In Search of Captain Zero

[Glenn Scheper]

 Part 1 of 2.

 When asked whosoever were there to recall student
 uprisings,
 I was silent,
 because I was not aware.

 The first I knew of anything was when a tight row of
 shield-carrying police proceeded across UCLA.
 I bolted,
 so someone called,
 "Hey man,
 don't run."

 You want to know about Santa Monica?
 "SAMOHI '69!"
 It was an unusual high school,
 having a computer.

 But let me tell you the character of Weed Atman.
 I only missed being him by years,
 and by chance.

 My father raised a fine Hegelian subject:
 People exist as universals,
 not as individuals--even me.

 Don't lie.
 Don't steal.
 Don't take risks.
 Study.

 A lawyer in Ohio,
 inquisitor of all misdemeanors,
 I was off and on across his lap for hours while he
 prosecuted the case that I had lied,
 casting a shadow back even to Freud's A Child is Beaten.
 I was never exculpated in later loss of a fiver,
 from the taint of the possibility I diverted it.

 Individual survival comes in the system's lapses,
 as he demonstrated with his thumb on the scales.
 The moment of individuation is when one wills to transgress
 the injunctions,
 and to pick survival.
 Until then we were as a family-against-the-world.

 Perhaps therefore comedy,
 a type of double-think,
 has survival value.
 Anyway,
 I was fed on cartoons until the evil Master Cylinder loomed
 in my dreams.
 Tragedy was a non-species,
 for it could be avoided by best practices.
 Even today,
 Leave it to Beaver,
 as also every LifeTime TV show,
 gives me visceral emptiness,
 as I withdraw in from tragic characters doomed by design to
 prefer every defective choice.

 My father repaired TV's,
 and I tried to read his stack of Radio-Electronics.
 I was embarrassed at his insistence--he even accompanied me
 to school--with my shoebox of dismantled radio parts,
 when my teacher thought the reassembly and description of a
 radio was not a valid science fair project.

 It was an air-brushed future forecast in Popular Science
 that looked glorious to me:
 I still have a clear mental image,
 a vignette now,
 as if cast into a hole and unattainable,
 of an ideal future featuring idyllically simplified tract
 homes not having trees for their having so recently sprung
 up around some government or industrial facility,
 and the perfection of the ever-sunshine outdoors.

 Maybe that was because he worked at a government
 audio-video facility,
 and would bring home many memorable doctrinal works,
 like,
 The Big Picture.

 That was his cache-phrase:
 "See the Big Picture."

 My only universally useful excuse was "to study,"
 and the library was my hangout.
 By carrying book cards in,
 I slipped out with whatever assortment of books I wanted,
 indefinitely.
 It was like part of my attire,
 the stack of titles I carried on my out-thrust left hip.
 I kept going back for Kant's Critique of Reason because I
 liked the title,
 but it didn't make a damn bit of sense from page one.

 I remember we moved from San Pedro to Santa Monica
 specifically because of SAMOHI's high reputation,
 although the family laundromats were in Hawthorne.

 SAMOHI's science teachers were exceptional,
 coaching us into some competitive awards,
 although I somehow failed to learn how to pen a simple
 English sentence.

 When General Electric distributed P.R.
 buttons in school,
 "G.E.nius",
 I proudly wore mine,
 unaware what an iconic geek I looked,
 with a vinyl pocket protector advertising C.R.E.I.,
 whose courses dad sold:
 I read free matrix math and nuclear science.

...

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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