Spike Jones string theory.

"Hey, how are you? You need any help?" It was one of the floorwalkers at the video store. I always thought there were a few too many of them in that place. Even when the store was busy, as it was that day, most of them were left with nothing to do, and those who were called upon for help could rarely provide it. I was just scanning the inventory the way I did every few weeks, to see if there was anything I didn't have yet, anything that caught my eye. So far, there was nothing. "I'm just fine, thank you," I told the young man. "And no, I don't need any help. But thanks for asking."

I stepped around him and continued browsing, but a moment later he was behind me again, talking over my left shoulder.

"Hey," he said, "Is?is your name Steve?"

I glanced at him quickly. I get a little weird and obsessive while scanning movie titles, and I don't like talking to people much while I'm at it. "No, I'm sorry," I told him. "My name's Jim."

"Oh," he said. But he didn't go away. "Did you used to smoke a lot of pot?"

That seemed an odd and awfully personal question for a video store floorwalker to ask.

"No, I'm sorry," I told him.

"You never smoked pot?"

"Not a lot of it, no," I said. "Never regularly."

"Oh," he said again, sounding disappointed at the news. "'Cause you look just like this Steve, man. Really."

"Really."

"Yeah. He was stone cool, man. He used to do the same thing?come in, look around at everything. And he'd always toss me a free joint."

"I'm sorry," I told him, wondering whether or not I should tell him straightaway that I was not "stone cool," or let him figure it out for himself. What I did instead was pull the pack of cigarettes from my breast pocket. "I'm afraid I only smoke Kools?but?but you can have one if you like." I shook the pack in his general direction.

He gave me a look that seemed accusatory somehow, before stepping away without another word and disappearing into the crowd, leaving me alone to continue scanning the titles.

Half an hour later, having found nothing at the video store, I was on the train home, staring at the floor, when another man approached me and said hello.

He was a nice fellow by the name of Mark, maybe a few years older than myself. He told me that he was a musician?guitar mostly?who'd just finished up the Simon & Garfunkel tour. Over the years, I learned, he'd played with all sorts of people, in all sorts of styles?from Broadway shows to Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Fred Frith and the whole Bang on a Can crowd. He'd toured with Paul Simon a few times.

We both got off the train at the same stop, and were headed in vaguely the same direction, so we continued talking. I wanted to bounce the names of a few other musicians off him, but didn't get the chance. Not after I found out that he'd grown up in Wisconsin.

"Wisconsin?" I yelped much too loudly for the subway station. "Where?"

"Appleton," he said.

Well, that was it. Appleton lies approximately 40 miles south of Green Bay. When I was a youngster, I used to spend the occasional summer with friends in Appleton, and we were almost always down there for New Year's Eve. It's always good to talk to someone from back home, especially one who was there around the same time and would understand my "Kaukauna" reference.

Then he mentioned that he and another musician friend of his were about to put on an off-Broadway show, just the two of them.

"It's kind of like Spike Jones," he said. Then he went on to explain, "He had an orchestra back in the 40s and 50s?"

That's when I cut him off. I can understand thinking that he might need to explain Spike Jones, especially if he deals with a lot of young people. Hell, I've had to explain Johnny Cash to youngsters. But I'd been a Spike Jones fan since I was a kid.

(For the youngsters: Spike Jones was a musician, band leader and comedian who surrounded himself with a crack team of cracked musicians. Despite the anarchic nature of his ensemble, The His City Slickers, they maintained an almost superhuman sense of timing. Using cowbells, guns, balloons and carhorns together with more traditional instruments, they blended jazz, classical and pop songs to create parodies of "serious" music that are still hilarious today.)

(That was just an aside.)

I needed to stop into the drug store, so Mark and I shook hands and he continued on his way. He was a good fellow, I thought. Then I went into the drug store to pick up something I could no longer remember, saw the crowd and the clutter waiting just inside the doors, panicked, then turned around and left again. I do that sort of thing a lot these days.

Once I got home, I flipped through the pile of CDs and pulled out one of my old Spike Jones records. Talking to Mark had put it in my head. I hadn't listened to Spike Jones in months, which was far too long. He always cheered me up. And, given as it was around the holiday season, his condensed and warped version of The Nutcracker was especially welcome.

After three days of non stop Spike Jones on the stereo (I get that way with records), I finally removed it and replaced it with my Ernie Kovacs record, which, though in the same vein, was a bit more low-key.

Then one night soon afterward for reasons that only became clear later, I decided to pop in my copy of Macon County Line. I hadn't seen that one in years. Fact is, up until the moment I plucked it from the pile, I'd had no desire to see it?I'd even forgotten that I had the damn thing. But something in my head was telling me to watch Macon County Line again.

About half an hour into the movie, I understood why.

There's a scene in which the great Geoffrey Lewis, playing Hamp the gas station attendant, argues with a doughy-faced old man about trading a horse for a set of four retreads. The scene goes on for an unusually long time?but it was worth it, because the doughy-faced old man was played by Doodles Weaver, a headliner (perhaps the headliner) when he was with Spike Jones' orchestra. His comic fumblings with the language and wacky sports announcer shtick made him an audience favorite.

(Doodles, an incorrigible drunk and Sigourney's uncle, died 10 years after filming his scenes for MCL as the result of two (!) self-inflicted gunshot wounds.)

After watching the movie, I went to bed. And as I slept, I had a dream in which a group of elderly European men was trying to smuggle me out of a place that seemed to be a combination of the front desk at New York Press and my old college dorm room. I wasn't sure why they were doing this, or why it would be necessary for me to wear a gas mask. It was in the dead of winter, though, so I also had to wear a ski mask. Whether it should go on over or under the gas mask was the source of some lengthy debate.

Anyway, as the dream ended, I was just about to go out a window. Once outside, I was supposed to dive into the back seat of a waiting car?a car being driven by Leif Garrett.

That last bit was the only part of the dream that made any sense to me the next morning, as a young Leif Garrett had a major role in Macon County Line, playing Max Baer's son. As it happens, he also played Buford Pusser's son in all three Walking Tall movies, but that doesn't matter here.

After that, the chain seemed to stop. It had only lasted a week or so, which isn't bad. It's odd how long these things can run sometimes, one thing leading to another leading to another. Hell, in some cases these things can carry a person through an entire lifetime. Most lives are like that, I'd guess, except that the connections are rarely this obvious. It's usually pretty hard to tell that you're even in a chain like this until you stop and look back on it?and even then, it's impossible to tell where it'll lead next, or if you've reached the end of one and are about to begin another.

Two mornings later, a drunk stopped me on 23rd St. Sunrise was still half an hour away, and I was on my way into work. He asked me for a cigarette, which I gave him. Then he asked for a light, and I gave him that, too. Then he asked, "Hey?are you some kind of famous?uhh, forensic, umm?uhhh?scientist?"