Sometimes I think I’ve lived too long. The memories, I mean, damn. When you’re old, there’s so much that comes back to you at the strangest times. Once hit by a random memory, I forget what the hell triggered it. These aren’t bad memories; they’re weird, a bit sick, and downright hilarious as a rule.
In fifth grade at Bodkin Elementary School, I was a fuck-up. I goofed off and drew pictures and did a lot of dissociative thinking. Teachers called it “daydreaming”. That ain’t what it was but who knew back then what else to call it?
I forget who taught what. Mr. Guzzo was my homeroom teacher. The rest I can’t remember, but one, either English or Science, she was nice. It took a lot for her to get riled. Can’t even remember her face. But there was this kid, he sat at the same table as I did.
We had tables with Formica glued on and plastic pastel chairs in green, orange, blue and yellow. Weird place.
And of course you’d never have seen that shit anywhere but the fucking 70s. Pastel colors, hard plastic, with aluminium legs. On carpet, no less, so every time you walked up to one, especially in winter, you’d reach out and get a nice static shock, and everyone wore long hair, and I swear, it was like they’d just rubbed inflated balloons all over their heads. Something like having to sit in a class full of Pennywise clones.
This one kid, what folks would later call a “nerd” of the scary kind, he had this bottle. Tall thing, amber glass, for liquor, probably some kind of cognac as it had a long thin neck and fancy barrel. I didn’t realize at first that I was about to see the process of something creepy and funny and nuts being created.
Yes. The title gave it away: he was obsessed with “I Dream of Jeannie”, a really awful sitcom which had been cancelled a year earlier.
Yes, I truly loathed that show. I loathed everyone in it and wished Dr. Bellows would institutionalize Major Nelson, the Blue Djinn would gut Jeannie in a live episode and that Roger Healy would shoot himself.
Wait, you think I’m dark?
Shit. After the first two seasons I’d get nauseous hearing the theme song. God what an awful show. I don’t blame it on the witless Sidney Sheldon; Screen Gems put out some real vomit back then. Sheldon just wanted to make money, and was it his fault people buy garbage? No. You ever seen the inside of a thrift store? Or smelled one? And the cash registers are always full. Now I could see maybe finding a Dickens leather cover and paying 5 bucks for it. Helluva deal. But someone’s old sweatpants? I mean, really?
After the American public had had enough of Jeannie, and before I even noticed the show was gone, right in front of me was this kid who would probably a let her go.
I’ll admit it. I did some weird shit when I was a kid. That’s all too true. But this was bizarre even to me.
It was over that winter that the bottle changed gradually with paint into Jeannie’s bottle. By the time it was finished, he had even put wadded fabric inside for her bed. And a paper cutout of a crayoned Barbara Eden. And, every day, carried it to school.
He talked like she was real. No, I’m not kidding, he would talk to her. During class. He’d close one eye and look down the neck of the bottle and talk to a piece of paper!
And the bottle was ridiculously hand painted with plastic jewels glued to it. And it definitely did not look like this:
But one day the teacher seemed to get suddenly freaked out by it all. She was fed up and she broke. She yelled at him to pay attention, and she walked to the back of the classroom and took it from him. He tried to order her to give it back, but that was the wrong move. Incensed, the teacher threw it away. He cried like a baby in the grip of colic, and he never saw the paper Jeannie again. I remember little of what she screamed at him, except that it was “creepy, the paper inside was not alive”, and she would be contacting his parents.
I laughed all the way through that shit. Laughed at his distress, anxiety and crying, at the embarrassment of being yelled at almost hysterically, laughed because the teacher was freaked out, the other students laughing, all of it.
It wasn’t really for me to think one way or another, since we were kids, and I was so fucked up myself, but I did get the feeling that winter that the whole thing was sick.
Obsession isn’t funny though. It’s scary, and I believe when it’s aimed at a real person, it can get fucking dangerous. The woman who stalked David Letterman was eventually going to get violent. She finally got locked up but there was an incredible length of time when she was free and even broke into his house. Celebrity? Why would anyone want that? Stalkers obsessed with you to the point you fear for your life? Is anything worth that?
I know the paparazzi give stars a bad enough time. Sometimes even that shit gets violent. It’s fucked up. No one should have to live like that. No one.
I’m not sitting here worrying about it, but I know it’s a thing. That’s sad.
Still, the kid with the bottle broke me up.
And later on, I saw something even more creepy.
I knew a guy in the Army who had a glossy 8×10 black and white portrait of Judy Garland on the inside of his locker door. Now that was creepy as hell. Mainly because Judy Garland died in 1969.
I don’t know why the sarge ever overlooked or chose to ignore it for so long, but the private turned into a shitbird on an inspection and the sarge threw everything out of his locker. He turned around before walking away and said, “And what the fuck is Judy Garland doing up there? She’s dead! Get that creepy shit down right fuckin now, goddamnit!”
But I can’t forget that once, I knew a kid who was sick. Who talked to some paper and Crayola at the bottom of a crudely painted booze bottle and did not dream of Jeannie, but thought she was real.
And his captive little friend.
I hope “Major Nelson” grew up to get help and live a prosperous and good life.
But I rather doubt it. And I still can’t even look at a picture of Barbara Eden. I tried once.
No good.
Memoirs of an American Asshole 