The Simpson’s Fraudster

RilalyLeave a comment

Tim Heidingsfelder was a nondescript, mousy little feller who had no charm, but he found a way to channel those characteristics into some real money. His physical flaws eventually led to a fatal flaw to Tims’ plans, when he successfully attracted the attention of a young, attractive, and unusually charismatic woman.

Tim Heidingsfelder probably considered his unremarkable characteristics a curse for much of his life. He was not an ugly person, not even during puberty. He never had acne, freckles, or notable blemishes on his face, but there was something about his bone structure that just wasn’t strikingly attractive. He had no chin, no discernible cheekbones, and no attributes we would call remarkable. As he grew into a man, Tim probably found his dating opportunities somewhat limited. They weren’t non-existent, but the rejections he received in high school surely helped shape the man Tim Heidingsfelder would become. 

When Tim Heidingsfelder decided to commit his first act of fraud, however, he found his unremarkable characteristics conducive to thwarting capture. As a fraudster who planned to live the high life and buy the most expensive items he could with other people’s money, he didn’t want people to notice him. He didn’t want people to remember or recall his features. 

No one remembered Tim Heidingsfelder when he checked into our hotel, but the entire front desk staff was skilled in making guests feel welcome. We would welcome every guest with a hearty, “Hello!” when they check into their hotel. We learned how to strike up a casual, fun conversation with every guest who walked in, “Hey, you’re from Michigan? Go Blue!” Our fellow, front desk employees did whatever they had to do to make every guest feel welcome and special. Yet, if those Michiganders ran into that friendly employee, hours later, even the best hotel employees probably wouldn’t remember them. We were just so good at making our guests feel welcome that they were shocked when we didn’t remember them. The problem for a hotel employee working at a large hotel is that there are just so many faces we saw in a day and so many conversations we had that if a guest didn’t say or do anything remarkable, chances are we wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a police lineup. It’s the perfect climate for anyone seeking anonymity. 

Tim Heidingsfelder wasn’t an outgoing type, but from what I heard, he wasn’t a quiet, loner either. (I only had one interaction with him, as I’ll detail below.) No one noticed Tim Heidingsfelder in the course of that day, and his daily routine allowed him to remain as anonymous as every other guest in our hotel. Throughout his elongated stay, however, Tim Heidingsfelder couldn’t help noticing how attractive the young women working behind the front desk were every time he passed.

It’s all about the money, is the first cardinal rule of fraudsters, and those who attempt to try to catch them. A fraudster needs to keep their crimes small and unremarkable, so they don’t hit the queues of investigatory agents. As most fraud investigators will tell us this might seem relatively easy, but it’s hard for a fraudster to fight greed. The second cardinal rule for fraudsters, based in part on the first one, is don’t bring unwanted attention to oneself. For Tim Heidingsfelder, and his unremarkable features, this was a relatively easy rule to manage. The man could slide in and out of just about any room unnoticed. Yet, when a late 40’s/early 50’s man stands face to face with an extremely attractive young woman, and that young woman looks through him, it can cause that man to do things he may not otherwise do.

The traveling businessman is the bread and butter of most hotels. Depending on the needs of their business, some businessmen can stay at a hotel 100 days a year. “First of all, you can forget the idea of having a family,” a traveling businessman informed me one day as we discussed the plusses and minuses of his profession. “Why?” he asked, repeating my question. “What kind of child would I raise being on the road an average of 100 to 150 days a year. What kind of marriage would I have? The life of a traveling businessman has its perks of course, but those of us who have done it for any length of time know it’s a lonely, sometimes grueling lifestyle.” I witnessed the effects this lifestyle could have on a person secondhand, and I saw them gather at the front desk to have conversations with front desk employees just to have some normal, non-business conversations in a day. I also noticed most of them centered their focus on the attractive women behind the front desk. It dawned on me, after the traveling businessman told me about the pratfalls of the profession that making an attractive young woman laugh could provide them a needed respite from their empty, relatively meaningless existence.

Tim Heidingsfelder was not a traveling businessman, but he was apparently as lonely as they were, and this otherwise unmemorable man needed to try to make one of these young women behind the front desk laugh. Based solely on his appearance, we later guessed that Tim Heidingsfelder probably had few opportunities in life to do so.

When he stopped by the front desk for whatever reason he dreamed up, Tim didn’t just stop to say hello, he didn’t just pick up a fax, or engage in the various business-related conversations that occur between hotel employees and guests. Tim Heidingsfelder stopped to chat. He stopped to shoot the stuff with some of these attractive, young women. He stopped to get to know them, so they could know him.

The best looking young employee at the front desk also happened to be the friendliest. Cheri Lee was so attractive and so skilled at engaging in short, friendly conversations with guests that she quickly became a favorite among the hotel’s businessmen and long-term guests. It took some of us naively stepping into these conversations —to do our job and add to the guest’s enjoyment– to realize they weren’t stopping by to chat … with us. They only wanted to chat with Cheri Lee, to impress her, and hopefully, one day, make her laugh. After a few of these chats, Tim Heidingsfelder asked the other front desk employees where Cheri was one day. When they told him that she had the day off, he was visibly disappointed.

As with most of the lonely, nondescript, and homely looking traveling businessmen who stayed at our hotel, Tim Heidingsfelder’s sole focus in life became Cheri Lee. According to the law enforcement officials on the scene, he spun a decade long, elaborate web of fraud and deceit. They couldn’t elaborate on the details, of course, but the little tendril he dropped to impress Cheri Lee proved a fatal flaw to his scheme. 

He probably didn’t fully appreciate the fact that the hotel paid Cheri Lee, and everyone else on their staff, to laugh at guests’ jokes. Some of the guests we talked to on a daily basis were genuinely funny. Some of the times, we laughed politely to fill the void after their punchlines, and some of the times, we laughed because it was good customer service to let guests think they were funny. Cheri had a gift for making all of her laughs sound the same. Tim Heidingsfelder enjoyed this so much that he pursued their professional relationship to its fullest extent. We don’t know if he had romantic plans with her, but after a couple of conversations with Cheri, he did everything he could, every day, to leave an impression on her.

“I’m a writer for The Simpsons,” Tim told her one day. “The Simpsons creators sent me to your city to scout it as a probable location for a future episode.” Was this lie something he dreamed up before he made the hotel reservation? Did he scheme it out beforehand with an algorithm of answers should anyone question him, or did he develop it for the sole purpose of impressing Cheri? How many lies did he think up before he landed on this one? Did he nix some, because they weren’t impressive enough? Did he nix others, because they were too grandiose and subject to fact-checking. We don’t know, but we think he locked in on The Simpsons’, Goldilocks lie, because it didn’t violate the cardinal rule of bringing too much attention to himself. He dropped the line matter-of-factly, and he didn’t elaborate too much. Yet, this seemingly harmless lie would eventually prove to be a depth charge that once detonated would expose all of his plans. 

Cheri Lee was undeniably attractive and charming, but if Tim was better looking, richer, more successful, or more charming he may not have tried so hard with Cheri Lee. A man who looks like Tim just doesn’t make people who look like Cheri laugh very often, and when they do they want to do it more often. A man like Tim doesn’t know what it’s like to impress women who look like Cheri, and when they do it’s intoxicating, and it becomes the sole focus of their life.    

When Tim dropped that line on Cheri, he accomplished his shortsighted goal of impressing Cheri. When I arrived at work the next day, Cheri was all a twitter about it. “Did you know we have a celebrity in the hotel today?” she said artfully spooling out the scoop she had. “I know you’re a fan of The Simpsons, and I know you’re a writer,” she told me. “Well, we just happen to have a guest who is both a writer and a writer for that show.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“His name is Tim Heidingsfelder,” Cheri Lee said. She told me that he was at the hotel on an elongated stay to scout our city as a probable location for a future episode.

“You’re kidding me?” I said. “That is so cool.” I thought about how cool it might be to meet him. I thought about how cool it would be to see our city depicted in animation, and I thought about how cool it would be to talk to a paid writer to learn from his path to success.

When I finally met Tim Heidingsfelder days later, he didn’t look like a writer, but what does a writer look like? Do they all look like James Joyce, professorial and bespectacled with patches on their elbows? Tim Heidingsfelder didn’t look that way, but either did Ernest Hemingway. I was not the least bit suspicious in other words. I talked with Tim Heidingsfelder with a co-worker standing over my shoulder listening. He unsuccessfully hid his laughter while two writer nerds talked craft.

“This is just so cool meeting you,” I said, “and I love what you, and the Simpsons’ higher-ups,  plan on doing for our fair city.” The man was cordial and apparently as impressed with me as I was with him. Throughout our introductory conversation, I told him that I was a writer and a huge fan of The Simpsons. “As a writer, I always pay attention to the credits that list the writers of the show,” I said proudly, “and I don’t remember ever seeing your name.

“Well,” Tim said. “You probably pay attention to the opening credits. Right? Yeah, I’m what you call an uncredited writer. I have yet to have one of my episodes aired,” he said with some chagrin.

“Shows, like The Simpsons,” he furthered, “have a number of staff writers, and most of us have never had one of our episodes picked up.” That was a great answer, because I read and watched a number of “behind the scenes” and “the making of …” stories about my favorite TV shows. I knew about writers’ rooms and head writers, and it wasn’t much of a leap for me to believe that most writers on staff don’t receive accreditation. I figured that if I really wanted to find his name, I could look at the long list of names that appear at the end of the show. I never did. I was never that interested or suspicious.

While Tim and I talked about the craft of writing, I could tell he wasn’t as into our conversation as I was. I figured that was the natural order of things. I figured he was one of the lucky few who someone paid to write, and I wasn’t. I also figured that by the time I met him, he had been a paid writer for so long that it was no longer special to him. Tim Heidingsfelder gave me no reason, at this point in our conversation, to suspect that he was anything less, or anything more than a writer for The Simpsons.

At one point in our conversation, I feared that I was playing the role of the fan, an annoying, uninformed and pathetic fan. I thought my end of the conversation was mundane, in other words, and I searched for a way to impress this man. I wanted a knockout blow. I wanted some little nugget of information that would prove I wasn’t just a fan. I don’t know what I hoped to see this man do, raise an eyebrow, smile an appreciative smile, or what, but I didn’t think my question would gain me anything. I just wanted to make an impression. 

I searched for that knockout blow while asking him other, insignificant questions, such as what he thought was the best joke he submitted, and he said, “Oh, there have been so many. It’s hard to pick one.” I asked him what it was like to be in a writing room, and I thought of a couple other nerdy, fanboy questions, but I couldn’t come up with that one big question that would blow him away. After a few more exchanges, it hit me. 

What I didn’t know in the moment I spent waiting for him to stop talking was that the question I had would eventually reveal Tim Heidingsfelder’s harmless lie for what it was. The moment after it dawned on me, I couldn’t wait to ask it, as Tim continued to answer my previous question in a congenial manner. The moment he finished, I launched into what I considered a knockout question that I thought might lead to one of those curious/impressed smiles that allowed him to launch into a discussion of his memories of the years he spent writing next to Conan O’Brien.

“Do you know Conan O’Brien?” I asked him. “Do you know him personally, or have you worked with him in any capacity?”

I don’t remember what he said, or if he decided to leave it blank, but I remember he began backing away to the elevator. That should’ve raised a red flag, but it didn’t. I didn’t think there was anything suspicious about that at the time. He was a guest at our hotel, and he had to take the elevator to get to his room. I thought he was signaling that his interest in our conversation was beginning to wane, or he had to get back to his room for a phone call or what have you. This happened on a daily basis at our hotel. With the benefit of hindsight, I now remember how uncomfortable that question made him. I remember his face turning three sheets of red in the aftermath of that question, but it meant little-to-nothing to me at the time.

My co-worker, who had been listening to this conversation throughout, noted the uncomfortable silence between Tim and I following that question and he capitalized on the moment to embarrass me.

“Conan O’Brien? He’s a talk show host, on an entirely different network,” my co-worker said. “What do you think all Hollywood people know each other?” He began laughing at me. He thoroughly enjoyed the moment. Tim Heidingsfelder joined in on that laughter, in a good-natured way.

“No,” I said looking Tim in the eye, seeking to have him join me in informing my irritant friend of Conan’s early days. “Not many people know this, but Conan used to be a writer for The Simpsons.” This might be common knowledge now, but in the nascent days of Conan’s talk show, it was knowledge only fans of both parties had. 

Unbeknownst to either of us, this innocent question spelled out a cautionary tale for all fraudsters and potential fraudsters. A fraudster might think they’ve worked hard to prepare themselves for every scenario. They might think they’ve built a mental algorithm to prepare for any scenarios that might come their way. They might even sit down and write out an algorithm out to prepare for anything and everything that might expose them. As even the most gifted fraudsters will probably tell anyone who’s interested, a fraudster cannot prepare for every situation. “You just have to learn to roll with the punches, but if there’s one thing you take from our discussion today let it be this, don’t create your own situations to unwind. Don’t create your own spider webs.”  

Tim Heidingsfelder could’ve said something as simple as, “No, Conan O’Brien and I never worked together,” or “No, we never crossed paths.” He could’ve said something simple as, “I don’t know what years he worked on the show, but I never had the opportunity to work with him.” It wouldn’t have taken much to throw me off a trail I wasn’t on in other words. I thought I was in the vulnerable position, trying to impress a man I never met before. If he characterized my question as one coming from a nerdy, fan boy, I would’ve slinked off with my tail between my legs, but he didn’t know enough about The Simpsons, or his lie, to throw me off a trail I wasn’t on. Knowing everything I know now, this would’ve been a perfect place for The Simpson’s character Nelson Muntz to say, “Haw Haw!” as Tim Heidingsfelder all but sprinted to the elevators.

Most fraudsters are smooth talkers, and we think that a late 40’s/early 50’s fraudster should know when to push and when to pull out of a conversation. We think that every fraudster, but particularly a seasoned fraudster, should know how important it is to say something, some of the times. Some of the times, we have to fill the blank before others do. Some of the times, it’s just as important to leave the blank alone, to allow the other party, or parties, to fill in the blank for them, as my co-worker did when he attempted to portray me as a Simpson’s nerd who knew more about the show than the actual writer.

Fraudsters learn how to fool people at a very young age. Deceiving the people who know and loved them most is excellent training. Salesmen learn such things in training classes. Trainers tell trainees to try to sell the product to their intimate friends and family first. “Not only are they great potential customers,” trainers say, “but the interaction allows you to work on your sales pitch.” Fraudsters follow the same methodology, as they try to see if they can fool their good friends, their aunt Gladys, or their own mother first. Doing this, is a way to practice the art of deception to see if they have any talent for it.

As a former liar, I often wonder what separates those who lied, stole and deceived in their preteen years and those who continue to do so well into their adult years. Lying, stealing, and deceiving those who loved me most almost felt like a rite of passage in my early teen years, but I hated it when they caught me in an act of deception. The embarrassment and shame that followed proved almost physically painful to me. No one trusted me. They called me a liar and a thief, and the only way I found to avoid that was to stop lying and stealing. It sounds so simple, and it is, but some people enjoy deceiving people so much that they keep doing it. Perhaps I’m approaching this from an autobiographical stance, but I believe that caring provides a dividing line between those who lie, cheat, and steal in their youth and those who will make a career out of it. Do you care what your friends, your mother, or your aunt Gladys think of you? How much do you care? Lying, cheating, and stealing will test what they think of you, and how you react to their findings will define you. 

Lying, cheating, and stealing are almost a rite of passage. Most kids do it just to do it. They want to fabricate to boost their self-esteem, they want to cheat to win, and they want to steal so they can have more items or money. They also want to test those around them to see if they’re good at it, or if they can get away with it. We’re awful at it, in the beginning, but we learn, from trial and error, the various nuances required to pull them off. We learn from getting caught, and what we do after that defines us. Fraudsters don’t want anyone to catch them, of course, and they don’t want to go through the embarrassment and shame of their acts, but if they don’t find a way to deal with the shame, in their youth, it will impede their progress. “I only steal from the rich,” thieves say in the movies to rectify their immorality. This keeps the audience on their side throughout their depravity, because the rich are a disembodied boogey man that we’ve been conditioned to hate. Is that the excuse fraudsters use to defeat the guilt and shame of stealing money from others, ruining their lives financially, and depriving them of the greater joys of life. How much did you steal, and what happened to the victim in the aftermath of your crime? How many of your victims were so loaded that they were largely unaffected by your crime? Most fraudsters not only wouldn’t know the answers to those questions, they wouldn’t ask them. They prefer that we join them in their disembodied characterization. 

If the fraudster doesn’t use the movie characterization to disembody their victims, they need something, some sort of mechanism that permits them to avoid caring about what their initial victims, their loved ones, think of them, and once they clear that hurdle, they will feel free to lie to and steal from total strangers. The proficient fraudster will combine that lack of concern with some effort put into covering their trail. No matter how prepared the fraudster is, no matter how smooth they are at fooling their mother, their aunts, and all the men in their life, a situation for which they are unprepared will find them.

Those who discover they have some talent for deception, but find that can’t go on knowing what others might think of them, use whatever talent they have in ways that are more productive. They might use that knowledge or talent to catch other fraudsters and liars for law enforcement, or they might go to work for a fraud department in a fortune 500 company. They might even become magicians, actors, or writers. These three crafts call for a mutually agreed upon level of deception and lying. Some unusually good liars never search for a productive way to deceive people, but they still have a need, a compulsion to feed the need for the thrill of it all, and anyone who has successfully lied, cheated, and stolen from another knows that thrill. They probably went through everything we did with the guilt and the shame, when they weren’t very good at it, but like a great wine, or a great bottle of scotch, they got better at it through will and desire.

The man who called himself Tim Heidingsfelder engaged in larger acts of fraud, and in doing so, he probably had prepared answers for larger questions, but he didn’t do his homework on the meaningless lie he told a young, naive front desk employee. Who would? We could say that what a fraudster does in that moment for which they are unprepared defines them, but who would think that a simple lie about writing for The Simpsons to impress a young, naive woman might start unraveling a complicated yarn of deception they worked years to build?  

The only thing I knew in the aftermath of my interaction with Tim Heidingsfelder was that the man was not sufficiently impressed with my knowledge of The Simpsons that day in the foyer of the hotel. I didn’t think about it too much, until I began seeing him in the foyer of the hotel. I had numerous opportunities to correct the record, but this man ducked me, constantly. I didn’t think he heard me a couple times, and I didn’t think he saw me a couple others. Over time, a troubling pattern began to emerge, until I found his evasion somewhat noteworthy.

“Why does he always do that?” I asked Brian, the front desk manager at the hotel. Just prior to that question, Brian was speaking with Tim Heidingsfelder. The moment Tim spotted me coming to the front desk he moved the elevators.

“Because you’re a nerdy fanboy, and no one wants to talk to nerdy fanboys,” Brian said. It was a great answer, as Brian unknowingly tapped into my vulnerability on the manner, and he put the onus back on me.

“Ok, but I thought he and I had a great conversation a while back,” I said. “I was beyond polite to the man, and I think he should enjoy talking about how jealous I am of him, but every time I walk into the room, he runs away.”

“Well I know you pretty well,” Brian asked, “and if I saw you coming, I’d walk away too.”

“I’m serious here,” I said.

“You think it’s suspicious?”

“It’s odd,” I said. “That’s all I’m saying. It’s odd.”

“Does everyone have to love you?” Brian said. “Maybe he just doesn’t enjoy talking to you.”

“Fair enough,” I said, “but you know me, I’m not the type who has to be involved in every conversation. As you said, I’m kind of a quiet guy, and when I walked up to this desk tonight, I had no plans of saying anything. I was just going to stand here and let you two talk. If I was rude, or an overbearing person, perhaps I could see it, but this guy jets like I have a communicable disease any time I enter the room?”

Brian did not begin investigating Tim Heidingsfelder that night, but Brian did not view the man with the least bit of suspicion before our conversation, and soon thereafter, he began spotting some unsual dots that he thought might lead to come connections. I might have initiated the suspicion, in other words, but Brian did all of the investigative work. He dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s to find Tim Heidingsfelder’s alleged criminal activity. Brian examined the credit card history on Tim Heidingsfelder’s account history, and he found that Tim Heidingsfelder switched credit cards a number of times. That, in and of itself, was no reason to call in the cavalry. Guests, particularly business travelers, regularly put a number of business cards on their account. At times, and for a variety of reasons, those cards max out. This is particularly the case with extended stays such as Tim Heidingsfelder’s. The company furnishes their business travelers with a number of cards, and some of the times businessmen puts their personal cards on the account and the company reimburses him. Long story short, a guest switching cards in the middle of a stay is no reason to investigate on their account. When Brian analyzed Tim Heidingsfelder’s account, however, he found that an inordinate number of the previous credit cards placed on his account that were declared stolen, but he probably wouldn’t  have investigated Tim Heidingsfelder’s account if Tim didn’t initiate the chain of events that led to his downfall by trying to impress an attractive, young woman. 

When I saw Tim Heidingsfelder sitting in the manager’s office, I knew he wasn’t there to discuss his stay at the hotel. His face was three sheets of red again. Brian caught him. Seeing those three sheets of red, I recalled the look Tim gave me after my Conan O’Brien question.

The local police soon followed and frog marched Tim away in handcuffs, and I sensed the script flip from a Simpson’s episode to one of Scooby Doo as I watched the police walk him off in handcuffs. I waited for a “And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you, the meddling fanboy” exit, but it never arrived.   

The police later informed us that Tim Heidingsfelder was a pseudonym he used, and they managed to locate his real name. They informed us that two other states wanted him on credit card fraud.

If he could’ve avoided the fatal flaws in the design of the human being, the need for attention, and the need to impress our fellow humans, particularly the cheerleaders and football players of life, Tim Heidingsfelder probably could’ve engaged in fraudulent activity for years. He could still be doing it, but for his need to have someone notice him and take note of him. The line on Tim Heidingsfelder is that he stole tens of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting victims, but that could’ve been nothing more than a good start for the man. He could’ve increased that total exponentially. He could’ve destroyed people, and left true carnage in his wake, if he could’ve just managed to control his need for human contact a little better.   

Naughty Appeal vs. Been There, Done That

RilalyLeave a comment

The cycle goes something like this “I don’t get it, but I’m going to laugh so people think I do,” to “I kind of get it, but I don’t get the full breadth of why it’s funny” to the final reward “I get it. I finally get it” and all the laughter and joy that follows. The reward for finally getting the joke, any joke, but particularly mature, adult humor is a rite of passage that some of us enjoy throughout their lives. “We get it now. We’re in the club.” We get just about every dirty, naughty joke we hear now, but the rewards are not endless for all of us. Some of us clawed our way through the mental maze, swinging from vine to vine therein, to try to understand the naughty jokes people tell. Then we reached a point of saturation where we get almost every dirty joke we hear now, but we don’t understand their universal and evergreen appeal. 

The “I get it” reward is strong among the young. Especially the “You don’t get it? I do!” reward. This reward probably dates back to young cave dwellers trying to find something awful in cave paintings. The “I get it” smile is broad and wide, and we try to hide it from the adults around us when we’re young. The reward for getting naughty humor is especially precious when their peers “Don’t get it”. How long does this sometimes subtle, sometimes overt reward last? Is it universal and evergreen?

We all have biological functions, and the need to explore others’ bodily functions on a perpetual basis, and some of them are quite funny when creatively framed, but how many body function jokes do we have to hear before they no longer stimulate our naughty neurons? I concede that I’ve probably watched so many movies that my naughty stimulators are all dried up, but I’ve “been there, done that” for so long that it takes a pretty ingenious presentation for me to laugh at naughty humor now.    

Yet, anytime I introduce comedic material to a friend of mine, he asks, “Is it safe humor?” I originally thought he was referring to the politically correct dividing line. He wasn’t, and he clarified his position. He’s forty something, and he still wants/needs innuendo and the worst swear words we can imagine for the comedic material to achieve some sort of mental stimulation. He won’t watch material he deems “too safe”. He alludes to the idea that “safe” material is condescending. He prefers the risqué, the provocative, and he defines those adjectives in swear words and innuendo.

“Why is that still so important to you?” I asked him. “I honestly don’t get it.” To clarify my position in this discussion, he and I passed middle age some years ago, and he and I have watched many of the same comedy shows, standup comedians, and movies. Whereas my well is dry, his is still seeking greater fertilization of his arena. He has no idea why, but he still wants a whole lot of naughty.

I cherished the naughty, back when it was a limited resource. I, like all my relatively sheltered grade school era friends, worshipped at the altar of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Cheech and Chong. Some of us could quote large chunks of dialog from the movie Porky’s verbatim. Porky’s was the ultimate taboo movie for those of a certain age, because it had naughty dialog, exposed female breasts, and a risqué scene with a wolf-howling woman. We talked about the unedited scene in Grease where Danny gets racked, and we talked about the unedited swear words in the song Greased Lightning the next day. If you didn’t “get it”, you were consigned to an inescapable outsider status among the cool kids.

The cool kids could tell anyone interested how many swear words a movie contained, and how many exposed female breasts there were. The coolest kid had a mental spreadsheet count on (‘F’) words, (‘S’) words, and exposed female breasts in whatever movie you mentioned. You name the actress, and he could tell you the movie(s) that contained her revelations. I met another who could do that in high school. He compiled a VHS tape of moments when famous females exposed their breast. He was so obsessed with compiling the tape that he could tell you the moment of exposure down to the second of the movie. He knew them so well, because he would watch the movie once on HBO, and he would then memorize the time of the exposure down to the second. There were times when his memory would fail him, however, so he began writing them down, but he said that writing them down helped crystallize the moment in his memory so well that he rarely had to consult his log when the movie repeated, usually hours later on HBO. He would watch the movie again with his thumb on the record button, as that scene neared. He did this so often that we could rarely stump him on such scenes. “[That actress] exposes her breasts at the 32:22 mark of [that movie],” he said listing the specifics.

If you were one of the few unfortunates who only saw the made for television version of Stripes and Airplane, you knew the FOMO (fear of missing out) acronym at a very young age, before anyone coined it. “You missed the best parts,” our friends would tell us, or, “You have to see the unedited version, it has seven (‘F’) words, two (‘S’) words, and it actually has an ‘MF’ in it. Seriously, it occurs after the barista in the movie says, (“Fill in the blank”) and before the scene where they show the topless astronaut hanging her laundry.”

I didn’t remember how focused we were on that mental clicker of swear words in our youth, until my nephew began this accounting process in his younger years. You name the movie, and my nephew can recite for you how many (‘F’s) and (‘S’s) the movie contains. When Dr. Johnny Fever, on WKRP in Cincinnati, mocked a priest for attempting to censor his playlist, as a disk jockey, we thought that was so cool. “Uh, oh! There’s a naughty word!” Fever said, mocking the priest. When George Carlin was asked why he swears so much in his otherwise intelligent, observational humor, he said, “It’s excellent punctuation.” Comedians suggest they’ve tried it out on the road. They say they tried the same joke with and without any swear words, at different locations, and they determined that Carlin was correct. A punchline just doesn’t land the same without the proper punctuation a swear word provides. Carlin’s statement asks the rhetorical question is it his fault or ours for the necessity of swear word punctuation in comedic presentations?

My Uncle Clark’s good friend Jim introduced us to this world without borders when we were pre-teens. Our parents had no idea we were watching naughty movies at Jim’s house, and that made it extra naughty. Naughty is an ever changing and relative term, of course, as what we deemed naughty in our era is relatively tame now, but some of the movies we watched at his house were the peak of naughty for us. “I don’t see anything wrong with the kids hearing swear words,” Jim said. “They’re going to hear them anyway. They’re eventually going to see a woman’s breasts. They’ll see people smoke pot, and everything else in these movies. I don’t see the harm.” He would swear around us so often that we learned how to swear. We learned how to inflect, how to time swear words, and how to properly punctuate a joke with a strategically placed swear word from him. He taught us how to avoid sounding like a little kid, when learning how to cuss for the first time. He also taught us how to talk about carnal relations with women. He wasn’t afraid to provide explicit detail. This guy was so cool and so funny, and not just adult funny. This guy was genuinely (‘F’)ing hilarious to us. He treated us like adults, and we worshiped him for it. He wasn’t a stick in the mud, like my dad.

I am that stick in the mud now. I am that dad. I’ve stopped cussing, and I require that my friends and family watch their language when they’re around my child. I do these things, because one of my other friends said that the (‘F’) word was one of his kid’s first five words. He wasn’t proud or ashamed of this. He treated this as an unfortunate fact of life, but he also found it “(‘F’)ing hilarious”. I wouldn’t enjoy that, and on one plane, it is about morality, but it also has something to do with class. “If your child is dropping swear words, like a horse dropping road apples in a parade, that’s kind of on you,” I say.

“You cussed a lot in your teens and 20’s,” my friends say. “In Europe, kids drink and swear like a sailor, and it doesn’t affect them in the least. In fact, I’d say most of them are more sophisticated and worldly than most puritanical American children.”

“I don’t care if I’m a hypocrite,” I say in response, “and, unless I can use their example and advice, I’m not particularly concerned with how other parents raise their children, as I’m no authority on the matter, but what you sway doesn’t sway me one iota.”

My “been there, done that” reactions are so strong that even after the kid goes to bed, I don’t enjoy the excessive need for swear word punctuation, and I often see it as just that in others’ attempts to be humorous. It has nothing to do with morality for me, personally, once the kid goes to bed. It’s more a “been there, done that” reaction I have to it now. I no longer have the clicker that counts those words. I hear (‘F’) words now, and they go in one ear and out the other. This cycle started soon after I was able to rent any movie I wanted. I was on my own, and I able to choose every naughty, dirty movie I could find. Back then, I avoided humor that was too safe, but the supply eventually reached my demand, until I saturated the market and I “been there done that”. I demanded naughty, risqué material, and it was in short supply for much of my life. Then it wasn’t, and it wasn’t for my forty-something friend either. If I put this supply vs. demand qualifier to our discussion, I’m sure he would concede that the supply met his demand a long time ago, yet he still needs material he deems relatively “unsafe”.

In this long-since passed era, the supply was so low that we met our demand by standing close enough to a drive-in theater to see, but not hear, the scene everyone was talking about. That era has passed for many of us, as we now have more than enough supply at the tips of our fingers, yet the demand for such demand obviously remains strong among my peers?

Can a joke be funny without the pre-pubescent and pubescent need for punctuation? Yes, if it’s creative. Yet, even incredibly ingenious jokes need punctuation. To my mind, the most ingenious learn how to punctuate without vulgar, or blue, punctuation, and that’s not about morality. It’s about ingenuity and creativity. Music has the same “been there done that” quality for me. I’m not going to join the pack and slam the heavy metal era for its lack of soul, and for all of its hedonistic plays for fame, but it had its place in my life. Some of those bands produced some quality music, but that time has passed for me. When I’m feeling nostalgic, I might click on an old heavy metal song here and there, but I’ve “been there done that”. I can’t make it all the way through any of those songs now. The need for nostalgia is not that great for me, as that music provides little-to-no value to me anymore. The elements in swearing, innuendo, and nudity in humor provide little-to-no value to comedy anymore to me either.

At the Check Out with Child

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“Oh shoot!” I said in a checkout aisle at a store. 

“What’s the matter?” my son asked.

“I just realized, I don’t have enough money to pay for these items,” I lied. I double-check my wallet, and I added a theatrical check of my pockets. Three customers stood between the Promised Land and us. I write Promised Land to characterize how much my son hates going to stores of any kind. Most people accept the fact of life that when we need goods, we need to enter a store. My son is not there yet. Entering stores is the great inconvenience of his life. When we mention that we must go to the store, he throws a fit that lasts until we enter the store. He indulges us, while in the store by behaving, but throughout our brief stay, he is looking for anything and everything that might cut short our stay and take him to his personal vision of the Promised Land, the store’s exit.

Back before debit cards, and back before we went and got all growed up, we had incidents like this one,“You still need twenty-seven cents,” a checker told me in the most dismissive manner imaginable. I remember that transaction every time I pass this convenience store. I remember standing there with insufficient funds thinking that I wasn’t ready for the rigors involved in completing adult transactions. I was in no position to question this sentry at the gate of maturity, but this transaction occurred before we all went digital. We could question analog, or manual, cash registers back then, because they required manual entries that could fall prey to human error. I told the cashier that I carefully added the total, and that I couldn’t see how I could be wrong. I showed the cashier my addition. “You forgot the sales tax kid,” the guy said. He was right. I heard about sales tax, but I didn’t know how to add it to a total yet. I was so humiliated and embarrassed that I walked away with my tail between my legs, vowing that this would never happen to me again. Remnants of that anxiety remain with me to this day. I over prepare in the aisles of the store. I check and double-check the price of my items, I project a total, and I allow abundant room for any errors in my calculations. Some of the times, I put much-wanted items back just in case I added the percentage of sales tax incorrectly. It’s still such a deep seeded anxiety that I would rather not have some items than risk the prospect of that embarrassment and humiliation I experienced as a young kid. As a result of that transaction, I became so hyper-vigilant that I made the mistake of believing that everyone knows about it on some level.  

I turned to my seven-year-old son at the checkout stand, “Do you have any money?” He had money in his pockets one time at a store, when we took him there to spend his birthday money. So, I thought this was such a ludicrous question that we might share a laugh. What I didn’t realize was that by insinuating that it was ludicrous that he should have any money, I was calling him ludicrous to his mind. He didn’t think it was ludicrous that he should have money. He had money, in fact, and he told me so.

“Yes,” he said. “I do have money.” Through some back and forth, we realized that he meant he had money in his piggy bank in his bedroom.

“No, I’m asking you if have any money on you right now,” I said, “I need you to help me pay for all this?”

“I don’t have any,”my son said. He was a little disappointed, but it dawned on me that he wasn’t disappointed in himself, or his role in this, because why should he be? Plus, he was rarely disappointed in himself, as he rarely cared about such situations. Thus, whenever he exhibits any disappointment in himself, it’s based on the idea that I might be disappointed in him.

If I ask him, “Did you score any goals in your last soccer match?” and he has to say no, he does so in a way that suggests to me that he never thought about it, until I asked. “Did you get 100% on your last spelling test?” He knows when he didn’t, of course, but he forgot about it soon after he received his test back. He doesn’t care about any of these things in the manner I do, just like he didn’t care that we didn’t have enough money to help pay for all the items we have in our shopping cart, but he doesn’t want to disappoint me by saying so. He’s no more ambivalent to such matters than any other normal seven-year-old boy, and just like every other normal boy his age, he knows that his happiness is based on the parameters that his authority figures set for him. He cares what I care about, in other words, and he knows that I’m trying to teach him to care. He also doesn’t want to disappoint me by revealing the truth of the matter that both of us know.

Do our kids worry about scoring goals in soccer matches? Do they even think about it? Do they care about winning? Parents on the sideline do, and we show it by building ourselves into a lather as the game progresses. We hoot, holler, and scream anytime they make a halfway decent move on their field. Kids enjoy hearing that, and they want more of it. Yet, nine times out of ten when an opposing player has the ball, our kids watch them dribble the ball along with the rest of us, until a parent or coach yells their name out, “There you go Freidrich. That’s yours.” We parents now say such things, because we’ve learned from our parents. We remember the pain and humiliation our parents induced when they screamed, “Wake the hell up and go get the ball!” in front of everyone. We use better, less inoffensive ways to encourage our children to wake the hell up now. When we now yell these inoffensive things, we awake them out of whatever momentary stupor they’re in, and they try to take the ball away from the other kid.

“Why didn’t you take the ball away from the kid before I said something?” we want to ask them.

“I don’t know,” they say. If they were more reflective and analytical, they might say, “The thought didn’t even cross my mind. I thought it was that feller’s ball at the time, and I thought he was doing just fine with it.” They might not be able to express themselves at the time, but we can see it on their face, as they watch the other kid dribbling. When they watch the opponent, along with the rest of the spectators, some of them even smile. We don’t know if they’re daydreaming in the moment, or if they’re appreciating the other kid’s ability, imagining what their parents might think of them if they were that skilled. When we instruct them to take the ball away, their expression flips, as if by a switch, from the daydreaming smile to one of determination, as they attempt to take the ball away from the opponent.

“You don’t just let the opponent dribble the ball in front of you,” we say with some exasperation after the game is over. We think they should understand that fundamental element of sports by now. “When the opponent has the ball, you need to steal it from him. That’s the key to most sports.”

If he was able to articulate the complex inconsistencies in the worldview I try to pass to him, he might say, “Well, doesn’t that fly in the face of everything you, and all my teachers, have taught me about sharing?”    

Other than “I don’t know” my son didn’t say any of these things, because he knows it would disappoint me that he hasn’t learned all of these complex concepts at age seven. He also isn’t able to articulate my inconsistencies on matters of large and small. Even though we enter our children into various sports, they’re brains are still so young that it’s tough for them to make quick connections. Even though we’ve logged hundreds of hours playing sports with them in the backyard, coaching them up with our philosophy on sports, they’re still so young that they have a tough time grasping difficult concepts. Their whole world is about having fun, laughing, and not caring about things. How many of us wish we spent our early, elementary years being more serious? They focus their mind on the simple, enjoyable aspects of life, and they know that the key to living that good life is to do everything they can to avoid disappointing the authority figures in their life.

After spending some time in theatrical deliberation, in the checkout line at the store, I looked at my son, “I think we might have to put some of these items back.” I affected this with grave disappointment that I hoped might transfer to him. He didn’t appear to be the least bit moved by it. He looked at the items, and he looked back at me.

“Well what are we doing standing around here then?” he said. “Let’s put these things back and get the heck out of here.”

His response suggested a certain level of ambivalence that threw me a little, but the full scope of his ambivalence didn’t dawn on me, until I said, “I’m just kidding. I have the money.” I don’t know how I expected him to respond, but I thought it might come somewhere close to relief. What I received instead was:

“Well what are we doing standing around here then? Let’s pay for these things and get the heck out of here.”

The prospect of the embarrassment and humiliation involved in putting things back obviously didn’t hit him yet. The embarrassment derives from not having enough money, not being able to add correctly, and being called out in front of a group of people. He hasn’t yet grasped the concept of money, and how others could view one with insufficient funds as not earning enough to buy something at a convenience store. He thinks we just go to the ATM to get the money necessary the complete a transaction. He doesn’t understand that we put money in there for later withdrawal. He’s seven years old, he doesn’t understand the complex emotions of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation on the level we do. 

If we spend enough time with our child, we will overestimate them as often as we underestimate them. We will also assign our complex emotions and values to them, and even though we teach them they’re young, unformed brains cannot grasp them yet. 

Even though I knew that my son had no experience with such situations, I incorrectly assumed that most people came equipped with that inherent sense of doing everything they could to avoid them. He, of course, didn’t know enough to know he should be embarrassed. We think we know them, but more often than not our experiences in life are not theirs, and they don’t understand how experiences, good and bad, shape the life we lead in various instances. If we spend enough time with them, however, we think they should naturally do what we want them to do, even without us telling them one way or another.