Schmidt's Shorts: Stories to Make You Smile

By Wayne Schmidt

Need a smile to break today’s depressing reality? Here’s an eclectic mix of short stories and essays from an eventful and well-lived life, certain to bring smiles and a few chuckles. Included are adventures – rafting the Grand Canyon; hiking Oregon’s wilderness; chasing big salmon, rare birds, and lost friends; debating “the shape of the universe, death, God or not, Big Foot, the condition of your prostate, and that bird you keep hearing across the desert night.”

You can groan through disastrous, youthful misadventures – descending old mines, climbing smokestacks, hitchhiking through the Sixties, and biking into calamities.

Learn why sometimes God sends kitties from heaven; other times, maggots. Why swamping the Grand Canyon and reading Ayn Rand should be done while young. What Flat Earthers, Mormons, and Evangelicals have in common. Why it can take 34 years to get over a lost fish. How you get labeled by Uncle Sam as a “nonaggressive, sociopathic, sex deviant (with a hernia).” Why you can’t fix stupid. How to “savor the beauty all around us while it lasts, even as the sky in the East grows steadily darker.” And proof of Wayne’s Rule #1, “a failsafe, four-word way to explain most any inexplicable human behavior” (hint, acronym: PAFM).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne Schmidt
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005386849

Book preview

~ A Story to Tell When I’m Old ~

(Excerpt from The Pecos Pig)

~ Flashbacks ~

~ Be Here Now! ~

(From Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories)

~ Swamping the Grand Canyon ~

FRIENDS

~ A Magical Night ~

(Halfway through my 8,300-mile road trip)

~ Jeanne Moons the Kayakers ~

(From Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories)

~ A Joke ~

(From True Tales from the East)

~ Last Man Standing ~

NATURE

~ California Birdin’ ~

~ Valley of the (Leftover) Giants ~

~ Snow Visit ~

~ The One MPH Hiking Club ~

~ Kitties from Heaven ~

FISHING

~ Not Just another Fish ~

~ I Saved Bambi ~

~ Getting It Right ~

~ Hawg Man, TV Fred, and the Great Deer Pee Exposé ~

~ A Big One ~

CRAZY DAYS

~ Dark as Death ~

~ Ayn Rand Got Me High ~

~ The First Time I Never Saw the Ocean ~

~ Hard Crazy Lessons ~

~ My So-Called Summer of Love ~

~ Hippies, Not Communists ~

~ Living Life My Way ~

~ God Sends Maggots ~

POLITICS & RELIGION

~ Ask, I’ll Tell ~

(From True Tales from the East)

~ Why I’m with Her ~

~ Mourning in America ~

~ What the Heck’s Going on in Oregon? ~

~ Blame the Mormons ~

~ Storm Clouds Gathering ~

~ You Can’t Fix Stupid ~

~ No Free Will? ~

~ Why I Don’t Believe in God ~

About the Author

PREFACE

Here are a few dozen favorite stories that I’ve written. These are the ones that still make me smile. I hope they do that for you.

Most come from the past ten years of my blogs (Wayne’s Blog). Several, recounting my crazy, younger days, are from my memoir, Bare Naked Wayne.

When a friend saw my first selection, A Story to Tell When I’m Old, he responded, But wait, you’re already old. Exactly. (In fact, 74.)

Thanks to Eva for the title, Meredith for the subtitle, Jill for the cover pic, Kristen for edits, and Ben Graham for cover design and production. And thank you for reading.

– August 1, 2020 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

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ADVENTURES

A Story to Tell When I’m Old

(Excerpt from The Pecos Pig)

Easter Sunday, noon. Forty-three degrees and raining, sitting here in my still-dead car at the Eagle Automotive Repair in Pecos, Texas, 1,843 miles from my home in Oregon. I am being rescued soon by Craig in his rented Prius. He’s driving 400 miles from San Antonio, where I was supposed to pick him up at the airport. Then he will turn around, and we will drive 400 miles back to San Antonio, then 200 miles south. After our week of birding in South Texas, I will be back to retrieve my hopefully un-pig-damaged car. That is the plan. Assuming no more suicidal pigs.

A few days ago, on my way to San Antonio, I drove out of my way to camp in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. But the campground was full. So there I was, flying down deserted TX 652, hoping to find a motel in Pecos. Turns out, all the motels were full. But that’s getting ahead of the pig. Which I didn’t.

As the sun set over the pancake landscape, the pig (a wild javelina) came trotting across the highway, left-to-right, hesitating, then going. Bull’s-eye! Like hitting a bowling ball. In my mirror I watched him rolling down the road, a 60-pound sack of dead lard.

No damage to the car was apparent. But 30 miles later, it died, too. I told AAA that I was 24.1 miles south of Orla and about 17 miles north of Pecos. AAA’s message to B&B Wrecker Service, however, was south of Pecos. It took two hours waiting in the dark with erratic cell phone service until we finally connected. They screw everything up, the guy said philosophically as he winched my poor car up on his flatbed truck. The best mechanic in Pecos is at Eagle Automotive Repair, he told me. He dropped me and my dead Honda Pilot on a weedy side street next to a ramshackle steel building and junkyard. The place was dark and deserted, with no discernable entry door or sign, surrounded by a rusty, barbed wire-topped fence. One street light and a full moon gave everything creepy shadows and a Mad Max glow.

After a long night half-sleeping in the back of the car, listening to passing trains and very early-rising roosters, I met Gary (the sum total of Eagle Automotive Repair) opening up. Over his first-of-the-day coffee, he learned about the pig, and promised he could fix my dead car. 

Yesterday, I picked up my new replacement radiator. Edel, a friend of Gary’s, drove me 95 miles from Pecos to Midland where we met Frank at Leo’s Radiator Shop (Serving the Permian Basin for 21 years). The Permian Basin is the local oil field. Edel told me all about pumping oil from 4,000 feet deep, and getting it to refineries. While the rest of the country is in recession, here business is booming. With oil at $100 a barrel, they are pumping like crazy. Lots of jobs. No housing left. I asked Edel what guys who move here to work do when they aren’t working. About all he could come up with was the local video rental.

Back in Pecos, I gave Edel $90 for the ride, when he dropped me and my radiator off in the early afternoon. I sat in the junkyard all day, waiting for Gary to get started on my car. He had promised to first install an engine in a little Isuzu truck for Paulo, another stranded traveler, from Amarillo. I rode over to AutoZone with Paulo to buy his new plugs. An odd fellow, a young, poetic Hispanic (fucking going to fucking Odessa tonight for some fine fucking bitches), who loved to ride a mountain bike and visit parks (I can never find anyone to go with me), and was in a panic to get back to work tomorrow (or get fired). In the end, something was wrong with his new-used engine, and it never did get fixed. Having heard my tale of pig woe, the last thing Paulo said to me was, Well, at least you will have a story to tell when you’re old.

Around 7:00 pm Edel stopped back again, just to see what was going on. We sat and watched Gary work on my car. It was not going well. Gary finally did get the new radiator in and hammered out the Pilot’s bent frame, where I’d hit that pig. Unfortunately, he broke the A/C condenser in his hammering; Freon hissed out for ten minutes. Gary assured me that the car would run just fine without the condenser and A/C. So, okay?

But when Gary started to fill the new radiator with antifreeze – surprise! It drained straight to the floor. What he hadn’t noticed was that the new radiator had a plug hole in the bottom (unlike the old radiator), but... no plug! After 30 minutes of trying everything in his shop to fit as a plug, Gary conceded defeat, and that’s when I called Craig in San Antonio, to rent a car and come save me.

Gary’s been by three times this Easter morning, trying to get out of town with his new wife, Emlyn. No more grease coating his skin. The last time he stopped by, Emlyn was waiting in his truck so I walked over and chatted with her, a lovely Asian woman of around 30, who Gary met through an online matchmaking service. During her frequent calls to Gary yesterday, I learned they call each other baby.

So now here I am, sitting alone in my goddamn cold, dead car on this goddamn cold, gray, rainy Easter Sunday in goddamn Pecos, Texas. Goddamn pig.

(Sept. 5, 2009)

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Flashbacks

When I returned to San Francisco for the first time since I lived there 40 years ago, the flashbacks were inevitable, even though the acid had long since worn off.

As a lost-in-life, hippy mailman driving a delivery truck back then, I had known my way around the city. In Chinatown this month, I couldn’t believe I once had navigated its confusing jangle of back alleys and labyrinth balconies, delivering packages to old Chinese-Americans, who seldom spoke English.

I frequently worked in North Beach – birthplace of the beatniks and the neighborhood where my writing hero, author Richard Brautigan (A Confederate General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America), lived. I trucked boxes of books to City Lights Bookstore, founded in the ‘50s by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind), and to all the tourist spots – Telegraph Hill, Lombard Street (the crookedest street in the world), and topless/bottomless joints on Broadway Street. My favorite delivery was to The Condor, where Carol Doda and her twin 44s danced. If I were lucky, a bare-breasted dancer would answer the bell and sign for my package. So to speak.

Some nights, I would wander along Broadway, watching the strip club hawkers at work: Right a-bove your chair on a sol-id glass cage… My favorite, I called The Bullfrog; his croaking voice, inviting sailors to step right in, was low as a bullfrog’s. He got upset if you giggled when you walked past.

On my recent return to San Francisco, I walked those same streets. The park, where once I had seen Richard Brautigan sitting alone on a bench, was filled with flocks of t’ai chi-ing Chinese-American women. Broadway’s licentiousness had withered; a shabby Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club echoed by-gone color. Chinatown was vibrant as I remembered, clogged with locals shopping for food – colorful boxes of fresh produce and seafood stacked early-morning sidewalks. Chinese-language voices chattered like wind chimes in the cool breeze. A bent, toothless woman with a bag of fresh, silvery smelt haggled price with customers surrounding her.

On Grant Street, a window display of ivory netsuke caught my eye. Netsuke – invented by Japanese more than 300 years ago – were used to cinch the cords that hung pouches to sashes (kimonos lacked pockets).

I first fell for the miniature carvings when I had lived in the city, often visiting the netsuke collection at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. In fact, that moment in Chinatown, I was heading to the Asian Art Museum to see them once again. (The museum was created from the old city library; it now displays the Asian art once held by the de Young.)

The netsuke in the Chinatown shop window, however, were not limited to traditional depictions of monks and animals. Many were X-rated, carved, oriental Kama Sutra – all acrobatic positions finely rendered in ivory. I needed a closer look.

The shop was empty of customers, but jammed wall-to-wall with all manner of high-end Asian arts and crafts, including exquisite jade and wood carvings. The really good stuff was upstairs on a balcony, the steps blocked by a velvet cord.

I asked Carlos, the young salesman, the range of prices for the netsuke in his front window. He said one to several hundred dollars, then escorted me upstairs to see more netsuke and other fine art.

I stopped cold at the head of the stairs. This is incredible, I mumbled. My delight at his sculptures inspired Carlos to show me his favorites – two-feet-long ivory tusks with dozens of figures incised in their curves. These are museum-quality, I said, and told him how I was heading for the Asian museum that very morning.

But you can’t touch them in a museum, he smiled, and caressed the un-carved, ocher end of a tusk. Here.

The ivory seemed alive, smooth and cool on my fingertips. It was like sneaking a feel in a museum, but without the guilt.

Carlos showed me a brilliantly lit display case crammed with netsuke. Any chickens? I asked. He opened drawers and boxes, but found only one mini rooster, which didn’t impress me. Carlos wanted to sell me something, and I wanted to buy something. He showed me ducks and other miniature creatures, but nothing I liked. I focused, one-by-one, on the hundred or so netsuke (the majority in frozen stages of fornication). I asked to see an R rated one, a naked geisha sitting on her haunches. Ivory, probably from an ice-age Russian mammoth tusk. She was the one. Sold, I thought. I threw out a number. Would that do it? I guessed. I was $30 too low.

But would you do it anyways? That’s my limit, I replied in my sternest tone. Carlos finally agreed and we started downstairs.

Just one last feel, I said, and stroked again the carved tusk. That gave Carlos fresh salesman adrenaline, and he launched into a story about rare white jade, reaching for a delicate white sculpture in a display case to show me the jade’s inner glow under the spotlight. His sales pitch started at $4,000 and eventually got down to $1,500.

Carlos, you’re killing me here, I laughed, while thinking: My wife would kill me. No, I just can’t, I concluded. "I spent all my money on chickens, building them the Taj Mahal of chicken coops."

Carlos tried to laugh, but sounded deflated. I went on my way with my naked netsuke, an odd birthday present for my wife.

At the Asian Art Museum, I saw the netsuke, soaked up all the art culture I could absorb, and returned to the San Francisco sunshine. The broad plaza between the library-converted-to-museum and the City Hall was quiet. But scenes of anti-Vietnam War violence and hatred flared in my head.

* * *

The date was May 4, 1970.

My apartment had been just up Market Street and then a couple blocks up the hill on Haight Street. Walking to the library that day, I had stumbled into an anti-war demonstration, and joined several thousand people outside the nearby Federal Building. Lots of right-on and power to the people in the air. Country Joe McDonald sang the call-and-response Fuck Song (Gimme an F!, etc.) and my favorite, the Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag:

Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,

Uncle Sam needs your help again.

He’s got himself in a terrible jam

Way down yonder in Vietnam

So put down your books and pick up a gun,

We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.

And it’s one, two, three,

What are we fighting for?

Don’t ask