Meanwhile… I'm Still Thinking

There was a guy in my class that was a thief. Fortunately, I seldom brought anything to class that I wasn’t wearing, reading or chewing so I wasn’t a particularly good target. That said, two things were stolen from me in grade school.

One was a Green Hornet glow-in-the-dark ring with a hidden compartment just right for hiding a capsule of cyanide in case I was captured by the Russians. It had been my father’s – he had saved it since he was a kid and gave it to me when The Green Hornet became a TV show. I can’t begin to tell you what a cool ring it was… did I say it glowed in the dark? Anyway, I brought it into class, showed everyone, stuck it in my jacket pocket that was hanging on the back of my chair and went to lunch. When I came back from the playground it was gone. That night I told my father that his Green Hornet ring had been taken, but he seemed to think that it hadn’t been stolen at all and that I had “traded it for something”. “Like what?”, I wondered nearly daily for the next thirty-five (or-so) years, until I finally brought the subject up with Dad. I had the image of that ring and his reaction to its disappearance burned into my psyche and on this particular day I said “Hey Dad, do you remember that Green Hornet ring you gave me?” His answer? “Nope”, he said, and that (as they say) was that.

The other item that got stolen from me was a Decca promo 45 of “I Can’t Explain” by The Who. Two things about this single I should mention. First of all, I always played the B-side of any record hoping that I would find a diamond in the rough that would double my pleasure, but the B-side of this record was a particularly nasty song called “Bald Headed Woman”. Incredibly awful… how could it even be the same band? Probably the biggest A-side/B-side quality discrepancy ever by anybody. The other weird thing about this record was that when I finally got a copy of it again (on “Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy”) it simply didn’t sound at all like I remembered it. The guitar chords that begin the song just seemed to have sounded a lot “bigger” (whatever that means) on the single. Maybe it was because of the record player I was playing it on, or maybe it really was a different version that I had. I’ll probably never know.

I was at a bar in Malone last fall with my sister and this guy comes up to me and says “Hey, remember me? Great to see you! You get up here much? Been a long time! Yeah… I just got out of rehab and got a divorce so I’m freed up for the first time in a long time! Wouldn’t it be great if we could hang out whenever you come home?” I was smiling and doing my best to carry on a conversation, but the whole time I’m thinking “Where’s my record and my Green Hornet ring you son of a bitch?” Funny thing is, it’s entirely possible he was never the thief to begin with. Maybe one day I actually WILL hang out with him at a bar in Malone, and after a while I’ll ask him “Hey, do you remember that song ‘I Can’t Explain’ by the Who?”, and he might just say…

“Nope.”