Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Read online

  1983

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

  If I done right or I done wrong,

  I’d sooner be held by the Vietcong.

  1991

  The Inside on Insider Trading

  “Daddy, what’s insider trading?”

  “Isn’t it customary in most families for the daughter to come down to breakfast and ask the father if she can buy the divine sweater she just saw in the window of some store whose name sounds like a traffic accident?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then why are you asking about insider trading instead of whether you can buy a new sweater?”

  “Can I buy a new sweater?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “That’s why.”

  “What kind of cereal do you want this morning? How about a bowl of this stuff that fulfills your basic daily requirements of niacin, lipides, and riboflavin? That would be a real load off your mind, not having to worry about niacin, lipids, and riboflavin all that time. It would leave you free to worry about whether your breakfast is rich enough in thiacin and pantothenate.”

  “That kind of cereal is gross, Daddy.”

  “Now that I think of it, Niacin, Lipides, and Riboflavin sound like some lawyers I used to know. If you think the cereal is gross, you ought to meet Lipides.”

  “Daddy, you know what Mommy always says: She says if you never give me a straight answer I’m going to grow up to be a smart-aleck like you.”

  “I thought ‘certainly not’ was a pretty straight answer to the sweater question.”

  “Daddy, what’s insider trading?”

  “Okay. Insider trading is when someone who works on Wall Street gets material information that is not available to the general public and uses that information to make money buying or selling stocks.”

  “What happens to someone who gets caught at insider trading?”

  “He gets arrested.”

  “But what’s his punishment?”

  “His punishment is that he has to tell on someone else who’s doing the same thing.”

  “At school, we call that squealing.”

  “These people call it making a deal.”

  “Don’t they ever have to go to jail?”

  “Well, maybe if—”

  “I know, Daddy: Maybe if they’re represented by Niacin, Lipides, and Riboflavin.”

  “May I recommend a bowl of this stuff that gives you the same amount of energy the Olympic decathlon champion gets every morning at breakfast? Then if you’re only interested in maybe a little shot-putting you’ll have a lot of energy left over.”

  “What I don’t understand, Daddy, is what people who work on Wall Street do who aren’t doing something you can get arrested for?”

  “They try to get material information that is not available to the general public and then they use that information to make money buying and selling stock.”

  “But if everyone who works on Wall Street does the same thing, why are just some of the people on Wall Street arrested?”

  “Those people are arrested for stealing too fast.”

  “I don’t think Mommy would call that a straight answer, Daddy.”

  “Well, it’s a lot like the speed limit on driving. It may be true that everyone drives faster than fifty-five, but that doesn’t mean that you can whiz past a state trooper who’s doing sixty and not expect to be pulled over to the side. It’s the same with those people in the New York Parking Violations Bureau who got indicted for taking bribes from contractors. If they had just waited until they left government and then taken cushy jobs with the contractors, nobody would have said anything. They got indicted for exceeding the speed limit.”

  “Is that your straightest answer—that business about exceeding the speed limit?”

  “Why do you think people are always talking about the risks of life in the fast lane?”

  “Could I please have a bowl of that cereal that’s chock-full of riboflavin?”

  “Sure. Anything else?”

  “Yes. I think I need a new sweater.”

  “No problem.”

  1986

  Four Supreme Court Nominations

  DAVID SOUTER ASTONISHES

  A character beyond dispute?

  No accusations to refute?

  Did no one ever institute

  A suit that claimed you took some loot?

  Not once, did you go on a toot?

  Or hit some brute right in the snoot

  When he, attempting to be cute,

  Insisted that a man named Souter

  would, of course, be known as Zoot?

  Or taste … er … ah … forbidden fruit?

  Or once neglect your paper route?

  1990

  HARRIET MIERS BRINGS TROUBLE ON THE RIGHT

  The President, who never tires

  Of naming cronies, named Ms. Miers

  To be a justice. I’m not kidding.

  He said he knows she’ll do his bidding.

  The social-issues Right went crazy.

  They called her record much too hazy.

  Though through the code, with some contortion,

  Bush signaled that she hates abortion,

  They asked, so why is she not willing

  To say right out it’s baby killing?

  Responding to this strong attack, he

  Assured the Right she’s really wacky.

  In phone calls, Rove, in hopes of winning

  Support from preachers gave this spinning:

  It’s by her church that ye shall know her.

  Her church is low. No church is lower.

  Her church friends (please think Holy Rollers)

  Treat embryos like kids in strollers—

  Including embryos of rapists.

  The Baptists to these folks are papists.

  She’s not the moderate you deem her.

  If you’re extreme, then she’s extremer.

  Her style is not to be dramatic,

  But be assured she is fanatic.

  2005

  SONIA SOTOMAYOR CAUSES SUSPICION

  The nominee’s Sotomayor,

  Whom all good Latinos adore

  But right-wingers tend to deplore.

  They’d like to show Sonia the door.

  Her record, they say, heretofore

  Reveals that beliefs at her core

  Would favor minorities more:

  She’d hand them decisions galore,

  Because of the racial rapport.

  Whereas white male judges are, as everyone knows, totally neutral.

  2009

  JOHN ROBERTS ACTS AS UMPIRE

  “Judges are like umpires.… I have no agenda.… And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

  —John Roberts’s opening statement at his confirmation hearing, 2005

  “The Roberts court … ruled for business interests 61 percent of the time, compared with 46 percent in the last five years of the court led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.”

  —The New York Times, 2010

  Regardless of which law he likes,

  He’s only calling balls and strikes.

  His own beliefs would never trump

  Decisions from this simple ump.

  Statistics that have just come in

  Now show what kind of ump he’s been.

  Extrapolating from these cases,

  Big-business pitchers all are aces.

  By chance, the pitchers who are great—

  The ones who nick or split the plate,

  The ones deserving of ovations—

  Just tend to pitch for corporations.

  Of balls and strikes that he has eyed,

  The union pitches all look wide.

  Consumers make for easy calls:

  Their pitches simply all are balls.

  Environmentalists? It’s droll

  The way control frea
ks lack control.

  A left-wing lawyer sharp as Darrow

  Will find the strike zone much too narrow.

  Behind it, crouching, is the Chief,

  Quite confident in his belief:

  Regardless of which laws he likes,

  He’s only calling balls and strikes.

  2010

  Damaged Goods

  I heard on the morning news that some kidnappers in the Bronx telephoned the wife of their victim with a demand for $100,000 in ransom money, and she talked them down to $30,000. The newscaster said the story had a happy ending—the victim was returned unharmed, the ransom money was recovered, the kidnappers were arrested—but all I could think of was how the man must have felt when, back in the bosom of his loving family at last, he discovered that his wife had him on discount special.

  I suppose a lot of people who heard the story took it as just one more indication that New York City is getting to be one of those places, like Bombay or Tijuana, where the price is always negotiable. They could probably imagine the victim’s wife standing in front of some huge counter, poking at her husband the way she might poke at a cantaloupe, and saying, “A hundred grand for that! The way it’s going soft around the sides already! You have the nerve to stand here and tell me that you are trying to charge one hundred thousand American dollars for that!”

  Even a resident of the American Bombay, though, has to be disturbed at the prospect of having a loved one treat him the way she would treat an overripe cantaloupe. “What if I got kidnapped and they called demanding ransom money?” I asked my wife, Alice, after stewing over the Bronx caper for a couple of days. “I don’t suppose you’d have any inclination to see if you could talk them into settling for thirty cents on the dollar, would you?”

  “You’re not going to get kidnapped,” Alice said. “Why can’t you just worry about high interest rates or acid rain or The Bomb, like normal people?”

  As it happens, I didn’t use to worry much about being kidnapped. After I heard the kidnapping story from the Bronx, though, it began to occur to me that the days when kidnappers limited their efforts to the better-known names of Manhattan café society may be over. It’s possible that the sagging economy has driven kidnappers to the outer boroughs. I had to consider the possibility that some particularly desperate gang was staking out the garage in Brooklyn where I take my car to be repaired. If so, I’m in real danger: If a kidnapper tried to calculate my net worth by simply extrapolating from the amount of money I’ve poured into that wretched machine, he would figure me for eight or ten million dollars at the least.

  All of which meant that I also had to consider the possibility that I might be the cantaloupe being discussed in a scene that flashed across my mind:

  KIDNAPPER: Look, lady, even at eighty grand I’d barely come out on the deal myself. I mean, with the price of getaway cars these days and—

  ALICE: You mean eighty thousand before we knock off the ten for softness around the sides, right?

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said to Alice. “Nobody could blame you for reminding the perpetrators that it’s going to be impossible for this country to get inflation down to some manageable level unless people in every walk of life make some effort toward voluntary control of wages and prices.”

  “I’ve never understood why you don’t get a hobby,” Alice said.

  Was it mere chance that she did not directly deny that she might ever consider me cut-rate merchandise? Was it really possible that she might respond to the dread call with a little dickering?

  KIDNAPPER: We got him, lady, and we want a hundred grand pronto.

  ALICE: (Long tactical silence)

  “I suppose there’s no reason to assume that just because someone happens to be your husband he’s automatically worth the full sticker price,” I said.

  “Maybe you should get involved in some sort of volunteer work,” she said. “Afternoons part-time at one of the thrift shops—something like that.”

  “Aside from some mileage on the odometer,” I said, “I’m sure I have a few little faults that might be mentioned by someone interested in lowering the asking price just a little.”

  “You mean little faults like going on and on about some particularly silly subject?” Alice said.

  “Well, I hadn’t actually thought of that, as a matter of fact.” Then I did think of it:

  KIDNAPPER: Lady, he’s driving us batty with all this talk about full sticker price.

  ALICE: Why don’t we talk again tomorrow, after you’ve had a chance to get to know him a little better.

  1982

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

  O.J.?

  Oy vey!

  1995

  LIFE AMONG THE LITERATI

  “The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt. Books by Dan Brown or Danielle Steel may have a longer shelf life, but they contain preservatives.”

  T. S. Eliot and Me

  For an Authors Guild benefit some years ago, four or five of us were asked to write a rejection letter turning down some classic work of literature. Garrison Keillor rejected Walden Pond, by Henry David Thoreau. He said that Walden Pond had a lot of good axioms in it, but that the structure was weak. So he suggested turning it into a calendar. I rejected The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot. I rejected it in iambic pentameter, of course. The last couplet of my letter was, “I know this is a blow, Tom, not to worry: / You’re still the greatest poet from Missouri.” The faintness of praise in calling someone the greatest poet from Missouri can be gauged by the fact that the other poet from Missouri is me. Another way to put it is that T. S. Eliot and I comprise the Missouri school of poetry.

  I know you’re thinking that there are considerable differences between T. S. Eliot and me. Yes, it’s true that he was from St. Louis, which started calling itself the Gateway to the West after Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch was erected, and I’m from Kansas City, where people think of St. Louis not as the Gateway to the West but as the Exit from the East. But then there are the similarities. For instance, both of us have a penchant for using foreign languages in our poetry. In fact, the rejection letter I wrote to Eliot criticized him for going overboard in that regard:

  These many tongues, Tom, into which you lapse

  Are foreign tongues—not spoken by our chaps.

  Some French, all right, but take a word like “Shantih.”

  The reader’s stumped, no matter how avant he

  Imagines that he is (Or is that fair?

  One might say Sanskrit’s truly derrière.)

  I’ve never used Sanskrit in a poem myself. I go in more for Yiddish. I think it’s fair to say that Eliot was not partial to Yiddish. When the breakup of Yugoslavia provoked a few wars, for instance, I wrote

  Croatians are the good guys now,

  Although their past is somewhat shady,

  So worry not that these same guys

  Chased both your bubbe and your zayde.

  Both of us toss in some German now and then. Eliot, of course, includes a passage from Tristan und Isolde in the opening stanza of The Waste Land, and I, when George W. Bush named an old family retainer as attorney general of the United States, took advantage of the fact that Alberto Gonzales rhymes with “loyal über alles.” And we both have occasionally written about animals. Eliot famously wrote a series of poems about cats, and I have written, for example, that corgis appear to be a breed of dog assembled from the parts of other breeds of dog—and not the parts that those other breeds were all that sorry about giving up. As a matter of perspective, I should acknowledge that there has never been a long-running Broadway musical called Corgis.

  Our paths do separate dramatically on the matter of rhyme. It isn’t that Eliot shunned rhyme. I still sometimes find myself murmuring couplets from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.” But in The Waste Land, ther
e were so few rhymes that I said in my rejection letter, “So my advice, Tom, ‘Hurry up, it’s time’ / For restoration of some lines that rhyme. / And when that’s done, I think it might be neater / If you could sort of tidy up the meter.”

  I, on the other hand, have stuck stubbornly to rhyme. That might have something to do with the poetic influence of my father. He was a grocer for most of his working life, but he owned a restaurant for a while, and he treated that as an opportunity to put a rhyming couplet on the menu every day at lunch. He was devoted to rhymes, particularly rhymes about pie. He rhymed “pie” with “shy” and “July” and “evening is nigh” and “All right warden, I’m ready to fry. / My last request was Mrs. Trillin’s pie.”

  The result of the separate paths T. S. Eliot and I took is simple: He is thought of as perhaps the greatest literary figure of the twentieth century, and I am a deadline poet, commenting on the events of the day in verse for a hundred dollars a shot.

  Deadline poetry is a small subset of rhyming poetry. A very small subset. A few years ago, John Allemang, of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and I founded the International Deadline Poets Organization, or IDPO. We were the only members. I hasten to say that IDPO is not the only exclusive literary organization I have ever belonged to. When I was traveling the country to do regular reporting pieces for The New Yorker, Jules Loh was doing a similar series for the Associated Press, and we formed the American Association of American Correspondents Covering America. Our meetings were held at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. We were the only members. The American Association of American Correspondents Covering America had only one rule: You can’t quote de Tocqueville. That’s how we kept the membership down.