The other day an incident occurred where I was accused of having a lot of nerve.
The incident was caused by accident; it was over something I wasn’t even aware I had done. It turned out to be a lot of sound and fury over nothing, but it made me do some thinking, mainly about times I have had a lot of nerve on purpose. I think I’ll tell you about one of them.
This one happened way back in the 20th century, during my senior year in college, at the University of Wyoming. When they make a movie about my life someday, this will surely be a scene in it.
It started when someone had really ticked me off over something I won’t get into right now.
I could have just let it go, but I didn’t.
What I decided to do instead was hit her in the face with a pie, in public, and with photographers present. It wasn’t actually me though; I don’t know how things are now, but back in the 20th century, it was pretty much impossible for a black guy to not be pretty high profile. It was for me, anyway.
I convinced a friend to pie her and mapped out with him just how the hit would go down.
Most people thought it was hilarious (they thought it took a lot of nerve, too; although I wasn’t the one to do the job, people had no problem figuring out I was behind it). A few friends approached me after and urged me to keep doing it.
I was a bit hesitant at first, but thought about it some, then decided to do it.
And Pie In The Eye Enterprises was born. The company name was derived from brainstorming an acronym for the word, pie.
I started the first, and only, pie assassination agency in Wyoming. I put ads in the student newspaper, and the response was immediate, overwhelming, and enthusiastic. (I used the tagline, ‘scuse me while I kiss this pie, a takeoff from a line in a Jimi Hendrix tune).
The way it worked was that people could call the number in the ad, and we would talk about the person they wanted pied, where, and why. I would go to the location with them in advance to plan out how the hit would happen, and to scout out escape routes. I wanted every base covered. We talked about what kind of pie would be used in the hit (coconut cream and banana cream were favorites).
I would collect my fee, go buy the pie, and then recruit a friend to carry out the assassination. I was present for all the hits, to establish my innocence and establish plausible deniability. This was 20th century Laramie, Wyoming, after all.
Curiously, most of my clients were coeds wanting to publicly humiliate their boyfriends. One stands out in my memory, where the victim was a fraternity guy attending a formal dinner. His girlfriend wanted him hit with a blueberry pie since he would be wearing a tuxedo. I was only too happy to oblige, even though I had to go to Mission Impossible lengths to get the location scouted out and come up with a workable plan.
Fortunately, my plan worked.
Soon, people around town were on high alert, since no one knew in advance where and when an assassination would happen–it could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. One assassination was carried out in a classroom, one was in a crowded bar. A lot of people had anxiety about whether they had been marked for assassination–I had several people come up to me and ask whether they had been marked to be hit. Guilty consciences, I guess. I’m just glad that none of my friends were marked to go down in a hail of pie and whipped cream. Also, I was lucky not to ever be arrested, since I didn’t know enough at the time it was legally considered assault.
And then came the piece d’resistance (don’t worry; I’m getting to what this has to do with traumatic brain injuries–I’m just setting the scene with some background).
To make a short story long, I learned that the president of the university was planning a public meet and greet event. I had a personal beef with him and saw my opportunity to get even. It was about to get personal. (For this piece, it doesn’t matter what my beef was).
The event was to be held in a location I already knew well, and it was easy to convince my pal Stoney to do the hit (Stoney was the well-deserved nickname he was known by).
I had Stoney positioned with a pie in a box standing by. On my signal, Stoney approached the president and smashed him full in the face with a cream pie.
All heck broke loose, as the place erupted in shock and laughter, and Stoney made his getaway.
Everyone was talking about it; I even had a friend who had taken the semester off and was spending her time off in Pennsylvania, her home state. She called me and said she saw mention of it on a network evening news broadcast(!) and said she knew it had to be me. It made the front page of the student newspaper; they were critical and disapproving. A photo of the president ran on the front page and a scan of that photo appears here. But I was warned by the administration that if any more pie assassinations occurred, I would be expelled, so I shut down Pie In The Eye immediately, about six months before I was set to graduate.
Well Isaac, that’s all well and good, but what does that have to do with traumatic brain injury?
This: I’ve never lost my nerve, although I have since channeled it and used my powers for good. It came in very handy in my previous life as an investigative reporter, and having a lot of nerve helped me be successful at it. It takes a lot of nerve to take on government officials, to ask questions they don’t want the public to know the answers to, to pursue and unearth documents they don’t want you to see, and to stick to your guns when they try to smear your name in public, even when you know you are right. I threw a lot of figurative pies at elected officials and a lot of them ended up with pie in their eye.
And although I closely follow the advice of my doctors regarding diet and medications, I have felt absolutely free to ignore their advice on other matters, like not using a walker and walking on my own. Apparently I am still considered at high risk to fall, but I have the nerve not to; I have never fallen.I also have not attended physical therapy or speech therapy sessions, as I was advised to.
My primary care physician tells me he thinks having that amount of sheer nerve has helped me in my recovery. Last week he told me that if he was meeting me for the first time, he would have guessed my stroke was two or three years ago instead of just over a year. I will always have the nerve to get better, and I have the nerve to keep going until my recovery is complete. I have the nerve to have no doubt that I can do it.
And then, when this is all in the past, I may have enough nerve to do a remake of The Godfather, one where the mob guys use pies instead of bullets.
Isaac Peterson grew up on an Air Force base near Cheyenne, Wyoming. After graduating from the University of Wyoming, he embarked on a career as an award-winning investigative journalist and as a semi-professional musician in the Twin Cities, the place he called home on and off for 35 years. He also doesn’t mind it at all if someone offers to pick up his restaurant tab. Peterson also welcomes reader comments. Email him at isaac3rd@gmail.com.
