So, you got in a stranger’s car, thinking it was your Uber. Or you hugged your mom at the mall, only it wasn’t your mom. Or the neighbor you’ve been calling Dave for fifteen years tells you his name is Greg. Big deal. Get over it. 

When I tell you my most embarrassing moment, well—let’s just say you’re going to be embarrassed to have suggested that yours deserves a second thought. In fact, my story is so preposterous you will think it is just that—a story. But I promise you every bit of it is true. 

It started with me in a hospital gown—opening in the back, please remove everything including your underwear—sitting in a chair in an examining room at St. Peter’s Hospital. I had shunned the padded exam table, feeling that was for after the doctor made his reassuring introduction.  It wasn’t like I was worried about a bad diagnosis or something. Kind of the opposite, really. My company had purchased a multi-million-dollar life insurance policy for me, and this was my perfunctory health exam.

Hanging out in a too-short hospital gown made me uncomfortable. When I leaned forward, elbows-on-knees to read People magazine, the gown splayed open, exposing my backside to the cold plastic seat. But when I tucked the gown under me, leaned back, and crossed my legs to keep from exposing myself, it felt weirdly seductive.

There was one soft knock on the door. A doctor entered, carrying a small wooden briefcase, which suggested traveling chess set more than medical equipment.  I couldn’t tell if his judgmental look was about the People magazine or my come-hither pose.

He placed his little briefcase on the exam table, opened it, and proceeded to remove and assemble gleaning stainless-steel parts that came together to create what looked like a foot-long Captain Video Ray Gun. He fumbled with the assembly long enough to convince me he had never put together, much less used one of these devices.

“I’m Doctor Sanden and I will be administering your Sigmoidoscopy today,” he finally announced. 

He extended his hand as if offering to shake mine, then detoured his movement to pick up the ray gun instead. He held it out for me to examine, as if that explained everything. 

“Okay, if you could just hop up on the exam table on your hands and knees, we’ll check out your sigmoid and get you out of here in no time,” he promised.  

And I’m thinking, where’s my sigmoid? So much for reassuring introductions.

At this point I had an uneasy feeling about where he planned to put that ray gun. Fortunately, I was still basking in the glow of the insurance policy and figured even this indignity would be worth it.

The scope was at full depth, with the doc peering intently into the eyepiece within inches of my butt when I heard the door to the room click open. I glanced back over my left shoulder to see a young nurse standing in the doorway. 

She took in the scene, locked on my eyes, and screamed, “Oh my God!”, fleeing and leaving the door wide open to the adjoining waiting room. I recognized several people who had been there along with me fifteen minutes earlier.

The guy in the business suit who earlier had caught me watching him surreptitiously pick his nose, gave me a self-satisfied little wave. An older man who had been slumped in his wheelchair had come alive, nudging his wife, and gesturing toward my room.

“Can someone get the door?” I stage-whispered. 

The doctor was too intent on my bowels to hear me, but the dozen or so previously bored people in the waiting room apparently did. Some craned their necks while others rose from their seats for a better view. This was well before people carried cell phones, so they were stuck with Reader’s Digest or Popular Mechanics. And what was going on next door was infinitely more entertaining than “I Am Joe’s Skin” or “How to Build a Helicopter in Your Backyard”.

Part of me wanted to search the faces in the waiting room for anyone who might know me. Instead, I turned my head to the wall, shielding my face—like criminals do when they are arrested in front of the tv cameras.

Now if you’re thinking that’s about as embarrassing as you can get, you would be only half correct. Because three years later I returned to the same room for the same procedure to renew that same life insurance policy.

Unfortunately, my positive vibes from the policy had long since evaporated, mostly because I had discovered that the company had named itself the beneficiary. They explained the policy needed to be structured this way to pay off shareholders’ heirs—”in case the whole plane went down.” 

So even though I knew what was in store this time, I felt much less tolerant of suffering for a dubious cause. The good news was I had a different doctor, who at least knew how to put the gun together, which I took as a good sign. His easy-going manner made me so relaxed, I told him what had happened the last time I had been in that room.

I thought he might laugh, but instead, he bolted the door, and solemnly promised me nothing like that would happen on his watch. 

Shortly into the procedure I heard him softly mutter to himself, “Oh shit.” 

Naturally I thought he was referring to something about me, or more specifically my sigmoid.

But the next thing the doctor said was, “damn light bulb burned out.”

My mood yo-yoed from the despair of wondering how long I had to live, to the joy of realizing it wasn’t me he was talking about, it was the ray gun!  But my joy was equally short-lived.

For some reason I still cannot understand, the doctor left the Captain Video Ray Gun in place, and instructed, “Don’t move. I’ve got to find a new bulb.” 

With that, he unbolted the door and left the room, leaving the door wide open to the packed waiting room outside.

My near-fatal freak accident involved a long, overnight drive, a patriotic budgie-smuggler and a flying umbrella. I never even saw the accident coming, on account of being asleep at the time — an irony, given that as a student of untimely deaths, I’ve always tried to be vigilant about having one myself.

For example, when my bag of pretzels gets hung up in a vending machine, I just walk away. No rocking the machine, no temper tantrum. That’s because thirty-seven people in the past few years have been crushed to death by vending machines — freaking out over losing a dollar.

A good source of these stories is the CDC, which tracks all accidents in the U.S. as a way to help improve public safety, like at baseball games. Fans used to see a foul ball heading their way and think, “It’s coming to me! I got it! I got it!” 

As it turns out those moments were more than just entertaining replays of fans muffing the catch and tossing their beers all over those around them. Between 2012 and 2019 the CDC reported over 800 foul ball injuries at major league fields — some resulting in concussions, permanent vision loss and the death of one grandmother celebrating her 79^th birthday at Dodger Stadium. As a result, major league baseball now has netting to protect fans from foul balls. So, positive outcome.

The same thing happened in the National Hockey League. A 13 year old girl was tragically killed by an errant puck in 2002. The following season the league mandated netting at both ends of every rink to protect spectators. 

Unfortunately, with many fatal accidents there’s just no way to protect the public — like the ones involving lava lamps. Lava lamps, of course, were born out of the 60’s drug culture, which might help explain why someone would be heating one up on his kitchen stove. 

“My lava lamp like exploded man, and it’s sticking out of my chest!” 

Some freak accidents can only be characterized as ironic. Like Jim Heselden, the inventor of the Segway, who in 2010 died after apparently riding his Segway off a cliff. Or Stephen Whinfrey, who was out hunting rabbits near Doncaster, England. Elmer Fudd-like, he inserted his head into a rabbit hole, got stuck, and asphyxiated. 

Then there are the deaths that involve being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mike Edwards, a founding member of the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving in Devon, England back in 2010. He was minding his own business — quite possibly humming the band’s 1979 hit, “Don’t Bring Me Down” — when a 1200 pound round hay bale randomly rolled down a field and flattened his van.

But in some accidents one can’t help feeling the victims had it coming — especially when they involve the mistreatment of animals. For example, in cockfighting men strap razor-sharp spurs on the legs of their roosters. At a California cockfight in 2011, one of these armed roosters accidentally slashed his owner, killing him. It’s hard to fault the rooster here. Or consider the Belarusian fisherman who bled to death after being bitten by a beaver he grabbed in order to have his picture taken with it. Didn’t he know that beavers are notoriously camera shy?

A sub-category of those who had it coming are the victims whose behavior is more freakish than accidental. For example, in 2005 Kenneth Pinyan died after injuries caused by having anal sex with a stallion, which is hard to imagine was an accident at all. Or, in 2008 a 43-year-old Irish mother of four died of an allergic reaction after having sex with a German Shepard, which had to have resulted in the most euphemistic eulogy ever. 

“She was such an animal lover.”

Of course, there are plenty of more innocent examples of animals killing people. Brazilian Joao Maria de Souza was sleeping peacefully beside his wife when a cow that had somehow wandered onto the roof of his house, dropped through the ceiling, crushing him. Fortunately, his wife and the cow were unharmed. Or, consider Floridian Jim Campbell. When he stepped out of his van in order to open the gate to his property, his dog excitedly jumped into the driver’s seat and stepped on the accelerator, running over his master.

But the accidents that really give me the willies stem from mistakes I too might have made at some time in my life — like mistakes with dry ice. You rarely see it anymore, but back in the 50’s this super-cold form of carbon dioxide seemed to be everywhere. As kids we’d pick up chunks in our bare hands — sustaining instant burns — and drop them into buckets of water to watch it boil and smoke. 

So, to me, it’s understandable that at a party in Moscow in 2020, some young comrades dropped 60 pounds of the stuff into an indoor pool, to create a cool-looking layer of fog over the water. Who knew that carbon dioxide would displace the oxygen, causing three people to pass out and drown? Not to totally malign dry ice, vodka may have also played a role here.

Or, how many drunk guys have eaten weird things on a dare? I once ate several live black ants for lunch, and I wasn’t even drunk. So, I can’t fault Sam Ballard, a 19 year-old Australian student and rugby player who ate a slug during Wine Appreciation Night with his mates.  But if you take anything away from what I am telling you, it should be to NEVER EAT A SLUG because it can cause paralysis and death, as it did with Sam.

Despite my own efforts to learn from the mistakes of others, when my freak accident arrived, as I said, I never even saw it coming. Having driven most of the night to catch the morning ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket, my wife and I were both flat on our backs, sound asleep on Jettys Beach. 

My ensemble consisted of nothing more than a pair of nylon Speedo briefs. The British call these suits “budgie smugglers” — a joke that went by me until someone explained that a budgie is what Brits call a parakeet. Actually, a true “budgie smuggler” is usually black, thong-like, has an overhanging belly, and is parked on a Black Sea beach. If anything, my Speedo stood out even more, displaying red, white, and blue stars and stripes. I’m not just bringing this up to mention that I once looked pretty much okay in a Speedo. It’s also an important part of our story.

Something pulled me out of my deep sleep. I opened my eyes to discover a large, green-striped beach umbrella overhead, my brain slowly upshifting out of dreamworld to wakefulness…

“It’s daytime?”

“I smell Coppertone.”

“That is not my umbrella.”

When I tried to roll over, my butt felt strangely anchored to the sand. Thrashing in panic, I managed to liberate the only important body parts that a Speedo is designed to cover, exposing myself to everyone south of me.

I tried to tuck myself back into my suit but found the fabric distorted and unyielding. My eyes traced the metal pole down to where it entered the front waistband of my suit, exited the fabric at the side below my hipbone, and disappeared into the sand. I grabbed the pole with both hands and pulled with all of my strength — to no avail. 

Suddenly, a stranger appeared over me. “Are you okay?” he asked, out of breath.

“I guess,” I said, though in truth I wasn’t all that okay about being pinned to a public beach with my bathing suit mostly off.

The stranger heaved the umbrella out of the sand, tucked it under his arm, sprinted toward the parking lot, and squealed his tires as he sped away.

I’m usually not a huge believer in fate, but if that umbrella had fallen just inches shy of where it did, well, let’s just say I would not have had the opportunity to meet the two wonderful daughters we have today. As if Great White Sharks weren’t already enough (thanks to Steven Spielberg and Jaws), the Fear of Neutering by Beach Umbrella for me became the final straw. 

I know what you’re thinking, “that was a fluke…what are the odds it could ever happen again?”

The answer is, the odds are pretty damn good, at least many thousands of times greater than going to the beach and being eaten by a Great White.

Over the past nine years, there have been over 30,000 reported incidents in which people have been hospitalized due to flying beach umbrellas. Experts estimate that a beach umbrella carried aloft in windy conditions can exert 8 tons of force per square inch at its tip — enough to go through a human body.

In 2015 Ed Quigley was lying on a Delaware beach when an airborne umbrella descended into his left eye, blinding him. For those of you who don’t believe in cruel fate, when the tip of the umbrella entered his brain it destroyed the sensors that enabled this gourmet cook and food lover to distinguish tastes. 

Or, consider Lottie Belk who was celebrating her 55^th birthday at Virginia Beach when an airborne beach umbrella struck her in the chest, killing her.

This is why the beach, this once-magical place, no longer calls to me (nor do vending machines, lava lamps, dry ice, slugs, rabbit holes, roosters, or beavers). If you need more convincing, just visit Ed Quigley’s website, www.beachumbrellasafety.org

This has been a Public Service Announcement. Well, sort of.

At the time we moved to yet another fading upstate New York mill town—this one with an open sewer running through its heart—I still clung to scouting like a security blanket. I felt the Boy Scouts would be the one thing I could count on, no matter where I lived. I could not have been more wrong.

I landed at Pleasant Avenue Elementary on my first day, my fifth school in as many grades.  I did my usual—hanging out in the back row, quietly studying my new classmates and teacher.

Miss Giles pulled down a large, window shade-style map of New York State, and beckoned me of all people, to the front of the class to locate Johnstown, my new hometown.

As thirty faces stared at the new kid, I scanned the map for anything recognizable. I located Albany by the star marking it as the state capital. Just below it was Delmar where I had attended kindergarten.

My eyes tracked the Hudson River downstream to Kinderhook, where we had lived next door to the old Martin Van Buren house, and I had marched on Memorial Day in my Cub Scout uniform. We had followed the buglers, drummers, and veterans out to the old town cemetery, where Billy Downing keeled over face-first into the grass. The rest of our troop remained at attention, immobilized by the speeches about ultimate sacrifice.

Due north of Albany, I found Lake George, where I always spent summers at my grandmother’s camp. I followed the lake to its northern end, and the black dot marking Ticonderoga. I first attended the Weedville School, where our janitor sliced oranges and apples for us at lunchtime. The following year for fourth-grade, they bused me to the school attended mostly by mill workers’ kids. One girl wore a freakish Halloween witch’s wig.  Another’s hands were stainless steel claws. Her parents said she crawled onto the train tracks when she was little. Townspeople whispered that the father had slammed her hands in a drawer when she would not stop crying.

I distracted myself by earning gold and silver arrowhead merit badges, mostly by memorizing things—the Morse Code, all the states and their capitals, the makes and models of cars, the Gettysburg Address. One assignment for our Blue and Gold Supper required us to compose an original cigarette jingle. I called mine the “Big O”:

Indians who know now smoke the Big O
Smoke signals go now by the Big O
They’re clear and they’re legible, they get there quick
Even signals sent with the new filter tip.

 The evening of the dinner, our pack lined up in front of our parents and scout masters to deliver our jingles. Everyone before me stole one-liners from existing cigarette ads: ”Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should” …”Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”. Embarrassed to be the only kid to have taken the assignment seriously, I offered, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”.

A sharp clicking sound drew my attention to Miss Giles. She stared at me impatiently with arched eyebrows. One hand perched on her hip while the other tapped a piece of chalk on the blackboard in a once-a-second beat.

“Do we not know where we live?” she asked, prompting a smug tittering from my classmates.

As I said, I expected to find refuge in scouting as I always had in these new strange places. I met my new scout mates on the ground floor of Johnstown’s Methodist Church for my first meeting. Technically we were now Webelos (We’ll Be Loyal Scouts) — the transition phase from Cubs to Boy Scouts. Mr. Simpson, our Scout Master, said we would become real scouts when he took us camping.

I showed up at Mr. Simpson’s house on North Perry Street the following week for our next troop meeting, joining nine or ten other scouts in his unfinished basement. The space had a moldy, fuel-oil smell and corners barely lit by bare bulbs hanging from the low ceiling.

“We’ll be working on our knots tonight, boys. These lally columns are really good for practicing them,” he explained, rapping his knuckles on one of the metal posts.

He introduced a thin, quiet man as his assistant. I may have missed it, but I don’t believe he mentioned the new man’s name.

They started us off with the square knot, half-hitch, and clove hitch — all knots I already knew from tying up boats at Lake George.

“You gotta know ‘em so well, you can untie ‘em behind your backs,” Mr. Simpson said. “So, let’s have a contest!”

With that, he and his assistant secured each scout to one of the metal posts, with their hands behind their backs. I reacted the way I always did in unfamiliar situations. I shifted away from the group to where I wouldn’t be noticed.

“Ready, set, go!” Mr. Simpson shouted.

At first, the two men playfully whacked a couple kids with ropes, as if encouraging them. “Knowing your knots could save your life someday,” Mr. Simpson said.

When his assistant noticed one kid wrestling with his constraints, he whipped the kid hard across his upper thighs. “Concentrate!” he commanded.

“I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” a kid named Eric said, clearly eager to be the winner.

“How…about…under…pressure?” Mr. Simpson asked, emphasizing each word with a sharp lashing.

As both men whipped the kids on the far side of the room, I walked as nonchalantly and as quietly as I could to the steps leading upstairs.

“Hey, meeting’s not over,” Mr. Simpson called after me.

“Bathroom,” I answered, as if I really had to go. I took the steps two at a time, ran out the front door, and abandoned the Boy Scouts forever.

Since that time, sexual abuse charges from more than 12,000 men against their Scout Masters have come to light. I feel grateful that my reticence—probably the same survivor’s instinct that helped me cope with constantly shifting schools, classmates, houses, and communities—instructed me to flee that evening. But I also carry feelings of guilt about what might have happened to those boys I left behind. At the very least, I should have told my parents. Perhaps they would have talked to the right people. It wasn’t until decades later I realized that would be giving my parents way too much credit.

It was late in my father’s life while I was capturing his memories on videotape. He spoke of sipping his first beer when he was fourteen years old with his Scout Master in an Albany bar. I commented on how inappropriate that would be today. When he appeared puzzled, I told him how scouting was the glue that held everything together for me as his job took us from town to town—until we arrived in Johnstown and the Scout Master and his assistant tied up and whipped those boys in his basement.

My father listened gravely to my story. When I finished he looked me in the eye, shook his head sadly and with complete derision proclaimed, “You were never a Boy Scout.”

[Author’s Note: Every part of this story is true, except the name of the Scout Master which has been changed to Mr. Simpson.]

“If you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?” I asked my friend Kevin.

“Nah, I’m not your guy,” Kevin answered. “If I could go back in time I’d go to Woodstock.”

Now, when my time-travel opportunity arrives I’m sure as hell not wasting it on Woodstock. And I won’t be attending the 50th anniversary either — unless I can return as a twenty year-old.

Looking back, it’s a miracle anyone showed up for the original Aquarian Exposition — so named for a shift in constellations responsible for a new era of peace and love (as it turned out, a wildly overblown expectation). There were no cell phones, no computers, no social media back then to spread the news. I only learned of the event when my college roommate Newt called me a couple days beforehand.

It had already been a hot, tense summer. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in March. Campuses were a tinder box of anti-war protest and violence. College deferments were still in place, however taking a gap year back then likely earned you the privilege of studying abroad — in Southeast Asia. It’s no wonder a half million kids were ripe for three days of peace and music.

Newt and I planned to meet on Friday at a farmhouse on a high ridge overlooking Troy, New York, which housed an unlikely commune of engineering students from nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The weathered house sat at the end of a three-mile long dirt utility road, beneath two immense radio towers.

The towers had been my sole navigational aid in getting me to our rendezvous spot. I wandered inside and found Newt in the kitchen talking to Steven, one of the RPI students from Newt’s hometown of Holyoke. Newt also introduced his friend Michelle, who would be joining us on our pilgrimage. The three of us headed south on the Thruway in my mother’s Chevy Malibu convertible — deemed only slightly less embarrassing than Newt’s parent’s station wagon, which we left at the farmhouse.

Newt rode shotgun, with Michelle in the back, hanging over the front seat.

“You guys, you guys,” she said, rapping Newt on the shoulder insistently with her knuckles. The familiarity of the gesture made me wonder if she and Newt were more than just friends.

“I peeked in the refrigerator and there was a box of sugar cubes in there.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially, “I think it was LSD.”

“Come on, Steven’s an engineer, for Christ’s sake,” Newt said, as if that explained everything.

“But why would they keep sugar in the refrigerator?” Michelle asked.

In my rearview mirror, her dark eyes sparkled so mischievously, I wondered if she had popped one of the sugar cubes for the ride.

What should have been a two hour drive stretched into six. Eventually we were barely moving, slowed by cars abandoned in the breakdown lanes, then clogging the highway itself. Hundreds of kids on foot streamed by us like third-world refugees, carrying their possessions in their arms. By the time we inched off the main road and found a place to park, it was midnight and teeming. We agreed to sleep in the car and worry about a plan in the morning.

Bedding down three people in a car with two bench seats is fraught with social awkwardness. I couldn’t cuddle up on one seat with either Newt or Michelle. And I didn’t want to force them together — in the event they really were just friends. So, I volunteered to sleep in the trunk. I removed the spare tire, propped the trunk lid partially open with the jack, lined the space with my sleeping bag and crawled in.

The mosquitoes, sharp angles, and an inexplicable hissing noise made sleeping impossible. At dawn I discovered and tossed out a punctured aerosol can of Foamy Lemon-Lime shaving cream (which, when you think about it is an odd thing to bring to Woodstock). When I emerged from the trunk, Newt and Michelle witnessed a ghost covered in desiccated shaving cream, imbedded with dead mosquitoes. The rain ticked insistently on the Chevy’s vinyl top as we sat inside discussing what to do next.

Somehow we surmised we were five miles from the festival. That may have been wishful thinking, given that none of us could pinpoint where we were on our roadmap. Driving any further was out of the question due to all the cars left helter-skelter on the roads. Newt and Michelle argued that we should walk the rest of the way. Embarrassingly, I admitted to worrying about my parent’s car getting towed, trashed, or stolen.

“Here we are, a five mile walk from what may be the countercultural event of our lives,” Newt said. “And you’re worried about a car?”

Newt and Michelle had the votes, but I had the car. So, just five miles from Woodstock we drove home.

As it turned out, Newt was right about one thing. Woodstock did become the defining countercultural moment for our generation. Officials put the attendance at Yasgur’s Farm at 400,000, while Joni Mitchell’s lyrics counted “half a million strong”. A hundred thousand “Children of God” unaccounted for is a lot. Newt, Michelle, and I were undoubtedly in that number.

It’s no wonder so many of us were stranded or lost along the way. Nearby thruway exits were closed, forcing us to navigate serpentine back roads. Adding to the confusion, the town of Woodstock had backed out just a month before the scheduled date, and the organizers hastily relocated the event forty-six miles away to a farm field in the hamlet of White Lake. It’s entirely possible we had erroneously followed thousands of others to the wrong town.

I never admitted it to anyone but as the legend of that weekend grew, so did my relief over having missed three days of rain, mud, no food or water, and overflowing portable toilets. I did however wrestle with where our near-miss placed us in history. It would be a lie to say we were at Woodstock. But in my mind we did go— we just never arrived.

The sixties’ cosmic haze of protest, pot, idealism and patchouli oil dissipated over the ensuing years as the Woodstock Generation built marriages, careers, and families. Twenty years passed, at which point the event felt ancient and abstract amidst our thicket of bills, work deadlines, and dirty diapers — until late one evening when I drove our Last Chance babysitter home.

“So, did the kids eat their dinners?” I asked.

My wife and I called her Last Chance because she wasn’t good with kids and she lived too far away. I especially dreaded driving her home, because she had either no desire, or ability to carry on a conversation.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, snapping her gum.

“Did they go to bed with no trouble?”

She distractedly riffled the pages of a thick, dog-eared paperback in her lap.

“Did you get to read your book,” I tried.

“A little,” she said.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

Her head spun toward me so fast, I feared it might go full-circle, Linda Blair-like.

“Omigod, it’s unbelievable,” she said, her voice revving up to 78 rpm. “It’s about this rock concert, and this girl really, really wants to go, and her mother won’t let her, and she goes anyway, and there’s like drugs, and peace and free love…” She ran out of steam and gasped to a halt, staring at me wide-eyed for several uncomfortable seconds.

Reverently and hopefully, she asked, “Were you from — THEN?”

“Meaning?” I asked, buying time.

“I mean, did you go to Woodstock?”

I wheeled into the babysitter’s driveway, fished out my wallet, and overpaid her.

“Yeah, I went,” I said, hoping that would send her on her way.

“Omigod, what was it like,” she shrieked, now back to her 78 rpm voice. “Did it really have all the drugs, and rock and roll, and free love?”

I weighed my answer carefully, which only increased her impatience.

I recalled the sugar cubes that may or may not have been LSD…sleeping in the trunk…possibly being the only person to have brought shaving cream and a razor to Woodstock…the rain…the abandoned cars…and fighting our way to (perhaps) within five miles of the event.

“So, was it just like in the book?” she prodded.

“Yeah, it was pretty much like that,” I said.

I abducted my old friend Steve Wadsworth and whisked him off to England in November of ‘03. It was a friendly sort of kidnapping though, mostly inspired by Steve’s leukemia. What could be a better last hurrah than going to find Malcolm Howorth — who we hadn’t seen since he moved away from Johnstown when we were kids? Somehow I cajoled Dan Duross, the fourth member of our childhood gang, into joining the adventure.

I sleuthed my way online to an email address for Malcolm’s daughter, Sarah. She proposed luring her dad to The Higher Trapp Inn near where they lived in Lancashire.

The place was a drafty, overly decorated country inn right out of Fawlty Towers. We arrived just before dinner in a turmoil, because that morning I had left my video camera in a cab back in London. But after several phone calls, a local video shop delivered a rental replacement to the inn.

“You look like you’re from the Channel Six News Team,” Steve said as I balanced the suitcase-sized camera on my shoulder.

I tested the camera as we wandered into the inn’s pub, which smelled as sour and malty as a frat house. The matronly bar maid who introduced herself as Margaret knew right away that we were The Americans. She took us on a tour, introducing us to the kitchen and wait staffs who all looked to be expecting us. Margaret next showed us the private room reserved for Malcolm and his family, and then hustled us back to the bar.

She wagged her finger at us and said, “No peeking. I’ll come and get you when they arrive.”

It’s not like we had a plan, but with the outlandish video camera as a prop, we decided to use it when we confronted Malcolm. After a round of pints, Margaret summoned us from the pub back into the private room.

I hid my face behind the big camera as I walked in and announced, “We’re a film crew from America doing a documentary on typical English pub life. Would you folks be kind enough to tell us what brings you out mid-week?”

A perky blonde woman who I took to be Malcolm’s wife spoke right up, “My name is Sally and that’s my husband Malcolm,” she said, gesturing across the table to a man dressed in black. “We’re taking our daughter Sarah and her boyfriend Thomas out for a meal.” The woman spoke energetically, answering for everyone.

I panned the camera around the table, pausing on Sarah.

“Sarah, can you look right at the camera and say, “All you need is love. Love is all you need?” Steve asked Malcolm’s daughter.

Sarah barely managed to recite the lines, clearly excited by her role as co-conspirator.

Next to her perched her boyfriend, a thin twenty-something young man with wire rim glasses and close-cropped hair. He sported a two-day old beard and spoke the Beatles’ lyrics with such uncertainty, I wondered if he was too young to know who they were.

“How about you?” Steve said, addressing the man in black. “Can you say it?”

As I studied Malcolm from the anonymity of the camera’s viewer, I easily recognized the thirteen-year old we had known. Though you wouldn’t call him heavy, he carried his weight comfortably, you might even say athletically. The slimming effect of his all-black, Johnny Cash style outfit certainly helped. If I had not been zoomed in on his face, I would never have seen the flash of contempt in his eyes.

Steve continued to badger him. “Come on, you look like you must have grown up with the Beatles.”

That sparked another dangerous look. Malcolm seemed to be weighing his options. He stared at the camera, and in a monotone muttered, “All you need is love. Love is all you need.”

Dan may have sensed the same tension. “Do you have any friends or family in America you’d like to say hello to?” he asked.

Malcolm slowly raised his head and looked closely at Dan for the first time. “Actually, I once lived in America. But that was long ago.” His eyes seemed to warm, then just as quickly hardened.

Dan cocked his head and peered into the lens. “This is an amazing coincidence ladies and gentlemen.” He turned back to address Malcolm. “And where did you live in America, my good man?”

Malcolm half rose from his seat and hesitated, clearly caught between fight and flight. He slumped back down, the fight draining out of him, and looked up at Dan. “Believe me, you’ve never heard of the place.” He paused before adding, “My good man.”

Fearing we were pushing our luck, I removed my hat and moved my face out from behind the camera, while continuing to record. The movement caught Malcolm’s attention. I felt certain that I detected a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

“Any old friends you’d like to give a shout out to?” I asked.

Malcolm slowly turned to me and stared intently for an uncomfortable length of time. He looked like a man coming out of a daze. His gruff exterior seemed to wash away in streaks, like the dust off of a car left out in the rain. Finally, he softly said, “I would suggest that you are Ned.”

“No way!” Steve immediately cried out.

I kept right on taping, but gestured to Dan with my free hand and asked, “And do you know who this is?”

Malcolm studied Dan for a good twenty seconds. Each second seemed like either a repudiation of our old friendship, or an indictment of how much Dan had changed. I figured Malcolm would identify him through association. Instead, he shook his head sadly, and said, “I’m sorry, too much time has passed. He just looks a weary world traveler to me.”

Steve cackled victoriously. Nonplussed, Dan stepped forward and said, “I’m Dan Duross.”

Malcolm’s squeezed his eyes shut tightly as if he were in pain. Dan immediately reached out and embraced him. Malcolm buried his face into Dan’s chest. They held each other as the rest of us watched in silence. I felt like an eavesdropper but kept the camera rolling. Finally, Dan stepped back and asked, “And who do you think this guy is?”

“This would have to be Steve,” Malcolm said, as Steve stepped forward. They embraced until Malcolm finally inhaled a mighty sniff, quickly blotted one eye then the other on his upper sleeves as he composed himself, and declared, “I am absolutely gob-smacked.”

“Gob-smacked,” Steve, Dan, and I cried out in unison. “What’s that mean?” Steve asked.

“A total loss for words,” Malcolm said. “I just can’t believe it.”

“Did you think there was something a bit quirky going on tonight,” Dan asked in a surprisingly good British accent.

“Yes, I definitely did,” Malcolm admitted. “Normally I’d be having an evening soak right about now after a hard game on the pitch.” Noticing the puzzled looks on our faces, he clarified, “Wednesday is four-on-four football night. It’s just so unusual for us to be going out midweek. I’ve been thinking me daughter is engaged and this is how they’re going to break the news — in a public place where I can’t rant and carry on.”

“They should give you some medication to calm you down like they did for me,” Steve said, which made all the Brits laugh a bit nervously.

Malcolm shook his head sadly. “They probably wouldn’t work on me. I’m the most miserable bloke you’ll ever meet.”

“Why?” Steve cried out. “What have you got to be unhappy about?”

“It’s true, he’s miserable,” Sally laughed. Sarah and Thomas nodded their heads in agreement.

“The bloody taxes, and the government, and the Royal Family,” Malcolm said.

“He always told Sarah here and our son to forget the U.K. and move to America,” Sally said softly.

Malcolm’s slumped body language told the story as he filled in the missing blanks about his sudden departure so many years prior. His family had moved back to the U.K. spontaneously because his grandfather had grown too ill to care for himself.

“Wouldn’t most people check out the situation first?” Malcolm asked. He stared at us, as if expecting an answer. “Just one letter from home and they pack up the whole kit and caboodle and move us back here?”

“So, did you all move in with your grandfather?” I asked.

Malcolm shook his head sadly. “We were all split up between various relatives. I lived the first year in Manchester with me aunt and uncle.”

“I had to use an outhouse to go to the toilet,” Malcolm continued, the tone of his voice neutralizing my beer buzz. “I’m not sure which was worse — freezing me arse off in the winter — or the retching stench when it was hot.”

There was an embarrassed pause around the table until Steve said, “Well, we still had the Cayadutta Creek and that stunk.”

“But you had indoor plumbing,” Malcolm pointed out. “It seems to me that every morning back in Johnstown, I’d wake up to blue skies and clean, fresh air. True or not, that’s the way I remember it.”

We watched Malcolm, more curious than ever about the parts of his life we had missed.

“I wore me old football jerseys from Johnstown and all the Manchester kids who wore nothing but black called me Yank and said I wore clown clothes.”

It was impossible not to notice that Dan, Steve, and I all sported colorful outdoor clothing, while Malcolm’s dress shirt, trousers, and shoes were all black.

“You know, in Johnstown, me mum would occasionally return home from work with a ball glove or a ball as a surprise. It wouldn’t be Christmas or my birthday or anything,” Malcolm said. “But when we came back here, there was no more of that,” he said, shaking his head. “I barely saw me parents.”

Our waiter set a tray down in front of Dan, choked with half a dozen pints. Dan passed the glasses around the table in both directions.

“The thing is it all felt so innocent and pure,” he continued.

“What was innocent?” Steve asked.

“Everything,” Malcolm said. “Walking to the movies, playing football on the Knox Gelatin lawn, dreaming about playing under the lights at Knox Field, discovering our Indian village. Anything seemed possible.” He stared down at his hands and inhaled deeply.

“And when I went back, it wasn’t anything like I remembered it,” Malcolm continued.

“Wait a minute. You went back to Johnstown?” I asked. “When?”

Malcolm looked puzzled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it was the summer of ’72 or ‘73. I’d been working as an auto mechanic and had an accident in the pit. I got burned pretty badly and had to get my head back on straight.”

Steve looked focused for the first time that evening. “That was just before I had my bout with mental illness, too.”

“And you never tried to find any of us?” I interrupted.

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell ya. Everything had changed,” Malcolm said. “I remembered the air as a kid as being fresh and every day was sunny. But when I went back it wasn’t like that at all. The town seemed broken down, like an old man.” He looked at us sadly. “I couldn’t grasp which had changed more — me or the place. I had planned to stay, but I didn’t know anyone, so I came back after two or three weeks.”

Woody stood up, raised his glass, and toasted us all. “I just want to say that I’m having the best night of my life.”

He swept his glass in the direction of Dan, Malcolm, and me, and said, “Here’s to old friends.” Then he raised his glass to Sally, Sarah, and Thomas and said, “And here’s to new friends.”

We all raised our glasses. “Here’s to Searching for Malcolm — the movie,” Dan toasted. “To Searching for Malcolm,” everyone repeated, as we stretched across the table to clink our glasses.

“Tell me,” Dan said, turning to Malcolm. “Now that Searching for Malcolm has become such a big hit, what do you plan to do with your newfound fortune?”

Malcolm’s eyes danced, relishing the role-playing. “If Searching for Malcolm becomes a big hit, I hope to…”

“Now that,” Dan corrected him. “Now that Searching for Malcolm has become such a big hit.”

Malcolm grinned with delight just like he did when we were kids. Then he composed himself and started again, acting serious. “Now that Searching for Malcolm has become such a big hit I plan to take the Rochdale Football Club to the premier league.”

“And be the coach,” Steve suggested.

“The player-coach,” Dan corrected.

“Yes, as player-coach, and owner of the team, I plan to take the team to the English premier league championship,” Malcolm continued.

“And lead the league in scoring,” I threw in.

“And score the winning goal in the championship game,” Dan concluded.

“Money will be no object,” Malcolm went on, explaining the success of the team.

Then Malcolm turned the tables and acted as the interviewer, posing the same question to us. When he got to Steve, I suspected that Steve might have wished for a lifetime supply of Gleevec, the forty thousand dollar a year drug that was keeping him alive. But Steve had yet to tell Malcolm about his leukemia. So instead, Woody raised his glass and said, “I’ll remember this night for as long as I live.”

Malcolm frowned. “That’s not even a wish.”

Woody raised his glass and tried again. “Let’s get together again before another forty years blips by on the calendar.”

“Here, here,” Malcolm called out. It sounded so quaintly English, like the comical huzzahs from the white-wigged Members of Parliament in the House of Commons, we all joined in. “Here, here,” we echoed.

AFTERWORD

Later that evening Steve pulled Malcolm aside to tell him about his leukemia. In the space of one dinner we managed to lift Malcolm out of a forty-year funk…only to drive him right back in. The following morning Malcolm and Sally sat us down for a conference in their living room. After talking most of the night, they had reached a decision. They would remortgage their house to help pay for Steve’s medication.

Steve never took them up on their offer. Instead, he simply stopped taking Gleevec — refusing to be extorted by Novartis Pharmaceuticals. His doctors expected him to die. But as it turned out, spiriting Steve off to England was a total bust as last hurrahs go. He has tested negative for leukemia ever since. I like to tell him it was the trip that cured him.

As if that weren’t enough of a happy ending, Malcolm and Sally did return to America and Johnstown the year after our reunion. That visit and others since have helped Malcolm reconcile leaving the U.S. so many years ago and he no longer claims to be the most miserable bloke in the world.

For me, the reunion unleashed a flood of childhood memories about days that are always fresh and sunny. I have written these stories as if they were fiction, about characters with made up names. I don’t know what I was thinking. A story in which someone remortgages his home in order to save a long-lost childhood friend is mediocre fiction at best. Yet that really did happen, along with Steve’s cure, both of which are truly remarkable. This is why I have decided to come out of the closest so to speak—and just use our real names from now on.

Like life itself, not every outcome of our reunion had a storybook ending. In Steve, I kept one friend who I feared I would soon lose. With Malcolm, I found a friend I believed had been lost for forty years. But for Dan and myself, friends of more than half a century, we have only grown more distant since that reunion fifteen years ago. This has left me to ponder whether there is some cosmic order that determines how many true friends we are allowed to have in our lives. If we regain two, are we destined to lose one? I’m not suggesting that losing a friend isn’t painful and sad, but if that’s the equation, I’ll take it every day.

When I tell the story about kidnapping my friend Woody, I always start by going back to 1961. That was just before our childhood cocoon began unraveling, accelerated by a drumbeat of national headlines: Families Building Backyard Bomb Shelters… Bay of Pigs…Cuban Missile Crisis…Medgar Evers…JFK…Martin Luther King…Bobby Kennedy…Viet Nam.

We were still happy and oblivious on that first day of seventh-grade, when Dondi, Woody, and I stopped by Malcolm’s house to pick him up on our way to school.

We expected Malcolm to be waiting for us on his front porch. Instead, we had to ring the bell to the upstairs flat. When he appeared, framed behind the aluminum storm door, he stood barefoot, sporting plaid boxer shorts and a white t-shirt. Instead of caroming between us, joking, and calling us blokes, he took just one step out onto the porch, while continuing to use the door as a shield.

“Hurry up man, you’re going to make us all late,” Dondi said.

Wedged behind the door, Malcolm said nothing.

“You’re not feeling a little peaky are you?” I asked, teasing him with one of his own expressions.

“Yeah, you can’t play hooky on the first day of school,” Woody said.

We all watched Malcolm more closely now, waiting for his response. That’s when I realized he actually did look a bit peaky.

“If you’re scared you’ll have to sing, we’ll protect you,” I said. On the first day of school, older kids would corner the younger ones and try to make them sing the alma mater.

“On your bike,” Malcolm said — his polite way of telling me to piss off.

“We’re walking,” I said, playing dumb.

“You know what I mean,” Malcolm said. “That singing shite don’t scare me.”

But his eyes betrayed his words. He looked like his faithful dog had died. But he didn’t have a dog.

That’s when Malcolm dropped his head, mumbled something, and disappeared as the storm door wheezed behind him and clunked shut.

We couldn’t even agree on what his parting words were.

“He said he was sick,” Dondi insisted.

“I thought he said he had to move,” I argued.

“Bowels no move,” Woody suggested, reciting the punchline to one of our favorite jokes.

Whatever he said, Malcolm’s behavior rattled us, and we did what we always did when one of us got out of sorts — we gave him some space.

By the time we circled back the next day, Malcolm’s front door was locked. Neighborhood kids informed us that the family had returned to England.

If we had been a little older, we might have hunted down our friend’s new address and written to tell him we would miss him as quarterback of our south end football team. We could have told him what a loyal friend he had always been and that our group wasn’t the same without his enthusiasm. Perhaps we would have admitted that life in our little upstate town had become flavorless without his English ways. If we weren’t twelve-year old boys, we might have even confessed that we felt guilty about taking his positive nature and loyalty for granted.

I joked with Woody and Dondi for the next 40 years that we should embark on a grand international adventure to find Malcolm. They never took me seriously. But when Woody wrote to tell me he had been diagnosed with leukemia — likely from inhaling compounds of benzene while shaving skins as a young man in the leather mills —I decided to kidnap Woody and take him to England, to find our long-lost friend.

I lured Woody to Williamstown, Massachusetts on the pretext of seeing a college soccer game, insisting at halftime that we leave to grab some lunch. We wound south on Route 7 with the promise of a great sandwich place, but by the time we passed through New Ashford and kept going, Woody started getting twitchy.

“I’ve got a knot in the pit of my stomach,” he complained, both hands clutching his belly.

“You’re probably just hungry,” I said, hoping to change the subject.

“I’m not hungry,” Woody said. “I’m nervous.” He held up two fingers. “Despite taking a Paxil this morning, and another one when you kidnapped me.”

Woody had clearly stopped believing my ruse about lunch.

“Are we going to be gone overnight?” he asked.

This question caught me off guard. I wanted to keep him in suspense at least until we reached the airport. “Why would we be gone overnight?”

“You tell me. But if you didn’t bring my meds, I’m a dead man.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got your drugs,” I replied, with more conviction than I felt. Woody’s wife had promised to stow his suitcase of clothes, his Paxil, and his Gleevic in the trunk of my car when she went to find the ladies room during the game. Upon returning, she gave me a wink and a quick thumbs-up. At the time, I took that to mean the luggage transfer had been a success. In hindsight, I worried that it simply meant she had found the bathroom.

As I veered toward the East Lee entrance to the Mass Pike, Woody continued complaining about the pain in his stomach. That’s what made me cave on my original plan to keep him in the dark.

“There’s a present for you in the glove box,” I told him.

Woody pressed the button, reached inside, and removed a brand-new black ball cap with the letters “SFM” stitched in gold on the front. He sat there studying it, rolling the cap back and forth, as if seeing the letters from different angles would suddenly reveal their meaning.

We barreled eastward on the Mass Pike for a good half hour.

“So, does he know we’re coming?” Woody asked quietly, finally breaking the silence.

I studied my old friend, wondering if he was just trying to flush out a clue. “Does who know we’re coming?”

Woody tapped the letters on his hat one at a time as he answered, “Searching… for… Malcolm.”

Even though I knew the next question was coming, I still had no idea how to answer when Woody asked, “Will Dondi be joining us?”

“He wanted to come, but I think he’s wrestling with a bit of agoraphobia,” I said, attempting to obfuscate my answer.

“What-aphobia?” Woody asked.

“Let’s just say he’s really uncomfortable about flying to England right now.”

Both of us knew the trip wouldn’t be complete without him, but I didn’t have the strength to relate all I had been through trying to convince Dondi to join our pilgrimage.

I’d had to change the dates for our flights three times after Dondi consulted his astrologer. Her skittishness didn’t feel completely crazy, given that two airliners had been flown into the World Trade Center Towers just a few weeks earlier. But after her second cancellation, when I suggested to Dondi that he have his astrologer book our tickets, he bristled and said, “You may think these precautions are funny, but I happen to take them very seriously.”

He was wrong though. They didn’t strike me as funny; I found the discovery that Dondi even had an astrologer to be downright disturbing. But fortunately, the stars eventually aligned and Dondi agreed to surprise Woody by meeting us at Logan International. I expected to be equally surprised if he showed up.

After shuffling through security, Woody and I settled at a table near the British Airways terminal. I saw no sign of Dondi.

Perhaps the pressure of the trip had triggered a new round of his frequent migraines…or his astrologer lady had detected a shift in the cosmos.

Scanning the concourse, I noticed a figure in a navy turtleneck sweater, khakis, English brogue-style boots, and a dark chocolate leather flight jacket window-shopping in front of the Burberry store. A casual observer would notice nothing amiss. But to the eye of a friend of forty years, the man was working awfully hard at appearing composed.

“How long do you think it took that guy over there to pick out his travel outfit?” I asked Woody.

Woody stared in the direction of my gaze, then stood up and waved. “I thought you said he wasn’t coming.”

The man locked in on Woody’s gesture, sagged in relief and strode toward us. Woody opened his arms.

After a long embrace, Woody leaned back, still clasping Dondi’s arms and smiled up at his old friend. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m catching a flight to ah, Greece,” Dondi said.

Woody laughed, nodded his head my way, and said, “Lucas told me you had some disease or something that keeps you from leaving home.” Dondi looked at me and raised one eyebrow — a trick he always did for laughs when we were kids.

I shrugged and said, “Agoraphobia,” as if that clarified anything.

“That’s it, Viagra-phobia,” Woody said. “Fear of needing Viagra.”

Stifling a laugh, Dondi snorted. “Well, I’m here.”

Within the hour, we boarded the plane and were surrounded by accents just like Malcolm’s. Woody knelt backwards on his seat, explaining our adventure to the older couple behind us.

“What a wonderful story. Your friend is going to be chuffed to bits,” I heard the woman tell Woody.

When he turned back around, Woody leaned over and whispered to me, “I hope Malcolm still speaks American, because I can’t understand a damn thing these Brits are saying.”

“What do you remember most about him?” I asked.

“What I remember most about Malcolm was Aunt Bea,” Woody said.

“Who was Aunt Bea?” I asked.

“I don’t know. At the time I thought she was Malcolm’s Aunt or maybe even mine. But she wasn’t either. She fed us peanut butter sandwiches after school.”

“What about you?” Woody asked. “What do you remember about him?”

I doubted I could properly articulate my belief that viewing our small-town existence through Malcolm’s eyes had somehow reeled us back from the abyss of young adulthood, allowing us to revel a bit longer in the fantasyland of boyhood.

“What I remember most about Malcolm was how he gave us an appreciation for all the things we had probably stopped noticing,” I said.

“Like what?” Dondi asked, sounding skeptical.

“I think Malcolm loved all the romance in American history and culture because it was all fresh to him — like the way we loved Davy Crockett when we were younger.”

“I still love Davy Crockett,” Woody admitted.

“Think about it,” I said. “Wasn’t it Malcolm who spotted that bluff overlooking the Cayadutta and convinced us that Indians had to have lived up there?”

“That’s where Malcolm insisted we become blood brothers,” Dondi remembered.

“Blood Brothers of the Cayadutta,” Woody added.

“We took a blood oath to have each other’s back forever,” I said.

With that, we fastened our seatbelts and rode an adrenaline high across the Atlantic, sharing stories from when we were last all together as kids. The plane was our time capsule, leaving contrails of toxic leather mills, leukemia, astrological curses, migraine headaches, and anti-anxiety medications hanging in the skies behind us as we hurtled ahead through the pure black air toward dawn.