Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (20 page)

An assistant came into Voldemar Vetluguin's office while I was sitting with him and showed him a report from a legal group in New York. The report said that lawyers had been portrayed as evil in 83 out of 100 parts they had played in Hollywood movies in the previous five years.

Vetluguin looked at the report for a minute, then handed it back to the assistant.

“Eighty-three out of a hundred?” he said. “Write back and say we gave lawyers a break.”

Until businessmen stop buying and selling each other and get back to paying some attention to making something other than money, a lot of people are going to feel they get a break in the movies.

Last year, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, I was driving through one of the poorest sections of New York City, thinking how unpleasant it was. There was garbage everywhere. Unemployed young men who
looked unemployable were hanging around the broken-down steps in front of the deteriorating brownstone houses, doing nothing.

A light changed to red in front of me and, as I pulled to a stop, I locked the car doors from inside. Across the street, two men approached a third standing in a doorway. There was an exchange among them, but the light turned, the man in the car behind me blew his horn and I moved on. I assumed I'd seen a drug purchase. I wondered whose car radio the buyers had stolen or whose house they'd broken into to get the money to buy the drugs. I wasn't in a court of law. I wasn't even speaking my thoughts to anyone. Sitting alone in the car, I could think all the prejudiced thoughts I wanted to in the privacy of my own brain.

“Scum,” I thought to myself.

At the next light, a boy about seventeen approached me with a dirty, wet sponge on the end of a stick. He was going to make a gesture toward washing my windshield in the hope I'd give him some change. This is a common practice in New York City where traffic piles up coming on or off a bridge or highway. Young boys, always black, congregate there with their pails of soapy water. It's a sophisticated form of blackmail. When one of these kids comes toward your car, there's an implied threat. They seldom do any better than make a mess of your windshield, so almost no one really welcomes them. If you don't respond with at least a quarter, they often dab your windshield with one quick stroke, leaving a dirty smear for you to clean off yourself.

If you wave them off as they approach your car, the clever ones often say, “Hey man, it better than bein' out there stealin'.”

Some drivers are angered, others shrug and pay up. A few feel the kids are at least showing a kind of ambitious enterprise that the ones buying drugs or sitting on the front steps doing nothing day after day are not.

Fortunately, on this day, the light changed before the boy with the dirty sponge could get to my windshield. I held my hand out the window with a quarter in it for him and drove off with mixed feelings. Does a quarter absolve me of any responsibility for his condition? Do I have any responsibility?

At the next light I was still contemplating poverty. If you have enough money yourself, it's easy to get to thinking it's their own fault. I was thinking a little of that when I had to stop a third time for a light. A simply dressed black woman stood on the curb holding a boy about seven and a girl eight by the hands. She glanced directly through my windshield to engage my eyes. The woman wanted to assure herself
that I had seen her before she crossed in front of the car with her small children.

Each of the two kids had on a new pair of sneakers. They looked nervous but eager. Under their arms were little paper briefcases, which I decided contained new pencils, erasers and rulers the mother had bought for the children at the ten-cent store. The woman was obviously taking her two children to their first day of school for the new year.

Every negative thought I'd been having about the area disappeared from my mind. I was touched by the loving concern of this mother for her children. She could have been any mother anywhere in the world, rich or poor, black or white. She wanted her children to feel comfortable and protected going to school that first day. She was apprehensive for them, but determined that they be educated.

When the light turned, I pulled away, embarrassed at the prejudiced thought I'd had about the people living in this poor area.

DILEMMAS
 

A Time to Cast Away Stones

Our trash collector comes twice a week but this isn't enough for Margie. No, this recently born-again neat freak, who until yesterday was as messy as I am, gets religion and calls a guy in the Yellow Pages to cart stuff away for $25. Suddenly she's Mrs. Clean.

I am much perplexed by what has come over her until I learn that there will be a meeting of nine women on her speakers' committee in our living room Thursday morning. Presumably they won't be able to decide who to get to speak next fall if we don't have the trash in our driveway carted away before sundown Wednesday.

At the appointed time, a truck arrives with not one, but two trash men and they are trash men to behold. They are stripped to the waist and ready for heavy work. I'd strip to the waist more often myself if I was as muscular as they are. The truck is a compactor with capacity enough to crush all the junk in our town any given day. It is all ours today.

We have put some things in the driveway for them and Margie still is hunting for more. The pile consists of some old boards from a packing case the new refrigerator came in, a Coleman stove that never worked, some branches, fifty feet of hose that leaks and two plastic pails with holes in them. I could get the whole mess in the trunk of my car.

“Where's the stuff?” one of the men asks, standing three feet in front of the stuff. We point.

“Is that all?” He wouldn't have brought all his muscles if he'd known there was that little.

“What about those old skis,” Margie says, and I'm not putting a question mark after that because she isn't asking me. She is planning to throw away the skis.

“They're beautiful,” I say. “They're hickory.”

“Yes,” she says, “and you've had them since you were in high school. They're the kind they had before they wore ski boots and bindings. You just kicked the toes of your shoes into the leather strap.”

“I like them,” I say.

“What about that old tire in the back of the shed? Why don't they take that?”

“It's not an old tire,” I say. “It's perfectly good. It doesn't have a thousand miles on it!”

“Yes, but you haven't owned a car it would fit for ten years.”

“What if I get a car someday that it does fit?”

“Ridiculous,” Margie snaps. “I suppose that's why you're keeping that broken shovel too, and that rusty lawn fertilizer. What about the half-bag of cement? Or is that a rock you put in that bag? What good is that board over there … the one you screwed the roller-skate wheels to when you wanted to move the refrigerator?”

“You can throw out the cement,” I concede.

“What about the shovel?”

“I'm going to get a new handle for it.”

“And that bicycle is no good. It doesn't even have gears. It's just taking up space.”

“It's a good bike,” I say. “I'm going to clean it up and oil it someday. That's what this place is for—to store things in.”

“Not if you're never going to use them again, it isn't.”

This idea is where the line is drawn between people who want to throw things out and people who want to keep them. When I keep something, it is not always with the idea that it ever will be useful to me again. There are useless things taking up space everywhere in my life that I keep because I like.

If I die with these possessions, someone else can throw them out. Someone it won't hurt to dispose of them. Why should I do it if it hurts?

“Oh say,” Margie says to the two men, “come up the back stairs a minute, will you?”

A minute later they emerge with the crib we have kept in the house for Christmas and other visits from grandchildren. We have four children—three married, one unmarried. We have three grandchildren now, Justin, Ben and Alexis. Alexis is the youngest but she's five.

I hope Brian doesn't find out his mother has given up hope and thrown away the crib.

There are a lot of ordinary things I find hard to do. I either can't do them at all or I do them badly. For instance, I can't:

—Pack a suitcase neatly.

—Make a bed. I couldn't do it to the first sergeant's satisfaction in the army and I can't do it to Margie's satisfaction now. I don't try often.

—Attach a hose to an outside faucet without having it leak. New rubber washers don't help.

—Cut the fingernails on my right hand with the clipper in my left hand.

—Hold a telephone between my shoulder and my ear while I try to write something down.

—Open a waxed cardboard milk container. I usually forget to look to see which side I'm supposed to crimp open.

—Take ice-cube trays filled with water from the sink to the refrigerator without spilling water on the floor.

—Adjust to the approach of the year 2000. On the radio I heard them say they'd probably be sending a spaceship to Mars in 2003 because Mars will be close to Earth that year. They said it matter-of-factly as if the year 2003 were just around the corner. I don't think of it that way and frankly, I don't care what year Mars will be close to the Earth because I know what I'll be fourteen years closer to in the year 2003.

—Press a pair of pants. I end up with two creases up the front of each leg.

—Draw a sketch of something on a piece of paper to describe to someone what I'm talking about. This includes trying to draw a map for directions.

—Sign my name so a stranger can read it. Someone said an illegible signature is the sign of an egotist. I agree with that and I hope I'm not an egotist but, for the life of me, I can't write my name legibly.

—Sharpen a knife properly. I remember my grandfather shaved with a straight razor. Every morning he'd run the blade over a stone a few times and then slap it back and forth against a leather strop. It was called a strop, not a strap. The blade was always, proverbially, razor sharp. I can't get an edge on a kitchen knife, even my good pre-stainless steel knives.

—Read for more than an hour. I admire people who can settle in with a good book for three or four hours at a time but I get restless after forty-five minutes and usually put down the book and do something else. I blame it on my glasses but I think it's my mind that's inadequate, not my glasses.

—Put anything back in the package it came in. The Japanese genius is nowhere better exhibited than in the way their products come packed, but if you have to take it back, don't ask me to try to repack it.

I wouldn't want you to think I'm being unnecessarily modest by suggesting there's nothing I do well. There are things I do well. For instance, I can:

—Guess exactly what time it is when I wake up in the middle of the night.

—Eat a Chinese meal with chopsticks.

—Make salad dressing. Paul Newman bottles and sells his, but mine is better.

—Park a car in a space no more than eight inches longer than the car is.

If the class will please come to order, today we'll take up the word
reverend
.

It appears now as though Jesse Jackson will be part of the American political scene for years to come and we might as well get his title right. According to every book on grammar that I can find, it is wrong, incorrect, ungrammatical and dumb to call Jesse Jackson “Reverend Jackson.”

If you decide to use his ecclesiastical title just to stick it to him, as some people are doing, you may choose to continue using that somewhat comic “Reverend Jackson.” If you mean it as a sign of respect, however, the proper form is “the Reverend Mr. Jackson” or “the Reverend Jesse Jackson.” The word
reverend
is an adjective. It must be followed by either a title, like “Mr.” or by a first name or initials. Catholics call Pope John Paul “His Holiness Pope John Paul.” They
do not call him “Holiness John Paul,” which would be something like calling Jesse Jackson “Reverend Jackson.”