Out of My Mind (5 page)

I did not want the “Panorama Moonroof.” My old car had one (called a “sunroof ” by that manufacturer) and I never—not once—used it. I had to take the “Moonroof.”

“If you want that,” the salesman said of another feature, “it's $350 extra.”

“What if I don't want it?” I asked.

“Well, you don't have to take it, but we don't have a car on the floor right now without it.”

In every case, when they say something is “optional,” they mean it costs extra if you want it. And if you want the car, you have to take it.

“Do I get four wheels?” I asked, “or are wheels optional?”

Car salesmen are deaf to attempts at humor.

The only “optional” equipment I seem to have avoided was the “genuine leather-wrapped steering wheel.”

There are so many variations on basic models that I question whether manufacturers ever make two cars alike. Anyone looking to buy a car can't compare prices of two different kinds of cars or two different cars in the same showroom because no two are the same.

Years ago, when I was buying my first car, it was simple. I had the choice of buying a Ford, a Chevrolet, a Buick or an Oldsmobile. Maybe
I'd look at a Pontiac or a Chrysler, but I wasn't faced with 19 different models of each make. It was either a Ford or it wasn't.

Now every manufacturer puts out a dozen models, each with a different number. My car comes in an X3, an X5 or an X7. I asked why they skipped model X4 and model X6 and the salesman didn't know. He thought it was strange that I asked.

At the bottom of many of the pages in the glossy brochure for my car, there are explanations for the asterisks like:

“Optional: included in X3 3.3Oi Premium Package.”

“Halogen free-form fog lights (std on 3.3 Oi, opt on 2.5i).”

“Included in Optional Premium Package.”

What “optional” means in every case is, it isn't included on the basic car or if it is included you can't buy the car without the optional features because they don't make a car without it. I am perfectly willing to have car salesmen make a decent living. Most of them have good personalities and are pleasant to deal with, but what we all want and can't get from them is a firm price that we can compare with the price of a car we're looking at somewhere else.

I don't know what it is about them, but I remember hotels I've stayed in and I was saddened to read that the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow is being closed and torn down.

I stayed at the Rossiya twice years ago and I've never forgotten because it was the worst hotel I was ever in. The Rossiya was built by the Communist regime in 1967. At the time, it was the biggest hotel in the world—3,000 rooms. That's a lot of little cakes of soap in an American hotel but the Rossiya didn't have soap.

When you left your room at the Rossiya, you turned in your key to a woman sitting at a desk by the elevator on every floor. When you came
back, you stopped and got your key from her. The Communists always wanted to know when foreigners were coming and going.

They were proud to tell you there was a telephone in every room in the Rossiya, but they didn't tell you there was no switchboard in the hotel. If anyone wanted to call you, they had to know the number. No one knew the number, of course.

If the Rossiya was the worst hotel I ever stayed in, the best was a suite I once had on the top floor of the Fairmont in San Francisco. I had a four-way view of the city, including the Golden Gate Bridge. Even breakfast was good.

The year after I was discharged from the Army after World War II, I wrote a book with a friend, which we sold to MGM. We went to Hollywood and our agent put us up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was such a grand experience that I've never stayed anywhere else when I go there. It's cost me dearly over the years. The hotel is owned by the royal family of Brunei, who probably took the money for it from the people of Brunei. I have breakfast in the Polo Lounge and always hope Clark Gable or Lana Turner will come in. They used to, but don't anymore.

In Paris, we stay at a small Left-Bank place called Le Relais Christine. It used to be a monastery and each of its fifty-one rooms is different. The Claridge in London is special. They tolerate Americans but don't really like them. When I'm in San Diego, I stay at the grand old Hotel Del Coronado. In 1978, I was on the top floor during an AARP convention. (I was hiding with a camera crew trying to question the president, Leonard Davis—the insurance salesman who invented the AARP as a sales tool for his Colonial Penn Insurance Co.)

I like hotels but do have some complaints. Nothing, with the possible exception of movie tickets, has gone up in price more and faster than hotel rooms. In 1955, I stayed in a good hotel in New York for $4 a night. The same room today costs $230.

I wish they wouldn't put so many pillows on the bed. Sometimes they're piled so high that you can't see the clock on the table.

I wish there were an industry standard for shower controls in hotel rooms. It's easy to get burned or frozen in a strange shower.

Call me cheap, but I prefer to bring my suitcase to the room myself, not have it brought up by a bellboy. That was the only good thing about the Rossiya. They didn't have bellhops.

It has never been determined whether human beings thrived on the planet Earth because conditions of atmosphere and weather were suited to their continued existence or whether, over thousands of years, humans went through some evolutionary process and adapted themselves to the conditions. For example, we sweat to cool our bodies. The process of evaporation uses energy—heat—which it takes from the body. The mechanism is all too complicated to comprehend and most people give in and just call it God.

Sometimes it seems like a close call whether we're going to survive with the weather we have. It is often perilously close to being too hot for us to live or too cold. We've been smart at countering the effect of weather on our lives. We no longer live in cold caves. We live in houses we heat and cool.

The trouble with these man-made weather deflectors is that they depend on electricity. When we lose our power, we're helpless. To keep from freezing to death we can heap on more clothes and survive, but there's no hiding from heat if the air conditioning is out.

There are occasional aberrations in our weather patterns that have a major effect on where Americans live. The hurricanes that hit Florida have a permanent effect on that state. A great many older people, living in other parts of the country, who were planning to retire to Florida, are going to rethink that plan. Florida has been hit too often by hurricanes over the years for anyone to think of it as the idyllic place for retirement. The real estate market in Florida may be depressed for years because of the memory of these hurricanes.

The real estate industry in California has suffered some of the same setbacks that Florida's has. People look favorably on the generally sunny weather in California, but then every few years there's a catastrophic fire, flood or earthquake that makes it seem something less than the ideal place to live. Surprisingly enough, California holds the one-day snowfall record. One mountainous area in the eastern part of the state got sixty inches of snow in one day years ago.

My choice for the spot with our country's worst weather is Washington, D.C., even though it ruins my theory that the most work gets done in places with bad weather. Washington gets the worst of northern cold weather and the worst of southern hot weather. If terrorists wanted to bring this nation to its knees, they wouldn't need to resort to nuclear or biological weapons. They could just pray to Allah for a few feet of snow in our capital. Half an inch brings Washington to a halt. They send people home and close government offices when it's cloudy.

New York, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are not known for their good weather but their extremes are predictable. Arizona and Nevada are the new fad states. Their populations are growing faster than any other states'. Maybe it's because they don't have snowstorms or hurricanes, but what both need and don't have is rain. They get only about eight inches of rain a year so they could use a sprinkler system in the sky. There's nothing I like better than a good, drenching rain. I enjoy both a raincoat and an umbrella. They give me the same good feeling I had as a kid in a tent in our back yard.

New York has a fairly consistent rainfall of about forty-two inches a year. Maine gets about forty-five inches but a lot of that comes down as snow. Ten inches of snow is the equivalent of one inch of rain.

You don't think of Arkansas as wet, but three years ago Little Rock got seventy inches of rain. Mobile, Ala., also gets a lot of rain.

Most of us prefer the weather we have wherever we are—bad as it may be.

There's nothing civil about the way Democrats and Republicans are behaving. It should be called “The Uncivil War.” It isn't just politicians, either. It's their supporters, as well, and I'm having nothing to do with all of them until it's over. I got a new toy yesterday that took my mind off the election.

Having recently lost my third cellphone, I acquired another. I write “acquired” instead of “bought” because the companies that make phones are so interested in having us buy their service that they're often willing to give us the instrument if we sign up. You know right away when they offer you anything free that they're going to get you later.

The people designing portable telephones in India or China or wherever they are, ought to take some time off. We don't need any new developments in their technology. We do not want our telephones to do the things they are designing them to do. All I want is an instrument that allows me to call home or the office. I don't want to see anyone on the screen. I don't want to “add to your database.” I don't know what my database is or what data it contains.

If there are young computer geeks who are amused by telephones that do a hundred things other than what a telephone was invented to do, good. Make a phone for them but make one for the rest of us that sticks to the basic job that Alexander Graham Bell had in mind when he called Watson.

My new phone plays what its designers must have thought was a cute tune when I turn it on or off. I'm not only disinterested in cute noises that alert me to the status of my phone, I'm damned irritated by them. When I leave my new phone on to get incoming calls, it gives forth a loud beep every four minutes to let me know it's on. I know it's on. I turned it on and I don't want to be annoyed by any damned beeping designed to inform me of something I already know.

The noises my new phone makes got me thinking about all the sounds used to alert us to a wide variety of occurrences. I'm always impressed, when I travel to another country, by how different their sounds
are. In London, ambulances and fire engines have a distinctive sound that I find more compelling and alarming than the sirens our ambulances and fire trucks use.

The family always enters our house through the kitchen door. The front door is for strangers, people selling something or kids at Halloween. There is a doorbell, but there's also a grand, heavy brass knocker on the door. I've noticed, over the years, that I like the people who use the knocker better than I like the bell-ringers. Brass knockers have gone out of style as sounding devices designed to alert the house's occupants to visitors. Too bad. There's something firm and deliberate about a knock on the door that a shrill bell doesn't have. Many old homes have both a bell and a knocker like ours, but I suppose some cost-conscious nitpicker decided both were unnecessary and chose to eliminate the knocker on new homes.

For some reason, we take our public and private noises without comment or complaint. We don't do that with anything else so dominant in our lives. We ought to complain and have some of them changed. I'd start by having them change the noises this new, free phone of mine makes.

Why couldn't one of the geniuses who keep changing cellphones come up with a different sound? Instead of what they call a ring—which isn't a ring at all, of course—they might have the phone emit the pleasing sound of a solid brass knocker on a solid wooden door.

A lot of the traveling people used to do by plane was frivolous. They went someplace for the sake of going, not because they had to get there for any good reason. The airlines depended on casual tourists like this because they filled their planes by outnumbering business travelers.

Even business travel was often unnecessary. Businessmen and women traveled to conferences because of the favorable impression this
made on the people at the meeting. If they came a long way it lent importance to the occasion. Too often it was not important that they got there at all, and they're no longer going as often.

In 1985, a company vice president I knew was always going to meetings in far away cities. He loved to say, “I have to go to the Coast Wednesday.” One New York tabloid even ran a daily column listing the prominent people who were going to Hollywood or returning from it to N.Y.

A friend of mine went to the airport one morning to catch an 8 A.M. flight to Los Angeles, where he was scheduled to attend an “important” meeting at 2 P.M. With the three-hour time difference, he figured he had plenty of time. The flight was delayed several hours while they repaired a windshield wiper and there was further delay on the runway. They encountered headwinds on the trip west and my friend didn't arrive at LAX until the meeting was over. He went back to the airline counter and caught the next flight back to New York.

He told me about this as though it had been frustrating but I never believed he missed anything important by not being at the meeting. A lot of travel used to be like that, but such trips are not being scheduled anymore.