Ephemera: A Shout-Out to Rick

Funny what you remember over the decades

Kids, don’t try this at home…

For several years in Tom Spanbauer’s workshop we were delighted by the stories of Rick T. He’d been a California Highway Patrolman and still had the blond buzz cut to show for it. Among his on-the-job stories were regular death-by-misadventures. It seems lonely men would open the back of an old radio to access the rheostat that controlled the sound volume. Such men would attach wires to the rheostat, linking the power to their own erogenous zones.

This allowed them to stimulate themselves with various carefully controlled amounts of electricity. As per Rick T, the inevitable always happened. During a flurry of self pleasuring a power surge would hit. The man in question would later—often much later—be found fried. Men wired to radios, fried and dead. Rick T had done welfare checks too many to count, only to find such sad scenes.

That’s the collateral benefit of workshop: You get the life experience of everyone present.

Wherever you are these days, Rick T, I hope you’re still writing. Your stories have left their scar on me.