the accidental memory

This is how it goes sometimes.

My friend Fred came by the other night for dinner. Fred's about a dozen years older than I am, and he likes to talk about old movies, TV shows and radio tunes with me because I'm one of the few people who gets what he's talking about. But what he likes best is when I do his remembering for him.

"I remember there used to be this guy," he was saying, "who was on all the old variety shows. He was sort of dumpy, had a really low-key delivery, and always talked about how shitty his life was."

"Jackie Vernon," I said.

"Who?"

"Um, Jackie Vernon?"

"My god, that's it." Fred said. "I've been trying to remember that guy's name for years. Jackie Vernon. Christ. How in hell do you remember that?"

It's a really good question, and the answer is I really don't know. But it happens every once in a while. Somebody says something about somebody they saw on something years ago, they begin to describe that somebody, and boom! I come up with the name.

Often it's just as surprising to me as it is to the person struggling for the name. I've done that with songs, band names, TV theme songs, comic characters, Saturday morning cartoons shows, and more TV and movie actors than I'd like to admit. The weird thing is, the answer tends to come rolling out of my mind and off my tongue like ping pong ball at a bingo game. Most of the time, I'm not even aware that I remembered the name until I blurt it out. It's like I forget I remembered, if you know what I mean.

A couple of thoughts occur about this. First of all, the fact that it's always otherwise useless pop cultural ephemera that suddenly springs from my mental vaults probably says as much about those storage facilities as it does what they store. How is it I can remember stuff like the theme from Top Cat cartoons and the entire cast of Petticoat Junction and not my parents' wedding anniversary? (That, by the way, is not a joke. The very same week I coughed up the Jackie Vernon nugget my father reminded me that the next day was his wedding anniversary. "I figured I'd tell you so you could call your mother," he added.)

What kind of brain prioritizes the retention of half-century old junk TV over family milestones? Or remembers the specific theatre in which it first encountered Count Yorga, Vampire but not how many years its brother has been married? Mine. My kind of brain.

I mean, I realize that this stuff has a power to insinuate itself deeply in the pliant human cortex, but my brain sucks it up like Bounty ("The quicker picker upper!"). I can't tell you who my best friend was in grade two, but I remember what time Crusader Rabbit was on. Leave me alone for a while and I'll come up with the channel.

For reasons that probably qualify as psychotherapeutically treatable, my mind has always glommed onto the most insanely trivial pop cultural effluvia. Some it is stored, remembered and summoned consciously -- like all those directors, bands, comic artists and TV shows -- but a lot of it gets stored away without any conscious effort. These are the things that lay like little data-mines in my memory, waiting for somebody like Fred to come along and detonate them. They just lie there, waiting to be tripped. And when they are, I always wonder the same thing: "How much stuff is there that will never be sprung? That just sits there like unfertilized milkweed seeds? And why, why do I remember that shit?"

But I do, and when I do it usually leads to this: I not only remember Jackie Vernon, I remember what he looked and sounded like, the little trumpet he used to carry as an odd little prop, the low whiny New York monotone he used to affect. And I remember laughing. I remember I used to love Jackie Vernon, and that I'd always perk up when I heard he was going to be on somebody's variety show. My dad loved him to. We'd both laugh like crazy.

I looked up Jackie Vernon on Wikipedia, and the entry included some typical Vernon stuff, like the story he used to tell about his sad campaign to make a house pet of a watermelon, the time he went to the Grand Canyon only to find it was closed, and how he once went to a fistfight that broke into a hockey game.

Pained self-deprecation was Vernon's schtick, but unlike, say, Rodney Dangerfield, he wasn't frantic. Where Dangerfield always struck a spark of righteous resistance against the forces marshalled to make him miserable (that's why he sweat so much), Vernon was way more philosophically resigned to his fate. He was part Eeyore, part Borscht Belt existentialist, and part Jackie Gleason on downers. He'd walk on stage like a man who'd just been hit twice by the same bus, look out at the audience, and begin: "To look at me now, it's hard to believe I used to be considered a dull guy..."

Like I said, the guy cracked me up. And I almost completely forgot about him until Fred came along and dislodged that particular pebble from my mental asphalt. And then I remembered a lot, and I got to wondering, you know, whatever happened to Jackie Vernon? I mean, he was everywhere in those days when standup was as much a fixture of variety shows as folks who spun plates, women who sang in sparkly evening gowns, circus acts, and thick-banged teen acts "for the youngsters". Along with George Carlin, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Henny Youngman, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, the Smothers Brothers and dozens of others, Vernon was part of that constant rotation of comedians who passed through prime time in those days.

(And I must say this: it served a comic much better to be in variety show context -- say between the Dave Clark Five and the June Taylor Dancers -- than one of those wall-to-wall standup shows you see today. That much standup comedy just makes you feel how aggressively, nakedly needy most comics actually are.)

Anyway, Vernon stood out from all these by playing it so quietly. (Newhart was close, but Vernon was way more schlubby and miserable.) When everyone else was whooping and hollering for your attention, he just sat there with his trumpet -- which, as I recall, he almost never played -- and waited to fill the silence with the wheezy sound of his own grief. And it was a riot.

Anyway, Jackie Vernon died in 1987, and these days he's best remembered as the guy who provided the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials that still get annual holiday rotation.   There's a part of me that wishes he was remembered for more than that, but there's also a part of me that remembers that I forgot too. But at least my mind stored the memory in that bizarre pop cult time-release capsule manner it has, and along comes Fred to flick it loose. It's the next best thing to remembering.