Clodchunk's Revenge

Ever since Homo erectus struck his first match, mankind has sought satisfaction in the communal consumption of burned, dead things. And when some Neolithic dude or dudette searching for a good buzz discovered alcohol, we were off to the races.

These two pivotal discoveries, fire, and later, alcohol occurred roughly 136,000 years apart, yet each helped pave the way for the modern-day barbecue. Not that there has to be alcohol at barbecues, but if you saw the caliber of folk I hang out with, you'd know it could only help.

So today I started thinking: What was the first barbecue like, the first one with alcohol on hand? This was probably during the Neolithic period, so imagine with me if you will . . .

. . . a sunny day in Asia Minor, a block party is in full-swing and the blocks are granite. The event is a B.Y.O.V. (Bring Your Own Vessel) gathering. Oonka Ugga is scolding her children for bothering their father.

“Goon-Goon! Morsquat! Leave your father alone! You know it takes him forever to build ONE SIMPLE LITTLE FIRE! And you know he’s even slower when people WATCH HIM!”

“But we wanna learn how to build a fire!” whines Goon-Goon.

“Well, you certainly won't learn by watching your father! Now scoot!”

Clodchunk Ugga is a man on his knees, literally and figuratively. Sweat is beading on his brow. A tiny spark kindles amid the leaves and twigs before him. A fragile flame takes hold and Clodchunk Ugga can’t believe his good fortune. Excitedly he blows on the fire and . . . the fire goes out. Clodchunk’s thirty-third time’s a charm, however, and this time the fire leaps to life.

”Hah, Oonka!” he yells derisively, pointing at the flames. “Take that and shove it where the hot and golden ball don’t shine! And while you’re at it, stop belittling me in front of the kids!”

Oonka groans, dismissing her husband with a wave of her dainty, calloused hand. “Oh, puhleeze. People have been building fires for 136,000 years and it took you that long just to build that one! Do you have any idea how slow you are at fire-building compared to Wham-Bam Boom-Boom?”

“Now that’s just great!” yells Clodchunk. “It’s been all of five minutes since the last time you mentioned him! Congratulations, you broke your own record!”

Despite his bravado, Clodchunk feels emasculated. Soon he is pouring his first gourdful of bite-bite juice. Several gourdsful of bite-bite juice later, Clodchunk is itching for a fight and if it turns out to be with Wham-Bam Boom-Boom, why, that's even better.

It’s just a matter of time before Wham-Bam saunters over, all cocky and arrogant-like. He is tall - nearly 5'7" - and his jet black hair stylishly glistens with boars' fat. He sneers at Clodchunk then gives Oonka a long and leering once-over.

“Well, hi there, Oonka.”

“Hello, Wham-Bam,” Oonka demurs, coy and blushing.

Wham-Bam directs his attention to Clodchunk.“Who started that little flicker for ya, Cloddy old boy? Did Goon-Goon do that? Or was it Morsquat?”

Clodchunk pretends to ignore Wham-Bam, squats down near the flames and points. “Hey, wow!” he yells. “A diamond – right there by the fire! Well, will ya look at that!” He reaches toward the flames then jerks his hand back. “Ooh! Ooh! It’s way too hot for me to even touch it! I guess I’m just not man enough!”

Wham-Bam rushes over to where Clodchunk still squats. “Where? Where’s the diamond? I don’t see it!”

“Right there!” Clodchunk bellows, still pointing. “You can’t see that? Why, it’s huge!”

Wham-Bam gets down on his hands and knees, his rump in the air, his face practically in the fire. “I still don’t see it!” he yells.

"It's right - THERE!" grunts Clodchunk, shoving Wham-Bam's head into the flames which instantly singe off Wham-Bam's eyebrows. "Oh, sorry, Wham-Bam. I guess that was nothing but a big - dumb - rock . . . kind of like you."

Alarmed, Oonka hurls a gourdful of bite-bite juice at Wham-Bam’s head in an attempt to cool him down, but the alcohol, combined with the boars' fat and an errant spark, cause his hair to erupt in flames. Explosions can be heard for blocks. A second dousing of bite-bite juice only makes things worse for some reason.

Grinning, Clodchunk jerks a thumb in the direction of Wham-Bam’s smoking, bald head. “Now, that,” he boasts to Goon-Goon and Morsquat, “is how you build a fire!”

Sweet Nothings

Sometimes in marriage it’s all about timing. Take for instance, Melrose and Ed. 

This was the early sixties and Ed worked for one of Southern Michigan’s General Motors assembly plants. He was that era's quintessential “regular Joe." He went to work in clean but faded coveralls and carried a big, black, barn-shaped lunchbox. 

And like a lot of men back then, Ed just might have been a wee bit chauvinistic.

But whatever Ed’s attitudes towards women, they did not include the conviction that after work his place was with his wife. His place, Ed felt, was with his fellow assembly workers at a neighborhood drinking establishment; the cinder-block construction, neon light illumination kind of drinking establishment.

Meanwhile, Ed’s wife, Melrose was the regular wife of the regular Joe. She stayed at home even though the kids were well out of the nest, claiming she was focused on homemaking. And she maybe wasn’t quite as on top of her appearance as when she and Ed first met. 

Melrose might also have had a tendency to meet her husband at the door (on the rare occasions he came straight home) in curlers and a house dress, the bunions on her feet peeking at Ed through threadbare slippers.

So there's a chance that each of them had reason to feel a bit resentful of the other.

One night, Ed was out at the bar knocking back a few while Melrose lay in bed dreaming of Ed’s early demise, so bitter was she over his nocturnal fellowship habits. When Ed came stumbling through the back door, Melrose didn’t hear him. 

This, of course, was before the days of cell phones when a third party could pick up the phone and either join the other two parties or just listen in, provided said person's phone was in the same residence as at least one of the others. 

When the phone rang, it startled them both, Ed in the kitchen and Melrose in the bedroom. They picked up within milliseconds of one another, Melrose assuming it was Ed and Ed with no clue who it was.

They said hello in unison before Melrose yelled: “Where the hell have you been? Do you know what time it is?”

“Hell, yes, I know what time it is!” Ed yelled back. He consulted his watch but it kept swimming around in front of his face. “By the way, what time is it?”

“It’s time your drunken carcass was here where it belongs! Why the hell aren’t you home?”

“What the hell do you mean, why the hell aren’t I home? I am home and damned if it isn’t hell!”

“Well, if you’re home, get your ass in bed!”

“My ass is in bed! It’s name is Melrose!”

“Aw, go to hell!”

“No! You go to hell!”

Ed and Melrose slammed down their receivers.

A few seconds later, Ed’s boss hung up, too.   

A Most Reluctant Cougar

Online dating is downright surreal when you're middle-aged, especially when you're a little on the shy side.

One of the biggest shockers is my appeal to certain men in their upper teens and early twenties. Actually, these aren't men at all; they're unsupervised Boy Scouts with Internet access.

Occasionally the messages they write me are sweet, almost innocent and I imagine Ron Howard in Happy Days asking a girl to the prom. I send them on their way with a "Thank you and I'm very flattered but . . ."

Sometimes this is enough to redirect their attention to the flat-tummied twenty-somethings with whom they belong, or on to other women old enough to be their mothers. But often they return, more aggressive, asking if I'm afraid I can't handle them. Then I write back, "Oh, don't worry about little old me. Run along now."

Some of my friends (and I like these friends), offer a flattering theory as to why this happens; that these young men have had some experience with girls and want to know what a woman is like. Sometimes these friends even call me a cougar. I like that. Cougar.

Of course we all know I'm about as cougar-y as a house cat - a timid, spayed and lazy one. I'm more likely to crawl into a man's lap and fall asleep than to use my claws for anything other than scratching dried smutch off a kid's face. 

Other friends (the ones I don't particularly like because they're honest), shoot me this jaded look that says, "Seriously?" And then words like kept and credit card and sugar momma float by my wounded self. 

At least twice now these kids were med students at the local university (possibly on the fence about geriatrics as a specialty) and another of them was in law school. 

The law student kept writing back, obviously amused by my rejections, and trying to trip me into agreeing to "date" him. I wrote and explained that first of all, NO, and second, that I was going through a divorce and didn't want to have to explain him in court.

He came back with, "Well, don't tell them about me."

"And if they ask?" 

"Then just lie." 

"But I might be under oath." 

"So?"

I wrote, "I'm shocked to think that you, a law student, would suggest I lie under oath."

He wrote back, "Hah-hah!"

He'd obviously been in law school a while because he had a firm grasp on how our legal system works. 

Eventually he gave up, concluding that by the time he managed to talk me into anything, both of us would have teeth in a glass by the motel bed.

But what do I really do when a 22-year-old asks me out? 

I politely decline while addressing him as dude, call up all my friends (except my honest ones) and flaunt it like hell. 

Scary, But Not Very

When I was growing up, my favorite thing about television was a creepy genus of quasi-humanity known as horror movie hosts. They roamed airwaves free and untamed on Friday and Saturday nights after the eleven o’clock news and sometimes on Saturday afternoons. Their heyday was roughly the late 1950s through the eighties.

One of my own little horrors.
Image: Teece Aronin

Horror movie hosts first sprang from the earth when a package of aging Universal horror films was made available to syndicated television stations and someone had the diabolically brilliant idea that the movies be hosted. 

By the late sixties many local television markets had had at least one of these hosts. Vampira in L.A. was likely the first. Then there were Zacherley, Morgus, Ghoulardi, the Ghoul, and an endless string of others - many now lost to the annals of time. 

And most of the original programming is lost, too, because the broadcasts were often aired live but not recorded. Worse, some were recorded then recorded over by stations on a budget. So even for those of us who are "of a certain age," most of those programs are but dimly lit memories in the spook-house of the mind. 

The hosts' personalities ran the gamut from formal and stiff to bouncing-off-the-dungeon-walls-zany. Better yet, they were often sarcastic. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was sarcastic and tantalizing, saucy, and sexy.

Among my favorite hosts was Sir Graves Ghastly who aired in Detroit, Cleveland, and D.C. He straddled the qualities of formality and sarcasm, once summing up the merits of that afternoon's movie by sneering that it had been "smuggled in in a cheese bag."

One nice thing about Sir Graves was that he was a little scary but not very scary. On that score he let me down only once when I had a nightmare about him climbing through my bedroom window. That dream scared me because mine was a second story bedroom, so it followed that if Sir Graves was climbing through my window, he wasn't just looking to come in from the rain.

Sir Graves "lived" in Detroit, in a castle off the John Lodge Freeway. Elements like that ignited my imagination. I remember riding down the John Lodge in the back seat of the family car watching for that castle. There's no better fun when you're a nerdy nine-year-old than looking for a castle beside a freeway in Detroit.   

And we "kiddies," as Sir Graves called us (he also called us, dear hearts), quickly figured out that he and all the funny peripheral characters inhabiting his world were played by one man. His name was Lawson Demming. But as crazy as I was about Sir Graves et al, I was just as interested in what I might find if I crawled through my family's black and white Zenith console television to peek behind his wingback chair. 

There are still horror movie hosts, even some from the old school. I'll just have to get savvy enough to track them down in the haunts to which time and technology have driven them - like wolves from the woods. 

One has fared very well, though. He is Svengoolie, whose alter ego, Rich Koz, replaced the show's original host almost 40 years ago. “Svengoolie” is syndicated nationally via MeTV, but I haven't quite figured out how to access the channel. I think I'll ask a kid to do it in which case I'll be hooked up in no time. 

So, that same technology that nearly ended them has also given the hosts new homes. If I look hard enough, I'll find them lurking amid the vaults of public access television and slinking around the headstones on social media sites.  

If I could watch the original shows again, I would want to watch them as they were originally presented, in ultra-brief blocks interrupted by rivers of commercials for local businesses with yammering salesmen. L.A.'s car salesman supreme, Cal Worthington was generally accompanied by his "dog, Spot”  who was usually a bear, a tiger or a chimpanzee. 

I know . . . It only made sense in L.A. 

Sam Spayed, Dog Detective - The Case of the Dead Cat Squawking

It was a sunny day in a city of hisses and growls. An October chill had me turning up the collar of my trench coat. 

Whiskers LeMieux playing dead. (Actually

the Aronin's sleeping tabby, Kitt).

Image: Sydney Aronin

And who am I, you ask? I'm Sam Spayed, Dog Detective.

Things were hopping and I don't mean the fleas. The grounds around City Hall were muzzle to muzzle with revelers celebrating Squawktoberfest.

Squawktoberfest is a three-day celebration marking a night in 1692 when a mob of angry villagers flipped their mental kibble and rounded up three ravens rumored to be witches.

"Burn them at the stake!" screamed the mob and the whole time they're yelling, they're dragging those birds into the village square. According to city lore, the birds were roped to stakes by a trouble-making bunch called the Cocker brothers while a gray tabby got busy preparing to set fire to the birds' tail feathers.

Then the ravens did something nobody expected. They hypnotized the tabby and the Cocker brothers into thinking they were the ravens. Those dogs and that cat started squawking like birds then ran around the village square setting each other's tails on fire. 

Meanwhile, the real ravens hypnotized each other into thinking they were axes and chopped through the ropes. The rest of the villagers saw what was happening, screamed and scattered.

When the fur and the feathers stopped flying, the tabby and the Cocker brothers were sporting singed stumps where their tails used to be.

Now my friends, get a load of this: that cat and those pooches are supposed to be the ancestors of the present-day Cocker Spaniel and the present-day Manx cat. Never mind that Cocker Spaniels with stub tails have undergone a procedure called "docking," people fall for that old yarn anyway and it's been the backstory on Squawktoberfest since it started more than 30 years ago.

But wait, folks; it gets better: These days people say that the ghost of that match-happy tabby haunts the town square one night every year during Squawktoberfest. They say they've seen him prowling the steps of City Hall, flapping his arms and squawking. They'll tell you that not only is he doomed to climb those steps one night each year but that he has to do it with his shroud forever hiked up over his nub of a tail. 

Something about this whole ghost tabby nonsense smelled fishy so I set up a stakeout behind a bush at the southeast corner of the City Hall building. By 10 p.m., I was all tucked in nice and warm behind the bush - and the flask of Jack Russells whiskey I'd been sipping from helped keep me toasted - I mean toasty. Since the ghost tabby wasn't due to appear till around midnight, there was plenty of time for old Jack and me to do some serious paling around. But I'd still have to keep my wits about me in case the ghost did show. 

Midnight struck, there was no ghost, Jack was gone, and I had nothing but my hiccups for company. 

Just then I heard something squawking. I looked in the direction of City Hall and there it was: a shadowy feline shape, its gauzy shroud hitched up over its stumpy tail. Its paws were tucked under its armpits as it flapped its arms up and down, more like a chicken than a raven.

I took off at a run and the cat saw me coming. Unfortunately even ghost cats are faster than a dog full of Jack Russells tripping on a trench coat. I threw the coat to the winds and closed in. The cat, in the meantime, hiked up his shroud and ran faster.

I was on that pussy in a New York minute and we fell. Down the steps of City Hall we rolled and when we finally stopped, I was on top. The cat was no ghost and it didn't take long to get the whole story once I twisted his arm, growling at him to cough up that fur-ball called the truth.

"Okay! Okay!" he yelled. "I'll tell you everything!"

Turns out the "ghost" was Whiskers LeMieux, a tough little Manx whose only claim to fame was that he was the founder of Squawktoberfest.

"Aren't you too long in the tooth to be flaunting your rump and your stump?" I asked. He wouldn't stop struggling so I muscled him a little harder.

"You idiot!" hissed LeMieux. "A thing like Squawktoberfest doesn't just run itself! It needs publicity! It needs mystique! It needs  - GHOSTS!"

I didn't appreciate being called an idiot, but Whiskers had a point. Attendance at Squawktoberfest had been lagging until the ghost made its first appearance last year.

I looked around, didn't see a soul and was glad I hadn't blown Whiskers' cover. Face it, drumming up interest in Squawktoberfest by showing folks his backside is pretty harmless in the scheme of things, and Squawktoberfest does have a certain educational merit. 

After all, a flash in the dark can be pretty enlightening. 

Margaret Versus the Russian

Poor Margaret. Short of having no mind of her own, she did nothing to deserve what happened to her at my house all those years ago. What happened is that my crazy Russian boyfriend barged in. But in his defense, he'd been invited and she had not. 

My crazy Russian boyfriend was the real deal. Well, he wasn't exactly crazy but he was a bit of a loose cannon and had arrived in the States from Moscow a few years earlier. He had chosen Greg as his Western name and looked like a 30-something Liam Neeson. My head felt like I'd drunk a little too much vodka every time I looked at him.

Greg was unfiltered. Whatever provocative, non-conformist, guaranteed-to-tick-off-as-many-people-as-possible, ultra-liberal thought entering the fruited plain of his mind would fly right back out of his mouth. He was opinionated, politically-charged and had a position on every issue.

And God help you if you didn't have a position, too. Your position didn't have to be the same as his, but if you didn't have one and he sniffed that out, you'd better make one up fast.

For some reason Greg called me Vegetable. The first time he did I reminded him that for every vegetable, there's a dip. I earned points from Greg for smacking him down but it never deterred him from calling me Vegetable.

Margaret lived across the street from me with her husband and two Springer spaniels. Because of a seizure disorder Margaret wasn't allowed to drive and her husband was at work all day. Her world was smallish as a result - or it seemed so to me.

Margaret often dropped by to chat. My problem was that I had a hard time coming up with anything to chat about because Margaret didn't seem to have many interests, nor for that matter, many opinions, nor for that matter, many original thoughts. She spoke of her dogs more than she did of her husband and of her church more than her dogs.

One day she dropped by unannounced and my heart groaned. I had nothing against Margaret other than my difficulty conversing with her and that she never seemed to know when to leave. Then I remembered that Greg was coming for dinner and my mood brightened. He'd arrive soon, there'd be a few minutes of friendly chat, Margaret would surely know to vamoose and all would be right with my world.

Margaret and I were in the living room drinking tea when Greg pounded on the door. When I opened it, there he stood, a freakishly long loaf of bread in the crook of his arm and a bottle of wine in the opposite hand.

"Vegetable, I am here!" he announced, arms spread, grinning and waiting for his kiss.

I took care of the preliminary business of hugging and kissing him. Then, knowing anything could come out of that mouth at any second and that Margaret was within earshot, I took him by the hand and redirected him as though he were a two-year-old: "Greg, come in and meet my neighbor!"

Greg never just worked the room, he possessed it. And physically he dwarfed Margaret and me. Intellectually he dwarfed Margaret. After three long strides he set down the bread and wine and came to a stop near my mystified neighbor. He extended his hand to Margaret who eyed it as though he'd just thrust a python in her face. Then he boomed, "Margaret! Wine?"

I knew Margaret didn't drink, probably due to her seizure medications, her religious convictions or both, so I jumped in quickly with, "Greg, Margaret doesn't drink." 

Already there was the slightest whiff of intolerance in the air but who had issued it I couldn't tell.

Within less than a minute, Greg managed to bring up the subject of term limitations, a hot-button issue slated for the ballot that November. Greg could manipulate conversations in ways that allowed a sizing up of those he might want dirt on. He would do this in order to bury them in that dirt later.

"So, Margaret," he began, artfully prepping his prey, "what do you think of term limitations?"

Margaret practically vibrated off her chair in excitement. "Oh!" she sang out, grateful he'd lobbed her such an easy catch, "I don't really have an opinion on them yet but I'll ask my husband what he thinks and of course, I'll talk to my pastor."

I swore I heard the cocking of a pistol and pictured its muzzle pressed against Margaret's temple. Greg smiled at Margaret. Guileless as an otter, Margaret smiled right back.

"Well, Margaret," he said, towering over her because he was too antsy to sit down and speaking as though to a moron, "the problem with relying on others to vote our consciences on this issue is that we can end up reelecting the same . . . g@##%$n . . . f%&*@#g . . .  a$$%@&#s year after f%&*@#g year."

Margaret was gone within seconds. I glared at Greg, disgusted in the same way baby Super Man's Earth mommy would have been disgusted if he'd smashed up the house with his rattle. Even then, when baby Super Man smashed up the house with his rattle, it was because he didn't know his own strength. Greg knew his own strength. He looked back at me and shrugged.

"What? What did I say?" he demanded.

These days I wish I had Greg around when some unwelcome visitor wants to change my religion.

Wait Till the Midnight Hour

"How would you like to walk through the cemetery with me at midnight tonight?

Your Name Here by Teece Aronin. Available at
RedBubble.com/people/phylliswalter.

This to me from my college gal-pal, Margie. I was barely out of my teens and Laurie was a few years older. 

"Are you kidding? Yes!"

"This'll be fun! I'll knock on your door at 11:30."

I thought about the upcoming adventure all afternoon. Would I be scared? No way. Margie was such a sweet girl; kind, funny, smart and reliable. If she said tonight would be fun, then tonight would be fun. 

But by that evening I was getting nervous and at 11:30 when Margie knocked, I jumped out of my skin. I opened the door and there she stood: five feet tall, glasses, a brunette with a pageboy haircut. She held a flashlight that was as big as she and she'd nearly buried herself in a black wool coat. It was October and nippy so I slipped my coat on, too. We arrived at the cemetery at 11:55 and waited until midnight to walk in. 

The darkness was near total. Branches trimmed out in decaying leaves were faintly silhouetted against the sky. Margie was in front of me fumbling with that steel pillar she called a flashlight and I was praying for her batteries to have more life than what was buried in the cemetery. And I was frustrated because I couldn't see her.

"Did you have to wear black?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Hang on - I'm trying to switch on this flashlight."

Blessedly it finally lit and we walked farther in. 

"Margie?" I asked. "Are you scared?"

"No! This is fun!" she bubbled, making me want to forget her adorable pluck and just knock her right down. "You?" she asked.

"Oh, you have no idea," I whined. I grabbed the back of her coat, the toes of my shoes just inches from the heels of her boots. 

Margie shined the flashlight in my face to read my expression, unintentionally blinding me. "You poor thing, You're fine. Really you are. But you want to know the real reason I wanted to do this?"

This was the part of the horror movie where the heroine finds out that the best friend is a homicidal maniac. In the morning, some grieving widow bearing flowers would stumble upon a corpse with a flashlight-shaped indentation in her scalp.

"No - I mean yes - I mean I guess," I answered, looking at her in a whole new horrifying light.

"Because someone told me they saw a gravestone in here with my name on it. I thought it would be fun to come find it."

"You mean there's a gravestone in this cemetery that says IDIOT?" 

"No, my last name," she said.

That was when Margie turned around, took one step and tripped. She fell forward and it didn't occur to me to let go of her coat, so I went with her. The momentum of the fall caused her arm to fling up - the arm that was attached to the hand that held the flashlight. The light swung up and flashed full onto a granite monument. The name engraved there: BYRNES. Margie's last name: Byrnes. 

We screamed, but Margie was the one who named names, mentioning a few you've seen in the bible. Then we scrambled to our feet and ran faster than two chunky little girls ever dreamed possible. We didn't stop until we skidded to a halt at the steps of Saint Gabriel Hall. 

"Wanna do that again tomorrow?" I gasped.

"#%!@ you!" she cursed - just not as sweetly as usual.