Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (40 page)

One bitter-cold January day I arrived in New York during a raging snowstorm with nothing but a small suitcase, a portable typewriter and high hopes for a job from an interview I was to have with an advertising agency. The job interview left a bad taste in my mouth for job interviews that lingers after thirty years. Who do job interviewers think they are? They sit there, all smug and certain of their righteousness, ready to blackball the applicant for the look of his haircut, the sound of his voice or because of his “bad attitude.”

I was curtly dismissed after a brief interview and walked out into the
snow that was swirling through the canyons of the city. How would I tell Margie the interview came to nothing and that I was still without a job? It was 4:30 and darkening. I walked the fourteen blocks to the Y with my suitcase and typewriter. It was important to save the dime a bus ride would have cost me.

At the front desk at the Y they weren't sure they could give me a room. Please wait and come back in half an hour. I went to a nearby Automat cafeteria and spent 55 cents for dinner—a hard roll, rice and fricassee chicken.

The Automat was good and there were always people there worse off than I was. The desperate ones made soup by pouring ketchup in the bottom of a cup and adding the free hot water meant for tea.

I felt better after my dinner and made my way back to the Y. Glory be, a room was available. I took the key, bought a nickel candy bar at the newsstand and went to the room.

That may have been the best hotel room I ever had. It was warm and cozy. Through the window I could see the cold, cruel world outside and that made it seem even better. I turned over one of the drawers in the dresser and slid it back in upside down so that I could use the bottom of the drawer as a table for my typewriter.

Because the rooms were all occupied by men, you could walk down the hall wrapped in a towel then. I undressed, tied on my towel and walked to the bathroom, where I took a beautifully warm, steamy shower. How good, I thought, that the YMCA can provide such hot water on so cold a day.

Back in my room, I put on my pajamas, unwrapped the Milky Way and sat down in front of the upside-down drawer to write.

The job interviewer at the ad agency was rotten, I thought to myself, but the whole world is not rotten … not when the people at the YMCA provide something like this for an anonymous person like me.

For every letter I actually write and mail, I compose a hundred in my head. Here are some samples of the kinds of letters I think of writing.

To the boss.

To the owner of the gas-station garage.

I've often written unmailed letters to the president of the bank:

Look at it this way. I've just saved myself 75 cents for not mailing these.

It would be nice if all of us could use the instant-replay system in our lives to decide whether we made the right decision.

For those of you who don't follow professional football, it should be explained that when the officials on the field make a call and there's some doubt about whether they are right, other officials in a booth above the playing field review the play from all camera angles available to them on television. If there are eight cameras trained on the action, all shooting from a different position, the officials can look at the play
from all eight angles and have a better chance of deciding what really happened.

That's what I'd like to do with my life. I'd like to have eight cameras trained on everything I do and then, when I make a mistake, I could replay it and see what I did wrong. Too often I can't remember exactly what I did or why I made the decision I did.

Last night I started to pull the car into the garage. I've done it thousands of times but this time I heard a terrible scraping, crunching noise and realized I'd caught the right side of the car on the side of the garage door. I'd like to review that.

By the time I was ready to go to bed, I realized I'd eaten too much for dinner. I'd like to review all eight camera angles of me at dinner last night to see if I can determine exactly where I went wrong. Next time we have it, I think I'd reverse my decision to have another helping of linguine with white clam sauce and I know darn well I'd overrule my call for more ice cream.

There are hundreds of decisions I've made that I'd like to see again:

—It would be interesting to replay the conversation Margie and I had when we decided to live in Connecticut instead of New York or California.

—The details of how we ended up with three cars for two people are vague to me. I'd like to see that again.

—If there had been cameras in the store where I bought the terrible-looking suit that doesn't fit me, I'd like to look carefully at those pictures to determine whether the salesman was out of bounds.

To be given a second chance, after reviewing the evidence and the facts, would change all our lives, I suspect three out of every ten important decisions I make would turn out to have been wrong if it were possible to go back over them and spend some time looking at every aspect of the problem.

The NFL owners are meeting in Phoenix, and the question of instant replay is on their agenda. They're talking about eliminating the rule that calls for it. I can't imagine why.

The instant replay has been a great satisfaction to both players and fans. They all get a better deal. I should think that even the officials would like it because they've come off looking good. The instant-replay feature was invoked 490 times in 210 football games and the officials were found to have been wrong only fifty-seven times. In other words, they were right almost 90 percent of the time. We should all have such a good right/wrong average in the decisions we make.

One objection NFL owners have is that it takes the officials in the
booth too long to make their decision. That's true, but it takes advertisers too long to sell their stuff in the commercials too, yet the owners don't complain about that.

Instead of eliminating instant replay from one sport, it should be spread to all sports where television cameras are present. Anytime you watch a baseball game, you see two or three bad calls a game. Some are so obvious that even the home-team rooting announcers can spot a bad call that went in favor of their team. The World Series would be improved with instant replay.

Baseball and I should both have instant replay so we could review what has just happened and correct our mistakes.

My old school classmate Howard Hageman has done very well in religion and he was the guest preacher at the beautiful little New England church in our tiny upstate New York town. I liked Howard in school and I was curious about how he did it, so I went to church.

When I knew Howard best, he was manager of our undefeated high school football team. He went to Harvard and subsequently became president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary.

There were thirty-nine people in church Sunday morning, a pretty good crowd. The interior of the church is perfect. It is absolutely plain, about sixty feet across and eighty feet long, painted a kind of Williamsburg off-white. There are twelve rows of pews, divided by a center aisle. The minister stands at a simple mahogany lectern, framed by two white, fluted columns that go from the floor to the roof.

Howard greeted the congregation and then, before asking the members to pray, and realizing some of the people had come a distance to hear him, said that if anyone had to go to the bathroom after the service, they could do it at the Palmer House Café just up the street.

The Palmer House is one of the best things that ever happened to our town. It's a serious little restaurant that has even arranged to get the Sunday papers so we no longer have to drive twelve miles for them. Sunday morning I can pick up four fresh-baked cinnamon Danish and
The New York Times
by eight o'clock.

When the restaurant opened two years ago, it was having trouble
getting a liquor license because it was less than the two hundred-foot state-mandated distance from the church.

The Palmer House has a wine license now and it sounds as though it has arrived at some quid pro quo with the church: The people who pray can go to the bathroom at the restaurant and the restaurant can have a wine license only 198 feet from the last pew.

Howard has gained a lot of weight but he has gained a lot of presence too. He's no Jimmy Swaggart, but he knows how to do it. He began by speaking to us about the Lord and was very professional with his change of pace and change of volume. He would speak softly for a minute and then, with a dramatic gesture, turn up the volume and shout at us. He was good and never at a loss for words.

The congregation was good too. Everyone in it but me knew when to stand and when to sit down. I was brought up a Presbyterian but had forgotten that they don't kneel. Howard said he was Dutch Reformed but later at lunch when I asked him to explain the difference, he was enjoying his chicken salad and deflected the question.

During prayers, Howard called on the Lord to end all wars, heal the sick, console the grieving and also asked Him to “give His blessing to this country and this land.” I'll be interested to see what happens. The theme of Howard's sermon posed the question of whether people are happier now than they were two hundred years ago when our small town was founded. He said that just because we have all these “instruments of pleasure” doesn't mean we're happier.

“Pleasure,” Howard said, “is doing what we like to do.” There was a clear implication in his sermon that this could lead us to what he called “the hell of fire.” Being a pleasure seeker myself, I was uneasy.

When Howard and I were in the academy together, we attended chapel every morning and sang four or five songs, including one hymn. I love those hymns I learned and I thought Howard was letting me down until the last one he chose.

It was one called “Love Divine.” It starts: “Love's divine all love's excelling.” My favorite line is: “Take away our bent to sinning alpha and omega be.” I never knew what it meant but it was great to sing.

Howard was tough on us sinners, and I was pleased to note at lunch that Howard himself is mortal, when he smoked ten instruments of pleasure in a little more than an hour.

Next time Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union comes to the United States, I'd like to show him around. A visit here would be a college education for him and I'm not sure he'd want to go back.

It would be fun to show Gorbachev around. I think a visit here would change any Russian's attitude toward the United States. We'll never do it by arguing with them. Most Russians are better informed about communism than the average American is about democracy and capitalism, but if every Soviet citizen spent just one day in the United States, it would be more effective than all the talking that has ever been done.