Middle of Nowhere
The fan exerts enough pressure to push them up and out of the tube, just like the smoke.
It was the opening line from one of the old Mission: Impossible! episodes with Peter Graves, the part at the start of each show where the Team gathers in a secret undisclosed location, usually in the Swiss Alps somewhere, to go over the mission at hand and how it would be carried out. In this episode, Barney was demonstrating how a killer insect was going to be forced through a tube so that they could get the insects into the room where the ‘enemy’ slept.
It was 1987. I was thirteen and my sister was ten. My parents had taken us to Death Valley, California. This was our mom’s favorite place in the world, as she often told us, the place to which she threatened to move, alone, when we were being particularly irritating.
We had planned ahead and had brought with us our scripts to our favorite Mission: Impossible! episode. We had even brought a few props, like some of our mom’s old credit cards, on which we had painstakingly scraped off and whited-out her name and written-in the names of the characters on the show with a thin Sharpie. This was to help us stay in character, because aside from the specific script, we were improvising the rest of the time as Jim, Barney, Roland, Cinnamon, and Willie. As usual, I played Roland and Willie, and my sister was Barney and Cinnamon. We took turns being Jim. “Stay in character!” I would remind my sister, sternly, when she broke character for a moment to tell mom she had to pee.
This whole uninterrupted performance during our family vacation was starting to drive our parents nuts.
A few years earlier for Christmas, we had received a huge boombox that could record audio cassettes. We mainly used it for recording cassette after cassette of our favorite television show episodes. This was when KOFY TV 20 in San Francisco was playing all the old spy shows from the sixties in the wee hours of the weekend mornings. We would get up at 4:58 AM on Saturday in order to catch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. at 5am, followed by Mission: Impossible! at 6am. We would grab our pillows and blankets and use the footstool in the living room with a carefully selected pile of books to position the microphone just right to catch the sound from the TV speaker. We could not miss recording the first sounds of the show, and there was always that lag time on the beginning of each cassette tape, so we had to time it just right.
We had boxes and boxes of these episodes on cassette, organized alphabetically by show title. Most of these we never listened to again. When we did replay them, we realized that they were mostly just filled with really bad spy show sound effects. There would be a lot of tinkling of high octave piano keys and then someone saying Okay, go! Then, some more dramatic music as someone was running across a checkpoint in east Germany or somewhere, fitting with the political slant of the times, and then ten minutes later: We’re in!
But for a handful of the shows, we actually wrote down the dialogue word-for-word, our fingers doing the familiar rewind-pause-play dance with the big buttons. Then we typed them up on the typewriter, photocopied them a few times, and put them in a folder labeled Scripts. When we had to go do something boring with our parents, we would pull out one of the scripts and prepare to memorize the dialogue.
As our parents pointed out incredible desert scenery, we were buried in our scripts, reciting, in character, the lines from this particular Mission: Impossible! episode.
“The fan exerts enough pressure—”
“Girls! Put those scripts away and open your eyes at what’s around you!”
Our mom had had enough.
“I’m tired of hearing Barney and Jim on this trip! If I have to hear one more line of that script, I swear—”
“The Enemy sounds mad,” Roland whispered to Cinnamon. My sister giggled. Our mother was always The Enemy.
That year for Christmas, we each got a dog tag style necklace from the mall that The Enemy had engraved. It read: THE FAN EXERTS ENOUGH PRESSURE
She had been paying attention.
