Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (7 page)

Then someone said, “Yep. They say it more closely approximates the workings of the human mind.”

And it occurred to me: who wants to approximate — if mine is any example — the workings of the human mind? I know my typewriter doesn’t want to. The great thing about my typewriter is its native toughness. Every couple of years it seems to be getting crankier than usual, but then a bent screw falls out of its insides and it settles back down. None of these screws has had to be replaced. In four places, my typewriter is held together with duct tape. My typewriter is from the old school, and doesn’t want to wade through a lot of fancy convolutions. My typewriter is always saying to my mind, “Hey, let’s tighten this up.”

So the next time somebody said, “I actually find I write better on a word processor,” I said, “Uh-huh. That’s what they used to say about drugs.”

But then the whole question of storage and retrieval came up. It was explained to me that you could pump cratefuls of information into a word processor, and those angels would tamp it all down into a little disk, and when you wanted any of it back you just pushed a button and those angels would find it for you.

That is something my typewriter will not do. My typewriter sits in the midst of stacks and clumps and windrows of information-filled paper. If I were to ask my typewriter to retrieve something from all this mess, it would look at me as if I were out of my human mind. I can usually find what I am looking for, myself, but when I come up with it I feel like I have finally caught a rabbit after chasing it through flocks and flocks of chickens.

And there are feathers all over the house. My store of information threatens to overwhelm, without in the least enlightening, the household. I have files that creak louder than the floorboards do, folders that shed worse than the cats. Sometimes I feel bad about this.

So when Joan — who hates a digital clock because it doesn’t have a face — and my son John — who won’t even use an aluminum bat — started saying we ought to get a word processor, I thought, well, no cottage industry can afford to drag its feet. And it’s hard not to drag them when there are papers up to your ankles. Maybe we ought to modernize, I thought.

Then we talked price. And I started yelling, “No! No! It’s right here in the Bill of Rights somewhere, that no citizen shall be required to lay out two thousand dollars in order to express himself! And what happens when people start splashing Kool-Aid around?”

So Joan bought a word processor on her own.

That’s why we have it in our house.

And a script I wrote is filed away in it. Because that way, when I have to make revisions, I don’t have to re-bang out the entire thing. I can just twiddle in the revisions and, presto, let the printer plickplickplick out a new whole.

Only the revised script is due now. And there is something wrong with the printer. Its old ribbon is exhausted, after one run-through, and it refuses to accept a new one. (My typewriter doesn’t give up on a ribbon until it has been reduced to ribbons.) So what am I supposed to do? Take a series of photographs of the script as it appears in segments on the word processor’s screen, and mail those in? The electronicians have been summoned.

As I await these divines, I am feeling less guilty about my mess of papers. One thing about my mess of papers, I can always get my hands on it. In fact I have to dig out from under it every time I get up from my typewriter.

And I am always finding things I never knew I had. For instance, I just found a copy of the
Times
from December 7, 1968, which I saved because my son was born the day before. And look what else was happening that day:

PUBLIC TO TAPE-RECORD IDEAS FOR NIXON

White Plains, Dec. 6 — Aides to Richard Nixon are planning to try out electronic listening posts in Westchester County and Alabama later this month as a means to let the President-elect hear from “the forgotten American.”

A spokesman at Mr. Nixon’s New York office said today the pilot projects were designed to test “a means of finding out what people are thinking and what the issues and problems are.”

Volunteers for the project in this suburban county … said they were planning to take tape machines into schools, colleges, town meetings and rich and poor neighborhoods to record the attitudes of people who want to reach their Government. …

What if Nixon had stuck with this program, and expanded it to the point where he was tape-recording everybody in the nation
except
himself? What if our government had placed a tape recorder in every American home?

I think I am going to go mix up a pitcher of Kool-Aid.

A
FEW YEARS AGO,
before nakedness became old hat, I was standing near Times Square looking at an opaque storefront behind which, according to a boldly lettered sign, you could talk to a nude woman. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would do, but, I stood there wondering what it would be like, what I would say to her, whether she would feel obliged to respond.

As I began to move on, I found myself surrounded by green arms: an army colonel and a staff sergeant materialized, passed each other and me at the same time, and exchanged crisp salutes.

Although these two may have been the only servicemen in the entire midtown area, their eyes did not meet. You can tell by looking at a person’s eyes whether they are meeting someone else’s. Both men were in fact angling their attention toward the TALK TO A NUDE WOMAN sign, but at any rate each of them addressed himself, quite properly, to the uniform, not the man.

I sensed an epiphany, or at least a
déjà vu.
Except that there seemed to be an element missing. I turned back to the storefront. What if the woman were actually quite good company: hearty, secure, at peace, her skin tautly billowy like a flag?

Still, you might be at some pains to give her the impression that so far as you were concerned, she was not the only fish in the sea. And she might want to convey that although you might be with a large accounting firm, and her own occupation was being talked to nude, she was not your bit of fluff.

It hit me. What was missing.

Then she came out, slightly but not unfetchingly crosseyed, and wearing — something loose. I can never, except where they are revealing, describe women’s clothes. But hers reminded me of the time in seventh grade when I showed up at my girlfriend Amy’s house unexpectedly the afternoon before a Methodist hayride I was taking her to and she seemed more domestic than she did at school. She smelled of hand lotion, something I did not understand the appeal of. Her hair was wet, and she was wearing the kind of flapabout clothes one’s mother wore while giving herself a home permanent. Then, through fabric, I descried the unsegmented line of Amy’s whole flank. I didn’t recall having seen that line, moving and unbroken by band or ruffle, before.

Amy, flustered, offered me a Coke. While she was getting it, I sat down. Her orange-and-white cat jumped into my lap and started kneading my crotch in an embarrassing way. I half stood, but the cat clung. I pulled at the cat, the cat sank its claws into me, and I was hopping, hunched, trying to wrangle the cat loose, when Amy came in with my Coke.

“Mister Fluff!”
she cried, and her eyes filled with tears.

Well, that was the element. When this nude woman in mufti came out of the storefront, she was carrying a plush but alert-looking gray cat. You know how hard it is to pin down a cat’s focus, but this one gave me a look, I thought, as his mistress went pitter-pat on high heels right by me, sprang into a taxi, and was gone.

Did she hold the cat, stroking it, in her lap or at her bosom, as she was being talked to? Did she let visitors touch it? Certain visitors? When I am trying to concentrate on something, cats drive me crazy, and yet I am drawn to them. To pet the cat of a not unfetching woman who is tangibly unavailable, as she watches, I imagine would be exciting but not salutary.

Associations were gathering quickly now. The salutes by which I had just been bracketed were the first I had seen in some time. They took me back to the mid-sixties, when nudity and antimilitarism were growing rampant among the young, and I was a callow, married army lieutenant. Other twenty-three-year-old Americans were daubing “Peace” and “Love” on their foreheads and filling the picture magazines with Human Be-Ins. I had grown up imprinted with sentiments like “Do your bit” and “If you must talk to a nude woman, start a family.”

What adults did, I had gathered, was marry, for life; Paul had told the Corinthians that it was better to marry than to burn. I had been burning since the seventh grade. So I married. And suddenly the conscience of America was single, anti-grown-up, and running around naked at Make Love Not War rallies.

These youths must have come along a few years too late to be affected, as I had been in 1949 at the age of eight, by
The Sands of Iwo Jima,
in which John Wayne plays a sergeant who turns raw recruits into fighting men. Since I was palpably raw, and I loved playing gun battle, and John Wayne was John Wayne, that movie struck me with the force of an imperative.

Looking at it today, you might think that
The Sands of Iwo Jima
would put a decent-minded boy off warfare, since it features the broiling of what John Wayne calls “little lemon-colored characters” in pillboxes. But you don’t have the feeling that John Wayne enjoys that kind of thing. The movie’s great theme is the difficulty of getting through to people.

Wayne keeps trying to strike a rapport with John Agar, who plays a raw recruit whose father, a legendary colonel, was killed in action. Wayne’s own son (from whom he is now estranged) is named after Agar’s father, under whom Wayne once served. Agar, for his part, is bitter toward his father, who regarded Agar as “too soft.” At mail call Agar learns of the birth of
his
son. When Wayne tries to congratulate him, Agar tells Wayne, coldly, pointedly, “I won’t insist that he read the Marine Corps manual. Instead I’ll get him a set of Shakespeare.”

Wayne’s eyes narrow, but with feeling. “I’ve tried every approach to you that I know, and got nowhere,” he tells Agar. Eventually the two of them become close, after Agar saves Wayne’s life by dispatching an impending Asian with an entrenching tool. Agar says, “There’s something I’ve been trying to say, but I just can’t seem to find the words.”

Wayne says, “You mean you been to two universities and still can’t find the words to say you been out of line?”

Then we see Wayne get killed by a sniper, and the famous flag-raising scene. Inside Wayne’s shirt Agar finds a letter to Wayne’s son that says, “Always do what your heart tells you is right.”

I don’t say, even in retrospect, that this is bad advice. But it doesn’t clear up the obliqueness in
The Sands of Iwo Jima,
which I never quite got out of my system. Furthermore, the notion that becoming a fighting man was profoundly connected with adulthood stuck with me, through two universities, all the way up until I entered the army. It was ROTC camp that took the pleasure out of weapons for me. To get our attention, one Korea-vet instructor went
fwooof
with a flamethrower and said, “Presto! Chinese hamburger!” By then I was already sworn in.

I embarked upon two years of bureaucratic lieutenancy. The Vietnam buildup began. I was unable to see the point of burning villages in order to save them. I
could
see a certain appeal, for a guy my age, in friendly nude anarchy. I was living in married-junior-officer quarters and exchanging salutes.

When saluted by young men who had the good taste to be not only disaffected soldiers, like me, but also uncommissioned, I felt what is known as role strain. And they knew it. Once I fell from a bicycle in front of a leaf-raking detail — three stockade prisoners whose sudden salute I tried to return while pedaling, balancing, and holding on to some papers. I and the papers fell into the leaves. The prisoners remained at attention. “Let’s all desert!” I felt like saying, but I was in no position to.

What you were supposed to say when you ran into a knot of enlisted men who were engaged in the accomplishment of their mission was “Carry on.” I didn’t like the sound of it. Even when not climbing out of a pile of leaves, I tried to give “Carry on” a tongue-in-cheek twist, but then it seemed to imply too racy an authorization. What if some specialist 4, caught body-painting a general’s daughter, were to exclaim, “But this lieutenant said I was to carry on”?

What really bothered me, though, was being saluted by a topkick or a sergeant major who looked as if he might have served with John Wayne at Iwo Jima. Clear as it was to me that the army at the upper levels did not know what it was doing, it was just as clear that this sergeant was my superior in years, training, job responsibility, and devotion to duty. He would signal himself officially beneath me with a salute snappy enough to cut ice, a salute that, however, leaned over backward not to contain any hint of “You mooncalf, sir.” I tried to develop a
wry
return-of-salute, but that is difficult.

I was myself required, of course, to salute superior officers — not as an oppressed person, which would have fit my mood, but as an accomplice. Here I showed some sixties spirit. Once, I saluted a major who was using one hand to take a last drag on a cigarette and the other to hold his hat on against the wind. A colonel would just have nodded, but this major, a young one, lost his hat and bit through his cigarette. Even a full bird colonel could be made to feel overacknowledged, I found, if saluted from fifty yards away, or while he was playing golf, or while the saluter was having a tooth filled.

A general, on the other hand, could not be made to feel that he was being shown undue respect. A general could seldom be made to feel that he was being shown anything. On Governors Island, New York, where I was stationed for a year, it was my good fortune never to serve as officer of the day, in charge of emergencies. A friend of mine named Swardlow drew that duty on the day of the big blackout of 1965, when electrical power went out all over New York City and its environs. Governors Island lies just below the downtown tip of Manhattan. Swardlow looked out his window, saw the Wall Street skyline go dark, and immediately heard the phone ring. “Brief me,” said the voice of a general.