Weird In The Afternoon

Weird In The Afternoon

Prime Time

by

Richard C. Walls

Late last November, when the yuletide spirit was just beginning to slither over the far horizon, not yet noticeable enough to change anyone’s basic surly attitude but still making its presence felt, subliminally, via the piney green crowding the peripheral vision of hapless shoppers in department stores and the swift but deadly assault of the occasional Mr. Microphone commercial over the airwaves, I had the occasion, the extremely stupid painful opportunity, to drop a Christmas tree on my foot. The details are fuzzy and mundane, the * immediate pain and subsequent embarrassrrient having overwhelmed my memory, but the tree was dropped, the foot was broke, andlspentthe following week in the hospital.

I wasn’t there of necessity, of course. I didn’t need a week’s worth of attention and in a more organized society 1 would have suffered comfortably at home. But having gone to the hospital for help I had to wait three days before the foot was properly examined and then three more days before the results were in, at which point I was quickly sent home with the priceless advice that I “stay off the foot for awhile.”

Having been in the hospital before, in a similar “semi-private” situation (which means that there’s a curtain, almost within reach, which you can pull around your bed) my first concern before settling into the mindbending boredom of hospital routine were how insane were my roommates (there were two of them) and how impossible was it to get hold of a television. The roomies were no problem—one, a cadaverous looking gent, slept all day and roamed the hallwaysat night, probably in search of blood, while the other, equally non-communicative and with the top of his head completely wrapped in bandages, labored over comic booksall day. So, turning to my second concern, I hassled the staff for a rented television which took two days to get (there’s always a shortage), cost a small fortune and had a five-inch screen. 1 didn’t mind the smallness tho. After two days of staring at my traitorous foot , giving blood at 6 A.M. (why? I never found out), eating generous portions of tasteless food (they must have boiled everything, even the rubbery hied egg), and taking regular doses of nameless pain killers (no buzz there, tho they did make staring at my foot a bit more engrossing than it might normally have been)—after two days of intensive pointlessness I was grateful for this small but expensive distraction. And I watched everything. I watched the news with the dispassion of the terminally bored, watched the weather with a feeling of awe about the approaching ice age, watched gleefully while capitalist representatives squirmed with embarrassment on Three’s A Crowd. And I watched all the series I could, all the shows I couldn’t bring myself to watch in “normal” life because I’d be overwhelmed by the feeling that there must be something better to do. I watched Dick Van Patten, pasty-faced and complaining onEightlsEnough, a sentimental sampler version of WWII on The Waltons, a bunch of funny character actors in search of a plot on WKRPIn Cincinnati, Gary Coleman in search of a laugh on Diff rent Strokes. Everything. It was a wonderful time.

Afternoons were difficult tho. There’s not much to watch in the afternoon, even when drugged by hospital ennui and Parke-Davis foot calmers. There was little pleasure in watching Bill Kennedy, Detroit’s perennial movie host, sip from the cup of senility, giving garbled or just wrong answers to phoned-in questions that were too boring to qua If y as trivia (Question: Is Robin Williams married? Kennedy: Gee.. .1 dunno...). There were the soaps but watching them is a serious hobby, like raising children or taxidermy, and the last thing I need is another hobby—and, of course, there’s the odd rerun like Leave It to Beaver or Nanny and the Professor... but I never became that bored.

Fortunately in Detroit we get Canadian television which in the afternoon features a handful of second-rate talk shows, nothing as engaging as Carson, or as problematic as Cavett, but also nothing as abrasively gauche as Mike Douglas or Merv. Just pleasantly boring, friendly, companionable. And, in the late afternoons, just before the early e vening class reruns of Van Dyke and Moore, I found a very peculiar little show called Beyond Reason.

Beyond Reason was (and, as of December’79, still is) a genuinely strange show presented with that mixture of torpor and unaffected tackiness which is a mainstay of Canadian television. The premise was simple enough: a panel of three psychically gifted people try to guess the occupation and/or identity of a mystery guest. The artlessness of the show was beguiling—each of the three panelists satin a soundproof isolation booth with a sliding glass panel in front which, as it rose and fell, inadvertently brought to mind old Monogram zombie flicks. The first time I watched it I was more than mildly skeptical. I’d always thought that people who believed in psychic phenomena were a little soft in the head, that they were people who’d gotten lost somewhere on the road to reason— not merely ignorant but victims of an irritatingly kinetic combination of stupidity and insanity. In a word, bozos. But these three psychics, just by making a series of. statements about the secret guest’s personality and/or job came awfully close to guessing who the secret guest was. And equally impressive was the lack of any show-biz or occult trappings about the psychics—no Ljberace suits or crystal balls. The show seemed honest.

The second time I watched the show one of the psychics, a munchkin who wore scaled down granny dresses and received vibes from the mystery guests by crumbling up a sample of their handwriting and then hyperventilating, actually guessed a guest’s identity. I pondered this, deeply impressed, for almost an hour, absentmindedly balling up kleenex tissues and tossing them into my bed pah. On the third show no one guessed any hidden identities, but another of the psychics, a gaunt astrologer with a funny beard and unmystical giggle, managed to come up with the mystery guest’s address. I was stunned. On the other side of my hospital room Count Dracula started to snore. The lobotomy kid yawned ferociously and started a fresh comic book. The sun went behind a cloud.

The remaining two shows during my hospital stay were equally revelatory. Despite the surrounding malaise"and the energy-stifling medicine I was beginning to get excited. I mentioned the show to a few nurses but they hadn’t heard of it, weren’t interested. I mentioned it to the friends and relatives who came to visit but they just smiled condescendingly and asked me how the pain was. And now I’m mentioning it to you. ’Cause I’m becoming obsessed with the idea that psychic phenomena does exisj and that I’ve been wrong about it all my life—the alternative, thatabunch of guileless Canadians could put one over on me, isjusttoo, too weird to consider.