The bag may not inflate but oxygen is flowing

The Column: 06.06.24

I went out to Colorado on Wednesday, a state I love because my great-great-grandfather David Powell went there in 1863, perhaps for the silver rush but maybe to avoid dying in the Civil War, which, if he had done the noble thing, might’ve eliminated the possibility of me. As Mark Twain said, “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” I would’ve gone to Denver to research David’s papers — he served in the first legislature — but I had to go to Loveland. I am one of America’s few remaining octogenarian stand-ups and I was booked to stand up and do a show.

I see now that I got into this line of work when I was small, and a neighbor child informed me that I had been left on my parents’ doorstep by gypsies, along with a note, “We will return for him soon,” which he told me with such certainty that I was on the lookout for gypsies, but there were none in rural Minnesota at that time so I forgot about it. Except you don’t, really. Soon after, my mother was large with twin boys, which was all quite real and remarkable and one day in March she went to the hospital and two days later returned home with them. Nothing was said about the inception of the two and no questions were asked. I don’t recall any sex education in school. I figured it out myself from a book I found in my mother’s dresser drawer, Light On Dark Corners, which explained sexual intercourse in rather flowery terms, like you’d describe ballet or raising hydrangeas, but I got the point. But the seed of my own oddness was planted and as the two boys grew into serious responsible scholars, I took up poetry, then fiction and showbiz, and now find myself in the gypsy life of an itinerant octogenarian stand-up. My true talent is farming, I’m sure, but a child told me I was an alien drop-off and I’m still living this idea. I had to leave town because Minnesota is a Scandinavian culture and observes the Jante law, “Don’t think you’re somebody” and you are known for the dumbest thing about you — back home I am still known as Boomer because in high school gym class I was wrestling a kid and he had me locked in a takedown and I strained so hard I let the loudest fart they’d ever heard. So I had to leave town or live the rest of my life with that name. And once you leave home, you are free to pursue a career in comedy.

I boarded a plane to Denver at LaGuardia and when the flight attendant instructed us to put our cellphones on Airplane Mode, I was engrossed in something else and somewhere over the Alleghenies my phone vibrated and the plane bounced and rolled to the left and dove, rocking side to side, alarms howling in the cockpit. Oxygen masks dropped down, women screamed, the flight attendants went white as sheets and the guy next to me who’d been looking at coital activity on his laptop yelled, “Jesus, I accept you! Take me, Lord! I am yours!” and then the woman on my right grabbed the phone out of my jacket pocket and switched it to Airplane Mode. The plane leveled itself, the masks swooshed back up, people resumed breathing. The captain came out and people pointed at me: I handed him my phone. The back of my neck got red, I could feel people staring at me, the terrorist. I could feel moral revulsion. But I was a big hit in Loveland.

I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to minus 70 and many of us Minnesotans became comatose, our metabolism stopped, there was no neurological response, and a month later I awoke in a narrow wooden box wearing makeup, which I’d never worn before. It was interesting. I should’ve dressed more warmly but as someone said, “Good judgment comes from experience and much experience comes from bad judgment.” And thanks to my mistake I have experienced the afterlife and I told them about it in Loveland. Someday I’ll come to your town and tell you.

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