META-SPIEL with The Gift for YOU this Giving Tuesday!

Today is Giving Tuesday, which means there’s an excellent chance that you will receive dozens of emails today soliciting donations, with triple match points aplenty! FORTY-LOVE!

oh wait that’s not right

anyway

Typically, on Giving Tuesday, I either renew membership or give some amount to mostly the same groups every year. And then in years past I’ve done the same the day following, Journalism Wednesday, specifically for media endeavors. This year, in large part because this is what the media outlets tend to want, I’m just doing all of that on Giving Tuesday.

I’m just going to mention here a couple of places where a little money is going this year, and then, for Giving Tuesday, I’ll be giving all of you The Gift!

Heatmap is, in their words, “a new media company focused on the biggest story in the world: the great climate and energy transition.” They appeared this year and I’ve found their reporting to be thoughtful and I respect an entity like this trying to make it. I’m subscribing today.

If you had been thinking about it but haven’t yet, today’s an excellent day to visit the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and get a copy of So It Goes, or get your copy of Player Piano, or become a member like us, and become part of Kurt’s Karass.

One of the more surprising institutions we’re members of is the Elmhurst Art Museum, surprising because art museums aren’t usually our thing and we don’t actually live in Elmhurst. But it’s a very nice smaller art museum that often has thoughtful and interesting exhibits, like the current Picasso exhibit. If you’re in the area and they’ve got an interesting exhibit, it’s worth a visit, with brunch in Elmhurst wrapped around it.

Apropos of nothing, I’d also like to recommend this article about the letter R, with the intriguing title “The ‘Crispy R’ and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter”, which is pretty much the kind of thing I aspire to write.

But enough of that. It’s time for The Gift!

Ah, well, you probably weren’t really expecting the video for the title track from Bullet LaVolta’s 1989 album The Gift, now were you? Here are some fun facts:

• Bullet LaVolta guitarist Clay Tarver would go on to form the sort-of-legendary band Chavez, and then years later he was co-showrunner for Silicon Valley. What a talented guy!

• An early road manager for Bullet LaVolta was none other than actor Donal Logue!

• The song “Birth of Death” from The Gift is still one of my favorites, even though it is completely ridiculous!

Alright, that’s not really The Gift. I mean, obviously, it is, but, no, it is not.

The Gift is a short story (no, it’s not called “The Gift”, how on the nose do you think I am?) which I came up with in bed one night and wrote entirely in the Notes app on my iPhone. I apologize in advance as it is highly likely that this will go over the heads of a great many of you, for no fault of your own. But I hope that those of you who understand this enjoy it, and I hope that those of you who do not understand it enjoy it anyway. And don’t worry, I’ll provide some context at the end for those of you who need it, and hey, even for those of you who don’t.

This story is called “Could It Be True?”

“OPEN THE DOOR!!!”

“Uh hello to you too?”

“OPEN THE DOOR, HURRY!!!!!”

Moose rolled his eyes but dutifully buzzed Rollie through. What would it be this time? Was Elvis still alive? Some new kicker conspiracy?

Rollie didn’t run down the hallway this time though. It sounded more like he was shuffling? Mumbling? Moose swiveled away from the console and tilted forward.

When Rollie finally appeared in the control room, he wasn’t alone. A small man was with him. The man didn’t seem very old or very young. His hair wasn’t very long or very short. It was thinning but only slightly. It was as nondescript as brown could get. His face was small like the rest of him. His jacket was blue, but not a particular shade of blue. The small man seemed very trepidatious but wasn’t exactly resisting. He looked resigned to what was happening.

But what *was* happening? The small man was being led by the hand by Rollie, all curls and tweed, who was often like a dervish but now seemed to be moving in slow motion. Instead of a typically wild eyed look, he seemed… determined? Focused? What the hell was going on?

And why would he bring anyone at all into the control room?

“Rollie… what the hell is going on?”

“Just sit down and listen!” Rollie was unusually terse.

“I *am* sitting down! Who is this guy? What the hell…”

“SHUSH!” Ronnie’s eyes steeled and he grunted through his teeth. “Just shush! This is important!”

Ronnie left the small man near the entrance to the control room and started fumbling around. He went back around the corner toward the inner hall and came back with two more chairs, even though Moose had an empty one next to him. Ronnie rolled one of the chairs toward the small man.

“Here, Leon. Have a seat.”

The small man, apparently named Leon, sat down. Moose leaned back and turned confusedly to Rollie. Rollie had the back of a chair in each hand but did not sit down.

“Leon… tell Moose here your name.”

“My name is Leon Campbell.” Even the man’s voice was small.

“And?”

“And I live in Crystal Lake.”

Moose was not understanding the point of this.

“Rollie? What…”

“Leon… tell Moose here your real name.”

The man called Leon looked down and sighed. Moose looked back and forth between them. What on earth was this?

Moose had worked at the agency for four years. It wasn’t a typical detective agency, but Moose wasn’t a typical private detective. He was huge, for one. And a terrible hands on investigator. But he handled the control room really well, and had a lot of patience for all of the crazy types who might come through the place.

“Leon?” Rollie was insistent. But also with a smidge of… compassion?

Not that Rollie wasn’t capable of compassion. He took pleasure out of busting philandering philanderers, sure, but mostly because he usually sincerely felt sorry for their poor long suffering partners. It’s just that that’s not the kind of investigation that tended to get him fired up. It usually took some crackpot conspiracy… paid or unpaid. He was good enough at his job that the boss kept him around as a classic private dick, but he could drive everyone up the wall, even Moose.

Rollie and Moose both looked at the small man intently, Rollie with an eyebrow slightly raised, Moose with both eyebrows curled up in the middle. Finally the man lifted his head.

“My name is Leon. But that’s not my real name. Not my birth name. I had to change it.”

“Leon… what’s your real name?”

The man shivered a little, collected himself, straightened up as much as his small frame would allow.

“My name is Robert.”

“Robert what?”

The man looked at Moose. Than at Rollie. Then, softly, slowly, he spoke.

“My name is Robert Rohrman.”

Rollie, who had been uncharacteristically stoic through all of this, turned to Moose, and suddenly became animated.

“Did you hear that?”

“Rollie, this guy, Leon, or Robert, or… whoever he is, what the hell is this all about?”

Rollie was beginning to quiver. “Moose! Moose, don’t you get it?”

“Get what, Rollie? What is there to get?”

Now shaking so much that both chairs, still in his hands, were rolling back and forth. It looked like he was about to fling them both at Moose.

“My God, man! MY GOD! This, that, right here, this is Robert Rohrman! DO YOU NOT SEE?”

Suddenly both chairs took off in opposite directions. One skittered down away from all of the men. The other skated a couple feet away from the small man and tipped over. Rollie looked like he was about to explode.

“MOOSE! MOOSE! LOOK AT HIM!”

Moose looked back and forth at the lunatic who now seemed to be hopping up and down and the small man who seemed to be getting even smaller. Finally Rollie could take no more and let out a strange, halting, screeching sound:

“AAAAAIIIIIIIFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!”

Moose looked at him dumbfounded as Rollie screamed:

“THERE’S MORE THAN ONE… BOB ROHRRRRRRMAN!”

After I wrote this story, I really had no idea why I had done so, or what I would do with it. I wasn’t sure about sharing it here, because I figured many of you, at this exact point in time, would be totally lost.

This video will, um, help:

This one too!

And there are so very many more. So. Very. Many. More.

So this is all Chicagoland. Even growing up in Rockford, I was familiar, because we got WGN (Channel 9) on cable, and for some reason we even got WFLD (Channel 32) on cable, so we knew the Chicago commercials too.

Even if you didn’t grow up with this madness, I’m sure you get it on some level, because every television market has, or had, their own Bob Rohrman, except, well, nobody else was quite like the late Bob Rohrman.

Indeed, there’s only one Bob Rohrman.

Or… is there?

Could it be true?

Just to be super clear, not that you probably really need this bit of clarification: there is no point to any of this. The entire story was based on the thought entering my mind: What if there were more than one Bob Rohrman? That’s all.

Anyway, after I first wrote this, and was trying to figure out what I might do with it, my friend Carmelito suggested that I post the story to NextDoor, the site ostensibly about neighbors sharing neighborly things, but which is fairly notoriously often one of the biggest cesspools of them all, where “neighbors” just spew various vitriols.

But hey, why not NextDoor? If anyone would appreciate this short story, wouldn’t it be my neighbors, the people who live near me, who may very well have purchased their automobiles from a Bob Rohrman dealership?

As of press time - let’s all chuckle along now with the idea that this thing has a “press time” - I have received one comment on NextDoor! The comment is this:

missing the point of giving Tuesday, but it was funny

I, for one, happen to think that “missing the point… but… funny” is about as solid a review as any writer could possibly hope for.