Excerpt from

Following one particular day of after-school effrontery, my father found me in my room huddled under a blanket, where I felt momentarily secure that my adversaries would not be looking for me. Dad sat on the edge of the bed, addressing a bell-shaped lump underneath the bedspread, and delivered a character-building lecture about confidence and courage, hoping to mold me, his eldest son, into a citizen who would not be such an embarrassment to him. Bullies, he promised, such as those I feared at school, picked on us only because we empowered them to do so. They bothered only those who they were certain would crumble in the face of their bluster. They sought out the fearful, the insecure, the beleaguered, those they felt would willingly submit, in short, a sure thing, which I appeared to be, evidenced by my frequent outbreaks of trembling in the corner of the schoolyard.

Bullies, he continued, were generally cowards themselves and the surest way to get a bully to stop was to stand up to him or, in the case of bulky Lucy Doherty, to her.

“If you bravely hold you ground ” my dad assured me, “a bully will always back down.” …

…The day after my dad’s lecture, I decided to confront the miserable bully whose secret life as a pathetic wimp himself would finally be revealed. Ronny outsized me in every dimension--- taller, more muscular and heavier by a good 20 pounds. The logic of me calling his bluff was not easy to understand. Still, I knew my father would not purposely expose me to harm.

I spotted McKasson standing aloneacross the playground, and in order to throw him off guard, I proactively approached, briskly walking toward him, my eyes narrow and locked on his, treading forward as erectly as my 50” frame would permit. I was pumped up hormonally, my heart beating quickly. I felt both a little scared and exhilarated, prepared to face down the spineless bastard, strike him definitively, and watch him whimper off defeated and humiliated. I was eager to see his expression turn flush and fearful.

“My dad says you are a big coward,” I blurted, stopping a bold 6 inches away from him, though unable to get the phrase out entirely before Ronny lifted his arm casually and slammed his oversized fist downward into my face. All he apparently heard was “My dad says you are a big cow….,” which I believe only made him madder.

The lesson excluded from my father’s sermon was that sometimes a bully is not a coward at all, and such was the case for Ronny McKasson, who as it turned out enjoyed beating up others and actually was quite good at it. If you think you will take a terrible thrashing from a guy who is calm and happy when he is hitting you, you will be astonished to learn that it is far worse when you piss him off.

In retrospect, I would like to amend my father’s wisdom to include the following disclaimer: Even if a bully is easily frightened, it does not necessarily mean of you.

I finally saw Ronny McKasson, now going by Ronald, at a high school reunion many years later, and as I predicted, he had aged more quickly than the rest of us. He blimped up morbidly and was now a pitiable character who had apparently peaked physically at age 12 and was now barely contained in an abused, failing body that gave no clue that it once housed a tyrant. He sat friendless at a table with his comparably overweight wife, his face bloated from medications, feebly holding on to an asthma inhaler he brought to his face to periodically jumpstart his wheezing lung. Likely, we thought, the guy would not make it to middle age, and it would not surprise any of us if he didn’t make it to the end of dessert.

He was unable to wear a tie, his shirt opened wide at the collar to accommodate a neck that had continued to grow unabated since elementary school and was now either the same size or slightly more circumferential than his head. Seated, an obese half-done of lower abdomen draped out toward his knees like a gelatinous lava flow, pushing downward and wedging his legs out at a 45 degree angle, hanging where a traditional lap on the rest of us would be expected. Bending forward, he was barely able to reach around himself for a goblet of water and had to reposition himself on his chair frequently to prevent pressure sores. He battled strenuously to move even a little, like a turtle on its back trying to right itself. I watched him struggle and pant pathetically, thinking this might be the perfect occasion after so many years for Howie and me to beat the crap out of him in the parking garage.

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Most of Bwana Al’s movies were Tarzan adventures. The most famous of all Tarzans was Johnny Weissmuller, an ex-Olympic swimmer who secured a career in Hollywood in 1932 after apparently finding no steady work as a “professional swimmer.” Tarzan, as author Edgar Rice Burroughs describes in his series of books about the ape-man, was the only child of a British nobleman named Lord Greystoke and his wife, the fetching Mrs. Greystoke. The couple were passengers on a steamer but were abandoned on the African coast by a mutineering crew who found it difficult to run a successful mutiny and provide decent service to passengers at the same time. Dumped on shore and forced to live in a handmade hut, the Greystokes survived by their wits, foraging through the jungle for food and taking on chores that they previously relied on butlers and nannies to perform. The couple conceived a son, who would not be born to the life of privilege as would have been his destiny, but instead to \this primitive and hostile world. Shortly thereafter, the Greystoke parents were killed at the hands of a moody she-ape. The abandoned baby boy named Tarzan was adopted by some of the local animals, who chose to raise him and show him the ways of the jungle rather than eat him outright.

Tarzan’s strength and courage reflected the patient training of his ape stepparents. But Tarzan would bring to the jungle the unprecedented gift of human intelligence, which would separate him from the rest of his simian pals. Harnessing his brain and jungle savvy he learned on-site, he was eventually able to rise above the rest of the animals, getting himself elected Lord of the Jungle, using his advanced human intellect to convince the other animals vote for him and not for his opponent, the ocelot.

Tarzan learned to speak a form of “broken English” surprisingly well for a child tutored exclusively by gibbons, and even with his halting command of the language, he was still able to make himself understood. However, having no human role models, Tarzan was unable to effectively master grammar and the proper use of pronouns, always referring to himself by his first name.

“Me Tarzan,” he would say, continually forgetting that “me” is used exclusively as a direct or indirect object. Confident in his knowledge of the jungle and his animal-like prowess, he was gracious in accepting his grammatical shortcomings.

“Tarzan regret not good with syntax,” he would say self-effacingly, admitting to both animals and people of his ongoing struggle with English structure.

Each week, Tarzan would prevent jungle evil through his direct intervention or, when necessary, in league with his ferocious animal friends, summoning them with shrill jungle calls and somewhat embarrassing animal impersonations. In response, a herd or two would reluctantly come over to see what Tarzan wanted, and as favor to him, would end up pouncing on people who had pissed Tarzan off. To function in this primitive environment, Tarzan learned to communicate with wild creatures, speaking the primordial language of the jungle. Not being his native language, he never learned to speak jungle talk fluently, though he did speak “broken animal” well enough to be understood.

To give the movies more human appeal, and to assure viewers that Tarzan was not having sex with animals, the films introduced a love interest, Jane, a woman attracted to his jungle passion and willing to give up a life of privilege to live atop trees. Tarzan and Jane stayed together for many years until the Ape Man got a little restless and broke off the relationship, one day saying, “Tarzan need space. Think good idea to see other people.”

Some years later, our local television station responded to complaints that Tarzan jungle movies unfairly portrayed all indigenous African people as cannibals, savage and barbaric primitives. Not to be accused of insensitivity and racial stereotyping, the station eventually took Bwana Al’s Tarzan Adventure off the air and replaced it with Charlie Chan Theater.

© Copyright 2004. Chuck Goldstone. All Rights Reserved

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Excerpt from

Booting up my own Flight Simulator, I pretend I am a swarthy pilot, flying an Airbus 340, which I have configured for international travel with 3 classes of service. I believe I look particularly dashing in a pilot’s cap.

Today I decide to fly from Paris to my old home town of Pittsburgh , eager to show the French where I grew up.

“There,” I would get to say to my passenger as I fly over the downtown area, “that’s the Monongahela River . When the steel mills were operating full tilt, the river was an opaque umber. As you can see, after years of environmental stewardship, the water is now just a little beige. Out of the left windows you can see the stadium where the Pirates play.”

I would then repeat as much of my speech as I could in my limited French, just to impress my judgmental Parisian passengers, “Voici la Rive de Monongahela. Il est beige. Ah, la place ou des Pirates joue, bon frapper du baseball, n’est-ce pas?

I am on a roll, so I continue my pilot banter using the only other French phrases I remember from my college Introductory French class.

“Jean et Marie vont a la bibliotheque,” I ramble on proudly. “Je demande une crème brulee, maintenant. Ou est mon pantalon? Mon Dieu, Edith Piaf est morte!”

I browse the controls across the bottom of my screen. I am amazed at the number of digital displays: engine RPM, oil pressure, navigational coordinates, an artificial horizon if I somehow question the existence of the real horizon, cabin oxygen levels, and warning lights to let me know if my landing gear or brakes are not functioning, which can only cause despair once I am off the ground. I will ignore those readouts which I do not understand.

Charles de Gaulle Airport wraps around me in 3D. In the real world I would have a copilot, but in the simulator world, I can handle the 7 hour Trans-Atlantic flight myself. My pretend airline has graciously passed the savings onto my passengers in cheaper tickets and better quality headsets.

I taxi to the end of the runway and stop. My plane’s undercarriage bellies over the thick lines painted on the far end. With the 340’s brakes locked, I rev the engines, which begin to store up energy like a taut rubber band. Flanking me on both sides are runway lights. I could instantly make it night by toggling something on my keyboard, but I don’t want to confuse my passengers, or make them believe we have been sitting on the tarmac for more than 12 hours. Two miles of pavement is all that separate me from the sky.

I release the brake and gently advance the throttle. I begin to roll, gaining speed faster than anything I have ever driven. Over 300 tons of airplane accelerates as the pitch of the revving jets increases and the thud of the tires passing over the seams on the concrete comes more and more quickly. The painted middle line is slurped under the plane like strands of spaghetti. The ground speed indicator displays 160 knots and I am committed to flight: my speed is sufficient for lift but I no longer have enough runway left to stop. So I pull the yoke toward my chest, rotating the nose upward. The horizon suddenly drops out of the bottom of my windshield and the sky opens. The thumping of the tires instantly quiets and is replaced by the whirring sound of gear curling up into the plane’s abdomen. A wedge of air now separates me from the airport. Following noise abatement rules, I cut back a little on the throttle so I do not piss off the Parisians living underneath me.

The checklist makes take off sound easy, but it is tricky to get a big plane off the ground and keep it from stalling at 1200 feet. It took me more than a dozen attempts before I was finally able to leave earth non-fatally, avoiding the kind of aircraft-ground incursion posthumously known as “pilot error,” some resulting from me folding up the landing gear before the plane left the runway, others from my inability to judge where the runway would be ending, a few based on my unfamiliarity with cockpit controls, and one when I got a phone call in the middle of my rollout, and not wanting to miss it, chose to sacrifice my passengers instead.

© Copyright 2004. Chuck Goldstone. All Rights Reserved

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Excerpt from

Should you unexpectedly tumble from the saddle of a dirt bike, you will likely continue on your own down the sharp boulder-littered pass, following the route intended for your two-wheeler, where you will bounce uncontrollably, alternating between contusions and lacerations, careening off outcroppings of rock, through thorn-vested vegetation, rasped against the abrasive grit of the trail, until you roll to a complete stop in some briars below. This is the kind of injury where gravity and clumsiness propel you down a mountain’s cheeks just as fast as the dirt bike ever could. Incidentally, as you are somersaulting a foot or so ahead of your heavily outfitted mountain bike, which is even heavier because it is equipped with specialized shock absorbers intended to keep you from falling in the first place, you will soon learn that the cartwheeling bike is probably following the same trajectory that you are and will eventually and inescapability catch up, just a moment after you abruptly thud to a stop. Sadly the bike will not land in some unoccupied plot within the vast expanse of nature at the bottom of the slope, but because both you and the bike were aimed in the same direction before your fall, will instead chose to land precisely on the tiny spot where you now lay buckled and bleeding, adding just one more wound to the collection of accumulating injuries that you amassed on the way down. You will be pleased to learn that your bike will probably sustain no irreparable damage, since you will have broken its fall when your soft body absorbed the majority of the impact.

© Copyright 2004. Chuck Goldstone. All Rights Reserved

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A Selection of Opening Paragraphs

Flights of Fancy

Mammals our size are not aerodynamic by nature. Drop us from any height and we will plunge straight downward. Flap all we want and we remain steadfastly earthbound. Fling us high in an skyward arc and we will follow a predictable trajectory and remain airborne for only a short time before we fall to earth gracelessly, no matter has desperately and spasmodically we flail. Still, all but the delusional among us who believe they already can fly, wish we could.

My Mother's Warning

My mother taught me to be cautious from the moment I could understand flashing lights.

“Be careful,” she would say, wagging her index finger, the Official Finger of Warning, whenever my brother and I left the safety of our home for any one of the infinite number of dangerous loci outside her immediate field of vision.

I believe my mother was like so many others, oozing with the innate maternal instinct to protect her prized offspring from all peril, spirited by a million-year-old tradition she shared with her hominid predecessors and animal counterparts. Inextricably rooted within her loving viscera was the drive to keep her babies insulated from harm and to teach them to stay clear of all that could be physically hurtful. She would pass on to my brother and me a legacy of common sense, vigilance, and shamelessly selfish survival, just as her mother had conferred onto her.

The Home Depot Chain Saw Massacre

I drove to the Home Depot to buy a no-kill trap to rid my house of a squirrel that had holed up in my pantry, though in my heart I really wanted to kill the filthy rodent outright, and believe me, I would have if I could have stomached the gory aftermath produced by smacking it with an omelet pan.

As my orange-apronned Lawn and Garden salesman was climbing the shelving to fetch me a humane snare, which incidentally costs eight times more than a straightforward trap that works by merely murdering the worthless animal, I noticed another associate talking with a customer who in some strange way reminded me of me. My fellow home owner stood similarly bent and humbled in the presence of so much domestic technology. He wanted desperately to look and act just like any other competent homeowner, but his eyes, like mine, could not conceal truth to the contrary.

Bully for Fear

If you had to point to the single characteristic most responsible for survival of life on this planet, you would be wrong to assume the development of mighty defensive paws, a ferocious threatening roar, serrated razor-sharp teeth, or venom sacs spilling over with paralyzing sputum. It would not be speed, agility, or unfaltering bravery. Nor would it be courage. Likewise, cross off keen senses, insight, compassion, and spirituality.

Communing With Exotic Pets

Personally, I do not understand the appeal of an animal that is not furry, cuddly, or capable of performing applause-provoking tricks. Given all available pets, I am surprised to find a number of people who opt for any kind of snake, poisonous or not, not because “all the other animals were sold out,” but do so willingly, even after conducting an exhaustive feature-by-feature comparison with gerbils, orange tabbies, and ferrets. These owners of nontraditional pets view slithering reptiles no differently than they would cats, gerbils, or ferrets. “We just see snakes,” committed serpent owners might say, “as slender, legless dogs.”

Not an Animal Family

My brother and I were sheltered from animals. We did not buy produce from farm stands, because of their proximity to the outdoors. We visited Lion Country Safari only once where, if I remember correctly, the rangers asked my family to leave after my father, attempting to retreat from some grazing gazelles, backed over an animal that we later learned (from the invoice) was an ostrich. On subsequent vacations, my dad would check the tourist books to see if an area had a less ominous drive-through animal park, always hoping to find something akin to a Barnyard Country Safari, where we could watch ducks and chickens, safely behind our rolled-up car windows.

The Revenge of Mountains

Some risky activities pit us as humans against the obstacles that nature itself heaves before us, a pretty unfair match since nature has had at least a thirteen-billion-year running start.

Our mountains are Earth’s most grandiose monuments, solidly planted and immovable. Embedded like molars deep into the Earth’s gums, they tower above continents and rise up from the floor of oceans. Imposing free-form sculptures, rippling outcroppings of rock that have erupted from the core of our planet, they intimidate all those in their shadows. Patient and unflappable, they flinch at nothing short of powerful explosives.

Your House Is Out To Get You

If someone asked you where you think you would be most likely to get killed, like most other people, you would probably guess incorrectly.

Topping the list of most popular death venues would not be under the wheels of a tractor trailer piloted by a drowsy long-distance trucker, not in a plane crash, not in a drought-stricken African savannah where underfed carnivores eye you from the brush, not in a foundry where hot smelted substances drip from weighty overhead cauldrons, not inside some crime-cultivating Pakistani brothel, or behind the steel containment doors of a Level 4 Infectious Disease laboratory where virulent Marburg virus sits out in open petri dishes.

The site of the most debilitating or fatal accidents is in the home, the cozy sampler-on-the-wall shelter where you go when you want to pretend to feel safe, the place where you huddle with your family to stay warm, the very enclosure where you walk confidently with bare feet over thick pile carpeting, and yes, ironically, the place you run to when you mistakenly think you are in greater danger somewhere else. It is here, under your own roof, that you are most likely to meet face-to-face with disfigurement or dismemberment. You are many times safer working in a meatpacking plant than you are standing on your patio.

Instruments of Our Personal Destruction

Since the time of Darwin, we have known that Homo sapiens ascended from the same bloodlines as monkeys and apes. Try as you might to distance yourself from lower primates, which zoologists rightly claim are downright stupid compared with the majority of us, you are probably aware that 98 % of your human DNA, the genetic blueprint that accounts for everything you are, is identical to that of primitive simians and that it is only by a mere 2 % fluke that you were not born a gibbon.

© Copyright 2004. Chuck Goldstone. All Rights Reserved

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