standing on the top bunk, stuffed some toilet paper in the hole. The wad of paper remained there for the rest of my childhood, but I never saw the gun again. It just disappeared from the house.

The memory of the rabbits never really went away. Like the hole in the ceiling, it simply got plugged up for a while. Years later, when I was old enough to attract the attention of the army, the experience with the rabbits came back to me—not consciously, but through a sharp pain in my back muscles. I didn’t like killing things anymore, and it seemed that in the army reserve, where I was learning how to be an officer, all they seemed to want to talk about was killing people. I was given the job of teaching recruits the most efficient way to kill the greatest number of people with a single mortar round. I tried my best to accommodate my superior officers. I studied up on mortars and gave it everything I had, telling jokes to keep the students’ attention and simplifying the material so they’d remember it. I sent them away with several good tips on how to destroy at least a dozen people with one round; then I went home and doubled up in cramps. Soon, every time I put on my uniform, the tissue under my shoulder blades, just over my lungs, would seize up. Once, when I picked up the uniform at the dry cleaners, I got only halfway down the block before I couldn’t walk without stopping every few feet to lean against a building, squinting in pain.

I was sent to Georgia to complete my education as a military hero, and once there, I was given a rifle again. “This is your rifle,” our sergeant said. “Your rifle is your friend. Take care of it, and it will take care of you.” He actually said things like that. I learned how to clean it and take it apart blindfolded and was careful never, ever, to let it stand with the muzzle in the dirt. I was trying hard to be friends with it.

One morning before dawn, we marched to the firing range. I was sleepy but kind of excited. We would be aiming at targets, not at anything living, and I did enjoy shooting. I settled happily onto the ground on my stomach, the sharp pebbles poking into my starched fatigues. I adjusted the rifle’s strap over my cocked elbow at the approved angle, and I sighted down the barrel.

“Ready on the right! Ready on the left! Commence…firing!”

I curled my finger over the trigger—squeezing, not pulling it—and, after correcting for windage, I began blowing holes in the paper targets.

A hundred other young soldiers were going through the same motions, and as a result, there was so much noise that I almost didn’t hear the sergeant call for cease-fire. Then there was silence on the firing line—except that something over on my left was giving off a piercing, high-pitched sound. After a while, I realized the sound was coming from inside my left ear. I wiggled my finger in the ear, but the steady ringing tone didn’t go away.

I heard it for the next three days, and when it finally did subside, I had to keep asking people what they had just said. I had become partially deaf in the left ear, and not so good on the right side, either. After a while, when it was clear that my hearing wasn’t coming back, I began to feel there was a real downside to gunpowder.