3/27/2002 7:14:39 PM
Curdling Curmudgeon’s Incautious Comments

It’s hard not to love a curmudgeon and it’s even harder not to be irritated by one that is close to you. Not that I have anyone in mind. I am merely anticipating my golden years and the good time that I will have exasperating everyone I know. It won’t be that long a list because I have already alienated a whole class of people with my overweening humor and my “smarty pants” opinions.

First there is my mother who still says with a jot of irritation, “You think you know everything!”
“Not everything,” I remind her, “just the important stuff.” But we’ve had this conversation so many times that it has passed beyond cliché, become far more than stereotypical, moving, I swear, into the realm of the archetypical.

And there are my colleagues at work who steam when I forcefully expose my theories on social injustices and the ridiculous waste of all political thought. Which brings me to one of my favorite curmudgeons. This is where I got on this electronic band wagon to begin with.

My oldest friend is Phil, well he’s not that old really, I’m older, (only by a few months or maybe a year) but I have known him the longest; since 9th grade when we became fast friends sitting on the bleachers of Seneca Junior High where the Penn Hills Indians still played to glory on account of the new high school didn’t yet have a football field. And Phil had a grandfather, who, if still alive, would certainly qualify as the oldest person I know. His name was Ralph. He spoke English with an Italian accent and the sum total of all his commentary on our life and times went something like this: ”Shiiiiiiiish” a sibilant blast like a steam locomotive struggling to leave the station. He would raise his hands up in the air like a supplicant about to receive some manna from the multifarious gods of his personal mythology, then shake his head and look around the room in grave disbelief. And this subject under consideration was merely something about the weather the next day. The hiss would grow longer and louder, the look more daunting, his hands now fending off an invasion of Harpies when the TV anchor started describing the shenanigans of some politico or organization.

A scant few years later, I saw the Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers for the first time. Groucho (Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff) is the President of Huxley College. He explains to the trustees in song:
I don't know what they have to say.
It makes no difference anyway.
Whatever it is, I'm against it
I knew that I had not only heard the tuneful embodiment of Ralph’s hissing, found a new hero in Groucho, but a fruitful philosophy upon which to mature.
(Yes this is the movie with these lines that can only be attributed to SJ Perelman:
Secretary: (Entering again.) The Dean is furious! He's waxing wroth!
Wagstaff: Is Wroth out there too? Tell Wroth to wax the Dean for a while.)

When I was a growed man and somewhat down on my luck I had the immense misfortune to be employed at a place called Funland. It was in a mall on the NorseSide of Pittsburgh. It was full of pinball machines and video games, the newest of which was Breakout and the only video game on the market, very expensive, that you could play on your personal TV screen was Pong. Eventually after Sub Chaser a game was delivered that only a true Curmudgeon could enjoy. You drove a tin lizzy and tried to run over pedestrians. The gall of the designer was at least unmitigated. It was kinda fun running over those small scampering old ladies.

I wore a red jacket with Funland proclaimed across the back in bold white and baby sat inner city kids while they figured how to beat the pinball machines out of games. It was absolutely true. They exhibited genius. It would take me days to figure out their winning strategies. “What,” I used to think, “if these kids applied that kind of thinking to their math classes? Teachers would be horrified, new geometries and alien algebras would be born, the world would change, we would probably have a starship or two traveling faster than light down some local wormhole to confront Cygnus X1. Alas, they only succeeded in perplexing me and much worse Art, who was the day shift. A man of such curmudgeonly properties that Ralph, Groucho, Henry Morgan, Alexander King, Oscar Levant and I looked like small fried fish in comparison.

Art was retired from the Air Force and living quite nicely on that pension. He worked at Funland and proudly wore the red coat with the bold white writing to earn a little drinking money. He spent his time between the bar in a restaurant up the mall in the afternoon a short skip past the elevators, where my mother was manager (You didn’t think I could get such a prestigious job without knowing someone, did you?) and a couple restaurant lounges on and about 6th Street, downtown Pittsburgh in the evening.

My good friend Bill was bartender at Art’s afternoon mall abode. He knew and put up with Art long before I came and long after I left the extreme joy of Funland.

Art walks in to the bar after a tough shift down at the joint. The blinking lights, ringing bells and harsh buzzers could get to you after a while. He sits at the first stool, which was his place at the bar, upset he would be if some other mortal dared to challenge his ascendancy, and made a sound roughly like a steam locomotive that had hitherto been Phil’s grandfather’s trademark.
“What,” says Bill?
“Those damn kids!” says Art.
“Yes,” said Bill?
“They think its all fun and games down there!”

I have never been able to put it better myself. You’ve really got to admire the single minded misery that such thinking recommends. What is it that the bumper sticker says? ‘I only want to live long enough to make my children miserable.’ Well, it’s something like that anyway. God, old age is gonna be such fun.