by Dick Cavett
Yes, my temple quota had been reached. And exceeded.
I opt to strike off on my own. I can step into nearby China and enjoy being unrecognized. I get the name of a picturesque small town not too far away and am taxied there, past miles of fairly dreary landscape and endless telephone poles.
I’m enjoying that strong, fun sensation you can exult in when in a foreign country: nobody, at this moment, has any idea where I am. Including me.
(The scene shifts now. Chinese restaurant. Interior.)
Now I’m at a restaurant table trying to find a bite or two of edible substance in a bowl of some kind of alleged salad featuring sharp, broken hunks of chicken bone so undercooked that they exude pure raw blood.
The waitress sees my displeasure. She has no English and I waste upon her, “This isn’t food, it’s attempted homicide.”
Departing through the beaded curtain, I flash back to Saturday afternoon serial days, wondering if, behind me, a dark, pigtailed figure will fling a dirk drawn from the back of his collar across the room, expertly implanting it between my shoulder blades.
As I step outside and look around the alien landscape, the thought that was no doubt unconsciously accumulating bursts into consciousness and hits me between the eyes.
I have let my cabdriver go! I don’t know how we got here. There are dozens of roads. I don’t know where the ship is docked! I don’t know the ship’s name. There may be dozens of piers. And dozens of ships, one with my wife on it. And all of them without me. Oh, God!
(Typing and reliving that moment just caused a noticeable increase in pulse rate.)
Have I been fooling you a little up to this point by seeming, perhaps, to be describing a dream? Alas, dear reader, this was stark reality. This bloody well happened. And, worse, not to someone else.
To have no language available to you is an awful thing.
Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine and I can get around Japan with ease. But there is no Japanese in Chinese. And little English in the part of China I had chosen to strand myself in with a ship leaving.
(Oh, and the cell phone, young people, wasn’t yet ubiquitous at the time of this particular adventure. There were a few so-called mobiles around, but they were more the size of a phone booth than a phone.)
And what kind of brains? Really!
Is this the same person who, as someone surprisingly wrote in an article about me, had “the highest IQ of anyone ever to go through Prescott School in Lincoln, Nebraska”? If true, would that person be dumb enough to get himself hopelessly lost in China? And what else might he be dumb enough to do?
We’ll soon find out.
Desperate for communication, and sweating, I clumsily tried to convey my plight to a couple of (other) cabdrivers—when, suddenly, a glimpse of salvation.
There was Larry King.
Three feet away, on a store window TV screen, was Larry, from the good old U.S.A. I was saved. Larry’s live. I’ll call him somehow and he can tell the Chinese where I am and … The irrational brain paused there, and subsided. Temporarily.
Back to the two drivers. Through a combination of clumsy charades and a crude drawing of a ship, hope glimmered. One man said the Chinese equivalent of “Aha!” (That may be exactly what he said. Is it universal?)
Although hope had glimmered earlier as well, when I pulled from my pocket something that might have the ship’s name on it. Yes, it was ship stationery. But the top, with the printing, was torn off.
The gods were toying with me ruthlessly.
But the one driver seemed confident. Some words had been recognized, it seemed. Maybe “cruise ship.” As I hurtled along in his cab, the telephone poles looked familiar. But then, don’t most telephone poles? I saw no land that supported a body of water.
And I had no idea how much time we had. I’ll forgive you for failing to believe that, on top of everything, my watch had stopped. Not that it mattered. It seemed nothing did. Life was pretty much over.
Honestly. The absurdity of it.
I have—or should it be had?—a lovely cabin on a lovely ship on a lovely vacation and I’ve gotten myself lost in an antique land, without a clue about how to get rescued.
What if the ship’s gone? Where do I go? People recognize me almost anywhere, but not here. I think of the line “My face is my passport.” Now, only my passport is my passport. My face has expired.
Whatever “hoping against hope” can possibly mean, that’s what I was doing. But on what evidence? Maybe the driver had totally misunderstood. More telephone poles. He might be speeding me farther inland. To a Chinese rodeo.
And then, wonder of wonders. Coming down a hill, I can see first the tops of some masts ahead. And then—the ship. About half a mile away. And not moving.
An odd quirk occurs in my half-ruined brain. I now see my thoughts in block letters. In that short, blunt, constipated style that the Hemingway typewriter produced so readily:
“It is a ship. It is a good ship. It is a good ship for it is my ship.” (Sorry, Ernie.)
We pulled into a parking lot as close as possible. About twenty yards from dockside. The ship sounded its whistle.
It began to move.
I hurled all the paper money I had at the driver—possibly a year’s salary for him—and ran for it.
The rational brain said not to do anything foolish. Then the irrational one took the controls:
You were a champion gymnast once. You can leap for that railed deck at the back end (stern?).
Thoughts, thick and fast and jumbled. “If I miss and land in the drink surely somebody will—” What? Take off his (or her) shoes and what? And there isn’t anybody.
I don’t want to overdramatize this heroic feat. The ship was not speeding along. It was lumbering. But there’s no getting around the fact that the correct phrase for what I was dealing with would be, let’s face it, a moving ship. I would have preferred stillness.
Channeling Errol Flynn, I took to the air and landed easily enough, hanging there on the outside of the ship’s rail like a kid hooked by his armpits over a baseball field fence.
I scrambled fully aboard. And here’s the sad part. There was not a single witness. No cheering spectators, no videocam, no applauding and adoring females. Nothing.
Now I was to learn what had happened. My wife, napping, had been awakened by an announcement. “We are leaving in ten minutes. Will passenger Cavett please identify himself.” She assumed I had.
Did they also assume so?
I didn’t blame them for not holding everybody up for one fool.
Yet a friend of mine, not unfamiliar with the law, said, “You should have sued them. Knowingly leaving a prominent passenger, or any passenger, stranded and abandoned? No way.”
Hmm. Is it too late?
Advise.
Finally, what can we learn from this, boys and girls?
Two things: (a) don’t ever, ever get lost in foreign lands, and (b) leap for boats only when it’s wise and sensible.
DECEMBER 14, 2012
Acknowledgments
George Kalogerakis, my editor at The New York Times, for invaluable help rendering my offerings into presentable reading form and, when necessary, for keeping me from going over the top. (And on occasion, too far under it.)
Paul Golob, formidable presence at Henry Holt, for his sharp, sharp eye and his skill in shepherding these columns from the digital world onto the printed page.
Lisa Troland, whom I’m urging to get rich writing “How to Be the World’s Greatest Assistant.”
And, lest I forget, my wife, Martha, whose talents and virtues, listed, would fill the rest of this page. (Even in small print.)
Index
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ABC
abstinence
<
br /> Acosta, Mercedes de
actorproof shows
Adnopoz, David
advertising
Apple
Ballantine
Godfrey and
Agnew, Spiro
airport security
air travel
Albee, Edward
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
alcoholism
Ali, Lonnie
Ali, Muhammad
Ali, Veronica
Allen, Fred
Allen, Steve
Allen, Woody
Alvarez, Luis
Alvarez, Walter
American Bandstand (TV show)
American Prince (Curtis)
Amis, Kingsley
ancestors
Andrews, Dana
Andrews, Dickie
Animal Crackers (film)
anti-Semitism
anxiety dreams
Apple computer
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Armstrong, Louis
Arthur Godfrey (Singer)
Assad, Bashar al–
Astaire, Fred
Astor, Nancy
atom bomb
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Automat
aviation
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Bible
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Blue Angel, The (film)
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“Bright College Years” (song)
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Broadway musicals
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first hosts Tonight Show
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Stan Laurel and
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Catholic Church
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Chaplin, Charlie
Chase, David
Cheers (TV show)
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Chesterfield cigarettes
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Chicago Seven
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class reunions
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“closure”
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Colbert, Stephen
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creationism
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
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Crow Indians
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Curatola, Vince
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Davis, Bette
“Dead, The” (Joyce)
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Detroit Metro Airport
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first network
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taping first
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Downs, Hugh
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author vs. viewer of
escape attempts
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madness and
readers on
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driving
drunks and drunkenness
driving and
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Dyson, Freeman
Ecclesiates
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EG (Entertainment Gathering)
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ERPI classroom films
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“Everyone Says I Love You” (song)
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Falco, Edie
Fallon, Jimmy
Fatal Vision (McGinniss)
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Fisher, Eddie
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Fonda, Jane
Fourth of July
Frasier (TV show)
Frazier, Joe
freezing rain
Freud, Sigmund
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Funt, Allen
Furious Love (Kashner and Schoenberger)
Gabin, Jean
Gabor sisters
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Garbo, Greta
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Gilbert, Billy
Gilbert and Sullivan
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t
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Godfrey, Arthur
God of Carnage (Reza)
Goldwater, Barry
Gormé, Eydie
Graham, Sheilah
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Greenway, Dave
Griffin, Merv
Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales (Bader)
Grunwald, Henry
Guinness, Alec
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Kent State shootings
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Kissinger, Henry
Koppel, Ted
Koran burning
Kraft Music Hall (TV show)
Kraft Television Theatre (TV show)
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Ku Klux Klan
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LaGuardia Airport