The Missing Tooth

I produced this episode after I sat in on a Genre Writers Panel at Rosemont College. I couldn’t believe everyone was talking about getting into the Young Adult field.

A lipogram is a composition containing no examples of a specific letter of the alphabet. In this example GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS without the letter E…or…

GOLDILOCKS PLUS GRIZZLY TROIKA (illustrated using Sketchbook Express).

Thus starts an account of a small girl, I shall dub Goldilocks.
Said lass pays no mind to Mum, lags till dusk, and strays far into the sticks.
Drifting for hours, hollow, arctic, and drowsy, at last our gal lights upon a cabana.
Now it just so occurs that a grizzly gang inhabit said cabin, and our furry troika is just through making mush for grub.
Finding it too hot to nosh right now this barbaric clan is out for an hour or two so chow can chill.
Thus our shack is vacant.
Now this Goldilocks cracks the door, butts in, and finds a trinity of mush bowls chilling.
Scarfing down a soupcon of  bowl A, Goldilocks bawls “Yuk! Too lumpy!”
Chomping on a tidbit of  bowl B, Goldilocks roars. “Yuk! Too runny!”
But gnawing a scintilla of bowl C, Goldilocks murmurs, “Just right,” and hogs the lot.

I was woken by the phone in the early hours of Monday, November 1st, 1999.

I could have ignored it, but with two small daughters I was used to waking up in the middle of the night, plus I was a little fatalistic about late night calls. Nine times out of ten they were wrong numbers, but if it was that one time out of ten, then it was going to be news that was too urgent wait until morning.

Feeling a mix of annoyance and trepidation, I rolled out of bed, stumbled to the hallway, found the phone, and pressed “talk.”

I was greeted by the sound of man yelling over a deafening roar. The background noise was so loud that I couldn’t make out what the voice was yelling.

My trepidation gone, I was now merely annoyed, but I restrained myself, knowing that sometimes you can hear all kinds of interference on your end of the line, but the person on the other end can hear you perfectly clearly.

Growing up in England, I was used to the wrong-number thing leading to apologies all round. The caller would apologise for dialing the wrong number. The person picking up the phone would apologise for being the bearer of bad news.

In Brooklyn, where I now resided, the whole thing was handled differently. A week earlier I had picked up the phone only to be bombarded by a stream of Russian.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you have the wrong number.”

“What the fuck!” cried the caller, changing to English. “You shit-for-brains faggot…”

Now, here I was a week later, in the middle of the night, listening to roaring and screaming which, now I listened a little more carefully, actually sounded as if it might be Hebrew or Arabic. Clearly a wrong number if ever there was. With my previous wrong-number incident in mind, I cleared my throat, and in my deepest voice, and my best Brooklyn accent I said, “Sorry buddy. I think you have a wrong number.” I then hung up and returned to bed.

I fell asleep right away but had a nightmare in which I was on a boat in the ocean, watching an air liner plunge through firy clouds and crash into the waves.

Next thing I knew it was 6 AM, and the radio was on with a report about the mid-Atlantic crash of Egypt-Air flight 990.

A chill ran right through me. I remembered the roar and the man screaming. Had my caller been a passenger on that plane?

I had heard that in the event of an impending accident, the airlines allow passengers to use their cellphones. If it was a passenger was it a wrong number? Or was it really someone I knew? According to the news the plane went down just off Nantucket Island at around 2AM. Nantucket was well within cellphone range of Brooklyn, but I hadn’t checked the time that we’d received the call.

Maybe it was just a random wrong number, that just happened to come in at the same time as a plane crash.

Or maybe not. As soon as they were available I scanned the passenger list, but no familiar name jumped out at me.

This is a still life by the fictional illustrator and painter, Charles Cornelius, 1899-1957(?), younger brother of my grandfather, Harold Connolly.
After returning from the First World War, Charles Connolly began his career as a cartographer in London. One morning at a Woolworths, he met and fell in love with Sylvia Broek, a Belgian au pair.
In the Winter of 1935, Charles changed his surname to Cornelius, and  the young couple moved to Ostend, Belgium. From this point onwards Cornelius produced an impressive body of work.
In April 1940, with the Nazi invasion imminent, Cornelius resisted all pleas from his family to return to the safety of England. He elected to remain in Ostend with his beloved Sylvia and, as he said in one of his final letters, he “cast his lot” with the people of Belgium.
In his last communication, dated June 1940, a few weeks after the fall of the Low Countries, Cornelius wrote:
“The Germans have declared my work to be degenerate. I have closed my studio and now, instead of creating large works in oil, I produce tiny watercolors in my bedroom at the dead of night.”
Following this, nothing more was heard from my great uncle, and my family suspected the worst.

SCHURKENBLOED, illustrated by Pierre de Loustall.

I got sidetracked in a comics store in Ostend, Belgium. This was one of my favorites. Beautiful line-work, and great atmospheric values.

With hindsight I probably should have waited until I reached French-speaking Brussels before I blew my Euros in a comics store, then I could have bought a French version and more or less figured out the story.

I found this Biggles book in Brighton. According to the half-title page the illustrator is “Stead.”

Could this be an early Ralph Steadman?

Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

How to Tailgate Like a Pro.
Okay guys, we all know how to tailgate, right?
You just tuck your Escalade in as close as you can behind any old weiner in a hatchback, and just stay there.
Think that’s tailgating? Think again.
These days the average hatchback driver is so used to seeing a giant radiator grill filling his entire rear-view mirror, that if the glass is clear he thinks there’s something wrong with the said mirror.
No. Merely careening along at high speeds, a few feet behind a much smaller car, is now considered, practically, to be normal driving.
Any jackass in an SUV can do it.
It’s your dad’s tailgating.
These days you need to tailgate with a little panache.
Fine tailgating is an art form, and like all art forms it needs to be useless.
Remember, real tailgating isn’t about getting anywhere faster, it’s about asserting yourself on the highway, so your tailgating has to be obviously pointless. Here are a couple of starter techniques.
1: THE SLIDING PUZZLE.
Only tailgate in the left-hand lane if there’s another vehicle right in front of your victim. This is especially effective if the victim can’t pull over to the right and let you pass.
Now the pipsqueak is going to see you in his mirror and say to himself, “what the…! If I move over and let this SUV-driving-dick pass me he’ll immediately be stuck behind the car in front of me.”
The result is that your victim will get angry. He will not pull over and let you pass. He will sit there, getting angrier and angrier, thinking that he is defying you.
He could not be more wrong. By staying there he is doing exactly what you want. You want to keep tailgating him. It’s your in-car entertainment. Few things are funnier than an angry pipsqueak.
This is known as the SLIDING PUZZLE as you victim has to somehow make a space to move over to the right, so that you can move into his space.
2: THE JERSEY TAILGATE.
This is a classic. Tailgate in the right-hand lane. Your victim is plodding along in the slow lane, thinking he’s staying out of the craziness, and suddenly there you are, filling his mirror. He’s going to have no idea what to do. Do you want him to pull over into faster-moving traffic to let you pass!? He’s not merely going to be angry, he’s going to be angry AND confused. This is a standard on  New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, where making yourself appear to be insane is an important component of effective driving.
3: THE BOB-AND-WEAVE.
This one takes a little experience, and a little nerve. Get as close as you can to your little victim, stay there for a few seconds, then allow yourself to drift back.
Now, just as your victim is thinking you’re letting him off lightly, step on the gas. Don’t slow down until the last moment. You want your victim to think you’re going to ram him.
Next, move over to the left. Make it look as if you’re going to try and squeeze past in the impossibly narrow space between your victim and the median divider.
Try all of the above during daylight first, then once you’re proficient you can try them at night, with the added bonus being able to use your brights to add to the confusion.
Once again remember that your tailgating must be obviously pointless.
You are not saying, “Excuse me, may I pass?”
You are saying, “I have no idea where I’m going, but wherever it is, you, Buddy, are in the way.”