Don't Panic!

If there’s anything in your life that makes you fondly recall hauling redolent, rank bales of trash into huge subterranean dumpsters, scoop up that something and carry it in a bushel basket. During my second iteration as a B. Dalton employee – the one where I was an actual, contributing member of the staff and not just the guy who lazed around all day and paid fealty to the Stephen King section in the guise of organization – I was Trash Guy. Well, one of them. At least twice a week, it would be my duty to gather up all the trash and the recycling in the store and stack it in big canvas bins on wheels, and drag it down to the mall’s basement. Our dumpsters were near the ones for the food court, so my trips, especially in the summer, were accompanied by the mephitic aroma of bourbon chicken and tacos and sub meat all tossed together and rotting in the heat.

My saving grace was audiobooks. I’d discovered them on my first go-round working at the mall, where I held down three separate jobs because it was better than going home to the rooming house, what with all the junkies and old men dying and such. I had a Dashiell Hammett young adulthood, but instead of making the mistake of sleeping with incongruously hot dames, I made the mistake of sleeping with one of my stalkers. He had webbed toes and seven cats. I did a lot of living in my late teens.

Anyhow, my audiobook thing started because this was before I discovered Bruce Springsteen, and I needed something to occupy me on the bus to and from work. The bus ride was always long and always horrible and never came at opportune times, so I did my best to maximize my fun. I spent a lot of my time at the Quincy Public Library, and at some point I realized that there was an all new way to love Stephen King. So of course I jumped. I had a Walkman and with it, I could do anything. Except listen to CDs, but that was ok because they’d probably never make a portable CD player I could afford, right? Right? (1993, people. There wasn’t even an Internet yet.)

I went through my Stephen King trove pretty quickly, and then I went foraging. I know I listened to some Robert Parker. Then one afternoon, under the concerned gaze of the librarians who worried about how much time I spent there, I went alphabetical, and that’s where I found it. Adams. Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Interestingly enough, this was not my first encounter with Hitchhiker’s Guide. Indeed, when I was young and disastrously poor, occasionally my Mom or my Dad would take us to visit their rich friends. Rich friends were those who could afford more than twenty videocassettes. (One of my aunts had laserdiscs. That was a level of rich I couldn’t even comprehend, like Margot on Punky Brewster.) One of the rich friends had a computer, and let me play with it. One of his games was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and at the time (was I seven? Eight?) I couldn’t wrap my mind around text-based adventure games. A few years later, when Mulcahey Middle school introduced a computer class (!), I got reacquainted with my old nemesis. Amidst all the learning games like Odell Lake and Oregon Trail, I did my best to master Hitchhiker’s Guide. I generally got as far as learning the word “analgesic.”

Still, it was one of the first instances of recurrence in my life. I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, but occasionally, there are things in my life that seem to want to be noticed and appreciated. Stuff that seems interesting, but hangs out in the background until I’m ready to “discover” it. I went through several minor phases with comics until I met Shawn and he made me a convert. I liked a lot of Springsteen songs before I realized they were all by one guy. Stuff like that. In hindsight, patterns emerge. When I found that audiobook, my first thought was, “Wow, there’s a book, too?” I was young, guys.

I blasted through The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe, and Everything in days. They were read by Douglas Adams himself, and I thought that was so cool. I tell people I’m not into British comedy, but this was evidence against that. I loved Adams’ wry way of reading, and I found myself laughing out loud at stuff about towels and whales and fjords. (Speaking of recurrence: I had a preschool teacher who was obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy; after I graduated to kindergarten, she and my Mom remained friends and she would come over sometimes and read the Narnia books to me. Sometimes, we’d go to her house, and I remember she had a stack of to-read books, and on the top was So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Patterns, seriously.)

In the days before Wikipedia, we got knowledge more slowly, so I didn’t even know there was a BBC miniseries for years. Maybe Tracey told me. Back then, she was nerdier than me, by which I mean she liked both Star Trek and Star Wars, and I was Trek only. She also had swords. Anyhow, by the time I found out about the miniseries, I was living in my studio apartment down the road from the rooming house, and I had an actual Blockbuster card. Things were pretty sweet by the time I turned 21. One of the coolest things about the miniseries was the cover of the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide, because it had the words “DON’T PANIC!” in large, friendly letters on the cover. I loved the font.

Recurrence: years later, I discovered that my friend Kenny – who is the master of most things uber-geeky – was deep, deep into Hitchhiker’s Guide. He furnished me with a track from the original radio series called “Marvin, I Love You.” It’s one of the best songs sung about or for a gloomy robot. I’m listening to it right now, and it’s just the best. It makes me miss Kenny, and happy that I know him.

The Internet exists now, of course, and of all the lunatic nerd-things that people get into, Hitchhiker’s Guide is one of the most pervasive. Of course, some of my other nerd interests are huge. I’m not sure that the Internet could exist without Star Trek, and Mario games are huge, and my love of MST3K is large enough and the fandom is niche enough for it to actually give me some nerd cred.

But Hitchhiker’s Guide? I mean, it’s geeky, it’s huge but small, and it’s British. I mean, this makes up for me not getting into Doctor Who, right? Maybe?

When I heard Kelly the Wonder Tattooer, a really hoopy frood, was coming back into town, I knew that I needed something nerdy. Not Disney nerdy, though because that’s not Kelly’s bag. He’d loved doing my Tom Servo, and he ... I remember him liking my Trek badge. And oh my God, was he all over my steampunk Dr Pepper. Hitchhiker’s Guide fit neatly into the camp of stuff I thought he’d like doing, but I absolutely did not want that planet with the tongue sticking out that’s on the covers of the books. (ImprovBoston’s old mascot, The Goon, also has a tongue sticking out, because that’s wacky! I got a giant leg piece of two fat, dead comedians just so I wouldn’t have to make The Goon my theater tattoo). Then it occurred to me: DON’T PANIC! Well, there’s a motto to live by. And a hidden “42,” because obviously.

I showed up today at noon and he positioned the stencil halfway between my Drive-By Truckers one (“It’s great to be alive” written beneath my Cooley bird) and my Tom Servo, a bridge between the profound and the highly geeky. I won’t go into the pain because it’s almost always the same: highs and lows and spikes of adrenaline. Shawn showed up right before and took videos and pictures and the whole thing was done in an hour. I have been assured that the letters are orange gradating into yellow, with some green highlights to make them pop. My colorblindness will prevent me from discerning all of that, because citrus colors are my weakness. Basically, I did this for y’all.

And now: maxin and relaxin at home for awhile, because when I exert on days I get tattoos, badness happens and I cry. Of course, I did just write a 1.5K essay about my love of a British novel that’s probably shorter than this, which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike relaxing. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go shower and wash this thing off. Now, where did I put my towel?