I stepped down into the basement again, that hulking cartoon character, a walking advertisement for SIU’s open enrollment policy, was leaning on a dryer.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said as I breezed past him.
The malevolent kid was smoking a cigarette. He looked up with a quizzical expression and then ground the butt under his heel. “What the fuck do you mean?” he said, and spat a speck of tobacco out of his mouth.
“I mean, I mean…with this humidity it takes a long time for the clothes to dry.”
“Is that so?” said the kid with a leer.
“Yup, here…” I gave him two dimes. “…make sure they’re good and dry. I mean, I did take some of your dryer time, and I forgot that it’s awfully humid outside.”
I wiped my brow. The kid took the dimes in his big paw and inserted them into the dryer, and as I had hoped, he increased the heat setting to ‘high.’ He sat down again without a word, pulled out another cigarette from his pocket, and sullenly lit it up.
An hour later I had my feet on my desk as I watched that savage walk slowly along Point Drive with his new friend: the gremlin that had been tormenting me for years. The kid was glowering—slung over his shoulders were shirts and trousers that looked like crumpled notebook paper that someone had tried to straighten out. As long as I remembered that image whenever I did my laundry, that particular gremlin would never pluck my nerves again.
My technique of reducing nervous symptoms might not have met with the approval of Dr. Von Reichmann, but it did work, and I took a deep, heebie-jeebie-free breath of nice, damp air. That’s when I noticed a faded 3x5 note card attached to the radiator with old yellow tape rippling in the breeze. On the card, some time ago, I had written:
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
Walt Whitman
I pulled out a piece of paper and my mechanical pencil. Maybe when I woke up the next morning, I’d be in 2009 again. Or some other year. Or maybe I’d have to relive most of my life all over again. I looked up at the oak tree outside the window; it would still be there in 2009, and so would I, one way or the other.
Now, what do I want from the future?
Honestly? I didn’t want to be poor anymore, yet I didn’t have the nerve resistance to hold a stressful job for very long, and until I could purchase a new and improved nervous system, all jobs would be stressful for me. I needed alternative ways to earn a living. I needed to take stock.
Stock!
I put pencil to paper:
FINANCES
Stocks that will appreciate over the next forty years:
General Electric
IBM
Microsoft
Southwest Airlines
Dell
Apple
Family Dollar Stores
Boeing
All I needed was $200 extra each month to invest in the stocks that I knew would appreciate, and then I would be set for life by the age of forty. I continued writing:
WORK
TV and radio news anchoring and reporting—stressful, but this is where my talents lie.
Radio talk show—stressful
Anything in broadcasting—stressful
Under no circumstances did I want to wind up at another part time, temporary, no insurance, Testing Unlimited-type job. I needed to be capable of taking the pressure at a radio or TV station in a medium or major market, because anywhere else would pay not much better than Testing Unlimited. I would have to get my nerves under control. WSIU would help:
To strengthen my nerves, practice techniques in Von Reichmann book every time I work at WSIU.
If I didn’t drink, smoke pot, or take drugs, and if I followed this checklist, then just maybe I could make a success of my life the second time around. I tacked this new paper next to “What I Know” on the wall to the side of my desk.
The sun was peeping through the trees, the temperature was perfect, and a light breeze was wafting through the casement window. I thought I’d reward myself with a nostalgic walk.
The SIU campus looked like pristine wallpaper that comes installed on new computers. Maybe, if there were no scenic woods in the middle of the campus, or a shimmering lake to the south, and maybe if Lincoln Drive didn’t curve in that certain way around the Point, then the campus would not have been the perfect thing that it was. I’d visited many colleges around the country, but this was my favorite. This was my alma mater.
As I strolled past the Agriculture Building on Lincoln Drive, I saw an image that, like so many I had seen in the past 24 hours, looked surrealistically familiar, but I couldn’t identify. An old man was walking toward me in gray bell bottoms and a blue paisley shirt with huge collar wings.
Probably a professor.
But as he drew closer, an old Daily Egyptian picture flashed in my mind, and I remembered the old man. He wasn’t a professor, but a student in his late 70’s going to one of the wildest universities in the country, living in the dorm, and attending classes with a bunch of crazy teenagers. There he was in his white belt and matching shoes, gripping a beat-up, old-fashioned briefcase as he slowly walked past the Life Science Two construction site. As we nodded at each other, another Egyptian article popped into my head, and I realized that I was passing a ghost. The old man had died shortly before he was to graduate.
I suspected that he would be the first of many ghosts I would see in 1971. When I got back to my room and looked into the mirror, I realized that the 20-year-old kid I barely remembered and who used to be in my young body was no longer there. So, in a way, I too was a ghost.
I found a Sherlock Holmes anthology on my bookshelf and started The Hound of the Baskervilles. I had to let the idea settle in my mind, that anyone I was going to encounter in 1971 would not be the same person in 2009, if they lived that long.
That’s why a 21st century man, now living in the 20th century, was sitting there reading about a fictitious 19th century detective.
By the time Harry got back to the dorm, it was raining again so hard that the sidewalk was covered in a mist of spray. My roommate was soaked to the skin and dripping water on the floor.
“Hey Harry, is it raining outside?”
I was back in good humor.
“No snake shit, I was walking my trout.” He glanced at his watch, toweled himself off, and rushed over to his portable TV.
“Bump-Bumpa-Dumpa-Bump” went the music on the TV as Harry adjusted the coat hanger/aerial.
“In color… It’s the Lawrence Welk Show!” said the chipper announcer on the black-and-white screen.
I’d
