Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (22 page)

The taxi drivers had objected to the enforcement of the ordinance, of course, and the mayor had called them vermin. The senior staff attorney of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Jeremy Thornton, had said that Ducavelli’s attempt to enforce the ordinance was “another of the spitballs that our mayor regularly flings at the Constitution of the United States.” The mayor had replied that Jeremy Thornton had a constitutional right to demonstrate that he was a reckless and irresponsible fool but that he should probably be disbarred anyway, as a public service. When a city councilman, Norm Plotkin, usually a supporter of City Hall, pointed out that someone flagging a cab from behind a line of parked cars was unlikely to be seen, he had been dismissed by Mayor Ducavelli as “stupid and imbecilic—someone who obviously has no regard whatsoever for public safety and is totally unconcerned about citizens of this city being struck down and killed in the street like dogs.”

Years before, in an article about how jokes get created and spread around, Tepper had read that commodities traders were at the heart of the joke-distribution system. The article had inspired him to test a
list of licensed commodities brokers for a client who was trying to sell a book of elephant jokes through the mail, and the list had done fairly well—well enough to justify its use again to sell a book of lightbulb jokes and a tape-cassette course on how to be a hit at parties. Tepper had decided that the actual trading of commodities must not require a lot of time if traders could engage in so many extracurricular activities, like organizing betting pools and distributing jokes.

Tepper could hear the drone of another car moving slowly down the street behind him. He decided to use the backhand flick if the car stopped next to him. He had perfected the backhand flick only that week—a speeded-up version of someone clearing away cobwebs while walking through a dimly lit attic. He used only his left hand. Without looking up from his newspaper, he would flick his fingers in the direction of the inquiring parker. It had taken some time to find precisely the right velocity of flicking—a movement that contained authority but lacked aggression.

The first time he had used the backhand flick—it was on Fifty-seventh Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, around the dinner hour—he had obviously flicked too aggressively. The gesture had brought a fat, red-faced man out of a huge sport-utility vehicle—a vehicle so high off the ground that the fat man, before laboriously lowering himself to the pavement, hovered in the doorway like a parachutist who’d taken a moment to reconsider before deciding that he did indeed want to leap out into thin air. Once on terra firma, the fat man had stood a few inches from Tepper’s window, which was closed, and shouted, “Ya jerky bastard, ya!” again and again. Tepper was interested to hear the expression “ya jerky bastard, ya”—he hadn’t heard it used since the old days at Ebbets Field—but he did recognize the need to flick his hand more subtly. Tepper hadn’t replied to the fat man, and not simply because there really didn’t seem to be any appropriate reply to “ya jerky bastard, ya.” Tepper tried to avoid speaking to the people who wanted to park in his spot.

2001

When Latin American dictators such as Somoza and Trujillo and Stroessner passed from the scene, most Americans got the impression that the exercise of totally capricious tyrannical power was drying up in this hemisphere, but New Yorkers of a certain station understood that the boards of New York co-operative apartment buildings will always be with us. In New York, someone who wants to buy a co-op apartment is also asking to join other residents in a partnership responsible for the entire building, and the board, after examining his references and his tax forms, can reject him without even troubling to give a reason. Supplicants before a co-op board—people whose demeanor in negotiations may ordinarily be contentious or even fearsome—accept this treatment without a peep.

In 1984, John Gregory Dunne, who was then living in Los Angeles, became interested in moving to a co-op in New York, and he asked me to write a letter of recommendation. We had known each other since we worked together at
Time
in the sixties. In fact, when I wrote a novel about working at a newsmagazine, he figured in a claimer that I included at the beginning of the book: “The character of Andy Wolferman is based on John Gregory Dunne, though it tends to flatter. The other characters are fictional.” When asked for the coop recommendation, I sent off a respectful letter, seeded with what I thought of as co-op board phrases like “deeply responsible” and “substantial resources.” Then I wrote a second letter, reprinted below, and sent a Xerox copy of it to Dunne. On top of the Xerox I scrawled, “This ought to do it!”

1984

The other day, we received a letter that began, “Where but in New York would citizens be buying lizards for protection?” Without reading further, we knew we had heard once again from our angry friend who writes occasionally on the off chance that we have forgotten just how exasperating he finds life in the city. “A few days ago, I dropped in to see some friends of mine, whom I’ll call Ralph and Myrna Cole, and discovered they had bought a type of lizard called a gecko,” he continued. “When I asked what had driven them to lizardry, Ralph Cole informed me that geckos are to cockroaches what New York bus drivers are to passengers—natural enemies. Once the Coles discovered this characteristic of the gecko (I should probably say of the family Gekkonidae; however many cockroaches there are, this town is always crawling with pedants), they rushed right out and bought one, for three dollars and eighteen cents, the wretched city sales tax (which I have always considered the equivalent of charging admission to a dungeon) included. They have now had their gecko for about a month. At least, they think they have had it; geckos are extremely shy—the only creature in the metropolitan area suffering from that affliction, to judge from the number of people who push ahead of me in line every day—and the Coles haven’t seen theirs since they brought it home and uncaged it in their apartment with instructions to gobble up every cockroach in sight. According to the Coles, the kind of gecko they have, which is Brook’s gecko (
Hemidactylus brookii
), only two or three inches long, eats three cockroaches a day—or a night, really, since geckos tend to be nocturnal. The Coles, in other words, bought this lizard to act as a kind of mini-predator.

“ ‘It’s nice to go to bed at night knowing that the little fellow is
going to down three of them before we get up in the morning,’ Ralph told me. ‘If he’s still here, that is.’

“ ‘What makes you think he’s still here?’ I asked, sneaking a glance under the couch.

“ ‘We may have three fewer cockroaches than usual,’ Ralph said. ‘Cockroaches multiply very fast, though, and the cockroaches in our apartment were uncountable to begin with, so it’s hard to tell.’

“ ‘We don’t have to feed him, of course, because he lives on cockroaches,’ Myrna said. ‘At least, if he’s still here, he does.’

“ ‘Doesn’t it bother you any to have a predatory lizard creeping around your apartment?’ I asked.

“ ‘Well, at first I was worried about waking up one morning and finding the gecko on my pillow,’ Myrna said. ‘But the pet-shop man told me that I’d be able to tell if a gecko was nearby—it makes a soft noise that sounds like “gecko.” ’

“Ralph then gave his gecko imitation—‘geck-o, geck-o, geck-o’—and I began to worry about the Coles. Frankly, Ralph hasn’t been the same since a newsdealer called him a fascist for asking for change for a quarter. Myrna has been acting a bit odd since she boarded a downtown East Side IRT subway and was taken to Philadelphia. Just on a hunch, I called on one of the chief reptile suppliers in the city—a place on Bleecker Street called Exotic Aquatics. (In a civilized city, of course, merchants would be fined for displaying cutesy store names in public; anybody who gave his store a name that included the diminutive of
and
—Knickknacks ’n’ Such or Strings ’n’ Things—would be put in the stocks.)

“Despite its name, Exotic Aquatics seemed to be run by a sensible tradesman. He was sensible enough, in fact, to inform me that any lizard will indiscriminately eat just about anything it runs across that seems small enough to eat—cockroach, cricket, or Landon button.

“ ‘Do you mean the gecko doesn’t have a special cockroach-eating capacity?’ I asked.

“ ‘Well, I suppose it has been known to eat cockroaches,’ he said. ‘And some people have always said that geckos are good for cockroach control. But we don’t push it. Most of the geckos we sell are for tanks.’

“So there is a picture of urban life for you: Ralph and Myrna Cole,
college-educated adults, going to sleep every night feeling slightly more secure because an onomatopoetic lizard is about to put away three of their cockroaches. And, for all they actually know, he may be in Central Park chasing caterpillars.”

1971

I live in Greenwich Village, where people from the suburbs come on weekends to test their car alarms. “This is a test,” I sometimes mutter, when the whine of a car alarm wakes me up late on a Saturday night. I know some of my neighbors must be waking up, too—the two little girls next door, and the man across the street with the funny-looking dog, and the elderly couple who live on the corner. “Don’t worry—this is a test,” I’d like to assure them. “I’m certain no cars are actually being stolen, because the very same cars will be back next Saturday night for the same test.”

Sometimes, as I lie there in bed trying to go back to sleep, I start wondering how the suburbs produce all of these car-alarm testers. I envision a father somewhere in Westchester County sitting in his easy chair, reading his Saturday morning paper. Junior, his teenage son, walks by on his way to revel in his many material possessions.

“Son,” Dad says, “have you tested the alarm on that car of yours lately?”

“Oh, Dad,” the son whines, “do I have to go all the way to the Village again?”

“Remember what I told you, son,” Dad says. “You take care of your car and your car will take care of you.”

Meanwhile, in the suburbs of New Jersey, there’s a lot of activity at the six-acre parking lot that has become the meeting place of the Bergen County Car Alarm Club. B-Ccac, as it’s known, has five hundred
members. Most of them spend most Saturdays fine-tuning their car alarms.

They wear identical black and gold coveralls with the club crest on the left breast pocket. The club crest shows an SUV with little marks coming off it, to designate sound, and people next to it holding their hands over their ears. B-Ccac members talk a lot to each other about their HTRs. An HTR is a hair-trigger response. Their goal is an HTR that will set off the alarm if the steps of one normal-sized adult reverberate on the sidewalk within six feet of the car. That’s called a singleperson HTR. Most of the members have it.

In a country club locker room in Fairfield County, Connecticut, four or five men are arguing. They are businessmen who bet a lot of money on golf games every weekend, except when it’s too cold to play golf. When it’s too cold to play golf, they bet on which one of their car alarms will go off faster in Greenwich Village.

They spend a lot of Saturday afternoons arguing about odds. The ones who have any car other than a Mercedes believe they should get odds. They believe that a Mercedes alarm is more likely to go off first because a lot of people who live in the Village have a habit of taking a kick at a Mercedes as they walk along the street—and a kick will almost certainly set off the alarm. But Mercedes owners drive a hard bargain. That’s how they made enough money to buy a Mercedes in the first place.

Sometimes, as I fall asleep on Saturday night, I think of all the car-alarm testers heading my way. The teenager from Westchester and a bunch of his pals are in his car heading down the Henry Hudson Parkway, practicing some of the songs they’re going to sing later in the evening to celebrate the successful testing of his car alarm. The members of the Bergen County Car Alarm Club are driving in caravan toward the George Washington Bridge. The Connecticut golfers have crossed the New York state line, still arguing on their car phones about odds.

I am about to fall asleep. But then an alarm goes off—an early arrival. I begin to wonder how long it would take to locate an alarm and turn it off, once you got inside the car. I can see myself and some neighbors trying to find out. We’re holding one of those battering rams they use to knock down doors in drug busts.

The man across the street with the funny-looking dog is there, and so are the two little girls from next door and the elderly couple who live on the corner. (They are remarkably strong for their age.) Rhythmically, we’re swinging the battering ram back and then against the driver’s window. The window is starting to go, even though we’ve missed it on a couple of swings and put great dents into the door instead. Somebody in black and gold coveralls shows up and starts shouting something about whose car it is. “Don’t worry,” I say. “This is only a test.”