A Rain of Frogs ~ I
get fired and meet a bear
by Rob Hunter
—Scrotum, a character in The Sod's Opera, a work apocryphally credited to Gilbert and Sullivan.
For
the past 2 years the signals had been familiar—the evasion of eye-to-eye contact,
diversion of regular assignments, and a hearty, bluff Rotarian mask covering all
unavoidable interactions. My bosses were under pressure from new competitors and
were planning to automate. I had been waiting for the fall of the axe since the
piecemeal arrival of computer gear began.
For a laugh I once brought home a promotional pencil from the radio station. Deejay Name Here was stamped on it. The letters were gold. A sixties style tie-dye pattern made the pencil look like it had been rolled in bubble gum. This was years ago in Massachusetts and the station manager had a box of five hundred. The manager used the pencils to demonstrate the transitoriness of human aspiration in general and the life expectancy of Top-40 disc jockeys in particular. That was then—in the 60s; as I was by now in my own 60s, my longevity was often in question. As well as my relevance to a teen demographic.
It was the usual workday. I arrived at the radio station, plumped the book bag with my lunch, Maalox and humorous magazines on the control room table next to the Associated Press computer station, and headed to the coffee service. My name is Robert Hunter, professionally Rob Hunter, except for a year in the late 1960’s when I was Tom Mitchell, a house name. WSAR in Fall River, Massachusetts had bought a jingle package and, before it arrived, Tom departed. I became Tom.
Jingles were expensive while disc jockeys abound. WQDY in Calais, Maine was my 17th deejay job, so the commonplaces of personnel—departures and arrivals—in corporate America were familiar.
“Could you come into the office?” There was a hand at my elbow. This was it.
Drunk or sober, over a 43-year career I had had much practice for this moment. The worst part was the waiting. Did I mention the Maalox? In spite of the agitation and the flush spreading up my neck, I was cool as a kumquat. There was one vagrant thought: What are these yoyos doing blowing away a world-class talent who has been working here for the last twelve years while they watched the business trickle through their fingers?
The unworthy thought passed, the flush retreated and the office door snicked shut.
“No one hates this as much as we do.” The partners were standing close, hovering over the desk. Their body language said they would be even closer if they could stand the sight of one another; it was bad partnership that had begun well.
The unemploymentification had begun, and my palms were dry.
Blossom and the Bear
So I was fired. I called my wife to announce the termination and we planned a picnic to celebrate. Bonnie and I had only the week before debated whether to drop collision coverage; the combined odometer readings of our two old cars might have taken us to the moon. What the hell, we had the money that week, and the insurance check slipped silently into the mail.
Blossom #1—a Volkswagen bug of many colors and a shaky lineage, decked out with harlequin fenders from as many junkyards—gave up the ghost driving the periphery of our 3.8 Maine acres to get up a charge on the battery. After 40 years of shade tree mechanics and third hand parts, I was the last straw; it caught fire and burned with a bright blue flame.
Blossom #2, a Geo Metro, was likewise named after the same cabaret singer, Blossom Dearie.
Years ago, at ServiSound, Inc. in New York, I had asked the dispatcher at Coleman Younger Motorcycle Messenger Service what car she would recommend to run cheap and sturdy in combat conditions. “Geo Metro,” said Georgia, “We run them two years midtown and Queens, then send them to the bailer.” Sound advice, and, 136,000 miles and two collisions later, the three little cylinders were still pumping away. The first pileup was a flipover on black ice, the second, well… My wife’s late father, Jerry Brown, had a theory that emergency brakes should not be used except in an emergency. Emergencies are, by definition, unforseen, thus making the emergency brake moot.
As the insurance check meandered through the perplexities of the Federal mail a fortune cookie fell at my feet. I was preoccupied with my new found freedom and failed to notice. “Today a romance of death and destiny will play itself out. You get to watch,” said the fortune cookie.
The bear was black, the car green...
Their collision course defined an uncertain future for both.
The next day, at Digdeguash Bridge, Bethel, New Brunswick, a two hundred pound black bear charged out of the woods and onto the Number One Highway. Bonnie and I were headed to a picnic; the bear was getting away from insects in the coastal marshes. At impact, the bear became a confused, writhing woods spirit, twisting back upon himself, searching out a reason for his pain. Blossom, the Geo Metro, would be ultimately repaired with junkyard transplants, just like Blossom #1. The wonderful, majestic bear would be hunted down, damaged and angry. The New Brunswick highway statutes blamed the bear, but he could not know that.
Blossom, the car, had been named for Blossom Dearie, a cabaret singer. Blossom’s
color, Tahitian Green, was what had been available on the lot at the time. This
is humility. Choosing and ordering a special color scheme for a simple transportation
device, no matter how well loved, is a level of self-involvement to which I would
not aspire. The color choice and the nicknaming of a three-cylinder automobile signify
an anthropomorphism that Bonnie calls Guy Magic, akin to the point of sale decision-making
process: gimme one a them.
At the collision the bear roared in bewilderment. Blossom and the bear slid together
at a neat 45-degree angle—a smooth billiards hit, no reverse English—each deflected
by half the angle of their tangential kinetics. They absorbed each other’s onrush
and slid together an additional twenty feet onto the shoulder. The bear turned backwards,
protecting its flank, seeking an attacker other than, more fierce than, the little
green cube-on-wheels, not much bigger than itself.
Ooh. This is going to be just like on TV. Nature, the bleary wallpaper of suburban suppertimes: “...and now the lion, hungry for dinner, stalks the unwary gazelle at this upland waterhole. His family will eat well and sleep this night.” Slaves of retinal retention, Bonnie and I were two startled passengers in a little green car, who had seen too much wildlife television with its saccharine narrators. We had never seen a collision between two baby rhinos who charge out of the savannah, bump and fall over.
The wounded bear retreated into a roadside copse of furze and tamarack.
The constable, large and polite, radiated self-assurance. He could handle any situation from murder to a kitten up a tree. We and our bear fell somewhere near the equator on his event horizon. His sergeant pulled in behind our parked parade. He sized up the damage and, after a call on his cell phone, reported that the forest rangers were busy with a moose collision. The Mounties would have to hunt down the bear.
The Mounties checked us out. Were we all right? We were; their focus was now on the bear. Their job description demanded a concern for the public safety, but the bear was to be regretted, the death of an innocent. The four of us mourned together. The constable and his sergeant opened the trunks of their cars and unlatched shotguns.
The car still ran, albeit noisily. The constable produced a jackknife with a blade the size of a chef’s roast slicer and offered to cut away the mudguards from inside the front wheel wells. OK? Yes. He cut away. Blossom passed the Mounties’ rough-and-ready safety inspection at the side of the road. “If the town police stop you in St. Stephen, don’t use our names, but you’re safe to go by Provincial standards.” We were dismissed. They set out into the woods with their weapons at port arms.
They would pursue the bear with shotguns and automatic pistols.
According to legend, Gilbert and Sullivan wrote an obscene work under the name The Sod's Opera, with characters including Count Tostoff (a ruined Pole), the Brothers Bollox (a pair of hangers-on), and Scrotum (a wrinkled old retainer)—and, by way of corroborative detail, it is said that, for many years, a copy was kept in the guardroom at St James's Palace—but there is no authoritative record of this remarkable creation.
—The Perils of Litigating a Defamation by Anthony J. H. Morris
The illustration, “Biting Pear of Salamanca” by Urusla Vernon, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Resources:
MP3 audio, the surviving episode of Fred Splendid,
Boy Announcer
The United States Postal Service:
www.usps.com/judicial