The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (59 page)

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10. '...you needed rest and escape' (p. 74)

It is difficult to explain to someone who has grown up under the anodyne influence of television how powerful and attractive radio was (? HYPERLINK “http://www.trevanian.com/radio/radio.htm” ?explore this theme here?). The scintillating golden age of radio lasted only about twenty-five years, from the late Twenties to the early Fifties, before the mind-numbing medium of television reduced radio to two functions: that of a mere envelope for popular music; and the ubiquitous call-in Talk Show in which the Lonely, the Loony, the Lost, and the Ludicrous share their ignorance, their complaints, their rages, and their desperate need to be listened to by somebody... anybody at all... even at the masochistic cost of being ridiculed by some wiseassed interlocutor. But during its relatively short twenty-five years of dominance, radio informed and illuminated America. The novelty and impact of hearing news when it was happening coming from where it was happening induced a level of concentration and deliberation on the part of the listeners that was hitherto unknown.

At the same time, radio broadcasters were experimenting with new modes and new methods. There were comedies in which the punch line was a sound effect (Fibber Magee's closet or Jack Benny's vault) and new kinds of drama in which sound not only carried the dialogue, but, through sound effects, established the locale and created the emotional ambiance for the play, like the innovative mystery dramas of Arch Oboler. (The sound effect of an unanswered telephone ringing and ringing was the effective punch ending of radio's most impactful drama, 'Sorry, Wrong Number'.)

Television programming, on the lesser hand, began with worn-out vaudeville hacks plus Hopalong Cassidy films; then, after a brief creative moment of live television drama, its economically in-built impulse towards mediocrity rapidly reduced it to predictable, formulaic situation comedies, cop shows, 'celebrity' panels featuring people who were famous for being on celebrity panels, and quiz programs for the meagerly-informed, finally descending to revolting voyeuristic orgies in which coprophagous afternoon viewers watch geek shows in which social rejects confess ghastly acts and attitudes in a pitiable desire to be on 'nationwide television' for three minutes, while the program's ego-maniacal presenter baits and urges them to debase themselves yet further. Exploiting the lowest-common-denominator nature of television, the bottom-feeding slime merchants who present these shameless feasts of nastiness become rich and famous. Then some of them clean up their acts a little and re-launch themselves as social crusaders. Some have even become ego-bloated media mega-stars, telling their mindless viewers how to decorate their houses, how to dress, what to eat, how to 'make contact with their inner selves'... even what books to read, for the love of God!

One activates and exercises a smaller area of one's brain by watching television than by listening to dramatic or narrative radio, and much less than by reading. The simple fact is that television is culturally passive; it is a slave's medium, an intellectual narcotic.

To be fair, television has natural medial advantages for the broadcast of some sporting events. But even here it has had the deleterious effect of showering obscene amounts of money on people whose only distinction is the ability to run fast or to strike a small ball with a stick of wood, or to cause a large ball to pass through a metal ring, soon driving the sportsmanship out of sport and replacing it with the barbaric ambiance of the Roman amphitheater. Even more disastrously, it offers the phantom dream of basketball riches to inner city kids who should be studying to improve their lot in the real world that most of them will live in.

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11. '...Aldrich's bad boy' (p. 76)

It was during this time that I first read Mark Twain, beginning with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (with whose complicated role-playing games and ability to con both adults and other kids I eagerly identified) then going on to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (with whose folksy language and gullible good-heartedness I did not). But my early encounter with Huckleberry Finn was not a total loss. Two summers later I tore the written-on pages out of a school notebook and, using the remaining clean pages, I began a book that improved on Twain's efforts by doubling the adventures and dangers, deleting the tedious late-night talks between Huck and Jim about life and slavery and human frailty and all that obvious stuff, and inventing more con tricks for the Duke and the Dolphin. (I've always had a soft spot for con men, despite the troubling example of my father. Perhaps that is why, in my early twenties, I spent a couple of seasons traveling with carnivals.) My book was set on Florida's Saint Johns River. I assumed that since Huckleberry Finn is set on the south-flowing Mississippi, no one would think of accusing me of imitation because, uncommonly of American rivers, the Saint Johns flows north. Alas, I forsook the career of Authorship after a couple of weeks the solitary drudgery associated with that low and lonely craft, but I've had to live with the possibility that I may have dealt American letters a serious blow by failing to finish The Adventures of Blueberry Coogan.

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12. '...beginning with the letter...' (p. 80)

Among the time-killing devices I used to relieve the weight of monotony and tedium of the classroom on a silent winter afternoon was the production of that quintessential artifact of classroom doldrums, the Chewed Pencil.

Sculpting the well-chewed pencil requires time, know-how, attention to detail, and no small amount of native tooth-to-lip dexterity. You begin with the tasty cedar point which you bite delicately between your front teeth, carefully making a row of tooth prints up to where the yellow paint begins, then you rotate the pencil slightly and work your way back down, then back up, then back down, until the entire point is crushed and sodden. It takes considerable address and judgment to apply enough tooth pressure to crush the wood and extract the cedar taste without breaking the lead. The tapered tip expertly chewed, you put the painted hexagonal shaft into your mouth sideways and work your way up the shaft to the metal eraser housing, making double sets of tooth dents, top and bottom, with each squeaking bite; then you rotate the pencil to the next flat and bite your way down to the point, then rotate it again and work your way back up to the metal barrel, until you have textured all six surfaces. Great control is necessary to keep the teeth from going in too deeply as you work your way from a nibbled place to an un-nibbled one and back again.

The pleasures of the pencil sculptor are both tactile (breaking though the crust of glossy paint and crushing down the wood) and auditory (which no one but you can hear, because your head functions as a sounding board). There isn't much gustatory gratification; only the cedar point can claim to be truly tasty; but the painted yellow hexagonal shaft has an interesting, if not appetizing, flavor, and the flakes that fall into your mouth in the process leave what wine fanciers might term a long, faintly metallic finish. But, of course, pencil-chewing is not about flavors, it's an art of textures. After you have crushed all the flats, you will have created six high ridges at the angles of the hexagon. (I say 'high' although the ridges are raised only a fraction of a millimeter, but things in the mouth explored by the tongue seem huge, as anyone who has ever had a tooth chipped in a fight will recall.) Chewing these ridges down is easy if the pencil is long and you work on it sideways in your mouth, as you did for the flats. But if the pencil has been sharpened a few times and is shorter, you are tempted to crush down the ridges with your front teeth, introducing the pencil point first. Caution! Don't daydream too deeply, as you might stick the back of your throat with the point, and the resulting gag is almost sure to attract the teacher's attention. The point and shaft of the pencil now thoroughly chewed, you begin on the eraser, which breaks up into gritty bits that have to be dredged off the tongue by fingers that must then be surreptitiously wiped on a corduroy leg of your knickers.

When the wood of a pencil has been painstakingly and fastidiously chewed from end to end, the 'dessert' is to crush the metal eraser holder between your front teeth. Then you rotate it ninety degrees and crush it again, rotate and crush, rotate and crush until the metal work-hardens and crystallizes along the crease, then splits, forcing out just enough of what is left of the eraser that it can still be used, but the jagged edge of metal is so close to the paper that sooner or later you will rip a hole in it.

The thoroughly chewed pencil is a deformed thing: unpleasant to look upon and ghastly to touch... in short, a piece of modern sculpture. Having elevated a pencil to this æsthetic state, the artist is torn between throwing it away, a shameful waste of money, time, and talent, or continuing to use it despite its repellent feeling between the fingers. There is a tertium quid that I tried a few times: rolling a piece of paper around the pencil and binding it with a rubber band. The paper wrap diminishes the revolting feeling of the pencil, but it slips within the wrap unless you grip it very firmly, which tires your fingers until they are dented and aching. More often than not, I passed between the horns of this dilemma by sharpening the pencil often and with unnecessary pressure, thus using it up quickly and having to replace it with an fresh, un-bitten, and therefore seductively tempting, pencil.

And there, Honored Reader, you have the common pencil treated as Robbe-Grillet once treated a cafetière.

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13. '...battalions of young Americans' (p. 92)

The George Washington Battalion's losses were so heavy that it had to be merged into the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, but there still weren't enough Americans to fill the roster, so in the end the Abraham Lincoln Battalion contained three times as many Spaniards as Americans.

The most famous of the Americans was a college student and the son of a lumberjack, Robert Hale Merriman, who eventually became chief of staff of one of the International Brigades and died in action when he was only twenty-six years old. Robert Hale Merrimen, a fugitive hero who quickly slipped back into the shadows of time. A name no longer remembered... except by you, honored reader, and if only for this fleeting moment.

After one of our talks out on his back steps Mr Kane gave me two biographies of his personal heroes in the struggle for social justice. One was a book about Thomas Payne, concentrating on the time after the American Revolution when he was involved in the French Revolution; the other was a biography of the compassionate and courageous John P. Altgeld, governor of Illinois during the brutal suppression of striking Pullman workers by vicious scabs armed with ax handles, Pinkerton thugs armed with narrow canvas bags loaded with buckshot ('kidney busters' or 'Pinkerton pain bags'), and Chicago Police armed with guns. Altgeld's efforts to protect the strikers from the foaming rage of the barons of industry cost him his career. I still have those books, and glancing through them the other day I noticed that they were published by the International Press with offices in London, Paris, and Moscow, the same company that, in the 1950s, printed good-quality editions of selected British and American literature for sale at unbelievably low prices to people on the Indian sub-continent who were eager to learn English, the language of success. In what was a subtle, inexpensive, and very effective propaganda ploy, these books provided impressionable young Third World readers with a grim view of capitalism as described by famous English and American writers: Dickens' Hard Times for example, and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which were published without permission and without any royalties being paid because at that time the Soviet Union was not party to copyright conventions, its principles of mass ownership coinciding with that deeply ingrained disinclination to pay writers for their work that marks all publishers in all countries, throughout all ages.

In 1943, I lifted my library's copy of Howard Fast's new and splendidly biased biography, Citizen Tom Payne from one of the return trolleys parked temporarily in the little-used room that was my reading hide-away, and I kept it out of circulation for a month, reading it over and over. Throughout my youth and early manhood, the protosocialist Payne and the crypto-socialist John Altgeld were my heroes in the struggle for social justice. And I admired Robert La Follette, a compassionate Republican from Wisconsin who was eventually obliged to turn away from a party dominated by the bosses, the rich, the privileged, and the railroads, and offer himself as presidential candidate on the Progressive ticket in 1924. He lost for want of support and organization, but he received almost five million votes.

Despite the tendency of Liberals to dissipate energy in rhetoric, to be self-congratulatory, and to sacrifice practical advantage on the altar of dogma, I have found them preferable to the political craftiness of the new Conservative establishment, which deifies profit, sanctifies enterprise, and is bent on ideological domination. It was a matter of choosing the less harmful of two corrupting political views. At least you can have dinner with a Liberal. He will be annoying, and his reasoning soft-centered, but he will not live, as his NeoCon opposite number does, in stew of hate, fear and envy that frequently manifests itself as religious fervor.

In contemporary two-party America there is not, alas, an effective national party for informed people of compassionate instincts; our only choice is between a party of the right, and a party of the extreme right. (see also ? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note68#note68” ??footnote 68?)