Electronic cigarettes are the new way to quit smoking

New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.

IF HARLAN GIRARD IS CRAZY, HE DOESN’T ACT THE PART. He is standing just where he said he would be, below the Philadelphia train station’s World War II memorial — a soaring statue of a winged angel embracing a fallen combatant, as if lifting him to heaven. Girard is wearing pressed khaki pants, expensive-looking leather loafers and a crisp blue button-down. He looks like a local businessman dressed for a casual Friday — a local businessman with a wickedly dark sense of humor, which had become apparent when he said to look for him beneath “the angel sodomizing a dead soldier.” At 70, he appears robust and healthy — not the slightest bit disheveled or unusual-looking. He is also carrying a bag.

Girard’s description of himself is matter-of-fact, until he explains what’s in the bag: documents he believes prove that the government is attempting to control his mind. He carries that black, weathered bag everywhere he goes. “Every time I go out, I’m prepared to come home and find everything is stolen,” he says.

The bag aside, Girard appears intelligent and coherent. At a table in front of Dunkin’ Donuts inside the train station, Girard opens the bag and pulls out a thick stack of documents, carefully labeled and sorted with yellow sticky notes bearing neat block print. The documents are an authentic-looking mix of news stories, articles culled from military journals and even some declassified national security documents that do seem to show that the U.S. government has attempted to develop weapons that send voices into people’s heads.

“It’s undeniable that the technology exists,” Girard says, “but if you go to the police and say, ‘I’m hearing voices,’ they’re going to lock you up for psychiatric evaluation.”

The thing that’s missing from his bag — the lack of which makes it hard to prove he isn’t crazy — is even a single document that would buttress the implausible notion that the government is currently targeting a large group of American citizens with mind-control technology. The only direct evidence for that, Girard admits, lies with alleged victims such as himself.

And of those, there are many.

IT’S 9:01 P.M. WHEN THE FIRST PERSON SPEAKS during the Saturday conference call.

Unsure whether anyone else is on the line yet, the female caller throws out the first question: “You got gang stalking or V2K?” she asks no one in particular.

There’s a short, uncomfortable pause.

“V2K, really bad. 24-7,” a man replies.

“Gang stalking,” another woman says.

“Oh, yeah, join the club,” yet another man replies.

The members of this confessional “club” are not your usual victims. This isn’t a group for alcoholics, drug addicts or survivors of childhood abuse; the people connecting on the call are self-described victims of mind control — people who believe they have been targeted by a secret government program that tracks them around the clock, using technology to probe and control their minds.

The callers frequently refer to themselves as TIs, which is short for Targeted Individuals, and talk about V2K — the official military abbreviation stands for “voice to skull” and denotes weapons that beam voices or sounds into the head. In their esoteric lexicon, “gang stalking” refers to the belief that they are being followed and harassed: by neighbors, strangers or colleagues who are agents for the government.

A few more “hellos” are exchanged, interrupted by beeps signaling late arrivals: Bill from Columbus, Barbara from Philadelphia, Jim from California and a dozen or so others.

Derrick Robinson, the conference call moderator, calls order.

“It’s five after 9,” says Robinson, with the sweetly reasonable intonation of a late-night radio host. “Maybe we should go ahead and start.”

THE IDEA OF A GROUP OF PEOPLE CONVINCED THEY ARE TARGETED BY WEAPONS that can invade their minds has become a cultural joke, shorthanded by the image of solitary lunatics wearing tinfoil hats to deflect invisible mind beams. “Tinfoil hat,” says Wikipedia, has become “a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.”

In 2005, a group of MIT students conducted a formal study using aluminum foil and radio signals. Their surprising finding: Tinfoil hats may actually amplify radio frequency signals. Of course, the tech students meant the study as a joke.

But during the Saturday conference call, the subject of aluminum foil is deadly serious. The MIT study had prompted renewed debate; while a few TIs realized it was a joke at their expense, some saw the findings as an explanation for why tinfoil didn’t seem to stop the voices. Others vouched for the material.

“Tinfoil helps tremendously,” reports one conference call participant, who describes wrapping it around her body underneath her clothing.

“Where do you put the tinfoil?” a man asks.

“Anywhere, everywhere,” she replies. “I even put it in a hat.”

A TI in an online mind-control forum recommends a Web site called “Block EMF” (as in electromagnetic frequencies), which advertises a full line of clothing, including aluminum-lined boxer shorts described as a “sheer, comfortable undergarment you can wear over your regular one to shield yourself from power lines and computer electric fields, and microwave, radar, and TV radiation.” Similarly, a tinfoil hat disguised as a regular baseball cap is “smart and subtle.”

For all the scorn, the ranks of victims — or people who believe they are victims — are speaking up. In the course of the evening, there are as many as 40 clicks from people joining the call, and much larger numbers participate in the online forum, which has 143 members. A note there mentioning interest from a journalist prompted more than 200 e-mail responses.

Until recently, people who believe the government is beaming voices into their heads would have added social isolation to their catalogue of woes. But now, many have discovered hundreds, possibly thousands, of others just like them all over the world. Web sites dedicated to electronic harassment and gang stalking have popped up in India, China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Russia and elsewhere. Victims have begun to host support meetings in major cities, including Washington. Favorite topics at the meetings include lessons on how to build shields (the proverbial tinfoil hats), media and PR training, and possible legal strategies for outlawing mind control.

The biggest hurdle for TIs is getting people to take their concerns seriously. A proposal made in 2001 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) to ban “psychotronic weapons” (another common term for mind-control technology) was hailed by TIs as a great step forward. But the bill was widely derided by bloggers and columnists and quickly dropped.

Doug Gordon, Kucinich’s spokesman, would not discuss mind control other than to say the proposal was part of broader legislation outlawing weapons in space. The bill was later reintroduced, minus the mind control. “It was not the concentration of the legislation, which is why it was tightened up and redrafted,” was all Gordon would say.

Unable to garner much support from their elected representatives, TIs have started their own PR campaign. And so, last spring, the Saturday conference calls centered on plans to hold a rally in Washington. A 2005 attempt at a rally drew a few dozen people and was ultimately rained out; the TIs were determined to make another go of it. Conversations focused around designing T-shirts, setting up congressional appointments, fundraising, creating a new Web site and formalizing a slogan. After some debate over whether to focus on gang stalking or mind control, the group came up with a compromise slogan that covered both: “Freedom From Covert Surveillance and Electronic Harassment.”

Conference call moderator Robinson, who says his gang stalking began when he worked at the National Security Agency in the 1980s, offers his assessment of the group’s prospects: Maybe this rally wouldn’t produce much press, but it’s a first step. “I see this as a movement,” he says. “We’re picking up people all the time.”

HARLAN GIRARD SAYS HIS PROBLEMS BEGAN IN 1983, while he was a real estate developer in Los Angeles. The harassment was subtle at first: One day a woman pulled up in a car, wagged her finger at him, then sped away; he saw people running underneath his window at night; he noticed some of his neighbors seemed to be watching him; he heard someone moving in the crawl space under his apartment at night.

Girard sought advice from this then-girlfriend, a practicing psychologist, whom he declines to identify. He says she told him, “Nobody can become psychotic in their late 40s.” She said he didn’t seem to manifest other symptoms of psychotic behavior — he dressed well, paid his bills — and, besides his claims of surveillance, which sounded paranoid, he behaved normally. “People who are psychotic are socially isolated,” he recalls her saying.

After a few months, Girard says, the harassment abruptly stopped. But the respite didn’t last. In 1984, appropriately enough, things got seriously weird. He’d left his real estate career to return to school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was studying for a master’s degree in landscape architecture. He harbored dreams of designing parks and public spaces. Then, he says, he began to hear voices. Girard could distinguish several different male voices, which came complete with a mental image of how the voices were being generated: from a recording studio, with “four slops sitting around a card table drinking beer,” he says.

The voices were crass but also strangely courteous, addressing him as “Mr. Girard.”

They taunted him. They asked him if he thought he was normal; they suggested he was going crazy. They insulted his classmates: When an overweight student showed up for a field trip in a white raincoat, they said, “Hey, Mr. Girard, doesn’t she look like a refrigerator?”

Six months after the voices began, they had another question for him: “Mr. Girard, Mr. Girard. Why aren’t you dead yet?” At first, he recalls, the voices would speak just two or three times a day, but it escalated into a near-constant cacophony, often accompanied by severe pain all over his body — which Girard now attributes to directed-energy weapons that can shoot invisible beams.

The voices even suggested how he could figure out what was happening to him. He says they told him to go to the electrical engineering department to “tell them you’re writing science fiction and you don’t want to write anything inconsistent with physical reality. Then tell them exactly what has happened.”

Girard went and got some rudimentary explanations of how technology could explain some of the things he was describing.

“Finally, I said: ‘Look, I must come to the point, because I need answers. This is happening to me; it’s not science fiction.’” They laughed.

He got the same response from friends, he says. “They regarded me as crazy, which is a humiliating experience.”

When asked why he didn’t consult a doctor about the voices and the pain, he says, “I don’t dare start talking to people because of the potential stigma of it all. I don’t want to be treated differently. Here I was in Philadelphia. Something was going on, I don’t know any doctors . . . I know somebody’s doing something to me.”

It was a struggle to graduate, he says, but he was determined, and he persevered. In 1988, the same year he finished his degree, his father died, leaving Girard an inheritance large enough that he did not have to work.

So, instead of becoming a landscape architect, Girard began a full-time investigation of what was happening to him, often traveling to Washington in pursuit of government documents relating to mind control. He put an ad in a magazine seeking other victims. Only a few people responded. But over the years, as he met more and more people like himself, he grew convinced that he was part of what he calls an “electronic concentration camp.”

What he was finding on his research trips also buttressed his belief: Girard learned that in the 1950s, the CIA had drugged unwitting victims with LSD as part of a rogue mind-control experiment called MK-ULTRA. He came across references to the CIA seeking to influence the mind with electromagnetic fields. Then he found references in an academic research book to work that military researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research had done in the 1970s with pulsed microwaves to transmit words that a subject would hear in his head. Elsewhere, he came across references to attempts to use electromagnetic energy, sound waves or microwave beams to cause non-lethal pain to the body. For every symptom he experienced, he believed he found references to a weapon that could cause it.

How much of the research Girard cites checks out?

Concerns about microwaves and mind control date to the 1960s, when the U.S. government discovered that its embassy in Moscow was being bombarded by low-level electromagnetic radiation. In 1965, according to declassified Defense Department documents, the Pentagon, at the behest of the White House, launched Project Pandora, top-secret research to explore the behavioral and biological effects of low-level microwaves. For approximately four years, the Pentagon conducted secret research: zapping monkeys; exposing unwitting sailors to microwave radiation; and conducting a host of other unusual experiments (a sub-project of Project Pandora was titled Project Bizarre). The results were mixed, and the program was plagued by disagreements and scientific squabbles. The “Moscow signal,” as it was called, was eventually attributed to eavesdropping, not mind control, and Pandora ended in 1970. And with it, the military’s research into so-called non-thermal microwave effects seemed to die out, at least in the unclassified realm.

But there are hints of ongoing research: An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words into a person’s head. “The signal can be a ‘message from God’ that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender,” the author concluded.

In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone’s head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory’s directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed for this article, the Air Force released unclassified documents surrounding that 2002 patent — records that note that the patent was based on human experimentation in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. Research appeared to continue at least through 2002. Where this work has gone since is unclear — the research laboratory, citing classification, refused to discuss it or release other materials.

The official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, tagged microwave attacks against the human brain as part of future warfare in a 2001 presentation to the National Defense Industrial Association about “Future Strategic Issues.”

“That work is exceedingly sensitive” and unlikely to be reported in any unclassified documents, he says.

Meanwhile, the military’s use of weapons that employ electromagnetic radiation to create pain is well-known, as are some of the limitations of such weapons. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one element of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagnetic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. So, yes, there is technology designed to beam painful invisible rays at humans, but the weapon seems to fall far short of what could account for many of the TIs’ symptoms. While its exact range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, such as aluminum. Considering the size of the full-scale weapon, which resembles a satellite dish, and its operational limitations, the ability of the government or anyone else to shoot beams at hundreds of people — on city streets, into their homes and while they travel in cars and planes — is beyond improbable.

But, given the history of America’s clandestine research, it’s reasonable to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or long-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the possibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categorically dismissed.

Girard, for his part, believes these weapons were not only developed but were also tested on him more than 20 years ago.

What would the government gain by torturing him? Again, Girard found what he believed to be an explanation, or at least a precedent: During the Cold War, the government conducted radiation experiments on scores of unwitting victims, essentially using them as human guinea pigs. Girard came to believe that he, too, was a walking experiment.

Not that Girard thinks his selection was totally random: He believes he was targeted because of a disparaging remark he made to a Republican fundraiser about George H.W. Bush in the early 1980s. Later, Girard says, the voices confirmed his suspicion.

“One night I was going to bed; the usual drivel was going on,” he says. “The constant stream of drivel. I was just about to go to bed, and a voice says: ‘Mr. Girard, do you know who was in our studio with us? That was George Bush, vice president of the United States.’”

GIRARD’S STORY, HOWEVER STRANGE, reflects what TIs around the world report: a chance encounter with a government agency or official, followed by surveillance and gang stalking, and then, in many cases, voices, and pain similar to electric shocks. Some in the community have taken it upon themselves to document as many cases as possible. One TI from California conducted about 50 interviews, narrowing the symptoms down to several major areas: “ringing in the ears,” “manipulation of body parts,” “hearing voices,” “piercing sensation on skin,” “sinus problems” and “sexual attacks.” In fact, the TI continued, “many report the sensation of having their genitalia manipulated.”

Both male and female TIs report a variety of “attacks” to their sexual organs. “My testicles became so sore I could barely walk,” Girard says of his early experiences. Others, however, report the attacks in the form of sexual stimulation, including one TI who claims he dropped out of the seminary after constant sexual stimulation by directed-energy weapons. Susan Sayler, a TI in San Diego, says many women among the TIs suffer from attacks to their sexual organs but are often embarrassed to talk about it with outsiders.

“It’s sporadic, you just never know when it will happen,” she says. “A lot of the women say it’s as soon as you lay down in bed — that’s when you would get hit the worst. It happened to me as I was driving, at odd times.”

What made her think it was an electronic attack and not just in her head? “There was no sexual attraction to a man when it would happen. That’s what was wrong. It did not feel like a muscle spasm or whatever,” she says. “It’s so . . . electronic.”

Gloria Naylor, a renowned African American writer, seems to defy many of the stereotypes of someone who believes in mind control. A winner of the National Book Award, Naylor is best known for her acclaimed novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which described a group of women living in a poor urban neighborhood and was later made into a miniseries by Oprah Winfrey.

But in 2005, she published a lesser-known work, 1996, a semi-autobiographical book describing her experience as a TI. “I didn’t want to tell this story. It’s going to take courage. Perhaps more courage than I possess, but they’ve left me no alternatives,” Naylor writes at the beginning of her book. “I am in a battle for my mind. If I stop now, they’ll have won, and I will lose myself.” The book is coherent, if hard to believe. It’s also marked by disturbing passages describing how Jewish American agents were responsible for Naylor’s surveillance. “Of the many cars that kept coming and going down my road, most were driven by Jews,” she writes in the book. When asked about that passage in a recent interview, she defended her logic: Being from New York, she claimed, she can recognize Jews.

Naylor lives on a quiet street in Brooklyn in a majestic brownstone with an interior featuring intricate woodwork and tasteful decorations that attest to a successful literary career. She speaks about her situation calmly, occasionally laughing at her own predicament and her struggle with what she originally thought was mental illness. “I would observe myself,” she explains. “I would lie in bed while the conversations were going on, and I’d ask: Maybe it is schizophrenia?”

Like Girard, Naylor describes what she calls “street theater” — incidents that might be dismissed by others as coincidental, but which Naylor believes were set up. She noticed suspicious cars driving by her isolated vacation home. On an airplane, fellow passengers mimicked her every movement — like mimes on a street.

Voices similar to those in Girard’s case followed — taunting voices cursing her, telling her she was stupid, that she couldn’t write. Expletive-laced language filled her head. Naylor sought help from a psychiatrist and received a prescription for an antipsychotic drug. But the medication failed to stop the voices, she says, which only added to her conviction that the harassment was real.

For almost four years, Naylor says, the voices prevented her from writing. In 2000, she says, around the time she discovered the mind-control forums, the voices stopped and the surveillance tapered off. It was then that she began writing 1996 as a “catharsis.”

Colleagues urged Naylor not to publish the book, saying she would destroy her reputation. But she did publish, albeit with a small publishing house. The book was generally ignored by critics but embraced by TIs.

Naylor is not the first writer to describe such a personal descent. Evelyn Waugh, one of the great novelists of the 20th century, details similar experiences in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh’s book, published in 1957, has eerie similarities to Naylor’s.

Embarking on a recuperative cruise, Pinfold begins to hear voices on the ship that he believes are part of a wireless system capable of broadcasting into his head; he believes the instigator recruited fellow passengers to act as operatives; and he describes “performances” put on by passengers directed at him yet meant to look innocuous to others.

Waugh wrote his book several years after recovering from a similar episode and realizing that the voices and paranoia were the result of drug-induced hallucinations.

Naylor, who hasn’t written a book since 1996, is now back at work on an historical novel she hopes will return her to the literary mainstream. She remains convinced that she was targeted by mind control. The many echoes of her ordeal she sees on the mind-control forums reassure her she’s not crazy, she says.

Of course, some of the things she sees on the forum do strike her as crazy. “But who I am to say?” she says. “Maybe I sound crazy to somebody else.”

SOME TIS, SUCH AS ED MOORE, A YOUNG MEDICAL DOCTOR, take a slightly more skeptical approach. He criticizes what he calls the “wacky claims” of TIs who blame various government agencies or groups of people without any proof. “I have yet to see a claim of who is behind this that has any data to support it,” he writes.

Nonetheless, Moore still believes the voices in his head are the result of mind control and that the U.S. government is the most likely culprit. Moore started hearing voices in 2003, just as he completed his medical residency in anesthesiology; he was pulling an all-nighter studying for board exams when he heard voices coming from a nearby house commenting on him, on his abilities as a doctor, on his sanity. At first, he thought he was simply overhearing conversations through walls (much as Waugh’s fictional alter ego first thought), but when no one else could hear the voices, he realized they were in his head. Moore went through a traumatic two years, including hospitalization for depression with auditory hallucinations.

“One tries to convince friends and family that you are being electronically harassed with voices that only you can hear,” he writes in an e-mail. “You learn to stop doing that. They don’t believe you, and they become sad and concerned, and it amplifies your own depression when you have voices screaming at you and your friends and family looking at you as a helpless, sick, mentally unbalanced wreck.”

He says he grew frustrated with anti-psychotic medications meant to stop the voices, both because the treatments didn’t work and because psychiatrists showed no interest in what the voices were telling him. He began to look for some other way to cope.

“In March of 2005, I started looking up support groups on the Internet,” he wrote. “My wife would cry when she would see these sites, knowing I still heard voices, but I did not know what else to do.” In 2006, he says, his wife, who had stood by him for three years, filed for divorce.

Moore, like other TIs, is cautious about sharing details of his life. He worries about looking foolish to friends and colleagues — but he says that risk is ultimately worthwhile if he can bring attention to the issue.

With his father’s financial help, Moore is now studying for an electrical engineering degree at the University of Texas at San Antonio, hoping to prove that V2K, the technology to send voices into people’s heads, is real. Being in school, around other people, helps him cope, he writes, but the voices continue to taunt him.

Recently, he says, they told him: “We’ll never stop [messing] with you.”

A WEEK BEFORE THE TIS RALLY ON THE NATIONAL MALL, John Alexander, one of the people whom Harlan Girard holds personally responsible for the voices in his head, is at a Chili’s restaurant in Crystal City explaining over a Philly cheese steak and fries why the United States needs mind-control weapons.

A former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, Alexander went on to a number of national security jobs, and rubbed shoulders with prominent military and political leaders. Long known for taking an interest in exotic weapons, his 1980 article, “The New Mental Battlefield,” published in the Army journal Military Review, is cited by self-described victims as proof of his complicity in mind control. Now retired from the government and living in Las Vegas, Alexander continues to advise the military. He is in the Washington area that day for an official meeting.

Beneath a shock of white hair is the mind of a self-styled military thinker. Alexander belongs to a particular set of Pentagon advisers who consider themselves defense intellectuals, focusing on big-picture issues, future threats and new capabilities. Alexander’s career led him from work on sticky foam that would stop an enemy in his or her tracks to dalliances in paranormal studies and psychics, which he still defends as operationally useful.

In an earlier phone conversation, Alexander said that in the 1990s, when he took part in briefings at the CIA, there was never any talk of “mind control, or mind-altering drugs or technologies, or anything like that.”

According to Alexander, the military and intelligence agencies were still scared by the excesses of MK-ULTRA, the infamous CIA program that involved, in part, slipping LSD to unsuspecting victims. “Until recently, anything that smacked of [mind control] was extremely dangerous” because Congress would simply take the money away, he said.

Alexander acknowledged that “there were some abuses that took place,” but added that, on the whole, “I would argue we threw the baby out with the bath water.”

But September 11, 2001, changed the mood in Washington, and some in the national security community are again expressing interest in mind control, particularly a younger generation of officials who weren’t around for MK-ULTRA. “It’s interesting, that it’s coming back,” Alexander observed.

While Alexander scoffs at the notion that he is somehow part of an elaborate plot to control people’s minds, he acknowledges support for learning how to tap into a potential enemy’s brain. He gives as an example the possible use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, for lie detection. “Brain mapping” with fMRI theoretically could allow interrogators to know when someone is lying by watching for activity in particular parts of the brain. For interrogating terrorists, fMRI could come in handy, Alexander suggests. But any conceivable use of the technique would fall far short of the kind of mind-reading TIs complain about.

Alexander also is intrigued by the possibility of using electronic means to modify behavior. The dilemma of the war on terrorism, he notes, is that it never ends. So what do you do with enemies, such as those at Guantanamo: keep them there forever? That’s impractical. Behavior modification could be an alternative, he says.

“Maybe I can fix you, or electronically neuter you, so it’s safe to release you into society, so you won’t come back and kill me,” Alexander says. It’s only a matter of time before technology allows that scenario to come true, he continues. “We’re now getting to where we can do that.” He pauses for a moment to take a bite of his sandwich. “Where does that fall in the ethics spectrum? That’s a really tough question.”

When Alexander encounters a query he doesn’t want to answer, such as one about the ethics of mind control, he smiles and raises his hands level to his chest, as if balancing two imaginary weights. In one hand is mind control and the sanctity of free thought — and in the other hand, a tad higher — is the war on terrorism.

But none of this has anything to do with the TIs, he says. “Just because things are secret, people tend to extrapolate. Common sense does not prevail, and even when you point out huge leaps in logic that just cannot be true, they are not dissuaded.”

WHAT IS IT THAT BRINGS SOMEONE, EVEN AN INTELLIGENT PERSON, to ascribe the experience of hearing disembodied voices to government weapons?

In her book, Abducted, Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy examines a group that has striking parallels to the TIs: people who believe they’ve been kidnapped by aliens. The similarities are often uncanny: Would-be abductees describe strange pains, and feelings of being watched or targeted. And although the alleged abductees don’t generally have auditory hallucinations, they do sometimes believe that their thoughts are controlled by aliens, or that they’ve been implanted with advanced technology.

(On the online forum, some TIs posted vociferous objections to the parallel, concerned that the public finds UFOs even weirder than mind control. “It will keep us all marginalized and discredited,” one griped.)

Clancy argues that the main reason people believe they’ve been abducted by aliens is that it provides them with a compelling narrative to explain their perception that strange things have happened to them, such as marks on their bodies (marks others would simply dismiss as bruises), stimulation to their sexual organs (as the TIs describe) or feelings of paranoia. “It’s not just an explanation for your problems; it’s a source of meaning for your life,” Clancy says.

In the case of TIs, mind-control weapons are an explanation for the voices they hear in their head. Socrates heard a voice and thought it was a demon; Joan of Arc heard voices from God. As one TI noted in an e-mail: “Each person undergoing this harassment is looking for the solution to the problem. Each person analyzes it through his or her own particular spectrum of beliefs. If you are a scientific-minded person, then you will probably analyze the situation from that perspective and conclude it must be done with some kind of electronic devices. If you are a religious person, you will see it as a struggle between the elements of whatever religion you believe in. If you are maybe, perhaps more eccentric, you may think that it is alien in nature.”

Or, if you happen to live in the United States in the early 21st century, you may fear the growing power of the NSA, CIA and FBI.

Being a victim of government surveillance is also, arguably, better than being insane. In Waugh’s novella based on his own painful experience, when Pinfold concludes that hidden technology is being used to infiltrate his brain, he “felt nothing but gratitude in his discovery.” Why? “He might be unpopular; he might be ridiculous; but he was not mad.”

Ralph Hoffman, a professor of psychiatry at Yale who has studied auditory hallucinations, regularly sees people who believe the voices are a part of government harassment (others believe they are God, dead relatives or even ex-girlfriends). Not all people who hear voices are schizophrenic, he says, noting that people can hear voices episodically in highly emotional states. What exactly causes these voices is still unknown, but one thing is certain: People who think the voices are caused by some external force are rarely dissuaded from their delusional belief, he says. “These are highly emotional and gripping experiences that are so compelling for them that ordinary reality seems bland.”

Perhaps because the experience is so vivid, he says, even some of those who improve through treatment merely decide the medical regimen somehow helped protect their brain from government weapons.

Scott Temple, a professor of psychiatry at Penn State University who has been involved in two recent studies of auditory hallucinations, notes that those who suffer such hallucinations frequently lack insight into their illness. Even among those who do understand they are sick, “that awareness comes and goes,” he says. “People feel overwhelmed, and the delusional interpretations return.”

BACK AT THE PHILADELPHIA TRAIN STATION, Girard seems more agitated. In a meeting the week before, his “handlers” had spoken to him only briefly — they weren’t in the right position to attack him, Girard surmises, based on the lack of voices. Today, his conversation jumps more rapidly from one subject to the next: victims of radiation experiments, his hatred of George H.W. Bush, MK-ULTRA, his personal experiences.

Asked about his studies at Penn, he replies by talking about his problems with reading: “I told you, everything I write they dictate to me,” he says, referring again to the voices. “When I read, they’re reading to me. My eyes go across; they’re moving my eyes down the line. They’re reading it to me. When I close the book, I can’t remember a thing I read. That’s why they do it.”

The week before, Girard had pointed to only one person who appeared suspicious to him — a young African American man reading a book; this time, however, he hears more voices, which leads him to believe the station is crawling with agents.

“Let’s change our location,” Girard says after a while. “I’m sure they have 40 or 50 people in here today. I escaped their surveillance last time — they won’t let that happen again.”

Asked to explain the connection between mind control and the University of Pennsylvania, which Girard alleges is involved in the conspiracy, he begins to talk about defense contractors located near the Philadelphia campus: “General Electric was right next to the parking garage; General Electric Space Systems occupies a huge building right over there. From that building, you could see into the studio where I was doing my work most of the time. I asked somebody what they were doing there. You know, it had to do with computers. GE Space Systems. They were supposed to be tracking missile debris from this location . . . pardon me. What was your question again?”

Yet many parts of Girard’s life seem to reflect that of any affluent 70-year-old bachelor. He travels frequently to France for extended vacations and takes part in French cultural activities in Philadelphia. He has set up a travel scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the name of his late mother, who attended school there (he changed his last name 27 years ago for “personal reasons”), and he travels to meet the students who benefit from the fund. And while the bulk of his time is spent on his research and writing about mind control, he has other interests. He follows politics and describes outings with friends and family members with whom he doesn’t talk about mind control, knowing they would view it skeptically.

Girard acknowledges that some of his experiences mirror symptoms of schizophrenia, but asked if he ever worried that the voices might in fact be caused by mental illness, he answers sharply with one word: “No.”

How, then, does he know the voices are real?

“How do you know you know anything?” Girard replies. “How do you know I exist? How do you know this isn’t a dream you’re having, from which you’ll wake up in a few minutes? I suppose that analogy is the closest thing: You know when you have a dream. Sometimes it could be perfectly lucid, but you know it’s a dream.”

The very “realness” of the voices is the issue — how do you disbelieve something you perceive as real? That’s precisely what Hoffman, the Yale psychiatrist, points out: So lucid are the voices that the sufferers — regardless of their educational level or self-awareness — are unable to see them as anything but real. “One thing I can assure you,” Hoffman says, “is that for them, it feels real.”

IT LOOKS ALMOST LIKE ANY OTHER SMALL POLITICAL RALLY IN WASHINGTON. Posters adorn the gate on the southwest side of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, as attendees set up a table with press materials, while volunteers test a loudspeaker and set out coolers filled with bottled water. The sun is out, the weather is perfect, and an eclectic collection of people from across the country has gathered to protest mind control.

There is not a tinfoil hat to be seen. Only the posters and paraphernalia hint at the unusual. “Stop USA electronic harassment,” urges one poster. “Directed Energy Assaults,” reads another. Smaller signs in the shape of tombstones say, “RIP MKULTRA.” The main display, set in front of the speaker’s lectern has a more extended message: “HELP STOP HI-TECH ASSAULT PSYCHOTRONIC TORTURE.”

About 35 TIs show up for the June rally, in addition to a few friends and family members. Speakers alternate between giving personal testimonials and descriptions of research into mind-control technology. Most of the gawkers at the rally are foreign tourists. A few hecklers snicker at the signs, but mostly people are either confused or indifferent. The articles on mind control at the table — from mainstream news magazines — go untouched.

“How can you expect people to get worked up over this if they don’t care about eavesdropping or eminent domain?” one man challenges after stopping to flip through the literature. Mary Ann Stratton, who is manning the table, merely shrugs and smiles sadly. There is no answer: Everyone at the rally acknowledges it is an uphill battle.

In general, the outlook for TIs is not good; many lose their jobs, houses and family. Depression is common. But for many at the rally, experiencing the community of mind-control victims seems to help. One TI, a man who had been a rescue swimmer in the Coast Guard before voices in his head sent him on a downward spiral, expressed the solace he found among fellow TIs in a long e-mail to another TI: “I think that the only people that can help are people going through the same thing. Everyone else will not believe you, or they are possibly involved.”

In the end, though, nothing could help him enough. In August 2006, he would commit suicide.

But at least for the day, the rally is boosting TI spirits. Girard, in what for him is an ebullient mood, takes the microphone. A small crowd of tourists gathers at the sidelines, listening with casual interest. With the Capitol looming behind him, he reaches the crescendo of his speech, rallying the attendees to remember an important thing: They are part of a single community.

“I’ve heard it said, ‘We can’t get anywhere because everyone’s story is different.’ We are all the same,” Girard booms. “You knew someone with the power to commit you to the electronic concentration camp system.”

Several weeks after the rally, Girard shows up for a meeting with a reporter at the stately Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where he has stayed frequently over the two decades he has traveled to the capital to battle mind control. He walks in with a lit cigarette, which he apologetically puts out after a hotel employee tells him smoking isn’t allowed anymore. He is half an hour late — delayed, he says, by a meeting on Capitol Hill. Wearing a monogrammed dress shirt and tie, he looks, as always, serious and professional.

Girard declines to mention whom on Capitol Hill he’d met with, other than to say it was a congressional staffer. Embarrassment is likely a factor: Girard readily acknowledges that most people he meets with, ranging from scholars to politicians, ignore his entreaties or dismiss him as a lunatic.

Lately, his focus is on his Web site, which he sees as the culmination of nearly a quarter-century of research. When completed, it will contain more than 300 pages of documents. What next? Maybe he’ll move to France (there are victims there, too), or maybe the U.S. government will finally just kill him, he says.

Meanwhile, he is always searching for absolute proof that the government has decoded the brain. His latest interest is LifeLog, a project once funded by the Pentagon that he read about in Wired News. The article described it this way: “The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read. All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audiovisual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual’s health.”

Girard suggests that the government, using similar technology, has “catalogued” his life over the past two years — every sight and sound (Evelyn Waugh, in his mind-control book, writes about his character’s similar fear that his harassers were creating a file of his entire life).

Girard thinks the government can control his movements, inject thoughts into his head, cause him pain day and night. He believes that he will die a victim of mind control.

Is there any reason for optimism?

Girard hesitates, then asks a rhetorical question.

“Why, despite all this, why am I the same person? Why am I Harlan Girard?”

For all his anguish, be it the result of mental illness or, as Girard contends, government mind control, the voices haven’t managed to conquer the thing that makes him who he is: Call it his consciousness, his intellect or, perhaps, his soul.

“That’s what they don’t yet have,” he says. After 22 years, “I’m still me.”

Sharon Weinberger
The Washington Post
Sunday, January 14, 2007; W22

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011001399.html

Sharon Weinberger is a Washington writer and author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Tuesday at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

Mind Games

You probably see the quit smoking slogans everywhere these days. Indeed, getting rid of this nasty habit seems to have become some sort of fashion. While in the past it was associated with being successful, professional and above all sexy today smoking is regarded as a threat. You are highly unlikely to see a movie star lighting up but rather those horrific pictures in which a young person turns into something that resembles a real mummy. Still, it takes some more in depth understanding why smoking is dangerous than just a mere ad. Here are the most important quitting smoking benefits that you need to consider. Hopefully these will be enough to make you decide more firmly to stop smoking once and for all.

There are numerous quitting smoking benefits associated with the health that you will appreciate when you get rid of this habit. You will breathe more easily and fully as your throat and lungs will have less harmful substances piled in them. Most importantly, you are less likely to suffer from lung cancer. Your blood stream will be naturally cleansed and it will be able to carry more oxygen to all the organs and cells in your body. This means that you will be generally healthier. After quitting smoking your blood pressure will go down to normal levels and the strain on your heart and blood vessels will be smaller. As a result you can expect to have a reduced risk of diseases of the cardiovascular system such as heart attacks and strokes.

You should not fail to take into consideration other less widely known, but still essential quitting smoking benefits. Non smokers have a healthier and more slowly aging nervous system. This means that if you quit you are less likely to suffer from extremely harmful medical conditions such as Parkinson’s diseases and Alzheimer’s disease. Recent researches in the field reveal that by quitting smoking you have a sufficiently lower risk of suffering from an autoimmune disease called lupus. This can have severe symptoms affecting the normal life of a person such as persistent inflammation and pain in various parts of the body. Tissue damage is also highly likely in many cases of lupus.

Some people tend to place a greater importance on the more obvious quitting smoking benefits. Your skin will be much healthier, softer and more elastic after you quit. The same applies to the hair and nails as well. Overall, you will look rejuvenated, which is more than valuable for the women and also for the men. The nicer breath is another superb benefit – you will be much more charming for everyone around you.

Many people do not realize that there are quitting smoking benefits for their social life as well. You will be able to go to various trendy places such as restaurants where smoking is not permitted. You will be surprised to find that many people who have avoided your company previously are now more than happy to accept you in their non smoking group of friends. Your boss and coworkers will surely appreciate the change as well.

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Zyban is prescribed as an antidepressant and a quit smoking therapy. It was the fourth most prescribed antidepressant in the US market in 2006 with over 21 million prescriptions. But how does the Zyban quit smoking method work?

The next problem is that most small online business owners usually have little money and not a lot of time to generate traffic and visitors to their site…. Many of them spend 6-8 hours every day just trying to generate some traffic to their site, product or service. And, at the end of each month, because nothing they seem to try ever works very well, they find themselves no better off than they were the month before. It doesn’t take them long to realize what a big waste of time doing it that way really is.
What we want to share with you today is one of the ’smartest’ ways to generate an unlimited number of visitors to almost any site. It doesn’t matter whether you are promoting a product, a service, a business opportunity or a content site. It doesn’t matter how much your product costs … It doesn’t even matter if you are promoting your own products or someone elses via an affiliate program. If you want to promote … need extra traffic or visitors … want to increase your sales and monthly income, while automating 98% of it all – then keep reading.
And while we can’t cover ALL the different methods here, we would like to reveal 3 or 4 that we have found to be extremely inexpensive, relatively untapped, that have huge potential in bringing qualified traffic to your website. And, even more importantly … regardless of whether you want 10,000 or 1,000,000 visitors, they only take about 30 minutes to set in motion! Why would you pay a lead-generation company $3 to $5 or more PER lead when you can generate your own at a fraction of the cost?
So now instead of spending your entire day and your entire bank account trying to generate traffic to your site, what we are about to reveal should have you spending your time on more important things – like developing new products, growing your business, golfing, or whatever else it is that you really want to do.
Isn’t that the whole point of having your own web business … so you can have more time and freedom to enjoy life and do as you wish? Wouldn’t you agree, it’s much better to spend 30 minutes or less on promotions, and to have the entire process automated? That’s the difference between working SMART, and working HARD! You don’t want to work HARD do you?
The first thing we need you to know is that all website traffic is not created equal. There are plenty of sources out there and we can’t speak for them all. However, we do use the traffic methods we mention below to successfully generate traffic and qualified leads to our business. And, as well as ones not mentioned below, they continue to work successfully to promote these types of online businesses with consistant success:
Business Opportunities
Network Marketing/MLM
Franchise Opportunties
Work-at-home programs
Credit Cards/Repair
Personal Finance
Insurance offers
Investment sites
Computers, Software, etc
Education, Jobs/Career
“Free Stuff”, Coupons, etc
Internet/Web Services
Shopping, Gifts, etc
Sports/Sporting Goods
Travel, Cars, Outdoors
Pets, Hobbies, etc
Mens/Womens Health
Dieting, Fitness, etc
Cooking, Gardening, etc
Home Improvement
Online Casinos sites
Joke and Humor sites
Online Games, Chat, etc
Music, Sports, Movies, etc
Pets, Hobbies, etc
The traffic generation methods we are talking about are Pop-Ups, Pop-Unders, Keyword Targeted Pop-Unders, Expired Domain Traffic, AUDIO is OK traffic, and the different targeting platforms that can make them even more effective in promoting your business.
It is important to note that these traffic generation methods are NOT spam advertising. All websites these methods take place with, have opted in to allow this to happen, are payed well to do so, and, there are tens of thousands of them participating).
Let’s start by taking a quick look at POP-UPS. I’m positive you’ve experienced “Pop-Ups” while surfing online. Pop-Ups are the irritating windows that suddenly “pop” out of nowhere, in front of what you were reading, interrupting what you are doing. We aren’t going to spend a lot of time talking about Pop-Ups. They tend to get a lot of bad press; most people have software installed and most ISPs have blocking devices in place to eliminate them these day, which makes them not as popular a means of generating traffic. Nevertheless, because they are usually slightly cheaper than the other methods, some people still buy them in large quantities and use them to pull a small, but converting quantity of traffic to their websites.
We want to spend more time talking about the other 3 types of promotion methods today. , and we will go next to the traffic method called Pop-Unders.
POP-UNDERS – are pretty much what the name sounds like. The big difference between them and Pop-UPs is that Pop-Unders load **under** the current browser window. Because of that, they tend to not be as bothersome or interrupting to the web surfers as Pop-Ups. 99% of the time the web surfer doesn’t even know the Pop-Under site is there until they move or close their main window, so they aren’t in a “bad mood”, from being interrupted, when they do see it. When you advertise your site with “Pop-Unders”, your site is loaded behind another website that someone has just arrived at or left. Once the person closes off that particular site they then see yours, hence the name “pop-under”. This is obviously a very cost effective way to have your site seen by thousands or even millions of people.
Obviously this type of advertising, as with most others has its pros and cons. The pro being people WILL see your site by the thousands and the cost is extremely low. The con being most people will close the pop-under without bothering to browse your website. That is a fact you have to be aware of. You are NOT going to see conversion rates of 10% or anything like that … far from it. However, you can make a small fortune even with a horrible conversion ratio. This form of traffic generation is so cost-effective that even if you only get 1 sale out of every 10,000 Pop-Unders you’re still a head of the game!
Let me say this another way, because this is the key and you really need to understand this. Quite truthfully, from a response ratio standpoint, Pop-Unders aren’t choice #1, however, because they are so inexpensive, they can be one of the BEST ways to promote your site from an ROI (return on investment) standpoint, and that’s what matters!
Pop-Unders are quite a popular means of generating traffic, especially since they can be targeted by topic into almost any specific niche your website fits into. For example, if you have a sports website, it can be targeted to “appear” behind sports websites. Or, if you have a casino site, it can be targeted to load behind casino websites. It’s obvious that only the visitors who are actually interested in those topics, would be looking at that niche site in the first place, right?
Here are some of the many categories that can be targeted:
Advertising Media – Agriculture – Animals – Antiques – Arts – Associations – Astronomy – Auctions – Auto Rental – Autos – Babies – Bathroom – Beauty – Bicycles – Boats – Books – Bridal – Building – Business – Camping – Candles – Candy & Confectionery – Cellular Phones – Cellular Service – Career Counselling – Car Audio – Charity – Chatrooms – Christian – Cigarettes – Cigars – Childrens Products – Clip art – Clocks & Watches – Clothes – Collectibles – College – College Nightlife – College Students – Comics – Computer Advice – Computer Memory – Computer Peripherals – Computer Programming – Computer Related – Computer Software – Computer Virus – Consumer Electronics – Conventions – Cooking – Cosmetics & Perfume – Costumes & Uniforms – Crafts & Craft Making – Credit Cards – Dance – Debt Consolidation – Diet – Domain Names – Education – Employment – Entertainment – Exhibitions & Conventions – Eye Care – Fabrics – Family – Farming – Fashion – Fashion for Men – Fashion for Women – Finance – Fishing – Fitness – Flights – Flooring – Flowers – Food & Beverage – Free Stuff – Friends & People – Furniture – Games – Games for Consoles – Games for PC – Gardening – Genealogy – Geography – Gifts – Golf – Government – Hair – Handbags – Health – Health for Men – Health for Women – High Tech – Home Business – Home Electronics – Horoscopes & Astrology – Horses – Hotels – Humour & Fun – Income Opportunities – Industry – Information – Insurance & Banking – Internet Services – Investment – Jewellery – Jobs & Career Counselling – Kids Activities – Kitchen – Language – Law & Law Enforcement – Liquor & Alcohol – Loans – Magazines – Maps – Marketing for Internet – Marketing non-Internet – Media – Miscellaneous – MLM – Money Making – Mortgages – Motorcycles – Movies & Films – Music/MP3 – Musical Instruments – Nature & Animals – News – Office Supplies – Organizations – Personal Advice – Personal Computers – Personal Homepage – Pest Control – Pets – Photography – Posters – Printers & Supplies – Property (Commercial) – Property (Residential) – Real Estate – Religion – Safety & Security – Sales – Science – Seniors & Retirement – Services – Shoes & Foot Products – Shopping – Skateboards – Smoking & Tobacco Products – Software – Sports – Tax – Tea & Coffee – Telephones & Service – Television & Satellite TV – Tickets – Top Web Sites – Toys – Training – Transportation – Travel & Tourism – Trivia – Vitamins – Web Design – Web Hosting – Web Resources – Webmasters -Wedding/Marriage – Adult Casino – Adult Movies – Adult Toys – Gay – Live Webcams – Match Making/Dating – Paysites – Paysites Amateurs – Paysites Hardcore – Paysites Interracial – Paysites Softcore – Paysites Teens – Penis Enlargement – Shopping – TGP – Untargeted Adult – Webmasters – Adult Casino – Free Games – Horse & Dog Racing – Premium Casino – Sports Betting – Untargeted Gambling.
There are some limitations to using POP-traffic that you should be aware of. You will find that most traffic resellers state these limitations in their Terms and Conditions; in clear view on their websites:
No other window of any type can be spawned internal or external of the target URL. The sites you submit may not contain any pop window (i.e exit pages, java pops, pop-ins, fly-ins, pop-unders, etc.).
No redirectors, scripts that change the home page settings, message boxes, download boxes, are NOT allowed
no hate/illegal/adult–All PG rated content.
No warez, virus, trojan, auto-downloads, framebreakers, or browser-altering allowed.
NO SOUND/NOISE on the page you are targeting.
Before they start a campaign for you, they thoroughly check to see if any of these “traps” are on the site, and they do refuse service to any sites they determine are inappropriate for their network.
Now while banning the presence of most of these “traps” listed above are valid, the NO sound/noise and the NO pop-up/under limitations that most traffic resellers enforce do stop A LOT of website businesses from using POP-traffic.
Now there’s a solution. AUDIO is OKAY! is a **new** mainstream form of traffic that ALLOWS you to have audio/sound and/or 1 Pop-Up or Pop-Under on your website’s front page. What this means is that a lot of website businesses that have state-of-the-art movies, talking, or music presentations that start automatically on their front webpages, can now buy and use POP-traffic to generate visitors! This is new and this is in demand!
Website promotion specialists can use POP-traffic to expose your business to millions of users with the most cost effective packages. They can deliver guaranteed visitors directly to your website 24/7. Whether you are looking to establish a presence on the Internet, or are just interested in branding your site, they can be your very own online advertising solution.

A Brief History Of Television

As Seen Through The Eyes Of A Mad Man As A Young Boy

1. Fight Night

Matthew Chambers stood behind the screen door watching the street. Heat rose from the asphalt even now as the day was entering the cool of the evening. Lawns were being watered up and down the street, the water running off the lawns across the dusty sidewalks over the curbs and onto the street. Flies bounced off the screening with an electronic pinging sound and lay stunned on the wooden verandah floor. Matthew opened the door slightly. He wanted to step out and crush the bugs.

“Don’t let those damn flies in!” his mother cried from the kitchen at the other end of the hall from the front door.

Matthew closed the door and retreated back into the house. He made his way back to the kitchen.

“You look like you’ve lost your best friend,” his mother said sitting at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. “We’ll have to get your hair cut tomorrow. Just looking at you makes me feel hot.”

“I like my hair long,” the boy said.

“You look like a shaggy dog. Don’t give me a hard time about it Matthew. I’m not in the mood.”

Laughter rang out from the back yard. A moment later Matthew’s father and uncle stepped into the kitchen. His father was carrying a case of beer, Red Cap. The two men’s shirts were damp with perspiration, dark pools around their neck and armpits.

“Beer’ll just make you sweat,” Matthew’s mother sighed.

“A godly way to sweat, sis,” Matthew’s uncle said. “Where’s my little darling?”

“Watch your language, Len,” Mrs. Chambers said gesturing with her head toward Matthew. “Cathy is over at a friend’s for the night.”

Uncle Leonard winked at Matthew.

“A little cussing never hurt anyone, sis,” he said then laughed.

Uncle Leonard handed the case of beer to Matthew. It was heavy. Matthew struggled to keep from dropping it.

“Take this into the living room, Matt. I’ve got to go back and get the television.”

Matthew’s father stepped up to the stove and peeked into the oven.

“Nothing for dinner?” he said.

“It’s too hot for cooking,” his wife replied. “I’m going to slice some ham and make potato salad.”

A few minutes later uncle Leonard returned to the living room and began to set up the Admiral black and white television set. He noticed that Matthew had already opened the case and placed two bottles of beer at his father’s and uncle’s designated chair.

“Take a beer to your mother,” uncle Leonard said with a wink.

When Matthew entered the kitchen, he found his mother and father in a heated discussion, which they suspended as soon as they spotted him. Matthew knew what the discussion was about. His mother did not want his father to drink. She felt it was a bad influence on Matthew. Everything fun was a bad influence on him, Matthew had come to realize.

After dinner, Matthew’s father and uncle retired to the living room. Matthew helped his mother with the dishes. When he stepped into the living room the two men had already emptied a couple more beers. The fight was almost ready to start. The picture was very snowy. Uncle Leonard adjusted the rabbit ears, than banged the top of the cabinet. The picture cleared or what passed as clear. For each image on the screen there was a ghost. Uncle Leonard called them guardian angels.

The Gillette razor parrot introduced the show. Feel sharp, be sharp! the parrot crooned. The picture was very small. A single camera somewhere in the rafters of the Madison Square Garden was focused on an empty ring. The announcer began to discuss the two fighters. Uncle Leonard leaned back and chugged on his beer. Matthew’s father leaned forward so that he was only a couple of feet from the screen.

Mrs. Chambers wandered into the room, still nursing her first beer. For a few moments she stared at the screen. Then she looked disapprovingly at Matthew. She insisted that it was time for him to go to bed. Matthew begged to stay up but he knew the battle was already lost.

“Let the kid watch the fight,” Matthew’s father pleaded as he lifted his bottle of beer to his mouth.

“No son of mine is going to watch two Negroes knock the daylights out of each other,” she cried.

“One of them is Italian,” his uncle clarified, a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth.

“Ah mom,” Matthew moaned.

“Don’t ah mom me,” his mother said. “You want to end up like these two wasting their lives away in front of that idiot box.”

Uncle Leonard laughed. “Ah Patricia, let the boy watch the damn thing for Christ’s sake.”

“None of that language in my house, brother,” Matthew’s mother spat out. “The boy needs his sleep.”

Nothing Matthew’s uncle or father said would or could affect Mrs. Chambers’ decision. Argument tended to fortify her resolve. Slowly Matthew struggled up the stairs. When he heard his mother return to the kitchen, Matthew turned and carefully made his way back down the stairs until he was satisfied that he could follow the fight without being detected.

“Look at the Eyetie,” uncle Leonard howled. “One blow in the belly and his dinner will be all over the mat.”

“You got any money on the fight?” Mr. Chambers asked.

“Does a dog have fleas?” uncle Leonard responded with a laugh. “Five bucks on Moore.”

The fighters were called into the middle of the ring. Mr. Chambers opened a couple more beers. Matthew licked his lips. He’d tasted beer once. His father had left some at the bottom of one of his empties and Matthew had tried it the next day. It was disgusting.

The fighters broke out of their corners and spent most of the first round stalking each other.

“Moore is just feeling him out,” uncle Leonard cried. “Look at how flat footed the Eyetie is. Moves around the room like a washer-woman.”

The screen turned snowy. Uncle Leonard cursed and kicked the side of the cabinet. The picture cleared. There was a commercial on. Matthew raced up the stairs, turned on the cold water tap in the bathroom and stuck his mouth under the faucet. Refreshed, he hastily returned to his place on the steps. For no reason, the volume increased.

“Can you turn that thing down,” Mrs. Chambers cried out from the kitchen. “The whole neighbourhood can hear you.”

Uncle Leonard reached for the volume. As he did the picture went snowy again.

“Screw the neighbours!” uncle Leonard cried and banged the cabinet with his fist. The screen cleared to show the great Archie Moore kissing the canvas.

“Jesus Murphy!” his uncle cried.

“I told you that Italian had bricks in his fist.” Matthew’s father laughed.

“The garlic must have knocked him over,” uncle Leonard cried.

Matthew’s father laughed with delight.

“Well, he ain’t up yet, Len. Never underestimate them Italians. Got a couple of those fellows down at the Plant. Hard as nails. You can’t hurt them. They don’t feel pain like normal folks. One fella had a crate of machine parts fall on his foot the other day. Never winked an eye. Finished his shift and than went to the hospital. Broke all his toes. Back at work the next day.”

Uncle Leonard shook his head. “Too stupid to feel anything.”

Moore got up off the canvas.

“Christ!” Mr. Chambers cried.

Uncle Leonard laughed. “Never count that Negro out.”

“How is the Italian supposed to win if the referee can’t count?” Mr. Chambers said.

“Oh, he can count, Gerry,” uncle Leonard howled. “You’re going to hear him count soon enough. The Eytie is in trouble now. He’s got Moore bloody mad.”

Matthew listened attentively.

“Matthew!”

A moment later Mrs. Chambers stepped around the corner and looked up the stairs. Matthew dropped his head, turned and retreated up the stairs and into his room. He sat in a chair next to his open window and watched the heavy yellow moon slip out from behind a cloud. The bright pink peaches on the tree in the backyard shone like planets. In the back lane someone was starting their car. Voices roared out from deep in the night. Downstairs uncle Leonard’s voice cried out in joy.

2. Ernie Kovacs

As Matthew Chambers stood strumming his fingers on the locked bathroom door, his sister Cathy lay in the warm languid foam of her bubble bath singing a pleasant tune.

“How long do you expect to be in there, princess?” Matthew barked sarcastically.

In her best southern accent, Cathy responded.

“I can’t quite say, Billy Bob.”

Matthew’s face was pressed against the door. He could hear his sister sloshing about in the bath. Matthew pounded the door.

“I can only wash so fast,” she added.

“But there’s so much to wash,” Matthew cried. He placed his face against the door and groaned.

“Get the friggin out of there!” he cried.

“I cannot understand why you cannot control your bladder, dear brother. What was it you were preaching to me the other day about self-discipline? The washroom was vacant a half hour ago. Why didn’t you take advantage of that window of opportunity?”

“You’re doing this on purpose.”

“I don’t know what you are driving at, brother.”

“Please,” Matthew moaned.

“Pretty please?” Cathy asked.

Matthew kicked the door. “Hurry up for Christ’s sake!”

“Oh,” Cathy responded. “Does he have to go too?”

***

Matthew stepped gingerly into the kitchen from the backyard. He hoped his parents hadn’t seen him pissing in the backyard. The television was on in the living room. Matthew entered the room and carefully took a seat on the couch. His father was watching the Ernie Kovac’s comedy show. Like his father, Ernie Kovacs combed his jet black hair back and wore a thick moustache. It was a look that had become fashionable in the years before WW2 with Hitler, Stalin, John Barrymore, David Niven, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin.

“Did you piss in the yard again?” his father asked.

“I couldn’t help it,” Matthew responded defensively. “Cathy wouldn’t get out of the can.”

On the television there was a crowd of men posing like a famous 15^th century painting by a Dutch Master. In the middle of the group was Ernie Kovacs smoking a cigar.

“I hope your mother didn’t see you,” his father said to Matthew.

“She’s not home,” Matthew responded. “You’ve got to do something about Cathy.”

“Can’t help you there, son.” Mr. Chambers laughed.

A crowd of angels posed at the Gates to Paradise. One of the angels, Ernie Kovacs, pulled out a cigar and lit it up.

Matthew didn’t want to smile. He was too angry. He swore that as soon as Cathy vacated the bathroom, he was going to lay into her. Matthew looked down on the floor at the newspaper that lay there. On the front page Richard Nixon was conceding defeat in the presidential election. Nixon looked like someone who was trying to hide something. Slowly Nixon’s face seemed to reshape itself into Ernie Kovac’s. The former vice president opened his mouth into a smile and inserted a cigar. Matthew shook his head.

On the television, Eddy Adams, Kovac’s voluptuous wife, pouted before the camera in a low cut tight fitting dress. Then she placed a cigar before her lips and kissed it. Matthew’s father fished a cigar out of the package in his shirt and lit one up. Matthew looked up at the ceiling. He could still hear his sister’s fat ass rubbing on the bottom of the tub. God, he had to take another leak.

Mr. Chambers took the cigar from his mouth. Smoke drifted aimlessly about the room.

“What’s wrong with you, Matthew? Can’t you sit still? You’re always fidgeting.”

“I gotta go again and I ain’t going outside.”

“Why the heck didn’t you go before she got in there? You know what women are like.”

“I didn’t have to go then.”

“If the bathroom is open, you go,” Mr. Chambers said. “Haven’t you heard of preventive medicine?”

Matthew turned back to the set. A beautiful young girl was taking a bath, washing one of her long legs that she raised high above the tub. When is she going to get out of there? Matthew cursed inside. Mr. Chambers coughed. At the other end of the tub, Ernie Kovacs rose out of the suds. He was smoking a cigar. Kovacs stood up, he was wearing a suit, and stepped out of the tub and walked off. Mr. Chambers choked with laughter. The young lady in the tub didn’t seem to notice Kovac’s departure. Matthew began to laugh. Another gentleman, in a top hat and carrying an umbrella rose from the other end of the tub and stepped out the bath. Both Mr. Chambers and Matthew howled with laughter. Next a plumber rose from the other end of the tub. He was followed by a policeman, a clown, two midgets carrying a ladder between them. Tears of laughter ran down Mr. Chambers’ face. Matthew moaned. God, I’m going to piss my pants! Above them the bathroom door opened. Matthew ran.

3. The Flintstones

Fred and Matthew lay on the broadloom floor staring up at the set. A glass of milk and a plate of chocolate chip cookies were set in front of each of the boys. Fred’s parents had left for the evening. They’d gone to see a movie at the Westwood Theatre, a local movie house.

“Your mom sure makes good cookies,” Matthew said.

“Ya,” Fred responded with his mouth full. “Do you think Wilma sleeps naked?”

“Wilma who?”

“Fred Flinstone’s wife, stupid,” Fred replied.

Matthew looked at Fred with a puzzled expression on his face.

“You ever think that Fred and Barney have dinks?” Fred added.

Matthew moaned. Fred was always talking about sex.

“They’re cartoon characters,” Matthew sighed. “They don’t even have ten fingers.”

The two boys turned back to the television. Barney and Fred were driving to work, their feet peddling the car along.

“That’s neat, eh?” Matthew said and laughed.

“You ever seen your mom naked?” Fred asked.

Matthew turned to Fred. “You crazy or something? Why would I ever want to see my mom naked?”

Fred shrugged his shoulders. After a few minutes, Matthew turned to Fred.

“How come there aren’t any Negroes in the Flintstones?”

“I saw some Chinese once,” Fred replied. “They were running a laundry.”

The boys turned back to the television. Barney was cutting his front lawn using a small dinosaur as a lawnmower. When Barney stopped to talk to Fred, the dinosaur rolled on its side and leaning on his elbow said, It’s a living! Matthew and Fred laughed. A few moments passed. Commercials. Matthew finished his milk.

“You ever seen a naked lady?” Matthew asked.

“Lots.” Fred grabbed one of Matthew’s cookies. Fred’s plate was empty.

“Sure!” Matthew responded with a smirk.

Fred stood up and insisted that Matthew follow him. The two boys climbed the stairs to Fred’s parent’s bedroom. Fred pulled a stack of magazines from beneath the neatly made bed. He opened the magazine on top and began to leaf through it. Matthew could not believe what he was seeing. Women were stretched out on blankets, naked, looking up at the two boys and smiling.

“You gotta see this one,” Fred said grabbing another magazine. In this magazine women were having sex with a number of different men, sometimes with more than one partner.

“Not so fast,” Matthew begged.

“Look at this one,” Matthew said laughing. “This lady must be double jointed.”

“What if they got stuck?” Matthew asked.

Fred shook his head with professional disdain.

“You don’t get stuck,” he said.

“My uncle’s dogs got stuck,” Matthew replied. “He had to throw cold water over them to get them separated.”

“People aren’t dogs,” Fred explained and then pointed at another picture. “Look at the size of that guy’s pecker. He must be some kind of medical freak. There’s a neat story in one of these magazines about a girl sucking a guy’s dick in the back of a car. They were parked in some lover’s lane. The car got rear ended by another car and the girl accidentally bit the guy’s dick off. They had to rush the guy to the hospital to get it sown back on and all the way while she was driving the guy to the hospital she had to keep his dick in her mouth so it wouldn’t get lost.”

For a while the boys looked through the magazines in silence.

“What do you think the ladies are thinking about when they’re having their pictures taken?” Matthew asked.

“Their hair,” Fred replied.

Matthew howled with laughter.

“My mother is always worried about her hair when someone is taking her picture,” Fred explained.

“You think they got homes?” Matthew asked.

“They don’t look like they got homes,” Fred replied.

“They look kind of sad,” Matthew added.

“They’re not sad,” Fred responded. “They’re having orgasms.”

“Oh,” Matthew responded.

“Like when you masturbate,” Fred explained.

“I’ve never masturbated,” Matthew said.

Fred groaned.

“Honest!” Matthew insisted. “I woke up once and saw something coming out of my pecker. I thought it was broke.”

Fred howled with laughter.

“What did you do?”

Matthew was silent for a moment.

“Promise you won’t tell anyone.”

“Promise.”

“On your mother’s grave.”

Fred nodded.

“I told my mom,” Matthew said.

Fred’s mouth dropped. Laughter sprayed out. Matthew looked at Fred and then he too began to laugh. Tears began to run down the cheeks of the two boys.

Fred stopped laughing.

“What was that?”

“What was what?” Matthew asked.

“Listen!” Fred insisted.

The two boys listened. Someone was opening the front door.

4. Hockey Night in Canada

The valley was mute except for the crackling sound of the stream eating at holes in the ice. Matthew squinted his eyes. The glare of the snow was blinding. In the distance he could hear the faint sound of the bus he was supposed to have taken home. He’d spent his money earlier that day on hockey cards. He wished he had saved some of the gum. He was hungry.

The shadow of a bird skated across the crust of snow. Matthew looked up. A crow landed on a branch high in a tree top, like the hockey announcer on Hockey Night in Canada, high above the action. Or maybe like God. God had become a problem for Matthew. He could not reconcile all the bad things that happened to people with a God who was all loving. The crow displaced a flurry of snow down upon Matthew.

Matthew’s foot sank in the snow. He couldn’t move it. He pulled with all his might but the boot wouldn’t budge. Matthew put his books down on the snow, undid the entrapped boot and slipped his foot out. When he had freed his boot, he put his foot back in. His books were now covered in snow. Matthew brushed them off and moved on.

He was getting cold. The clouds of breath that earlier had fascinated Matthew as they rose like balloons from his mouth, now poured out in a stream of exhaust. His lips began to feel as if they were bleeding. Small pin needles began to jab at his cheeks. His lungs were sore. Curling his fingers up in his mitts, Matthew cursed the books that made it impossible for him to keep his hands in the warmth of his pockets.

The stream looked strong enough. It was about ten feet across. A journey around the stream to the bridge at Kipling Avenue was a long one and the day was already beginning to dim. How he wished he hadn’t bought those hockey cards; how he wished he’d taken the bus home. The ice was crystal clear, not a speck of snow on it. He had dreamed of such ice earlier that winter when he and Fred had planned to skate down the creek until it met the Humber River.

Gingerly, Matthew stepped out onto the ice. Each step was cautiously plotted and executed. It reminded Matthew of a war film he’d seen in which a company of soldiers crossed a mine-field. All of them didn’t make it. About half way across the stream, Matthew heard a crack. He looked around. Above him, the crow he’d seen earlier, cried out. Before Matthew knew it, he was up to his knees in water. The current of the stream pulled on his legs. He reached out for the shore, slipped, and fell through the ice. A mouthful of cold water choked him. Kicking and clawing, Matthew managed to grab a tree branch that hung over the stream. He pulled himself out of the creek.

Matthew lay on the snow, coughing and panting. Turning he spotted his history book sinking below the broken ice. The hockey cards he’d purchased that morning floated down stream, the Golden Jet passing Bobby Baun. Tears welled up in Matthew’s ice and froze. He tried to stand up but his boots, now filled with water, were as heavy as cement blocks. He tried to pull his feet out but could not. Don’t panic! he told himself. Finally by jamming his boot in the crux of a small tree, Matthew managed to pull one foot out and then the other, extricating each with a great sucking sound. Matthew took his socks off and squeezed the water out of them. His feet were blood red and freezing cold. He didn’t want to put the socks back on but knew that he must. He emptied his boots of water and pulled them on. He grabbed the rest of his books, stood up and began to move.

Matthew moved slowly, the weight of his wet clothes bearing down upon him. As the sun began to sink, the wind began to pick up. Remembering something his mother had told him, Matthew made a conscious effort to keep moving his toes. Tears ran down Matthew’s cheeks as he dragged his legs through the snow, pulling himself along at times by grabbing bushes and tree branches. In places the snow had drifted. Several times Matthew found himself in snow up to his waist. His pants were now frozen stiff. It was a great effort to bend his knees. Keep moving! he told himself. When he reached the edge of the valley and looked up the steep hill he had to climb, all hope left him.

Matthew sat down in the snow and cried. He could no longer feel his feet. His hands were beginning to go numb. He began to shiver. Matthew closed his eyes. A voice inside spoke to him. Maybe if I just slept for a while. Maybe I could get my strength back. The crow that Matthew had seen earlier landed on Matthew’s head and began to beat the boy around the ears. Matthew fought the crow off. He stood up. Matthew began to climb. The hill was slippery. Twice he fell and slid back down the hill. Each time the crow swept down over Matthew’s head, screeching. Matthew pushed himself higher and higher. He forgot about the top of the hill and concentrated on the next step. When he reached the top of the hill, Matthew fell to his knees and sobbed.

After a brief spell of tears, Matthew stood up and looked back down the hill. Darkness had filled the valley. The only sound he heard was the snapping of tree branches under the weight of the snow and the whisper of the breeze as it whistled passed his ears. As Matthew turned and headed home, the crow flew low over his head, screeched, and climbed into the night.

5. The Twentieth Century

Matthew leaned against the window, his nose smeared against the glass. It had been raining all morning, a cold October rain. No football or road hockey today, he said to himself.

Fred banged on the back door. Mrs. Chambers let in the dripping wet teenager, rain dripping off his baseball hat.

“You’re soaking wet. Mr. Chambers will have to drive you and Matthew to church,” Mrs. Chambers exclaimed.

“Oh no, Mrs. Chambers,” Fred responded with a clearly false charm. “I wouldn’t think of imposing on Mr. Chambers. My mother would be very upset and I think that young Matthew and I are up for the challenge. Certainly our forebears had to deal with much harsher conditions…”

“Knock off the Eddy Haskell imitation,” Mrs. Chambers said without a smile.

Fred grinned. “Yes, mam. I was practicing. Someday I hope to make it in television. Our drama teacher Mrs. Giancola says that we have to take advantage of every situation that life offers us.”

Mrs. Chambers sighed and returned to the kitchen. Matthew clamored down the stairs and grabbed his jacket and cap. On the way to church, the two boys discussed the upcoming football game that afternoon between the Toronto and their arch rivals the Hamilton Tiger Cats. Both agreed that it was a shame the game was blacked out on television. The rain continued to fall.

“Have you noticed the way people walk in the rain?” Fred asked. “They scrunch up their foreheads as if the scrunching would keep them dry.”

Matthew thought about Fred’s remark for a moment.

“My father said that there wasn’t any television when he was a kid.”

“Ya,” Fred replied. “I can’t even imagine that. Gives me the creeps when I come home and there isn’t any one home. First thing I do is turn on the television. Just for the company. In the middle ages, there wasn’t any electricity. People must have done a lot of sleeping. Imagine if you were an insomniac.”

Matthew nodded. “I guess that’s why they called it the dark ages.”

The boys stopped at the hydro field. They had to decide whether to stick to the road where only their shoes would get wet or risk getting soaked if they took a short cut through the field. They chose the short cut.

“I saw a guy painting one of those towers,” Matthew said gesturing to the giant steel towers where the hydro wires hung. “There is no way you could pay me enough to climb up those things.”

“Must be a great view though,” Fred said looking up into the sky.

After the boys passed through the field, they stopped at Duke’s Cycle and Sports. The boys pointed to particular pieces of equipment they hoped to receive that Christmas. Next the boys stopped at Richard’s Television. Mr. Richards always left one of his television sets in the front window, on. Although the programs were mute, the boys enjoyed watching them.

An evangelist, Oral Roberts, smacked a young woman on the forehead sending her back into the arms of another man.

“What do you figure was wrong with her?” Fred asked.

“Maybe she had a headache,” Matthew responded.

Fred laughed.

The program changed. A picture of the Rock of Gilbraltor appeared on the screen. Matthew had seen the program many times. It was a news program that examined the events of the twentieth century. Matthew could almost hear the narrator, Walter Cronkite, speak. The Prudential Insurance Company presents the Twentieth Century. Fred nudged Matthew. He wanted to move on. Matthew waited a moment. On the television bulldozers moved across the screen pushing piles of dead bodies into a large pit.

“What the hell is that?” Fred cried.

“Concentration camps,” Matthew responded.

“Jesus!” Fred gasped. “What did all those people die from?”

“Being Jews,” Matthew replied.

The two boys moved along. They were quiet for some time.

“You remember that story in the bible where God talks to Moses?” Matthew asked.

Fred nodded.

“What do you think God’s voice sounded like?”

Fred thought for a moment then shook his head.

“I think his voice sounded like Walter Cronkite,” Matthew replied.

Fred began to laugh as the two boys reached the front steps of the Church.

“What’s so funny?” Matthew asked.

“What,” Fred responded continuing to laugh as he spoke, “what if God sounded like Donald Duck?”

The two boys opened the church doors. They were late. Mass had already started. Gingerly they climbed up to the balcony where they hoped to go unnoticed. The balcony was empty. They slipped into a pew. The priest was in the middle of his sermon. He stopped.

“Would the two boys in the balcony,” he demanded, “please come to the front of the church. We have two empty spaces right here in front of me.”

6. The Great Show

The priest’s voice thundered through the church, crashing over the parishioners. Matthew looked at his father who was smiling. How could he smile? The priest was scaring the hell of Matthew. Matthew glanced around the church. Many of his friends were there with their fathers. None of his friends were moving, none were slouching, all were sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for the next words from the priest. It was a great show. It was the parish retreat for fathers and sons

Each evening for four nights, boys and their fathers would show up at the church and for two hours they would take an emotional roller coaster ride that would leave them exhausted and exhilarated at the same time. The priest that stood before them in the pulpit was a huge man, more warrior than healer. His voice, which was deep and loud, was used like a weapon. Matthew could imagine the priest in hand-to-hand combat with Satan. The devil would have all he could handle.

It was the last night. Mr. Chambers had promised Matthew something special when they came home that night. When they arrived home, Mr. Anderson and his twin sons were awaiting them. Matthew didn’t trust the Anderson twins. One was indiscernible from the other and they dressed alike to exacerbate the confusion. They went everywhere together and when asked a question, they would confer with each other as if every answer demanded a consensus. They spoke a strange exotic language, their mother’s tongue, from some land deep inside Asia. To Matthew, it didn’t sound like an earthly language but some alien gibberish one might expect to hear from beings not of this world.

Once inside the house, Matthew was ordered to remain at the back stairs with the twins.

“Did you go to the retreat?” Matthew asked.

“We did,” one of the twins replied.

“We found it very upsetting,” the other twin added. “Do you believe in hell?”

Matthew shrugged. “I guess.”

“What if one of us goes to heaven?” one twin asked.

“And the other goes to hell?” the other twin added.

Matthew scratched his head. “Maybe you could phone each other,” he suggested.

The twins looked at each other and conferred. Matthew’s suggestion seemed to please them.

“What are they doing?” Matthew asked referring to his father and Mr. Anderson.

The twins smiled.

“We have been told to remain silent,” one of them said.

“Or else,” the second added.

“Do you guys always talk like this?” Matthew asked.

The two boys looked at each other and responded in a chorus. “Talk like what?”

Cathy appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she cried, a glittering smile of braces. “Isn’t it the way you always expected it to happen? I couldn’t believe mama when she told me. I could just die.”

“Cathy is very excited,” one of the Anderson boys said.

“What’s going on?” Matthew asked.

Cathy looked at Matthew for a moment before her mother’s recent command struck her. She slapped her hand over her mouth.

“I forgot,” she cried and ran off.

Matthew turned to the twins for help. They too had their hands over their mouths.

Finally Matthew was called upstairs. Both his parents were waiting in the living room. Behind them a large box was covered by a white sheet. Cathy started to screech with delight. The two Anderson boys smiled at each other. Mr. and Mrs. Chambers stepped aside. Mr. Anderson reached over and pulled the sheet off the box. Matthew gasped. A new television.

Cathy jumped up and down.

“It’s a colour set!” she kept screeching as she jumped up and down.

7. Bishop Sheen

Matthew fell angrily into the arms of the couch.

“You can’t be serious?” he cried.

Mr. Chambers glared at Matthew. The answer was self-evident. Matthew sighed. The Bishop Sheen Show, a weekly Roman Catholic program about various moral issues, came on. Matthew sank deeper into the couch as the Bishop smiled at him, then stepped over to the blackboard where he made his usual joke about an angel cleaning the board for him. The Bishop discussed the need for prayer in the world. He talked about the material poverty in the world, but not as poor as the spiritual poverty of America. On the way he made several jokes about his aging Desota automobile.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Matthew muttered.

Mr. Chambers looked over at Matthew from his chair. The hard outline of his jaw was drawn tighter than usual.

“You’re lucky I don’t clout you. You and your big ideas. Your mother wants me to give you a whipping but you’re too old to be banged about. That might have worked…”

“Spare me,” Matthew said with a sigh of contempt.

The Bishop cleared his throat. Mr. Chambers turned back to the television. The Bishop drew a picture of the stable. He made a joke about his drawing skills.

“What did I do?” Matthew asked.

Mr. Chambers turned to Matthew.

“We were called down to the school. Your mother and I. Your mother was crying.”

“What?”

“Father Bill showed us your religion exam.”

“He what?”

“Thirteen out of a hundred!” Mr. Chambers barked. “How could you write such a thing? Father Bill read it out to us. They want you expelled. I had to plead to the Father for a second chance. You have disgraced us.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“We promised Father Bill that it would never happen again. When I think of how we had to cut corners to scrape the money together for your tuition. Your mother and I haven’t been to a movie in five years. You complain about meat loaf. All that money was put aside so that you could go to Michael Power High School. Father Bill says that you are headed down a dangerous road.”

“It was a joke,” Matthew cried, his voice shaking.

“A joke! You write a religion exam and you tell me that it was a joke. It’s no joke for me down at the plant. Sometimes in the summer it gets over a hundred degrees in there. They hand out salt pellets to us so that we won’t pass out. I eat lunch in my car because its too hot in the lunch room.”

“Aren’t you going to listen to my side?” Matthew cried, his voice choking with emotion. “Father Bill said that the exam didn’t count for anything. He said it was only a formality. He joked about it with us, said we could write a Dear Abby letter if we wanted.”

“And you wrote a weather report!” Mr. Chambers responded.

“It was a definition of God,” Matthew replied, his words stumbling out of his mouth.

“What is God?” Bishop Sheen asked, than broke into a smile. “I am reminded of the story of two Irish priests.”

Tears ran down Matthew’s cheeks.

“It was all a joke!”

“You were trying to be a smart ass!” Mr. Chambers barked. “You think you’re so smart. I’ve seen what happens to smart asses who work at the plant. They think they know everything. They don’t listen; they take short cuts. Lose a finger, some teeth, their job. You know how many smart asses we left dead on the beaches in the war? Its no joke out there in the real world.”

“It was a joke!” Matthew pleaded.

“Priests don’t make jokes!” Mr. Chambers replied.

Matthew jumped to his feet and fled from the room.

“Come back here!” Mr. Chambers shouted shaking with rage as Matthew pounded up the stairs. He heard Matthew slam his bedroom door shut. Mr. Chamber’s face sank into his hands.

The Bishop smiled benignly.

“To God, all of us are children.”

8. The Honeymooners

It all seemed so foolish. The crowds of relatives had left. The lawn chairs and fold-up chairs lay abandoned in the circle they had been placed in, haunted by the figures who not so long ago occupied them. He couldn’t understand why his mother had made all the relatives stay outside. It had been bitterly cold. It was as if she were punishing them, reminding them through their discomfort that they were alive and her husband was not. Matthew took a seat in one of the chairs. He looked up. A pale moon rose high in the late evening sky. A flock of birds shredded the burnt almond sky.

Matthew took out a package of his father’s cigars from his pocket and lit one up. The first puff made him choke. Matthew sucked on the Marguerite. What does the end of a life signify? he asked the gathered furniture. Matthew spotted an unopened beer bottle under one of the chairs. It was one of the case of beer his father had bought for the Grey Cup Game. The one year the Argonauts get into the big game and he couldn’t let the old man see them play. Matthew opened the beer and saluted the empty backyard.

When Matthew entered the house, he heard crying. It was his sister, Cathy, up in her room with her best friend. She hadn’t stopped crying since that lonely drive to the hospital three days before. How could someone have so many tears locked up inside her? The television was on in the basement. Matthew stepped downstairs to find his mother watching The Honeymooners in his father’s favourite chair. She looked old and small. Matthew sat down beside her and sipped on his beer. He handed the beer to his mother who took a sip.

Mr. Chambers had hated Ralph Cramden, the loud mouthed overly sensitive bully that Jackie Gleason played in the comedy. But Mr. Chambers loved the character Norton, a maddeningly meticulous innocent who was Ralph’s sidekick.

“Your father loved you, Matthew,” Mrs. Chambers said without looking at her son. She handed the beer back to him. “He was so proud of everything you did.”

Matthew smiled. All he could remember was his father’s increasingly impatient voice. He seemed so disappointed in his son. Why was his mother saying this now?

“It went by so fast,” his mother said, smiling as Norton attempted to sign his name to a document while Ralph became increasingly unnerved by Norton’s mannerisms. “He would have retired next year. All the plans we made…”

Mrs. Chambers handed the beer back to her son.

“After the war, your father and I had nothing. No one had anything. It was a real treat for us to go down to Chinatown once or twice a year. We went with the Channings. They were such good friends. They lived on the flat above ours on Jarvis Street. Beatrice had a little girl only a couple of weeks older than you .We used to put you two in a carriage together and walk over to the park. I don’t suppose you’d recognize Sarah now. How could you?”

Ralph and Norton entered the Cramden flat dressed in coonskin hats from their Lodge meeting, happy as larks until Ralph found a note on the kitchen table from his wife, Alice. She’s gone, Ralph whimpered, his eyes saddened, his lips quivering.

Mrs. Chambers reached over and took the beer out of Matthew’s hand. She took a large swallow.

“Your father never lost faith in you and your sister. When I worried about you, he’d laugh and say you’d be okay. I’d say that you would never make it in the real world, your head too filled with fancy ideas. Your father said that you could stay in school the rest of your life. He just didn’t want you to be like him, didn’t want you stuck in a nine to five job, working in a sweat shop or a factory floor.”

On the television, Alice Cramden stepped into the apartment. Ralph, alone, sat collapsed in a chair. He stood up when his wife entered, looked at her sheepishly. Alice gave Ralph a brief lecture. Ralph listened meekly. Then she told him she loved him. Alice’s face opened up into a smile. Ralph stammered, took his wife in his arms. Alice, you’re the greatest! Ralph smiled and kissed his wife.

“Did you love dad?” Matthew asked.

Mrs. Chambers was silent for a few moments.

“Your father and I were never… romantic. But he treated me with respect and he provided for all of us, and he never gave me cause for worry.”

“And that was enough?” Matthew asked.

Mrs. Chambers handed the beer back to her son.

“It was more than I expected,” she said.