Albuquerque I
Dr. Palmer figured his best chance to bed the local TV news anchor was to win the Easter bonnet contest. He hadn't known she would be judging the event until he read about it late Saturday night in the Albuquerque Journal. Ever since she first appeared about 9 months ago, Palmer had been entertaining thoughts about the news anchor that most people would consider as fantasies. Dr. Palmer was not most people. He considered these sordid ruminations as prophecy. Palmer grew up in New Mexico in the 1950s and due to his father's political career, he had concluded that anything within the state's borders was his for the taking.
Michael (age 10), Marc (age 6) and I were spending Easter vacation at Palmer's place. Palmer explained to us with great urgency that he required our help in constructing a winning entry that evening as the contest was to be held the following day. After a brief exchange of ideas we settled on a massive headdress of balloons. We didn't have time to do something with any degree of artistic detail, so we settled on a strategy that would overwhelm the competition by sheer size.
Unfortunately, Palmer had no balloons and he knew of no store that would be open at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. However, he did have some surgical gloves which we experimented with and discovered not only could they be inflated like a balloon, but if you tied off 3 of the 5 digits, it looked kind of like a bunny's head with 2 ears. Unfortunately, Dr. Palmer had only a dozen pair of surgical gloves.
The 4 of us drove to the hospital at the University of New Mexico where Dr. Palmer was on staff as a gastroenterologist. As long as we avoided the emergency room, Palmer assured us that things would be pretty quiet since it was now well past midnight. We took the elevator to the upper floors and found that the halls were dimly lit so as not to disturb sleeping patients and few nurses were on duty. Palmer gave directions to where examination rooms were located and we spread out to retrieve as many gloves as we could find on the top floors. When we met back at the car in the parking structure, we all pulled gloves out of every imaginable hiding place and determined we had more than enough.
Once back at Palmer's, there was a division of labor. A wire harness and a frame for the headdress had to be constructed; gloves needed to be inflated, tied off and attached to the headdress; and ribbons of various colors that Palmer had found somewhere had to be measured, cut and attached to the headdress.
The harness and frame for the headdress were made with coat hangers and duct tape. Marc was selected to don the headdress for the cute factor. The harness had 2 straps over each shoulder like suspenders and they were joined in the back where an armature rose vertically behind Marc's neck until it cleared the top of his head by a few inches. The frame for the headdress was attached to the top of the armature. The headdress frame was 9 feet in length and up to 4 feet in width at the widest point.
After some trial and error, we determined that the only way to ensure the necessary stability for the contraption was to build the entire thing while it rested on Marc's head and shoulders. Unfortunately, this required him to stand in place until we finally finished at 4:30 that morning.
We left Palmer's a little before 9 a.m. the next morning. The 4 of us were in the cab of his pickup truck and the headdress filled the truck bed in back and was covered with a tarp. The contest was being held at a public park about 15 minutes from Palmer's place. We were going to arrive a little early as part of Palmer's plan to give us a chance to size up the competition. The other part of his plan was to wait until the last possible moment before we threw back the tarp and sent Marc into the fray wearing the headdress.
When we drove up to the park it was evident that we were indeed early. There were only a few people around and there was no indication that anything was about to start.
I asked Palmer, "Maybe this isn't the right place."
Palmer said, "No this is the right place. The newspaper was clear on that."
I said, "Go ask somebody what's going on."
Palmer walked off and then returned after a few minutes. The expression on his face made it obvious that getting into the anchor lady's pants would be delayed. Palmer said, "That guy over there says the contest was yesterday. I think maybe when I saw the thing in the newspaper, I got so worked up I didn't notice the date."
Since we had gone to so much effort, it seemed only right to let Marc throw the thing on and take a few laps. It was the first time any of us had seen the thing on Marc in broad daylight. It was a true abomination. If we had shown up at the Easter bonnet contest, it would not have gone over well. There was no chance it would have been overlooked or ignored. The combination of countless colored streamers hanging down to the ground; the hundreds of what were obviously inflated surgical gloves, each with a little bunny face drawn with a grease pencil; and a harness that looked as though it was a device for a paraplegic; doubtless, someone would have called the authorities.
When we were ready to leave, we tossed the headdress back into the truck and got into the cab. A young kid about 9 years old came up to the truck and asked what were we going to do with the headdress. I said, "Nothing. It's yours if you want it."
The kid went ape-shit and asked if we could drive him, his bike and the headdress to his home. We loaded everything up and off we went. He directed Palmer where to drive and after a few minutes we pulled up in front of a small house. We took everything out of the back. The kid said thanks, laid his bike on the front lawn, and then grabbed the headdress and started up the steps of his front porch. Dr. Palmer pulled the car away from the curb and slowly drove off as we all looked back at the house. The last image I recall was of two small feet and ankles visible under a mass of surgical gloves and streamers that were permanently lodged in the front door; and the sound of a startled dad shouting, "Eric, what the hell are you doing?"