Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Calvin Trillin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All of the pieces that appear in this work have been previously published, some in different form.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Trillin, Calvin.

  Quite enough of Calvin Trillin / by Calvin Trillin.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60480-8

  1. Trillin, Calvin. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3570.R5Z475 2011

  814′.54—dc22 2011004050

  [B]

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket drawing: Saul Steinberg, Looking Back, c. 1953

  Ink on paper, 13 1/8″ × 10 1/8″

  Private collection

  Originally published in The New Yorker, December 26, 1953

  © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  BIOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING

  Chubby

  Geography

  Spelling Yiffniff

  Doing My Talent

  People in Charge

  Cow Town

  My Tuxedo

  THE MEDIA—LIBERAL ELITE AND OTHERWISE

  Corrections

  On the Assumption that Al Gore Will Slim Down if He’s Intending to Run for President, a Political Reporter Is Assigned to Watch Gore’s Waistline

  Presidential Ups and Downs

  “Whatta We Got for the Folks This Week?”

  We Could Have Made a Killing

  RSVP

  Unpublished Letters to the Ethicist

  Show and Tell-all

  TALES OF A CLEAN-PLATE RANGER

  Alice

  What Happened to Brie and Chablis?

  Chicken à la King

  Missing Links

  Goldberg as Artifact

  Inspecting the Cork

  The Italian West Indies

  Unhealth Food

  HIGH SOCIETY AND JUST PLAIN RICH PEOPLE

  Errands

  Thoughts on Power Neckwear

  The Tweed Curve

  The 401st

  Invasion of the Limo-Stretchers

  Dinner at the de la Rentas’

  CRIMINAL JUSTICE, CRIMINALS, JUSTICES, BUT (PROBABLY) NO CRIMINAL JUSTICES

  Crystal Ball

  What Whoopi Goldberg (“Not a Rape-Rape”), Harvey Weinstein (“So-Called Crime”), et al. Are Saying in Their Outrage over the Arrest of Roman Polanski

  Marc Rich and Me

  Rodney King Sings the “Picked Up by the Los Angeles Police Department Blues”

  The Inside on Insider Trading

  Four Supreme Court Nominations

  Damaged Goods

  The Sociological, Political, and Psychological Implications of the O. J. Simpson Case

  LIFE AMONG THE LITERATI

  T. S. Eliot and Me

  Paper Trials

  Half an Oaf

  Mencken’s Mail

  Answer Man

  Publisher’s Lunch

  MADLY MAKING MONEY

  New Bank Merger

  An Outtake from Antiques Roadshow

  Dow Plunges on News of Credit Crisis in the United Arab Emirates

  The Alice Tax

  Economics, with Power Steering

  Basic Economics

  Wall Street Smarts

  Voodoo Economics Up Close

  All Puffed Up

  Embarrassment of Riches

  Two Poems on Goldman Sachs

  THE YEARS WITH NAVASKY

  Ambushed

  Pinko Problems

  The Case of the Purloined Turkey

  I’m Out of Here

  Inspired by Sununu. Paid by Navasky.

  TWENTY YEARS OF POLS—ONE POEM EACH

  John Sununu

  Al Gore

  Bill Clinton

  Lloyd Bentsen

  Steve Forbes

  Richard Lugar

  Pete Wilson

  Robert Dole

  Alfonse D’Amato

  Richard Nixon

  George W. Bush

  John Ashcroft

  Dick Cheney

  Richard Perle

  Colin Powell

  Tom DeLay

  Condoleezza Rice

  George Allen

  Donald Rumsfeld

  David Vitter

  Mike Huckabee

  Rudy Giuliani

  Dennis Kucinich

  John Edwards

  Michael Bloomberg

  Fred Thompson

  Mitt Romney

  Phil Gramm

  John McCain

  Michelle Obama

  Sarah Palin

  Rod Blagojevich

  Arlen Specter

  Barack Obama

  John Boehner

  Chris Christie

  NYC

  Curtain Time

  The Co-op Caper

  An Attack Gecko

  Testing Grounds

  What’s the Good Word?

  Tourists Trapped

  Social Questions from Aunt Rosie

  Tepper Parked in Front of Russ & Daughters

  FAMILY MATTERS

  Naming the Baby Calvin

  Merger

  Incompatible, with One L

  Naming the German Baby

  Father’s Day Is Gone

  Stage Father

  Just How Do You Suppose that Alice Knows?

  Turning the Tables

  Slipcovers Just Bloom in the Spring, Tra La

  Hate Thy Neighbor

  Long-Term Marriage

  BEASTS OF THE FIELD, FISH OF THE SEA, AND CHIGGERS IN THE TALL GRASS

  Loaded for Raccoons

  True Love

  Talk About Ugly!

  Animal Wrongs

  Horse Movie, Updated

  Weighing Hummingbirds: A Primer

  All the Lovely Pigeons

  The Playing Fields of Mott Street

  ENGLISH AND SOME LANGUAGES I DON’T SPEAK

  Short Bursts

  Like a Scholar of Teenspeak

  Literally

  Roland Magruder, Freelance Writer

  Nerds, Dorks, and Weenies

  Holistic Heuristics

  I Say!

  Pardon My French

  BAGELS, YIDDISH, AND OTHER JEWISH CONTRIBUTIONS TO WESTERN CIVILIZATION

  Seder Splitsville

  Killer Bagels

  So, Nu, Dr. Freud?

  Jacob Schiff and My Uncle Benny Daynovsky

  THE SPORTING LIFE

  My Team

  Baseball’s Back

  Chinese Golf

  On the Marketing of Yankee Grass

  The Great Game of Frizzball

  On Buffalo’s Losing the Super Bowl

  The Gipper Lives On

  SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE HEALING ARTS

  Molly and the V-Chip

  Benefit of the Doubt

  My Dentist

  Backwards Ran the Clock

  Smart Camera

  Ouch!

  Unplugged

  FOREIGNERS

  Losing China

  Thoughts on Geopolitics

  Bonjour, Madame

  Without His Nurse

  Polite Society

  The Saudis and Their Oil Rigs

  Capturing Noriega

  I
SSUES AND OTHER IRRITATIONS

  Complicated Issues

  Letters to the Solid-Waste Commissioner

  I’m OK, I’m Not OK

  Back Where You Came From

  SEEING THE WORLD

  Defying Mrs. Tweedie

  Weak Dollar Blues

  Time and Tide

  Low Visibility

  Phone Pals

  NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

  Eating with the Pilgrims

  Harold the Committed and Halloween

  Christmas in Qatar

  Iran for Christmas

  The Fruitcake Theory

  Oh Y2K, Yes Y2K, How Come It Has to End This Way?

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  These pieces have appeared in, among other places, The New Yorker, The Nation, a newspaper column syndicated by King Features, The New York Times, and various books. Some of them have been trimmed or merged or otherwise altered, but they remain in their period. Salaries have not been multiplied to account for inflation. VCR references have not been transformed into TiVo references.

  BIOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING

  “I’ve found that a lot of people say they’re from Kansas City when they aren’t. Just for the prestige.”

  Chubby

  It’s common these days for memoirs of childhood to concentrate on some dark secret within the author’s ostensibly happy family. It’s not just common; it’s pretty much mandatory. Memoir in America is an atrocity arms race. A memoir that reveals incest is trumped by one that reveals bestiality, and that, in turn, is driven from the bestseller list by one that reveals incestuous bestiality.

  When I went into the memoir game, I knew I was working at a horrific disadvantage: As much as I would hate this getting around in literary circles in New York, the fact is that I had a happy childhood. At times, I’ve imagined how embarrassing this background would be if I found myself discussing childhoods with other memoirists late at night at some memoirist hangout.

  After talking about their own upbringings for a while—the glue-sniffing and sporadically violent grandmother, for instance, or the family tapeworm—they look toward me. Their looks are not totally respectful. They are aware that I’ve admitted in print that I never heard my parents raise their voices to each other. They have reason to suspect, from bits of information I’ve let drop from time to time, that I was happy in high school. I try desperately to think of a dark secret in my upbringing. All I can think of is Chubby, the collie dog.

  “Well, there’s Chubby, the collie dog,” I say, tentatively.

  “Chubby, the collie dog?” they repeat.

  There really was a collie named Chubby. I wouldn’t claim that the secret about him qualifies as certifiably traumatic, but maybe it explains an otherwise mysterious loyalty I had as a boy to the collie stories of Albert Payson Terhune. We owned Chubby when I was two or three years old. He was sickly. One day Chubby disappeared. My parents told my sister, Sukey, and me that he had been given to some friends who lived on a farm, so that he could thrive in the healthy country air. Many years later—as I remember, I was home on vacation from college—Chubby’s name came up while my parents and Sukey and I were having dinner. I asked why we’d never gone to visit him on the farm. Sukey looked at me as if I had suddenly announced that I was thinking about eating the mashed potatoes with my hands for a while, just for a change of pace.

  “There wasn’t any farm,” she said. “That was just what they told us. Chubby had to be put to sleep.”

  “Put to sleep!” I said. “Chubby’s gone?”

  Somebody—my mother, I think—pointed out that Chubby would have been gone in any case, since collies didn’t ordinarily live to the age of eighteen.

  “Isn’t it sort of late for me to be finding this out?” I said.

  “It’s not our fault if you’re slow on the uptake,” my father said.

  I never found myself in a memoirist gathering that required me to tell the story of Chubby, but, as it happened, I did relate the story in a book. A week or so later, I got a phone call from Sukey.

  “The collie was not called Chubby,” she said. “The collie was called George. You were called Chubby.”

  1998

  Geography

  Geography was my best subject. You can imagine how I feel when I read that the average American high school student is likely to identify Alabama as the capital of Chicago. I knew all the state capitals. I knew major mineral resources. Missouri: lead and zinc. (That’s just an example.) I learned so many geographical facts that I’ve had to spend a lot of time in recent years trying to forget them so I’ll have room in my brain for some things that may be more useful. I don’t hold with the theory that everyone is just using a little bit of his gray matter. I think we’re all going flat out.

  For instance, I’ve worked hard to forget the longest word in the English language, which I had to learn for a high school club. Pneum​onoul​trami​crosc​opics​ilico​volca​nocon​iosis. It isn’t a word that’s easy to work into conversations. There are only so many times you can say, “Speaking of diseases usually contracted through the inhalation of quartz dust …” I finally managed to forget how to spell it, and I was able to remember my Army serial number.

  I think my interest in geography grew from the long automobile trips across the country I used to take with my family as a child. I grew up in Kansas City, which is what the real estate people would call equally convenient to either coast. We usually went west. My father would be in the front seat, pointing out buttes and mesas, and my sister, Sukey, and I would be in the back, protecting our territory. We had an invisible line in the center of the seat. At least, Sukey said it was in the center.

  There were constant border tensions. It was sort of like the border between Finland and the old Soviet Union. I played Finland. Sukey played the Soviet Union. Then my father did something that we now know was politically retrograde and maybe antifeminist. He told me, “We do not hit girls. You will never hit your sister again.” Sukey was not visited with a similar injunction. So I became a unilaterally disarmed Finland, while she was a Soviet Union bristling with weaponry. If I hadn’t had to be on constant alert because of Sukey’s expansionist backseat policy, I might now know the difference between a butte and a mesa.

  If I had followed my geographical bent, I would have become a regionalist, a geographer who decides where to draw the lines dividing the regions of the United States, like the Midwest and the South and the New England states. Actually, I do the same sort of thing, without a degree, except I only use two regions—partly because of my math. Math was my worst subject. I was never able to convince the mathematics teacher that many of my answers were meant ironically. Also, I had trouble with pi, as in “pi r squared.” Some years ago, the Texas State Legislature passed a resolution to change pi to an even three. And I was for it.

  The way I divide up the country, the first region is the part of the United States that had major league baseball before the Second World War. That’s the Ancien United States, or the Old Country. The rest of the United States is the rest of the United States—or the Expansion Team United States.

  For those of you who didn’t follow baseball closely in 1948, there’s an easy way to know whether you’re in the Old Country or the Expansion Team United States. In the Old Country, the waiters in an Italian restaurant have names like Sal or Vinnie. If you’re in an Italian restaurant and the waiter’s name is Duane, you’re in the Expansion Team United States.

  1988

  Spelling Yiffniff

  My father used to offer an array of prizes for anyone who could spell yiffniff. That’s not how to spell it, of course—yiffniff. I’m just trying to let you know what it sounds like, in case you’d like to take a crack at it yourself. Don’t get your hopes up: This is a spelling word that once defied some of the finest twelve-year-old minds Kansas City had to offer.

  The prizes were up
for grabs any time my father drove us to a Boy Scout meeting. After a while, all he had to say to start the yiffniff attempts was “Well?”

  “Y-i …,” some particularly brave kid like Dogbite Davis would say.

  “Wrong,” my father would say, in a way that somehow made it sound like “Wrong, dummy.”

  “How could I be wrong already?” Dogbite would say.

  “Wrong,” my father would repeat. “Next.”

  Sometimes he would begin the ride by calling out the prizes he was offering: “… a new Schwinn three-speed, a trip to California, a lifetime pass to Kansas City Blues baseball games, free piano lessons for a year, a new pair of shoes.” No matter what the other prizes were, the list always ended with “a new pair of shoes.”

  Some of the prizes were not tempting to us. We weren’t interested in shoes. We would have done anything to avoid free piano lessons for a year. Still, we were desperate to spell yiffniff.

  “L-l …,” Eddie Williams began one day.

  “Wrong,” my father said when Eddie had finished. “Next.”

  “That’s Spanish,” Eddie said, “the double L that sounds like a y.”

  “This is English,” my father said. “Next.”

  Sometimes someone would ask what yiffniff meant.

  “You don’t have to give the definition to get the prizes,” my father would say. “Just spell it.”

  As far as I could gather, yiffniff didn’t have a definition. It was a word that existed solely to be spelled. My father had invented it for that purpose.

  Occasionally some kid in the car—usually, the contentious Dogbite Davis—would make an issue out of yiffniff’s origins. “But you made it up!” he’d tell my father, in an accusing tone.

  “Of course I made it up,” my father would reply. “That’s why I know how to spell it.”

  “But it could be spelled a million ways.”

  “All of them are wrong except my way,” my father would say. “It’s my word.”

  If you’re thinking that my father, who had never shared the secret of how to spell his word, could have simply called any spelling we came up with wrong and thus avoided handing out the prizes, you never knew my father. His views on honesty made the Boy Scout position on that subject seem wishy-washy. There was no doubt among us that my father knew how to spell yiffniff and would award the prizes to anyone who spelled it that way. But nobody seemed able to do it.