Nobody Dies If You Cross the Finish Line: An Embellished Autobiography

By Benjamin Kalb

Even if other people are more famous or more important than me, my life has been like no other.
I purposely almost killed two people and was never arrested. I robbed a bank and never got caught. I was a survivor in a plane that crashed and killed everyone else on board, including my first fiancé. I hit the winning shot in a college basketball tournament after one of the opposing players called me a derogatory name. I turned invisible in a manner of speaking and it saved my life. I competed in the Olympics with a bullet in my side. I saved a 3-year-old boy in a way doctors called a miracle. I appeared on Saturday Night Live with an A-list group of singers. I have made love to some famous women and was almost murdered by a woman not so famous. I have lived a life you wouldn’t believe even if I passed a polygraph test in front of your eyes. I have seen the sights, took the pictures and wound up with enough memories to write this embellished autobiography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781621836094

Benjamin Kalb

Benjamin Kalb had a background as a sports journalist before heading to television magazine shows as a producer and then off to the world of TV commercials and infomercials as a producer/director/writer. One of the infomercials he produced and directed, AbTronic, went on to become the top selling show in the world. Benjamin graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon.

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Prologue

Even if other people are more famous and more important than me, my life has been like no other. I purposely almost killed two people and was never arrested. I robbed a bank and never got caught. I’m wanted in one state and I have yet to return to it. I was a survivor in a plane that crashed and killed everyone else on board, including my first fiancée. I hit the winning shot in a college basketball tournament after one of the opposing players called me a derogatory name. I was chased by a gang of soccer hoodlums and wound up barely escaping after climbing a rope outside an office building. I turned invisible in a manner of speaking and it saved my life. I competed in the Olympics with a bullet in my side. I saved a three year-old boy in a way doctors called a miracle. I appeared on Saturday Night Live with an A-List group of singers. I have made love to some famous women and was almost murdered by a woman not so famous. I have lived a life you wouldn’t believe even if I passed a polygraph test in front of your eyes. I have seen the sights, took the pictures, and wound up with enough memories to write this embellished autobiography.

Chapter One

WELCOME TO MY WORLD

My life changed the day Marilyn Monroe died. This had nothing to do with the fact that she committed suicide at her house on Fifth Helena Drive in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood, nor the fact that my parents and I used to live within walking distance of that house. My life changed that day because it was the first time my parents got really angry with me.

I told them not to blame me for what happened that day. I told them to blame the Los Angeles Dodgers. But after that day I swore I would turn myself invisible every time my parents or anybody else got mad at me.

I was literally born—Peanuts cliché notwithstanding—on a dark and stormy night. The rain was coming down hard and my dad was driving as fast as he could to the hospital with my mom in pain. Yes, I had a habit of causing people pain throughout my life.

I came out seven pounds, eleven ounces. 7-11. I had the world going for me, or so I thought.

I grew up as part of the middle class, maybe upper middle class if you wanted to stretch things. My dad was an attorney and a certified public accountant. But his clients were mom and pop people. Dry cleaners, liquor stores, small bookstores, etc. No one famous. No celebs. No CEOs of big corporations.

My parents never got seriously mad at me until that one day. Oh sure, there was punishment at times but nothing that would damage me psychologically. I grew up a pretty stable kid. My dad was not one of those hard core guys with a rifle in one hand and a bottle of alcohol in the other. No physical abuse. Very little yelling and screaming. My mother, who at one time modeled professionally, had one problem and only one problem. She would spend money like life was an open piggy bank. She once owned her own Beverly Hills beauty salon with wives of famous celebs as clientele but she was not a good businesswoman and the salon folded. My mom and dad eventually divorced.

The one time both parents got upset at me, and forced me into my go-invisible mantra, I was at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers were playing what started out as an afternoon double header. My friends and I had tickets right behind first base. The first game went extra innings. By the time the second game was over, it was dark. We stayed for the completion of both games. After the second game was over we saw these old newspaper vendor guys hanging out in the Dodger Stadium parking lot.

Extra, extra. Marilyn Monroe commits suicide. Read all about it.

My friends knew I used to live close to Marilyn Monroe, so we all had a chat about her as we walked down to Sunset Boulevard. Because we had no other transportation and nobody was old enough to drive, we needed to take a bus back to Sherman Oaks which was where my parents had moved to. By the time we got to Ventura and Fulton, it was past 10:00 pm, and the streets were fairly deserted because it was a Sunday evening. Our favorite hot dog stand Cupids was closed so we couldn’t get a hot dog with their famous chili for the walk home. By the time we walked the mile we needed to, it was after 11:00 PM when we reached my house. My dad was pissed. I had never seen him so upset. My mom was also worried. She was even crying. My parents had called the cops, and the cops were there when we arrived home. There were no cell phones at the time so we couldn’t check in. And we were too involved in the game to find a phone booth to call. My friends called their parents from my parents’ house to come pick them up. Their parents were also pissed off at their kids. My mistake. I lost my allowance the next week, among other punishments. I eventually learned my lesson. From then on, I became more aware to check in with the family if it ever got late. And I made the life-changing decision that if I needed to hide from my parents or other people, I would learn how to become invisible. Sort of. At the age of fourteen who knows what’s in store for your life. Who knows what career you will move into; what girl you will marry; what kind of personality you will develop. I bought a comic book one day, Mr. Invisible. He could hide from anybody. He could rob a bank or save a stranger. He was a cool dude, maybe even a Superhero of sorts, but fictional, of course. I spent months trying to become invisible. First, being an optimistic fourteen-year-old boy, I was sure I could wish myself into invisibility. I wished and wished and wished. I even turned around three times in one place at one time. That didn’t work. I kept thinking maybe I didn’t wish hard enough. Then I tried chemistry. I bought a chemistry set. I spent $125.75 from my allowance for it. I would spray stuff over my body, usually just my arms as a prerequisite, to see if I could get at least a little bit invisible. I must have tried thirty-five different concoctions. Darn, people could still see me. Then I read up on invisibility. There was the basic Invisible 101 recommendation about wearing something that always identifies me such as a pair of glasses, displaying that look with consistency, and then when I wanted to become invisible, eliminate the glasses thereby changing my typical look. This wasn’t really the invisibility I was going for. It was just hiding in plain sight. But it was a start.

I read about transformation optics, or controlling the paths of light rays, but I was not the brightest bulb in science so I decided not to get involved in that. I’ve always admired people who were science geniuses because they grew up to cure cancer but if you are not born with that kind of mind, you need to move on to what you are good at.

Later on I read about illusion optics, meta-material walls, acoustic cloaking, space time cloaking and so on. It was still above my brain’s capacity so I needed to figure something else out.

Camouflaging became the closet thing I could conceive of. I would buy an outfit that fit in with the rest of my background and therefore I would remain invisible to those also in the immediate area. Of course, the only problem was I changed backgrounds so often that I would need to buy too many outfits to fit in. I remember seeing a movie one time where a serial killer would get an advance look at the inside of a person’s house or apartment, and buy or create an outfit that matched the drapes or curtains. He would already be in the house when the victim would get home, and the victim couldn’t see him, so it was only a matter of time before there was one more dead body. I didn’t have any ambitions to be a serial killer, so this was not on my list of career choices.

***

I ended up buying a generic matching shirt and pants light beige in color that I could use in our house, and it was great if I wanted to scare my younger brother or sister, but if I went outside it didn’t do much good. I didn’t have outfits that looked like a brick wall, or a side of a house or the green green grass of home. Then I discovered something called an Invisible Cloak. This was a piece of material that had the feel of plastic and was five feet tall and about two feet wide. Scientifically, it was a material that hides infrared, ultraviolet and thermal signals. It was a technology that bent light around a target to give it the illusion of making something vanish. To become invisible, an object (me) must bend light around itself so that it casts no shadow or reflection.

The science was still way above my brain level. But I ended up buying a piece of it. It came with two handles on the back allowing me to hold it. From my point of view I was hiding behind this material. From your point of view, I was invisible. But realistically, the object needed to be stationary to remain invisible. It was aimed at objects such as hiding real airplanes (obviously a much larger piece of material) in a war-like situation. If I were to move around, it would be very hard to keep hiding. And since it was only about five-foot-high, some part of my clothing would still be showing. But I wasn’t going to complain. I had something I could make work if necessary. And one day it became necessary.

Chapter Two

HOW I MET (AND LOST) MY FIANCÉ

There are a lot of ways to meet your significant other. A bar, school, museum, church, temple. Even at a football game in college. But I seriously doubt if many people ever met and developed a relationship because of a wrong phone number. But that’s what happened to me. No lie. History has not recorded whom I was actually trying to call that night. But I wound up on the phone with Linda. Hello is ______________ there, I said.

No sorry you have the wrong number, said Linda. No it couldn’t be. I swear I dialed and proceeded to read off seven numbers.

She, of course, corrected me, and I was ready to apologize, hang up and say good-bye.

Then she asked me some question. Again, history fails to recall what that question was. But it had something to do with a class she was taking or something she was studying. I answered the question correctly and that led to another question, and before you know it, we were long past questions and answers and on the way to a two-hour call.

Soon the questions moved from school to personal things. She grew up in Nebraska and her family has just moved to Los Angeles. But she was going back to Nebraska to attend college. I had lived in LA all my life, and was going to attend the University of Oregon in the fall. We hung up and I called her back the next night, and the next and the next. We found out we had a few things in common and I decided to ask her out. I do not remember if I asked her to send me a photo. There was no internet or cell phones those days. So, I’m guessing, I just took a chance, and by the same token she was taking a chance.

But we hit it off. I took her to a Beatles concert, films, a Dodger game, I don’t know what else. But I do remember we kissed at the end of each date, and it was a good, long kiss, not one of these peck on the cheek Hollywood kisses. We wound up going out the entire summer, and four years later when our respective college years were completed, and we had diplomas in hand, we met back in LA and started going out again. But this time things were different. We got much more intimate and I guess you could say we were starting to fall in love. But one catch, I was still single. She had been married and divorced and had a two-year-old boy named Hudson. One of those college age flings with a football player, she said. But it was a disaster. He hit me enough to give me a black eye. He yelled at me. He hit Hudson and screamed at him for no reason. I couldn’t take it, so I got a divorce and custody of Hudson. He wound up in jail for a few months, and then became an alcoholic. I won’t let him near my son because I’m afraid of what he will do to him.

Does he try and get in contact with you now? I asked. Not yet, the court ordered him to get his life in order before they would revisit visitation rights to Hudson.

A year later, we got engaged. You’ll love this. I’ve heard or read about some great marriage proposals. Engagement ring in a Cracker Jacks Box. Proposal on the scoreboard at a baseball game. Hiring a skywriter to write the proposal in the sky. But mine was pretty clever I thought. I set up a video that was to be played at the local movie theatre. I even had some of her friends sprinkled in the audience. Before the film started, you would usually see Previews of Coming Attractions. Well, I put together a Coming Attraction of the two of us doing some crazy things, and that played on the movie screen. At the end of the trailer, on the screen, I got down on one knee and pulled a ring out of the box, and a sign that said, Oh Come On. You’ll marry Me, Wont You? She was flabbergasted as she looked at the screen. I then stood up next to her, offered her the ring, and helped her out of her seat. She said yes, kissed me, and the crowd stood up and applauded. I guess you could say that was my first standing ovation. We had been going together for almost a year when we decided to take a trip to Nebraska so she could introduce me to her relatives. Like maybe twenty-three of them. On this trip she would leave Hudson, now three years old, at home with his grandmother. We took a small plane, one of those planes that seat only thirty people. It was called Pacific Coast Air and it only flew to select cities. The flight fees were a little higher than regular commercial airlines. But the service was second to none. About half way from Los Angeles to Omaha, in a small town called Johnsons Corner, Colorado, the plane