Deep Cover

I’m Lucky to be Alive

Exhausted driving home from a one-day 800-mile round trip to LA for the AES convention, near dawn 100 miles south of Sacramento at 85 mph at the crest of a long steep grade on Highway Five, the roadway narrows its two lanes for the hillside cut. Like the open jaws of Megalodon, there is a 30-foot long 2-foot tall steel I-beam on its side diagonally blocking my fast lane, 3 feet from the crash barrier, 1-foot from the double yellow lines, into the right lane. On reaction only, I swerve left and snap right to get my Honda Accord wheels to straddle the steel. The violent maneuver lifts the driver’s side of the car up on the steel. I hear a sandpaper shuffleboard sound, and my engineer, Eric Lander shouts “Watch”… suddenly I am in the slow lane going 85 having been a slot car racer for all of 30 feet …” Out!” I take my car the next morning to my mechanic and ask him to check the oil pan and undercarriage, he didn’t believe my story. Later he called astonished, the bottom of my engine frame was polished silver. To this day, I wonder how many race car drivers or gamers could have made that maneuver.

MMM Scenes – Microfiches of my Life

When my mother was pregnant with me, she was depressed about her marriage falling apart and, at the last minute, avoided hitting a tree to end her life. You see, my mother married a rogue of a husband who had a second family tucked away.  I remember meeting my dad for the first time when you got out of Jail for embezzling money from investors. He tried to blame the embezzlement on my mom.  It was a good thing that she remembered the papers that he had her sign and where the money went. It was a high scandal in the Chicago press in the early fifties.  You see, my father married my mother for her family’s wealth. He later fell in love with one of my mother’s good friends, which led me to luckily being alive today as abortion wasn’t easy in those days.

Dennis the Menace had nothing on me. At age four I was stealing gas from the next-door neighbor’s garage to throw onto the large leaf-burning piles or lighting the garage on fire playing Smokey the bear. One day my cross-the-street neighbor Huntie Hamill and I shot our new dirt guns in his grandmother’s empty lot next door aiming at a pile of bricks.  Little did we know we were hitting a hive of yellow jackets. That day I wound up getting over 65 stings and certainly made a scene when I ran through the front door playing with a very angry swam of yellow-jackets. The doctor made a house call and gave me a quarter teaspoon of antihistamine. Luckily, I wasn’t allergic to bee stings. I am still twitchy about being close to bees to this day.

One day my mother pulled her car into the driveway and found me on the third-floor rain gutter of the Gessel’s house next door; I was crawling outside the sun porch’s pony wall waving down at her. The most fun I had was the 4th of July in 1957 when I set off a cherry bomb in the village square’s cannon kitty corner from our home.  The historic cannon belched a fiery report. I listened to how the sound ricocheted off the houses moving their window panes with the blast across the village square and beating it back home.

At age six I came down with encephalitis spending 10 days in isolation at the hospital with a temperature of 107 degrees. It is likely caused by the bad measles or polio vaccine that I had taken. I could only have a radio in my room because it could be boiled sterile.

When Dad got out of prison, for a white-collar crime, I was re-introduced to him.  He later had me on weekends.  I only wanted to go to the Science and Industry Museum in Chicago.  I must have gone there 40+ times by Second Grade. By Third Grade, I was reading Scientific American, and for Christmas, I only wanted a subscription to Scientific American for my Christmas present.