Peter David's Blog, page 81

Doing Enough

Originally published November 14, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1252

It’s never enough.

No matter how much one does for the fan base, it is absolutely never enough. Because for every thousand or so fans that you manage to satisfy, there’s going to be a 1001st who is going to decide that you haven’t fulfilled whatever standards he or she has set for you. And, even more dangerously, there’s a 1002nd who is going to take it upon him or herself to try and make your life miserable—just because he can. Just because he thinks that there’s some sort of satisfaction in “standing up” to the pro, or showing the pro that he or she is “no better” than anyone else.

Several cases in point:

A month or so ago, I was supposed to do a live chat on the Marvel board on America Online. And I completely forgot about it. Totally zoned. Got caught up in some fast-breaking events at home and spaced on my commitment. I felt terrible about it, because here the fans had gathered to listen to me (for some bizarre reason) and I hadn’t shown up. I do not like to disappoint fans.

In fact, one of my main reasons on getting on AOL was to make myself that much more accessible. I’ve even made no secret of my “name” on AOL, the consequence being that it seems as if every comic fan in Christendom has put my name on his or her “Buddy list.” Which means that, when I log on, I get pelted by instant messages (IMs). I will respond to these for as long as I can, but sometimes it becomes a real hassle, particularly if I’m trying to compose articles or mail. It’s like trying to write while someone keeps shouting in your ear; impossible to concentrate. And sometimes what I’ll do in those cases is simply shut off all incoming IMs.

Invariably, however, when I do that, every single person who’d been IMing me assumes that it’s personal. That I got sick of talking to him and him alone. Which means that I’ll then wind up with an e-mail box full of letters, with messages ranging from hurt feelings bordering on paranoia (“What did I say?”) to attitude (“Fine, don’t talk to me. See if I care.”) to outright belligerence (“I heard you didn’t care about fans, and now I know that’s true!”)

So—the live chat.

A second chat had been scheduled, and this time I didn’t want to take any chance that I was going to be late for it. Scheduled for “prime time” of 8 p.m. EST, it can sometimes be problematic getting online. So, to play it safe, I started my attempts at 7:45 and got on after five minutes of endeavor. I checked mail, fielded some IMs, and then popped over to the Marvel chat room. There were about thirty people waiting for me, and I was all set to discuss whatever they wanted to discuss.

And suddenly a blank IM (that is, an IM window with no words on it) appeared on the screen, sent by one of the people in the room (whose name I won’t dignify with publicizing here).

And then, just like that, an “Error” message flared into existence. The next thing I knew, I’d been thrown off of AOL.

Now, I didn’t think anything of it in particular. It happens occasionally; sometimes, for no apparent reason, AOL will disconnect you. However, this was particularly bad timing.

“Aw, great,” I said. I then worked on getting back online, and this time it took me ten minutes to do so. It was now 8:10 and I’d accomplished nothing.

I got back online, made my way back to the Marvel chat room. People were immediately happy to see me.

And then another blank IM came from the same fan.

And I was gone again. Catapulted right off AOL.

Ian Fleming wrote, in Goldfinger, that once is happenstance—twice is coincidence—and three times is enemy action. In this instance, however, I didn’t need a third time around. I knew exactly what had happened: This little creep had some kind of program built into his IMs that will disconnect victims from the board.

This time it took me fifteen minutes to log back on, and the moment I was back, the first thing I did was block all incoming IM s, so he couldn’t do it again. Then I re-entered the Marvel chat room, and I have never, never been that angry in “public.” I immediately informed everyone in the room of what this particular fan had done. The reactions ranged from disbelief to outright anger (although there were some who seemed more amused by it). The culprit immediately denied any wrong-doing, but not for a moment did I buy that. If nothing else, ever since I’d blocked out the IMs, I had remained securely in place online.

I informed the moderator, in no uncertain terms, that the chat would not proceed until the culprit had been banished from the chat room. I wanted him out, I wanted him gone. Actions have to have consequences. The little creep had wasted twenty-five minutes of my time, and kept his fellow fans hanging in limbo while I fought to get back on again. After a couple of minutes when I made it clear that I wasn’t going to change my mind on this, the culprit—protesting his innocence—was blocked out of the chat room.

I then stayed online about forty minutes, talking it up with the remaining fans, and trying to answer the barrage of questions as fast as I could.

The next day I logged onto AOL—and immediately I got an IM from the fan, shouting, “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!” Instantly I blocked any further IMs, and literally caught his catapulting IM on screen before it could send the error message into my computer. I then tracked him down to the Marvel chat room—where he was busy boasting to the other fans that he’d thrown me off AOL the previous night. So much for any vague concern I might have that I’d acted in haste.

I subsequently filed an official complaint about him with AOL and I haven’t heard from him since. He might be there under another name, but at least he’s keeping his distance from me.

And then, of course, there are IM “bombs.”

One day I logged on—and suddenly, out of nowhere, the following IM appeared on my screen: “Die!” And it appeared again and again and again, over and over, completely consuming my entire screen. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t find any way to shut it off. I jumped over to my e-mail to see if getting to another place on AOL would end the messages—and instead, I saw my e-mail box rapidly filling up with messages from the same person, each and every one with the same charming message. I later learned that this particular gift was called an IM bomb.

It appears that, no matter how impressive a creation, there will always be people whose first priority is to try to use it as a means of hurting people.

At this point, it’s frustrating, because I think I’m going to have to start blocking all IMs except from those handful of people that I know personally. Because I’ve heard rumors, for instance, that there’s an IM program that will enable the sender—if replied to directly—to discover what your password is. I don’t know first hand if it’s true or not, but I can’t take the chance. A service I joined for the purpose of talking to the fans, and I’m going to have to pull back from it so that the few idiots out there can’t use it to make my life miserable.

It’s never enough…

Then there was the fan who posted an angry message about George Takei, who had been a guest at a convention called Defcon 4. “I asked him for an autograph, and he was rude to me!” declared the fan.

I was at that convention. George embarked on an autographing session at about 5 p.m. I had a dinner date with him at the hotel restaurant at 8 p.m., because that’s when we’d been told that the autographing would wind up.

As of 8 p.m., the line was still huge. George had been promised that it would be only three hours long. But without hesitation, he declared that no one who was waiting on line was going to be cheated out of an autograph. Nine o’clock came and went; we didn’t get to the restaurant until 10 p.m. Five solid hours of signing, and he spent time talking to each and every fan, making all of them feel individual and special.

But this one fan, for whatever reason, wasn’t satisfied. Perhaps he tried to stop George while he was en route somewhere. Perhaps George had been told to confine autographs to the scheduled signing times. Didn’t matter.

Although it’s worth mentioning that, in the restaurant, word quickly spread among the staff that “Mr. Sulu” was dining there. Now I don’t know about you, but when I go to a restaurant, I usually see one waitress, one water guy or bus boy, and that’s pretty much it. At this restaurant, throughout the evening, somehow every single staffer managed to swing by the table, sometimes for the most hilariously obvious of reasons. My favorite was when we asked the waitress about the desserts, and she said—with sudden inspiration—”You know who likes to talk about desserts? The chef. He’s very proud of them.” And she runs into the kitchen and returns, thirty seconds later, with the chef. Yeah, sure. That happens a lot. Chefs always want to tell the customers first hand about the desserts.

At least, in that restaurant, everyone was happy. For one brief, shining moment—it was enough.

But usually it’s not.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Next week: more “not enoughs.”)

 

Ooo! I wanna play, too!

Remember when the right went bugnuts crazy on the Dixie Chicks because they dared say something critical of Bush?

Wasn’t that fun? I want to play, too!

I have never bought an album by Megadeth before, but now I never will! See why here!

(I wonder how many people will say this and mean it.)

PAD

The Radio Contest, part 2

Originally published November 7, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1251

You want stories to go a certain way.

I was thirteen years old, living in Verona, a jock town where my athletic ineptitude was one of the key ingredients in my inability to make any friends. I sorely missed my previous home in nearby Bloomfield, which might as well have been on another planet for all the opportunity I had to socialize with the friends of my younger days. Since my daily humiliation in school was insufficient, I also joined the local synagogue’s youth group, United Synagogue Youth. I figured that we would spend time discussing Judaism. Learning about our cultural history. Socializing.

Nope. USY’s activities centered around one thing and, apparently, one thing only: Basketball.

We had a basketball team which played the teams of other USYs. Naturally I was bottom-ranked on that as well. I was slow, I could dribble only adequately, and I couldn’t sink a basket. So I spent many a game watching the more athletic members—namely, anyone—charging up and down the court. Basketball. What a great game.

So there I was, having won the opportunity to go to a Knicks game and, at half time, shoot a foul shot in an endeavor to win some sort of further prizes.

I thought long and hard about not even bothering to go, because I knew myself: Concern about sinking the shot would utterly destroy my attention on the first half of the game, and my inevitable inability to make the shot would hang over the second half.

But… what the hell. How often would I have a shot at something like this? To say nothing of the fact that it was a Thursday evening and a pre-season game at that. Everyone I mentioned it to said blankly, “The Knicks are playing already?” I figured that there would hardly be anyone there.

The parking lot was packed, as was Nassau Coliseum. Over 13,000 people were in attendance, and every time the P.A. announcer made any sort of mention of a promotion, the crowd would boo. It was a tough, cranky, New York audience, and I was going to be at their mercy, and not one of them was going to give a damn about me or my alleged wit or whatever clever stories I might have produced in my career. I was going to be just another object of derision.

Fortunately, I had company.

I had learned that there were seven other contest winners as well. Naturally I had a worst-case scenario all worked out: I would go last, the seven people ahead of me would sink the basket, and I would miss. The cheese, standing alone.

We assembled, as we had been instructed, at the Zamboni entrance, and as the minutes ticked down to the half time, the details of the contest were explained to us. Each of us would take a shot from the foul line. In the event that more than one person was able to sink it, the “finalists” would be moved back to the three point line, there to shoot again until only one was left standing. What we were to be competing for was dinner for two—and a key. One of one hundred and three keys (logical, since the station was B103 FM), and one of those keys would turn over the engine of the grand prize: A Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Like I could give a damn about a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I just wanted to sink the basket. To win, not for a prize that didn’t interest me, but for the sake of winning.

I looked around at my competitors. All shapes and sizes, male and female, a variety of ages, from an older bearded man to a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve.

I stood on the sidelines, watching these behemoths charging up and down the court, David surveying nearly a dozen Goliaths. And I found my attention straying to the basket. Now… I have a basketball hoop in my back yard. I had spent the past few days practicing.

A guy named Arnie was standing next to me. He worked as a control tower attendant at the local airport. And I muttered to him, “Does that basket look… small to you?”

“I was thinking the exact same thing,” he said.

It was. The height didn’t bother me; I had my basket at home set at regulation height. But the hoop was unquestionably smaller than I was used to. It looked to be almost exactly the circumference of the ball itself. There was no leeway.

I knew I was in trouble.

One day, the Verona USY was scheduled to play the Bloomfield USY. I was extremely apprehensive. I’d had a lot of friends in Bloomfield, and hated the notion of sitting there gathering bench splinters, looking like a useless fool to my old cronies. But that was exactly what happened. We went to the Bloomfield synagogue, and there was any number of my former friends on the opposing team, and all I wanted to do was look good in front of them. Instead, as always, I sat on the bench while the other taller, better kids racked up the points. To make matters worse, my father had come along for this particular away game (a chance to socialize with his old friends, I guess) and he got to watch his eldest sit there like a lump. How enchanting.

We rolled into the fourth quarter and had a commanding lead. It was the kind of lead that no one player, no matter how incompetent, could possibly screw up. Which was the point that the coach decided to put me in. I ran out onto the court, trying to look competent, secure in the knowledge that I was one of many players out there. All I had to do was not embarrass myself, and I’d be satisfied with that.

We were on offense. A guy named Matt had the ball, was looking for someone to pass it to. I was open. Why not? I hardly looked like a threat. He pass-bounced it over to me and I caught it cleanly, pivoted, bounced it once—and a Bloomfield player, seeing me as easy pickings (which I was) tried to get the ball away from me.

“Foul!” shouted the ref, and I wondered what I’d done wrong. I’d been out on the court less than thirty seconds. Then I realized that I was the injured party as the ref pointed to me and indicated that I was to take a foul shot. One shot.

In the scheme of the game, it meant absolutely nothing. We were too far ahead. But all eyes were on me as I took my place at the foul line… feeling that my entire life was on the line in that magnified way that only thirteen-year-olds can have.

The basket looked a million miles away.

They had us wearing white t-shirts with the station call letters, which I’d put on over my own shirt. It’s not like I’m svelte under ordinary circumstances, but in this instance I looked like Poppin’ Fresh.

The announcer informed fans that we were contest winners for 103 FM. Boos rained down on us. Gotta love those fans. They then announced that we were going to shoot hoops for a shot at a Harley-Davidson. This seemed to catch the crowd’s attention, since choppers are cool, and there was actually encouraging cheering. And then, to my horror, I was called up first. My name was announced. There was a smattering of cheers, as I took the ball and bounced it experimentally. Yup. It was a basketball, all right. I looked to the basket and thought, Don’t rush the shot, Don’t rush the shot.

I rushed the shot.

The ball arced upward, hit the backboard, comfortably missing the basket by a good half-foot, and fell to the floor impotently. Moans came from 13,000 throats. I shuffled back to the rest of the contestants and waited to see who would sink it.

No one did.

The crowd booed. What a bunch of losers we were. But I was sure that I could sink it from the foul line, given a second shot. I felt I had a feel for the target.

They moved us closer.

Now I felt totally lame. The basket was so damned close, but the angle felt completely weird. I aimed at the small square directly behind the basket, and this time I didn’t rush it. The ball arced upward gently, gently hit the square perfectly, gently hit the rim… and gently, ever so gently… rolled around the rim and hit the floor.

The boos were far less gentle. A stadium full of New Yorkers, all thinking the exact same thing: Jeez, I could sink it from there! Fortunately enough, the next two people after me missed as well. Then came the little girl, and I thought, Aw, let her get it. Because at that moment, all I could think of was that time when I was thirteen…

I stood there, staring at the basket for my foul shot. I’d never sunk a basket, not even in practice. Everyone was watching me: my old friends, my teammates who had no patience for me, my father.

Everyone. I prayed. Why not? Right environment for it. I aimed and let fly.

The ball went in like it had eyes.

I couldn’t believe it. Shouts of approval from everyone. Our cheerleaders chanted, “Peter, Peter, he’s our man!” I was left out on the court for another minute or so, dribbling, passing for an assist, and then the coach pulled me. No reason not to. I’d accomplished everything I’d needed to.

The little girl swung the ball down from around her knees and hurled it upward with all her might.

Hit the hoop. Bounced away. And there was a genuine moan from the crowd, not from collective annoyance as with me, but because we’d all been rooting for her. The basket was finally made by some guy with a gray beard, ending our group humiliation.

I spent the rest of the game being overjoyed every time one of those glandular-skewed behemoths missed a foul shot, and pondering how sometimes stories turn out the way you want them to, and sometimes they don’t. And as I was getting ready to leave, Arnie walked up to me and deadpanned, “Actually, I missed deliberately because I wanted to give the little girl a chance to win.”

And me—I did the same thing. Self-sacrifice in the hope of making a child’s dream come true. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

The Illusion of Transparency

The fact that Romney hasn’t released more than two years of his tax returns doesn’t bother me.

The fact that he and his people seem annoyed and belligerent and even surprised over the request is what bothers me.

Candidate Obama released seven years of his, as did candidate Hillary Clinton. George W. released nine years; Dukakis six. Yet Romney’s campaign doesn’t quite seem to know how to handle this situation other than stonewalling or trying to deflect. “It is clear that President Obama wants nothing more than to talk about Governor Romney’s tax returns instead of the issues that matter to voters…” declared Romney’s people. Well, first of all, a president should be able to multitask. I’m betting he can talk about both. Second, in a recent poll, 54% believe he should release them, so obviously it matters to voters. But of those voters polled, only 30% who asked for full disclosure were Republican, so maybe he meant only voters that he cares about.

My point…and I do have one…is that the tax returns matter less than what I call the illusion of transparency. Let’s not kid each other: everyone has shit they’d rather not have public. Everyone.

But presidential campaigns are incredibly invasive. I know this. You know this. Anyone with two braincells to rub together knows this. But voters want to believe that you have nothing to hide because what they’re really concerned about is whether you’re going to hide things from the public once elected. (Which every president does anyway. That’s not necessarily a negative. If Obama couldn’t keep a lid on things, bin Laden is still alive. Hell, how far back to you want to go? The majority of Americans didn’t know FDR was in a wheelchair; didn’t make him a less effective president.)

But anyway, candidates put on a show of “I’ve nothing to hide” and reporters say, “Challenge accepted.” And off we go.

And when the things that you’d rather not see out there get out there–as they inevitably do–it’s less about the facts themselves than it is about how you handle it.

And you know what defense rarely works when something negative comes up? “None o’ your beeswax.”

Now if Romney never intended to release more than two years of his returns–well, fine. I personally don’t care. But he should have been ahead of the curve on this, because the person I want for president SHOULD be ahead of the curve. The times when Obama hasn’t been, he’s gotten slapped around for it. And that was when shit happened that was beyond his control. This was IN Romney’s control. He should have seen this coming and his campaign should have had a strategy in mine to deal with it because it’s no secret that this happens every campaign.

If nothing else, they should have noticed that McCain’s campaign released exactly two returns. That ended well for the GOP. Am I saying direct cause and effect? No, of course not. I am saying that it’s worthwhile to look at campaigns that lost and say, “We should do the opposite.” Instead they’re following McCain’s tax return campaign and nominated a vice presidential candidate who has the exact same opinions as, and only slightly more testosterone than, Sarah Palin. And they seem surprised that the media is focusing on Romney’s tax returns, whereas if he’d released, say, five up front, this simply wouldn’t be an issue. Except now people wonder, “Well, what’s he hiding?” And when you’re trying to present an illusion of transparency, that’s really what you don’t need people asking before you’ve even been made the official nominee.

Yet he didn’t see any of that coming.

THAT is what disturbs me.

PAD

The Radio Contest, part 1

Originally published October 31, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1250

Do not seek great depths of comics wisdom in the following words. It’s just, well, something that happened to me that’s kind of bizarre, and I went along with it because I thought, “Well, might be able to get a column out of it.”

I was driving home the other morning, and had my radio tuned to a Long Island radio station, 103.1. It’s an oldies station, and I love it, because I never know what sort of memories are suddenly going to be stirred up when I listen to it. It’s the auditory equivalent of jamming a stick into the silted bottom of a pond and then blinking in surprise at whatever happens to be dredged up by the impact.

They were asking trivia questions. The challenge was to answer three questions relation to horror/suspense films, within thirty seconds. I listened as a woman called in to take a shot at it. The first question was, “In a 1960 film, Anthony Perkins played a homicidal maniac fixated on his mother.”

I was already saying Psycho when the DJ continued, “What was the name of the hotel which he owned?”

“The Bates Motel,” she replied, and I realized that I would have blown it. The phrasing was designed to make you blurt out a premature and wrong answer.

I listened, playing along for the second: “What 1968 movie starring Mia Farrow was about witchcraft?”

“Rosemary’s Baby,” I said, and the woman echoed it a moment later. Easy enough, although I always thought of the antagonists more as Satanists than witches, but that’s splitting hairs.

“What was the name of the teenaged actress,” came the third and last question, “who was possessed in The Exorcist?”

“Linda Blair,” I said immediately.

Dead silence on the radio.

“Linda Blair,” I repeated, trying to urge the caller to intuit the answer through my overwhelming psychic prowess.

Nothing.

“Aw, c’mon! Linda Blair!” I said with rather unseemly irritation. This was bugging the hell out of me. How could someone not know this? A film which shocked the movie-going public at the time (although by today’s standards, it could probably run on “Nick at Nite” and not provoke a raised eyebrow) and catapulted Blair, with her spinning head, into the public eye (and such G-rated subsequent epics as Born Innocent, Chained Heat, and—most horrifying of all—Roller Boogie). Who could forget Linda Blair?

“Uhm… Linda…” she started, struggling to try and come up with the last name.

And her time was up. “We’ll see if someone else can answer all three questions. Call in,” they said.

I felt a bubbling sense of moral outrage (which, I admit, has a fairly low boiling point. I become morally outraged if I have to wait at a train crossing). These were easy questions! Who couldn’t nail all three within thirty seconds? It was just silly—to say nothing of being an insult to one of the premiere pea-soup-vomiting actresses of her generation.

I had to do something about this. I could not stand still for the insult. I could not let this affront go unavenged.

Aw, screw it—I just wanted to win.

This has always been my greatest asset, and also my greatest liability. I have an overwhelming drive to win, which has helped to propel me along my career path. This, in and of itself, is a plus. On the other hand, I’m a lousy loser. If you want someone on your team who’s going to play as if his life depended on it, you want me. If you want someone who’s going to be a good sport if you lose, get someone else. If I know I’m going to be faced with a challenge, I’ll prepare for it with life-and-death intensity, no matter how stupid that challenge may be, just because I have a drive to win. When I agreed to the stupid debate with Todd McFarlane, I prepared myself to such a degree that consequently—when I trounced him—I made it look so easy and effortless that it seemed like I was beating up on a helpless punching bag. I’d over-prepared and looked like a bully, which was probably what Todd wanted.

When playing a game, I play to win (unless it’s, y’know, against my six year old or something). If I don’t win, I get annoyed with myself. Remember Kirk in Star Trek II saying, “I don’t like to lose”? I should get a bumper sticker that says that. I mean, no one likes to lose, but it’s not that big a deal to some people. To me—it is. That’s why, when I win an award, it means a lot to me. I like to win. Whenever possible. Sue me. To a degree, I try and avoid board games and card games in the same manner that an alcoholic avoids booze: I don’t do well with the downside of it. The last time I played Monopoly was fourteen years ago. I lost so badly that I knocked the entire board off the table, sending the pieces flying everywhere.

This did not serve me well in high school, particularly, because I would join athletic teams in order to find social acceptance, since that was the only way in the jock town where I lived that one could find social acceptance. Unfortunately, I was totally inept at any major sport. Lousy soccer player, lousy basketball player, lousy baseball player. The heart was willing, the flesh was hopeless. Contests of the mind I could win; contests of the body, forget it. So I was drawn to comics, identifying with heroes for whom no physical challenge was too daunting, and they would always triumph over those who would try to put them down.

Still, physical competition and my relative lack of skill at them has always screamed “high school” to my psyche and brings up very unpleasant memories.

But the radio challenge was a cakewalk. This was something I could win, with no effort and no risk of humiliation.

Moments later I got home, picked up the phone and started dialing. Hit a busy signal for the first minute, and figured I didn’t have a prayer. Legions of Linda Blair fans, no doubt sharing my indignation at the slighting—via lapse of the public consciousness—of this quality actress. Everyone had to be calling in with the right answer.

I got through in a little over a minute and wound up getting the on-air announcer. “Hi, I wanted to take a shot at the trivia questions,” I said.

“Oh good!” he said. “Because we still haven’t gotten a right answer to the last question. It’s a trick question.”

Immediately alarm bells went off in my head. A trick? It—it seemed so straightforward. They’d said “teenager.” Was there a teen in the film I’d forgotten about, other than Blair? Maybe she hadn’t been a teenager in the film and the answer was, “Nobody!”

“There’s a trick to it?” I said nervously.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” he said confidently. I was pleased at his certainty on both our behalves. Me, I jotted down “Linda Blair” on a napkin just to make sure I didn’t blank on her name.

They rolled tape (since I wouldn’t be on “live,” but rather about five minutes later. Avoids problems if a contestant shouts, “Oh [insert obscene expletive here]!” in case they screw up) and he started firing the questions at me. I answered the first two with confidence. At least I didn’t feel guilty about “building” on the previous contestant’s work. I’d known the answers.

He then asked me the Exorcist question. With just a millisecond of hesitation, I said, “Linda Blair?”

“That’s right!” he exhorted. “We have a winner!”

I was very pleased, of course. And deep within me, the high school student who had carried all sorts of useless bits of information in his head and was reviled by all the jocks and always felt unhappy because he couldn’t measure up to the demands of the athletic community. That student rejoiced in the triumph.

“And we’ll be getting those Knicks tickets off to you,” the announcer was saying.

My mental congratulations slammed to a halt.

Knicks tickets? Knicks? My mind wandered for a moment. Say “Knicks” to me, I’ll think you’re talking about what you get from a bad shave. Knicks?

“—for this Thursday’s game against the 76ers at Nassau Coliseum!”

“Knicks… that’s a basketball team, right?” my mind said, and fortunately enough my mouth—on autopilot—simply said, “That’s great! Thanks!”

“Plus you’ll be eligible to join in our half-time contest for further prizes!” he added.

I felt my blood run cold.

Half-time contest. I did not like the sound of that.

And when the DJ was done chatting with me, and passed me over to the assistant so that she could get my full name, address and the like, I asked her what was up with the half-time competition.

“Well, what do I have to do?” I asked cautiously.

“We’re going to make you dance,” she said.

Okay. Okay, I could handle that. Baryshnikov I’m not, but I’ve got a basic sense of rhythm. Plus I’ve taken some dance lessons. I can do a basic swing step, some mambo, hustle. It didn’t seem to make sense, but I could handle that…

“No, I’m kidding,” she said, amused by her own joke. “No, we’re going to bring you down to the court, and you’ll have the opportunity to make a free throw from the foul line to win more prizes!”

My harmless game of knowledge, my trivia contest—that I was certain I could win with no evoking of ghosts of my horrendous teen athletic career—had just been taken to a new, potentially astronomic opportunity for personal humiliation.

And somewhere from within me, that inept high school student said, “You are so screwed.” And I had the sick feeling that he was right.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Next week: Peter on the floor of Nassau Coliseum, being booed by 13,000 fans. Bring popcorn.)

 

Is a class action suit against the GOP possible?

There is little to no doubt that the GOP-driven endeavors to block voting for legitimate (and likely Democratic) voters in a number of states has nothing to do with voter fraud and everything to do with trying to tilt the odds in their favor for the next election.

So I, with my complete lack of education in the law, find myself wondering whether disenfranchised voters constitutes a class in and of themselves and they can actually sue the entirety of the Republican party in general and in specific the legislatures in the nine states that are complicit in this indisputably partisan endeavor? Of course, the whole point of this exercise is to target the poor and those least likely to have the resources to defend their rights, so it’s not likely to happen. But I still wonder if it’s possible?

PAD

Planet Comics

Originally published October 24, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1249

We write of heroes.

Yes, yes, I know there is a whole big, wide world of comic books outside the realm of the superhero. But it is there that I have most of my experience, and it is there that—for the moment—I am dwelling.

We write of heroes, gaudy and flamboyant and bigger-than-life. A veneer of “reality” has been added to them—several veneers, in fact, beginning with the addition of human frailties and foible to The Fantastic Four, expanded upon to the nth degree in Amazing Spider-Man. And DC followed suit with stories of “relevance” with subject matter ranging from bigotry to drug abuse.  But the heroes remained bigger-than-life, fantasy figures with spectacular powers and uncompromising viewpoints. Uncompromising in that good always triumphed. Had to triumph, completely.

You could argue that the triumphs were not always complete. Look at Doctor Doom, for instance. Didn’t matter how many times the FF defeated him; Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had hit upon the deliciously demented notion that Doom could never be arrested or prosecuted because he had diplomatic immunity. (Why America didn’t sever ties with Latveria and declare Doom an undesirable alien was never addressed.) So Doom could never be punished to the fullest extent of the law. But when villains in comic books were beaten—as they invariably were—they never felt good about it. They could never claim a victory in any sense of the word. The most that they could do was slink away, licking their wounds and growling that they would return at some future date with a newer, bigger and better plan that would, without doubt, polish off the hero for once and for all.

And the heroes triumphed. Always. Well—except Spider-Man, who would defeat the villain but always ended each Lee/Ditko issue by summarizing all the problems that were currently haunting his life. Frankly, it got to the point where you just wanted to slap him and say, “Hey, jerk! At least you’re alive! Hel-looo? Someone was just trying to kill you! You survived! You beat them! Be happy you’re still sucking oxygen, ya twit!”

He had just as many triumphs as anyone else; he just couldn’t find it within himself to celebrate them. The classic “is the glass half-full or half-empty” conundrum was insufficient for ol’ Spidey.  He would look at the glass as not only half-empty, but the liquid that was left was sour, the glass was now dirty, he didn’t have money to buy dishwashing detergent to clean it, and Aunt May had dishpan hands from all the other half-empty glasses she’d had to wash.

We write of heroes and their artificial worlds. A world where might makes right, and right always wins. A world of such skewed logic that if a group of super-villains gang up against a hero, it’s an ambush and a trap and an unfair battle. But if a group of heroes gang up against a villain, it’s called a team book.

And it’s so easy. So easy to write of heroes because the rules are clear-cut. The heroes will always go into battle because that’s what they must do, by definition. There’s never any question of it (again, except for Spider-Man, who will occasionally toss his costume into the garbage can and walk away, but we know it’s only temporary). They will give 100% every time out and, although they can be temporarily defeated, overwhelmed, trapped or outwitted, in the end they triumph.

Would that the real world were that simple. Would that it were that neat and tidy. Would that the world of Hunter and Kennedy, the former owners of Planet Comics, were as simple to navigate, instead of being the morass of treachery and duplicity that it is.

The requisite summary for those, as they say in the Phantom comic strip, who came in late: Hunter and Kennedy owned a comic book shop called Planet Comics in Oklahoma City, a place where city officials and watchdogs groups display a level of tolerance and live-and-let-live attitude that is several notches below what one used to see at the average auto-da-fe. Kennedy and Hunter’s store was targeted for the unspeakable crime of selling adult comic books to—get this—adults. The store was shuttered, the owners prosecuted and persecuted. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund got squarely in their corner as Kennedy and Hunter faced charges that threatened them with decades of jail time.

The case received a great deal of attention within the industry, although there was no national media spotlight to speak of.  One would think that, out of a sense of self-preservation if nothing else, the media would highlight any and all stories that feature a threat to the First Amendment. Apparently, however, the media had more important things to worry about, and it was left to those within the industry to try to rally behind Kennedy and Hunter.

At the eleventh hour, just before the case was to go to trial, Kennedy and Hunter took a plea bargain offered them by the DA. In essence, they pleaded guilty in exchange for a three-year probation, at the end of which time their records would be expunged. In a bizarre, sick, comic book way, it’s almost appropriate. After three years, they’ll be rebooted. Retconned. The great cosmic rewind button is hit. They were convicted felons—oh, wait! They’re not anymore! Now they’re just two guys with no criminal record. It’s like a Hawkman relaunch.

Unfortunately, the reboot is not going to include a return to the lives that they had led. The crime will be erased—but the punishment will linger on. Planet Comics will not snap back into existence. The police and their Gestapo tactics will not evaporate from living memory. The lost income will not be reinstituted, the broken marriage and shattered relationships sustained by the once-owners of the comic book store will not be re-knit (at least, in theory.) The damage will be done, and will remain so, even though the sentence that they are being made to suffer is just going to go away.

And the bottom line, as was pointed out by CBLDF representatives, is that Kennedy and Hunter will have been found guilty for the simple crime of practicing their First Amendment rights. By the standards of reasonable people (which lets out those who persecuted them in Oklahoma City, as well as those who condoned it) these guys didn’t do anything wrong. They shouldn’t be made to suffer—and yet they are.

They had rights, damn it. Why didn’t they stand up for them?

That’s really the most frustrating aspect to it all. One wants to cry out in frustration and say, “Blast it, guys! This isn’t right! This isn’t fair! You’re knuckling under! You’re letting the bad guys win! Don’t you get it? The reason they’re offering you a plea bargain is because they think their case is shaky! They’re running scared and think they won’t get a conviction! Now is the time to make a statement! Now is the time to refuse to back down! To say, ‘Hell, no! We’re not afraid of you! We did nothing wrong! We shouldn’t be made to plea guilty to something that we feel we didn’t do! And we won’t! You know why? Because this is America! This is the land of opportunity, the land of freedom! The land where—to paraphrase—I disagree with everything you read, but I’ll defend to the death the right to read it!’

“To play ball with the DA, to roll over and take the plea bargain, is to encourage the DA to go after other comic book store owners, or booksellers, or TV stations, or whoever might be offering entertainment of any kind that offends the sensibilities of a select but vocal few. We will not stand for it! We will not suffer the villains to get away with such gestures!

“For we are heroes! We have profited off the four-color adventures of heroes, and now we’re going to give back some of that! We’re going to take a stand! Think of reporters who have gone to jail rather than betray a source. Think of the founding fathers and the people who fought and died to give us those very rights that zealots would now take away from us! No! By Crom, by Odin’s beard, by bye Birdie, no! We shall take the risk, throw the dice, face the odds, and we shall triumph!”

To which Hunter and Kennedy would basically reply, “Yeah, well—it’s not your butt on the line.”

And it’s not.

Perhaps it comes from a lifetime of reading comics wherein the good guys know triumph and the bad guys go down in defeat, every time. The problem is that real life interferes and creates a world of not black and white, but grays.

The real world doesn’t do well with absolute triumphs. More often than not, both sides wind up claiming victory. In this case, the DA can claim triumph, stating that a warning has been issued to other sellers of adult material, and that groundwork has been laid for more prosecution—to say nothing of tax payer dollars being saved by skipping a trial and going straight to sentencing (which, let’s face it, a lot of Americans wouldn’t mind seeing in any number of criminal cases.)

The defendants can likewise claim triumph, but theirs is not a societal triumph—for in their hearts, they know that they have let society down. Sometimes, however, society takes a back seat to watching out for number one. The defendants were more concerned about their own well-being. They wanted this ordeal to be over with, already. They didn’t want to risk their freedom on the outcome of a jury trial, because as a nation full of dropped jaws proved at the climax of the O.J. Simpson trial, no one can predict what a jury is going to do.

The real world is a gray area of compromise. The Justice Society didn’t get into extended negotiations with the Injustice Society; they just whupped them. For all the talk of diplomatic immunity, the FF never faced off against Doctor Doom in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations and sought official sanctions, demanding to know what the world was going to do about this guy. They just unleashed the Thing on him, and the Thing shredded his armor, after which we watched Doom limp away.

Intellectually, we are frustrated that Hunter and Kennedy didn’t see it through. Even reps from the CBLDF clearly sounded as if the cause had been undercut, in favor of selfishness on Hunter and Kennedy’s part. Is what they did wrong?

That, too, enters into a gray area. Right and wrong, like truth, can be extremely subjective. On a societal basis, they were wrong. For themselves, they were right.

One of the things that makes superheroes so effective—that makes heroes so attractive in general—is that we feel they appeal to the best in all of us. We imprint our own desires, our own fantasies and self-image, on the heroes. We identify with them. We want to feel that we, too, could fight the good fight unselfishly against evil. That we could stand up as heroically and faithfully against the forces of fear. We have to feel that way, because if we didn’t, then we could never read and enjoy these fantasy hero constructs because all they would do is remind us of our own shortcomings. They accomplish the deeds that we wish we could do, and even fancy ourselves capable of doing, were we in their shoes. But which of us really knows just what we do would if faced with a situation wherein we have the chance to be heroes? To risk our necks, to throw ourselves on the line in the cause of a greater good? Which of us really has the stomach to wind up being a martyr?

It’s a tough call. We all like to think the best of ourselves. We all like to think that we would rise to a challenge. But until you get to that point, until you find yourself staring down the barrel of that gun with the trigger cocked, you don’t know if you’re going to squint in your best Clint Eastwood manner and say, “Do you feel lucky, punk?” or if you’re going to say, “Uhm, look—let’s talk this over and see what we can work out.”

Blame the heroes, I suppose. We’ve read them, been influenced by them. We’ve seen Superman standing there, arms akimbo, smirking at those who would do him harm as bullets ricochet from his body. We’ve seen Batman outwitting, outthinking and outfighting all manner of villains using nothing but brains and a superbly trained body. They’ve given us something very powerful and very demanding to live up to. Perhaps what it boils down to is: Why do you become a hero? And I think the answer is: Because you’re put into a position wherein you simply have no choice in the matter. To just go around risking yourself for no reason at all is not heroic; it’s just reckless. It’s stupid. It’s the mark of a crazy person.

A Superman, a Spider-Man, they must use their powers to help others because they have no choice. They simply can’t stand around and not use their abilities. They are compelled, by upbringing or circumstance, to utilize them for the greater good.

A soldier in combat sees a grenade about to wipe out his platoon, and he cannot simply run. He must throw himself on the grenade to save his mates. He’s a hero.

And Kennedy and Hunter: Are they heroes?

To society, no. Society says, “You let us down. You’ve just made life harder for others who are to come after you and face persecution.” Because they were given a choice and they walked away from the harder road.

To their loved ones—probably yes. Because they decided to end an ordeal that had to be difficult on their immediate friends and family by publicly stating—even though they didn’t believe it—that they were guilty of a crime. They sacrificed their pride so that life could return to some vague semblance of normality.

How would the Thing have handled the situation? Probably waded into the headquarters of the obnoxious citizen groups and leveled the place. How would Captain America have handled it? Made a patriotic speech in a courtroom that would have moved the jury to tears, the judge to dismiss the entire case, and the DA to personally fund the launch of a new Planet Comics. How would Superman have handled it? He would have saved the DA and the judge and the obnoxious citizen group from a convenient alien attack and—having garnered their gratitude—cashed in a few favor chips and gotten Kennedy and Hunter off.

We write of heroes.

Would that it were that easy.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

 

Fighting Digression

Originally published October 17, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1248

One never knows.

With all the topics I write about, all the opinions I toss around—what column of mine drew the single greatest number of comments? The one where I took the liberty of lettering Rob Liefeld’s first issue of Captain America, making use of the special preview which Rob had graciously supplied.

Well, since Rob was kind enough to provide a similar preview of Fighting American at the Chicago con this year, I decided to take another stab at it. I hope it will meet with the same degree of amusement afforded by my previous endeavors.

So I present: Fighting Digression.

 

Adventures in Lima: Getting There

So a few weeks ago I attended a book fair in Lima, Peru. I was asked to go by the State Department; apparently I’d gotten good feedback from the folks in Uruguay a year or two ago. So when this Lima Book Fair, a co-production of the Lima government and the State Department, appeared on the horizon, I was suggested by the State Department as a guest (along with several other folks) and it seems the people in Lima were really enthused by that. Of course, since they all read translations of my work, I’m figuring it’s more of an endorsement of the translator’s skill than anything else.

Anyway, as I’ve learned with my multiple adventures getting into and out of Canada, nothing comes easily for me when it involves air travel.



In this instance, I was to fly from Long Island to Philadelphia, where I could catch a 1 PM flight down to Atlanta. It would get me in at 3:20, plenty of time to change to the 5:20 to Lima.

So I get to Philadelphia a good three hours ahead of my flight. I check the boards. My 1 PM flight is now delayed by half an hour…and then an hour…and then an hour and forty-five minutes. I’m hemorrhaging connection time and anyone who’s ever changed in Atlanta can tell you that’s not always an easy endeavor. I go to the Delta desk and inform them that I’m ready; why, as per their commercials, aren’t they? I’m informed a mechanical problem has been discovered on the equipment which is currently IN Atlanta and has yet to take off (turns out the windshield was cracked. Wonderful.) So she rebooks me onto the 2:15 PM which I’m told will get me into Atlanta at 4:30 PM. My two hour window has just been trimmed to fifty minutes. Tighter, but not impossible. I check a little further and discover that we’re going to be landing at the furthest possible gate in Terminal A, and naturally–naturally–my connection is going to be at the furthest possible gate at Terminal E (almost the furthest possible terminal).

I call my contact at the State Department and bring her up to speed. If I miss the flight out of Atlanta, then I’m stuck in Atlanta overnight because the next flight to Lima is 24 hours later. She says she’s going to do two things: First, ask Delta (since I’m connecting Delta-to-Delta) if they can hold my connecting flight. And second, she’s going to try and arrange for one of those electric golf carts to speed me along. The cart can’t get me from terminal to terminal–only the damned train can do that–but at least it can get me to the train point faster than on foot.

Some minutes later she calls me back to inform me that Delta refuses to hold the flight, but that they will do their level best to make sure there’s an electric cart waiting for me.

So I board the 2:15. We pull away from the gate.

And we wait. Because of weather somewhere along the route. We don’t take off for half an hour, so that further erodes my connection time.

Once we’re en route, a flight attendant comes over to me. She has a clipboard. “Mr. David?” she says.

I’m in the middle seat being crushed between two people who are both heavier than I am. “Yes.”

She says, “I’m happy to tell you that we can absolutely guarantee you a wheelchair when we arrive.”

“Ah. Okay, well…that’s very kind of you,” I say, “but I don’t need a wheelchair. What I need is an electric cart.”

“Well we can’t promise you a cart, but I can guarantee you a wheelchair.”

OKay, clearly there’s been a misunderstanding. “I don’t need a wheelchair,” I said. “I can walk. What I need, for the purpose of speed, is an electric cart.”

“We don’t know where the carts will be at any given time. But I can definitely arrange for a wheelchair.”

I glance at the guys on either side of me, because I think I’m making myself clear, but obviously I’m not. They shrug. I turn back to her.

“Listen,” I say, “I’m ambulatory. I’m capable of locomotion. I can walk. I can run. What concerns me is that I can’t run fast enough to make my connection. Every minute counts, and if running the length of the terminal takes me fifteen minutes, and riding in the cart takes three, that could be the difference between making my flight or being stuck overnight in Atlanta. I need the cart not for comfort, but for speed. The wheelchair will not only do me no good, but it would actually hamper my ability to make my connection. Is that clear?”

“Yes, absolutely,” she says with a Stepford Wife smile. “The problem is that we can’t guarantee you a cart. However…we definitely CAN make sure you have a wheelchair.”

Okay, NOW she’s just trying to make me lose my mind. “Look,” I said, very patiently, “unless the guy pushing the wheelchair is an Olympic sprinter, and his hobby is wheelchair races, the wheelchair will be worse than useless. I need to make my flight and we’re running half an hour late…”

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” she says confidently. “The Captain will make up some of the time. We’ll land at 4:45 at the latest, so that will make up fifteen minutes.”

“Right, and when we do, they’ll tell us there’s no gate for us, so we’ll wait another fifteen minutes for a gate.”

“I’m sure that won’t happen,” she says with certainty. “And besides, because of the weather, your connecting flight will probably be delayed.”

“No,” I say with a heavy sigh, having been down this road before. “It’ll leave right on time. And it would be really nice if there could be an electric cart waiting for me to help me get to it.”

“Can’t promise it, but,” and she was so CHIPPER, that was the killer, “I’ll make sure there’s a wheelchair waiting for you.”

I stare at her. “That would be great,” I tell her.

She walks away and before I can say anything to my seatmates, they immediately say, “It’s not you. It’s her.”

So we get to the airport. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Although we have landed, they don’t have our gate ready, so it’ll just be a few more minutes…”

Fifteen minutes later I emerge at the far end of Terminal A. Five PM straight up. No cart. There’s a guy about ten years my senior, ninety pounds, waiting with a wheelchair. I run past him. For all I know he’s still there.

I sprint as fast as I can the maximum distance from where I was to the trains. A cart rolls past me shepherding half a dozen laughing teenagers. If they had one neck, I’d hack it through.

It’s ten past five as I get onto the train. It buzzes along and I’m running up the escalator. As I emerge on the top, it’s 5:15 and there is absolutely no way I’m going to be able to get to the departure gate at the other end in time. I glance around. No cart. A random attendant walks past with a wheelchair. Despairing, I glance at the departure screen for my flight. It says, BOARDING. It’s leaving bang on time. Of course. Then I notice it says “GATE CHANGE.” If it tells me it’s leaving from Terminal A I’m going to blow my brains out. I look at the new gate.

E9.

My head whips around. I’m standing in front of E9. God has decided to cut me a break. I’m right there but they’re getting ready to close the door.

“Hold it!” I shout as I sprint toward the desk. “Hold it, I’m right here!” I nearly collapse onto the desk, clutching my ticket. My biggest fear is that they’ve given away my seat.

The woman at the desk looks like a dead ringer for the flight attendant. She cocks her head at me like a poodle and says, “Are you on this flight?”

No, not yet, y’idjit, I’m standing here with you asking me stupid questions while that guy over there is getting ready to button it up. I settle for, “Yes. My connecting flight ran late. I had to run.”

“Oh,” she says. She takes the ticket, does whatever she’s supposed to do, hands it back to me. As I stagger to the door, the last one onto the plane, she calls after me, “If this ever happens again, you should arrange for an electric cart.”

PAD

From the Jokes File

Originally published October 10, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1247

Well, once again I find myself under the deadline gun. I guess the worst thing you can do for a writer is hire him, thus leaving him all sorts of cause for complaint. Which is particularly upsetting because I wanted to talk about the settling of the Planet Comics case. But that’ll have to wait until next week, and I’ll have to push back the brand new relettered Fighting American another week as well. So here, once again, is humor from the computer barrel drawn from the apparently endless gags that folks keep sending me.

From Chris C. comes the tale of:

The New Priest

A new priest at his first mass was so nervous he could hardly speak. After mass he asked the monsignor how he had done. The monsignor replied, “When I am worried about getting nervous on the pulpit, I put a glass of vodka next to the water glass. If I start to get nervous, I take a sip.” So the next Sunday he took the monsignor’s advice. At the beginning of the sermon, he got nervous and took a drink. He proceeded to talk up a storm. Upon return to his office after mass, he found the following note on his door:

1. Sip the Vodka, don’t gulp.

2. There are 10 commandments, not 12.

3. There are 12 disciples, not 10.

4. Jesus was consecrated, not constipated.

5. Jacob wagered his donkey, he did not bet his ass.

6. We do not refer to Jesus Christ as the late J.C.

7. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not referred to as Pop, Junior, and the Spook.

8. David slew Goliath, he did not kick the crap out of him.

9. When David was hit by a rock and knocked off his donkey, don’t say he was stoned off his ass.

10. We do not refer to the cross as the Big T!

11. When Jesus broke the bread at the Last Supper he said, “Take this and eat it, for it is my body”, he did not say, “Eat me.”

12. The Virgin Mary is not referred to as the, “Mary with the Cherry”.

13. The recommended grace before a meal is not: “Rub-A-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, yeah God!”

14. Next Sunday there will be a taffy-pulling contest at St. Peter’s, not a peter-pulling contest at St. Taffy’s.

 

*  *  *

Anna M. speculates:

What if Dr. Seuss did Technical Writing?

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted ’cause the index doesn’t hash, then your situation’s hopeless and your system’s gonna crash

If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but  your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, ’cause as sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk, and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk, then you have to flash your memory and you’ll want to RAM your ROM. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom.

 *  *  *

And finally, for you pet lovers out there, Anna also gives us the following tale (tail?):

A lady awoke one morning and discovered her dog was not moving. She called her vet who asked her to bring the dog in. After a brief examination, the vet pronounced the dog dead.

“Are you sure?” the distraught woman asked. “He was a great family pet. Isn’t there anything else you can do?”

The vet paused for a moment and said, “There is one more thing we can do.” He left the room for a moment and came back carrying a large cage with a cat in it. The vet opened the cage door and the cat walked over to the dog. The cat sniffed the dog from head to toe and walked back to the cage.

“Well, that confirms it.” the vet announced. “Your dog is dead.”

Satisfied that the vet had done everything he possibly could, the woman sighed, “How much do I owe you?”

“That will be $330.” the vet replied.

“I don’t believe it!!!” screamed the woman. “What did you do that cost $330????”

“Well”, the vet replied, “it’s $30 for the office visit and $300 for the cat scan.”

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)