Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Page 7

  “Soy waste, granola dust, pure extract of tree stump—what’s the difference what they call it?” I said. “Judging from the condition of the clerk, it obviously isn’t enough to keep a human being alive.”

  It happens to be true that health food makes me sick. In fact, health food stores make me feel a bit queasy even if I don’t buy anything—partly, I think, because they always smell like capsules that have been in the medicine chest since the Nixon-Humphrey campaign.

  “The children said you made a scene in the store,” Alice said.

  “Not a scene, really,” I said. It is true that, as I poked around the aisles looking for the soy waste, I stopped to sniff the air, and suddenly heard myself shout, “Help! I’m trapped in a bottle of multivitamins!” That isn’t really a scene though. I think of it as more of an outburst.

  “I think you’re becoming a crank,” Alice said.

  “Isn’t there some public health law against people who are shopping for food being reminded constantly of the last days of Howard Hughes?”

  “A sausage-eating crank at that,” Alice said.

  “Let me ask you just one question,” I said. “If bumblebee leavings and stump paste are so good for you, why can’t any of those guys grow full beards?”

  1980

  HIGH SOCIETY AND JUST PLAIN RICH PEOPLE

  “When my freshman-year roommate at Yale, Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, told me that after the war his family no longer dressed for dinner, I thought he meant that they showed up in their undershirts. I said, ‘My mom would have never allowed that, Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, and I’m talking here about Kansas City.’ ”

  Errands

  I’ve been back from the summer cottage for a while now, but I still seem to spend most of my time doing the sort of things that the recent biography of William Paley says he never had to do.

  These biographies of the mighty stir conflicting emotions in the ordinary reader. For instance, Paley, the founder of CBS, is revealed as a liar, a braggart, a bully, a turncoat, a philanderer, and the sort of parent who in a just world would be tossed in the slammer for dereliction of duty—in other words, the sort of person we’re used to reading about lately in biographies of our country’s most prominent citizens. On the other hand, he never had to unpack his own car.

  This combination is what stirs the conflicting emotions. If you’re reading the book on the beach, you might think, “What a thoroughly loathsome human being.” But if you’re reading it in the license-renewal line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau—the line you’re afraid you might wait in for forty minutes only to be told that the form you’ve filled out with such care is of no use without the birth certificate you keep in the safety deposit box—you might think, a bit wistfully, “I guess Bill Paley would have had somebody to take care of this sort of thing for him.”

  You would be half right. As I understand it, he would have had two people take care of that sort of thing—one to stand in the line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau and one who was in charge of such matters as sending somebody down to the Motor Vehicle Bureau to stand in line. This, at least, is what I was advised by my wife, who was the person in our family actually reading the book. I wanted to get to it myself, but I was too busy unpacking the car.

  “When the Paleys flew from one of their houses to another, they didn’t even carry a suitcase,” she said. “There were people who went ahead of them to make sure that the closets were in order and the refrigerator was stocked and there were fresh flowers in the house.”

  Again, if I had been told that while I was lying quietly in the hammock, I might have taken it in as a marginally interesting fact about the habits of the rich. My response had to do with the fact that I was at that moment trying to balance a pile of underwear in one hand while violently pulling on a drawer that seemed to have an old Stroud’s Fried Chicken T-shirt (“We Choke Our Own Chickens”) stuck in it in a way that prevented it from being opened more than three or four inches.

  I let go of the drawer, and paused, still holding the pile of underwear teetering in one hand. “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” I said to my wife.

  “No, you shouldn’t,” my wife said. “If you threw out that junk you have in the lower drawer and put the underwear in there instead, you wouldn’t keep getting that drawer jammed.”

  “I mean I shouldn’t be spending my time unpacking clothes and trying to open drawers that are jammed by Stroud’s Fried Chicken T-shirts.”

  “Not if you’re going to get to the cleaners before they close,” she said. “I finally got the washing-machine repairman to answer the phone, but I have to leave for my meeting in five minutes if I’m going to stop at the post office. You should probably run over to the cleaners now and finish unpacking later, after you change that one light bulb in the hall.”

  “What I meant,” I said, “is that I really should have people dealing with these things for me. Didn’t you tell me that until he went to check the display of some CBS magazine Paley had never been in a supermarket?”

  “I don’t think you’d be happy having someone else go to the supermarket,” my wife said. “You couldn’t trust anyone else to come across those weird brands of diet root beer you like.”

  But it would give me a lot more time. Of course, when Paley had a lot more time, he used it to cheat on his wife and plot against the colleagues who trusted him. Maybe he would have been better off spending a little more time going to the supermarket and standing in Motor Vehicle Bureau lines. I thought about that for a while, and looked at the underwear in my hand. “Is it possible that organizing the underwear drawer is the path to virtue?” I asked my wife.

  “Maybe you’d better take a little break,” she said. “You’re beginning to talk funny. We can pick up the cleaning tomorrow.”

  1991

  Thoughts on Power Neckwear

  I like to wear a power tie.

  I think it helps identify

  With colors that you can’t deny

  An A-list guy who sits on high

  In boxes when the footballs fly.

  It shows I’ve kissed coach seats goodbye.

  I’ve been to Delhi and Shanghai.

  I’ve met the Sultan of Brunei.

  My sight is where my problems lie:

  I’m color blind, so though I try

  To, through my neckties, signify

  That normal rules do not apply,

  I oftentimes in error buy

  A tie that says “This guy is shy

  Of influence—a small-fry guy.”

  The thought that I could mortify

  Myself like this just makes me sigh.

  Oh, woe is I. Oh, woe is I.

  1996

  The Tweed Curve

  While controversy was raging over The Bell Curve, which contends that intelligence among blacks is immutably lower than among whites, there was some speculation that I planned to write a book demonstrating that rich people from Social Register backgrounds are, for the most part, dumb as dirt. I want to make it clear that I have no such plans.

  What caused the speculation in the first place? In Remembering Denny, a book that dealt partly with the fifties at Yale, I wrote the following about how a high school boy from Kansas City could be permanently affected by prolonged exposure to hordes of old-money boarding school graduates with names like Thatcher Baxter Hatcher: “If I meet someone who is easily identifiable as being from what was once called a St. Grottlesex background, my gut expectation—kicking in fast enough to override my beliefs about judging people as individuals, slipping in well below the level of rational thinking—is that he’s probably a bit slow.”

  Yes, I acknowledge that this is only my gut expectation. When rational thinking exerts itself, a moment later, I understand that intelligent thoughts can be expressed in the accent sometimes called Locust Valley Lockjaw, even if those thoughts are often about sailing or the stock market. Still, you might say that when it comes to being dismissive about the intelligence of an entire class of peop
le, I was ahead of the Curve.

  On the other hand, I lacked a political impetus for writing a book. One of The Bell Curve co-authors, a political scientist named Charles Murray, manages to come to the same conclusion no matter what he studies—that the government should quit trying to help out poor people. I didn’t burn to write The Tweed Curve in order to argue that, say, confiscatory inheritance taxes should be applied as a means of keeping some of our more important institutions out of the hands of ditz-brains. To the extent that I considered the project at all, my motive was simply to make a bundle.

  I knew I could hire research assistants to run up a few charts for me—distribution of Groton graduates in the academic ranking of the Harvard class of 1959, say, or the average IQ of people who regularly play court tennis compared with the average IQ of people who regularly play handball, or the number of Junior Assemblies debutantes who have submitted winning entries to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

  The study that I considered particularly elegant in its construction would have compared median SAT scores of students with at least one grandparent in Hobe Sound with the median SAT scores of students with at least one grandparent in North Miami Beach. I called it “The Florida Index.” I also tossed around some ideas for quizzes I might use to break up the statistics while furthering my argument. (Name a distinguished American novelist who is a high-caste WASP and not named Louis Auchincloss. Gotcha!)

  So what stopped me from cashing in? I’d like to think that some moral qualms were involved—a concern, say, that some oversensitive Hotchkiss lad who has just been cut from the junior varsity lacrosse team might be crushed by learning that he is probably genetically fated to rise no higher than the Palm Beach office of a white-shoe stockbrokerage.

  Also, I have observed the way The Bell Curve got taken apart by reviewers who have some background in the field of human intelligence. The unkindest cuts came from people who dismissed Murray as the ideologue who didn’t quite understand the theories of his co-author—the late Richard Herrnstein, who was, in fact, a psychologist. Reading those reviews provided some idea of what would have happened in Stalin’s time if the mechanical-engineer half of the team assigned to do the book on farm implements had been sent to the gulag just before publication day, leaving the political-commissar half to explain to confused readers precisely how a tractor works.

  I was obviously vulnerable to such treatment. I know some would claim that Yale in the fifties presented a flawed sample, partly because the admissions office was fussy about the grades of public high school boys but dipped far enough into the class at certain boarding schools to pick up the slow but socially acceptable father of that Hotchkiss lacrosse player. I know some would dismiss as unscientific my hypothesis on why intelligence deficits seem to accompany old money. (“I guess the blood sort of runs out, or something.”) I know someone would discover that my academic background in this field amounts to one year of Human Science, a yard-sale version of biology that was taught at Southwest High School by a man who told us, among other things, that colored people and white people smelled different.

  So I decided against publishing The Tweed Curve. I realize that this decision could have also been influenced by a lingering feeling, brought on by early association with Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, that there is something crude about suddenly making a bundle. Of course, the intervening decades, with their economic ups and downs, could have changed Hatcher’s views on whether the age of one’s money is terribly important—compared with, say, the amount of it. He may see my decision as an indication that I’ve become dumb as dirt.

  1995

  The 401st

  The minute I saw Forbes magazine’s list of the four hundred richest people in the United States, my heart went out to the person who was four hundred and first.

  “He’s nothing but some rich creep,” Alice said.

  “Creeps have feelings, too,” I said. The phrase she had used suddenly conjured up a picture of the poor soul I was worrying about: Rich Creep, the Manhattan megadeal cutter and man about town. He lives in the Carlyle. He dates models. He eats breakfast at the Regency, where deals are made so quickly that a careless conglomerates could find himself swallowing up a middle-sized corporation while under the impression that he was just mopping up his egg yolk with the end of a croissant. He dines every night at places like La Caravelle and Le Cirque. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Cripp,” the headwaiter says when Creep walks in with an icily beautiful fashion model who weighs eighty-eight pounds, twelve of which are in cheekbones. “If I may make a suggestion, the overpriced veal is excellent tonight.”

  On the way to breakfast one morning, Creep happens to see the cover of Forbes at the Carlyle newsstand. “The Richest People in America,” the headline says. “The Forbes Four Hundred.” He snatches the magazine from the rack and, standing right in the lobby, he starts going through the list—at first methodically and then desperately. Finally, he turns and slinks back to his room. He can’t face the crowd at the Regency. They’d pretend nothing has changed, but then they’d start trying to find some smaller corporation for him to swallow up—the way a nanny might sort through the picnic basket to find the smallest piece of white meat for the least adventurous child. He cancels his dinner date for the evening. He’s afraid he might be given a cramped table near the kitchen, where the draft from the swinging doors could blow the fashion model into the dessert cart. He’s afraid that the same French waiters who once hovered over him attentively while he ate (“Is your squab done expensively enough, Monsieur Cripp?”) will glance in his direction and whisper to each other, “Les petites pommes de terre”—small potatoes.

  So who says I have no sympathy for rich people? And this is nothing new. When Fortune first published its list of the five hundred largest corporations in America, my heart went out immediately to the corporation that was five hundred and first. Of course, I had no way of knowing its name—that tragic anonymity was the basis for my sympathy—but I always thought of it as Humboldt Bolt & Tube. I felt for the folks at Humboldt Bolt & Tube. I could see them giving their all to build their corporation into one of the largest corporations in America—busting unions, cutting corners on safety specifications, bribing foreign heads of state, slithering out of expensive pollution-control regulations—only to remain unrecognized year after year.

  As the Fortune 500 became an institution in American life, I often pictured the scene at the Humboldt Country Club in Humboldt, Ohio, when an important visitor from Wall Street asks casually over drinks, “Do you have any Fortune 500 companies in Humboldt?”

  For a moment, no one speaks. The “old man,” as everyone in Humboldt calls Harrison H. Humboldt, the son of Bolt & Tube’s founder, looks out at the eighteenth green, the hint of a tear in his eye. Finally, someone says, “No, but we’ve got the third-largest granite pit east of the Mississippi.”

  1982

  Invasion of the Limo-Stretchers

  I pinned what Pam Blessinger said about rich people on my bulletin board. For a few months now, it has been in the section I reserve for permanent display, right next to a Wizard of Oz quotation that somehow comforts displaced Midwesterners in New York City by stating what should be increasingly obvious: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  Pam Blessinger spoke as president of the residents’ association of New York’s Roosevelt Island, which is in the East River in a spot usually described as in the shadow of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Developed ten years ago as a middle-income “new town,” Roosevelt Island has become a quiet, family sort of place that one of Blessinger’s fellow residents described to The New York Times as “an island of Indiana in the middle of Manhattan.”

  Blessinger was quoted in the Times in opposition to a proposed expansion of the development that would include what looked to her suspiciously like luxury apartments. “We’re not against white or black or purple,” she said. “What we’re against is rich people.”

  There. She said it. The rest of us ha
ve been pussyfooting around this for years, afraid of being called prejudiced. Not Mrs. B. She could envision the peaceful lanes of her little island jammed with triple-parked stretch limousines waiting in front of restaurants where a plate of spaghetti costs eighteen dollars and change. She could see the day when respectable citizens who have to get up and go to work the next morning would be awakened in the middle of the night by the braying of rich people being dropped off after charity balls: “It was marvelous, darling!” “Wasn’t it marvelous, darling?” “Yes, it was marvelous, darling!”

  Mrs. B. said out loud what the rest of us have been thinking: Those people can ruin a neighborhood lickety-split.

  No, we are not prejudiced. We wouldn’t mind one or two rich people, but these days the supply of them seems inexhaustible. As seems to be true of so many recent developments in American life, this surfeit of richies has come as a surprise to me. When I was growing up, one of the most important things about truly rich people was that there weren’t very many of them. Also, my high school teachers told us that people like the Rockefellers had grabbed their piles before the tax laws made it impossible to amass huge personal fortunes.

  So why have so many people become as rich as the Rockefellers? Is it possible that these rich people know something about the tax laws that my high school teachers didn’t know?

  Most of the rich people are in New York. I don’t care what Forbes says about where they live. They’re here. We’ve got Texas rich people and California rich people and Colorado rich people. We’ve got rich people with new money and rich people with old money and rich people whose money just needs to sit in the window for a few days and ripen in the sun. There’s no variety of rich people we don’t have in overstock. New York has more rich people than some cities have people.