Good Old Sergeant Chevalier

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 27, Verse 20

"Ambition and death are alike in this: neither is ever satisfied."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

"The Pink Panther Strikes Again" is, arguably, his best Panther.  Peter Sellers absolutely shines in what is a pretty poorly-constructed film.  Its plot is outlandish and ridiculous, though criticism of the plot of "Pink Panther" films is, in itself, as ludicrous as critiquing the plots of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, or, frankly, soap operas, but the slapstick comedy is some of the best you'll sever see on film.  This film boasts the quintessential Cato vs Clouseau fight-- it's as long as it is hilarious, and very creative-- and one of the best pratfalls performed by one of the best prat's (and the best prat's stuntman, too, no doubt).  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 33 delicious seconds of Sellers: 

Beautiful, wasn't he?

One of the quieter moments of the film takes place on the pastoral grounds of a psychiatric hospital where Chief Inspector Clouseasu's former boss and rival Chief Inspector Dreyfuss has been involuntarily committed after Clouseau made him crack.  I know, I know, no one can make you crack.  Anyway, Clouseau and Dreyfuss are making a painful attempt at congenial small-talk, and Dreyfuss asks after some old colleagues.

"Sergeant Chevalier sends his regards," Clouseau says, trying for conversation.

"Sergeant Chevalier?  Ha ha ha-- good old Sergeant Chevalier.  How is he anyway?" asks Dreyfuss.

"Ah, well, you know, there are some who will be leaders, and some who will be followers.  Sergeant Chevalier, I'm afraid," opines Clouseau, "will always be a follower."

Dreyfuss can't help laugh at this, with a maniacal twitch of his eye.  

"And you, Clouseau, a leader?  Eh?  Always a leader?  Onward and upward to the top?!"

"It is my destiny," says Clouseau, "my karma."

I believe more in Peter Sellers than I believe in destiny or karma-- at least I know he existed once.  My mother is a big fan of "everything happens for a reason" which is kind of like the poor man's destiny.  I can remember, a short time ago, interviewing for a job and telling the Executive Director, "Look, I don't have designs on your job.  I just want to come in, and do a good job for an organization I care about.  I don't mind being a cog in a wheel.  I just want it to be a good wheel."  And don't you know she offered me the job?  I told her that "I basically have no ambition", and she offered me the fucking job.  Gotta love America, right?

Ambition is a funny thing.  Those of it who have too much scare the shit out of everybody, and those who have too little everyone writes off as an ass-scratch nail clipping.  I'm somewhere in the middle, but definitely closer to the ass-scratch nail clipping than, say, Mussolini.  In everything except theatre.  If there was a part in a show I wanted, I prepared for that audition.  I am an aggressive auditioner, and I will try everything I know how to do to charm my way into a director's heart.  Pants.  Whatever.  And, unlike smarter actors, I won't take another part if it's offered to me.  I am a child.

I want THAT one.

WAAAAA!

And, usually, I get what I want where the footlights are concerned.

Life is a different story.  Since college, I haven't run or walked so much as crawled.  My occupational path hasn't been linear or logical or luminous.  It's been what it's been, and I'm tired of apologizing for it.  There is a cadre of boys with whom I was very friendly back in elementary school, and they're all doctors.  They all went to the same college, and the same medical school, I think they fucked some of the same chicks and now they're all doctors.  And that's fine for them.  That didn't happen to me, partially because I didn't want it to, and partially because I can't do math without counting on my fingers and the scientific extent of my life is occasionally contemplating watching an episode of "NOVA".  But I went off that show when they re-did the theme music. 

I suppose I'm a little bit like Sergeant Chevalier-- a follower, but I'm not always sure who I'm following, and I don't know if that makes me better or worse off than the fictitious Surete police sergeant spoken about by Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers on that insane asylum bench.  I got a new position at work-- a promotion, we can call it, because I suppose that's what it is.  And I am extraordinarily grateful for it but I'm also terrified of it.  I know that I will disappoint a lot of people if I fail to perform my duties-- not that I'm even all that sure what exactly my duties are at the present moment-- and I know that the stakes, for me and for my family, are too high to crash and burn on the runway. 

Things change as you get older, and I'm not just talking about the cartilage erosion in your knees. It used to be that my ambition was to not say something idiotic during a date, or to get through a shift on the ambulance without ripping off the light-bar at a drive-thru restaurant.  Back then, that was a big fucking deal.  Today, everything feels like that.  Every second of every moment of every breath of every footstep is terribly, dreadfully important, and my ambition now is to make it to the next moment, the next foothold, the next sip of coffee and we're striving and it's furious and the wind burns the cheek and the desert goes on forever, at least, I hope it does.  Because good old Sergeant Chevalier will always be a follower.  

And I was known as the Pavlova of the parallels.     

You Can Wear a Tie Under the Robes, Mommy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 28, Verse 4

"To complain about the law is to praise wickedness.  To obey the law is to fight evil."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

I've wanted to be a cop.  Went into the academy in 2002, washed out.  The seven year itch (SERIOUSLY! IT REALLY WAS SEVEN YEARS LATER!  WOW!) set in and I took some county police tests and, well, you know, it didn't go so well.  The FBI didn't want me either, which was especially sad for me, because the FBI combines three of my affinities: suits, overcoats, and, I guess, law enforcement.  

I tried to become a lawyer, too, a long time ago.  Fresh out of college.  Again-- suits, overcoats, and the law beckoned and, this time, it seemed to make sense.  Nice Jewish boys from the suburbs don't become cops, but they definitely do become lawyers.  Finally, THIS was a career move my mother's son could make that would be appropriate for her to talk about to her patrons at the public library.

Alas, it was not to be.  I got the LSAT's lowest possible passing grade.  Widener Law School offered me a provisional acceptance and, like someone who REALLY wanted to become a lawyer, I wrote them a letter refusing, in no uncertain terms, their tepid acceptance.  

When I was a boy, I was fond of watching Judge Joseph Albert Wapner on "The People's Court" (he's still alive, at a thoroughly judicial 93, in case you were wondering) and I had youthful aspirations of becoming a judge.  I had all the necessary qualifications, I reasoned, as a nine-year-old.  I knew when people were lying to me, I was quickwitted and had no interest in listening to anybody.  What more could the American justice system ask for?  Plus, I looked good in black.  

"And you can wear a tie under the robes, Mommy, and it'll show," I said at the kitchen table once while my mother was making dinner and probably considering suicide, "because the robes are V-necks."

We weren't a very law-and-order type of house.  My father was kind of a rebel growing up.  He grew up like many Israeli Jews of that vintage-- hyper-religious.  But, at age 16, "I threw my yarmulke into the sea and said, 'Fuck this!'"  (Well, he said it in Hebrew, but I don't know how to say that in Hebrew, much less type it.)  My mom rebelled, too, getting married and pregnant at a very young age and splitting from her parents.  We weren't taught about Johnny Law and reverently imbued with respect for things like property lines and stop signs.  Yet, somehow, I became very intrigued with laws and the enforcement thereof.  Maybe you might say "obsessed", and I can accept that.  Whereas lots of people in their teens and twenties had problems with authority, I had problems without it.  I instinctively look to ties and suits and graying mustaches for guidance.  And maybe that's why I dress as formally as I do.  Maybe that's how I want to be seen-- as a comforting symbol of direction and surety.  

Which is about as big an illusion as I am capable of conjuring up, because anyone who knows me will freely tell you, as freely as I'm telling you now, that I'm full of shit.

It's funny, though, what a button-down shirt and tie can do for a guy.  One day, when I was maybe in my early twenties, I happened to be taking a train from Philly to Washington.  I was standing in the station, looking particularly, at least I thought, bewildered, when another hapless traveler came up to me and started asking me questions about train schedules.  I thought maybe this guy thought I had Aspergers and had memorized all the arrivals and departures for fun, but then I realized, oh.  I'm wearing a navy blue three-piece suit with a pocket watch chain strung across the vest.  He thinks I work for Amtrak.  

Right.

I love laws.  As someone who has generally very minimal direction in his life, laws tell me what is okay and what is not okay.  I thrive on structure.  I get off on order.  Give me guidelines in explicit lengthy detail, and I might start humping your leg.  I need to know what is okay.  I have to know how not to be a bad boy.  If I don't know, then how will I know?  How will I ever know?  How will I know when to arrive?  How to behave?  How to dress?  How to cross my legs-- like a girl, like a fag, like a guy with big balls?  What do I do?  What do I say?  What isn't right?  I'm funny-- is it okay to be funny?  Can I say this in public?  Is this a word that's only okay for the house, Daddy?  Can I not say that in school?  

Please.  Tell me what to do, and how to do it.  Please.  I'm so scared.

That I'll break the law-- hurt the law-- hurt the spine of the book, the screen on the phone, the plastic coating, the foam insert, the shoulder blade, the flower petal.  I'm frightened, Aunt Em.  I'm very, very frightened.

A women interviewing me for a job this afternoon remarked, trying to be humorous-- I hope-- that, upon reading my resume, she thought to herself, "Now, what does this guy want to be when he grows up?"

Well, obviously a cop, a lawyer, and a judge.  And a writer, too.  But only if I'm allowed to wear a tie.  Where I work, you can't wear a tie.  It's too dangerous.  If it isn't in the employee handbook, it should be. 

Pangea

CHIP OF WISDOM:

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

We don't talk about it much anymore.  

Sure, it creeps up every now and again-- like a zit or something-- and it finds its way into conversation sometimes.  It's usually something innocuous and banal that sparks it.  A book title, or a quirky bit of unrelated conversation.  On Sunday, it was Mother's Day.

My wife's mother was visiting from out-of-town and my wife was railing against the tradition of taking "the little woman" out to eat for a Mother's Day Brunch "because you sure can't trust a man in the kitchen and mom's got the day off-- har har har".  Her mother tried to say that some stereotypes about men and kitchens being like oil and water or Doritos and coffee are true.

"Right," said my wife, "like when I was recovering from my surgery, I remember one day Daddy was taking care of me and he made me macaroni and cheese for lunch and dinner."

And so it was time to pop the zit again.  You know, the brain surgery zit.  

They cut my wife's head open in July of 2004, back before we had children, back before we had a house, back before we had a joint checking account.  Back before she was my wife.  They were inside her head for approximately nine hours, poking around, digging, cutting, suctioning.  It's impossible for me to believe that was almost ten years ago.  It seems some days like it was yesterday that I was lying on the floor of the waiting room that you weren't supposed to sleep in, while "Bridget Jones's Diary" blared on the TV that you couldn't turn off or lower the volume of or change the channel.  Some days it seems like it is impossible that it ever happened at all.  

But, run your fingers across the top of my wife's head and, under all that lovely, fine dark hair, you'll feel that ridge.  Pangea.  It happened.

We often talk about how we were "babies" when we first met, and we were.  It's true.  She's right.  We didn't know shit about nothing; the only thing we knew was we were weird and in love with each other's weirdness.  She says that she didn't allow herself to think about all the things that could have gone wrong during her surgery.  I couldn't allow myself to think of anything else.  Terrified, sickened, half crazy with fear, I slowly marched with intractable resignation towards June 22nd, 2004.  There was an AVM in there that could explode at any moment, leaving her disabled, paralyzed, dead.  Who knew?

Brain surgery, of course, could have done all those things to her, too.  But we didn't talk about that much.  We tried to enjoy each other as much as we could.  We went to plays, movies, concerts.  We stayed up late and talked.  We were silly.  We were scared.

At least, I was.  

I don't know if she was.  I'm too scared, even now, even almost ten years later, to ask.  I guess this is me asking.  

To me, my wife is fearless.  She does things that I am frightened to do, even though she'd probably tell you that she's frequently sidelined by fear.  She makes choices that are empowering and bold, while I stagnate and caress my various stupid routines.  If they'd told me, in 2004, that they were going to cut something out of my head, I don't know that I could have gone through with it.  I really don't know.  You can't know, of course, until it's you, but I don't think I could have done it.

I know she's scared of some things-- everybody is-- but I like knowing that she faced down a pretty ornery dragon once upon a time, and I know that, when my time comes to do something similar, I'll only be able to do it because she did.  She has a career and I have a job.  She's not afraid of real responsibility like I am.  I hide in my do-nothing, go-nowhere world.  Because I'm frightened to succeed just as I am to fail.  

Fear is funny.  It's inside of you, and you know it is, and sometimes it's just dying to get out, and sometimes it's very content to just nestle and nuzzle inside of you, keeping your intestines warm, like fat. I'll never know what was surging through my wife's veins while she was wheeled into that elevator away from me for the last time with that thing in her head.  And I guess that's okay.  Because we don't talk about it very much anymore.  And I guess that's okay, too.  

Sissy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 3, Verse 25

"Be not afraid of sudden terror, or of the darkness of the wicked when it will come."

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CHIPPED WISDOM: 

It's funny what you remember.  I remember nice things-- like my first kiss with the woman who would become my wife (precipitated by my undeniably romantic utterance: "Let's get this over with already") and I remember the surge and roar and growl my first car's engine made when I stomped hard down on the accelerator as an idiotic 16-year-old.  I remember how it felt to be ensconced within my mother's arms as a boy when I was sad and I remember the exhilaration of riding the conveyer belt at my father's factory when I would go with him to work on Saturday mornings for his customary half day.  

Wouldn't you know it, I also remember things that are not so nice?  

You don't forget being bullied.  My bullying was not so terrible, but it was rather consistent, and it lasted I think longer than is probably customary.  I was bullied pretty heavily in college.  My hallmates covered the doorknob to my room in a substance that was most likely ejaculate, which made shaking hands with my doorknob, um, unpleasant.  They downloaded porn of dubious quality and taste onto my desktop computer when I wasn't there and my roommate let them in, and probably supervised the operation-- then they made pictures of obese women masturbating the subject matter of the screen-saver.  

Cute.

One intoxicated gentleman decided to trim his pubic area while sitting on my bed.  With my office scissors.  While I was sitting in the chair next to him, daring me to do something about it.  He was a lot bigger than me, and, you know, he had office scissors.  With pubes stuck to them.  I chose the Gandhi route.  

Predictably, the bullying occurred, though not to this degree, in high school, and middle school, and elementary school-- where kids first establish a pecking order once they realize some kids are different than other kids and are, consequently, to be targeted.  My bullying, however, started even earlier than that.  My kindergarten teacher, after witnessing my perhaps excessively negative reaction to a picture of a tarantula in a storybook, yelled, "Oh-- don't be such a sissy!"

It hurt to hear it, and I crawled under a table in the corner for the better part of the day and cried, but really, it was good advice.  If only I'd listened.  

I'm not scared of tarantulas anymore-- though, to be fair, I can't say I've ever seen one in person... let's just say I'm not scared of pictures of tarantulas anymore-- though I do have a significant amount of fears.  High on the list is a fear of dying in an airplane crash.  Now, I haven't been on many airplanes, so the probability is very low but, every time I fly, I am about 90% certain that the flight is going to terminate in a twisted inferno necessitating consultation of my unfortunate dental records.  How my wife ever got me on many, many planes to get me to Indonesia for our honeymoon without the aid of copious amounts of Ativan and ether is beyond me.  I guess you do crazy things for love.  

When I was eight years old, Pan Am Flight 103 fell from the sky and its remains, and the remains of its passengers and crew descended on the town of Lockerbie, Scotland.  I had a youthful affection for news anchors because they wore three piece suits and so I watched the news all the time as a kid, and I was mesmerized by the images of the broken plane, lying inert and in tatters, as helpless and bewildered local policemen stood impotently around the scene.  Nothing to do.  No one to help.  

Nothing.

I watched endless footage of the bodies set alongside one another, in endless rows, in a makeshift morgue, covered in shrouds.  They reminded me of candies in a box, just all lined up, identical looking in their wrappers.  I watched film of hearses coming to the morgue to take this body or that to this morgue or that.  If I wasn't watching that, I was watching reruns of "Monty Python's Flying Circus"-- so I'm not really sure which one is healthier. 

One day, speaking of healthy, I assembled my family, and a friend of my 11-year-old sister who had the misfortune to visit our house that day, in the living room.  I brought in our Casio electronic keyboard.  I put a toy hearse (what?  Didn't you have one of those growing up?) on the glass table in the middle of the room.  I lined a bunch of Playmobil action figures (supine) onto the table and methodically covered each one in a white Kleenex.  I played a modified version of Chopin's Funeral March on the keyboard and then loaded a Playmobil figure into the back of the toy hearse, drove it to the opposite end of the table, unloaded the action figure, and repeated until all of the Playmobil men and women victims were successfully deposited.  I wish I could describe for you the facial expressions of my family members, and my sister's friend, but I never looked up once.  When I was done, I wordlessly picked up my gear and walked out of the room.  Maybe I knew what I was doing was wrong.

"You were trying to develop mastery over your fear," my wife said to me recently.  I'm not sure that's true, and, if it is, I don't think it worked.  Yeah, I've flown to Pittsburgh, North Carolina, Australia, Indonesia, and Ireland, but I've been an absolute wreck each time.  Not only that, recently, when we had some free time to ourselves and it was my turn to pick the evening's televisual feast for the evening, what did I choose?

"Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel.  Subject matter: a 1978 mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a Cessna over a crowded section of San Diego, killing 144 people.  I mean, what was I supposed to do?  "Bob's Burgers" was a re-run.

Fear doesn't stop me-- not from doing anything, really.  It doesn't stop me from working in a dangerous place with dangerous people, it doesn't stop me from flying or driving too fast or doing things I know I'm not qualified or capable of doing.  It doesn't stop me from loving or losing or taking risks.  It doesn't stop me from eating salty and fatty foods, or from going downtown to see a show.  It doesn't stop me saying how I feel.  But it does haunt me in a way-- I know the darkness of the wicked is always there, even when it's not.  It's fastening its seatbelt and returning its tray and its seat-back to the upright position next to me.

And it's always letting me know, never letting me forget that, deep down, where it counts the most, I'm still a sissy with a bowlcut and an aqua blue sweatsuit, hiding under the snack table, fighting back tears with everything I've got.