Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin
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Unpublished Letters to the Ethicist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. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. 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.