Simple as Pie

Suzanne Birrell (I called her "Sudsy Barrel) lived six blocks away on Haskell Avenue. Our mothers took turns driving us everywhere--to school, to junior high band practice, to friends' homes--so often that we were considered siblings. We had the absurdly easy friendship common among young musicians who belonged to our tribe of gifted kids with delight and runaway dreams.

My best pal Matt and I would orchestrate shenanigans that took Suzanne and Maryanne Hoobs by storm: we kidnapped them in their pajamas before dawn and spirited them to breakfast at the pancake house. We flocked the trees and eaves of their homes with rolls of toilet paper.

Matt and I gleaned most of our ideas from Mack Sennett comedies. Our favorite character actor, James Finlayson, appeared in more than 200 films--including the Laurel and Hardy features--as the master of the double-take and glare. He'd wink and yell "Doh", an expression later stolen for Homer in the cartoon series The Simpsons.

Matt and I would catch each others eye across the band room and shout "Doh", grimacing as if we'd been smacked with a plank. And we'd lug paper plates and shaving cream in a grocery bag when driving around to our friends' homes, ringing the front doorbell and slapping a pie into Suzanne's face or Russ' jolly mug, and then make a run for the safety of the road. By the time we were in high school, Matt owned a Falcon wagon, our corporate office for mischief, and we drove around the San Fernando Valley, slapping pies on people.

Wednesday was cruise night on Van Nuys Boulevard and we'd drive from Victory all the way to Ventura Boulevard, hang a u-turn in the Lucky Market parking lot, and head north again among the spiffy jacked-up Fords and Chevys, watching girls as they strolled the sidewalks in their headbands, vinyl boots, and miniskirts, leaning on the horn and speeding between the red lights. If we had more than three of us, we'd screech to a stop at the light and conduct what we called a "Chinese Fire Drill". The idea was to exit from the closest door, run around the car like madmen until the light turned green, then race back into the car and lurch off for the next street along the way, Jim Morrison's voice belting out "People are strange...", or the stereo booming out the Vanilla Fudge version of "Ticket to Ride"... or Jagger's "Ruby Tuesday".

One time Matt, hobbled by a broken leg, lumbered around the Falcon with his leg in a cast, the cops just behind us on Reseda Boulevard. Good old Matt. He had a spare steering wheel, which he held up as he screamed hysterically from the driver's seat while one of us wrangled the car surreptitiously.

When we tired of the slapstick, we sat in Bob's Big Boy, spooning down thick chocolate milkshakes, or we took a carload of chums over to Farrell's Ice Cream on Reseda where the waiters threw your own gluttony parade with horns and bass drum if you powered down a two-person serving of sundae, appropriately known as "The Trough".

In 1969, we graduated high school and went into the diaspora of pie-tossing expats. Today, Matt works among the musical elite in the San Diego symphony scene and Suzanne still makes music, playing bass guitar professionally. I sit looking out at the pond, down into the San Joaquin Valley where the Sutter Buttes rise into the smokey air, and cannot find the thread inside that leads to the unbridled glee of those days. Have I failed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs? I am recovered from hopelessness and I'm reasonably happy. But what I'd give for a belly laugh so fierce I'd have to struggle to hold consciousness, bursting into a million motes of delight--like the spray from an Independence Day sparkler--fizzing, jangling down to the marrow at the idiocy, blind, brutal idiocy of taking myself so damn seriously.

Flying Blind

Whenever I board an airliner through the jetway, I practice a well-grooved ritual that I believe keeps the plane in the air. I won't spell it all out for fear of compromising its spiritual integrity, suffice to say it involves touching the airliner with my hand, looking at the runway, talking to God, and stepping into the aircraft with faithful choreography.

My first flight in an airliner came in 1959 during our familiar transmigration of body and soul from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. We flew out of LaGuardia on a three-tailed, glamorous Lockheed Constellation, lit up by spotlights on the damp runway with its bright red "TWA" insignia behind a veil of showers. In those days, you had your own compartment and the stewardess handed you a blanket, pillow, and comfortable slippers.

You could see the fiery exhaust streaming from behind the propellers in the dark gloom and tendrils of lightning burst from the pillars of black clouds. I thought the engines had caught fire, and I slept fitfully. In the morning, the painted desert stretched out below in pink and amber light. Over Las Vegas they served eggs and bacon and toast, and after the Constellation dropped hundreds of feet in a sudden air pocket, I threw it all up in the tray.

The details may be apocryphal, but I haven't been comfortable in an airline since. Those falling oxygen masks during my flight to Athens were doozies.

Leaping Off
In an attempt to cure my fear of falling, crashing, & dying, I signed up for a full course of hang-gliding lessons in the 1970s. We drove out to Sand City near Monterey before sunrise and met on the tall dunes in the face of an offshore breeze. These were first-generation Regallo kites with delta shapes, heavy, ungainly, hard to steer, and we strapped ourselves into them, ran headlong down the dune, then lifted the leading edge into the breeze and were swept into the air. It felt as if a powerful hawk had seized your spine and dragged you into the sky. After flying forty or fifty yards, you lowered the edge and crashed into the sand.

I stayed with it much longer than I had intended, although I never gained the expertise or willingness to leap off of a cliff. And when my instructor failed to tie himself into the harness one day and fell a thousand feet from the kite during a steep dive off of the Santa Cruz mountains, I canceled the balance of my lessons.

Acting the Imbecile
In my senior year of college, The Boys took flying lessons. Dennis, Russ and Kevin signed up together. The year before they had all gotten motorcycles. I would visit them on my trips to Los Angeles from northern California during semester breaks to view the toy de jour. I was as excited about going up in a small airplane with them as one might yearn to be covered with hot tar. I hated small planes. They bounced around in the clutches of the wind. They had fixed windows that made the cramped quarters even more catastrophic when airborne. And they fell out of the sky all the time.

But fearing judgment, I crawled into the rear seat of a low-wing Grumman Tiger and Russ powered the plane down the runway as fast as the little propeller could spin. Just beyond the control tower, I expected the nose to rise gently, for Russ to throttle back and climb. Instead, he raced headlong toward the end of the tarmac where I could see the ratty weeds poking up as they grew near. At the last minute, Russ yanked back the yoke, dropped the flaps, and the plane lurched into the air with a wrenching g-force that felt like a fat man jumping on your heart.

Ten minutes later, over the Tehachapi Mountain Range, The Boys broke out the funny cigarettes, filling the cabin with smoke. I could protest, I suppose, but at that moment it felt necessary to join them.

Homeward bound, moments after Russ turned base to land the Tiger, he nearly crept up the tail of a twin-engined plane in the pattern ahead of us. "He's in the wrong place," Russ said as we shouted. I told The Boys my flying days were over, but sadly, I went again and again because I liked the pot. I was still terrified every take-off and landing, and Russ' barrel rolls, hammerheads, and other aerobatics did little to change things. My persistence in this case does not reflect upon me kindly.

New Equipment
Coming in from a delightful trip to the Yucatan, I found myself seated by my customary right-front window when the Mexicana Airlines 727 jerked up in a labored climb moments after it had descended to the runway at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Out the window as we rose, you could see the planes crowding the runway where we had meant to land.

Terrifying. But that experience pales next to the Milan-bound charter I boarded in Toronto in 1985. Shortly after takeoff, the jet slid into a steep turn, dropped into the clouds below, and made an emergency landing. We learned after we had bussed to the relative safely of the terminal that a window had blown out in the cockpit and charts were flying around the cabin.

Hours later we boarded--unknowingly--the same aircraft, which made our landing across the ocean at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport far more exhilarating than the champagne they poured so freely to placate us. The brakes had burned up earlier on landing in Toronto. After it screeched to a stop, we left the plane and waited a few hours for, as the airlines love to say, new equipment.

Turn Left at the Dog Star

"Is there anybody alive out there?" -- Bruce Springsteen

The Mercury-Atlas spacecraft carrying Alan Sheppard set sail on February 10, 1962. It was a sub-orbital venture that carried Sheppard 116 statute miles skyward and ended almost as abruptly as it began. I woke at 5 am to watch the launch on our flickering black and white television. By then I was 10 years old and had already traveled much further into space than Sheppard.

My first favorite novels were written by science fiction masters, and they cultivated in me a hunger to travel across the starry heavens to encounter, one hoped, a friendly face, an outstretched hand, people who knew how to live in this mixed-up mess of exploding personalities and uncomfortable atmospheres.

Ever since, I've searched in the star-ship of Florence's mighty Duomo, amidst the marbled forest of pillars in Notre Dame, in the glittering candles and gold elephants of Ganesh in Buddhist monasteries, among the weeping, gnashing throngs of davening Jews in synagogues, in the stoic faces inside the al-Aqsa mosque, and amidst the whirling dervishes who surf the cosmos without leaving the room. Trapped in my ever-decaying body, bound on a planet ruled by the least-qualified humans to hold the job, I sought escape to the heavens where I would find beings of my own higher nature.

In my youth, I gobbled up the first novels of early Heinlein where, in Red Planet, Jim befriends the young Martian boy Willis. After Jim rebels against the uber-authoritarian humans at his boarding school, Willis entreats his elders to let Jim live among the Martians. A friend in an unfriendly cosmos is a friend indeed. Later, I drank deep of Ray Bradbury and kept his signed copy of Golden Apples of the Sun ("How do you like these apples?" he wrote to me) until I saw him as an adult manning a booth promoting nuclear power.

And I rose the morning of each Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch, turning off the sound so as not to wake my parents, delighting in the raw chutzpah of men who strapped themselves into hardware that frequently blew into billions of pieces in a fireball of inept human engineering. I marveled in Ed White's first walk into space, wondering what he truly saw through his silvery visor, if the stars fanned out in vertiginous depths without atmospheric twinkle or--as I later learned--spherical aberrations of the lens. I wept when White perished in the January 27, 1967 flash fire of an oxygen-rich Apollo spacecraft, the result the alchemy of human pride and blunder.

In high school I wrote a script for Star Trek, visiting Desilu Studios for personal copy of the show's bible, a booklet that talked about the power of warp drive, the concept of transporting, and the nature of Spock's Vulcan ears. The literary agent to whom my father sent my completed script actually delivered it to Desilu and later wrote back to my dad, "The script is just too similar to recent episodes they have bought, but as a writer, your son definitely has it." Grist for a life of letters and starry explorations.

My friends, too, remained loyal to the fantasy that we'd outlive human ignorance and someday fly to the heavens. Dennis, Russ, and I packed food, sleeping bags, and wild brownies into the trunk of a blue Chevy Malibu and drove 9 hours through the night to Oregon's Columbia River Gorge in February of 1979 to see a total solar eclipse. Once you've seen one, you'll understand why people save their hard-earned money for years to fly around the world to see another. The sun rose over the sparkling river, then the birds were silent, and a shadow moved across the rolling hills of the Dalles, a black terminator rolling steadily, ominously over trees and farms until it swept directly overhead and plunged us into darkness. The stars flooded out and then the black, obverse sun gleamed like a onyx, endless eye with a flaming corona overhead. Just as the chill of night seeped down, the sun coursed effortlessly through the sudden dark and flared bright and warm overhead and the starlings burst from the trees and down the canyon in broadening circles.

We piled into the Malibu again, the three wanderers, out to the Dryden Research Center in the morning chill of April 14, 1981 to watch as the first space shuttle Columbia left its cradle atop a 747 airliner and sailed gracefully through the bright morning sky to a safe landing in the California desert. Surely, there was room for us aboard.

In college I volunteered at the NASA Ames facility for sleep experiments to explore the effects of long-term space flight. I enrolled in astronomy 101, joining other seekers on dark mountaintops for unobstructed views of heavenly bodies. Once you knew where to look, you could spot the moons of Jupiter, pinpricks of hopeful light arranged in their ecliptic plane across the bright, huge mother world --spot them with simple binoculars. And aided by telescope, you could see the azure dust of the great nebula Messier 42, just there, in the middle of the jewels of Orion's belt. The science was baffling to a lad who never passed a math class the first time. But I took a second course in planetary astronomy, continuing until the physics overwhelmed me. Dropping out, I decided that I'd rather be an innocent bystander than a scholarly inquisitor.

In the 1990s, I visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the control center for all manned space flights. The gigantic Apollo booster rocket lay on its side, a discarded cocoon from which spring the dreams and conquest of the lunar surface. Sometimes, I turn on the NASA channel just to watch space travelers perform their silent terpsichore over the whirling blue heavens below, the heavens that separate them from where I whirl at a thousand miles per hour on this precious living rock that bridges this world and the next one. I marvel at the black and white science films of my childhood where scientists once predicted that we would orbit satellites that forecast weather and aided communications and how, today, I watch the NASA channel via one of those artifices, that the brave new world of my childhood is the same one that I take for granted today, the same one that threatens our existence as going human concerns by our thirst for material mastery at the expense of our most-precious resource of wonder, generosity, and kindness.

In the 1960s, we embarked on what we called the Space Race. It was a race for military supremacy of the heavens. Today, the Russians we hoped to beat now share bunks with us in an orbital station we've assembled like some ticker toy of disparate parts. Over the decades I've rather thought that the race was for survival itself in the face of our own stupidity. I hoped we'd get off this diseased rock and find a new home among the wandering worlds unblemished by human stain before we exterminated ourselves on this one. We seem to be losing that race.

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?" Rilke wrote. "Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not home in our interpreted world."

If you can, pull away from the hypnotic eye of the television some night and drive out beyond the bubble of city lights to where the Milky Way spreads its lace across the heavens. Don't you ever wonder, "Who made all of this?" Those billions of burning stars--some newly birthed, some dying, some long gone into dust--are members of our extended family. Onward against the current of our own egos we search the cosmos for the God inside of us, the universal soul that inhabits every living being residing in strange or forgotten worlds. Encountering them for the first time as we extend ourselves, they reach out to welcome us home.