The Curious Business of the Pants

It was not my intention to go into the Pants Business, but this is how it happened in my dream.

I was out of work and walking down a street in Berkeley, CA., Telegraph Avenue. This is a section of Berkeley very near the University and thick with small shops of all kinds. I was holding a towel tightly around my waist because I was missing my trousers.

I looked first in one shop, then in another, looking at all the carrying bags for computers, pens and pencils, and other objects. I then went on to look at shoes. It was just at that moment that I ran into my old friend from the car business, Bill Albertson. Bill was one of my dearest friends from the days when we sold together on showroom floors. He was a loving, religious sort of person, a good friend, father, and husband. We had travelled together to Hawaii with our wives, having won a contest. Bill died of cancer very young.

Blalbertson, as we called him for short, looked great in a 3 piece suit. I asked him what he was doing these days, and he led me into a store front which turned out to be a warehouse inside. Bill said he had gone into the Pants Business, and asked me to join him. And, this is how we got the pants.

From a rack in the largely empty warehouse Bill took a gun, a very large Revolutionary War musket. We walked out into the street. Bill pointed the rifle skyward, and took aim. He then began to chant in a sing-song voice, and I knew that this chant must be done just exactly right. When he had completed the chant 3 times, Bill fired the rifle.

There fluttered down from about the third floor level a single pair of white chino trousers which eventually landed in the street. We retrieved the trousers. They were just what I needed. Then we made our way back to the warehouse, our aim fittingly accomplished.

A Delivery to Mrs. P.

When I was 5 and my brother was 8 years old, my parents bought a corner grocery store in South West Philadelphia and moved us from our idyllic boyhood home in Allentown, Pa., over the strong objections of my brother and myself. When we saw our new house, we had a case of "Hate at First Sight". Despite our cries of, "Please don't move here!!", we were bundled from the family Nash and deposited into our quarters above and behind the corner grocery store, a location that would become the setting for my boyhood dramas along with free lessons about religious and racial differences.

The business was destined to fail, doomed by the emergence of supermarkets. My father tried a number of occupations from insurance salesman to department store manager. My mother minded the store and the family until until she was released into her previously set- aside singing career by our subsequent move to Northeast Philadelphia.

One of the jobs that came with the store was "delivery boy". Our local customers called in grocery orders which my a brother and I delivered for whatever tips were forthcoming. A quarter was top dollar for a tip, dimes OK, nickels on the cheap side. One consistent quarter tipper was Mrs. P, who lived a short distance from the store. Mrs. P's orders usually consisted of one highly deliverable box full of groceries.

My first Winter time delivery to Mrs. P. required the following: thick socks, snow boots with buckles, trousers tucked in, corduroy trousers or thick jeans, a warm sweater or series of shirts, a bulky jacket, earmuffs and a woolen hat or a hat with built-in earmuffs, a scarf, gloves or mittens also clipped to the sleeves of the jacket. Upon reaching Mrs P’s house in all this paraphernalia, it was necessary to climb the porch stairs covered in snow and ice, balance the box against the doorway, and ring the doorbell.

When Mrs P opened the door, the smell that wafted from the interior of her row house was like a sledge hammer to the olfactory nerves. One barely stood one’s ground in the head-wind of that odiferous onslaught! A delivery to Mrs. P.’s house was not for the faint of heart or breath. It required a few seconds to compose myself, regain the ability to breathe, reacquaint myself with sensation in the legs, and recover from the shock, all the while maintaining a pleasant aspect for our customer. Taking all of this in stride out of an 8 year-old’s loyalty to our father (whose leadership, strength of character, and ability to be pleasant to our customers were legendary), I would plunge ahead into the house.

I had to traverse the complete interior of the house from the front door to the very back where the kitchen was located while the strength of the odor increased exponentially with each step forward. As if pressing against a tangible weight, I moved my sodden snow boots into the darkening gloom of the household, through room after room until I entered the kitchen where I finally beheld in the dim light the source of that unbelievable stench.

There, in the light of the farthest room in the house was a large cage and in that cage was a monkey, the source of the smell. Graciously, I exchanged small talk with Mrs. P., in the kitchen as my father would do with all the customers of our grocery store. Small talk, I say, not smell talk, a subject to be avoided like Bubonic Plague (which I might have caught). And after discussing the weather, the state of Mrs. P’s daughters or whatever (smell wipes clean all memory of conversation), I would beat a casual retreat as if nothing were amiss, and be rewarded with a quarter at the front door along with the sure knowledge that there would be an argument about which brother would brave the next delivery to Mrs. P.

Alien Abduction

My cat’s recent visit to the vet provides the setting for the classic alien abduction story. Just look at the event from his point of view.

You are sleeping peacefully in your bed when you are unexpectedly lifted bodily into the air by a force you cannot resist. As you slowly begin to come out of your sleep you realize that you are being placed into a confining area barely larger than your body with only small holes you can look out of to see what’s going on.

You resist. You stretch your limbs out to stop it from happening, but you can’t. You catch a glimpse of your captors on your way into the box. These cannot be the people you know and trust. These uncaring things, immune to your distress, must have replaced them. All this is so disconcerting that you have no way to interpret what is happening to you except that you have absolutely no control over it. Despite your vocalizations and protests and cries for help, your will is completely ignored. You have no dignity, no status as a sentient being whatever.

Your confining cubicle is then  lifted into some vehicle of advanced technological design which takes you away from your home. All of the surroundings, though you can’t see them well, smell unfamiliar. You are filled with fear and foreboding. You try to communicate with your captors again, try to convince them to stop this, but it’s useless. No one is listening.

Your cubicle is moved again into a different area. You hear the complaints and cries of fear from captives of your species and other species as well. As your own vocalizations increase to express your mounting terror, the cubicle is moved again. You are released into a new area which you have never seen before except in some memory that seems like a bad dream. You always wished that you would never see this place again. You are placed on a cold metal table. You are subjected to the unavoidable anal probe. Someone looks into your facial cavities. Your ears are drilled into by itchy devices, your mouth is forced open. Your teeth and gums are probed. Then some other stranger comes and whisks you off to another area where needles are stuck into your body that carry strange fluids, and you have no idea what is in them.

When you are finally returned to your home, those around you behave as if nothing has happened, that this is a normal day. Your recovery from this ordeal may require 16 to 20 hours of sleep, and later it all seems like a bad dream.

Kill the Messenger

I.

Once upon a time in the City, riding in the heart of the financial district, traffic was bumper to bumper. It moved not at all. The river of metal and glass, pumping out exhaust, noise, dirt and grit, was completely stalled, and for untold blocks an army of endless red lights held time frozen.

Enter the bicycle messenger. My delivery was on the 12th floor. As I reached my destination, I made a mental note of the position of the car caught in traffic directly in front of the building, along with the consternation on the face of the driver. Entering the building, I took the elevator to the 12th floor. I completed the delivery, had the paperwork signed, and called in to the office for my next destination. I came back down to the street, and there it was, the same car stuck in the exact same place for about 20 minutes. It hadn’t moved at all. The driver was giving me looks that could kill the messenger. 
   
All business, I mounted my heavy-metal steed and moved between the lanes directly beside his car, and then, unfortunately, it happened!  A species of Road Rage that infects Messengers. The once friendly messenger became the Messenger of Doom. A hot and dirty body, a mind overwhelmed by noise and pollution, compassion stretched, and too many Bugs Bunny Warner Brothers cartoons had come together in my mind. I puckered up my lips. I leaned over, and made a huge kissing noise in the unfortunate driver's window, like Bugs Bunny kissing Elmer Fudd on the head before escaping Elmer's "fwustwated fuwy."   The enraged driver rolled down his window to reply to this insult, but I dug out between the lanes leaving the poor man stuck were he was. He may be there yet, even though this was 47 years ago.
   
   

II. Another Mental Breakdown

One day I was heading for home from work on my bike in rush hour traffic. As usual, I had  to ride on just a few inches of street by the curb of an extremely busy multi-lane one way street. The cars beside me were dangerously close, and my attention was challenged by the need to stay out of traffic while balancing on a narrow strip of concrete.  And then, it happened! Horns were blaring, drivers were snarling, but my tiredness, frustration, and frazzled nerves overcame common sense and even self-preservation. In a gesture of reality-negating bravura, I rode away from the curb and out in front of a lane of the on-rushing river of metal and glass. Surprising even myself, I began to  weave back and forth in front of traffic in my lane, making everyone back up behind me unless they were willing to kill the messenger. I had practiced this weaving S-shaped curve riding my bike when I was 10 years old, and executed it perfectly. Fortunately, self-preservation gained the upper hand over bravura, and I went back to my curb hugging ways.

III. Bicycle Messenger Dream

   
I’m climbing a hill in downtown San Francisco on my 50’s bicycle. It has a heavy steel frame and balloon tires.This messenger service bike has rusted chrome handlebars. (I never would have tolerated this as a boy. My handlebars shone like mirrors!) The bike has an extra wide seat, a useless feature since, at this point in my life, I weigh in at 128 pounds. With an eighty pound weight in the front basket, that bike is going to throw me over those rusted handlebars if I hit a curb too hard.

In my dream I’m straining, standing up on the pedals, pushing with all my might climbing the steep San Francisco hill. I lean further forward, getting my nose closer and closer to the street. At some point, my weight and strength, the weight of the bike and the load, and the steepness of the grade all reach equilibrium. My forward motion stops. I fall. The bike crashes down beside me. I Iie there looking up at San Francisco sky.

 I’ve been at the job for some months now, and I have these dreams. The job allows me to retain full Hippie regalia, long hair, bell bottoms, sneakers, head band. There is no dress code. There are no drug tests. There is just bicycle, traffic, smog, noise, dirt, and deliveries. My bike wants to flip over forward from heavy loads. Traffic cops hate us. "Hit him," they yell at motorists, gesturing at us.
    

The traffic is intense for everyone. Motorists are irritated with us, this wandering Hippie tribe of the downtown mounted on old heavy-metal steeds, negotiating the congestion, slipping through lanes and up onto sidewalks to make deliveries. Drivers feel that somehow we are winning the traffic wars that they lost long ago, 

Beauty Pageant Winners

Winner of the early hominid beauty contest who hates people.

Miss Anne Thrope


Married winner of the Beverage Industry beauty pageant and a large river.

Mississippi


Winner of the fast food beauty pageant and a failed police action.

Miss Take Out


Sexually ambiguous winner of the one pan cooking contest.

Miss Stir Fry


Winner of the Charles Darwin Evolutionary Biology beauty contest.

Miss Sing Link

The Oboe Reed Makers' Lament.

 

Oboe Reed Maker's Lament

 As an oboist, I have tried to cope with the onerous and endless task of making oboe reeds by resorting to humorous inventions to keep my brain from exploding in exasperation. Notably, I had a conversation with a piano instructor at SSU who reported that she  grew up in Palo Alto in the same school system as Richard Woodhams, the former principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She reported that he was the nicest young man possible. One day she was walking by the room where he was in the process of making oboe reeds, and  "Oh, the language!" she said.

 I have concocted ways of cashing in on the reed making process. For instance there was the idea of creating a Reed Channel, which would only show hands making oboe reeds in complete silence from midnight to four in the morning. Viewing this channel would force any insomnia into submission, thereby giving reed making a different and exalted purpose. The motto of the channel: "All reeds All the Time, an Insomniac's Dream." 

I have claimed, facetiously, that Moby Dick is really about a frustrated oboe reed maker whose reeds always turn out flat, as mine do. Finally encountering the perfectly pitched reed at the end of the book, Ahab, who is really a frustrated oboist, cries out, "He Rises!"

I invented a commentary on the ever increasing expense of reed making materials Years ago they cost less than a dollar per reed, and now the same materials cost as much as $10 per reed or even more. The Oboe Reed Index, my invention, is an investment instrument, touted on stock market shows, featuring the desperation of the customer base for reeds, oboe players. Given that reeds may only last a day or two of hard playing, the materials to make them are guaranteed to have a market at all times. This is a product group oboists must purchase no matter what, so the sky's the limit on pricing, a huge investment opportunity!

 The following is a Reed Maker's Lament I wrote to be sung to Bob Dylan's "Everybody Must Get Stoned"

It is about the need to constantly make oboe reeds if one is to play the oboe at all:

 

The Reed Maker's Lament

 

You make them
While you're talking on the phone

You make them
When you think you're all alone

You make them
While you're driving in your car  

You make them when you don't know where you are.

Now I would not
Go and bite the hand that feeds.

Everybody must make reeds!


You make them
While you're entering a room

You make them
While you're visiting Grant's Tomb

You make them
When you're sitting on the pot
And when you have a cold
And when you're hot.

You make them
While you're chewing up your food
You're hoping that just one of them is good!

You're angry as
You throw them at the wall!

You realize
They're too long
Or they're too small

You think
You have some kind of a disease

But everybody must make reeds!

Why So Much? Why So Much?

    The thing about being a car salesman is, you have to get  to the negotiation. “The car  is already sold," my trainers would say, “They didn’t come here to buy a loaf of bread!”

    “Why So Much?” That question from the potential buyer is both an accusation and the opening gambit in a negotiation. I can tell it’s going to be a long and hard negotiation complete with fists banging on desks, pleading family members, theatrical facial expressions and body language. To the person who asks this question, negotiation is a religion, a way of life, and the success of the  negotiation can be measured by how much physical and emotional energy is expended in the process. The negotiation must take several hours, maybe all day, and exhaustion is just as  important as the final outcome. Woe to the salesperson who takes up the challenge of “Why So Much?”. 

     From the customer’s point of view, the question must be asked with a look that simultaneously shows both insult and amazement. It’s important that face and body language express both emotions at the same time in order to communicate almost unbearable
suffering brought on by the price tag.  A catatonic and stunned silence follows. Speech itself is now impossible. The silence is deafening.

    “Why So much?”  The question tells me that this  person has engaged in price negotiations before at a different dealership, and they do have a purchase price in mind. So now I go fishing for the figure that seals the deal today. “How much too much is it?" I ask. The answer is not going to be simple and straight forward because the compulsive negotiator won’t reveal the figure. They believe they might get even a better deal if they repeatedly ask how much will I cut the price and then, can I do better than that and so on.

    I was well trained. “If I could, wouldja?” I was trained to say. “If I could get it today for $15,973.64 , wouldja buy it today??”  Notice the odd numbers involved. Using  these odd numbers indicates I’m making a heroic effort on behalf of the buyer to cut the price to the last possible cent. It also might be a cue (hopefully) to not take all this so seriously. Notice the use of the word, “today” in the question. This means it’s now or never, baby.  If I use this expression often enough, ending every offer with “Would you buy it today?” this will hopefully introduce levity into the negotiation. If this question is not successful, the next step is to say, “Mr. or Miss or Ms so and so, you seem to be hesitating, would you mind telling me what it is?” I try to get this question into the conversation at least three times because of the Three Answer Rule, to wit:

    The first answer will be an out and out fabrication like, “My dog ate the advertisement from the other dealership," or, “My daughter has the mumps today, and I need to get back." The second answer will be a red herring like, “My mother in law’s best friend told me it’s well known  that there is a defective haliboose in these cars”. The third answer may contain the essential ingredient, like  “I just got a divorce and I don’t think my credit is good enough to buy it on my own”. Finally! I could say (after discussing mumps, and halibooses, my experience with them in my own family, etc. at great length!), “If I could get the credit problem handled, wouldja buy it today?” And if the answer is yes, then I can move on to solve the credit problem.

    But I digress. Back to “Why So Much? I won’t need the Three Answer Rule in this case. The person who asks "Why so much?" can buy the car today. All I need is, “If I could do this, wouldja buy it today?” I’ve already used it countless times without success. Why?

    Remember there is the negotiation exhaustion requirement. We still have a long way to go before collapse of the parties involved. The price negotiation is only part of it. We have yet to exchange accusations: being unreasonable, taking advantage of people, making exorbitant profits, benefiting from the gas crisis, putting Americans out of work, and so on. We have, in some cases, not yet met the other family members who will come to testify about the character of this person, that this person is poor, sick, has limited opportunity and resources, that this is a good person, kind and caring, that this is the first car they have ever bought or that this is the last car they will ever buy in their lives.

    If other family members do arrive, it becomes more dramatic. Some family members engage in theatrics like  the good cop, bad cop scenario, the firm protector and the willing conciliator. The bad cop family member threatens to buy it elsewhere if I don’t  come down more in price. The conciliator may  give me a  pat on the back for trying so hard. Back and forth I go with offers from the buyer and counter offers from the sales manager, wearing a groove in the floor. Courage and endurance! Exhaustion is coming.

    It has been many years since I sold cars. I live with my wife in a country property with many beautiful starry nights. At times we sleep out on the deck and look up at the night sky. As more and more stars appear, and I look at the vastness of it all, sometimes I think, “Why so much?” Sometimes I imagine I hear the voice of the Great Negotiator saying , “How much too much is it?” “If I could cut it down to 972,849,227,100,843 stars, wouldja buy it today?”

    I read that some cosmologists believe the universe is infinite. Many people say they don’t know what this could possibly mean, but I have an idea. It means that no one anywhere or any time will be able to answer the question, “Why So Much?”

   

Working the Docks

Working the Docks

It’s 5 o’clock in the morning. A single light bulb sways overhead and creates yellow glare in the union hall. Smoke fills the room  from Swisher Sweets cigars lit repeatedly over domino games in the basement.  Hippies, freaks, and men from every country on planet Earth mill in front of the barred job window at the Ship Painters and Scalers Union, like sharks waiting to feed. The Union Hall is in Lusk Alley, San Francisco, South of Market Street. Lena’s soul food restaurant is around the corner. My friend has a thing for Lena. 

We press together tighter in front of the job window.  On the wall, the pegboard with our  numbers awaits the beginning of the job calling ceremony. Javouis Robbins, known to one and all as “Jiveass," sits on a beat up office chair behind the window, like an executive in a down-and- out company that can’t afford furniture. The ever present fedora over his bald spot keeps the yellow glare from bouncing off his head.  He starts to call  numbers for the day’s jobs.  “I want six mens on Coffee," he intones. His voice is beautiful, musical, lyrical. The next ten seconds are crucial if I’m going  to work today.

“Thirtysixfotynine!" yells Jiveass, running the numbers together at the speed of light. The music in his voice is gone. “Twenysenfifyfo!”  Believe me this is not a guy who took elocution lessons. I get less than a second to translate what he said and  yell “here!” “hay”, or some other identifying sound when my number is called.  If I don’t answer before he gets to the next number, I don’t work.  I yell “Hay!” in time to get the coffee job. He takes my number peg out of the board and throws it on the ledge in front of him.

Robbins frequently gets into loud arguments with men who don’t respond in time but want to work anyway. He never loses an argument, and he never relents. Some people say Jiveass keeps a gun back there.  “Unpopular.”  This word would be an appalling understatement for Jiveass Robbins.

Jiveass begins calling jobs again.“I want eight mens on hides," he intones.   Hides are foul smelling. Men have to burn their clothes after a day unloading hides. Other jobs include scaling rust off ships, unloading rubber, moving and organizing cargo in the warehouse. When the calling ceremony comes to a close, I pile into one car with up to seven other men for the drive to the San Francisco or Oakland docks. I speak only English, but most of the men don’t. The place would be a  linguist’s dream, but there is some unspoken convention that restricts dialogue. Silence reigns.

“Coffee” is a pretty good job. Before the container ships took over, crews like ours would crack open the hatch covers on the ships at dock and then, standing on top of  coffee sacks going down three or four decks, we would dig our way to the bottom.  The procedure goes like this: Two-man teams  swing each 100 pound coffee sack onto a pallet. A glove on one hand adds some leverage. A coffee hook in the other hand helps to grapple the end of the burlap coffee sack. When the pallet is filled with sacks, it is removed by the crane operator and placed on the dock.

The jobs are inherently dangerous. The crane has steel cables we attach to pallets, hatch covers, debris, anything to be lifted out of the work area. The cables can snap back unpredictably. There are heavy objects and debris underfoot and pallets swinging overhead. Stories circulate about fatalities, men crushed between a cargo load and the hull of a ship. A current story warned about a worker killed by a load of glass. “Look in all directions,” I was told. This includes “up," and  sometimes it took more than just looking, especially when working with rubber.

Rubber was baled into cubes made up of  flat sheets compressed and  bound tightly together by crossed steel bands.  The cubes were about three and a half to four feet in each dimension and weighed enough so  that no one ever tried to lift them. They have a low center of gravity, cling to the decks like  giant erasers, and seem to resist all movement. With effort, we roll and prod each cube onto the pallet. When the crane operator jerks a full pallet of rubber into the air to place it on the dock, a bale  sometimes comes loose. When this happens, down comes a  tightly compressed rubber cube. It’s like a  game of dodge ball, but the balls are cubes. They come from above, and they’re deadly.  The crew stands on a steel deck. The question is, when a rubber cube weighing nearly two hundred pounds strikes a  steel deck, which way will it bounce, how far will it go, and will it mow someone down along the way? No one bothers to calculate the geometry of the thing. We all dive behind posts, other loads, debris, anything.  Finally, the  rubber  comes to a rest after two or three big bounces and a few directional changes. No one gets hit, so no one’s out of the game today.

The men can be dangerous as well. There’s plenty of posturing and ego here. The dominoes games in the basement of the Union Hall are incomplete without a constant stream of insults and  bantering. Common practice is to slap down the pieces in macho defiance.  But dominoes is just a game, and everyone there plays it this way. On the job, things are serious. One day, I’m sitting next to a guy about as big as a house. He just got up and loosely tightened some turnbuckles on a load going into the hold of a ship.  Thinking of the safety of the workers who might be below us in the hold,  I got up and  retightened the turnbuckles. When I sat down again, he turned to me and said with quiet menace that if I ever did that again he’d kill me. I‘m sure he  meant it.

Sometimes the docks can present a surreal beauty. As usual, it’s 5:30 in the morning. Our cargo ship appears shrouded in thick fog as we approach. The ship is the only visible object under bright lights in the otherwise grey pre-dawn world of the port.  Mist flows and swirls from its decks and down its sides like thick dawn fog cascading downhill in the redwoods. Because the cargo is packed in dry ice, we insulate our jackets and shoes with newspaper before boarding. Working in the holds will be intensely cold. The shifts are one hour on, 45 minutes off to warm up, then back in for another  hour.  We crack open the deck hatches.  The liberated dry ice fog billows out in force. When it clears, we descend into the cold to work. But hell has not frozen over this day. This ship carries beer, ale, candy, and lobster tail. Hallelujah!

Miss McMenamin

Miss McMenamin

When I was a boy in Junior High School (grades 7-9), Home Room was the gathering place for the beginning of the school day. My Home Room was presided over by the tyrant known throughout the school as Miss McMenamin. The woman's iron-handed rule included ingenious and unique penalties for offending her. If a student's behavior did not meet Miss McMenamin's rigorous standards, that student was required assume "The Position" in the aisle on hands and knees between the rows of old  wooden school desks. Then, facing the tyrant at the front of the room, the offending student was required to bow, first arms in the air overhead, and then forehead to the floor, over and over, while chanting repeatedly, " I'm so sorry Miss McMenamin, I'm so sorry Miss McMenamin, I'm so sorry Miss Mcmenamin."  Fifty to one hundred repetitions depending on the infraction.

One member of our class, I'll call him Freddie, was so constituted that the very act of breathing looked, both on his face and in his demeanor, like an act of mischief or insubordination or both. Needless to say, Freddie spent just about every waking hour in Home Room on the floor doing penance before Miss McMenamin.  I am told, that if this were to occur in school now, the student would have to be wearing a helmet, knee pads, special gloves, and even then the lawsuit would be gargantuan.

 

Freddie, to give him credit, was a kind of "canary in the coal mine"  when it came to responses and reactions to the idiosyncrasies of our teachers. Naturally he rubbed Mis McMenamin the wrong way, but his reaction to Miss McMenamin was topped by the adventure of the Eighth grade substitute we were blessed with one wintry day.

 

It must be noted here that the schoolrooms at our Junior High school in Southwest Philadelphia were heated from a boiler in the basement, tended by Mr House, our cranky custodian who inhabited the subterranean levels of the school building The classrooms were connected to the basement boiler by wide mouthed ducts that looked like the giant funnels on a steam ship. These openings were located about seven feet up one of the walls in each classroom.

 

On that fine winter day our class had as a substitute teacher a  woman whose physical presence was so breathtaking that it sent adolescent boys into hormone induced shock. Her technique of controlling the class was non-existent. After the usual introductions, she began to move about the outside perimeter of the classroom at a near run while verbally tossing instructions into the midst of the class, a class that had become over stimulated and out of control. It had quickly gone completely berserk!

 

The acme of the noise, the wrestling, and general activity was reached when  Freddie, in a fit of uncontrolled stimulation, managed to wrench a sneaker from a classmate's foot and launched it in a perfect arc into the heating funnel seven feet up the wall. This was truly a remarkable shot from the center of the room. However, it went almost completely unnoticed due to the melee.

Somehow we were all eventually saved by the bell, and we wandered dazed out into the hallway seeking recovery and redemption.