Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (25 page)

On a newspaper, it's considered a promotion when a reporter is made an editor. Who wrote that? The editor should work for the reporter, helping, guiding and keeping the reporter from making a fool of himself or herself in print. (Reporters may stand and cheer.)

Every writer and every news organization has an obligation to get people to read or watch what they're about to tell them. That's what headlines are for. To this extent, news is show business. There's no sense putting the information out if no one's reading or watching. The danger comes for news organizations when they put too much emphasis on attracting a crowd and too little emphasis on telling the crowd anything once it's assembled. Get back in the kitchen where you belong, Sam!

I've just come from the barber and:

—My hair looks good now but it won't after I've slept on it tonight.

—If your hair looks as good after you've been to the barber as it did before you went, you've had a good haircut. This goes for women who go to the hairdresser, too.

—It shouldn't cost three times as much for a woman to have her hair cut as it costs a man. Confidentially, I think women are being taken.

—Men have their hair “cut” and women have theirs “done.” The difference in price may be right there. Having it done sounds harder and more expensive than having it merely cut.

—I like my barber, Manny. He always asks me how my kids are and I tell him. He has kids too, and I never ask him how his are.

—I give 50 cents to the man who sweeps up and keeps my coat now. That's 15 cents more than a haircut cost me when I first started getting one from Mr. Kelly on Ontario Street.

—If Manny isn't ready when I get there, I look at
Playboy
. I wouldn't call it pornographic but it's pretty dirty and the naked girls look cheaper, less attractive than they did when they wore more clothes. I can't imagine buying a copy for $3.50.

—A barber always wants to wash your hair, and if you let him, he washes it before he cuts it. The worst thing about having a haircut is all the loose hairs that go down your collar the rest of the day. The time I want my hair washed at the barber's is after I've had a haircut.

—There are fewer and fewer barber poles outside barbershops and almost none of those move anymore. Why was a candy-striped pole a sign for a barbershop anyway?

—Manny's very quick with a pair of scissors. He never once has stabbed me with the scissors even though I always fall asleep and jerk my head up when I catch myself.

—When there are more than two barbers in a shop, they don't seem to get along very well among themselves.

—What would it cost, do you think, to have a barber's chair installed in your living room in front of the television set? Before I had it done, I'd want to test a dentist's chair to see which is best.

—A haircut looks worst the second day after you get it.

—An experienced barber can talk to you in the mirror as if he were looking you right in the eye.

—From what I learn from looking in barbershop windows in New York, prices run from a low of $6 to a high of $20. For $20, a man gets his hair “styled.” “Styled,” for a man, is more like a woman having hers “done.”

—You're always seeing women who have just been to the beauty parlor. Half the time I feel like telling them they ought to demand their money back.

—You don't really appreciate how hard it is to give someone a good haircut until you've had kids and tried to save money by cutting their hair yourself.

—Getting a haircut is an event of some importance for men and having their hair done is an event of paramount importance for some women. If the possibility of something else comes up, “I have a hair appointment” takes precedence over almost everything else.

—They always have a lot of bottles of stuff. I've never tried any of it. I have a feeling it smells quite a bit.

—The worst mistake a barber can make is to try to give you your money's worth by taking off too much.

—When I left, two men were waiting for other barbers. One of them was reading
Playboy
and I thought to myself, “He looks like the type who would.”

Short skirts come and go every few years as the fashion for women. When the dress designers are pushing short skirts, it's usually apparent on the streets that the designers and the people who write about women's clothes like short skirts better than the women expected to wear them. Except for a handful of women under thirty with great-looking legs, women hate short skirts.

A woman never seems comfortable in a short skirt. Watch a woman wearing one and you can see how careful she's being. She can't sit down, bend over, get out of a car or climb a flight of stairs without wondering about the angles of someone else's vision and about how much of herself is visible.

French women who go topless at the beaches along the Mediterranean seem casual and easy with their bareness but American women in short skirts are ill at ease. Their knees are always on their minds.

I hate clothes that constantly remind me of what I'm wearing and if I were a woman I certainly wouldn't wear short, tight skirts. The clothes I like best are the clothes I put on in the morning and forget until I take them off at night. Obviously most women feel the same. When a woman gets herself together for a special event, it's right that she should put on her drop-dead outfit even if she's a little uncomfortable in it. Wearing a skirt up to here on the street, in the middle of the day, is ridiculous and rude because it intrudes on the thoughts of everyone she passes.

People have never agreed on what to wear and I suppose it's more interesting that way. If you sit in a car and watch people coming and going on a busy street, you'd never guess they all come from the same planet. The variety is incredible.

One morning last spring, it was 37 degrees when I left the house. I noticed that a lot of the men going to work in their offices were dressed differently than they would have been on a 37-degree day in the middle of winter. Some of them weren't wearing any topcoat at all over their suit jackets. On the same kind of day in the middle of winter, they'd have had on overcoats, scarves and gloves. The temperature was the same this morning as it had been on several days in January but the men's dress had been decided on not by conditions but by the calendar.

One man who catches the same train I do every morning doesn't wear a coat all winter, and he never waits inside the station, either. He takes his position on the platform, jams his hands into his pockets with his newspaper under his arm and stands and waits, eyes straight ahead. It doesn't matter if it's below zero; he stands there and takes it like twenty lashes. I've never talked to him and I can't figure out why he does it. He must have admired the Spartans. Or maybe he thinks it's good for him, like a cold shower. Maybe he's showing the weather who's boss and proving it can't intimidate him. If he were a woman, he'd probably be wearing a miniskirt.

I've never believed the “thin blood” theory. That's the idea that people who grow up in warm climates are more affected by the cold than people who grow up in the North. The same people are always cold and the same people are always hot. It doesn't matter where they come from or what the conditions are. Being hot or cold is often more a state of mind than a condition of the blood. I work with a woman in a nearby office who always has a little electric heater near her. In the summer, when the rest of us are taking all the air conditioning we can get, she turns on her heater to fight it.

The businesswomen catching the train I take to work are a small minority and it's very apparent how much more of a problem clothes are for a woman than for a man in business. It's acceptable for a man to wear the same suit to the office day after day but a woman won't wear the same dress. I suspect this is something women have imposed on themselves because men don't care whether women wear the same dress to work every day or not … as long as it doesn't have a short skirt.

At the start of the New Year, when resolutions are so popular, it's disappointing to consider how infrequently resolving to do something really works. Breaking New Year's resolutions is as much a tradition as making them.

In my lifetime I've resolved to do a thousand things I have not done. I have been determined, on countless occasions, to stop doing the things I do badly. I've promised myself to think things through more carefully, not to be so careless with money, not to eat so much, not to make so many cutting remarks either in writing or in conversation and to finish every project I start. These are my weaknesses, and I must add to those my inability to correct them by resolving to do so.

Resolve simply doesn't seem to help anyone be a better person. Alcoholics who are determined not to drink again are unable to maintain their pledge without outside help; cigarette smokers are unable to stop smoking even as they lie dying of emphysema or lung cancer. Gamblers can't stop buying lottery tickets or playing the horses even though they know that in the long run they'll lose.

I'm sympathetic to everyone with a shortcoming who tries to correct it by determination. “Me too,” I say.

We are led to put faith in resolutions because on rare occasions they do actually help. More than two years ago I noticed my arms were getting flabby and I decided to lift weights to rebuild my biceps. For what reasons I cannot say but I've stuck at curling a ten-pound weight every day for about five minutes an arm. I'm now up to doing it one hundred times with each arm and my biceps are noticeably firmer. I don't know why I've been able to do this exercise every day when I can't stick to a resolution not to eat so much ice cream. Whatever leads me to lift those weights also gives me false hope that someday I'll be thin through resolve. It's a mirage but I see it every day.

The news, recently announced, that there is scientific evidence that heredity has a great deal more to do with what we're like than the circumstances under which we live while we're growing up is seriously bad news for all of us. I hate to believe it's true. It means I'm hopelessly trapped being exactly the way I am for the rest of my life, and that isn't good enough. It means that all the people who are poor because they've
been born without much ability to succeed are having babies born with the same natural inclination to failure.

The idea that our destiny is largely determined by the genes we inherit is a discouraging thought for many reasons. For example, it diminishes the importance of education. As much as I dislike accepting the theory, my failure at self-improvement has made me so skeptical of the power of resolution to improve me that I've all but given up making resolutions.

The only hard thing I've ever decided to do and then consistently done in my adult life is to get out of bed early every morning. I've stuck at rising before the crowd through light and dark, warm and cold. Getting going early seems to be responsible for most of any success I've had. I was congratulating myself on this just now as I thought it over but I couldn't help wondering how it fit into my belief that resolutions are almost never kept.

It suddenly occurred to me that the chances are that determination and strength of character have nothing whatsoever to do with getting up in the morning. I can stop congratulating myself on having followed through on a resolution. It's simpler than that. I get up because I can't sleep.

So, Happy New Year, but for better or worse, you might as well resign yourself to being about the same this year as you were last. Chances are, those resolutions aren't going to improve your personality or lose you a pound.

Things never went very well for Jim Oakland. He dropped out of high school because he was impatient to get rich, but after dropping out he lived at home with his parents for two years and didn't earn a dime. He finally got a summer job working for the highway department holding up a sign telling oncoming drivers to be careful of the workers ahead. Later that same year, he picked up some extra money putting flyers under the windshield wipers of parked cars.

Jim was twenty-three before he left home and went to Florida, hoping his ship would come in down there. He never lost his desire to get rich but first he needed money for the rent, so he took a job near
Fort Lauderdale for $4.50 an hour servicing the goldfish aquariums kept by the cashier's counter in a lot of restaurants.

Jim was paid in cash once a week by the owner of the goldfish business and the first thing he did was go to the little convenience store near where he lived and buy $20 worth of lottery tickets. He was really determined to get rich.

Recently, the lottery jackpot in Florida reached $54 million. Jim woke up nights thinking what he could do with $54 million. During the days, he daydreamed about it. One morning he was driving along the main street in the boss's old pickup truck with six tanks of goldfish in back. As he drove past a BMW dealer, he looked at the new models in the window. He saw the car he wanted in the showroom window but unfortunately he didn't see the light change. The car in front of him stopped short and Jim slammed on his brakes. The fish tanks slid forward. The tanks broke, the water gushed out and the goldfish slithered and flopped all over the back of the truck. Some fell off into the road.

It wasn't a good day for the goldfish or for Jim, of course. He knew he'd have to pay for the tanks and 75 cents each for the fish and if it weren't for the $54 million lottery, he wouldn't have known which way to turn. He had that lucky feeling.

For the tanks and the dead goldfish, the boss deducted $114 of Jim's $180 weekly pay. Even though he didn't have enough left for the rent and food, Jim doubled the amount he was going to spend on lottery tickets. He never needed the $54 million more.