Bed: The Most Dangerous Sport in America

Falling out of bed. Haven’t we all done this, either figuratively or imaginatively?
I would venture to say that we have. Beginning in toddlerhood. Ending in second childhood. There’s nothing unusual to be said about that.

Which is why I paid scant attention when some TV pundit reported upon some newly released statistics from some government agency or public commission or nonprofit something or other. FOX? CNN? I can’t really say who brought this up. Bicycles were the most dangerous contraptions in America. Beds were a close second.

No way, I protested silently as I went about whatever the business of the moment happened to be. Was I indulging the hazardous preparation of lunch? Risking my life the better to fold the socks? About to wrench my back while dusting sconces? Whatever it was I was doing at the moment I heard the latest inane pronouncement, I was aghast and indignant.

Motorcycle riding was the most dangerous sport on earth. Bicycles had to be number two, if they ranked at all. Not that my perceptions were biased by the fact that a certain young man who had been forewarned about the evils of motorcycling had taken a flying leap off a cliff on a Kawasaki over the summer and broken every rib that God gave him, plus a few he invented as he yowled in a hospital bed. I wasn’t biased against bicycle riders, sconces, or anything equally dangerous, so why pick on beds? Those havens of sanctity? Those blissful shelters we take to when things aren’t going well? Those sources to time travel and heroic adventure? How on earth can beds be the second most hazardous means of travel we possess?

I gave no further thought to this issue until a day or two later when I got a call from Barbara Oehlbeck. Now, if you happen to be among the two or three people in the State of Florida who don’t know who Barbara Oehlbeck is, I’d be happy to introduce her.

Barbara is the author of books about Florida plants, including The Sabal Palm. She’s a well-known columnist and Florida historian, whose most recent book, The Ranch, recently won top non-fiction honors from the Florida Publishers Association.

Of course, my perspective is somewhat different, since Barbara Oehlbeck is the godmother of my novel, The Serena Scandal. At any rate, we were talking about the forthcoming release of my first novel The Don Juan Con in a new edition, which Barbara had endorsed. I called her to update her attribution, when she began to tell me her tale of falling out of bed. This made Barbara one of the toughest people on the planet and a national statistic.

Just a day or two prior to my call, Barbara admitted, she had tossed and turned one night while attempting to gain a more advantageous purchase on her pillow. She had suddenly slipped and fallen from her perch on a very high bed. “You do know how high they make mattresses these days, don’t you?” Barbara said.

Barbara banged her head on her antique iron bedstead and then, as if that were not indignity enough, she bashed her head against the floor, awakening her husband, Dr. Lou. He's a pathologist, who, if things had gone badly, could have at least supplied an explanation as to what might have befallen his dearest beloved.

By this time Barbara was laughing, describing the lumps on her head and I was commiserating--with the floor. After all, Barbara being Barbara, we were talking about serious gashes in the floor such a hard-headed woman would have left there.

So, as statistic go, I have to admit that the government (or whomever) is correct, and yes, beds are indeed not only dangerous from the standpoint of our physical safety and well-being. Then I began to realize that beds are also dangerous in psychic terms, which is where the novelist enters in.

Bed, as we all surely realize, is fraught with danger. Bed, particularly the propensity to get into it with the wrong person, is a danger I feel certain was not included in the statistics. Perfectly sensible people do this all the time. For instance, I recall the story of the woman who woke up one morning and found herself in bed with a man she barely knew; and whom she had not only slept with but had gotten married to at some point in some hazy weekend. This happened in Las Vegas, I believe.

What impressed me most about this lady’s tale was not that she was somebody I’d made up; she was a respectable person and a licensed family therapist, who very sensibly got a quickie divorce and got on with her life. And let us hope she went into counseling herself.

Beds, I now realize are profoundly dangerous, not only from the “What on earth am I doing in here with him/her?” but also, “How come I just woke up and found my hands tied to the bedposts?”

In such situations it is the duty of the novelist to supply the hero or the heroine with the psychic underpinnings or the moxie which allows this person in distress to barter, buy, manipulate or otherwise find his/or her way out of trouble.

Now, I wonder what agency is compiling this second sort of statistics about beds? If we figure in all the psychic dangers of getting a good night’s sleep, then, indeed, it must be true that the bed is by all odds the very most dangerous place in America on any given night. And so, it is with that thought, my dear readers, I wish you all the best in pursuit of that most dangerous occupation: a good night’s sleep.

A Bad Hair Day

It is indeed a shock when your own hairdresser has a bad hair day, especially a a series of them. I was sitting in a salon hot seat recently, having my roots rescued, catching up on the life saga of the hairdresser I’ve had in Fort Myers for at least twenty years. She’s a formidable woman who has survived various health problems and family traumas with pluck and aplomb. Due to the fact that I had been in the San Juan Islands over the summer, I hadn’t seen my friend in awhile, and I was astounded by the fact that her business was thrown for a loop when a woman who worked at her salon had walked out and started a rival salon right across the street. This, of course, created great upheaval among her clients.

Wait a minute, I found myself thinking. This is a real-life version of a plot right out of the Bad Hair Day Mysteries by Nancy J. Cohen. In Died Blonde, the book I happen to be reading at the time, hairdresser Marla Shore is helping her detective boyfriend find out who murdered a rival salon owner who was out to ruin Marla’s business by moving into the same shopping center and pulling all sorts of nasty pranks on Marla. When the rival turns up dead, suspicion turns Marla’s way, but she’s sheltered by her lover, Detective Vail, who, fortunately for Marla, has a full head of hair which she styles on a regular basis.

I’ve met Nancy Cohen several times and always enjoy her books. I ran into her again at the Murder on the Beach Bookstore booth at the Miami Book Fair, where we were signing books. Nancy signed a copy of Died Blonde for me.

Meanwhile, Nancy gave me a ringing endorsement of The Don Juan Con which will go one the cover of a forthcoming edition. Nancy got the whole point of what I meant to do with Don Juan. I aim to raise awareness of a certain type of romantic swindle that amounts to the emotional rape of the victims. Nancy was kind enough to interview me for her blog, and I’ve posted a copy of interview in the review section of this site. Here I am, a fledgling novelist being interviewed by a famous one!

Check out Nancy’s blog for yourself:
(http://www.mysterygal.bravejournal.com)

Meanwhile, Nancy’s latest book, Perish by Pedicure, was reviewed by Jay MacDonald in the Fort Myers News-Press, Tropicalia Magazine, Dec. 17. MacDonald gave Nancy a great review and I enjoy Jay’s work because he also interviews the authors he writes about and delves into their background.

MacDonald did the best he could for Nancy, but Jay’s a guy, after all. I met Jay MacDonald last year at The Lee Reading Festival in Fort Myers. Jay’s a tall, handsome fellow and quite the speaker. He even has a reasonable amount of hair. MacDonald just has to be a barbershop type of male who never set foot in a hair salon, however. Why am I saying this? It’s because the root appeal of the Bad Hair Day Mysteries is to the millions of women like me who swap life stories with their hairdressers for years on end. What guy could figure that out, unless he’s a salon-styled male like detective Dalton Vail? For women, the hairdresser and client lead very separate lives, and so their relationship, however enduring, has a secretive, parallel universe quality to it.

The lives of the hairdressers I know are full of the same sort of mayhem that turn up in The Bad Hair Day Mysteries, and so of course, we can project a bit of our hairdressers’ lives onto the Marla Shore character. This, I believe, is what makes Nancy J. Cohen’s mysteries so cozy in the best sense of this traditional genre.

Out of Touch

An old-fashioned snowstorm blew in the Monday after Thanksgiving , creating a fairytale setting, here in the San Juan Islands, a robin's egg sky, brilliant sun orchestrating a dazzling scene everywhere it touched. Every tree limb, bush and railing is covered thickly in a layer of powdery frosting. The house is filled with the smell of woodsmoke and lamp oil and the ticking of the grandfather clock. The power has been out for close to thirty hours now. There's nothing left of the twenty-first century: no internet, no telepone; the cell phone is on its dying gasp and the car is frozen solid. I've tramped up and down the neighborhood where the only news comes by word of mouth. Power has been restored in the hamlet of Eastsound. This is a major bulletin. Do I care? Not really. Tonight I'll have oil lamps to read by and propane to cook with and feather comforters for warmth, and in between there's a spectatular white world, the likes of which has not been seen here for a decade.

Notes from the North Caribe

The anhinga in the front yard is flapping his soggy wings, wagging his head in time to The Cinderella Suite playing on PBS radio. Who says the wildlife doesn’t appreciate the higher culture here in the North Caribe?

Can’t find the North Caribe on the map? That’s because The North Caribe is how a climatologist, or an orchid fancier, or a Friend of the Fakahatchee Strand thinks of what the rest of us consider to be Southwest Florida, here on the Florida Gulf.

Tropically speaking, we’re in the North Caribbean eco system. So says that oracle of the natural world, Tropicalia, the Sunday Magazine of the Fort Myers News-Press (www.news-press.com) in its cover story of Sunday, Nov. 5., devoted to the rare orchids of the Fakahachee Strand and the intrepid trackers who tramp the Strand in search of some of the world’s most elusive plants. If you ever read and loved The Orchid Thief, as I did, this is what we’re talking about.

It’s the idea of being not just Southwest Floridians but North Carribeans that enlarges the perspective. We are what our climate makes of us. The exotic hothouse of the North Caribe has given bountifully, not only the hundreds of rare plants including 45 species of exotic orchids, but also the agricultural breadbasket on the flanks of the Lake Okeechobee, what I called Serenoa country, the land of the creeping palm, the Serenoa repens. It’s a tropical wild west, a place I limned as best I could in my novel, The Serenoa Scandal, which I’ll be discussing as a guest of The Friends of the Lakes Library, this coming Friday, November 10. To brown bag it with a hungry author, call 533-4000 for details, 15290 Bass Road at Gladiolus Drive. 11: 45 a.m. to 2 p.m.