Stories:Paper Plate, Door Handle, Melissa Gilbert

Author: Joe Wall. Written: March 23, 2013. 
I've been cleaning my basement in a frenzy of frustrated minimalist puritanism, and in a box buried in the morass, there's a paper plate signed by a woman named Linda. I've rooted through these boxes with friends and loved ones over the years, and that's always one of the things that stands out to the more normal folks. 
"Why is there a mashed paper plate that says 'Linda' in here?" 
"A waitress in Maine autographed it for me back in '83. I thought she might be my fairy godmother at the time." 
"A...what now?" 
"Just put it back in the box." 
That one was an artifact from the trip to Maine I took with the Explorers, a wonderful ramble through the world peppered with minor and major disasters, and it's one of few mementos I kept from that trip, as most of the moments then were the best of the purely ephemeral. 
We got trapped on a cliff face while oblivious to everything but the best blueberries we'd ever tasted, and I attempted to swim across Lake Placid at night and realized, halfway across, that I could neither get across nor back to the shore. I danced with Lilah at a campground dance, made plans to ring the Liberty Bell, and discovered the true and almost secret delight of unreliable vehicles when the Post's truck broke down in Yonkers (not to mention the Moxie atrocity), which has given me, for some thirty years now, a reason to smile whenever I see the word "Yonkers" in print. 
Most people let these things go, and that is probably a very natural and very healthy thing for them, but for us, it was mental holography, coding memory into units that, even if some of the story is lost, remain vivid, albeit in a slightly foggier form. 
Vygis was a careful curator of his life, and this, I suspect, amounted to a good bit of our bond as well as a reinforcement of my own intentions for the future. I come from two families that love stories, that love telling them, and repeating them, and refining them on the lathe of often unwilling audiences until they became almost one-liners, strong on their own, but capable of being rendered in almost microscopic detail, and Vygis was my kind of family. 
He spoke a sort of coded language, comprised of inside jokes and myriad private references, and you had to jump onto that lurching trolley as it clacked and clattered from track to track if you were going to make any sense of him at all. 
I have to admit that I never fully grasped the leech tongue, as it were, in his series of progressive visionary mudras that represented a source of comfort and a rich parallel universe for him, but leeches preceded my entry into his life and he often maintained these satellite worlds around himself. Leeches belonged mostly to the close friendship of Charles Dickson and Vygis, and I was invariably destined to lack the poetics that come from being a native speaker, but I did my best to keep up, though I've completely forgotten what comes after you mash a leech, and where the ba-boommp-a-booomph fits into the leech lifecycle, to my eternal shame. Sometimes, you just gotta smile and tap dance a little harder to keep up. 
We had our own vocabulary, though. We wore coat hangers in the mall, black armbands when Walnut Grove was blown up to defeat an evil real estate grifter, and increasingly awful clothes as the increasingly awful eighties rolled along, and peppered our conversations with phrases known only to us that referred such incidents and interventions. The presumably real world was an inconvenience, so we rewrote the script. 
"Door handle, Vygis!" 
I'd taken off at a clip, leaving him lingering way behind on the sidewalk, and "door handle" referred to a particularly idiotic stunt we'd pulled on the highway, tying his Oldsmobile to my Datsun and making, for a few seconds, a flag-festooned barrier across four lanes of I-95 between us. Something spooked him in the midst, almost certainly a sudden flash of unexpected good sense, and he hit the brakes…neatly removing one of the door handles from my station wagon and leaving him with a forty foot trail of flags with a little chrome door handle making sparks at the end. 
"I was looking in the window back there. Jeesh." 
It's the sort of thing that's guaranteed to alienate your outside friends, regularly telling tales that need whole pages of footnotes, but it's just too hard to leave out too much and still make sense. 
Definitions for "Melissa Gilbert," for instance, include "famous actress," "child star of Little House on the Prairie," and "former president of the Screen Actors Guild," but the name can also mean "would you be a dear and save me from dying horribly from compressive asphyxia?" 
That one was my own fault, it seems. 
We'd been reworking the underground fort, and I had the notion that we needed an entrance that wasn't just right out in the middle of the room, so I started digging a parallel shaft in one wall that would eventually turn upwards and make an entrance that we could drain out into the natural slope of the hillside. We were both big fans of The Great Escape, so it was a labor of love, and halfway through, when it was just a long tube of red clay, I decided to sleep in there on one of our sleepovers, while Vygis slept on his little shelf. We'd been talking sci-fi and nonsense, when a sudden consequence of digging a tunnel without placing any supports became annoyingly clear. 
"Ooomph," I said, as the entire tunnel closed on me like a big ragged mouth, leaving just my head sticking out of the wall like an upside-down hunting trophy. 
"Ooomph what?" 
"I'm—aaugh, the tunnel caved in!" 
"That's unfortunate for you." 
"No, Vyg, it's crushing me!" 
"Like I said…" 
"No, I'm not kidding. I can barely breathe!" 
The sudden sensation of realizing that I was completely pinned in a buried sleeping bag with my arms at my sides manifest itself in a wild fit of panicked wriggling that did nothing but bring down more of the tunnel's roof. 
"Helphelphelp, Vygis! Dig me out!" 
He sat up, lit a candle, and looked down at me with a slightly raised eyebrow. 
"I'm not sure I like your tone, Joe." 
"That's hilarious. Now fucking dig me out!" 
"Nope. Tone." 
"Okay. Vygis? Would you be a dear and extract me from my erstwhile tomb?" 
"No." 
I waggled my disembodied head and rolled my eyes. 
"Go on," I said. 
"Umm, who is the most beautiful actress in the world?" 
"Divine?" 
"I would have to say no," he said, presiding from his obnoxious superior position of not being buried alive in a small dark hole at 3AM somewhere in central Maryland. 
"TV's lovable Laura Ingalls, Melissa Gilbert?" 
"Let me get a trowel." 
You'd think I'm making this all up, but we really did speak this way, and it was wonderful—an endless surrealist script for stage and screen in which the play of language was always paramount. 
"Jesus, Vygis," I sputtered, mid-rescue. "You're getting dirt in my eyes." 
"Should I stop?" 
"Melissa Gilbert Melissa Gilbert Melissa Gilbert, just c'mon." 
It's been a long time, and I have languages of my own with friends and loved ones who've come along since, but the detail's never been quite what it was. Lifetimes can pass and some things still hang there, suspended in the well-curated back galleries of your brain, as clear as a paper plate autographed by a fairy godmother. 
Cat in the freezer, Vygis, you're door handling me. Melissa Gilbert, okay?
Category:Stories
Category:Author:Joe Belknap Wall
Category:Mythologies:Leeches
Category:Mythologies:Underground Fort
Category:Interests:Actresses:Melissa Gilbert
Category:People:Joe Belknap Wall