Famous Men I Almost Met

 

Kim Shable

 

 

I.      Richard Nixon

President James A. Garfield, whose roots were in northeast Ohio, kept company with and wished to marry an Aurora girl by the name of Taylor before he entered politics. But the girl’s father believed the boy wouldn’t amount to anything.

                                                                                                --The Aurora Story

 

                Before I moved there, there was cheese, I guess. A lot of it, hundred of thousands of tons. The subdivision I moved to was built over the remains of one of Aurora’s many cheese factories, as was the hell of Centerville Mills YMCA Day Camp, where I spent four summers learning to canoe and ride horses and shoot arrows at haystacks with moldering targets sinking into them. As was the Harmon Market, first a cheese factory, then a bowling alley, and, by the time I arrived, a quaint gift shop called Three Elysabethes, which no one ever bought things from but somehow stayed open, anyway, perhaps living fat on cheese money. Aurora, Ohio, cheese capital of the world, importing to Europe, the Rocky Mountains. Until those bastards at Kraft put us under. Then, we were nothing.

           

            So it must have been a godsend when he got there, part of a campaign tour, in his limo, maybe, entourage, Secret Service, men in black suits and dark glasses hovering in the Gazebo, on the lawn of the Church of Aurora. 1971: Richard Nixon makes a campaign stop in Aurora, and the Hanging Tree is cut down, it says in the great timeline of city history. The two must have been related, somehow.

 

            Before I got there, there was cheese, and after were the tourists, the honking, trapped in our houses from 9-3 every day while people from Michigan and Pennsylvania plundered our goods and littered in Historic Aurora. To Sea World, to Geauga Lake, then to Six Flags, later. Souvenirs, invisible dog leashes, shot glasses, foam iguanas, snow globes, the cheesiest kinds, exported from our town in carfulls. Million dollar houses built for million dollar stars, sports figures, TV anchors, Albert Belle, David Justice, we’d see them at the supermarket, at the library, registering to vote. Smiling cheesy smiles that said I am here and you can’t touch me. Made strangers in our own hometown.

 

            How did it go down, Richard Nixon? How was it decided? Find a town with a quaint past and a blossoming future? A town still halfway owned by the family of a founding father when you came in ’71? Had you already begun Watergate? Did you know that I would be here, someday?

 

            Aurora, Ohio, 1995: I begin a research paper on Richard Nixon, skimming books by him, about him, about Watergate, about IRS fraud and enemy lists and the door to China and détente. About Vietnam and Vietnamization. All from inside a classroom trailer at our body-dense high school, built and outdated before he ever arrived. The paper was supposed to be easy: here is why Nixon was a bad, bad man. And he was. But what I learned, what I really learned, was that a man as bad as Nixon, as wounded and destroyed as Nixon, as amoral and defeated and unloveable as Nixon, could battle back, could become one of our nation’s most respected elder statesmen, could persevere. Even if he was pure evil.

 

Aurora, Ohio, 1971: Richard Nixon accepts the key to the city. Did the motorcade go past my house? Did my neighbors, Al and Lee Pelcin, come to see you? Did you meet them?  Did you meet Mr. Luckay, my Ohio history teacher? Did you meet the Aurorans that stayed after the cheese and before the million dollar mayhem, the real Aurorans, whose numbers can’t even include me, not really?

It must have been like this: hundreds of people lining Chillicothe, waving paper U.S. flags, screaming for you like you were the Beatles. People on the lawn of the library where I would later work. People on the steps of the church I would later see my aunt married in. The Aurora High School Marching Band, which consisted at the time of thirty weary students and a record player, playing “Hail to the Chief.” News crews everywhere. For once, Aurora, important again, for one day, made important by you. The mayor hands you the key. Pat is by your side. Children look for Checkers. You loft it above your head and people cheer. Then, you move on, adding the outsized key to your outsized key ring and hit the next town.

 

This was before Watergate.

 

But still, I like to imagine that you came back in the night, used your oversized key to break into people’s homes, stealing their money, their TVs, their votes, and their hearts.

II.   Ric Flair

            Ric Flair. That bastard.

                                --Shirley Baldwin

 

            Everyone in North Carolina has met Ric Flair but me, and I am pissed.

            They see him in elevators, stumbling out into lobbies, drunk and yelling “whoooo!” They see him at the Charlotte airport, drinking martinis and asking the ladies if they want to ride Space Mountain. The Nature Boy Ric Flair, he’s everywhere. Except within a twenty mile radius of me.

            Richard Morgan Fliehr, son of a obstetrician, with a lisp and two cauliflower ears. Fourteen time world wrestling heavyweight champion, and I’ve never met him. People who hate wrestling get to meet him. Maybe he wanders into their houses at night and tries to use their bathrooms. Maybe he hits their parked cars and tries to flee the scene. Me, I’ve been a fan since college, where there was nothing else to do but watch wrestling or out with  frat boys to beat up the Amish, knowing full well that they weren’t permitted to fight back. I followed his North Carolina gubernatorial bid in 2000 from six hundred miles away. But has he shown up to damage my property or fondle my breasts? No.

            Even Shirley Baldwin’s seen him, and she thinks he’s a bastard.

            Shirley Baldwin, caretaker for the invalid, doll collector, part-time racist. Thinks I’m a mulatto, and that any American with Arab blood should be rounded up and put into an internment camp, even me, saying “sorry, honey, but that’s the way it goes.” Shirley Baldwin, the first bona fide North Carolinian I ever met, who took care of my wheelchair-bound roommate and smoked seven inch cigarettes on my concrete side stoop—even she got to meet him.

            The way she tells the story: Dawn was real sick.

            Every story starts this way, with Dawn, her daughter whose name she pronounces like Doan’s Back Pills. So—Dawn was real sick. And she takes Dawn to the hospital, right? To get her in to see a doctor? But they gets there and the doctor says unh-unh, Shirley, you hold back a sec, ‘cause there’s been a plane crash.

            So it must have been in October—October 4, 1975. Ric Flair’s private jet runs out of fuel and crashes in Wilmington, paralyzing two passengers, killing the pilot, breaking Ric Flair’s back in three places. October 4, 1975, Dawn like Doan, age two and a half, is real sick. Worlds collide.

            Anyway, Shirley says, she says to the doctor hold back, there, when my Dawn is real sick like this? You give me some antibiotics and I’ll give ‘em to her myself, being a registered nurse like I am.

            Then Ric Flair disappears from the story for a very long time. Dawn goes home, some relatives come over to look at wedding pictures. Shirley describes the process of performing an emergency tracheotomy. Dawn had the croup, you see. Her throat would close up. She never had to do it, thank the lord, never had to cut her own’s baby’s throat, but she came right close that night, when baby Dawn toddled up to her and she was all hot and her nightgown rode up when she sat in Shirley’s lap and she was just as cyanotic as could be, all swollen and purple and blotched up, and Shirley said LET’S GO NOW, and they all got in the car, and this whole time that Shirley and company are rushing this dying baby to the hospital, with Shirley in the passenger seat waving her arms out the window yelling GET OUT THE WAY, I am thinking but what happened to Ric Flair?

            So.

            They get to the hospital and get Dawn all set up, nice as you please, no more danger here, and whooo, Shirley is beat, so she goes to relax out in the ‘Mergency Room, and who’s out there on a stretcher all wheeled up to a phone talkin’ to his daddy the obstetrician but Ric Flair, back all taped up, muscles big and tan. And he turns to Shirley, and he says to her…

            Do you know what he has the nerve to say to her?

            …He says to her, hey-ya, cutie.

            And Shirley Baldwin, she thinks: you bastard.

                And me, I think: do I have to find me a dying baby just to make Ric Flair say I’m cute?

 

III. Mark Harmon

            I don’t care if she gets an autograph or not. Rude is rude, and I don’t reward it.

                                                                                --Mark Harmon, to his secretary, about me

 

                Getting hate mail from b-list celebrities is hell on your self-esteem. Especially when you’re in high school—going dateless to the prom, being picked last in gym, day to day ignominious defeats and having back acne to boot—and it just shows up in your mailbox, here you are, you snide-ass little punk, here’s your autograph. And especially when that celebrity is Mark Harmon.

            But before all this, before the package came and its contents were destroyed, Mark Harmon and I were in love. We spent many long fall and then winter and then spring months staring into each other’s eyes, and I cast him as the lead in my new movie, based on my new novel, which sucked, but he wasn’t exactly pulling down the big parts anymore, anyway. I first encountered him in a full page ad in Entertainment Weekly for his new show Charlie Grace, his nostrils wide and powerful, his shiny leather jacket so suave. The show only lasted a few weeks, but the ad lasted much longer, because I laminated it.

            Oh, I laminated it, and I backordered the People magazine from 1986 that named him the Sexiest Man Alive and I laminated that, too, and I was prepared to make little two-dimensional laminated babies with them, but no, I needed more, more, more, I was a junkie, a Mark Harmon junkie.

            So I did what any normal fifteen year old Mark Harmon devotee would do. I wrote him a letter.

            I don’t remember what it said, now; all copies have been destroyed, but I imagine it was something benign: dear Mark Harmon, I am your biggest fan, please send me an autographed picture, I just know we would be the best of friends if only you met me, your fan, Kim Shable.

            Two weeks later, the letter came back. Return to Sender, handwritten across the front.

            By now I had my two big pictures and several smaller ones: Mark after rescuing two boys from a burning car, Mark on Chicago Hope, Mark with Morgan Fairchild on Flamingo Road, a picture I had ripped out of a TV encyclopedia at the library. But surely, my letter had simply been misaddressed. So I wrote a second letter, enclosing the first for Mark’s perusal and enjoyment, and mailed it off, positive he would be won over by my wit and joie de vivre.

            Until I got the second letter back.

            Dear Mark Harmon, I wrote, or something like it, I know you’ve been very busy saving people from burning cars and protecting the general populace at large, but is it too much to ask for you to send me one autographed picture of yourself? I have enclosed an autographed picture of myself to prove to you that it isn’t that hard.

            I included a picture of myself on the children’s merry-go-round at Wal-Mart, wearing a pink polo shirt and baby barrettes in my hair. I don’t know why I thought this would be a good idea.

            Weeks later, months, the package came. It contained one autographed picture, which looked like someone had attached a clothespin to the back of Mark Harmon’s head to drawn the skin of his face tight, on which he had written best of luck, Mark Harmon. It contained a ten page letter from his secretary, describing me as snide and making the claim that I needed to develop some serious skills in dealing with adults, as well as intimating to me that Mark Harmon was indeed a very busy man with two young children who didn’t need to be wasting his time with me. And it contained a photocopy of my envelope, on which Mark Harmon himself had written I don’t care if she gets an autograph or not. Rude is rude, and I don’t reward it. It was the same hand that had scrawled return to sender over the last two envelopes.

            There isn’t much more to say about our doomed love affair. I ripped the autograph into a hundred tiny pieces. I ate the signature. I threw the secretary’s letter away. But I kept the photocopy, and then lost it. I threw away all my pictures of Mark Harmon except the ad from Charlie Grace, which I hung on the inside of my closet door next to a petrified booger I found there. And I recast my novel and my movie with someone else, but it was just never the same.

            At times, though, I wonder if he has still has that autographed picture of me. Not in a frame or anything, just somewhere, around, taped to the fridge or a dartboard, maybe. Something that he and his wife, Mindy from Mork and Mindy, can laugh about. But sometimes, at night, he comes out in his robe and slippers and flips on the light, and stares deep into my eyes, just like he used to.