Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Read online

  Finally, we brought in a ringer—my cousin Keith, from Salina, who had reached the finals of the Kansas State Spelling Bee. (Although Keith, who eventually became an English professor, remembers the details of his elimination differently, I’m sure I was saying even then that the word he missed in the finals was “hayseed.”) We told my father that Keith, who was visiting Kansas City, wanted to go to a Scout meeting with us to brush up on some of his knots.

  “Well?” my father said, when the car was loaded.

  “Yiffniff,” my cousin Keith said clearly, announcing the assigned word in the spelling bee style. “Y-y …”

  Y-y! Using y both as a consonant and as a vowel! What a move! We looked at my father for a response. He said nothing. Emboldened, Keith picked up the pace: “Y-y-g-h-k-n-i-p-h.”

  For a few moments the car was silent. Then my father said, “Wrong. Next.”

  Suddenly the car was bedlam as we began arguing about where our plans had gone wrong. “Maybe we should have got the guy who knew how to spell ‘hayseed,’ ” Dogbite said. We argued all the way to the Scout meeting, but it was the sort of argument that erupts on a team that has already lost the game. We knew Keith had been our best shot.

  1986

  Doing My Talent

  I can whistle and hum at the same time. It’s my talent, in the way the Miss America people use the word talent—as in “Miss Minnesota will now do her talent.” If the Miss America people announced that I would now do my talent, I would whistle and hum at the same time. I would probably whistle and hum “Stars and Stripes Forever,” although I’ve also prepared “Buckle Down, Winsocki” in case of an encore. It’s a secure feeling, knowing that you’re ready if the Miss America people call.

  I hate to use the phrase “God-given talent”—like a lot of people with God-given talent, I have always prided myself on my lack of pretense—but it’s true that whistling and humming at the same time came to me naturally. I didn’t work at it, the way I worked at being able to blow a hard-boiled egg out of the shell. It’s more like my other talent, the ability to bark like a dog: One day I just realized I could do it.

  I can whistle/hum anything, but I prefer “Stars and Stripes Forever” because it’s a traditional song for people doing my sort of talent. On Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, a program whose passing I lament, “Stars and Stripes Forever” was a staple. I once saw a man play it on his head with two spoons, varying the notes by how widely he opened his mouth. I suspect he had “Buckle Down, Winsocki” ready as an encore, even though they never did encores on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour. “Buckle Down, Winsocki” is also traditional.

  You might think that my ability to whistle and hum at the same time has always been a matter of pride in my family. I know the sort of scenes you’re imagining. You see my wife at lunch with one of her friends. “It must be exciting being married to someone who can do a talent,” the friend is saying. My wife smiles knowingly. You see my daughters as kindergartners bringing other kids home and begging me to show little Jason and Jennifer and Emma how I can whistle and hum at the same time. “Do ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ Daddy,” they say. “Then do ‘Buckle Down, Winsocki.’ ” I do both. Even little Jason looks impressed. “Jesus,” he says. “I thought I’d seen everything.”

  That’s not the way it has been at all. When my daughters were kindergartners, they never asked me to whistle and hum at the same time for their friends. Little Jason, I know for a fact, still hasn’t seen everything, even though he’s now sixteen years old. Now that my daughters are teenagers themselves, their response to a bit of spontaneous whistle/humming in a restaurant or an elevator tends to begin with “Daddy, please.”

  I don’t know what my wife and her friends say to each other at lunch, but I have to consider the possibility that my wife rolls her eyes up toward the back of her head as her friend asks, “How’s the old spoon player these days?” All this reminds me of what used to be said about the kid in my fourth-grade class who couldn’t seem to catch on to math: “He doesn’t get much encouragement at home.”

  Not that I expect special treatment. I’m not just being modest when I say that I think many people have similar talents, even if they don’t always demonstrate them. I’ve always thought that of world leaders, even though a lot of them act as if they might have had too much encouragement at home. When I used to see pictures of General de Gaulle, I’d always think, “I bet that man can play ‘Lady of Spain’ on his head with a spoon. He may not want to, but he has the capacity.” I believe that if you gave Helmut Kohl an ordinary pocket comb and some waxed paper, he could turn out a credible rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” I’ve always thought that Margaret Thatcher must be able to throw a lighted cigarette in the air and catch it in her mouth. I sometimes think that we would have been better off, and she would have been better off, if she had just gone ahead and done it.

  Actually, I don’t do my own talent in public anymore. Here’s what happened: I was in Milwaukee on a book tour. Some people who had read about my talent came in the store and said that they had a man with them who could also whistle and hum at the same time. They suggested that the two of us might like to do a quartet. He was the chairman of the neurology department at the local medical school, although I don’t think that had any connection to his talent. The talent I do is not deeply neurological. It’s more like a God-given talent. At any rate, it turned out that this man could not simply hum and whistle at the same time. He could hum one tune while he whistled another tune. He could, to be specific, whistle “Goodnight, Irene” while humming “I’m in the Mood for Love.” Well, right then, I packed it in.

  But I still daydream about doing my talent. Sometimes, I imagine that Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour has been brought back to network television. I’m on the first show. I’ve whistled and hummed “Stars and Stripes Forever.” They call for an encore. I’m ready.

  1990

  People in Charge

  In all of the theories about why so many people have attacks of wackiness when they reach middle age—resign from the bank to go live in a van with a teenage mushroom-gatherer, and that sort of thing—one factor has been neglected: When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him. If he’s one of the people put in charge of things himself, it may scare him all the more. In his heart of hearts, he knows how he made it through English 137, and he suspects others may know. He’s right. I know. I’m not in charge of anything, but I’m scared anyway. I know some of these people.

  The neglect of the old-acquaintance factor has meant that some manifestations of middle-age behavior are misunderstood. For instance, there came a time when I seemed to lose interest in reading the morning paper. “He’s at that age,” the United Parcel Service deliveryman explained to my wife. “His hormones are starting to act up on him.” Wrong. My hormones are just fine, thank you. Look to your own hormones, United Parcel Service deliveryman. “He’s depressed because he sees himself slipping,” another lay analyst said, after observing me while he was in the house to unstop a clogged drain. “I’ve seen it on a lot of jobs lately. He knows he’s starting to throw a step behind the runner.”

  Wrong again. That is not why I quit reading the morning paper. I quit because I was starting to come across the names of people I knew, and it was scaring the hell out of me. Sure, I had borne up under it stoically for a while. I didn’t say anything when I read that the trustee chosen to preside over some important estate was a childhood neighbor of mine who had regularly cheated his little sister at Old Maid. People change. Maybe selling answers to the ninth grade algebra test—answers, I happen to know, that were worked out by the weird but brilliant Norton Gonsheimer on a promise (never kept) of 40 percent of the action—does not indicate a deep, immutable streak of dishonesty. Who was I to interfere? I remained calm when I read that the new chief of surgery at a fancy ho
spital uptown was someone who, I happen to know, was held back in the third grade for klutziness. I certainly didn’t say anything when I read that one sector of the U.S. Army’s missile-alert force was under the command of someone I knew in college as Dipso Dick Donnigan. What the Russians don’t know, I figured, won’t hurt them.

  When I read that Dalt Durfee had been sent over to work out our trade difficulties with the Japanese, I said a little something. I said, “Dalt Durfee! That pea-brain! Jesus Christ Almighty!” Or words to that effect. I might have said more, I’ll admit, if my wife hadn’t shot me an odd look and told me I was frightening the children. The reason that the news about Dalt Durfee pushed me over the edge was that I finally realized what was happening. When people around the country read in the morning paper that L. Dalton Durfee, Deputy Undersecretary of State for Asian Economic Affairs, was going to sort things out with the Japanese, they felt reassured that somebody as important as a deputy undersecretary was looking into the matter, and they continued breakfast secure in the expectation that they’d soon be able to buy something that was actually made in America besides hairspray and trash bags. I realized, though, that the person walking around in the role of Deputy Undersecretary of State was, in fact, Dalt Durfee, the fourth-dumbest guy in my college class—someone whose most penetrating display of intellectual curiosity had been when he asked a professor of geology whether A.M. means morning or afternoon. I realized that the Japanese would have California before the year was out. Worse than that, I finally realized that every deputy undersecretary was known way back when by someone like me. At that point I gave up reading the morning paper.

  Why, then, did the symptoms persist? Why did I continue in a funk that inspired the postman to explain to my wife that many men grow listless at a certain age because their thoughts start to dwell morbidly on the future of their prostates? The symptoms persisted because I realized that the people I knew back when were not simply in the newspaper; they were in the Yellow Pages. When I was staring out the window and the postman thought I was thinking of prostates, I was actually thinking of all the people listed in the Yellow Pages under Attorneys. I know some of those people. It scares me.

  In Toledo, the listing includes Ralph W. Moshler, Esq. It’s really Blinko Moshler, the dumbest guy in my class—a man who could stand in the intellectual shadow cast by Dalt Durfee and never see the sun. When Durfee asked the professor of geology whether A.M. meant morning or afternoon, Blinko, who was pushy as well as dumb, waved his hand and shouted “Afternoon! It means afternoon!” How, you ask, did someone as dumb as Blinko Moshler get through law school? If law school is hard to get through, I answer, how come there are so many lawyers?

  Blinko is with a respectable firm. People who don’t know any better think he’s a lawyer named Ralph W. Moshler, Esq. I worry about that. Sometimes, when I’m waiting to fall asleep at night, I imagine a decent, hardworking young man from a very small town in Ohio who goes to Toledo to get factory work. He lives quietly in a boarding-house. He’s saving his money so he can go back to his little town and open a Burger King franchise. One day, his landlady is brutally murdered. Circumstantial evidence points to the young boarder, although he is, of course, completely innocent. He has no money for a lawyer. The judge says, “I have appointed an attorney to represent you—a prominent member of the bar named Ralph W. Moshler.”

  “Stop!” I shout. “It’s not a lawyer! It’s Blinko! He’s a mushhead! It’s Blinko!”

  My wife shakes me awake. “You were talking in your sleep again,” she says. “You must be getting to that age.”

  1983

  Cow Town

  I think I’ve reached a détente with the boosters in Kansas City, my hometown. The trouble started some years ago, when the boosters were possessed for a while by the notion that Kansas City was not a cow town but “the glamour city of the seventies.” I’m certain that the boosters—I took to calling them the glamour gang—loved Kansas City in their own way, but sometimes it seemed that they mainly just hated cows.

  I appointed myself the protector of all that is bovine. I was lobbing in my opinions from New York, of course—like a Free French officer, as I saw it, engaged in the issues of his homeland while living in London during the occupation. I jeered at whatever evidence was presented to demonstrate that Kansas City—“a cow town no longer,” they kept saying—was sophisticated and up-to-date. When the glamour gang boasted about Kansas City’s new quarter-of-a-billion-dollar “international airport” that had been built somewhere in the direction of Nebraska—the city council’s policy on accumulation of noncontiguous land having been inherited intact from the British Colonial Office of 1843—I pointed out that no flights took off from said international airport and landed in another country. Yes, things got ugly.

  We had a strong disagreement over the city’s motto. When I was a boy, Kansas City was known as “Gateway to the West” or “The Heart of America.” Then St. Louis built a “gateway arch” 235 miles from the real gateway and starting calling itself “Gateway to the West.” That left “The Heart of America”—which I rather liked but which must have reminded the glamour gang of one of the internal organs of a cow. They decided that the city needed a new motto and the one they got the city to adopt was “More Boulevards than Paris, More Fountains than Rome.”

  So I wrote somewhere that if we had so many fountains, we could tear one of them down and use the materials to build a statue of Henry Perry, who brought barbecue to Kansas City in the early twenties. As I said, things got ugly.

  After a study had shown that the Kansas City economy was indeed based on agriculture, though, the glamour gang recanted its anti–cow town views in front of the Rotary Club, and for a while, Kansas City had as its motto “World Food Capital.” I quit jeering. I even started feeling a little forgiving toward St. Louis for having stolen “Gateway to the West.” It’s understandable that St. Louis would have been sort of desperate for an impressive motto, since it had previously been known as “Mound City.” Kansas City people try to get along.

  Not many years ago, I spoke at the Chamber of Commerce banquet in Kansas City, and I tried to reach out for some common ground. I said that when I recommended tearing down one of the fountains, that depended on how many more fountains than Rome we had. If we had only one more, I was not in favor of tearing it down. I didn’t want to lose the edge. I didn’t want to show up in Rome someday and see a sign on the city limits that said PIÙ FONTANI DI KANSAS CITY.

  The Chamber people seemed to accept that. I think we’re okay now.

  1997

  My Tuxedo

  I am often mistaken for the sort of person who does not own a tuxedo. Once or twice, I regret to say, this mistake has been made even though I happened to be wearing a tuxedo at the time (“My goodness, are they still renting that kind?”). More often, it is part of a general impression. “I don’t suppose you own a tuxedo …,” people sometimes say to me, the way an English country gentleman might say to the Hasidic scholar he has met on the train, “I don’t suppose you own a shooting stick.…” The general impression is incorrect. I do own a tuxedo. I have owned a tuxedo for nearly thirty years. The same tuxedo. If you were planning to invite me to an event at which tuxedos are required, rest assured that I would show up properly dressed.

  Don’t ask me for New Year’s Eve. I’m busy. I go to the same party every New Year’s Eve, and one reason it gives me great pleasure is that it presents me with an opportunity to wear my tuxedo. I bought the tuxedo in 1954, when I was a thrifty young undergraduate, because I had added up the number of black-tie events I would have to attend during college, divided the cost of a tuxedo by that number, and concluded that I would be better off buying a tuxedo than renting one. As you must have gathered, this was a fancy college. I am often mistaken for the sort of person who did not attend a fancy college, but that’s another story.

  As it turned out, there have been a number of occasions to wear the tuxedo since graduation—that possibility
hadn’t even figured in my tuxedo management scheme in 1954—and every time I wear it, the cost per wearing decreases. This New Year’s Eve, for instance, wearing my tuxedo is going to cost me only about forty-eight cents. Try renting a tuxedo for forty-eight cents these days. Knowing that my tuxedo becomes cheaper every time I wear it may influence me in the direction of showing up in a tuxedo now and then at events where black-tie is not strictly necessary, like a hog roast or a divorce hearing or a meeting where people are planning the overthrow of the government by force and violence.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have bothered,” the hostess often says, while gazing admiringly at my cummerbund.

  “It’s nothing, really,” I tell her. “A matter of approximately fifty-five cents.”

  When I tell people about my tuxedo (“Guess how much this tuxedo is costing me tonight. Go ahead—don’t be afraid to guess. Just take a guess. How much do you think?”), they often tell me that I should be proud of being able to fit into something I bought in college. True. I would be prouder, though, if I did not have reason to believe that the pants of my tuxedo actually belong to Joe LeBeau. Joe was a college classmate of mine—a rather rotund college classmate of mine, if you must know. I have reason to believe that just before graduation, at a black-tie party for which a large room was converted into a dormitory for a number of out-of-town guests who were wearing nearly identical tuxedos, Joe LeBeau and I came away with each other’s pants. That’s the sort of thing that can happen at a fancy college.

  When somebody who sees me in my tuxedo asks a question that leads to the subject of Joe LeBeau (“Say, are you by any chance wearing somebody else’s pants, or what?”), I am often asked why I did not simply exchange his pants for my own once the mistake was discovered. Anybody who asks that never knew Joe LeBeau, for whom the phrase “not vulnerable to reason” was invented. As an example of LeBeauesque conversation, I repeat an exchange between LeBeau and an earnest fellow from down the hall who happened to be taking the same course in modern history: