My Name is Hector Bullshit Cullivera
His name is actually James Edward Andrew Hanover, and if you think that’s a mouthful, know that he very narrowly escaped “Clinton Dewitt Hanover IV.” I met him at least once before the friendship took. I was in elementary school, hanging with Charlie Martin, who was one of those two-name people, like “Charlie Brown” or “Vida Blue.” One day, Charlie Martin took me down to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Binghamton one day—one of the ugliest structures in all of architectural history—and his UU buddy, James, was there. I remember him as being on fire, and by gosh, that particular first impression was dead on.
He lived in Montrose, PA, and seemed to find that fact interesting. Later, I’d learn that Jim finds almost all facts, pseudo-facts, and conjectures interesting enough to dissert upon. I remembered these things from that first meeting, but neither he nor the UU Church captured me at the time.
Three years later, I was in ninth grade and lonely. The kids from my junior high did not generally go to Binghamton Central High as freshmen, so I was surrounded by strangers from the South Side’s Macarthur School (washed completely away by the flood in 2011).
I took to eating my lunch in a small stairwell off a side hallway that led to the library. Jim would saunter by every couple of days, and say, “Hey, want some M&Ms?” I don’t know if I remembered at first that I’d met him before. Maybe. But I would politely take a few, thank him, and then he’d talk. About history. Politics. A capella singing. James Taylor. Godknowswhatall. And I had a friend.
One day I asked where he got the two 12-oz bags of M&Ms he always seemed to have, and he suggested I meet him the next day out in front of the school right after fourth period. He started talking while he walked across the street. And he just kept talking, loudly and dramatically, while he walked into the Giant, went straight to the candy aisle, picked up two bags of M&Ms, and walked out. I was terrified and amazed by this modern Artful Dodger.
I had a short-lived affair with kleptomania after that. One time, Jim and I nabbed two cheap shirts at Philly Sales for our long-distance girlfriends. I don’t think those gifts ever reached their destinations, but that was hardly the point.
Part of Jim’s appeal—or, to some, the opposite—was his flamboyant wackiness. He’d sing at the drop of a hat… no, a pin… no, nothing needed to drop. It might be falsetto Frankie Valli, Swedish folk songs, Russian drinking songs, or improvised tunes about latent homosexuality (“I’m just a lonesome cowboy…”) or Russian History (“Yermak was a Cossack, ya see, who understood being Tartar Khan”). At parties, you never knew what you’d get. One time, he burst out of the bathroom in whiteface, calling himself “Kaopectate Man.” At least he didn’t break into Al Jolson.
At his core, Jim is a performer, a star of the stage, a bullshitter nonpareil. Telling lies or, to be charitable, bending the truth, works best when you are brilliant and have a great memory for trivia, and Jim’s mind is like the world’s largest filing cabinet, just tipped over. At the Rooney Fest one year, a friend had brought 5 gallons of 13-bean salad (I shit you not). There’s just no way for any number of campers to eat that, so Jim made up a game. In “Truth or Bean Salad,” Jim states some “fact,” and the players determine whether it’s the truth. If not, the players pelt him with handfuls of bean salad. It’s an outdoor game.
Another variant—minus the beans, and suitable for indoor play—is “Dates.” In this one, you call out a year after the year 1000 AD, and Jim tells you some historical event that happened in that year. The players determine whether the event is historical or BS. It’s actually quite difficult. The last time I saw Jim, we played Dates and a friend’s teenage son demanded to be the historian. I was astonished at his chutzpah (nobody is Jim but Jim), and we called him on his BS, but man, that’s a ballsy kid. He’s got a future, methinks.
Jim and I went to a bunch of Unitarian Universalist youth conferences, where the Bean Salad flew perhaps more freely than it did anywhere else. One of our bits was telling new kids that we were twins. “Oh, fraternal?” they’d ask. No, we’d say, identical. Now, we’re not the same height, not particularly similar looking, have noticeably different eye color, and well… there’s no way we could be identical twins. But all that would be explained away, and invariably, kids would buy it.
I’m not sure how this started, but all the guys from our youth group started writing “Hector Cullivera” on our name tags. This evolved into, “Hector Bullshit Cullivera,” then “Hector BS Cullivera.” It was something of an “I AM SPARTICUS!” thing for us. Solidarity in absurdity and bullshit. I occasionally felt guilt for what we put our advisors through. Occasionally.
One of my bon mots is “Nobody deserves nothin’.” I mean it, of course, both ways. It’s kind of my pithy distillation of John Rawls’s “Original Position.” If anyone ever deserved success based on genius and ability, it would be James Edward Andrew Hanover. He is the most brilliant person I’ve ever encountered, with talents in almost every human direction. He’s struggled with money and work, like we all do. He’s doing fine these days, with a good job with a major technology company as something of a high-end technical sales representative.
But nobody deserves nothin’. And I get angry hearing and reading worship of people like Steve Jobs—who deserves nothing—in a world full of brilliant, hard-working, creative people. Nothing happens that benefits us all without all our participation. And if that makes me sound like a communist, fine.
Truly, I’m a Social Socialist, committed to a grand time for the folks around me. And if I’m having a Social Socialist party (not Party), I want Jim as the entertainment. Who better than the Father of the Foolish Trotskyite League of Binghamton (FTLB)? Yes, he admits that their membership (2) experienced the requisite ideological schism, but that’s not the point, is it?
What was the point? Oh, yeah… something about “Big Girls Don’t Cry” sung over “Pinball Wizard.”
This one goes out to a man I love.
