Of John Wayne and Hasty Rodents

“Baby, do you understand me now? Sometimes I feel a little mad.”
The Animals (Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood)

Let me explain to you a little something about Bryan’s temperament: It can’t be explained. I suppose the closest I could come would be to say that he tends to take the big things small and the small things big. I admit he is normally such a rational, self-possessed individual, and in the face of ugly circumstances I appreciate this to no end about the man. It is stupefying, but I’ve seen very serious things go wrong for him – some part of his life that took a wrong turn, and then spit in his face and stole his wallet – and I’ve swooped in to help, only to watch him pass it off with barely a twitch. But many of this world’s pettier annoyances…well… those can be, equally perplexingly, just a bit too much for him.

I give you the example of watching television. Don’t you just love I Love Lucy? Right – who doesn’t? Bryan. He finds it not funny. But this, with him, is not a matter of taste. He simply instead experiences the show as “frustrating,” and avoids it the way I do balancing my checkbook, or talking longer than five minutes with my mechanic who doesn’t speak English any better than I speak Automotive. Now understand, Bryan grew up not really watching I Love Lucy the way I did. But he did grow up watching television, and I had presumed that by the time I met him, had a firm enough grasp on the concept of fiction versus reality.

Not so. Lucy’s globally famous and beloved scrapes, pickles, and pinches are just lost on my Bryan. Her dubious decision making actually pushes his buttons, and he is not unlikely to scream at her, with the same desperate terror as a frantic horror film attendee who cries out, “Don’t go into the bathroom!” I learned this about him the time we sat and watched a bit of the episode where the Ricardos and the Mertzes go on a cruise together. They’ve left Little Ricky on land with his grandmother, and Lucy is experiencing separation anxiety. She waves to the boy from the boat, crying and clutching her little hankie.

Apparently seeing it coming, Bryan tipped forward in his seat and scowled, just before Lucy deboarded the boat altogether, against Ethel’s wishes, to give the baby one last kiss goodbye.

“No!” he wailed, with a slap to his furrowed forehead. “What is she doing?”

“Uh, you know this is just for fun, don’t you?” I asked. But he was too far gone. Just as the ship’s horn blows its “all aboard” warning, Lucy gets her skirt irreversibly caught on some guy’s bicycle, so she rips the skirt off, revealing her lacy white slip in what was surely a display of gratuitous nudity in the 1950s. But her act of indecent bravery not withstanding, Lucy has, quite literally, missed the boat.

As the ship pushed out to sea, leaving Lucy on the ramp in a panic, Bryan nearly suffered an aneurism.

“Bryan?” I gaped. “What in the name of Jeff is wrong with you?”

“Well. She deserves it,” he resigned in a mini huff, and then went to read a nice relaxing book.

Yep.

There is another episode I love in which Lucy convinces Ethel to help her steal John Wayne’s footprints from the front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. She wants them for a “souvenir” of this trip to Hollywood– and isn’t shameless, unadulterated thievery just so forgivable, even cute, when the perp is Lucy? After the two have pulled off the heist, Ricky finds her out as he always does, and his signature Spanish tirade startles her so badly that she accidentally breaks the cement slab to pieces. No sweat – a quick pull of a few industry strings and Ricky has gotten John Wayne himself to make a new set of his footprints for the theatre. They will replace the property in secret, and the poor, stressed-out Cuban will have helped his squirrelly little woman dodge yet another trip to the slammer. Then Lucy breaks that set of footprints, too - and another and another…slab after slab getting ruined in this way or that, testing poor Mr. Wayne’s patience beyond any cowboy’s reasonable limit.

I bring it up only to say I am thankful Bryan remains happily unaware of this particular installment in Lucy’s adventures. I have thus far viewed this one alone, in peace. Had he been there, I’m guessing that after heaving something heavy at his red-headed nemesis he would have come up short to pay for his newly-needed ulcer treatment and my new television, and we would have just argued about which one was more important.

The second instance I offer up occurred when we were watching the hilarious show Maximum Exposure, otherwise known as Max-X. Even Bryan knows this one is funny, and if you’ve seen it then so do you. It was an animal rescue episode; a giant bulldozer scooped into a raging river to deliver a nearly-drowned beaver onto dry land. The operator lowered the apparatus, full of water and a thrashing beaver, slowly to the ground. Just inches from safety the animal forced itself over the side, and fell on its back with a thud. Though the little guy appeared fine and scampered for home, Bryan could not help sending him off with a rebuke.

“Stupid,” he scoffed. “He was so close - why didn’t he just wait?”

“Honey,” I said gently. “Um…he’s a beaver. Betcha he just doesn’t realize what their intentions are.” Was “stupid,” after all, really the fairest assessment? Hadn’t he just been eager? Isn’t that what his kind is known for anyway?

In the days that followed this incident I teased and teased Bryan about it, eventually coining the phrase “Dumber than a Max-X beaver.” Which got under his skin, but now he sometimes uses the expression himself, apparently finding the analogy altogether apt –spot on.

And, finally ~ Late one night at my place, Bryan was preparing to go out with his guy friends to see a movie. He was spearheading the outing himself, so he swiped up my cell phone, sat down on my sofa, and called one of those pre-recorded movie info lines to secure a time.

What began as the picture of tranquility, as Bryan’s requests met with less and less cooperation from the machine he was dealing with, became something very, very different. I could see the transformation creep over his face as he lost touch with the fact that this was not a real person he was talking to, nor would it turn into one no matter how exasperated he became.

As the number of times he had to hang up and call back escalated, his simple commands of “yes,” “no,” and “find a theatre” began to give way to disgruntled sound offs that were entertaining but fruitless.

“Burbank,” spoken enough times, became, “Bur-bank-Cali-for-nia,” and finally, “Burbank, idiot.” And when he had taken all he could bear of “I didn’t catch that,” Bryan took his final swing with a weary, “That’s because you’re stupid.”

I know of approximately twelve questions that, asked at exactly the right time, could cause a turbulent scene in any relationship, no matter how stable, and I now carelessly asked one of them to Bryan.

“Can I try?”

I guess he was already spent. “Alright. You try,” he conceded without a struggle, and went into the bedroom to call a friend with internet access.

I (ahem) got it right on the first attempt, breezing through the robot woman’s promptings with the ease of a…well, a woman. I then took the sheet with the movie times into the bedroom, and handed it to him with a smile. Not a gloat, but a show of support, of relief. Yet somehow my attitude seemed irrelevant, Bryan communicating without a word that my simply performing the act itself made me a smart alec. He accepted the scrap of paper with conviction, squinting at my scribblings as though they were a well-sweat-out science project, or some sort of business proposal I had drawn up, but in either case was turning in much too late for any serious consideration. Then he looked at me and yielded, “How did you do that? That’s amazing.” I shrugged, and went to the kitchen.

He wandered in behind me, put the jotted show times on the counter, and looked into the fridge. Closing the door, he glanced around, patted his pockets, and asked, “Where did you put that little piece of paper?” With one hand I put a piece of cold chicken into my smart mouth, in lieu of biting my tongue, I suppose, and with the other I pointed a casual finger at the missing item. He seemed to realize simultaneously that he had put it there himself, and that we were both far too adult to make a thing of it. Silently taking the note, he wandered back out to refocus all his energy on picking his movie time.

Bryan is the smartest guy I know. But even the brightest of us have those days when we just feel dumber than a Max-X beaver.