The Dangerous Animals Club

by Stephen Tobolowsky

  Janet looked at me and said, “Don’t kid yourself, Stephen. A divorce isn’t easy. We were married. Twelve years. Twelve years of being with the man who was going to take care of me and love me for the rest of my life, the man who was going to be the father of my children. Now the clock is ticking and I have no children and he ran off with his secretary. His secretary. He didn’t just cheat on me. He stole my life.”

  Well, this was going well. Three minutes into dinner and I was on my second glass of wine. Janet was a delight. I hoped Jeff had checked her for weapons at the door. We finished dinner. Jeff announced we were all going out dancing. Dancing? I mentioned that he said we were going to listen to music. He said what do you think they play when people dance? It’s called music. Jeff said he would drive over to the club. We could follow. Janet added she was going to take her own car, in case she wanted to “leave early.”

  At the club, Janet disappeared into the ladies’ room. She came out five minutes later with a new look. She had let her hair down and was wearing a different bra. I knew she had changed bras because it was a different color. She revealed it by unbuttoning a couple of more buttons, letting the world know she was available to anyone—except me.

  The music started. Jeff and his girlfriend and Janet vanished into the pulsing throng of miserable humanity. That was the last time that evening I saw them. Maybe Janet had to get back to the store window before midnight, I don’t know. I sat at the table, alone, drinking more wine while being driven into the ground by the sledgehammer of mediocre eurotrash dance music. The air was thick with the mix of a hundred different perfumes and human pheromones. I finished my drink and left. Outside, the night air was cold. The moon was beautiful. I felt better. Until I got to my car. I had been robbed. Someone smashed my windows and stole my radio.

  I drove home in silence. The cold wind chilled me, but there was nothing I could do about it but enjoy the cold. Then it hit me. That was it. That was the satori: Yes, I had things taken from me. Yes, I was sad and sick from the loss. But I still had the choice to enjoy the cold.

  Thereafter I started a new regimen to heal my heart. It was a program that didn’t involve intoxication or psychiatry. Life was short enough without the fifty-minute hour at the therapist’s office. I came up with a program on my own.

  I decided to invest my time pursuing what I loved instead of what I feared. I started taking piano lessons again. I picked out a type of music I had never listened to, and I gave it a try. It happened to be modern, atonal music. Something I never imagined I would care for. I went to concerts of Steve Reich and Ligeti in warehouses and at community colleges. It was quite wonderful in its own weird way.

  I started to focus on getting healthy. I went to the gym. I took walks. I went to art museums to be inspired by beauty.

  And it started to work. I left the city whenever I could to be in nature. It’s amazing how comforting the simple things were—like trees, or a mountain, or snow. When I turned my attention from my own pain to look at the amazing world around me, I started feeling better. I was rediscovering the miracle of my own life.

  It happened that one day, simple sunshine gave me comfort. I was genuinely happy again. But don’t be deceived. I never got over my broken heart. Now almost three decades later, I’m still not over it completely, but maybe that’s a good thing. What good is a journey if you can’t remember where you’ve been?

  24.

  THE LIGHT OF THE FIRST DAY

  WHEN MY SON William was four he asked me what’s the difference between a person and a cat. I told him blue jeans and a license to drive. That’s an oversimplification, I know. There are other differences. Climbing the drapes. Drinking out of the toilet. But taking a true sounding of the depth of his question, I think William was trying to ask what separates mankind from the rest of the animals.

  I thought about it carefully. I have considered lots of different answers over the years. There is the classic: man is the only animal that uses language.

  I wasn’t sure about that one anymore after listening to a mockingbird outside our house imitating everything in the neighborhood—including a car alarm. I read in the bird book a mockingbird does this for two reasons: to secure its territory and for mating. Tough talk and sweet talk. That is a pretty good working definition of language, as far as I could figure out.

  I read an article about an experiment in North Carolina with baby birds. They put a nest of hatchlings in a soundproof room to see if they could still sing. And they couldn’t. Apparently their song had to be learned. This finding was further corroborated when the baby birds were released and finally learned they had a melody.

  Another answer I could have given William was that man is the only animal that creates tools. This is different than monkeys finding sticks to eat termites. Man can invent air conditioning if he lives in a place that’s too hot or build winter homes in Florida if he lives in a place that’s too cold. Not only can man make different tools, he can build machines to make the tools for him.

  In the end I backed away from those definitions and just told William that man was the only animal that asks why he’s different from other animals. That answer has worked so far.

  Last summer I visited friends in Maine. To get the cheap fares we had to buy the plane tickets way in advance and ended up vacationing during the end of a hurricane. We sat inside the kitchen sipping coffee while half of the state remained without electricity. My friend mentioned how astonishing the rain had been. She said that the power of the wind had uprooted trees and flooded some communities. “It was amazing,” she said.

  And then William’s question came back to me. I had a new answer. What separates man from all of the animals is our ability to be inspired. You could argue that my cats are inspired by food, sleep, and occasionally toes under the covers. Humans can be inspired by anything. And that inspiration is boundless. Inspiration can take the ocean and turn it into a poem. It can take the life of a man and turn it into a philosophy. It can take the wind of a hurricane and turn it into entertainment on the news channels, a charity for those who had lost their homes, or just a sense of awe while sipping coffee in a kitchen.

  Inspiration is only half of the equation of what makes man unique. It is the invisible half. Its visual counterpart is creativity. The two go together. All humans have the potential to feel inspiration and to react creatively. But like the baby birds in North Carolina, we only learn it when we’re released into the world.

  I remember with fondness one of my first bursts of creativity. I was in fifth grade and Mrs. Middleton, our teacher, had assigned a report on the new state of Alaska.

  I was still on the fence about Alaska. I was excited about the idea that the United States could just keep growing by adding new states, but I wasn’t excited if it meant that I would have to do more homework writing papers about them.

  I decided I would give Alaska a chance and commit myself to the report. The report was not so much the creative part of the project. Back then it was not uncommon to copy your reports directly from the World Book Encyclopedia. The students who did the best were not so much good writers as good scribes with the patience to copy paragraph after paragraph from the World Book.

  The year before we did reports on Kansas. Our fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Norton, asked us to read our papers out loud. The first three students got up and read identical reports. By the time the third student got up and read about the brave man who survived the tornado in Wichita, the entire class could recite by heart how he was “carried for a half a mile and put down safely in the middle of a cornfield.”

  I was not a particularly good student in grammar school. I never had the patience to copy my reports from the World Book. Usually, I just made them up.

  I was especially proud of my fourth-grade report on Texas pioneer Moses Austin. I didn’t feel the need to crack a reference book at all. I just made up his life story out of whole cloth. I had to read this report in front of our school on parent-teacher day.

/>   I based my paper about his life on my family and some of my favorite episodes of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. I said that Moses Austin was born outside of Scranton. Just like my mother. His family was poor but he loved to read. Just like my mother. Like Davy Crockett, he wanted to head south for Texas. Eventually, Moses Austin led two hundred settlers from the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area to Texas. Who knows, maybe he did. But while I was reading the report at the assembly, I felt like the part of the story with the settlers needed more oomph. On the spot I extemporized that Moses Austin led ten thousand settlers from Scranton to Texas. Thank God I didn’t have a chance for another rewrite, or he might have ended up like a different Moses altogether. Let my people go—to Waxahachie.

  In the car on the way home, Mom asked me where I got my information on Moses Austin. Keep in mind this was around 1960. There was no Internet. There were no computers. We didn’t even have computers in our science fiction movies. There were only three channels on television, four if you count the one that showed The Three Stooges and cartoons. I was stuck.

  “I think some man told me,” I said innocently. Mom looked over at me and said, “Do you know what man?” I said, “I’m not really sure.” Mom looked straight ahead at the road and gently suggested, “In the future, Stepidoors, before you do a report, you always should know who the man is that tells you things.”

  I told Mom next time I would use an encyclopedia.

  When Mrs. Middleton assigned the Alaska report it was my chance to redeem myself. Like so many others, I was inspired not by achievement, but by atonement. I would use the World Book just like all of the girls in my class who got Ones on their report card. In Texas at that time, the prevailing grade scale was One to Four. One for very good. Four for absolute failure.

  I got home and pulled out the World Book marked A. I turned to “Alaska” and started writing. I copied paragraphs on Alaska’s population, noting population density of several key cities. I copied the paragraph on the location of Alaska’s mineral deposits. The fire of plagiarism burned brightly. It was wonderful. I had never written this well in my life. I kept copying. In the end, I had a fifty-five page report. It was massive. This report was much more extensive than the ones on Kansas the girls copied last year. I had trouble putting it in one of the standard-sized folders we bought at Skillern’s Drug Store.

  I wrestled my report into a yellow folder and bent down the brads. This was my way of saying “Done,” as it was hard to unbend the brads, add pages, and bend them again. I placed the finished work on the center of my desk and stood back to admire it. It was truly an achievement. I still wasn’t exactly sure who the man was who told me what to write, but I knew World Book knew, and that was good enough for me.

  But as I stared at the tome I felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction. It didn’t have a real cover, a title, and introduction that announced, “This is a monumental work.” I didn’t want to just freehand the title with my name as I usually did. This report was special. It required a stencil.

  I carefully measured the front of my folder. I used pencil to sketch out the block letters “ALASKA.” I stood back and looked at the penciled lettering and thought I was ready for phase two: Magic Marker. Back then Magic Markers were not something everyone had access to. They didn’t come in a twenty-pack in a variety of colors at the Office Depot. They only came in black. And only the teachers or occasionally truly exceptional students like Claire Richards were allowed to use them. And then, only with the windows opened because of the fumes. I begged Mom to get me a Magic Marker for my report. She looked at me and without saying a word stopped our family’s dinner preparations and made a special trip to Skillern’s. When I heard her car driving into the garage, I ran into the kitchen. She handed me a small bag. I looked inside. Could it be possible? A Magic Marker of my own.

  I ran to my room. I closed my door for privacy. I opened my windows so I wouldn’t be asphyxiated and removed the top of the marker. I held my breath and started to fill in the stencil very carefully. You couldn’t make a mistake with Magic Markers. When I finished I stood back. There was my yellow folder with black, block capital letters: ALASKA. But there was still something wrong. The word looked so unattached and barren on the cover. It needed more. I grabbed my stencil and checked it out. Yes! There were lowercase letters as well.

  I went to work with my pencil and then with the Magic Marker. Mom was calling me into dinner. I yelled that I was almost done. I stood back and saw the results of my labor. The report now said: ALASKA—the 49th state.

  I went to eat dinner. When our family moved into our house when I was four, Mom and Dad hired a handyman to open up a portal from the kitchen to the den. This way we could watch television at dinnertime and not have to speak to one another. But tonight I was not interested in Steve McQueen or Johnny Yuma, the Rebel. I was ruminating on my report. The cover was still wrong. I got an idea. It was bold. It was a type of inspiration I had never had before. A great report required a great cover. Words alone could not tell a story as big as Alaska. I needed art.

  After dinner, I copied the outline of a map of Alaska from the encyclopedia onto tracing paper. I transferred it to the cover of my report. I outlined the state in Magic Marker and then used colored pencils to draw in mountains and forests. Looking back, here is probably where the train first came off the tracks.

  I used my “Moses Austin approach” as to where I thought mountains and forests were. I just drew them in where it seemed like they should be. I mixed it together with random patches of yellow to signify ice. The results were disastrous. My picture was unrecognizable. Because Alaska is not symmetrical it looked as though I had drawn a liver on the front of my report.

  I panicked. To indicate what the map was supposed to be, I drew a picture of a ptarmigan on the cover, Alaska’s state bird. The bird didn’t help. Through the unfortunate mixing of metaphors, the bird was way too big beside the mountains. It looked like Rodan, the giant pteranodon from the Japanese monster movies, was flying over Fairbanks.

  I needed something on the other side of the cover for balance. I decided to freehand a picture of William Seward, who purchased Alaska in 1867. I was not a good artist so I just made sure he had a jaw and eyes. I covered the rest in hair and put him in a black suit. Since he was unrecognizable as a human being, I had to write “William Seward” under his picture. For balance, I had to write “Ptarmigan” under the bird.

  I stood back to view what I had done. The cover of my once-great report looked like a vegetarian pizza. I figured I was in for a penny in for a pound, so I finished the cover by writing “Alaska” under the map of Alaska I had drawn.

  I went to show my brother, Paul, who was busy doing his homework. I asked him what he thought of the cover. He looked it over, looked at me, and said, “Stevie, you have a lot going on here. Maybe it would be better if it were a little less.”

  I was embarrassed. He was right. There was no excuse. My brother told me in arithmetic that anything multiplied by zero is still zero. My Alaska report would always be a zero even if I had the best cover in the world. I had spent most of the night foolishly trying to decorate the void. It was too late now to get another folder.

  I sat in class the next day with the yellow folder on my desk hidden under my textbook. I decided to show it to Claire Richards who sat in front of me. She looked at it and politely raised her eyebrows and nodded and said, “It’s big.” Mrs. Middleton called for the reports. We handed them forward. My cheeks burned as I watched the folders go to Mrs. Middleton. She casually looked through them and stopped at mine. She looked at the cover. Then she turned it sideways and looked at it a second time. Mrs. Middleton noted its heft in her hands. She looked over at me—and smiled.

  I don’t remember much about Alaska but that day I did learn why grown-ups were the only ones who handled the Magic Markers. They were aware of the dangers of a permanent mistake.

  A week later I got my report back. I opened my folder. I got a One. Mrs. Mi
ddleton wrote: “Good work, Stephen.” That is when I learned my second lesson: redemption isn’t always based on merit.

  THERE WAS A third lesson in my misguided Alaska project. Creativity is not the same as beauty. The process is different from the result. It can be messy. Ask any obstetrician.

  When we listen to the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony we hear the pure sounds of what could be the beginning of time and space. We hear vastness and majesty, fear and beauty. However, we almost never connect the rapture of “Ode to Joy” with the fact that Beethoven was a pathological slob. From looking at letters written by his contemporaries, he was a candidate for a segment of Hoarders. He was lucky in that he had some money so whenever one of his residences got overwhelmed with trash he just moved into another one. During the course of his life in Bonn, Germany, Beethoven left a string of deserted apartments filled with uneaten food, stacks of music manuscript paper, spilled ink, melted candles, dirty clothes, and abused pianos.

  The mangled pianos were not because of his temper. It was not because of any lack of care he had toward the instrument he helped to define. It was part of the mess of creation. Because he was deaf, Beethoven had to come up with unique methods of composing. By the looks of many of his abandoned pianos, his “go-to” technique was to bite into the wood above the keyboard so he could feel the vibrations of the notes through his skull. Occasionally, he would remove the legs from his piano and place the keybed on the floor. That way he could lie on his stomach and feel what he was writing through his body.

  I’m not saying that you have to chew on your pianos to be a genius or be a hoarder to be Tennessee Williams. That’s how art gets a terrible reputation—by people affecting the appearance of creativity without delivering the product of it. Creativity is sneaky. It rarely comes in the package we envision.