Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Missouri and now live (very, very) close to Atlanta. With the exception of college, I have spent my entire life in the South.
raconter des salades
I’ve been told no one believes me. No one believes anything I have to say.
They won’t tell me to my face. They just roll their eyes and walk away.
Oddly as this sounds, what if the throngs of people I encounter are indeed correct? What if I have yet to tell a story without a glaring lie? Perhaps this is possible. Perhaps there is a reason.
If I spoke of the reason, if I made the corrections, would you believe me?
You don’t have to.
You are under no obligation.
But, what if you did?
File all of this under the “Spinning Yarns that are so Lyrical” (thank you Rod Stewart) and the intersection of “Plausible, maybe even Possible”.
Here goes.
I graduated high school, but did not participate in any social events (no prom, no dances, no parties, no graduation ceremonies). I did not have a girlfriend. I did not own a car. I tried a few sports with a minimum of success proportional to my minimum of enthusiasm. My grades made me top 10%, but not top 10.
So what did I do?
I went to work.
I mowed lawns. I painted houses. I was the ice cream man. I worked at a few factories. I rode horses. I even went so far as to be discovered, out of state, holding down a position while on “vacation”.
So bland an existence. Such a pedestrian life. Who would pay any attention? Who would care where I was or what I was doing?
I did and that’s all that counts.
What if one of those factory positions included a stay manufacturing chemicals ostensibly for lawn care or pest removal applications? What if I really was working on similarly formulated feedstocks for chemical weapons? For an overseas war? Between two belligerent governments, hostile to the US, but more hostile to each other? What if my employment was the perfect cover for such activities? Even if you discovered this, would you care? Do the ends justify the means? Would anyone belittle a teenager trying to make more than minimum wage while facing an impending college tuition bill? I could claim plausible deniability if discovered. I was underage at the time, but fully adult in both size and temperament. The end result of my actions would be the deaths of tens of thousands, possibly more and all I had to do was my job. Think about a serial killer living in close proximity to you. As long as he did what he does elsewhere, affecting others and not you, will you delve deeper into his life? Or would you pass off the meager evidence as nothing more than meager? Nothing more than a story?
When I attended college, my outwardly existence became even less noticeable. I moved among the beautiful people sans a spoken word or proof of an intersection. I kept to my studies, soon moved into my own apartment, had a small circle of friends, and led an existence not worth the inventory.
My major was engineering physics and my minor, Russian studies. During the 80’s, this combination was not as unusual as it might appear today. The Cold War raged, but was soon to end because of the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union. So where does a budding physicist with little outward expectation of success find a home?
What if it was with the Star Wars program? What if some government agency needed an engineer of some sort that could build a laser, a big laser, to fry the electronics of a passing satellite, compromising a communications link? If accomplished, who would know? In space, there are no witnesses? On the ground, troops would not receive their instructions and would resort to standard operating procedure instead. Glitches happen would be the excuse for a lost window of coordinated opportunity. I would never be told of any such event. These decisions always occur by people with higher pay grades than mine. All I would be certain of was a meager paycheck from a “Carolina Telephone and Telegraph” front that would disappear and become untraceable.
Next came my stint as a municipal firefighter.
A what?
Yes, I was a municipal firefighter for a number of years. I lived within a 30 second walk to the firehouse and was seen by many, many people in various emergency and non-emergency activities in the 80” and 90’s. I did not have the passion for the position. I was not the best at what I did. All that remember my employment would not have to testify under oath to this. On a scale of 1 to 10, I resided at a 5.
But I was there. I did go to fires, car crashes, rescues, chemical spills, and conferences. I attended graduate school (chemistry) at the same time, opening more doorways. I had all of the time in the world and little to account for my actions.
Don’t ask what I did. Think about what I could have done.
Who better to be in the right place, at the right time, than an invisible man? Fully trained, I would know what to do. Having the firefighter schedule I did (2×9 hour days, 2×15 hour nights, 4 days off), did I have the ability to respond? Would anyone have cared? I always kept a series of part time positions to augment my income. What would be one more? The bank tellers would not notice? Neither would my small group of friends. If I let something slip, some pertinent piece of information, who is to say that an episode of “Jeopardy” or a rare volume of obscure Russian engineering drawings are not to blame. Has anyone ever read Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October? Did anyone ever read about the propulsion system or just the fact the cook was the agent of Soviet Influence?
It is always the cook. Spoiler alert! It has been 35 years, you should know this by now.
A man of my pedigree, not observable from any distance makes for the equivalent of a cook.
Is it now a story, or simply a yarn with a few omissions to protect the innocent?
I now take to writing.
Here, I am neither exposed to the dangers of the plot nor the uncertainties. I can outline the chapters, storyboard each character, and create the world in which they live. To this end, I have been successful in excess of 200 times.
But, to those with the pertinacity to scrutinize details both present and omitted, how much effort did it take for me to reach this result? Can I write about a murder if I never witnessed one? How does an inferno progress through a structure? Will a fire sound differently from the inside of a house as opposed to the outside of the same house? At what temperature does a person combust? At the autopsy, how will the coroner know if the bullet was a 180 grain 45 acp bullet or a 230 grain 45 acp bullet without weighing the fragments? Why does law enforcement scan a house from two perpendicularly directions in infrared prior to serving a warrant? Just because the smoke is purple, is the oxidizer potassium permanganate? Could it be any other chemical? How does anyone know this information?
Perhaps decades of research. Perhaps an equal amount of time in a pay grade. Perhaps a combination of both. Interviews are the best time to ask, but no magician reveals the details of the magic for free. Writers are of the same ilk.
The man who sits silently, next door, never bothering anyone, may be of that grouping. His tales may be facetiously (a great word with five vowels + a y in order) told as campfire accounts or revealed as parables to rival Aesop’s.
Tu ne sauras peut-être jamais.
