JOI's own voice: the Man-from-Glad father, the moving of the bed, and the origin of annulation

pivotal · Winter B.S. 1963, Sepulveda CA; JOI ~13

• When: Winter B.S. 1963, Sepulveda CA; JOI "already taller than both my parents," home while his father, "the first of two actors to portray the Man from Glad," is between takes of his sandwich-bag career
• What: One of JOI's very few own-POV sources anywhere in the record (first-person retrospective narration). His father — "My father served for two years as the Man from Glad" — mixes a tomato-juice drink, brings up gastric blood, and conscripts the boy to help wrestle his mother's squeaking bed apart; the afternoon ends with the father vomiting and fainting face-down across the frame, which "had broken in half," while the boy calmly examines casters and hardware ("Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science"). Amid the boy's room of prisms, lenses, tennis trophies and a Peeping Tom poster, an amputated doorknob falls and rolls in a strange double-axis figure — a cycloid, "L'Hôpital's solution to Bernoulli's famous Brachistochrone Problem," complicated to a cycloid on a sphere — and the grown narrator marks it as the germ of his life's science: "This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation." The scene fuses, in one afternoon and one voice, the paternal drinking and bodily collapse (event 1), the optics-prodigy mind, and the origin of the annular-fusion fortune (event 4).