Orange Crush

I know this is going to show a shocking lack of self control, but I find myself a bit short tempered lately. I wish I wasn’t and it doesn’t feel great, but it does feel a little like I’m coming into a birthright.

Do you like comics? You know who The Hulk is, right? Hulk Smash? Puny humans? everyone knows the Hulk, but do you know his whole thing?

There were a bunch of cartoons in the late sixties for Marvel books, very cheap, a lot of still shots and utterly still, motionless heads with animated mouths. They’re best remembered for their theme songs, particularly “When Captain America throws his mighty shield.”

It’s an ear worm that if it wasn’t buried deep in subconscious, it is now. You’re welcome. Far less memorable but flat-out brilliant is the theme for The Incredible Hulk cartoon:

Right? “Dr. Banner, Pelted by Gamma rays, turns into the hulk, ain’t he unglamorous? “ Rhyming “Gamma rays” and “Unglamorous” is perhaps the pinnacle of human artistic achievement, and if you don’t think I’m serious, then you might think you know me, but you don’t.

But my point, and I always have one eventually, is that’s how the Hulk got his powers. Dr. Banner was pelted by gamma rays, and it turned him into the Hulk. Sometimes. He’d go back and forth, Jekyll and Hyde style. BUT, when gamma rays pelted someone else? It was different every time. Samuel Sterns was a janitor in a chemical plant, but when gamma rays pelted him, it turned him Green (like the Hulk) but instead of being a super strong brute, it made his head real long and turned him into an evil genius. Betty Ross, Banner’s girlfriend and later wife, turned into The Harpy, a giant, green bird/woman hybrid who is just flat out bonkers and a total man hater in a way that only a guy who wrote comics in 1973 could have written. Emil Blonsky was a KGB spy turned sort of olive drab and all giant lizard guy when he got pelted, sort of like if the Creature from black lagoon was crazy juicing and not amphibian. Walter Langowski, a Canadian physicist became the superhero Sasquatch who wasn’t green at all and in fact looked like the result of marital relations between a Bigfoot and a Golden Retriever. General Thadeus “Thunderbolt” Ross when pelted hulked out, but was red, and upon transforming, his trademark mustache retracted into his head, the single most awesome thing in any comic book ever!

You see? Gamma rays express themselves generally as at least rage adjacent, but always uniquely!

That’s the anger gene in the Y chromosome branches of the Burbank family tree. That’s our gamma ray induced, transformative power. We all have it, but for each person… it’s expressed a little… differently.

My Paternal grandfather, a beloved physician, was in private a ball of tightly repressed rage who held grudges lasting generations. Favorite moment? He took the whole family on a month-long trip to the four corners region of the American south west. We of course visited the Grand Canyon, North Rim first. It’s far less developed than the South Rim, way less tourist amenities and trails. When we visited the South Rim, my Grandfather asked me what I thought. I said it was amazing, but I actually liked the North Rim better. The views aren’t as impressive, but if it was less awe inspiring, it was more… manageable. You could take in the scope of it. And there were way less people on the trails. You could be alone with the Canyon. My Grandfather looked at me and growled “If I’d known you weren’t gonna like it… I’d have slit my wrists.”

When I tell that story, people are always, like “Wow! Your Grandad was awful!” And he was. But he was also magnificent! His anger was so totally unwarranted, so focused and channeled, like the entire weight of the misery, confusion and downright confoundedness of his life as the first Jew in Brooklyn to bull his way into a world that wanted nothing to do with Jews; A Doctor in World War II who’d seen the camps, a devout and fanatical atheist working his way up from and out of a community that spoke only Yiddish, all of that funneled into a bright black laser beam of rage… at me! A millionth of his power, but you could tell if he ever truly let it loose, it would VAPORIZE you! It was impressive. And he could release that tiny nugget that spoke so eloquently of all the supernova boiling away behind it whenever he wanted, which was often!

My Dad, another doctor, could be explosive, but surgical, elegant, precise. And often his towering rage was directed not at me, but at inanimate objects and the inescapable fact that the universe itself had been purposely designed to just piss the shit out of him. He swore like a longshoreman, but always, always pronounced the “g” in “Fucking” as in “It’s the fucking decline of western civilization.” He also had an artist’s fondness for sarcasm. One time we were getting ready to go to Vermont over winter break? It was a Sunday morning and we were all packing and loading the car, and I asked my mom, I specifically asked, if I could take a break and read the funnies. ‘Cause it was Sunday, see, and this was in the magical before Internet times, and the Sunday paper was HUGE, like SEA TURTLE huge, and it had a whole section of full color comics! I know, but it’s TRUE!! And oh, but I loved the funnies. So I’m sitting in our kitchen reading the Katzenjammer Kids, the ongoing adventures of Hans and Fritz, two unruly first generation german immigrant kids and Der Captain, their… stepfather? Maybe? A befuddled alcoholic fisherman/spanking enthusiast and here comes my old man into the kitchen, arms laden with cross country skis and poles, and he looks at me sitting there grinning at the antics of these heavily accented cartoon Germans and says…

“Oh, GOOD. Thank GOD, really. I mean, here I am, frantically packing for our family vacation, and the whole time, my main concern, the principal worry absolutely dominating my consciousness was, in all the hurrying around necessary to get this family off their asses and into the car with all their assorted CRAP accounted for, what if Max never found a peaceful moment to sit and indulge his singular passion, the SUNDAY FUCKING FUNNIES?!”

And yes, he most certainly did use the phrase “indulge his singular passion”, and yes, he most certainly did pronounce the “G” at the end of the word “Fucking”, crisply, pointedly and stingingly, because no matter how seriously the world is going to hell at any given moment, the Gerund MUST BE RESPECTED!

My brother is a great sigher, long, blustery, eyes-closed sighs indicating the exasperating patience needed to constantly carry the enormous weight of the infinite irritations of existence. He once described life itself to me as “A series of hassles occasionally punctuated by tragedy” and honestly, I defy anyone to argue with that definition. Design was his particular nemesis, the way any inanimate object, say a can opener or the crank that opens the windows in our Mother’s house, is such a perfect illustration of man’s hatred of his fellow man, the effort it took to create a device so frustratingly bad at what it’s meant to do, that surely it must be deliberate, surely that was its entire point.

I have spent most of my adult life being fairly even tempered. It took me a very long time to gain control of a near-constant angry anxiety that people who had not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be benign were almost certainly thinking poorly of me. As a child, I often indulged a paranoid fantasy that everyone in the world was telepathic except me, that life was a massive conspiracy to keep me from catching on, so that I wouldn’t feel inferior, which obviously I was in that I was the only one who was NOT TELEPATHIC. Another flight of paranoia was that I would run into a total stranger who had spent his life constructing an elaborate set of highly specific rules so astronomically unlikely to occur that it would forever keep his addiction to MURDER at bay; Something along the lines of “I will never, EVER kill a child UNLESS… It is a Saturday evening in November and an early snow is falling and I am dining out alone at the China Blossom in North Andover, Massachusetts, and I go to the restroom and the Muzak is playing a watered-down version of “Funky Town” and the door opens and a young teenage Jewish boy walks in with one of his shoes untied, and that was EXACTLY WHAT HAD JUST HAPPENED and that JEWISH BOY WITH THE ONE UNTIED SHOE WAS ME!

Over time I learned that being anxious and angry all the time was a terrible way to live, that most people you met far from thinking poorly of you or wanting to kill you barely registered your presence at all and that some people who seemed to be nice seemed that way because they were. Nice. And I figured out I really hated being angry and I stopped. Mostly. OK, in a lot of cases I substituted outrage for anger, but it’s a step.

And I only feel in touch with my birthright when I’m stressed. And I got stressed more than I wanted to before ALL THE THIS THING RIGHT NOW.

So just lately I feel like a Burbank Man more than I’d like to. Very easily. With very little real provocation, and sometimes only incorrectly imagined provocation and sometimes with no provocation at all.

For instance. This afternoon.

My youngest daughter who at 20 is not so young, I realize has been standing in front of me for a while trying to get my attention. And I didn’t hear her or notice, because I have earphones in. I am indulging my singular passion for John Oliver, watching him intently as he does what I do, but much, much better for a much, much larger audience and for a great deal more money. And she can see this is what I’m doing, but she’s standing there, talking to me. I can see her mouth moving. And I feel that conduit opening up on a black hole of anger like my grandfathers. And I pause my computer. And I take out my earphones. And I heave a sigh that shifts the weight of the world on my shoulders but doesn’t lift it, like my brother.

And she asks me what we have to eat.

And I say:

“I’m curious. Can you tell me what’s changed? Can you tell me what about our circumstances has changed that allows you to, in some corner of your mind, believe that considering the world we are currently inhabiting, we have any food today that we did not have yesterday, seeing as how we have not left this house for two weeks?” Or words to that effect. I did not say “Fucking”, as I have some self-control, but if I had, I would certainly have respected the Gerund.

I spoke as I did because it is my birthright. I said what I said because whatever else I am, I am also a Burbank Man. I have been pelted by gamma rays.

And she cried, because she is also stressed out, as is everyone on Earth right now. And because even at 20 she has not yet become a connoisseur of the awful moment as I already was that day in the parking lot on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. And because whatever else she is, she is not a Burbank Man.

So, I got up and got her an Orange Crush from the downstairs refrigerator, leftover from a party in the before time when things like soda were taken for granted and which she did not know we had. And her sister asked her if she even liked orange soda.

And she said, “Doesn’t everyone?”