Busted

So me and my friend are tromping through the woods, making too much noise, talking way too loud. We’re both under the influence, and we’re both underage. So’s everybody else back at the campground, a couple hundred yards out near the water. We’re down at the southernmost tip of New Jersey, a whole bunch of us. Reason is, three of us, myself included, have to appear in front of a judge for some, uh, indiscretion committed earlier in the summer.

I’m stumbling about in complete awe. It’s like a little city, a little medieval village, all these tent cottages. The little pathways through the woods take on the look of well-worn winding streets and avenues, worn well under the hooves of horses and farm animals and mailed soldiers over centuries of feudal living. The colored lights that some campers string about the trees over their lot – red and yellow and blue and orange – dance in my eyesight. Campfires flicker all over, crackling warmly in the humid night, speckling the hilly forest off the beach and I wonder why the whole thing doesn’t go up in a Chicago-style conflagration.

Anyway, we’re stretching our legs, out for a little stroll. Whatever I’m on – and I don’t really remember what it was, but it was generously washed down with Miller Light – is making me anxious and sweaty and itchy. So my buddy takes me out for a two-cigarette walk to calm down.

We emerge from the brush in a lighted area, when suddenly we’re accosted.

The rattling engines of a souped-up golf cart destroy the rustic majesty of the night. Zipping out of the darkness, it skids up to us, halting so abruptly I think for a wild second it’s gonna tip over. The driver’s wearing a uniform and an extremely angry expression. He’s got one of those curly-wired cop car mic thingies to his moustache, which he slams down into its cradle. Uh oh. It’s Johnny Law.

He leans over to us suspiciously. “Can I help you two gentlemen?” he drawls.

One of my pet peeves is the old, “Can I help you?” spoken by someone who has no intention of helping you, let alone is interested in your well-being. For instance, years later, I was on the swings with my daughter at a playground when a woman came up to me asking if she could help me. When I said I didn’t need any help, she informed me that we were trespassing.

Okay.

So, now this dude is fishing for info on me and my buddy. This time, however, we’re very, very guilty.

Thinking much more quickly in his state than I am in mine, my friend says, “We’re looking for the bathrooms.” All campsites have them. They encourage campers to use them as opposed to using the Great Wild as your toilet.

While our would-be interrogator is looking us over, we’re looking him over. Immediately I notice that he’s wearing pants too small for his rather husky physique. He’s also wearing a leather jacket in August – in August! And how can he see wearing those dark sunglasses when it’s gotta be nine or ten o’clock at night? This guy’s a wannabe me and my friend telegraph simultaneously to each other with a glance. For crying out loud, he’s a security guard at a campground, and he’s scrutinizing us like he’s Harry Callahan and we’re hippies (which we kinda resembled, I hate to admit).

“Bathroom’s over there,” he whispers, half-nodding over his shoulder.

“Good day, sir,” we say, and make our way to the first building we see.

I pause at the door, though. “Is this the men’s room or the women’s room?” For the life of me I can’t tell. I have the sinking feeling that in my altered state I’m missing a vital clue. And Sheriff Fat Boy is still there, a peripheral glance reveals, still eyeballing us.

“Just go in!” my friend hisses.

Inside we’re in a tiled room, pleasantly light blue and white. Sinks, waste baskets, mirrors. Stalls off to both the left and right of the door. I panic. “Oh no! No, no, no. Where are the urinals?”

I plant the seed of doubt in my buddy. We look at each other, confused. “That guy’s gonna bust us now for going into the ladies room!”

“Relax,” my friend says. “We’ll just head back out.”

“What?!”

“LE, get a grip. Did you see that guy?”

“Yeah …”

So we head back out, chatting nonchalantly, back past young Kojak on the beat.

As we walk by, he removes his sunglasses and catches me with a glance. “Thought you had to go to the bathroom?”

A Ponderance

Hmmm. I’m being called to re-read The Lord of the Rings again. That’s the best way to describe it. And it’s weird, because it doesn’t fit into my life right now, you know, schedule-wise, stress-wise, things like that.

Now, I know I happen to be reading a book about the trilogy. But I’ve read books both about Tolkien and about his works before and haven’t felt this strong push. The most recent case was the Lin Carter book on the professor I read a year ago. So I don’t chalk it up to Stanton’s tribute. At least I don’t think so.

My first and only reading of The Lord of the Rings was back in the summer of 1981, after whipping through The Hobbit. I made a half-hearted attempt at The Silmarillion a few weeks later but only got two books in. Towards the end of the 80s I finished that encyclopedic work. I re-read it again in April of 2008.

I made an abortive attempt to re-read the Rings epic in 1994, I think, summertime again, but didn’t get too far into it.

But something is strongly pulling me to take Tolkien’s masterpiece back off the shelf. I don’t know how long I can resist. Maybe I’ll start it at the beginning of the new year.

If I’m being honest, I am often “called” or “pulled” to read certain books, mostly out of the blue, so this is nothing new to me. It’s the strength behind it that’s really noticeable this time around, though.

Anything like this ever happen to you?

The Game of Glory

Vestal, the little town where my paternal grandmother lived when I was in my tweens. Upstate New York, but closer to Buffalo out west than Albany up north. Still, it was noted (by us at least) for its snowy winters. It was during one such snowy winter, possibly in 1979 or 1980, that I read Poul Anderson’s Flandry of Terra, a Christmas gift no doubt.

So despite its setting in a humid waterworld, I will forever associate the first novella, “The Game of Glory,” with snow.

These memories came tumbling back to me this past weekend as I reread it after scoring it at a local used book store. Flandry of Terra is a trio of long short stories concerning a Bondian hero of the far future. In this case, Dominic Flandry is the stand-in for 007, and instead of serving the interests of Her Majesty’s Empire, he fights the shades of gray skirmishes to keep the Terran Empire – all one million planets – functioning smoothly against its nemesis, the Merseians. Now, I haven’t researched this, so don’t hold me to it, but Anderson wrote a whole bunch of Flandry stories way back in the 50s, so it’s not exactly an Ian Fleming rip-off. I also think I’ve seen other Flandry compendiums.

Anyway, Anderson can write. I’ve been a fan of his since I was a youngling. Tau Zero was probably the first “hard science” SF book I read, way back when I was ten or so. So the science is all there in these stories. But so is the intrigue, the espionage. And the characters. In “The Game of Glory” we have not only Flandry but Flandry chasing a lead on a waterworld called Nyanza, trying to get to the bottom of a whispered conspiracy against the Empire by some shady folks.

The shadiest is thrown at us almost as a coda. The force fomenting dissension, smoked out after some delightfully unanticipated subterfuge by our spy hero, is a Merseian operative called A’u. How I loved A’u as a kid. That name! And what A’u exactly is – a massive, whale-sized slug-like creature who was hiding out on the ocean bed on Nyanza. * And yet he, too, is a spy, Flandry’s mirror opposite, merely doing his own best for his own king and country. In these stories, no one is really in the right, there is really no white knight in shining armor. There is only one side doing a better job than the other.

It took me 90 minutes to relive the story. 90 minutes well spent. I give it a solid A. The other two novellas are significantly lengthier, so the remainder of Flandry of Terra will wait its turn in the reading queue. But I’ll get to it, eventually, for it’s definitely worth a read.


* Picture Jabba the Hut sparring with Sean Connery at the climax of Thunderball, and I think you come close to what ran through my head at the conclusion of this story.