Secret Agent Man

I’m sure it’s a long way off, so please forgive me for my haste when I inform you all that I have already reserved a spot for Danny’s funeral. I hope Matt, David, Krissy, Jenny, and Kathy will forgive me if I’m not sitting with them or the rest of Danny’s friends and relative’s graveside. Please don’t think of me as any less sympathetic if I’m not in earshot of the one giving the eulogy. Lastly, please don’t take me as ungrateful when I decline the invitation back to the house for funeral potatoes and possibly a handful of Kathy’s World Famous Chex Party Mix. No, I will be lurking in the trees just in site of the whole thing, possibly for hours, sunglasses and pinstriped suit on, standing beside my rental car, a black Ford LTD with tinted windows. You may see me talking into my sleeve as well, as if I’m trying to communicate with some high-op member of the CIA. Why, you ask? Well, don’t let them know this, but I’m going to be monitoring the others who show up, dressed just like myself, who come to pay their final respects to Danny. Unless TV has led me wrong, and I can’t ever imagine a time in which it has, the cemetery will be swarming with people who come for just a split second, mysteriously, before vanishing. At the dinner afterwards, many will be left to inquire, “who was that man?” before others chime in with “I thought you knew!” Then flowers will unexpectedly arrive at the door without a note signifying the sender. Thus it is with the death of a man who leads a double life, a whole lot of questions and no answers. That is why I will be taking cover as one of them.Some have skeletons locked inside their closet while others still will keep a tight lid on Pandora’s box of secrets. Danny, however, has a tied scrapbook of pictures. I know it exists. I have seen evidence of it in the form of an old black and white delineation. It was a day just like any other. Matt and I had just finished playing a game of Basketball in his driveway when we went inside to get ourselves a drink. There, lying on the couch was a picture of a man riding a bull. If not for its age, it could have easily been disregarded as the back cover of a magazine, an ad for Marlboro cigarettes or something to that affect. Matt and I gazed upon it, trying to decipher who it was under that dusty cowboy hat. Kathy came into the room and, upon seeing our bewildered looks, exclaimed, “bet you didn’t know Dad rode bulls, did you? Neither did I!” Kathy went on to describe how Danny’s mother had just come by to drop it off. We all went inside the kitchen to have a drink. Once we came back, it was gone. Danny walked in later that night and when asked about the picture he muttered “hmmmmm, don’t know what you’re talking about”. Matt, Kathy, and I declared we all saw the picture. “Well, whatever you saw, it sounds like Snoop ate it.” That reminded me of the time on The Simpsons when Millhouse asked Bart about his missing fish; “you told me I never had a fish, but why did I have the bowl Bart, why did I have the bowl?” There was something that just didn’t add up. Perhaps it was the fact that Snoop was at the vet’s office that day, but whatever it was I knew Danny was hiding something, something that we caught a fleeting glimpse of before it vanished back into obscurity. It was then that I got the feeling that perhaps Danny wasn’t just being secretive because he felt like it, but rather because he had to be. Maybe he was part of some big government project and had taken an oath years ago to honor its secrecy. If that was the case, and once again I am relying on trusty old TV, that would mean Danny meets up occasionally with somebody on a park bench, both of them casting their eyes in the opposite direction. This was right around the time I was conjuring up my Eagle Scout project and thus I decided on painting park benches around Cache Valley. This would give me ample opportunity to survey Danny’s whereabouts were he indeed meeting up with some undercover agent. Yet, months went by and not a single sighting of the man in one of those parks. It was time for me to move on to wire-tapping. I inserted one onto the Wettsteins’ phone one day, just inside the receiver, but all I was ever to record were boxes full of cassette tapes containing the phrases “Matt’s not home, mmmmmmmm”, “David’s not here, mmmmmmmm”, “Krissy’s gone, mmmmmmmmmm” and so forth. It was time to move on to bugging his vehicle. I could never get close enough to the blue truck to even cast a shadow upon it, let alone latch a tracking device onto it. The next best thing was that truck inside the garage. I knew it would be drivable soon and once it was, BINGO! That was 15 years ago and I’m still occasionally looking at my computer monitor for any sign of movement, but alas nothing.So all else has failed. Perhaps on that sad day Danny leaves us, I’ll get my answers. And when I do I will lye the last Rose upon the gravestone of Danny Wettstein, which will read, “Danny, we hardly knew ye.”

"I Will See You On White Trash Wednesday"

General MacArthur said something perplexing to me in his farewell address; “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” What exactly did that mean? After all, we all die someday, right? And why should who we were and what we left behind ever fade away? I think what that brilliant, but now senile, old man had actually meant to say was that “Old SHIRTS never die, they just fade away.” Truer words were never spoken. Jerry Seinfeld added his two cents years later by stating “ Men hang on to their shirts until each individual shirt molecule is so strained it can barely retain the properties of a solid. It actually becomes shirt vapor. We don’t ever throw it out, we just open up a window and out it goes like dandelion spores.”Such was the case with Danny’s old shirts. It was one semester up at USU, while attending the same Institute class, that Matt and I came up with what we would term “White Trash Wednesdays.” Each Wednesday we would get up early to search the remote corners of the closet or the uncharted spaces of the dresser drawers for that perfect shirt. It’s hard to describe exactly what kind of shirt we were looking for, but once we found it we just knew it was right for “White Trash Wednesday”. Sometimes I went for sheer ugliness, like the shirt my mother had made for my Grandmother before she was to be a contestant on the Price Is Right, all decked out in large neon letters and gold glitter paint. Sometimes I went for sheer grunginess such as the Grateful Dead shirt that had so many holes in it that it was being held together by safety pins. Though Matt had produced one fairly good winner in the form of an ugly neon-green Logan Regional Hospital Parrot shirt found used as an oil rag inside the barn, his efforts had been waning for a while. Perhaps, I thought, he was too worried what the girls would think. I had long ago gotten married and was past caring about my day to day appearance. No, more than likely he just found it tough to compete with decades worth of Morrell hand-me-downs. I had pretty much given up on “White Trash Wednesday” half way through the semester, when I caught a site of something that will forever be burned into the back of my retinas; It looked like Matt was walking into the room with just jeans and a garment top on. I rubbed my eyes and there it was again. Oh no, not this dream again! At least I wasn’t the only one who had come to school without dressing, this time Matt had come as well. I looked down like I always had in such a dream, expecting to see myself only in garments before looking back up at a thousand smirking girls! But this time I was fully clothed. What was going on here? All of a sudden it dawned on me that Matt was actually wearing a shirt! I squinted my eyes to make out the letters NASA as Matt inched closer. So old and worn was the shirt, that just a faded red collar and those four letters remained visible to the naked eye. I stuttered through the congratulatory comments to Matt , still in awe of his victory, and asked him where he had found such a marvelous trophy? “Oh, I finally broke into my dad’s closet, he has tons of these old shirts!” I drooled onto my desk and sat the rest of the class period pondering the treasures that awaited us once we got back to Matt’s place. We raced home from school and threw open the closet doors. There they were! This was the Mormon kids equivalent to finding his fathers porn stash! I grabbed the Mickey Mouse shirt that was so worn it looked like it was about to slip through the hanger that held it at any second. I put it on, imagining the last time that shirt looked somewhat new. “I bet these were given out the first day Disneyland opened!” I gasped. “No, it’s gotta be older than that” Matt said. “ Maybe it was worn by Walt Disney himself to commemorate the finalization of his first cartoon, Steamboat Willie, back in 1912?” However old it was, and only carbon dating could let us know the real truth, I was in White Trash Heaven. Many semesters have passed since those wonderful Wednesdays, but I’ll never forget that one special day Matt’s dad handed him the forever-reigning trophy. You were spot-on Mr. MacArthur, some shirts will never die!