MEAN SEASON
"You know, I've been talking with you on the tape you sent. I answer your rhetorical questions and respond to things when you say them or pause. We've had 3 or 4 conversations you didn't even hear."
-- Michael, in a letter from 1986
Ed. Note: Sorry no good Michael stuff. Can't get it together to make a selection this month. It has been a stunningly mean season so far. Did anyone ever see the movie Mean Season with Kurt Russell and the late great Richard Jourdan playing the serial killer? I loved the scene when Richard has Kurt’s girlfriend hostage. He is eating an apple with one hand and holding a gun with the other hand, and she is interestingly-strategied enough to insult him. Faster than a snake could strike, the gun is at her head and his outraged “HEY!!” is ringing in our ears. There is a frozen pause, following which, gun still held to her face, he blurts out: “You know, for a teacher, your range of comprehension leaves a lot to be desired.”
Good Times.
Here are some more good times, compliments of Michael, who was lately joined by another of my rapidly dwindling supply of Beloveds:
Once, at a family reunion, I left my purse in the living room and went out to the back porch for a smoke. I returned to the living room to find the couch covered not with relatives’ butts, but surrounded by relatives, all surveying the entire contents of my purse, emptied out and lined up in neat rows across the entire length of the couch. Birth control pills and all. And me an unmarried woman in the seventies.
At another family get together, Michael roamed around the gathering like a troubadour, hooking a Polaroid camera under the ladies’ skirts without warning, snapping the shot, and then gallantly handing them each a developing picture of their own crotches, pantyhose seams and all. The fun, really, was in watching the varying reactions. It was like seeing a roomful of women randomly discovering they were holding a live grenade.
Another time, another gathering, still in my cigarette smoking era: I passed Michael coming back in as I left the building to smoke a cigarette outside, and there, as nature- perfect as a starfish, was a banana peel, stretched out perfectly in five directions, for maximum symmetry and artistic impact, at the very top of the stairs.
Michael was a fast typist. Once upon a time before computers, when I had an important letter to type and did not own a typewriter, Michael told me to bring my handwritten draft of the legal appeal to his house and he would type it for me. I arrived and handed him the appeal and then lay down on the chaise lounge in his living room and began ranting explanatorily about the content he was typing. Before I had been there for five minutes, he said here it is and handed me the completed two page document. I began to read it, and became instantly UNHAPPY because I was working against a real time crunch, and I saw he had messed around and typed it all wrong. The serious document I had drafted was now all about me working a temporary job where I was stationed on a folding chair at the top of a flight of stairs and had to type 100 words per minute while wrinkled old white men tried to crawl inside my little office dresses with me, which made me claustrophobic and on and on….. This time Michael’s teasing had really put me behind the eight ball. I had to be out the door in another nine minutes, and now everything was ruined, because… and on and on and on……At this point he preempted my whining, by whipping ANOTHER two page document out from behind his back and presenting it with a flourish. Michael had typed my legal appeal properly and THEN typed it over again changing it into something horribly crazy and vulgar and inappropriately hilarious, and all in under five minutes.
Michael used to shout out jubilantly “We’re here!” when we entered restaurants, mystifying diners, who appeared to suspect someone else in their party had invited him. He also had a tendency to look stunned and heartbroken when the waitress presented the bill. You’d be amazed at how often the waitresses responded by looking shamefaced.
And then there is the one about the letters he sent with each payment on his layaway, all posted on the walls of the store's office when we arrived to pick up his purchases. ("Here is the money you wanted and I hope it makes you happy. I cried all night….") And the one about the time he applied a slice of pizza to the face of a carefully made up woman and lived.
Once he asked our youngest brother to drive over to the local video store and pick up a movie he had just reserved by phone. Our brother agreed, grabbed his car keys and left. Then Michael told me he had asked the clerk to hold the movie and said he would be over to pick it up in a couple of minutes. Then, he said he had added, “You’ll know me when I come in, because I’m REAL Good Looking.”
When our brother came back with the video, Michael asked “Did they give you any trouble?”
"Nope."
Then Michael said “Because I’ve heard they can be pretty crazy at that store.” “Now that you mention it,” the other replied, “ They DID kind of all stop talking and look at me really weird when I asked for the video.”