My earliest childhood memory consists of a mustard colored wall and a deformed male head with two mouths. Presumably God or Nature had sliced the spare mouth into a plateau of flesh just to the left of this man’s other more normally placed mouth. His second mouth had rows of misplaced teeth and I could see weird stalactites of saliva stretching and breaking as he opened and closed it casually. He smoked a cigarette out of both mouths simultaneously and blew some smoke in my direction with a squint. The mustard color of the wall is equally as vivid in my mind as the deformity, and it coordinated well with the exotic complexion of the man’s skin. I should stress how certain I am that this actually happened to me, probably at a State Fair or grocery store in the very early 1980s, and although this event has always been a profound mystery to me personally I am aware that my childhood memories are largely ineffective when retold and not that incredible to anyone else.

Twenty-some years later I was at a hotel party in Boston, drinking Crown Royal out of paper cups with five strangers I had met that day: a DJ, the DJ’s young wife, a producer from Los Angeles who wore a scarf and distant expression, a guy who was definitely gay but not a rapper, and a gay rapper named "Juba" who had a chin ring and thirty-six inch dreadlocks and was squatting on a chair near the bathroom. The hotel room was decorated in a variety of mustard and goldenrod tones. Most of my new drinking buddies were promoting a documentary on gay rappers, and as I recall we were discussing old TV shows (a common subject among intoxicated strangers of the same general age) when I began to ignore the conversation and stare into the exotic complexion of the liquor. The dizzy combination of mustard wallpaper and fleshy ice somehow conjured up inside my cup a vision of the deformed head with two mouths from my earliest childhood memory. I reviewed the details of the memory in my mind. Then I looked up and drunkenly said to a room in which other conversations were already happening, “I just had this flashback to when I was a kid and I saw this guy with two mouths. He had one normal mouth and this other fully functional mouth on the side of his face. It's like the earliest thing I can remember and it has totally haunted me all my life. ”

The DJ, who sat with one butt cheek on the bed, replied excitedly, "Oh shit, did you ever watch the show That's Incredible? I remember they had a guy with two mouths on that show once. He could smoke through the other mouth and everything." I took another sip. The DJ proceeded to describe for me, with shocking accuracy, the details of my own personal memory. He perfectly recounted the appearance and complexion of the man, the exact position of his deformity, and even the squinty eye / fat eyebrow combination. While the DJ couldn't be sure, both the gay rapper and the producer were certain that the stage set of That’s Incredible! was a mustard yellow color indicative of late 70s and early 80s, further corroborating the DJ’s evidence that my earliest memory had actually been a TV show. "That's incredible!" the DJ joked as he readjusted his cap. The group quickly drifted on to new drunken subjects of even greater nostalgia, passing my revelation by like the flip of a channel.

The DJ's wife had a Powerbook and the hotel had a wireless signal, and within seconds I had Google on my lap and was effectively calling up search results about my own memory. According to Wikipedia, That's Incredible! ran on the ABC television network from 1980 to 1984:

That's Incredible! was the show that helped create today's reality series genre with segments that showed everything from death defying stunts, mystifying phenomena and wacky animal stunts, as well as uplifting stories about amazing people who overcame obstacles and handicaps. Hosts John Davidson, Fran Tarkenton and Cathy Lee Crosby were some of the first to break away from the canned variety acts of the 1970s to reveal the more real and unusual sides of nature, medicine and human endeavor.

It seemed that the very first reality TV show in history had so thoroughly surpassed the usual schmaltz and artifice of the sitcom that it had actually become my reality. Scrolling down the webpage, a familiar color rose over the toolbar: an image of hosts John Davidson, Frank Tarkenton and Cathy Lee Crosby, smiling, one mouth each, standing in front of a mustard colored stage set of the precise hue that had been burned into my vision. I put my drink down. I thought back on how deeply personal this memory had always been to me. Though never compelled to own much outside of my body (such as a condo or a nice turntable), I had always felt it essential to own everything within me (such as my opinions, desires, and past experiences). But now it seemed that 25 - 50% of all Americans watching television the night of this particular show had witnessed my first memory themselves, and it had meant nothing more to them than filler between Diet Coke ads. I looked over at the DJ. I felt like he had drugged me. I wanted to own and cherish that memory, for it to remain an unexplained core of my being. But apparently, at the core of my being, there is only a reality TV show.

I can’t know what my great grandfather’s earliest memory was, but I can imagine that it was the sight of his wooden tricycle hiding in the dark grass twenty yards from his father’s porch. The porch was 4.3 degrees crooked on its southeast side and made entirely by his father's own hands out of white oaks from his uncle’s property. My great grandfather felt an unstoppable urge to run and retrieve the tricycle from the spooky Michigan night in order to feel again the comfortable and familiar shape of the tricycle’s seat (which had been carved in the small shed near the barn to a profile unmatched by the shape of any other tricycle on earth) beneath his hand-sewn overalls, and subsequently he made a sprint through the shadows, where, sitting on the seat finally (and pausing a moment to absorb the crisp moon and stars seen from an angle that only he could see at that exact moment in time) he became so terrified by the deep infinity over the cornfield that he ran quickly back up the porch and into the warm house with his tricycle safely retrieved. This memory belonged only to my great grandfather. Although my great grandfather did have to share the concept of moon and stars with the rest of the world, his moon and stars lived in an un-captured moment, and the particular light they broadcast was susceptible to time and space and water particles and the Canadian jet stream and obstruction by thin clouds from certain perspectives, and the same stars he saw numbered seventeen in New York city and seven million in Colorado and twinkled in Texas but were entirely obscured by fog in Seattle.

The ABC Television Network is bigger than the moon or stars. The ABC Television Network is not bound by laws of time or space. It was not the shape of the TV screen that lasted as my first memory, or the fuzz in the reception or the knobs on the paneling. I remembered directly through the object and into the shared concept. I have far more memories of the ABC Television Network than I do of the moon or the stars, and with each passing day I am filled with less and less experiences that are not massively shared. I can't think of anything anymore that is my own. Everything I say or do, even this, I feel is being read from a movie script. If I have a memory, I am suspicious that reality TV cameras have conveyed it to me.

One such memory is of the Boston hotel room containing a DJ, his wife, a producer, a gay guy, and a gay rapper. I am fairly certain that this memory was actually a reality TV show. The camera of my eyes seemed to be held by hand. I took sips of liquor and stared at the Google logo above my lap. The gay rapper was describing a funny YouTube video he had seen, but everyone had already seen it.

Kevin Bewersdorf
2007