COLUMN: "Unemployed Flying Object"

From John Lennon's "Stepping on the Big Man's Toes," Spring '92. I've made it through the first five, which many years of scientific study have established as: 1. Infancy, 2. Childhood, 3. The Time When All You Can Do Is Think About Girls, Even In Church, 4. High School -- known to scientists as "Hell" -- and 5. The Period When You Still Think About Girls All The Time, Although Now They're Women, And You Sometimes Take Breaks To Drink A Lot Of Beer. But now I'm about to smack into the sixth, sort of like when you're driving along in your car, listening to your Verlaines tape, and you decide you want to hear "Baud To Tears" one more time, so you bend over and hit the rewind button, and when you look up you're about six inches away from wrapping the car around a convenience store at sixty miles an hour. This sixth stage is known as "Unemployment." Now, I'm not the most nostalgic person, not in print anyway, but this stage has got me thinking a lot about my childhood. After all, it's much more pleasant to reminisce about the way you used to burn various forms of wildlife with a magnifying glass than it is to consider stage seven, "Moving Back In With Your Parents." For instance, I'm reminded of the UFO Club. This was a club founded by me and my friend Matt, which consisted solely of me and my friend Matt. Our mission was to solve all the UFO mysteries that cropped up in our fourth grade class. Predictably, these were few and far between, since our organization was based entirely on a phenomenon of questionable reality. As a result, we went to great lengths to manufacture UFO mysteries. It was not at all unusual to hear conversations like this: MATT: Look here in this photograph! A mysterious flying disk hovering in the background! ME: You're right! It's a UFO! OUR FRIEND CAROL: Actually, these are our vacation photos. That's a frisbee. See? Here I am, throwing it to my sister. MATT: No, that's definitely a UFO. Look at the strange, alien markings! CAROL: I think that says "Wham-O." So pretty soon, to humor us, our friends started bringing pictures of UFO's to school for us to confidently debunk ("No, Lee, I'm quite sure that this is simply a photograph of your dad flying a kite," or, "Actually, Todd, we're fairly certain that this is a ball of aluminum foil that you threw into the air."). But the club was not to last; Matt and I began planning elaborate UFO-searching expeditions for sunny days, but always ended up in his living room, playing Atari until our pupils began looking like pimientos. And then there were whiffle ball games. We had an actual league: me and Dave, the kid across the street, versus my brother Chris and Dave, the other kid across the street (my neighborhood, like Penn, was rife with Daves). We covered the ball with black electrical tape so it would go really far, like all the way into the cornfield across the highway or through somebody's windshield. Hitting the ball this far was actually frowned upon, as it disrupted play - but if you did it, it was a huge status symbol, easily as important as being able to belch seventeen times in rapid succession or owning the most Kiss records. The only major rule, though, was no quitting, a violation of which was a crime of the highest degree, way worse than eating in front of the other guys without giving them any, even worse than that gravest of offenses: telling on somebody. The quitter was ostracized as quickly and efficiently as a bubonic plague victim, and so ignored until somebody else quit, which, considering the stigma attached to the offense, happened fairly often. Through all this I had these glasses with huge plastic frames, which were the symbolic equivalent of having "NERD" printed across my forehead in yellow traffic paint. So by the time I entered eighth grade, my parents invested in a pair of contact lenses for me, which immediately won me the widespread admiration of my peers and a gaggle of adolescent girls who followed me around as though I were the pied piper of junior high. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. All the contact lenses really did was cause me, by force of habit, to keep pushing my glasses up onto my nose even though the glasses weren't there anymore. Consequently I was seen poking myself in the eye over and over, to a point where my I.Q. was retested and I was scheduled for several appointments with the school psychologist ("Depressed? No, Doctor, just poking myself repeatedly in the eye."). A fellow senior English major told me the other day that, after four years of relative independence in Philadelphia, she was going to have to move back home for awhile. Frankly, I have no idea what we expected when we chose our major. ("What's this? You say you've read four hundred contemporary American novels? Why, our company has been looking for a contemporary American novel reader! Can you start at forty-five thousand dollars?") But moving back home? Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Hell, the whiffle ball equipment is still in the garage. I could dig out the old glasses, brush up on my swing, buy a new roll of electrical tape . . . Then again, maybe the greater Philadelphia area is ready for a chapter of the UFO club. If you join, I promise I won't quit. John Lennon is a senior English major from Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Stepping on the Big Man's Toes appears alternate Mondays.