The following story is an outtake from my memoir The Accidental Terrorist. The names of most of the other participants, including relatives, have been changed to offer some small measure of concealment.

When I was eighteen, my father and I drove from northern Utah to Los Angeles for my cousin Delia's wedding. I had recently put in my application to become a Mormon missionary, and I had yet to learn where I'd be spending the next two years of my life. It wasn't for the sake of one last road trip with my father, though, that I agreed to tag along. I was hoping to meet Danny Elfman.

After the wedding—a brief affair in a tiny chapel like a sugar-frosted cake—the entire gathering moved down the road to the Arcadia Women's Club, a large banquet hall for rent, where a shaggy trio played jazz on a spare proscenium. A dozen long tables were set up in ranks across the room, and we enjoyed an abundant feast of cold cuts, casseroles, and cakes as the music played. "Hey," I said to my aunt Deborah, who sat across from my father and me, "I thought Oingo Boingo was supposed to play."

"All Delia and Sammy's friends are musicians," she said, "so lots of different people are playing. I don't think they're on until later."

"Oh, okay." I glanced at my father, deep in conversation with Uncle Carl, and hoped he wouldn't make me leave too early.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, is that my number-one cousin?" said a rasping voice.

I turned to encounter a beaming apparition in a powder-blue leisure suit. (This was 1986, and even then the look was smarmy.) "Markie?"

"That's me," said Markie, arms spread. He might have been taking the stage for a Vegas-style lounge act. "Didn't recognize me with the haircut, did you, Billy?"

The last time I'd seen my cousin Markie, a thicket of curly, light-brown hair had nearly concealed his face. Someone had taken a hacksaw to the tangle in the meantime, chopping it short and (mostly) squaring it off. "It took me a minute," I said. "You look ... great."

"Thanks. Figured my sister's wedding, I should clean up a little."

"Cool."

He grabbed my arm. "Well hey, Billy, come on. I gotta introduce you to the gang."

He dragged me first to a knot of shady characters clustered in a dim corner of the room. They had each made a stab at cleaning up for the wedding, but none had gone quite to Markie's extreme. "Hey, guys," he said, "I want you all to meet my number-one cousin Billy."

His friends transferred their beers to their left hands so we could shake, and I tried not to look too uncomfortable. I liked Markie, but his several arrests for drug-dealing were no secret in the family, and I figured I was rubbing shoulders here with a regular underworld convocation of scofflaws.

I glowed bright pink, ducking my head, as Markie gushed on. "He's the genius in the family. He used to say the alphabet backwards when he was just a little guy, wearing these great big, thick glasses. He plays the piano, and he skipped all these grades, too."

"Just one," I said. "First grade."

"And he's modest, too!" said Markie, slapping me on the back.

We worked our way around the hall, Markie and I, until finally we ended up in the kitchen among the fragments of turkeys and fruit pies, chatting with a huge dark fellow with a thick black beard, a leather vest, and arms sleeved in colorful tattoos. Markie dragooned him into helping us clean up the kitchen.

A half-dozen plastic garbage bags later, Markie's friend had made himself scarce. Markie leaned on his broom, lit a cigarette, and asked, "So what's new in your life, Billy? Girlfriend, anything like that?"

Markie's attention and his willingness to help with the scutwork behind the scenes at the reception had put me at ease. As we cleaned, he had regaled me with stories of close brushes with the law and of his drunken exploits at parties with Quiet Riot, and I laughed until my sides ached. His friends were nice guys, not at all the way I had pictured drug dealers. My horizons were expanding and I was feeling good. "No girlfriend," I said, "at least not at the moment."

"Bummer, man," he said.

"Well, it's no big deal. I'm leaving on my mission soon anyway."

Markie raised his eyebrows, dragging on his cigarette. "Mission? That's like what Uncle Doug's kid did. Lauren, right? Where'd she go?"

"Iowa."

"Yeah, Iowa. Where are you going?"

"I don't know yet."

"Hey, you're smart. They'll send you someplace like, I don't know, China or something. Not Iowa."

A broad open window above the counter in the kitchen looked out at the banquet hall. Markie puffed his cigarette, staring at the crowd. A new band played discordant rock from the stage, almost submerging the murmur of conversation.

"Hey," I said, "is it true that Boingo's supposed to play here?"

He nodded. "Yup."

"When?"

"I don't know," said Markie, distracted. "Party's supposed to go all night. Midnight they're on, I think."

"No way," I said, my heart sinking. It was only two in the afternoon.

Markie stubbed out his cigarette in the sink, still looking out at the crowd. "Hey, Billy, I see my friend Daisy out there." He motioned. "C'mon, you gotta meet her."

He led me through the door back into the banquet hall. "Who's Daisy?" I asked.

With a little backward glance, he headed down the row between two tables. He leaned toward me so he could speak quietly. "She used to be one of my girls back when I was pimping. She quit all that to get married, but I think I could still get her to do my number-one cousin for free."

All the breath left my lungs, like a giant rock had crushed my chest.

And suddenly there was Daisy.

She stood up from the table to greet Markie with a warm hug and a kiss, then sat down again. An empty chair waited to either side of her. Markie took the one closer to the stage. I took the other.

"Daize, this is my number-one cousin Billy," said Markie.

The woman dutifully turned to shake my hand, but without really noticing me. She was thin, around Markie's age, with skin tanned nearly to the texture of leather. Her hair was short and brown, and she wore a sleeveless pink denim dress so brief that it barely covered her crotch. The dress buttoned up the front, but she had it unbuttoned to the middle of her fairly flat chest. She wasn't wearing anything underneath. After her perfunctory greeting, she turned back to Markie, and I was forgotten in the minutiae of their small talk.

After several minutes, I grew uncomfortable and restless enough that I decided it was time to excuse myself. But just as I was making my move, Markie leaned past Daisy and said, in a complete non sequitur, "Hey, Billy—are you still a virgin?"

Swallowing, I settled back into my chair. "Yes," I said, feeling my limbs grow cold.

Daisy's head swiveled around like a radar dish, locking into place as its target was acquired. Her green eyes fastened hungrily on me, sparkling. "Ree-ally," she said.

"Look at that," said Markie. "He's a real Shunn. He can say that without even blushing." He stood up and patted both Daisy and me on the shoulder. "Hey, I've got someone I need to go talk to. I'll catch both of you later."

Then Markie was gone. My lifeboat fled, I bobbed helpless and seasick on an unknown ocean.

Daisy's shoulders shimmied a little. I could see the play of muscles beneath her skin as she squirmed in her chair. She hunched forward like a confessor or a confidant in her flimsy metal folding chair. Her bare knees nearly touched mine.

"So, you're a virgin, Billy," she said.

I did not find her attractive, but still she exuded confidence and sexuality like a musk. I swallowed. Her eyes held me fast.

"That's right," I said.

"So, Goody Two-Shoes, what do you do? Do you mess around a little?" She shifted on her chair, smiling mischievously. "Do you eat pussy?"

My mouth was so dry I nearly choked. The giddy thought went through my brain that if Mormonism were a graduate program, then this was my real oral exam. It took me a moment to find my voice. "Uh, no—no, I don't."

Her brow furrowed in question. Her teeth were small and even. "Well, why not?"

The scents of meat and cigarette smoke seemed to thicken in my throat. "Because of my religion," I said, somewhat stiffly.

Daisy burst out laughing. My cheeks blazed.

"Sorry, sorry," she said, waving her hand as she tried to get herself under control. "Religion, I'm sorry, I can respect that, I can respect it. You must take it very seriously."

I nodded, trying to keep the tremor from my hands. I felt humiliated.

"What religion is it?" she asked.

"Mormon," I said. "I'm going to be missionary pretty soon. I have to ... adhere to standards."

She leaned in close. I could smell the soap she had washed with, and I could see down her dress to her navel. "Look, I didn't mean to laugh. That's a great thing, really." Her voice dropped to a husky, conspiratorial whisper. "But tell me, Billy—have you ever seen the inside of a cathouse?"

"Uh, no."

"Would you like to? I could give you a personal tour."

"Well, I'm not sure I ... I..."

"Here, I'll give you a card." She felt the breast pocket of her dress. "Shit, they're in the truck. And I can't go get one or my husband will see me." She compressed her lips in thought. "Here, do you have a pen?"

I patted my breast pockets. "Sorry, I'm fresh out."

"Damn," she said. "I'd give you my number and you could call, but—" She shrugged. "Well, that's life."

"C'est la vie," I agreed.

She rested her chin in her hand, scrutinizing me through quizzical eyes. "Tell me one thing, Billy. Let's say you wandered into a cathouse somehow, and a woman there tied you up and started to rape you. What would you do?"

I sighed, brows raised. "I don't suppose there'd be much I could do. As long as I was helpless, I guess I'd have to just relax and try to enjoy it."

Daisy smiled. She patted my knee and stood up. "You know something, Billy? You're okay."

She slung her purse over her brown, brown shoulder and strolled away into the crowd: some wicked, postmodern Mary Poppins hunting children more corruptible to nursemaid. Her image in my mind's eye didn't fade so quickly as she did, nor did her touch on my knee.

If only she knew how corruptible I wished I were.

Dazed, I wandered back to where my father was sitting with Aunt Deborah and Uncle Carl. Almost as soon as I sat down, my father wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Well, I think it's time for us to be leaving," he said to the relatives. "We'll see you back at the house."

I looked at my watch. "But ... Boingo..."

"You don't want to be here until midnight," said my father.

And that was that. I never did get to meet Danny Elfman. But years later, that's not the missed opportunity I can't stop thinking about.

Let me tell you about the night I hung out with Mötley Crüe.

Okay, to be honest, it was only half of Mötley Crüe, and it's not like we were out clubbing it up with groupies and blow. But we were at a club. I was reminded of this story the other day when I happened to hear "Shout at the Devil" on the stereo for the first time in quite a while.

This was June 1997. I was working in New York City as technical producer for a website called Rocktropolis.com (sadly now long deceased). Our company, N2K Entertainment, ran a variety of genre-specific music sites, all meant to drive traffic to our online CD store, Music Boulevard. At Rocktropolis we ran rock music news, contests, curated streaming radio, artist chats, and—coolest of all—live concert webcasts.

Some of our live shows were simply streamed versions of special syndicated radio broadcasts, but more and more we began to arrange our own on-location webcasts. We would get a temporary DSL line installed in the venue (if they didn't already have one—and they usually didn't), hump our equipment over there, tap directly into the soundboard, and stream the feed out to users via RealAudio. Believe it or not, this was trailblazing stuff at the time.)

So it was that my friend and colleague Andrew and I lugged our gear uptown to Roseland Ballroom one afternoon to set up for a special Mötley Crüe record release show. This was their big comeback attempt—well, their first one, anyway. Vocalist Vince Neil had just rejoined the band after an angry stint away, and the new album, Generation Swine, featured a touch of oh-so-no-longer-hip industrial flavoring.

For the weeks leading up to the show, we'd been running giveaways on the site and debuting a new track from the album every day. The office favorite—okay, the favorite of me and Michael, tech producer on Classical Insights—was track 12, a re-recording of the Crüe's 1983 hit called, imaginatively enough, "Shout at the Devil '97." Michael and I would arrive at the office early just to blast this tune at full volume in our little wing of the cubicle farm. (I wasn't super-familiar with the original version, having deliberately avoided all things hair-metal in high school, so the faster, harder 1997 version is still the one that sounds "right" to me.)

Anyway, along with our decks for compressing and transmitting digital audio, Andrew and I brought a couple of huge laptops. These were not just for running the webcast but also for the live chat session we were doing before the show with Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee—the so-called "Terror Twins." We set up shop in a balcony overlooking the club floor. At about two hours to showtime, our chatroom was teeming with fans who'd logged in for the unmoderated free-for-all. That's when Nikki and Tommy walked up to the long table where Andrew and I had the laptops set up.

Now, I met some of my favorite musicians while working that job, folks like Curt Smith from Tears for Fears, and John Wesley Harding. Chuck D. was in our office once. I even spent a couple of hours on the phone with Krist Novoselic from Nirvana, moderating a chat session. Hell, my boss was Nick Turner, who'd been the drummer for Lords of the New Church and The Barracudas. But of all those people, Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee were the two who looked more like rock stars than anyone else. Tall, muscular, slim, heavily tattooed, wearing their expensive white T-shirts, black jeans, cowboy hats, and boots with casual ease, oozing charisma. They shook our hands and put us instantly at ease. They came across as the nicest, most charming guys in the world.

We all sat down at the table. I ended up between Nikki and Tommy, with Andrew on Nikki's far side. The two of us had the jobs, for the next 45 minutes or so, of monitoring Nikki's and Tommy's activity in the chatroom, standing by to offer any needed assistance, and being ready to fix any technical issues.

"So, do we just jump in and start?" Nikki asked, watching the chatter scroll by on the laptop in front of him.

"You're both logged in," Andrew said. "Any time you're ready."

Nikki started typing. I was watching Tommy's screen, and I saw Nikki's first comment appear:

Nikki_Sixx> Hey fuckers!

I must have chuckled, because Nikki turned to me and said, with a grin but in all earnestness, "Insults and profanity are the entire basis of our relationship with our fans. Which is mostly thirteen-year-old boys."

I thought this was a remarkably cogent analysis of market expectations from someone I hadn't expected to be quite so self-aware. I was thinking about this when Tommy, who had been pecking two-fingered at his keyboard, leaned past me.

"Hey, Nikki!" he said, sounding as proud and excited as a three-year-old. "I just typed 'Fuck'!"

I have to say, hanging out with them during the chat was a lot of fun, even if it was a little surreal to have someone who'd been clinically dead for two minutes after a heroin overdose sitting to my right, and the star of the most infamous celebrity sex tape to date sitting to my left, and who between them had been married to three Playboy Playmates. (Of course, we were seeing only their most charming selves. I'm not sure I would have wanted to meet them under other circumstances.)

After about 45 minutes, Nikki logged out. "Time to get in wardrobe," he said, standing up. "Come on, Tommy."

"I'll be there in a few minutes," Tommy said. He was having a hell of a good time chatting.

Maybe fifteen minutes after Nikki's exit, Tommy turned to me in consternation. A troll in the chatroom had been saying for some time that Tommy and Nikki were not who they claimed to be, and now he was urging everyone else to stop chatting with Tommy.

"What am I supposed to do?" Tommy asked me. "This guy's telling everyone I'm not Tommy Lee. How do I prove I'm Tommy Lee?"

"Um," I said, racking my brain, "I don't know. I guess all you can do is say something only Tommy Lee would say."

Tommy frowned, then bent back to the keyboard and typed:

Tommy_Lee> fuck you i am tommy lee!!!

Eventually someone from the band's management came upstairs to the balcony and insisted that Tommy get down to his dressing room. He hugged us both and went on his merry way. I'm a little bummed that I didn't carry a cellphone at the time. A picture of us all would have been cool.

I worked other live location webcasts, including a Halloween show with The Cure at Irving Plaza, and two nights with the Allman Brothers Band at the Beacon Theatre, but our Mötley Crüe night was by far the most memorable. Now I feel like shouting at the devil, '97-style:

I read the following essay, which appears in somewhat different form in the epilogue to The Accidental Terrorist, in the Essay Fiesta series at The Book Cellar in Chicago, on December 21, 2009.

There is no worse feeling than, five minutes after some unpleasant confrontation has left you tongue-tied, humiliated and confused, smacking yourself on the forehead and exclaiming, "Oh, my God! That's what I should have said!"

This is not that kind of a story. This is the story of how I once delivered the perfect rejoinder, in the moment, when it counted. I tell it not to demonstrate how smart, suave, or clever I am, but because it so rarely happens that way with me. In fact, this may be the only story of its kind I have.

This happened in December 2003, at a Christmas party my wife Laura and I threw at our apartment in Queens, New York. Our parties, if I do say so, were legendary, always with an interesting mix of people, and always with good booze, and plenty of it.

Among the many invitees were my old, old friend Katrina and her new husband Bernard. Katrina and I had gone to high school together in Utah, dated seriously for a while afterward, and stayed in touch over the intervening years. Bernard was Dutch, and nine years her junior. They met in graduate school at the University of Fairbanks, where Katrina finished a master's degree in microbiology. They had just moved to Connecticut and taken jobs with a big pharmaceutical company. Our Christmas party was my first time meeting Bernard. He struck me as a nice enough fellow when I took his coat and hat at the door, if a little reticent. I put it down to the nerves you get at a party where you don't know anyone.

But an hour of sampling our beverage offerings loosened Bernard's tongue considerably. Did I say "sampling" our offerings? A better word might have been "plundering."

I was talking with a small group of friends in a corner of the kitchen when the young Dutchman—a newly minted doctor of chemical engineering—came sauntering over and inserted himself in the conversation. In a slurred accent, he said, "You know what I just found out that I did not know before? I found out in the car on the way down here. This guy here"—he indicated me with the wineglass in his hand—"he used to be engaged to my wife."

I looked around the small group I'd been chatting with. It included my long-time friend Bob, and also my friend Elizabeth, who is blind.

"Well, this is awkward," I said.

"Yeah," Bernard went on, "he like got engaged to her at some airport."

This was true. It was the Salt Lake International Airport, seventeen years earlier. I was about to get on a plane and leave for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons. Katrina and I had only been dating for a few weeks at the time, but we had fallen desperately in love—as people often do when an attraction manifests and the time to act on it is short. I wanted her to wait for me while I was away saving souls in the wilds of . . . Canada, and she had been dropping big hints that a certain question might serve to seal that deal.

I didn't like the intent look on Bernard's face, nor his belligerent tone. I hadn't been in a fight since junior high (Jason Peterson), but I really didn't want Elizabeth caught in the middle if things were about to turn violent. I tried to play it casual.

"That was a really long time ago," I said. "We were kids. I was nineteen."

"Yeah," said Bernard, "and my wife was twenty."

"Time to change the subject, Bill," said Bob, who among other jobs had worked as a merchant seaman. "You're only digging a deeper hole."

"Can you believe this?" Bernard said to the group at large, spreading his arms and sloshing some of his wine on the floor. "I only just found out. That's a pretty big thing."

I suffer, I'm afraid, from the delusion that reason and calm words can actually make a difference in the world. "Not really, it's not," I said in an offhand tone. "It didn't mean anything. To Mormons, getting engaged is like a pastime. It's a sport, it's just what you do. It's not the same as for other people."

This, also, was true. Mormons so heavily stress finding a mate and getting married that women are considered old maids at 21. But by the same token, engagements made under that intense pressure can also be rather fragile. I myself was engaged no less than five more times before it finally took, which didn't even match my father's record of seven engagements, one marriage.

Of course, by the time I did get married, I had long abandoned the LDS faith, as you might have deduced from the copious alcohol at our Christmas party. Which had somehow gotten me into this tense and uncomfortable conversation.

Bernard was undaunted by my footnotes to his pronouncements. Unfazed, he addressed the group at large, unsteady on his feet. "You know what else I found out? There was something about a ring, this ring—made out of wrapping paper?"

I looked around the group again. "Foil," I said. "It was the foil wrapper from a stick of chewing gum."

I was nineteen, had never lived away from home, and was about to embark on a two-year experiment in poverty. No way I could afford a real ring. So when I got down on one knee in front of Katrina in that airport departure lounge, I pulled out a foil gum wrapper folded twice lengthwise, wrapped it around her ring finger to size it, tore off the excess length, and fastened the ends together with a piece of Scotch tape I had stuck to the ATM card in my wallet. Voila! Instant engagement ring.

Of course, it was worth about as much as I'd paid for the gum. I came home two years later only to have Katrina tell me that she'd met someone else while I was away. (That ended up being her first husband, whom I'll call . . . Jerkface.)

"Yeah, yeah, that was it," said Bernard, wagging a finger at me. "A gum wrapper. And you know what else?" He leaned in close enough for me to gag on his breath, but without lowering his voice any. "She still has it. She still has that ring."

I was stunned, completely stunned, but I tried not to let it show as I delivered my verbal judo flip, my coup de grâce.

"That's nothing, Bernard," I said, patting him on the shoulder. "I still have the gum."

For a second there, Bernard looked like he believed me. Then everyone laughed good-naturedly, and he did too. The situation was defused. Bernard wandered peacefully away in search of other entertainment.

"You really dodged a bullet there, pal," Bob told me.

As I watched poor Bernard drift around the party showing people his stomach tattoo, I realized that I probably had. Back in 1988, that is, when Katrina broke up with me.

The wonderful video below reminds me of a good story about a microwave oven. Two microwave ovens, actually. But watch the video first, before I tell it. Don't worry, I'll wait.

Wasn't that awesome? Especially the metal stuff. I used to have a girlfriend who would put metal in the microwave all the time. Spoons, aluminum foil, whatever—she wouldn't bother to remove any of it before nuking her food. I'd tell her that was a bad idea, a dangerous idea, but we had the kind of relationship where anything I said was considered silly and untrue just by virtue of my having said it, no matter that it was easily verifiable by checking with any other human being on the planet.

This was 1998. We lived together, and eventually the very bad breakup that had been coming for a very long time was upon us. Our microwave over was very old and very primitive, and my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend had at last saved enough money to buy the kind of very advanced, fancy new microwave she'd been dreaming of for a very long time. She didn't even take it out of the box when she bought it. It was going to be a housewarming gift to herself in her new apartment in her new city, and she was graciously leaving the old crappy microwave behind for me.

One evening shortly before her moving date, I arrived home from work to find the apartment filled with the unmistakable acrid smell of an electrical fire. I hurried into the kitchen. The inside of the crappy old microwave was blistered brown. Stalactites of melted plastic hung from the ceiling of the oven chamber.

She didn't want to tell me what had happened, but it came out soon enough. She had put a container of leftover Chinese takeout in the microwave to warm it up, but hadn't removed the wire handle from the carton. Before long the electricity arcing from the wire had started a fire.

No one was hurt, and nothing was damaged besides the carton, the Chinese food, and the oven itself. And that is how I got in the last word on the subject of putting metal in the microwave.

Oh, and it's also how I got the fancy new microwave as a parting gift. It's nice to be taken seriously.

21

I'm still not sure quite how I managed it,
but I somehow talked my parents into giving me
the family van for two weeks that spring,
two long weeks that stretched into three.

It was my best friend Tim and me--
we'd been missionaries together in Idaho--
returning to the scene of the crime
visiting all the families we used to know.

No doubt I got the van because of that girl,
Miss Bonners Ferry, the lumberjack
who played classical piano, was a lifeguard too
and the whole reason I wanted to go back.

A nice girl for a change, good wife material,
instead of the tramps I usually chased.
Tim had his eye on her younger sister,
but those were long odds we faced.

A thousand miles I rebuffed his offers
to help drive. Insurance reasons, I'd say,
but really I didn't trust him at the wheel.
My father had treated me the same way.

Things were good in Bonners Ferry. We hiked,
climbed rocks. The girl let me hold her hand
one night, and we played duets at the piano.
Tim and I stayed longer than we'd planned.

Then one day he left his journal sitting out,
open to a page about what a jerk I was being,
always making him look bad. I asked the girl,
but she couldn't guess what he was seeing.

A thousand miles home is a long, long way
to drive when you don't know what to say.


28

I-80
Wyoming
night time
snowstorm
eastern slope
Continental Divide
15-foot U-Haul truck
  50 to 60 miles per hour
      girlfriend white-knuckled
           behind the big wheel
                swerving skidding
              on the downhill ice
           all our possessions
        rocking in back
      not quite
   overbalanced

I pump my
passenger brake
of course to no effect
snowflakes like hyperspatial
streaks in the headlight beams
    I gently suggest slowing down
            or even pulling over to let
                          me drive instead
                              but not gently
                                      enough

                              I'm an excellent
                            driver she insists
                      you should have seen
               that time I spun out in Texas
    and I didn't even run off the road

  but I grew up driving in snow
I tell her and you didn't
you have to slow
down

  it's the wrong thing
            to say and we
                            fishtail
                                            again

                                                                  one
                                            moment
                          of terror in the
          long, slow slide from
west coast to east coast

one harrowing strobe-lit frame
   from the superslow-motion
           accident that is

                    us


24

Wait, that's the one where
I lost my virginity.
Sorry, not this time.


23

Immediately after the tiny little Salt Lake City wedding,
I jumped in the Nova with Tim and his blushing bride—
not the sister. We raced straight to Evanston, Wyoming,
taking adjacent motel rooms. All night I had to imagine
what might be going on next door—which turned out
the next morning to have been nothing much. (We had
size issues, Tim whispered.) Their friend, a guy named
Bart or some stupid shit like that, met us in the parking
lot, having driven from who knows where for who knew
how long. I rode shotgun across Wyoming and sunny
Nebraska in Bart's Japanese pickup truck, all day long,
all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where we staged a
second ceremony for the benefit of the bride's family.
Before the sun was up again, Bart had lit out west with
me groggy in the passenger seat, on our way back to
Utah. I could barely keep my eyes open, but late that
morning when I caught him nodding off, the adrenaline
jolted me like paddles to the chest. I begged him to let
me spell him behind the wheel. He denied having fallen
asleep, and when argument failed I resorted to Plan B.
I talked my way through that day like I've never talked
since, and never before—babbling, burbling, blabbering,
spinning stories like Scheherazade staving off death.
I even sang my heart out, and every time I saw those
eyes drift closed I cranked the volume. It occurred to
me, thinking of Tim and his impenetrable bride still in
Iowa, that this longest day of my life was my payback.
It's just a good thing that road was so damn straight.

Clearing out my inbox (a task that requires a pitchfork, a shovel, and high-volume hose), I ran across an email from a old, old family friend who had known my father since they were young together in Los Angeles, and whom my siblings and I have always known as Uncle Lee. Laura and I dropped in on him last February, and while we shared a meal of takeout sushi he regaled us with stories from Dad's younger and wilder days.

In the followup email, Uncle Lee had one more memory to share:

I think I forgot to tell you that your dad could dance and memorize at the same time. If he liked his dance partner he would ask her for her telephone number which he would memorize immediately so he could call her and thank her the next day.

I am not sure how many telephone numbers he could memorize in one evening.

It was a simple drive twelve miles north this morning to get to Skokie for Algis Budrys's memorial service. Laura was unable to join me so I went alone, and I found when I arrived at the funeral home that there was no one there I knew. Actually, I did meet Ajay's dear wife Edna back in 1985, but I wouldn't have expected her to remember that brief occasion all these years later.

I don't do very well in crowds where I don't know anyone—heck, I can get intimidated in crowds where I do know people—so I sort of slinked around at the back of the room, feeling somewhat like an intruder. Two display tables helped me occupy myself. One was covered with an arrangement of various editions of Ajay's books. The other displayed a selection of interviews with and articles about him, both from print sources and online. On a widescreen television ran a slideshow of photos of Ajay and his family.

The service began not long after I arrived, and I found a seat toward the back. There were fifty or sixty people in attendance, I would estimate, and the number of chairs for everyone was almost exactly right. A pastor spoke for a few minutes about Ajay's greatness as a husband and a father and a writer, and offered a prayer. Then she turned the time over to Ajay's sons.

Jeff shared remembrances and appreciations of Ajay he had gathered from people online over the preceding few days. Among the poignant, funny, and just simply factual snippets he read, I was startled to hear a line I had written in a brief post on Monday. Tim expressed his good fortune at being able to spend many of his adult summers with his parents' house as a home base, and shared an observation an associate at a Renaissance fair had made—that no wonder he seemed so even-keeled, with parents who had always stayed together. Dave recounted the last years and final days of Ajay's life, when despite setback after setback, Ajay had remained cheerful and become even more of a sweet man. All three sons credited their parents with giving them the space to do their own thing—as long as they did something. There was also much talk of Ajay's prowess as a bicycle builder and mechanic—the boys grew up having by far the best bikes around, at a time when 10-speeds were still exotic—and stories like the time he singed his eyebrows off cleaning bike parts with gasoline.

After the boys spoke, Edna offered a few words in tribute to Ajay's humor and wit. She also recounted how, when they were young and living in New Jersey and playing a regular penny-ante poker game with Fred Pohl and others, they would all pay their poker debts to one another first anytime a check for a story arrived in the mail.

Next the pastor opened the service to remembrances from anyone who cared to share them. We heard moving and amusing stories both, from people like the massage therapist who worked with him the last three years of his life, the neighbor who eventually went into politics with Ajay as a close supporter and publicist, the young man to whom Ajay was a surrogate father figure, the director of the Writers of the Future contest who had worked with him for 24 years, the friend who first met Ajay in the '50s in the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the younger cousin whose family were fellow immigrants, and more.

Finally, after some internal wrestling, I stood up. You might not know it if you've heard me speak, but it terrifies me to talk in front of a group unprepared, especially a group of strangers. But none of Ajay's students had spoken up yet, and I thought at least one should. What I said, more or less, was that despite only really knowing Ajay for a few weeks during the summer of 1985, he'd had a profound influence on my early development as a writer, as he no doubt had on thousands of others. I said that what I carried with me was not just the serious lessons about writing that he imparted, but also the demented childlike glee in him that would manifest at the oddest times.

I recalled the epic water fights of our Clarion workshop, and Ajay squaring off against Damon Knight with water guns at our final barbecue. What dangerous opponents they were to any who crossed them! And I recounted a scene that is seared into my brain, how when Ajay spied a blue stuffed rabbit that seemed to show up as a Clarion mascot year after year, he got a demonic look in his eye, hissed, "I ... hate ... that ... rabbit!", and proceeded to bite, kick, and bludgeon it into oblivion. "If you knew Ajay at all," I said, "you can imagine what a startling sight it was to see him jumping up and down on that stuffed bunny."

What I learned from this, I said, was to try to remember to keep a spirit of fun about me, even when engaged in work what I consider to be serious work. I managed to get through my two minutes without resorting to a tissue, though it was a close thing.

After a couple of more remembrances, the mourners filed past the open casket one last time—Ajay looked about as good as anyone I've seen in that situation, with a very short, neatly trimmed white beard—before retiring to the parking lot. Edna thanked me for what I had said, which put me at something of a loss for words.

I had to be back home, so I didn't join the procession to the cemetery for the interment, but I trust it was as lovely and bittersweet a ceremony as the service at the funeral home. I will leave it to others to remark on Ajay's importance to the field of science fiction, but I can only remark right now on his importance to my science fiction. I'll never forget him because he was the first person to, with authority, give me serious reason to think I might really be capable of becoming a professional writer. In his curmudgeonly way, he told me I wasn't close to there yet, and he certainly let me know it was going to be a difficult process, with only a small likelihood of flashy rewards, but he let me know I had the potential.

One last thing I will never forget is how, on the last day of Clarion, Ajay brought to me a copy of the souvenir book we students had made with a selection of our stories, and almost shyly asked if I would sign it. Of course, all of us were signing one another's copies, like yearbooks, but there was just something in Ajay's approach to asking that made me feel like a king. I was seventeen, and he was a Golden Age giant, but he made it seem like those designations didn't matter. And they didn't.

A meme via curmudgeon:

The Rule is that you take the best picture you like from the first page of Google Images results.

1. The city and state of the town you grew up, no quotation marks.
http://home.comcast.net/~utahauras/trevorspider1a.jpg

2. The town where you currently reside. [Sorry, had to pick two, tempted by three!]
http://www.ohfs.org/images/PictureGallery/2004/2004NewYork7.jpg
http://www.wirednewyork.com/parks/astoria_park/astoria_park_pool.jpg

3. Your name, first and last, but again, no quotes.
http://www.dogberry.net/dhsx/reunions/dhs84/20_Year/images/28.jpg

4. Your grandmother's name.
http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2004/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/03/04/forgotten.photographs.ap/vert.partridge.ap.jpg

5. Your favorite food. [Close second and mouth-watering third.]
http://www.xperiment.se/bilder/gyro.jpg

6. Your favorite drink.
http://www.flubu.com/comics/Bizarro-scotch.gif

7. Your favorite smell. [Mmm, the second-place smell, the third-place coquettishness.]
http://www.ibiblio.org/dykki/pics/coffee.gif