Another Modest Proposal

(With apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Humankind has been cursed over the millennia with two major man-made scourges – war and violent crime. From billions of dollars of government-sponsored research, we now know that both these plagues have, as their major causative agent, one relatively simple organic molecule, testosterone. Therefore, in order to cleanse the world of war and violent crime we need only rid the world of testosterone. To accomplish this end is also relatively simple – the world needs only to castrate each and every male the world around. Now there might be a few problems with this approach… but I also have solutions for these issues too:

1) It will be relatively simple to cut the testicles off of every male baby. We can think of it as a kind of super circumcision. We can create an elaborate ceremony around this deballing … maybe calling it a “bris-cut” (with a nod to the Jewish crowd). We might also make all these newly-made eunuchs honorary citizens of France. However, castrating adult males might be a little more difficult … with some fairly serious rebellions resulting. I suggest that this reluctance be defeated with the “salami approach” (excuse the pun). That is, we snip the more unpopular males first -- lawyers, felons, Madison Avenue types, politicians, Canadians, car salesmen, and Bill Gates. Then, little by little, we can expand those males that get neutered to include a larger and larger percentage of adult males until finally the snipers themselves are held down by the snipees and deballed to the cheers of Gloria Steinhem, Jeanne Garofalo and the NOW crowd. I also suggest that Harry Reid be put in administrative charge of this worldwide process since he has obviously already undergone a nut-ectomy.

2) There almost certainly would arise a black market in artificial testosterone. Therefore, it will also be necessary to make all testosterone, in pill or injectable form, a controlled substance with severe penalties for its illegal possession – possibly a public beheading by radical Muslims or PETA. The only population segment who could be written legal prescriptions for testosterone would be female athletes and Hollywood producers.

3) Once all males have been castrated there then arises the obvious (and ominous) dilemma of how we propagate our species. For the first months or so fecund females might be inseminated from the existing frozen sperm banks. However, for the longer run, there will need to be a better solution. Obviously, the cloning of humans might be a neat answer … if this process ever becomes viable and reliable. But to avoid all the possible technical and genetic pitfalls of this resolution, it might be necessary to keep a nominal number of uncastrated males around to provide for species propagation. I suggest that this breeder stock of males (drones) be kept under strict lock and key and milked regularly for their spunk by the likes of Madonna, Monica Lewinski and Elton John. The number of males required for this societal duty might not be that great since each ejaculation produces tens of millions of sperm cells. I suggest that these lucky guys might be selected by voting on American Idol. Perhaps, with frequent milking and careful rationing of results, Barack Obama, George Clooney, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (my predictions for the voting outcome) might be the only studs required worldwide.

And thence comes the age of Aquarius ... and love will conquer all.

© Copyright, George W. Potts

The Old Man

I was sleeping in my grandparents’ sewing room. It was a small room at the head of the stairs and beside their only bathroom. My grandmother had moved her old treadle Singer sewing machine away from the back window which overlooked her flower-laden back yard and installed a fold-out bed for me in its stead. My sister and mother shared the front bedroom as we had recently moved in with my mother’s parents. 

My mother had left my stepfather, Sarsfield (Sarge) Burns, after about three years of marriage. I, at the age of twelve, wasn’t entirely unhappy about this development despite my new cramped quarters. Sarge (I never called him Dad) was not a good father or even a mediocre stepfather. He adored my mother and older sister. But he treated me with total indifference other than to use me as a gofer and a grunt. This included lugging bushel baskets of dirt around to fill in holes in the front lawn and fetching his Corona-Corona cigars from the drugstore about a half mile away. No, I didn’t really miss my life with him.

My new bedroom had, to the right of the entry door, two large built-in closets containing my grandparents’ mothballed clothes. Above them were two smaller built-in storage cabinets holding, among many sewing notions, at least a dozen large tin containers of A&P black pepper. I was curious about this hoard until my grandmother told me that, during the war, black pepper was hard to come by. I assumed that she was referring to World War II. This room also had a side window which looked out onto the next-store house across a small dark walkway. It couldn’t have been more that ten feet to this modest home of the Trouts and I could see into its back bedroom like it was an ell of off my own little room. Since their house was shorter than my grandparents’, I looked into this room from behind and above at a slight angle.

My mother, my sister and I stayed with my grandparents for about six months and, throughout I had a clear view into the Trout’s lighted back bedroom. And for this entire period it seemed that nothing went on in this room other than an old man sitting on the edge of his sagging bed that had been pushed against the back wall. I assumed that this sad sack was the father of either Mr. or Mrs. Trout, but since I never saw him outside in their company, I could not be sure. He was a rather gaunt soul with a bit of a paunch, an angular face, and usually, a stubble of whiskers. He sat on the edge of this bed, generally in his gray wool pants, suspenders down, and an old-fashioned armless undershirt, staring at the wall. That’s all I really ever saw him do there -- stare, with a haunting hollow gaze, at that floral wallpaper on the opposite wall. Actually, this is not quite true. He did from time to time hack up some phlegm and spit it a dirty old rag that he held on his knee. Then he went diligently back to his task of trying to stare the budding flowers into bloom ... or the perched birds into flight.

This scene repeated itself over and over -- early morning, late night, or even if I was in my room in the afternoon. He just sat there, staring ... hardly ever moving. Often I would force myself to stay awake late into the night to see something happen. But it never did. A few times I did see him go out of the room presumably to the bathroom, but that seemed the range of his physical activity. He sat there staring ... staring until I thought that he must be mad. Of course, there was no way to know what he was thinking, but I would imagine that he was reliving his life in the foreground of that wallpaper ... dancing, going to war, getting married, playing baseball, harvesting wheat, whatever. He just sat and stared until my grandma’s backyard garden had faded and we had moved away.

And so, while still quite young, I had learned a serious lot about getting old.

© Copyright, George W. Potts

Hot Buttered Toast

Indian Mountain, a boys’ boarding school, was a self-contained community. Located near Lakeville, Connecticut along with its sister school, Indian View, it was patterned after an English preparatory school ... even down to calling its classes “forms”.

I was in the fifth form, a new student there and my first year away from home. Just about everything was new to me, but I wasn’t particularly homesick. I was more detached, drifting through this novelty without leaving any footprints. My father had died four years earlier and my mother had just remarried a dapper New Yorker named Sarsfield “Sarge” Burns. He was very cosmopolitan poltroon and lived in the Hotel Windsor near Central Park. I had never imagined that people could live in a hotel. But he didn’t take to children the way he took to my mother, so my sister and I were shipped off to Connecticut for a year of boarding school while my mom was introduced to the glamours of city life. While we were away my mother moved everything out of our house in Greensburg, Pennsylvania and she and my new step parent moved into a bigger hotel room at the Hotel Salisbury, on 57th Street, diagonally across from Carnegie Hall. It was to this hotel room we returned to for holidays ... to sleep on cots in the corner.

This school was understandably sited at the foot of Indian Mountain and most of its facilities -- classrooms, an assembly hall, a small library, the dorm rooms, a dining hall, a locker room, an infirmary and even some faculty quarters, were all located in one big brick building. If the weather was bad, we could spend the entire day indoors ... in our large brick cocoon. We would wake up in our dorm rooms, go to the basement to perform out toilets, move to breakfast in the dining hall, go to classes, eat lunch, more classes, study hall, dinner, assembly, study hall again, and then back to our rooms until lights out. If the weather was good, we would play outside before dinner, usually a sport appropriate to the season. On the weekends we usually played hare and hounds outside or went on a school trip. When we were in the dining hall, we always ate at the same table and sat in the same seat. Meals were served family style in bowls and platters from which we took what we wanted. At the head of each table was a proctor, who was either a faculty member or someone from the school administration. It was this proctor’s responsibility to see that we ate everything on our plates and did it with a semblance of decorum.

Mr. Howell Richards was an English teacher of a certain age and my dining table proctor. He was archetypal English from the tip of his oxblood brogans to his Paisley bow tie and wire-rim glasses. He always wore tweeds ... not just a tweed jacket, but a full tweed suit, often with a vest of the same brindle colour. These suits always hung on his thin frame like a sheet over an old chair. He was a meek man ... a man who seemed to be waiting to inherit the Earth. He had an even meeker, childless wife who was prone to dangling onto his sleeve like a waif clinging to her mother’s dress hem. She made a mouse look debonair. She was devoted to “Professor Richards” as she called him, trying to get us to do the same. Mr. Richards wasn’t a professor, but if we called him that, his whole mien brightened by about 50 lamp watts. The Richards’s lived in a modest home that was built as an ell off the back of our brick cocoon, near the dining hall. The Richards’s needed only to exit their front door, take about ten steps across a courtyard, and enter the side door of the dining hall to sit down to a meal. Their table was the one closest the side door nearest their abode. I say the “Richards’s” because Mrs. Richards (I think it was Florence) always ate with us. She sat to her husband’s right and would tend to his every need throughout the meal. She was so very solicitous that she even made me, a budding social oaf, uncomfortable.

And one of Professor Richards’s needs at every dinner was toast, hot buttered toast. We usually had old stale cold toast for breakfast, but it was always soft, squishy rolls for lunch and dinner. When Richards and his wife entered for dinner, we would stand as they sat down. Then Florence would discretely place next to her husband’s plate a small napkin-wrapped package she was carrying. We all knew what was in it ... hot, aromatic, done to a tee, butter-infused, cut-on-the-diagonal, white toast. After the usual blessing, Professor Richards would open the napkin wrapping like it contained a cache of diamonds. And out would flood the sweet aroma of this hot buttered toast. Then throughout the meal, be it spaghetti, or meat loaf, or Swiss steak, or whatever, Mr. Richards would nibble his hot buttered toast ... his toast exclusively ... his raison d’être ... his holy right ... his status symbol ... his badge of honor ... the meaning to his day ... and maybe even the foundation to his entire life. If Mr. Richards had to choose between his toast and his wife, I suspected I knew what his choice would have been.

But this hot buttered toast also became my obsession. I would plead with my eyes to Mr. Richards for just one small bite of that hot buttered toast ... as would most of the other boys at the table. But Mr. Richards kept his eyes averted from our longing stares and just kept nibbling on his hot buttered toast after about every second bite of his dinner. And when the meal was done and the hot buttered toast was but a few crumbs, he would fold up the napkin, give it to his wife, and stand up, signifying that another Indian Mountain repast was completed. Then, as his wife demurely tucked this napkin into her coat pocket, we would all stand to be excused. Finally, the Richards’s would exit through the same door they had entered ... together ... Mrs. Richards hanging onto the Professor’s sleeve ... quiet and alone.

© Copyright, George W. Potts

Upon Reaching Sixty

As I am entering my sixty-first year I feel compelled to reflect on my past life and on what may be my dubious destiny. First, I am all too aware that, if I am very lucky ... given the suspicious quality of my genealogical soup, I should be thrilled to live to eighty. Thus, I am likely now three-quarters of the way through my life journey and, in the distance, I can discern that grimy station at the end of the tracks. Certainly these last twenty years are doubtful to be as rail-smooth and offer the same panoramas as my first three score. In fact, unlike the song’s “purple dust of twilight time,” my dotage will probably be awash with the choking soot of infirmity ... not a very happy thought. And when my train finally pulls into its death-depot, I likely will be fearfully frozen in my berth.

So, why the journey? How is it that I am on this pilgrimage to the worm farm? Can this all evolve from one balmy night in May, 1938 when my parents did the nasty to the strains of “Stardust” lilting out of their brown Philco radio? Does my Dad’s one wriggler and my Mom’s willing ovum beget “me?” Logically, I understand, but emotionally I am confounded. It’s akin to turning the Empire State Building upside down and balancing it on the very tip of its antenna. That one moment of conception is the pin-point fulcrum for my entire life: a massive number of happy ceremonies, bitter failures, transient joys, defining events, greasy hamburgers, loopy ideas, indulged senses, and bodily functions -- all crammed into my sixty trips around the sun. Did my Dad, now gone for almost fifty-five years, really comprehend what he was begetting that May evening? Most unlikely. Sinister Nature makes our procreation so euphoric that we aren’t tempted with consequential thoughts.

And so I was born ... into a planet reluctantly entering the Second World War. The ovens at Treblinka had yet to be built. Jet planes were only a distant, discounted idea. The first computer, Eniac, was still a maze of radio tubes and wires. And our leader in the White House was quietly hardening his arteries with the contents of his theatrical cigarette holder. The town into which I set my tiny ink-stained foot was Greensburg, Pennsylvania; a grimy mill town thirty miles east of Pittsburgh. Greensburg was built, like Rome, on seven rather steep hills. It straddled Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway ... well before the age of truck routes around towns (such “civic planning” destined to drain these towns of their life force.) Our white clapboard house was owned by my mother’s father. It was a modest home, by today’s standards, set high on the eastern hill which cast its morning shadow on the high-school football stadium and a triple set of feeder rails connected to the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The mainline itself framed the town’s northern bluff which, in turn, created the valley through which the Lincoln Highway promenaded.

My bedroom window overlooked this valley and often at night, particularly after my father had closed his eyes forever, I would sit on the edge of my bed watching the trains tightrope their way across the horizon. The wail of their steam whistles drew me to reveries of getting older and traveling to strange new places. Now, I am much older and have traveled to many strange new places. And, unfortunately, trains no longer belch coal smoke and lure dreamers with their mournful trills. It’s as though, as a young boy, I was suddenly able fly across that valley and board that train to my future. And now, having traveled well along to my destination, I yearn to be back in my old bedroom, sitting on my chenille bedspread, staring across the valley at that moving line of lights.

(Written 11 years ago.) © Copyright, George W. Potts

Be My Valentine

Sheldon was very depressed, almost despondent. His mother, to whom he was deeply attached, was dying. Sheldon’s father, a tailor, had passed on almost fifteen years earlier, while Shel was in seventh grade. His mother had stepped in to fill his father’s role, and then also became his mentor and his closest friend. It was she who had inspired him to do well enough at PS 168 and Bronx Science to get a full scholarship at Harvard. She encouraged him to go into premed studies and then, after he was accepted to Columbia Medical School, sold shoes at the Thom Mcan store on 46th and Broadway so he would have enough spending money to subsist in a small cold-water flat on West 178th Street.

After he had graduated from Columbia with honors and got an internship then a residency in cardiology at Bellevue, Shel moved in with his mother in her two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town. It was like he was a kid again. She would always have his favorite foods waiting for him no matter what time of the day or night he returned home. She would be waiting there in her flowery chintz bathrobe with a plate of blini or some sliced brisket and half-dones from the 2nd Ave. Deli. On the Saturdays that Shel was not working, they would travel by the Canarsie line to the Pastrami King restaurant in Brooklyn and spend hours gorging themselves before going on to Far Rockaway to watch the surf or bask in the sun, depending on the season.

But this particularly cold February things were very different. Shel’s mother could no longer go out of their apartment. Shel himself had diagnosed his mother’s condition -- congestive heart failure. Too many corned beef sandwiches and too little exercise were conspiring to take Shel’s mother away from him before her time. She was only 58 after all. But there was little Shel could do, save a heart transplant, to return his mom to here former vigor. And the cost of a new heart for her, even with Shel’s medical privileges, was well beyond what he made or could even borrow (being already tapped-out due to his medical studies). And besides, by the time Shel’s mother reached the top of the waiting list for a new heart, it most probably would be too late. So Shel’s brooding mood matched the grayness of the late-winter Manhattan weather.

Now Shel, although not quite handsome and hardly the athlete, had attracted, by his potential earning power, the attention of quite a few of the female hospital staff. He was constantly getting invitations for coffee, or for drinks after work, or to spend the weekend helping some comely nurse paint her apartment. All of which he refused. That is, all, until this particular Valentine’s Day when he got dozens of cute cards with all kinds of sappy and suggestive messages, such as: “You can have my candy, Valentine” or “You can put your dart in me, Sweetie.” One particularly florid card showed cupid shooting an arrow into the tukhas of a doctor who was, in turn, ogling a nurse with a lot of cleavage showing. It read, “Just say the word ...” It contained some of those little heart-shaped candies that had inscribed things like “Be my Valentine” and “My heart is yours;” and the card was signed “Amanda.”

When he read this card, Shel immediately got a half a woodie ... for he had been secretly admiring Amanda, out of all the nurses vying for his attention. She was statuesque with large breasts and, unlike most women endowed in this manner, also had a very shapely derriere. She was, of course, a blond schiksa whose intellect was not the match of Shel’s. But in some ways she did remind Shel of his mother and this made him feel more comfortable around her. She often knitted socks, just like his Mom. She drank her tea with a slurping sound, just like his Mom. And she often wore he hair in a tight bun covered with a snood, just like his Mom.

So Shel decided to break his self-imposed exile and have a go at Amanda. He sent her back a note asking if she would like to have dinner at the local Szechuan dive. His beeper went off fifteen minutes later and its text message read: “YES! YES! MANDY.” They met later that night at the restaurant and small-talked their way through the Hunan chicken and the sweet and sour pork. When Shel asked Mandy to come back to the hospital, she practically gushed her assent. Then she, from behind, placed her hand into Shel’s right front pants pocket to let him know a bit of what was coming. They practically ran back to the hospital and up to the top floor where the residents had temporary lodgings while they were on duty. By the time Shel had closed the door and moved his black bag off of the bed, Mandy had already shed her blouse and had let her beautiful breasts come cascading out of her bra. His breathing became short and shallow.

Shel, then cracked a couple of Amyl Nitrate vials, which they both quickly sniffed. Then he produced a Nitrous Oxide inhaler, which Mandy quickly sucked into her lungs as she slipped out of her panties. Shel quietly held back. Then he produced two Seconols, which, while Mandy downed hers, let his slip softly to the floor. Next he lay his drowsy and giggling date on the metal-frame bed and proceeded to tie her up, hand and foot, as she squealed with delight. Next, he opened a canister of ether, which, as Mandy inhaled its distinctly sweet smell, brought a flash of panic to her eyes. When Amanda was fully zonked, Shel slipped a rubber sheet under her supine nude torso. With that, he retrieved his black bag and proceeded deftly to spread open her chest, cut out her heart, and place it, still beating weakly, into a sterile cryogenic package ... and then into a small Thermos ice chest. He then calmly phoned for an ambulance to bring his mother to the hospital. As he double-locked his room, picked up the ice chest, and turned to make the necessary preparations in Operating Room 4, Shel, with a sly smile, realized that he truly had stolen Amanda’s heart.

© Copyright, George W. Potts

Soul Proprietor

Things hadn’t been going right for Jim for quite some time. Business arrangements that seemed like they were done-deals inexplicably fell apart. Friends took umbrage at some random comment and turned to ice. His wife and his children hated him and treated him like he had a contagious disease. James Caterwaller felt like he was living under some kind of thunder cloud ... like the character, Joe Bfstplk, in the old L’il Abner comic strip. He couldn’t remember the last time he had won at poker or at the casino. Every time he had a decent-looking car, it would be totaled. His twenty-one-year streak of bad luck was beginning to grind Jim down. When he was much younger he had always been lucky. Women would swoon into his arms at the dumbest comment. He was regularly winning raffles and games of chance ... a Camaro, a trip to the Bahamas, a Harley Davidson, a bag of gold coins, four cash prizes ranging from $100 to $1000, six turkeys (five Toms and a capon), and a set of dishes. He was often accused by his fraternity brothers of having a horseshoe up his ass. His moniker among the Greek brothers was Lucky Jim.

Why this miasma hung around him now was the subject of many a sleepless night for Jim. Had he broken three mirrors? Not that he could recall. Well, maybe one ... a long time ago. Was he being punished for all the hearts and hymens he had broken? Probably not ... for most of these women also had designs of their own. Had he offended some lesser god to the degree that he was being hounded into his crypt? He couldn’t remember anything specific ... perhaps it was his youthful digging in an old Indian burial mound? Nah, that was well before he had had his run of good fortune. This bad luck thing was a splinter in Jim’s psyche.

As a result of these misfortunes, Jim, not normally an irrational fellow, had acquired over the years a staggering number of obsessive superstitions. He would never have the salt passed to him without it being set down on the table. He would never enter and exit a house without sitting down. He never walked under ladders. He would never let a cat walk across his path without spitting three times. He would waste hours watching digital clocks till they clicked up combinations of his lucky numbers (3, 7 and 9). He would be sure that ever wad of paper that missed the waste basket was a curse on his day. He never opened an umbrella in the house or put a hat on a bed. He never spoke ill of the dead. He knew that those years whose digits added up to a number ending in six were doomed.

Then one day a revelation occurred to Jim. An old drinking buddy from his fraternity was listed in the alumni magazine as having died in a skiing accident in Colorado. This name, Morton Melvane, started the wheels spinning in Jim’s brain. What was it about Morton Melvane that was special ... other than he was a nice guy and could play the piano like Andre Previn? Aha! Jim had bought Morton’s soul (for five dollars) one drunken night at the frat house many years ago. This remembrance now triggered a flood of other such recollections. Jim now remembered that he had purchased many different souls in his salad days. He was wont to do this as a devilish prank during drunken parties. He would announce to a group of revelers that he was buying souls for whatever people wanted. Then, if he had the requested funds in pocket, he would draw up a contract on a scrap piece of paper:

 “I, ____________________ , sell my eternal soul to James Caterwaller for the sum of $________ .
Signed _________________________”.

Jim would then get the person to sign this document and give them their requested pelf. This amounted to anywhere from a penny (for those wishing to prove their atheism) to fifty dollars (for the less sure, but more hard up). One late night at a poker game, he even bought a fraternity brother’s soul for twenty dollars, in lieu of his marker.

Could this amassing of people’s souls be what was causing Jim’s ill-starred streak? Particularly, if these people were dying? First, Jim had to reconstruct all the names on all those contracts. In fact, where in the world were all those contracts? Jim had saved them in an old cigar box which, as he recalled, had gotten pretty stuffed. It was held shut by the original brad when the box was full of stogies. Jim went through the entire house and couldn’t turn it up. He seemed to remember he had kept it in the old antique desk, but it was no longer there. His wife said she hadn’t thrown it out ... so where was it? Then, as life happens, a family emergency arose (Jim’s daughter was cut when she ran into a plate glass door) and his quest for the cigar box was postponed until Jim once again noted the passing of another one of his contract signers. It seemed, over the next nineteen years, that the weight of the souls he had purchased in his youth were beginning to bend his back to age and infirmity.

If you purchased someone’s soul, were you then responsible for it after the contractee had died? This was a frightening thought for Jim. Where these people roaming the world looking for their souls just as Jim had repeatedly rummaged through his house scouring for their mortal contracts? Were these dispossessed dopplegangers playing tricks on Jim’s private life and fortunes until he somehow released them from their own eternal damnation? Jim would periodically come back to these same thoughts, late at night, when his life was going particularly bad or when another of those accursed names appeared in the alumni magazine. This old parlor game that Jim had used to enhance his mien and mesmerize women was turning into his own personal Hell. He had to find these soul contracts and somehow release himself from their onus!

But the time finally came, when they were packing up to move out of their lovely old Victorian house and into a modest retirement facility, that Jim’s wife let out a whoop! She had found the old cigar box at the bottom of a trunk containing their children’s saved toys and books. With trembling fingers, Jim went through the now-yellowed slips of paper. There was Morton’s soul! There was Jerry, the poker player’s soul! Hadn’t he died in Viet Nam? There was Lucy Starkey’s soul! Wasn’t she Ron Bosset’s girlfriend back in college? I wonder if they ever got married? I wonder if she is still alive? All together there were thirty-five souls which had been purchased for a total of $634.67. Jim went to his computer and figured that, had this amount been invested with some conservative mutual fund forty years ago, it would have grown to about $150,000 today ... enough to have paid off the mortgage on their old house ... and thus not requiring their current move. But it was too late now. The contract had been signed and they had to be out of their only real home by Thursday.

With a sigh ... and then a longer sigh, Jim took the cigar box full of spirit covenants to the hearth in which was burning their very last fire ... a flame which had defined their hospitality over the last seventeen years ... and threw the slips of paper, box and all, into the conflagration. They burned with uncommon haste and heat. And Jim thought he could hear Handel’s Hallelujah chorus echoing faintly in the crackling of the flames. All was reduced to ashes in very short order and Jim felt as though a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. His step was lighter. His wife and children were warmer. And on the very next Friday, Jim hit the state lottery ... for $150,000.

© Copyright, George W. Potts