The Mickey Mouse Episode

At my house, the Mickey Mouse Episode has assumed iconic stature.

To understand, you need to know two things about me.

First, I am reluctant, quite reluctant, to part with T-shirts. I’d rather spend a week factoring polynomials than part with a T-shirt. I’d rather hand-tat lace while operating a jackhammer than part with a T-shirt. If it is in shreds, held together by little more than a molecule or two, I’ll begin to consider throwing it away. I have T-shirts that are 25 years old. I had one that was 32 years old, but this past spring the molecules finally gave way, and I consigned it, ruefully, to the dustbin of T-shirt history.

I do not suffer from T-shirt Hoarder Syndrome., though my wife Kathy is convinced that if such a diagnosis appeared in the DSM, the definition would consist solely of my photograph. My T-shirts are really tinseled backward glances. They recount for me the races I competed in during my running days, the cities my son D.J. and I visited on our annual post-Christmas trips, the athletic teams I played on or rooted for, the politicians and political causes I supported, and the one sentence witticisms that, at the time, I took for profound truth. Besides, T-shirts are like excuses for procrastination: you simply cannot have too many. So it was that I fished out of a basket of clothing which had lain, undisturbed and with yet undecided future, for 18 years under a table in the laundry room, a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Mickey Mouse—wearing a red and black polo, with a three-fingered hand outstretched and palm up—encased in a red circle, across the bottom of which is written the proud declaration “Mickey Mouse Club.” It had belonged to my stepdaughter Alma. It was in mint condition, it fit, and it cataylzed a nostalgic remembrance of my own membership in Mickey’s jolly clan, the sole benefit of which, for me anyway, was any number of prepubescent fantasies about Annette Funicello.

Second, I have a temper. I get angry. Really angry. Normally, I am imperturbable, a meek-shall-inherit-the-earth kind of guy with a portfolio of self-discipline well into the six figures. But, at times, not often, but at times, normal dissolves in the solvent of anger, an anger that does not start out small and mount, that does not, like the overture of Don Giovanni, begin in a minor key, but explodes, with a choral uproar that, to paraphrase Keats, becomes my only music. It is an anger with kleig-light intensity; it is gale-force anger, tasered limbic circuit anger, a hard-booted and sharp-spurred anger riding a horse with a caffeine IV, a lava-like anger that could rebury Herculeneum, a mutinous anger that strips my frontal lobe region of command and sends it off in a lonely rowboat to some small, faraway deserted island, an anger that has bid a flippant adieu to anything but rant, a “tiger-footed rage,” to get all Shakespearean about it, an anger like a sequence of wrathful cannons that “spit forth their indignation.” And, therefore, the Mickey Mouse Episode.

On an afternoon when the heat index hovered at 110 degrees, wearing my newly-reclaimed Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I began the ritual that precedes my mowing the lawn: coiling the strung-out 50 foot garden hose into the window well under the spigot. Coiling the hose is a skill my father taught me and which I duly passed on to my son. I take it seriously, not just as a practical matter, but as an aesthetic one. There is, quite simply, a beauty in a well-coiled garden hose. However, the supposedly kink-free hose was, with bullying audacity, with adamant kinkitude, resisting my art. And its antics didn’t stop there, oh no. It knotted, too; intricate little gordian knots for which the solution of Alexander the Great would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, I was forced to unthread yards of hose, often to find the knot still stubbornly in place. And that’s when I went ballistic. Mark Twain counseled that “when angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.” I dispensed with the counting part. I flung every Anglo-Saxon derived profanity I knew against the indifferent sky and then, for full measure, repeated them. I stomped and waved my arms, steroidally kinetic, tempestuously adrenalized. I quivered with fury; I gesticulated ungovernably; I gyrated tumultuously. And all the while, I was being observed through the dining room window by Kathy and Alma, who were laughing uncontrollably at the dissonant sight of a grown and graying man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt given over completely to a ponderous, pulsating rage. Thus was born the Mickey Mouse Episode, which my ever-mindful wife never tires of recounting. It has become, in the space of a month, the light, loving mockery of that most delightful of narratives, the family story.

I am not puzzled by my angered outbursts. I know exactly what causes them. I am not even especially alarmed by it. It is never directed against other persons, or sentient beings in general. It is directed against things, the unfairness of things, the rampant refusal of things to do what they are supposed to do, to yield to our expectations and intentions. Prior to the Mickey Mouse Episode, the light-saber wattage of my wrath was leveled against a string trimmer whose string repeatedly broke and, despite my repeatedly tapping the spool on the ground, declined to advance so much as a millimeter. Before that, the unaccountable rupture of a supposedly impervious 9 mil, 13 gallon garbage bag, spilling a toxic distillation of coffee grounds and other kitchen waste on a floor I had just mop ‘n glo-ed. I believe we need to dust off existentialism and rename it resistentialsm, a philosophy of resistance against the stiffarming, ego-addling, tranquility-plundering nature of things. We need a resistential Satre or Camus under whose banner we can conscript ourselves and proudly march.

I know the Bible advises us to be “slow to anger” and warns us that “anger resides in the bosom of fools.” Yet, God often displays anger, as does Jesus at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart and at the moneychangers in the temple at Jerusalem. St. Paul openly and angrily rebukes St. Peter, the first pope, for goodness sake—literally, for, to Paul, Peter’s insistence that Jews and Gentile Christians cannot lawfully dine together unsutures the Galatian church Paul has sought so arduously to infuse with Christian unity. Righteous anger, I suppose, aroused in defense of faith’s principles, yet I would argue that my torrential anger is defensible and, in its own way, even righteous. It is a natural human emotion, a product of long-evolved brain processes serving perhaps to alert us to the wrongness of what should be right. It vents and dissipates pent-up stress, thereby promoting psychological hygiene. It is honest. Love can be feigned, friendship faked, caring counterfeited; anger, however, does not lend itself easily to affectation. Most significantly, I think, my anger is a refusal to accept the givenness of things. My anger makes demands: that things should be answerable to our expectations of them, that they should make sense, that they should make our lives easier, not strew them with obstacles. My rage is, at bottom, a rage for order, and packaged up tightly within that rage for order is a belief that purposeful change and improvement are possible.

Still, I have no doubt that, had she seen my exhibition of all-suffusing fury, the lovely Annette would have frowned, folded her arms, and turned her back on me. Cubby no doubt would have sought a restraining order. And parental figures Jimmy and Roy would no doubt have rescinded my “you’re as welcome as can be” status and banished me from the Mouseketeer tribe’s jamboree. Fortunately, Kathy still keeps me around, and that is a jamboree exquisitely, gratifyingly, all its own.