Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (6 page)

However. Only the Shadow knows how many cancer-encouraging, heart-discouraging influences lurk in even a clean-living modern American’s system. A person I met recently who was in chemical research told me that
plastic
— for instance, refrigerator-storage wraps and bags — exudes carcinogenic molecules. I don’t see how I could live without plastic. Strangers’ cigarette smoke, though, I don’t need.

So it is good that movie sweethearts rarely light up anymore. (Instead, they simulate oral sex.) It is good that more people notice that smoke bothers them. (I must say it never struck me as a clear violation of my personal space until recent years, but then neither did Republicanism.) If there were a nicotine head in my household, I might well remind that loved one occasionally, with tact (“Do you think there’ll be ashtrays in Heaven?”), of studies that find a high cancer rate among nonsmokers living with smokers. I have one new measure to propose:

Waiting areas — in airports, hospitals, bus stations, Limbo — should be. divided into smoking and nonsmoking sections. Waiting in designated areas is, if not carcinogenic in itself, so dismal that it stimulates the smoking urge and also the outrage reflex. Puffers and huffers should be kept apart.

But banning all smoking on airplanes and in other places where nicotinists must fidget for long periods of time is too much like flogging. People who smoke writhe like salted caterpillars when they can’t. It is not excruciatingly difficult, most of the time, for nonsmokers to circulate through contemporary life without becoming trapped in the lesser distress that smoke-inhalation causes them.

Far more obnoxious than smokers, to me, are people who seem to relish the opportunity to upbraid smokers for perceived foulness. I know lovely people who smoke; I once knew (not for long) a woman who found it refreshing to jog through the fumes of Central Park but would snarl “That’s a filthy habit” at people who smoked near her and, if they didn’t desist immediately, would actually snatch the smoking materials out of their mouths. It would not break my heart to hear that she had been run over by a truck full of Lucky Strikes.

According to a cover story in
Time,
a revival of manners is under way. I would like to see manners flourish between smokers and nonsmokers.

Let us go to one of those waiting areas I was talking about. In an airport. Any traveler knows that hell is other passengers. Especially when nothing is moving except passengers’ twitches.

A man is sitting next to a woman with a small child who is running in tiny circles and then falling flat, rooting on the floor for a while, and then getting up to run in tiny circles some more — all the time engaging in an unengaging form of wordplay: “Blinkle blinkle blittle blar, blow I blunder blut you blare.”

“Mind if I smoke?” asks the man.

“Oh, I’m sorry, but I’m actually allergic to smoke,” says the woman civilly. “I suppose I could go over by the window.”

The man does not say he is allergic to the woman’s small child. He says, “Wouldn’t hear of it.
I’ll
go over by the window.”

Actually, of course, there is no openable window in the airport. But neither party acknowledges this fact, lest they begin to scream.

“Well,” says the woman, “I hate to inconvenience you. As a matter of fact little Janie and I need to stretch our legs, don’t we Janie?”

“Bletch our blegs, bletch our blegs.”

“Tell you what. I’ll have a smoke while you’re gone and when you get back I’ll teach little Janie how to whistle.”

Is that so hard? Okay, okay. Is it impossible?

What if
graciousness
became a widespread habit? It would offset a lot of smoke in the atmosphere. There are more powerful carcinogens around than cigarette smoke, and self-righteousness may well be one of them.

Then too, umbrage is as fierce an addiction as smoking. So let me address the user and the bluenose who get wind of each other:

Eschew tense snappiness, which is bad for the blood pressure. Welcome the chance to blow off steam, not snidely but with eloquence and gesticulation. Hand-waving and a brisk flow of words help clear the air. They also provide some of the satisfactions of smoking. And you never know when Ted Koppel will happen by and invite you both to go on “Nightline.”

I
AM THE FIRST
to admit that Brunswick stew, which I think the world of, lacks the mystique of chili. I don’t admit for one minute that the Southwest has any notion of real barbecue, but I will admit freely that those folks out there have generated more mystique around their chili than Southeasterners like me have around Brunswick stew.

You never read about Brunswick stew-offs, where people compete to put the finest, hottest, most natural, and hairiest (figuratively speaking) ingredients together into the most definitive bowl of mushy, tangy, reddish-brown-with-yaller-specks stuff.

This is partly because, what kind of hat would you wear to a Brunswick stew-off? And partly because Brunswick Stewoff sounds like the son of an Anglophiliac movie agent.

“Chili” is a sexier term than “Brunswick stew.” If you doubt it, try saying “chili-chili-chili-chili-
hoo
-pah!” in a bouncy, finger-popping kind of tone and then try the same thing with “Brunswick-stew-Brunswick-stew-ick …” I don’t think you will get as far as the
hoo-pah
. No one enjoys setting out toward a
hoo-pah
and bogging down.

On the other hand a long slow rolling “Bruuuuu
uhn
-z-wick stoooo” has resonance. So if the Brunswick stew industry (should there be one) were to hire the right public-relations firm, and change the name slightly so that someone could throw in a lot of extra hot sauce and market Third-Degree
Burns
wick Stew, it would probably become commonplace within the next few years to find out that your daughter is rooming with a former stew princess at some fancy college.

But I would hate to see Brunswick stew blown out of proportion. I think that’s what has happened to chili, frankly. Chili to me is like peaches: even out of a can it’s not bad. In fact that’s the only way I ever had it until I was twenty-three years old. That’s why you have to make a mystique of chili, to justify not eating it out of a can.

Whereas Brunswick stew isn’t put out by Hormel; it just crops up, at barbecues and in barbecue places. No one knows what is in it. It may be a by-product of the hickory-smoking process — resulting when small animals running somewhere with ears of corn in their mouths tumble into the open pit.

And sometimes it’s not good. Sometimes. I will urge some people who have never had Brunswick stew (nobody but a Russian has never had chili) to try it, and I’ll tell them it’s named for General Lionel Brunswick, who discovered that you can mix anything with okra, and I’ll assure them that boy, do they have a treat in store for them. And then it will arrive and it won’t be good, sometimes.

That’s why I’m glad Brunswick stew doesn’t have the mystique that chili has. Anybody who has ever glanced at an in-flight magazine knows what goes into authentic chili: antelope chunks, hand-chewed Guatemalan cumin, individually seeded and dried chili peppers (only the ones that point upward on the bush) from the Aiyaiyai region of Oaxaca, and no beans, because chili in a can has beans. But no one, even the Brunswick family, can say for sure what goes into Brunswick stew, or what doesn’t.

Which means that I can be authoritative about it. When people complain that this Brunswick stew I have touted them onto is not good, I can roll a bite of it around against my upper palate, gaze off into the middle distance with my eyes closed except for tiny contemplative slits, and observe, with no tinge of defensiveness, “Yeah, this is a little off. Prob’ly used a rabid squirrel.”

T
HE FIRST THING I
look for is whether I am in it. Many mornings — the majority of mornings — I am not. This fuels my belief that the
Times
has me black- or at least brown-listed. Every writer who is neither rich nor a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters has a right to this belief. William Styron is in the
Times
nearly every morning, being either reviewed or quoted. Sure! He probably goes skiing with those guys!

The second thing I look for in the
Times
is something juicy. This may seem quixotic. I realize that the
Times
gives the impression that it doesn’t want to admit that there actually is anything in the world that Weegee would have liked to photograph. But when there does occur a murder or an accidental squashing that the newspaper of record cannot in all good conscience overlook, the
Times
always comes up with good obscure details. Several years ago the
Times
ran a story about a helicopter crash that killed twenty-one people being transported to Disneyland. A witness was quoted as saying, “Two small gears and a dime hit me on the chest.”

I don’t mean to outrage traditionalists, but I recommend looking in the
Times
for signs of writing that is not wholly institutional. It’s there. It’s like little rustles of life in the forest primeval: it’s there if you look for it.

But don’t tell anybody.

I
WAS TALKING TO
a grade-school teacher the other day. She said some of her students were wholly nonplussed by the concept of clockwise, and she had figured out why: all the timepieces they had been exposed to were digital.

What is Western culture going to do without the concept of clockwise? How are newspapers going to identify people in group photographs?

The one just to the left of the water pitcher there is Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: The one to her left — not to your, the reader’s, left, which is to say what has just been referred to as “the” left, but rather to her. (Mrs. Thatcher’s) left — is Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Okay, now, keep moving in that direction in an orbital manner, so to speak. Pretend you are revolving around the ice sculpture there, and …

Whatever else may be miniaturized in the years ahead, it won’t be photo captions.

But I haven’t got time to worry about the impact of electronic wizardry on newspapers. I am too busy worrying about the impact of it on me.

In my own home.

There is a word processor in my home.

“Word processor,” indeed! That thing doesn’t know what words are. A word, to that thing, is whatever comes between spaces. That thing would just as soon process
tbldgk
as it would
mellifluous.
Unless it has some kind of correct-spelling program in it, in which case it would probably refuse to process
tbldgk
on the grounds that there is no such entity that fits between spaces. So you see, this essay could not have been written on that thing.

But I realize that is not your, the reader’s, problem. So let me ask you this. You have a VCR in your home? You have any children in your home that drink Kool-Aid?

In our case, by all firsthand accounts, no particular child was involved. It was one of those spontaneous Kool-Aid spills that happen. But only children were present. It cost S270 to fix.

One jelly glass of Kool-Aid tips itself over into the VCR, and there goes $270. You know why? Because when it comes to these electronic things, there are too many angels in there dancing on the head of a pin. If man had been meant to compress so many angels that he could drown $270 worth of them with one glass of Kool-Aid, he would have been given children who might be pinned down and held liable for such sums.

Had the VCR been a Stradivarius, the Kool-Aid could have been wiped off with a sponge. If it had been my Royal standard manual typewriter, bought used nineteen years ago, nobody would ever have noticed. You’d have to spill a pot of chili into my typewriter to make it operate any worse than it does already. Can you imagine what it probably costs to spill a
spoonful
of chili into a word processor? I don’t even want to think about it. Forget I mentioned it. And I like to eat while I’m working.

My wife, Joan Ackermann-Blount, and I both write. At home. A cottage industry. Our 115-year-old house in the Berkshires used to be a parsonage. It had too many angels dancing in it already, before electronic wizardry started crowding in. But I had some faint idea of how to deal with those angels. I could imagine why the house creaked where it creaked (someday, unless I am just saying this, I intend to shim up the old floorboards), and why it leaked where it leaked (because New England pipes get a kick out of freezing when they are owned by someone from Georgia), and what made that skittering sound within the walls (an escaped hamster named Sherry, or her ghost).

The more electronic our home becomes, however, the more it becomes the department of the electronicians. If an electronician tells me it costs, say, $1,140 to fix a word processor that has had Kool-Aid spilled into it, how am I going to argue? It’s like being kidnapped by savages and told I’m going to have to paint my head blue. What am I going to say? “That doesn’t sound right to me”?

I’ll tell you what doesn’t sound right to me. That word processor we’ve got now. When you type on it you have to be gentle, and it makes a little twiddly noise. (I don’t want to twiddle out a story, I want to bang one out. I want to be saying to my typewriter, “Take that! Take that!” Because I know my typewriter is going to be saying back, “Yeah, right.”) And when the printer prints, it makes the sound of someone doggedly running a fingernail back and forth over the teeth of a comb.

So how did it get into our house?

Well, I’ll admit, I have gone back and forth on this word processor question. For years I said, firmly, “Nope. Not me. Just give me a stub pencil, an eyeshade, and a wet whistle, and I can turn out as much copy as anybody else can on one of these futuristic deals that require eighty books of instructions and a backup generator.”

People would say, “I actually find I write better on a word processor.” I’d say, “Uh-huh. Isn’t it a shame Flaubert didn’t have one?”

But then all the newspapers in the land and half my friends converted, and I started saying, “Well, I guess it’s coming. We might as well face it. We are all going to be using one of those gadgets someday.”