LAUGH LINES : You, Too, May Have Once Been a Space Cadet

I’ve been trying lately to figure out who among the people I know has been abducted by aliens, meddled with and put back.

I have a wide circle of friends. I don’t think I boast when I say that my friends are the sort of people aliens would find interesting.

Many friends are attractive and full of vitality, and those aliens who are engaged in breeding human beings or hybrid species--which goes on a lot, according to the latest accounts--would be foolish to turn up their noses (if they have noses) at my friends who do (nice ones, mostly).

It will be suggested that I have loads of friends who have been abducted, who have spent well-recollected hours in some of the nicer pods, who have been given haircuts or been harvested in more deeply stirring ways.

It will be suggested that my friends don’t tell me, because it is bad manners to burden another soul with long-winded stories involving probes.

My friends do have very nice manners.

But my experience is that if you hang around long enough people will tell you anything. If you stay late enough at parties, you will hear people confess to the hostess, loudly, levels of hatred or love for the hostess that would seem to require the summoning, at minimum, of a constable or nurse practitioner.

If you look people in the eye, they will tell you of inappropriately intense relationships with Venetian blinds or pressure washers. They will confess theological beliefs that require a larger participation in the business of the universe by Marvin Hamlisch than he is actually believed to have.

In fact, I am trying to think of something nobody has ever told me or at least told someone who told me. In that latter category belongs a story that makes me think large trout can have more surprising lives than I had ever imagined.

But nobody has ever, ever, when the Gewurztraminer bottle is down to the little crystalline structures you subsequently wish you’d poured onto the grass, said to me:

“Funny thing. Last summer, one afternoon, I’m out on the mower. Have I showed you the new one? Briggs & Stratton, 12.5 horse, shift-on-the-go, it’s a beauty. Anyway, long story short. This blue light comes down, shuts off the mower, lifts me up in the air, I’m flying like a sonofagun. I wind up inside this huge lime-green butler’s table. And these little guys strap me down, open up the top of my head, do some stuff there.

“Then there’s this whole thing like--remember Steve Moore’s bachelor party?--it was sort of like that, but in a more sterile environment. At one point, I said, ‘Hey fellas, does my CIGNA cover all this?’ Anyway, next thing, I’m back home, in the house, the Sox are up 5-3, Hesketh grooves one to Buhner and that’s that.”

“I remember that game.”

“Two weeks later, this thing falls out of my nose. Here, I got it with me. That part’s a highly compressed carbon compound and the little filaments are glass and amino acids. I found out if I put it near the TV set, it unscrambles Showtime.”

I should have had this conversation, because these things happen all the time. I have been reading a new book by John Mack, a celebrated Harvard psychiatry professor, who started treating people who thought they were abducted and decided they were probably right.

Can you imagine the department chairman at Harvard?

“John, we couldn’t get you interested in teaching pigeons to play Ping-Pong or something, could we? We still have B. F. Skinner’s old stuff in the supply closet.”

It turns out you may have been abducted if you can’t account for hours of your time, have unexplained marks on your body, wake up paralyzed with a strange presence in the room and see puzzling lights.

That’s my average day. Maybe I’m the guy. If so, I can stop telling my friends about the Venetian blinds. I’m the guy.