The Dangerous Animals Club

by Stephen Tobolowsky

  I guess the most famous story of creativity is the beginning of Genesis. Everyone knows that one. It’s the story of how God created the world in six days and took the seventh day off. It was one of the first stories I learned when I went to Sunday school.

  When I was little, I imagined that when God said, “Let there be light!” the sun was created. I never thought about it much after that. Until a few years ago. In Hebrew class we were slogging our way through the first chapters of the Bible and I realized something that anyone who knows the Bible already knows. When “Let there be light” is pronounced, God is not referring to the creation of the sun, moon, or stars. They were created on the fourth day. So what was the light created on day one?

  The answer is not apparent. It is as hard to grasp as the scientific questions relating to the first moments of the young universe. It is as perplexing as what existed before the Big Bang. The question of the light of the first day has been the subject of commentaries, poetry, and is a cornerstone of a branch of Jewish mysticism called the Kabbalah.

  The Kabbalah was born from a different sort of battle between religion and science. In the Middle Ages, just about every discipline was based on Aristotle’s teachings from almost a thousand years earlier in about 350 BC. Aristotle shaped many of the ideas of the Western world for two reasons. First, he was Alexander the Great’s teacher. Everywhere Alexander conquered was exposed to Aristotle. His teachings were everywhere. He was the ancient version of the Internet. Second, Aristotle was smart. At a time when most people knew nothing, Aristotle appeared to understand everything. Entire nations deferred to him on subjects from plants and animals to physics and religion.

  Ancient scholars used his methods of examination to parse every idea. Back in the twelfth century, a great Jewish writer and philosopher, Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon, or Maimonides for short, felt that he could use Aristotelian reasoning to explain all the truths of the Torah.

  Another group of rabbis thought this approach to religion was destructive. If you could explain everything in the Bible as a set of easy-to-grasp, sciencelike facts, there would be no mystery. Spiritual truth is like a first date. It works best by candlelight. Shadows are an important part of beauty. They came up with a set of writings called the Zohar. The Zohar reaffirmed the questions of the Bible instead of trying to find answers.

  The Zohar tells the story of the light of the first day in mystical terms so ineffable, perhaps it could only be understood by Stephen Hawking. It describes the moment of creation as “a blinding spark of darkness.” The initial burst of the creative was so overwhelming it could not be seen.

  “Out of chaos He formed substance, making what is not into what is. He has hewed enormous pillars out of ether that cannot be grasped.” Rabbi Eleazer’s description of the light of the first day of “making what is not into what is” could also be a perfect description of any play I have worked on. It describes the process of making a film or television show and more. It could be a good working definition of all creative efforts.

  The singular most creative moment of my life happened when I least expected it. It wasn’t my opening night on Broadway. It wasn’t running to meet Bill Murray the first day we were shooting Groundhog Day. It had nothing to do with my career.

  I was twenty-four. I was living in Dallas with Beth. It was late afternoon and she had sent me to the grocery store to buy the fixings for dinner. I bought chicken breasts, Italian Swiss Colony wine, and some mangoes. Mangoes were a new fruit back then. People didn’t quite know what to do with them. I had no idea how to tell if a mango was ripe. As I held it in my hand and started shaking it to see if it rattled or sloshed, an older man wearing blue jeans and a black short-sleeved shirt came up to me and put his hand on the front of my cart. That was odd. I grew up believing that someone else’s grocery cart was sacrosanct. It’s like someone else’s belt. You don’t touch it except by invitation.

  He looked into my cart and admired my cargo. “I see you have mangoes,” he said. I tried to press onward but he wouldn’t move from in front of my cart. He looked at me steadily and said, “Mangoes are from South America. I have always thought of them as the most exotic of fruits.” With that he started to cry. I thought, this is not good. I knew that there could be hundreds of good reasons to cry on any given day but mangoes would never be one of them. I figured he was senile and maybe would go away if I gave him a mango. I reached down into the cart. That’s when I saw that he was holding a .45-caliber handgun behind his back.

  In a single moment my brain and heart and soul went blank. I knew I was dead.

  I stood up with the mango in my hands. He looked into my eyes. He must have seen the emptiness. In my expression of nothing, he knew I knew. He whipped the .45 around and put it in the middle of my forehead. With tears running down his face, he spoke to me with a strange mixture of grief, self-pity, and satanic possession. The man sobbed and said, “I don’t know why I picked you today, I don’t know why. I contracted brucellosis, a cattle disease in South America. It leads to suicide—or homicide.”

  Just my luck. Today it had to be homicide.

  I looked beyond him. For the first time I noticed that the entire store was empty! Empty! I must have been too busy shaking the damn mangoes to have noticed the mass exodus when the crazy guy with the gun came in.

  I was scared. He pressed the .45 harder into my forehead and then, remarkably, I thought of Chad Everett on the television show Medical Center. It was popular back then. There was an episode where he had to deal with a similar situation. The advice he gave on TV was “to keep the gunman talking.” I didn’t know how to do that. So I started talking. What followed was pure creation.

  I told him how he reminded me of my father (which he didn’t), and then, I launched into several loosely related monologues I remembered from the television show. There were a lot of father-son conflicts between brash young Chad Everett and his dad, the head surgeon, James Daly. There were a lot of speeches about responsibility, the sanctity of life, and the dangers of infection while visiting a hospital.

  I told my prospective murderer that my dad was a little taller than he was. He was a doctor. I was never smart enough to be a doctor. I thought that disappointed him. In fact, I was always a disappointment. It seemed like nothing I ever did was good enough for him, nothing I ever wanted was right enough for him. He saw me as a nothing, a loser. I almost summoned up tears as I said all I ever wanted was for my dad to love me. But we always fought. I just wanted to sit down with him for once and tell him what he meant to me and how I looked up to him.

  I was talking faster than a horserace announcer on Mexican TV. I plunged from one monologue into another. The man still had the gun pressed into my forehead.

  I kept talking. I asked him why love had to be so hard. Why couldn’t a father and a son sit down at the table and just say, “You’re fine the way you are, and I love you.”

  What made the surreal so real was that while I was telling the amazing and quite fabricated story of my father, I was looking out the big front window of the store. Outside in the parking lot I saw police running back and forth, crouching down, carrying rifles and wearing bulletproof vests. I saw a television news truck in the parking lot with the back of a newscaster doing a report live from the scene. I heard a helicopter bearing down from above. An ambulance pulled up. The back doors flew open and paramedics unloaded a stretcher and a body bag. And while I was talking, I was thinking, “Hey, stretcher. Body bag. One of them is for him. One of them is for me. I wonder which it will be?”

  After forty-five minutes of nonstop blather, I felt the adrenaline start to wear off. I knew I was in trouble. He still had the gun on me. In this situation flop sweat could be fatal. I heard a voice in my head say, “Stephen. It’s time to do something else.” So I did. Escape seemed impossible so I did the only thing I could think to do in the moment. I invited the man over for dinner.

  I recognize that this was not a particularly good plan. I said, “Excuse me, do you
know what time it is? I have to get back and start dinner. Hey, are you doing anything now? I mean, we’re having a good discussion, we’re getting all of these things worked out. Why don’t you come over? We’ll have some chicken, drink a glass of wine, eat the mangoes. Let me give you my address.” I realized I didn’t have a pen or paper. “Do you have a pen on you?” I asked.

  In what would be unbelievable in a movie, the man, still holding the gun to my forehead, reached for a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket. He handed it to me. I took the pen. I tore off a bit of the brown paper bag that held the mangoes and started to write. Unfortunately, I was so tired and so scared that I wrote down my real address. I handed it to him.

  Out of the whole ordeal I remember the next moment being the scariest. After I gave him my address, I told him I had to go and get the chicken in the oven. I pushed my cart past him. He stepped aside and then I felt him stick the gun into the back of my head. The voice inside me said, “Don’t turn around, don’t turn around, whatever you do, don’t turn around.” I didn’t. I kept walking. Eyes front. I had no idea what would happen next.

  I didn’t know it but a SWAT team had sneaked into the back of the store a half an hour before, sometime during my Medical Center monologues. They crept down the aisles adjacent to us and had positioned their rifles at us through the food the whole time. Ahead of me there was a display of Pepsi at the end of the aisle. The voice in my head kept telling me, “Get around the Pepsi. Get around the Pepsi and you can run.”

  I didn’t have to. As I rounded the corner, the SWAT team jumped over the huge shelves of food and tackled my potential dinner guest. They had him hog-tied in eight seconds. He had ties on his ankles, knees, arms, and hands. They carried him out of the store on their shoulders like he was a roll of carpet.

  I walked with my shopping cart in the deserted store to the deserted check out counter and waited patiently with my wallet in my hand. A policeman walked up to me and said, “Hey, buddy. You can just go.” I left.

  I got home. Beth said, “Well, where were you?”

  I said, “I was just held hostage at gunpoint.”

  She said, “Well, it took a long time.”

  “I know. I know. It does. The hostage thing takes time. I’m starving.”

  That night we ate our chicken and mangoes, and I will always remember that day as the only time I left a store without paying for my groceries.

  As time has passed from that day so long ago, I realize it was important for another reason. Like my mother said in the car after I gave my report on Moses Austin, “You always should know who the man is that tells you things.” Even though I never saw him, I think he was in the store with me that evening. I think he whispered advice to me and reminded me about Chad Everett. And somewhere between the mangoes and an invitation to dinner, in a blinding flash of darkness, he told me the light I was looking for was somewhere beyond the Pepsi.

  25.

  IT’S NOT MY DOG

  I THINK IT’S safe to say that animals didn’t fare too well in our neighborhood during my childhood, which spanned from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s. They had a lot to deal with. There were no leash laws, so dogs were constantly run over. Everyone owned a gun, so dogs and cats were frequently shot. Some of my neighbors owned multiple animals, so there was animal-on-animal violence. Some of the local animals were victims of all three scenarios, like Charlie Harp’s dog, Kookie.

  Kookie lived across the alley. He was a Chihuahua mix that over the course of a year was shot, run over by a pickup truck, and kicked by a horse—leaving him with three legs and one eye. In the best of times, Kookie was an irritating dog. He always yapped whenever you got in or out of your car. But his string of injuries and his ridiculously slow demise by subtraction demoralized everyone in our family, especially Mom. She would stare out the patio window and watch him hobble around yapping and attempting to chase cars driving down our alley. She would shake her head and look at me. I would never be able to tell if she was going to laugh or cry, and she would just utter one word, “Terrible.” There was a particularly painful period when Charlie’s family got a rooster for some reason. The rooster would chase Kookie around the backyard and peck his rear end.

  But as bad as that was, there was a worse scene down the block. A couple of houses from us lived the Dodges. Mr. Dodge was a full-blooded Indian who performed in movies, in Westerns. He could ride a horse at full speed and shoot a bow and arrow. If you are a fan of the Western, you are familiar with the work of Mr. Dodge. His daughters Debbie and Donna were also talented. They sang and danced and did a hobo act. There was talk that they were going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  However, their coexistence with the animal kingdom was misguided. They acquired a dog, a duck, and a horse. Kept together in their small backyard, these three animals created an ecological nightmare. The horse ate every blade of grass and every leaf on their tree, turning the yard into a moonscape. The duck sat on the horse’s back to avoid the dog. The dog barked at the duck, constantly. It became a real-world textbook of the Catastrophe Theory, which states that order can be maintained only to a certain point of stress. Then all bets are off.

  The rubber band snapped one rainy day after school. The horse was shot by a passing motorist, thus enabling the dog to eat the duck. White feathers covered the yard. It was like a deleted scene from Saw III. Police investigated but to no avail. It was a drive-by.

  On top of all this brutality, Billy Hart and I formed the Dangerous Animals Club and made regular forays into the woods with jelly jars, broomsticks, and chemicals to bring the animal kingdom to its knees. In the end, the animal kingdom won, but you can still make a case that it was a dangerous time to be an animal in our part of the world.

  But despite this climate of abuse, I developed a strong attachment to animals. Perhaps too strong. When I was five, I went to preschool at a place called Story Book Playhouse. One morning our teacher called Mom up and told her she had to come to the school and talk to me for disciplinary reasons. I was not participating in the tap-dance part of the class because I claimed I had turned into a rabbit and rabbits don’t dance.

  The teacher told me I had to join the others. I recall sitting on the bench in a catlike pose, resting on my knees and elbows and squinching my nose. She told me once again I could join the others or be punished. I told her I couldn’t understand her because she spoke English and rabbits can’t talk.

  When Mom arrived, I was hopping around. I had further transformed by pulling out a long grocery receipt that I took from the car and kept in my pocket. I started eating it. The teacher confronted Mom and started talking in low, urgent tones. Occasionally, the teacher would point in my direction and Mom would look at me with a concerned expression on her face as she saw me hopping around. I only heard the mumbled words “rabbit,” “not listening,” and “sassing me.”

  I knew even at the age of five that the only offense that had any traction was “sassing.” “Sassing” was such a gray area. It was only defined by the grown-up who heard it. “Sassing” could or could not be a hanging offense, depending on Dad’s mood after work.

  Mom nodded to the teacher and walked over and sat down with me. She asked why I wasn’t listening. I told her that I was a rabbit and couldn’t tap-dance. Mom said whether I danced or not I shouldn’t eat the grocery receipts from the A&P. The ink was bad for me. I told her the ink was the best part. Mom shook her head and told me that rabbits don’t eat paper, goats do. If I kept it up I could turn into a goat. I looked at Mom with fear that I had begun yet another unexpected transformation. I liked being a rabbit.

  I began to dream about rabbits. I imagined I was walking in the woods and I came upon two lost bunnies. I told them that I had a home hidden in the trunk of a tree. I took them there. I opened a secret door and brought the rabbits inside. I gave them a bowl of water and a plate of fried chicken. The rabbits thanked me for my kindness and then started gnawing on the drumsticks.

  I have never been able
to explain the rabbit period of my life. I have often heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I’m not sure I have ever bought that. I believe imitation may be the sincerest form of regret.

  A lot of the ways we live and react come from seeds planted in childhood. This idea is not new. It’s an idea that’s in just about every country-western song. Country music is the final repository of a good idea before civilization drops it. It’s why a good country song can always make you cry. It reminds you of something you never should have forgotten.

  But the seeds that are planted in us as children are amoral. It is our free will that gives them meaning. For example, the animals in our neighborhood. The seeds of neglect and cruelty were planted in me. But it was my choice as to whether they became the ideas I would embrace or reject. These seeds, like the tides, work powerfully but often invisibly, waiting for someone or something to bring them full force into our lives. One of those tides turned for me in 1983.

  Beth and I got back from a camping trip to Havasu Falls, an offshoot of the Grand Canyon. We were gone for about a week and were exhausted. We had never camped before and had to buy a tent, sleeping bags, air mattresses, canteens, camping utensils, backpacks, and flashlights. Basically we paid about $1,500 a night to sleep on the ground, but we weren’t eaten by bears so I guess we broke even. We had a friend watch our house for a couple of the days we were gone.

  We returned late in the afternoon, tired, dirty, and in need of a bath. We dumped our backpacks in the living room, opened the doors and windows, happy to be home. The only thing that marred our return was what appeared to be a dead dog in the backyard. Besides the awfulness of seeing the body, it was a mystery as to how the dog got there, as the yard was enclosed.