The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me. Section Three.

 

I managed to escape my captors in a hot air balloon over the Jamoke Mountains.

"Tork! What a team we were!"

Steve Smith, former Dean of

Ringling Clown College

and gag man for Chuck Jones.

Radio meant something when I was a kid.

It had gravitas and credibility.

I remember this advertising slogan:

"We are closed on Sunday."

"We prefer to see you in church."

There were two popcorn balls on WCCO,

Boone and Erickson,

who laughed at their own jokes.

They were like crazy uncles

in the morning while I ate

my cereal.

I worked with them on their show

in 1973 while doing advance work

for Ringling with my partner

Steve Smith. 

They showed me a parody of a

Time Magazine cover with Governor

Wendell Anderson --

instead of holding up a walleye

he was holding up a Playboy 

centerfold.

Huh. Back then

people thought clowns were

dirty-minded and drunk.

Too bad most of them were.

I am often called "the salt of the earth."

If my work, my autobiography,

my meanderous prose,

is a smell to you

instead of an aroma,

all I can say is:

Enjoy the ride or get off.

The rotary phone hung on 

the kitchen wall.

It was yellow.

Our phone number was

612-331-7441.

Long distance calls

were so expensive

said my mother

that I never made one

until I left home to

join the circus.

No one rang you before

9 a.m.

or after 8 p.m.

Unless a family member 

had died in a zeppelin explosion.

There was no such thing

as telemarketing.

A stranger on the other end

meant nothing but trouble.

To emphasize this distrust

of strangers

we watched a TV episode

at grade school that featured

a hand puppet chanting in

a high shrieky voice:

"Danger! Stranger!"

The telephone cord

was so curly

that Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis

made sight gags out of

getting tangled up in them.

I took a rotary phone apart

when I was six

with a screwdriver

and a pair of pliers.

I found it in a trash can

in our clinker paved alley.

I wanted the bell

which I kept in a green

cardboard box along with

the bellows from a cuckoo clock

a rabbit's foot dyed purple

a stainless steel ball bearing I winkled

out of a can of spray paint

steel pennies from World War Two

that I swiped from my brother Billy

an empty bottle of Sloan's Liniment

an empty snow globe

(I believed the water inside of a snow globe

had some kind of magical power to grant

wishes if it were drunk. It didn't.)

a set of keys, origin and purpose unknown,

and a plastic siren whistle from a box

of Cracker Jacks.

The telephone bell had a sharp enough rim

that I cut myself on it.

So Ma Bell got her revenge on me

for vivisecting one of her children.

As a young man I partnered with Igor Sikorsky to market

the first gyrocopter, but it never got off the ground.