THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607130041
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 94 lines
THE QUESTION before the house - actually it was the garage - was whether space aliens were invading Chick's Beach.
A meeting had been called by Bob Guess, owner of B & B Boat Shop, because Randy Clemmons had seen something very strange at 4 in the morning outside his bedroom window.
Randy said it had been scarier than his wife, Bobby, with face cream on and hair bristling with curlers.
``The thing had beady eyes, a long nose, long ears and a silver circle of light glowing around its entire head,'' Randy said.
Randy had reached over and shaken his wife's shoulder.
``When I sat up, all I heard was a thump as it moved away from the windowsill and brushed the side of the house,'' Bobby said. She said she ran outside barefooted with a poker in her fist, her husband offering moral support from no closer than the front porch.
When she reached the window, whatever had been there was gone.
Maybe if Time and Newsweek hadn't been doing covers on space aliens. . . . Maybe if ``Independence Day'' - about an earthly invasion of space aliens who destroy Washington - wasn't the blockbuster movie of the summer. . . .
Then the creature at the Clemmons window might have been ignored. And Bob Guess wouldn't have called this special meeting of the B & B Boat Shop gang to deal with the extraterrestrials. (B & B, incidentally, means ``beer and bull,'' and, as the discerning reader has no doubt guessed, this account is in the B&B tradition.)
Bob'a garage is, like Chick's Beach, a mixture of things: old calendars and beer signs, souvenirs and curiosities, a rusting fish-cleaning sink, and an old refrigerator filled with beer. Bob's boat building tools hang on the walls and are tucked away in drawers and compartments.
A hull under construction sat on sawhorses in the middle of the garage with Nikki, the black-and-white cat, asleep on the bow. The alien-concerned boat-shop gang showed up in shorts and T-shirts. Some had bare feet; the fancy ones wore flip-flops. I got there after the second round of beers had been passed out.
``You've all heard what Randy saw at his window,'' said Bob, the group's official logistician. ``The question is: Do we have space aliens at Chick's Beach? And if so, what are we going to do about it?''
Will Walker, an expert in home demolition, interrupted Bob. He said the better question was: If space aliens invaded Chick's Beach, could anybody tell the difference?
Will claimed he had attended a party-till-you-puke beachfront blast in the neighborhood July 4. He reported that several of the party goers had shaved heads, pointy ears with rings in them, and green faces. He said they were spookier looking than Ross Perot.
A debate erupted over whether space creatures would look like Ross Perot or not. Bob argued that you couldn't tell how a space alien might appear.
``One might seem to be one thing for a while and then seem to be something else . . . like Bill Clinton,'' he said thoughtfully.
Everybody nodded in agreement. Then Bob asked everybody to tell what the weirdest thing he or she had seen lately.
Bob's wife, Patti, said she thought maybe space aliens had been sleeping in the finished boat Bob had stored in his backyard - a block from the beach on Chesapeake Bay. Twice in recent weeks she had gone outside to get the paper and found strangers asleep in the boat, she said.
``They sure as heck didn't look human or smell human,'' she said.
Bob said he didn't think the boat sleepers counted.
Then Ed Cobb rose to get another beer. He said he had seen a huge creature that looked like the one from the Black Lagoon on the beach at sunset two days earlier. ``I thought the thing was covered from head to foot with seaweed, but as he got closer I could see it was a man covered with tattoos,'' Ed said.
A new argument broke out over whether space aliens wore tattoos. And whether even a space alien might have been frightened by the people Patti found sleeping in the boat.
Beer will stimulate deep conversations like that.
Jonna Walker called me aside after the meeting and said she believed the thing that had appeared at the window was their dog, Ben. Ben is a tan hound that is everyone's friend. Jonna said the dog had been biting his back, and a vet had attached a round device resembling a huge Elizabethan collar around Ben's neck to stop the biting. Her husband had wrapped silver foil around the collar so it could be seen when he walked Ben at night.
Made sense to me. But the crowd at the B & B Boat Shop voted nevertheless to appoint Ray Fels as the official alien watcher for our neighborhood. Ray, who just turned 80, is a very active fellow. He scoots around Chesapeake Beach and Chick's Beach at all hours on his red motor scooter with an American flag flying from one of his shiny handlebars.
Ray feeds the ducks in the lake fronting my condominium every day. I found him there one morning after the meeting. He removed his helmet and walked over to give me a report on the space aliens.
``Not a one so far,'' he said. Ray, who swims several miles in the Bay each afternoon, said he thought he'd had a close encounter of the third kind last week when a heavy living thing brushed his side during a swim.
``Scared the hell out of me at first,'' he reported, ``but it was a dolphin. Imagine that.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color illustration by Janet Shaughnessy/The
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