Dr. Howard Steele

I'll do anything you want to with this. I'll talk to anybody. They won't believe me anyway. I'm here and happy to screw things up further, but I can't believe what I did for 50-some years. I don't know what anyone would want to do with it except shut my mouth, but it's getting kind of late. God will shut it pretty soon. And you know how she is.

Yes, good afternoon. My name is Dr. Howard Steele. I'm a Colgate alum. In fact, I'm the oldest surviving... And at first I'm just like, am I in trouble?

What's going on? And then he sort of pauses and he says, I am the author of Ho Man Kwok.

And I have a lot to say about it. I just surfaced.

I have a phone. I answer that phone all the time because I store the little thing that keeps it electrified in my left chest.

So when the phone rings, my heart stops and I answer immediately. At any rate, it would be a pleasure to hear you. Hanging up now. Have a nice evening. Bye.

I'm going to take you back to the beginning. There was a dear, dear friend of mine, and I were recovering from a Chinese meal we'd had downtown. We spent about once a week, and we were perfectly happy.

He said, you know, you're stupid, Steele, number one. You shouldn't expect to send articles out and then get them published in these dumb journals.

He told me that it was impossible for someone as stupid as an orthopedic surgeon, which I was, to write an article that could be published in something as magnificent as the New England Medical Journal. That was a threat, and he was willing to make a bet.

I decided, well, I'll write a little article and send it over there. So I went home and I just sat down and wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal of Medicine in New England.

And I didn't sign it with my name, but I signed it Homan Kwok, H-O, one word, M-A-N, one word, Kwok, K-W-O-K, figuring that someone, when they got this letter, would realize that what that word was was a breakdown of a not nice word we used to use all the time when someone was a jerk. We call him a human crock of you-know-what.

As soon as it came out, I called the general editor and told him that it was a bunch of bunk. It was all fake. It was all made up. And he hung up the phone on me. He wouldn't talk any further. He thought I was a jackass. So I kept calling him. And finally, apparently, he gave a message to the phone girl in the office that if anybody named Howard called, hang up.

Actually, for years, I tried to call him and tell him that the whole thing was a hoax. that it was not true, that I didn't know anything about Chinese, and particularly Chinese, what's it called, Chinese restaurants. I never saw anybody with it. I didn't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Everybody in the world is talking about the Chinese restaurant syndrome. And it's a lie. It's a big fib. It's astounding.