When James Earl Ray escaped from prison, I was sent to cover the story.  There were a few dozen of us from all over the world.  It was a crowded mass of reporters and photographers laden with film cameras, tape recorders and harsh camera lights.  Nothing like the hundreds who would cover the event in modern times.  By that standard it was a small group of locals and a few national people.  I was struck by the nonchalance of all the crews.  I was not used to being around such a big story but soon I learned to dial back the sense of urgency and go with the flow. 

Every one was chasing rumors, often created by the journalists about how he escaped and where he was headed.  Every now and then a prison spokesman would walk to the makeshift podium and fill us in on the latest.  There just wasn't much news.  So as the afternoon sweltered into the night, we all found a way to get comfortable.  It was a nervous wait.  I kept my camera next to my leg and my battery pack in stand by.  As the night wore on, it began to rain.  And that was exactly what the trackers were waiting for.  Now the dogs could go to work.  We heard them wail as they ran down the road away from us.  Some tried to follow but the police were quick to halt them and we were resigned to the fact that we were not going to be allowed on the hunt. 

I sat down next to a journalist from somewhere north of New York and we started to talk.  I soon learned that she was a very bright girl who was looking to get laid.  So I shared my room number with her knowing that I would be relieved in a few hours.  My attention shifted from covering the story to watching the clock, waiting idly for my relief. 

In a few hours, we gathered again and the warden gave us encouraging news.  The rain had made it possible to pick up a strong trail and the dogs were making great progress.  It was believed that they would find Ray within the hour and it would all be over soon.   I peered over at my pretty young reporter and smiled.  She looked away, feigning indifference, as if she was too wrapped up in covering the news conference to notice me.  I took the rebuff in stride and turned my attention back to the presser.  After a few minutes, they finished and we quickly dispersed, settling back into the waiting routine. 

Chapter 18: TAKING A SHIT IN JAPAN

I have told this story a few times in mixed company. It is absolutely one hundred percent true. Not a single word is embellished. Most of the stuff I am writing here is riddled with bullshit. But this story is the God's honest truth.

I went to Japan as a documentary photographer for Channel 5 back in 1980. We were supposed to visit the Nissan plant and sample Japanese culture and bring back video of the trip. It was a plumb assignment with a reporter who was a great writer and a close friend. Greg and I had teamed up for a lot of great assignments and some really lame shit as well. We always managed to laugh our asses off and work our asses off at the same time. It was great to get the opportunity to go to Japan for ten days but going there with Greg was the icing on the cake.

When we got to Japan, we were met at the airport by a chauffeur with a little cap and a big sign that said, “Mr. Zerb. Mr. Thompson.” They spelled Greg's name wrong somehow but mine was perfect. We had never been escorted from any airport before so this was a blast. As we grabbed our bags we tried to make a detour to the bathroom but this poor guy spoke no English and we couldn't get him to slow down. So we followed him to the van and settled in with our stuff, hoping it would be a short ride.

Greg and I had opted not to take a shit on the airplane for some ungodly reason.

So as soon as we arrived at Nissan headquarters, we piled out of the van and skipped up the stairs and into the elevators. It was a long elevator ride. Both of us were suffering mightily by the time it stopped. We were greeted at the door and ushered into a large meeting room. They immediately started handing out business cards and I became greatly afraid that everything was coming to a head.

I looked at Greg. He was starting to sweat. I made my way over to him and I decided to take matters into my own hands. I lifted my arms in the air and asked for everyone's attention.

“Please!” I said, “Greg and I have just finished a very long flight and we must visit the bathroom before we can meet with you guys.”

After a brief moment of silence, I wondered if Greg had just shit on the floor. Apparently, it is bad form to make a public announcement like that in Japan. They looked at us as if we had just soiled the carpet. It really didn't matter to me. I knew they thought of us as vulgar Americans and I was gonna give them exactly what they were looking for.

The interpreter finally told the others what we had said and there was some nervous laughter. Finally, a young man took me by the arm and led us to the latrine. I thanked him and we walked through the door.

Finally! Everything was clean as a pin and orderly as hell. I opened one of the stalls and noticed that there was no toilet, just a porceline hole in the floor. Greg opened the next door stall. Same thing. We looked at each other and started to laugh. Then we noticed shitting noises and realized we weren't alone.

I walked into my stall and closed the door. I heard Greg walking down the long row of stalls, opening doors and closing them. I could see that there was a man in the stall next to me. As I took down my pants, I tried to figure out how to aim my ass at the little hole.

It was a really small hole. So I pulled my pants down to the floor, positioned myself as if I were sitting on an air toilet, took careful aim, and let fly...sort of like a bombadier bracketing in on his target.

I missed. Most of the shit hit the little porcelin thingee and some of it landed on the floor. It took a supreme effort, but I managed to stop the shit in mid turd. Now I had to clean up the floor without getting shit all over my hands and clothes. It was hard to do because my pants were still on the floor and the toilet paper was really thin. I thought I heard the guy next to me mutter something in Japanese. He seemed to think I was some kind of scum bag. I have no idea what he was saying, but he clearly was talking to me. I ignored him and cleaned up the mess.

Now it was time to give her another go. This time I sighted the hole and then moved forward a few inches. Bulls eye! Only one problem. When the shit hit the water, it splashed up all over my clothes. I had to stop again and reconnoiter.

Suddenly, it hit me. You ain't supposed to act like you are in an imaginary chair. You are supposed to crotch all the way down and put your ass on the little porcelin thing. Wow! What an uncomfortable way to take a shit. But once I got the mechanics down, I was able to finish the job without too much further ado...or should I say doo doo ado?

Anyway, as I came out of the stall, I began to snicker. Greg came out about the same time and he was laughing pretty hard. I thought we were both laughing at the same thing. But Greg was laughing harder. In fact, he was laughing so hard, he couldn't talk. He just grabbed me by the arm and led me down the row of stalls. He opened the last stall and showed me what was so damn funny.

It was regular, American style toilet sitting there in the last stall, still warm from Greg's enormously relaxing dump. We both pealed with laughter as the suit clad Japanese gentleman came out of his stall. He did not share our bemusement.

It was the beginning of a great adventure.

In the next few days that followed, Greg and I were treated like royalty...albeit imprisoned royalty. Everything we did was by their schedule. We were television reporters. And working by a schedule was absolutely foreign to both of us. The Japanese wanted to make sure we took back footage of exactly the right kind. That meant we were not to ask for interviews or do anything off schedule. We soon learned that our trip was not meant to be great journalism. It was meant to be a public relations production...propaganda.

Greg and I talked about this. I was hard on poor Greg. I urged him to ask hard questions and be a good journalist. But I was like a kid in a candy store. The Japanese know how to make a good cameraman salivate. In fact, I may have been preaching journalism to Greg, but I was practicing propaganda myself.

It was just so hard to keep a good perspective with these guys. Our interpreters were the nicest people you ever met. They tried their utmost to wine and dine us even though we were uncomfortable being catered to in that way. And every time we asked to jump out of the bus and shoot something that was happening extemporaneously, they looked at their watches and said, “But schedule says...” This became a joke with Greg and me. We would throw out a suggestion and then watch them confer and look at their schedule. Then we would smile at one another when they carefully told us that there was no time to do what we had suggested.

I cannot emphasize how valuable it was for me to be there working with Greg. I knew him as a friend, not just a reporter. So even though the trip was often stressful, I always knew that Greg would have my back. This became necessary when we had to go to a Japanese news station to sort out an equipment problem.

We were in a long line of traffic creeping along, trying to get to the station before our deadline. The traffic finally came to a complete standstill. I got out of the bus to see what was wrong. The Japanese freaked out. We were not supposed to venture out on our own like that. As I walked away from the bus, they all yelled at me to come back. Then they all filed out of the bus like a line of keystone cops with black suits and skinny ties.

I had walked less than a block when I saw the problem. Somebody ahead of us had parked illegally in a spot that was way too small. It was a Volkswagon beetle. There were at least a dozen Japanese gathered around scratching their heads. A large bus was unable to get through and that caused the bottle neck. So I walked over to the car and opened the door. My little entourage began chattering disapproval. They kept saying, “No No No, must ask permission!”

I turned to Mitsunaga, my lead interpreter, and asked him why I should be polite to this unknown Volkswagon owner when he had shown no deference to the rest of us. But Mitsunaga just kept insisting that I ask permission. In fact, all of the Japanese around me were extremely distressed at my actions. I ignored all of them. Greg nodded his approval. So I slipped into the driver seat and pulled the gear shift to neutral. Then I pushed the car out of the way to the approval of everyone watching, and everyone quickly got back into their vehicles and drove through the now clear intersection. It was a lesson in culture I will never forget. The Japanese culture is polite to a fault. This was proof.  

Coming Soon!

I am taking time off the blog to finish my Life Insurance exam.  This Sunday, the blog will pick up where it left off with lots more funny anecdotes and deep shit.

Upcoming subjects:

Taking a shit in Japan
Eating adventures
Unions, strikes and morality
Why I hated Vegas
Who Would Jesus Tax?
Fear of Queers
Happy Children
Custodial nightmares
God and Pets
God and Nature

Chapter 17: Hope and God

I recently listened to a story on NPR about a lady whose son had died from severe burns. She described the injuries in gruesome detail and talked about his pain and the surety of his death. She was an avowed atheist as was her son. She reached out desperately for solace but found nothing for atheists. Every book or resource that dealt with grief based its premise on some kind of religious underpinning.

What could she possibly say to her dying son? Could she tell him God would help him or that heaven awaited him? As she told her story, I wanted to turn the radio off. It was very painful for me to listen to this. Yet, it was important for me to confront the searing questions she posed.

“When there is no hope, what do you do?”

With no God to turn to, she had to do the only thing that made sense to her. I have eluded to it in previous chapters. I fould a lump welling in my throat as she proclaimed the answer. The only way, it seems, to eleviate such abject despair is to reach out and help someone else. It goes back to the very core of our existance. We must reach out to help one another. We must do things for complete strangers. We must make someone else's life a little bit easier. That really is the only way to find respite from that kind of despair.

And if you take the time to do a good deed for someone, the burden of your own troubles begins to lighten. I tested this theory once when I was in the depths of depression after the breakup of my marriage. I went to work for the church building habitat homes. I can honestly say that the work did much more for me than for the crew. I felt like I was accomplishing something. I felt like I was a value to society. When you are depressed, there is no more effective remedy than getting out, rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty. I highly recommend it. It was one of the things Jesus exemplified by the selfless life he lead. It does not require belief in any God and it works beautifully.

It isn't just the feel good you get from such deeds that benefits you, it is the contact with people who can expand your horizons and make it possible for you to conquer your demons.  

Fallen Catholic (continued)

Chapter 16: Good Nun, Bad Nun

One of my pet peeves with non-Catholics is the universally shitty image they have of nuns. I have been around a lot of them. Most of them were absolutely wonderful people. Some of them were radical liberals. Some were tough skinned conservatives. I only had one bad nun in all my years of Catholic education.

She was mean. She kinda looked like the wicked witch of the west. I don't know if one had anything to do with the other but she seemed to excel at criticizing children. If she wasn't scolding us for one thing, she was scolding us for another.

I had just transferred to a new school in the East end of Louisville and was used to being treated well by all my teachers. This one was impossible to warm up to. The year was 1963 and President Kennedy had just been assassinated. It was a few weeks before Christmas and we were putting on a Christmas play.

I was supposed to be the King of something or other. She was gathering us together, directing us, telling us when to enter stage, etc. She had told us to come on stage all together for the introduction, then everyone was supposed to get off the stage in preparation for the first act. She suddenly realized that I was supposed to be in place at the beginning of the first act so she told me that after the introduction, I should just stay put and wait for the first actor to enter.

Later that afternoon, when the parents got there, the play began, we were introduced and everybody left the stage right on cue. I stayed put as I had been told and waited for the actor to enter. Suddenly Sister Mary Nasty Bitch started waving wildly at me to get off the stage. I stood my ground, knowing that I was needed for the first act. She thought I was being obstinate, ran up and pushed me off the stage.

She began to rant at me and everything came to a halt. Then she realized that the play had come to a dead stop and said, “What is holding us up, people?” Then she realized what she had done, that I was in the wrong place, and pushed me back on the stage. She never apologized. She merely lamented, “Why can't you do as you're told, Rodney?”

What a bitch! She did me a great service because later in life I met a lot of people who were incapable of admitting their own mistakes. She was the first of a long line of arrogant idiots who loved to throw their weight around. But as a kid, as someone who had been nurtured by great, sweet Dominican nuns, it made me think I was a bad kid. I actually became depressed and avoided school. For the first time ever, I started making up excuses to miss school.

One day, after a long illness, I was helping one of my buddies with a Math problem. Sister Mary Nasty Bitch asked me how he was coming. I liked helping him so I told her he needed more help. She grabbed me by my ear and yanked me out of the classroom. “Are you trying to get out of working on your own?” She asked. I looked down at the floor.

“What is wrong with you, Rodney?”

I stood there trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I began to cry. I looked up at her, with tears in my eyes and said, “I never hated school before.” And with that, I began to sob.

It must have finally hit a chord in her stony heart because she stopped dead in her tracks. Instead of scolding me, she patted me on the head and told me to go back into the classroom.

Things were different after that. She actually began to smile occasionally. I hope it did her some good.  

Chapter 15: Hell

Let's talk about hell, shall we? There's a lot of good shit in wiki about it. Lots of facts about its origins bla bla bla. Hell is probably the single most compelling argument against traditional Catholic theology. I recently sat in front of a conservative priest and watched him contort his brain around the idea that hell is a human invention. He was completely unable to look outside the confines of his recent seminary experience as he fumbled around trying to refute my assertion that Hell simply cannot exist as a function of a just God.

It is simply impossible to reconcile the idea of a just God condemning even one evil person to the fires of everlasting torment. If you add compassion to the list of traits we assign to God, the question becomes laughable. Yet Christians cling tightly to the idea that God sends bad people to hell and good people to heaven. And those who wish to confuse the argument claim that we choose heaven or hell voluntarily. More nonsense.

We cannot possibly claim that God is all knowing and good and claim that he sends people to hell. Even the most evil people on earth believed they were doing the right thing. Hitler believed he was giving humanity a great gift by killing the Jews. We always go to Hitler when we start to talk about hell, don't we?

And think about how much a minor burn hurts. Think about how much that hurts and then imagine that pain a hundredfold. That is what these phenomenally stupid people want us to believe. And why do they want us to believe this? Don't you know? Because if we chime in and say we believe, it gives them solace. They want so desperately to believe this stuff that they cannot help but badger the rest of us. And if they can get a few smart people to agree with them, they can claim that they are not crazy, and dim-witted. They can claim their ideas are main stream.

I have talked to a lot of main stream believers about hell. None of them have ever professed any belief whatsoever in this horrible idea. Only the most fundamental elements still sell this idea. Catholics still cling to it somewhat but Baptists rely on it to fill the seats. They use it to motivate themselves whenever they feel their faith waning. And isn't that a great way to winnow your thoughts? Scare yourself into believing what you want others to believe by inventing a place for non-believers. Then shake your head as if you care dearly that they will most likely burn in hell for lack of commitment. Tell them you will pray for them. Jesus!

Much of this nonsense is a result of brainwashing. A family who constantly reinforces fundamentalist ideas brainwashes their children and creates a powerful wedge between their ability to think critically and their superstitious legacy. They pass on their worst ideas like a virus, infecting the minds of their progeny. And if said family is a loving and sweet bunch of people, it becomes almost impossible to eradicate the infected thought processes. The warm love of the family becomes synonymous with the superstition and therefore confused with reality.

Of all the ideas passed on via brainwashing, the idea of hell is the most pernicious.   

FALLEN CATHOLIC:

MY SEARCH FOR THE REAL JESUS

(continued)

Chapter 14: Fear of Death

You know, when I think about death, real death, the total end of my life, the last cogent thought, I really have no fear of passing into oblivion. In fact, in some ways, I look forward to the peace it will bring me. But at night, when I am in that half waking, half sleeping surrealistic world between sanity and chaos, I often wake with a start. I sit up in bed or scream out in my sleep like a child. Sometimes I start moaning and crying. It is a very disturbing thing for my wife. She knows to wake me. When my brain is half asleep, my animal fear of death seizes me like a vice. There is no reasonable discourse...no careful analysis of the situation. In those moments, those horrible nightmares, I am on the verge of death. I am at the precipice of the abyss.

My wife has told me that she usually wakes up a few seconds before I do and that she knows I am having a nightmare before I start to moan. That connection between us, that unspoken communication tells me that there is something deeper in life than meets the eye. We have all heard stories about husbands dying a week or a month after their wives. We have all had premonitions about the future that prove to be accurate. And there are books everywhere touting the evidence of ghostly entities among us.

I don't believe it is possible to go to your death suddenly without tremendous fear. It just doesn't seem possible to me. As logical as we are about death, our animal lower brain takes over when it senses that its survival is threatened. Yet somehow, people do face death calmly and with acceptance. Are they more brave than the rest of us? Are they more sure of their destiny?

I have had a few close calls with death myself. In both cases, I remained calm and decided not to panic. I remembered that survival often depends on keeping one's wits. I decided that I would be the one taking charge, leading people to safety. It happened on a plane over Nashville during the Senate race of 1976.

We were on a vintage DC3, a tail dragger. It was one of the most reliable aircraft from the early 50s. But this plane was a relic that had passed its usefulness. As we lifted off the runway and began to climb, black smoke stared billowing out of the starboard engine. The pilot accidentally hit the intercom as he talked to the ground about his mayday. We could hear him argue with the tower over whether he should feather the crippled engine as he struggled to gain altitude.

We were watching out the window as it happened. The seats faced each other and we looked at each other as if to say, “This is it!” The pilot rolled the aircraft steeply to starboard and the ground suddenly seemed way too close. We all wondered if we would make it back around to land. I looked at one of the young ladies across from me and I smiled. Then I said, “Here we go!”

Everyone in our little group laughed. It broke the tension and we all realized that we would survive. But for that little moment...that small instant...we were staring directly into the face of death.

Well, unfortunately, we all died in a horrible crash that day. And that's the end of my story.