Murdock saved my life.

Hello, all you fleshy weirdos. I do hope that you are doing well and keeping warm and having a wonderful 2018. But not a greater one than me. Cause then I'll just have to give your car a venereal disease or something. Wait, did I mean, car? or your uncle Ronnie? You know who I am talking about. The one that eats most of the pizza at your child's birthday party? 

Someone I know was telling me that facebook and blogging are dead in the ways of being on the cutting edge of information. I am not sure what to think about that phrase. I have never been a fan of Facebook, but I have been blogging off and on since 2002. I never talked about politics or any kind of movement. I mainly just posted poems and journal entries and such. It gave me an idea about writing a blog post talking about is Blogging dead? I started gathering information about it and started doing research, but something else was troubling me.

The way I perceive myself and the way others perceive me. As an adult, they’ve always been two very different things. People have said that I appear stoic which may be the case if we don’t know each other, but it got me to thinking about Murdock from the 80’s TV show, The A-Team. (I’ll explain later, just trust me and keep reading.)

Dwight Shultz was born in the city of strong deeds and gentle words, Baltimore Maryland on Nov 24, 1947. Of English and German stock, he was raised Roman Catholic and graduated with a B.A.  in Theater Arts at Towson State College in Maryland.

He moved to New York and got the lead part in the play, The Water Engine and went on to act in Crucifer of Blood, in which he won the Drama-Logue Award.

In 1983 Dwight was 36 years of age and was almost written out of the TV show pilot, The A-Team, but the test audience approved of his over the top performance of Howling Mad Murdock.

In a Q&A interview, Shultz said that he got his inspiration for Murdock from a gas station attendant from Texas.  His performance as Murdock did something to my brain, now that I think back. I still can’t understand it, seeing him on the screen prompted me to immediately imitate him as soon as the show was over. Dwight was very partial to impersonating other people, such as James Mason, Henry Kissinger and people that he grew up within Baltimore.

I’d seen comedians do impersonations and impressions before but never did I see an actor switch vocal characterizations so much and so quickly during an episode. It was like watching a jazz musician playing. You could see the script he memorized, but he took advantage of the pauses to add some improvisation and the way things were said by him was the best part of the show for me. Sometimes he’d talk to himself in a completely different accent and you never saw it coming. Dwight was also the mastermind behind all the different t-shirts that he wore in every episode.

Murdock was my coping mechanism when I was a child, a way to deal with an abusive alcoholic father and a way to deal with bullies at school. During recess, Tim didn’t exist anymore. Murdock would take over and all would be well.

Yep, I am wearing an A-team shirt. 

My best childhood friend, Dru Davison and I watched a movie called Coach on HBO with Michael Biehn and Cathy Lee Crosby. In the movie, the team reprograms a fellow player by the use of hypnosis to be NBA legend Sydney Wick. The trigger word to change the lanky teenager into the power forward was the word “Jabberwocky”.

I had no idea who Sydney Wick was back then, but the idea that you change a person into some else through the use of hypnosis was a breakthrough idea for both us! That year he and I would pretend that a trigger word would change us into better athletes whenever we were in P.E. when we would not be doing as well as the other kids, we would say “code words” to each other to get ourselves pumped up. Dru chose Jabberwocky, and I, of course, used Murdock.   

Anytime we were failing abysmally in gym class, we would yell the trigger word to each other. To me it did really help. I felt a surge of adrenalin and was faster and more agile, but also howling mad at the same time. I think Dru felt it too.

You see the word Murdock, the character Murdock, did a lot to motivate me. The character would take me away from pain and confusion of the world of a pre-teen. A world where girls were starting to make me feel weird, a world where kids were vile and horrible and cruel and teachers were just the same. You’d go home wanting to cry, thinking about the day that you had, but then you would think of Murdock and start yelling from the back seat of the family car that your Bell UH-1 Iroquois had taken substantial flack damage and you wouldn’t be able to land her properly. Then you’d go into some proto English accent and yell at yourself for not being more nimble in the art of land to air combat and how you shouldn’t try to make a helicopter do a loop de loop in the air, the propellers would be sheared off! “Hey, it worked in Blue Thunder!” You’d say right back to yourself.

I remember my idiot cousin, you all remember him? The one that torched his truck? yeah him. He was always be telling me to “talk normal” all the time when we got together. I guess one day I did, and Murdock went away. I still feel him in there. I can’t really recall when he went away though. It makes me sad thinking about it.

He’s somewhere in my head, in a hotel room, watching T.V. wearing a WWII fighter pilot cap, his jacket over his pajamas with little A-Team vans all over them. He’s talking to the TV in different accents and throwing goldfish snacks in the air every time the word “Congeal” is said on a sci-fi program. He parades around singing songs and stomping the cheddar flavored crackers into the carpet during commercial breaks.

But yeah, he is still around though. Now he’s been neutered into a saner Murdock which is basically a quiet guy wearing a silly shirt. It makes me sad to think about that. That his only outlet out of me is a geeky shirt that makes people think, “Hey, that guy is secretly interesting and probably goofy, or kooky. And it shouldn’t be that way. It should be the other way around. You shouldn’t let your clothes define your craziness, you should be howling mad from the inside and not the shirt that you put on, makes you a functioning lunatic.

Somewhere in my timeline, someone did something to me, someone broke my self-confidence and self-worth someone made me feel embarrassed about being who I truly am. And I never got over it. I never went back to what I used to be.  I guess maybe somewhere during life, that version of me was chewed up and spit out by life. I became one of those kids that stopped growing, I guess in some case and started hating everything. This kid who didn’t care what people thought about him, became an adult that was afraid that everyone would hate him.  He became ruled by anxiety, worry, and fear.

One of my goals for this year is to attempt to reconnect to my inner Murdock, in that hotel room. And get him out of there and go on an adventure somewhere. I think it would do my soul some good.

And wherever you are Mr. Shultz, thank you so much for your creation of H.M. Murdock and know that it helped a little boy through a lot of drama and heartache.