Different Slants

SIX-LEGGED OBSESSION!!!
THE FLY AND I SEE EYE-TO-EYE  September 30, 2007

My original newsstand, from August 1965 on was 4 feet x 4 feet, built from rough, stolen, construction-site exterior plywood sheeting, was about 6 feet high, with a roof that projected out from the front of it about 4 more feet, at an angle making the far edge of the overhanging roof higher off the sidewalk by about one foot than the back of the tiny newsstand, where it was secured by many nails. It was meant to shield us from the powerful sunlight that turned our ‘hot-off-the-presses’ newspapers yellow and our skin red ( pale Rick) and brown ( olive Bob), and also from sudden rain squalls that would otherwise drench our small stacks of newspapers.

Its color was a kind of checkerboard white and green, really ugly, but they were the only two cans of paint I could find in my mother’s garage. On the sides of the stand, where it was white, I painted “B & R Newsstand”. I was very proud of our little enterprise and its name. Rick, less so.

The floor was wooden, and also rough to sit on, with remnants of concrete stuck to its surface from previous construction jobs. There were two front doors on hinges that could be locked to secure the unsold newspapers when we closed at night. The four metal hinges that held the two small doors were the only items I actually purchased to construct the original newsstand. They cost about $4.00.

That padlocked area was underneath the waist-level wooden counter where the change and other newspapers sat. I would seek refuge in there from the sun, because in August 1965 my acute allergies to dust, mold, grasses and ragweed were overwhelming and somehow triggered by harsh sunlight.

When people walked up to the newsstand, if Rick wasn’t there, they would call out for someone to take their money and then be startled by a seemingly disembodied voice coming from somewhere inside of the newsstand asking them which paper they wanted. It amazes me today that we did not have any cases of heart failure among our older customers due to the strangeness of how I sought to transact business from under the newsstand’s counter and completely out of anyone’s sight.

The interior where I hid from the bright sunlight and evidently my customers too, was musty, damp, and probably moldy. It was a toss-up whether I was better off sneezing like a machine gun standing in front of my newsstand or breathing unknown and possibly poisonous vapors while huddled inside that cramped storage area. No wonder Bill Reynolds, our 69 year old first employee, when he first surveyed this unorthodox selling situation, concluded that I was nuts and that I would never make a successful newspaper vender. I suspect he felt I was an embarrassment to the Trade.

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When school started earlier for Rick at Bowen High School (on Chicago’s South-East Side) than it did for me at Lab School, (next to Hyde Park’s University of Chicago) I was totally alone for hours on that sun-drenched bit of sidewalk, in 1965. There were virtually no customers or even pedestrians on those hot, humid late Summer days. So I waited, as the days passed, sitting in the dark under the top shelf of my quaint handmade newsstand, avoiding the light so the Sun’s broiling heat wouldn’t turn me into a raison.

To add more misery to this less than enchanting part of learning the realities of a newsvendor’s life, I was plagued by incessant swarms of flies also seeking shady relief from the oppressive mid-day heat. They tried to share my moldy quarters with me.

Big mistake.

I hate…REALLY hate…filthy, buzzing, flies.

I began to kill flies, using a rolled-up newspaper. A few at first, when I was still inexperienced in the ways of flies. But with quiet determination, I began to study the way a fly landed and moved around on different kinds of surfaces. Then I noted how they took-off again. I studied the movements of their multi-colored, translucent sets of wings and their six wire-like legs with their knee joints. Soon, there were distinct patterns in their behavior that I was able to predict. I learned that if I killed the damn flies steadily, consistently, on a particular part of the outside of my newsstand, with minute bits and pieces of wings and legs still crushed into the crevasses of the rough plywood, after perhaps twenty minutes of unrelenting slaughter, the flies stopped coming.

Period.

No more flies.

Perhaps they recognized the assorted parts of their crushed comrades still stuck to the rough surface of my newsstand and decided to call it a day. Perhaps they saw the futility of attempting to land on my newsstand. I will never know how they felt about me, those nasty flies.

The flies only attacked me from the sunny side of my shack. If the temperature was in the upper nineties, their reaction time was slower. Killing them became less challenging, the more I learned about their behavior as the Summer marched on. Periodically, Horseflies–which were much bigger than ordinary flies and really ugly–chose to land on my “Newsstand Airport”. But they acted very much like their city cousins. They also could bite me, and I feared them. When I killed a Horsefly, I felt I was making the world a better place.

But there was a clear difference to me in how I killed the different kinds of flies. Ordinary flies I swatted with the practiced precision of a tennis player who hit thousands of balls each day in order to maintain his high level of play. Horseflies…I hunted, staying out of their line of sight and making sure that when I went for the kill, I wouldn’t miss. I kept a separate, rolled-up old newspaper that had a certain stiffness to it, so that when it slammed down upon an obscenely repulsive Horsefly, it flattened out but still maintained the integrity of its tensile strength, giving the Horsefly no quarter, and no possibility of escape.

I learned to kill with style and panache, and over time, I mastered my environment, and it became a fly-free zone. In my first couple of Summers at that newsstand, in 1965 and 1966, I undoubtedly killed tens of thousands of flies.

I eventually learned by careful and patient observation, that when a fly lands on a flat surface, it remains tense, alert and agile, ready to take off in a fraction of a second to escape death. But in order to maintain this alert vigil, the fly had to crouch all six of its springy knees in order to give it the lift it needed to escape the surface it was standing on, and also have sufficient room to flap its four wings. After a while, if no threat was obvious to their minute fly brains, they would relax their crouching posture and straighten their legs.

But this relaxation stance also prevented them from instantly flying away.

So, if I saw a fly land near me, I would slowly position myself within striking-range of it and hold my Newspaper of Death poised above the fly, about twelve inches over them. Then I would patiently wait.

The second the fly decided it couldn’t detect any movement near it, felt safe, and straightened out its sore bent legs, BAM!!! They were killed instantly by the latest headlines.

I also learned that trying to kill a fly with my hand alone was different, because a stiffened hand forms a kind of inverted “cup” and when my hand would swoop down to crush the fly, the fly was alerted to the coming fatal concussion by the sudden change in air pressure that preceded my hand landing on the fly and it would always escape. So I decided that a stiffened and flat newspaper was a superior weapon. Also less disgusting.

At the same time though, my timing and reflexes improved and I was increasingly able to stay in sync with the fly’s limited manner of response. It got to a point where I could knock a fly down with my hand alone while it was in flight. If you think this is no big deal, try it yourself some time and see the skill required to do it.

One time, with all three of my young (2,4 and 7) children present in our house in Evanston, Illinois in 1982, I caught an irritating fly buzzing around our kitchen in mid- flight with just my hand.

I don’t know if those now adult kids (27, 29 and 32) will still remember that moment today, a quarter century later, but they seemed pretty impressed at that moment. I know I was, even though it never happened again. The captured fly did not receive a reprieve, in any event.

I learned that it may have been the same way in baseball where a very good hitter could somehow mentally focus on the speeding ball aimed right at him, moving at ninety-plus miles per hour, and mentally slow down the ball in order to enable the batter to connect with the ball at just the right moment for maximum effect in order to not only stop the hurtling object, but also completely change its direction and velocity.

I decided that Baseball Physics were very similar to Fly Physics, except that Fly Physics required less strength and more intelligence, because the direction that the hunted fly could escape to was highly variable. So, even though the ball was launched by one skilled human toward another skilled human, the ball itself could do no more than it was forced to do, and had no ability within itself to change its course to evade the batter’s possible crashing blow.

Whereas the fly, even with its evil little brain sitting inside a sturdy black exoskeleton, still had many possible choices of movement and that added the necessity of flexible versatility among the talents required of the fly’s executioner and the ability to instantly respond to the fly’s sudden final destination decision with precisely aimed lethal force.

While the major similarity between the two pursuits is that both require a young man’s reflexes, sadly, tens of millions want to watch some muscle-bound behemoth smash a relatively large stitched leather sphere into oblivion, and professional baseball team owners are willing to pay that grunting person a hundred million dollars to let thousands of paying customers watch him do precisely that, regretably, my deadly perfection in extinguishing the existence of untold thousands of annoying insects with silent Samurai-like studied movements has been known to no one, until now, and I will most likely remain unsung, and unpaid, for what might be considered by a (very) small number of people to be legendary deeds.

But at least, from now on, no one will ever say of me,

“Why, he wouldn’t even hurt a fly!”

Friend, don’t bet on it.

Even in my quiet, post fly-killing retirement, I prefer to still consider myself a threat. One has one’s pride.

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As a concluding note, Reader, you might be interested know that five years earlier, when I was just ten years old at a Midwestern summer camp in 1960, I was always sent ahead of the rest of the campers in my cabin, including the fearful adults, into the small concrete block changing room first, because I had figured out how fast the large, black, menacing, well-armed wasps flew, and in what manner. I discovered that I could kill all of them, without being stung.

I was never stung. Not once.

The key to my being safe was my lack of fear and my willingness to stand still long enough to observe a wasp’s flying behavior, carefully. I saw that their airborne movements were extremely predictable. The light in that small changing room was fairly dim, and I eventually knew that factor would severely inhibit a wasp’s ability to use its large and powerful wings. And soon thereafter, their nasty stingers. I had a huge insect collection at that time and knew a great deal about different kinds of bees, ants, butterflies, grasshoppers, crickets, etc.

The funny thing was that killing the wasps did not improve my social situation one iota with my fellow cabin-mates in that miserable summer camp. Yet, still I was willing to make the changing rooms safe for all the others.

I wonder, even today: Why did I do that for them?

I guess I was better with bugs than people.

On the other hand, it probably would not have worked out so well, if I had chosen to respond to those mean kids in that camp who tormented me, in the same unforgiving manner in which I treated flies and wasps.

I guess.

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