by Mike Rowe
Was he depressed? Or just depressing to be around? Whatever the case, he retreated into himself once again—and his reluctant bandmates had no choice but to replace him.
Sometimes, when you hit what feels like the bottom, it’s not enough to simply start over. Sometimes you need to go in a completely different direction. So Jason did something most aspiring rock stars don’t do: He cut his hair. He lost the nose ring. He enlisted in the army and applied for a fast-track program into Ranger School.
Not only did Jason get in—he excelled.
From Fort Benning, Georgia, it was off to Fort Lewis, Washington—not far from where he had blown up that innocent toilet ten years earlier. There he completed his Ranger training and got a round-trip ticket to Latin America, where he fought in a number of covert drug wars. Then it was off to Asia to fight piracy on the high seas.
Jason served with distinction but he wanted more. At twenty-six, he applied for the Special Forces and got in, completing his final phase of training on September 11, 2001. In no time, he was up to his neck in the world’s most dangerous places. In Afghanistan, he smelled the poppy fields of Kandahar, came face-to-face with suicide bombers, and learned the local language. He helicoptered in for midnight raids and fought on horseback. In Iraq, he fired grenades from a Humvee in front of the front line of America’s biggest conventional military operation since World War II.
Jason was back on the stage now—the world stage—playing with a very different kind of band: a band of brothers.
You won’t get the details from Jason. Most of what he did is still classified. But the medals and photos covering the wall in the cabin he calls home today are both numerous and hard to discount. The coveted Combat Infantryman Badge sits next to a photo of Jason with Donald Rumsfeld and General Stanley McChrystal. You might say that in blowing things up, he finally found a career he couldn’t destroy. And by hitting the reset button when he did, he did something rather extraordinary.
Because while Jason is certainly not the only musician to sabotage his own career, he might be the only one to do so in such spectacular, incomparable fashion. If you thought that Pete Best blew his chance with the Beatles, consider this: the first band Jason bungled sold 30 million records in a single year—the year after he got himself fired.
Thirty million.
And the second band? Don’t even get me started on the second band, which outlasted the first one.
Ultimately, Jason Everman, the guitar player everyone wanted, missed out on more than 100 million albums sold—and many, many millions of dollars. What he wound up with was a hell of a story. The story of a guy who washed out of Nirvana and Soundgarden, but still went on to become… an American rock star.
* * *
Back when Jason was dressed in camouflage, shooting Taliban, I was dressed in wrinkle-free rayon, shooting infomercials. But I did wear a uniform once: olive green regalia with short pants, knee socks, and a long sash festooned with a few dozen merit badges. It was during my time in that uniform that I, too, lit a fuse. Like Jason, I came close to blowing up my own future.
In 1976, my scoutmaster was a retired army colonel who treated the boys in his troop—Troop 16—like recruits. His recruits. Mr. Huntington divided us into five separate “patrols” and put me in charge of one called “The Trailblazers.” Patrol leaders reported to the senior patrol leader, who reported to the assistant scoutmaster, who reported to the scoutmaster. That chain of command was designed to teach us respect for authority. A scout is obedient, after all.
Rick Hansen was in my patrol. He was a frail, pale kid cursed with a serious stutter. Not a minor stammer, like the one I had in those days. A full-on, world-class, Porky Pig–style speech impediment. It was so severe that he seldom spoke. But one day in school, during our ninth-grade science class, Ricky surprised us. Our teacher, Mr. Tubbs, asked us if we knew what “Au” stood for on the periodic table of elements. Rick raised his hand—an unprecedented gesture.
“Yes, Ricky? Tell us the answer.”
“Is it guh-guh… guh-guh… guh-guh…?”
It was hard to watch. It was even harder to listen to. I wanted to say it for him—“It’s gold, Ricky, gold!”—but I also wanted him to say it for himself.
He never got a chance to.
“What is ‘guh-guh’?” Mr. Tubbs asked. “Can somebody please tell me what ‘guh-guh’ means?”
The class laughed, Ricky turned red, and I felt a kind of anger I’d never felt before. A righteous anger that made my ears ring and my fists clench. In a roomful of children, Mr. Tubbs himself had behaved like a child. A cruel child. Something had to be done. But what? What was justice for Rick Hansen going to look like?
I had an idea. Later that day, while Mr. Tubbs was sitting alone at his desk, reading Sports Illustrated, I lit the fuse of an M-80 smoke bomb and slid it under his door.
The classroom filled up in seconds with thick yellow smoke—the kind of smoke a pilot could have seen from 5,000 feet. Mr. Tubbs bolted straight out of the classroom, the smoke followed him into the hallway, the entire school was evacuated, and within a few minutes, fire engines arrived. Most of the smoke had dissipated by then, along with most of my anger. At which point my thoughts turned to a more pressing matter: Would I get away with it?
That question was answered almost as soon as Mr. Tubbs got on the school intercom and offered a $20 reward to anyone who could identify “the perpetrator of this heinous act.”
Before an hour had passed, a toady—let’s call him Kevin, since that was his name—had ratted me out. Down at the principal’s office, Mr. Tubbs made his case for my expulsion, a request the principal said he’d consider. In the meantime, I was to be suspended until further notice.
I couldn’t believe I’d done what I’d done. I didn’t know what I would tell my father, who was a public school teacher himself. For a few hours, I pretended that nothing had happened. Walking through Double Rock Park, as I always did after school, I arrived at the Maryland School for the Blind, where I had been working on my Eagle Scout project. It occurred to me as I walked that I might be mentally ill. Seriously, how many aspiring Eagle Scouts get themselves expelled for throwing smoke bombs at their teachers? A scout is helpful, after all. Who exactly had I helped with that act of terrorism?
My dad sensed right away that something was wrong.
“Is there something on your mind, Michael?” he asked as he drove me home later that day.
“Well, Dad,” I said, “I threw a smoke bomb into Mr. Tubbs’s classroom today. The school was evacuated. I’ve been suspended indefinitely.”
My father cocked his head and stared at me in much the same way as a cow might regard a new gate. “Have you lost your mind?” he asked.
“It’s possible,” I said. “I thought of that, too. But I had a good reason.”
My father didn’t speak again until we were parked in front of the house. Then he turned to me and simply asked, “Why?”
“Mr. Tubbs made fun of Rick Hansen’s stutter,” I said.
Dad lit his pipe and told me to go tell my mother. She, too, looked at me incredulously. She congratulated me on ruining my life. Then she told me to go feed the horses.
I didn’t sleep that night, but the next morning Dad drove me to school and somehow made things better. Whatever he said to the principal worked: I got off with a stern warning and a week of detention, which was rescinded when my father pointed out that I worked with the blind after school.
I’d dodged a bullet—no punishment at school and no punishment at home—while Kevin was ostracized for ratting me out. He became known as “Kevin the Fink,” and Ricky Hansen was grateful, even though it took him several minutes to actually articulate his gratitude. There was one more anxious moment afterward: Sounding every bit like the colonel he’d been, Mr. Huntington called me in front of the troop, chewed me out, and told me that I had behaved “precipitously,” with no respect for my future, public safety, or authority.
“Worst o
f all,” he said, “you showed no respect for the uniform!”
Then he winked and told me to get back into line… where I’ve tried to remain ever since.
THE 25-MILLION-DOLLAR KISS
Hedwig was beautiful and married to a man she didn’t love. Fritz was an arms merchant and deeply possessive of his trophy wife.
At their home in Austria, Hedwig was a fly on the wall at more than a few dinner parties, listening quietly as important men discussed with her husband evolving technologies that would change the complexion of modern warfare. Fritz’s guests were intelligent and influential. Some were physicists. Some were inventors. Many were fascists. Many were Nazis.
Hedwig didn’t care for fascists, or Nazis. She didn’t like them in her house or at her table—and she hated the fact that her husband was selling them weapons. And so, as one more dinner party approached, Hedwig selected from her vast wardrobe the most glamorous evening gown that she could find. She adorned herself with every piece of expensive jewelry she owned. She smiled sweetly during the appetizer and listened attentively during the main course. Just before dessert, she went off to powder her nose. She never returned.
The next morning, a stunning woman arrived in Paris by train. After that, it was your basic Hollywood fairy tale: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was “discovered” by the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer. A year later, she was starring opposite Clark Gable. By then, she had a new name to go with her new address in Hollywood. By 1941, she was widely regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world.
In fact, Hedwig was so gorgeous that she was deemed “too beautiful to speak”—and was given very little dialogue on the big screen. Once, when asked to explain the secret of being glamorous, Hedwig said, “That’s easy. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
But Hedwig wasn’t stupid. Far from it. Among other things, she was an amateur inventor—a woman who spent most of her free time at home hunched over her drafting table. Her big idea was a thing she’d been tinkering with in response to the Germans, who were targeting cruise ships in the Atlantic, murdering hundreds of civilians.
Hedwig had read that the Allies were unable to sink German U-boats because the Germans had figured out how to jam the torpedos’ radio frequencies. She recalled a scientist at one of those dinner parties in Vienna. He had been talking to Fritz about the untapped potential of radio waves in the context of modern warfare.
Now Hedwig wondered, “What if a single radio signal could hop randomly from one frequency to another? How would the Nazis block that?”
The question was ingenious, and so was the answer.
She developed the technology, patented it, and offered it to the navy free of charge. But the US military had a hard time believing the most beautiful woman in the world had come up with the solution to a problem that they themselves hadn’t been able to solve. The navy wasn’t interested in her idea. In fact, Hedwig was told that if she really wanted to help the war effort, she would need to use the assets for which she was best known.
Hedwig was disappointed, but she knew that she did have the assets in question, and she was eager to contribute—to help, in any way, to win the war. So, to raise money for war bonds, she began selling kisses. In a single night, she raised $7 million—just by “standing still and looking stupid.” Over time, she raised $25 million. In today’s money, that’s more than $220 million.
If the story had ended right here, it still would have made a good headline: “The most beautiful girl in the world fights off Nazis with kisses!” But Hedwig’s story was far from over. During a very anxious week in 1962, known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, her technology was finally employed—and it worked. Big-time.
Hedwig was given no thanks or acknowledgment. Nor did she ask for any. But let’s be absolutely clear about the enormity of the idea she had patented: Not only did “radio hopping” change the face of national security; it led directly to the development of our modern-day satellite communications system, and a handy bit of technology we know as “Wi-Fi.” Without her invention, I could have never researched her life at 37,000 feet and shared her story with you—the story of a beautiful girl who knew which assets mattered most. A movie star named… Hedy Lamarr.
* * *
I’m twelve years old, sitting in a darkened theater with my eighteen-year-old cousin, who has smuggled me into my first R-rated movie. On the screen, a group of cowboys are huddled around a campfire. They’re finishing their evening meal when one of them farts. I’m not sure how to react, and neither, it seems, are the adults around me. That sort of thing happened in the Boy Scouts all the time, but uninhibited farting on the big screen? It was so unexpected.
Moments after the first fart, another fart follows, and another fart after that. Soon all of the men around the campfire are farting and I’m dying—laughing nervously at first and then so much that it hurts. As the grown-ups around me begin to laugh, too, my mirth escalates ever further. So does my cousin’s. The more the men fart, the harder we laugh—and the men don’t stop farting. Soon tears run down our faces, and I can feel the Junior Mints in my belly threatening a hasty exit. Grown-ups laughing at the sound of other grown-ups farting? This is simply unprecedented.
The movie was Blazing Saddles, and the first time I saw it I laughed through the entire thing. I laughed when Alex Karras punched the horse. I laughed when Cleavon Little asked, “Where all the white women at?” I even laughed at jokes I didn’t get. I very nearly peed myself when Hedley Lamarr, played to perfection by Harvey Korman, became more and more exasperated over people’s tendency to call him “Hedy.”
“It’s Hedley,” he said over and over again. “Not Hedy, Hedley!”
Why is this so funny? I have no idea. It just is. I ask my cousin who Hedy Lamarr is, but he’s laughing too hard to answer. He laughs so hard a snot bubble explodes from his left nostril—and that sends me into another spasm of uncontrollable giggling. Before long, we’re both on our hands and knees, gasping for breath, laughing ourselves sick for reasons we can’t even articulate—and every time that we think we’ve recovered, Harvey Korman says the magic words that set us off again: “Not Hedy, Hedley!”
When I get home, I tell my father about this hysterical character, Hedley Lamarr.
“Not Hedley,” he says. “Hedy.”
“Wait, what? There’s a real person called Hedy Lamarr?”
“Sure,” he says. “Hedy Lamarr is the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Really? Do you have a picture?”
“No,” my mother yells from the kitchen. “Your father doesn’t have a picture of Hedy Lamarr!”
My father turns back to his newspaper, neither confirming nor denying.
“What does she look like?” I ask.
“She looks like your mother,” he says, a little louder than necessary. “Now go split some wood. You’ll feel better.”
Out in the garden, ax in hand, I still have questions. Why don’t I know who the most beautiful girl in the world is? How can I be twelve years old and still be so… uninformed?
Today I’d google her and see for myself. But back then, Hedy’s ingenious invention had not yet led to the development of Wi-Fi. So I had to wait until Monday, when I could avail myself of the services of our county library. There, under a fog of disapproval emanating from the librarian who assisted me, I perused a stack of books about Hollywood starlets from days gone by.
There she was: Hedy Lamarr.
Wow! She was indeed “a looker,” as my grandfather would say. Sure enough, the caption identified Hedy as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” It gave the date and the place of her birth. But there was no mention of anything else, except for lists of the films she’d appeared in and the men she had dated. And so, aside from that random reference in Blazing Saddles, that was the only thing that I’d know about Hedy Lamarr until I did google her, forty-five years later at 37,000 feet. Only then did I learn about the person she really had been—or at least the person the inter
net says she was.
Quick digression: My friend Alex is a wreck of a man but one heck of a writer. He dropped by the other day to see how this book was coming along.
“You tell me,” I said, handing him a stack of pages.
Alex claims to know what he’s doing, and there’s evidence to suggest he might be right. After reading a couple of chapters, he stopped. “If you do this right,” he said, “there’ll come a time when your book starts talking to you. When that happens, you should listen.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Fish don’t fly. Books don’t talk. Then again, maybe they do. So, I’m beginning to wonder if any of these stories are all the way finished. Consider the very first one in the book: the one about Mel Brooks.
When I started it, I wanted to pay tribute to the man who’d made me laugh harder than I’d ever laughed before. With the help of Hedy Lamarr’s invention, I googled him and learned that, once upon a time, the man who wrote, directed, and starred in the funniest movie I’ve ever seen had climbed a utility pole in the Ardennes, hooked up a loudspeaker, and played a song by a Jewish singer to a forest filled with Nazis. That struck me as a story worth sharing. Picture him there, up at the top of that pole. The moon is out. The woods are full of Nazi sharpshooters. And there’s Brooks: he might as well have a bull’s-eye on his back, and he’s doing it all for a joke. That’s brave and brilliant and also dumb. Smart-stupid, like most of his movies. As I pictured the scene, I saw the same sensibility that informed every frame of Blazing Saddles—the movie that led me to Hedy Lamarr. Googling her (thanks to Mel Brooks), I learned that this “most beautiful woman in the world” was also a brilliant inventor. That struck me as a story worth sharing for a number of reasons, chief among them the undeniable fact that I wouldn’t have been able to write these stories without her invention.