Is That What People Do? (50 page)

Elroy swung into action. He pounced on the Directory and located the Spouse Alteration Service of Saugerties, New York. They came and took Elva away and Elroy finally had time to get into himself.

First he learned how to achieve instantaneous ecstasy at will. This ability had formerly been an exclusive possession of a few Eastern religious organizations, which, until recently, had been the only ones with the telephone number of the service that provided it. Bliss was a lot of fun, but Elroy had to come out of it when Childmenders called to say that his child was irreparable. What did he want them to do with her? Elroy told them to put her back together as well as they could and store her until further notice.

It was at this time, through the assistance of Psychoboosters, Inc., that he was able to raise his intelligence to two levels above genius, a fact that was duly noted in the updated edition of his autobiography, which was being serialized in
The New York Times.

The Spouse Alteration Service called and said that Elva was the old unalterable model and could not be adjusted without grave danger to the mechanism. Elroy told them to store her with his irreparable kid.

At last, triumphantly alone, Elroy could return to the joyous work of saying goodbye forever to Mr. Pain. He had it all pretty much together by now, of course, and was experiencing many religious visions of great power and intensity. But something unsatisfactory still remained, though he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He looked through the Directory, but found no answer. It looked as if he was going to have to tough this one through on his own. But then, providentially, the front door opened and in walked a small, dark, smiling man with a turban and all-knowing eyes and an aura of incredible power. This was the Mystery Guru, who seeks you out when the time is right and tells you what you need to know—if you are a subscriber to the Directory.

“It’s the ego,” the Mystery Guru said, and left.

Vast waves of comprehension flooded over Elroy. The ego! Of course! Why hadn’t
he
thought of that? Obviously his ego was the final thing anchoring him to the gummy clay of everyday reality. His ego! His very own ego was holding him back, forever yammering its selfish demands at him, completely disregarding his welfare!

Elroy opened the Directory. There, all by itself on the last page, he found the Lefkowitz Ego Removers of Flushing, New York.

Beneath their ad was this: “Warning. The Surgeon-General Has Determined that Ego Removal May Be Injurious to Your Health.”

Joseph Elroy hesitated, considered, weighed factors. He was momentarily perplexed. But then the Mystery Guru popped into the room again and said, “It’s a seven-to-five shot at the Big Spiritual Money, and besides, what have you got to lose?” He exited, a master of timing.

Elroy punched out the big combination on the console.

Not long afterward there was a knock at the door. Elroy opened it to the Lefkowitz Ego Removal Squad.

They left. Then there was only the console, winking and leering and glittering at itself. And then even that was gone and there was nothing whatever in the room except a disembodied voice humming “Amapola.”

THE SHAGGY AVERAGE AMERICAN MAN STORY

Dear Joey:

You ask me in your letter what can a man do when all of a sudden, through no fault of his own, he finds that there is a bad rap hanging over him which he cannot shake off.

You did right in asking me, as your spiritual advisor and guide, to help you in this matter.

I can sympathize with your feelings, dear friend. Being known far and wide as a double-faced, two-tongued, short-count ripoff artist fit only for the company of cretinous Albanians is indeed an upsetting situation, and I can well understand how it has cut into your business as well as your self-esteem and is threatening to wipe you out entirely. But that is no reason to do a kamikaze into Mount Shasta with your hang glider, as you threaten in your letter. Joey, no situation is entirely unworkable. People have gone through worse bad-rapping than that, and come up smelling like roses.

For your edification I cite the recent experience of my good friend George Blaxter.

I don’t think you ever met George. You were in Goa the year he was in Ibiza, and then you were with that Subud group in Bali when George was with his guru in Isfahan. Suffice it to say that George was in London during the events I am about to relate, trying to sell a novel he had just written, and living with Big Karen, who, you may remember, was Larry Shark’s old lady when Larry was playing pedal guitar with Brain Damage at the San Remo Festival.

Anyhow, George was living low and quiet in a bed-sitter in Fulham when one day a stranger came to his door and introduced himself as a reporter from the Paris
Herald Tribune
and asked him what his reaction was to the big news.

George hadn’t heard any big news recently, except for the Celtics losing to the Knicks in the NBA playoffs, and he said so.

“Somebody should have contacted you about this,” the reporter said. “In that case, I don’t suppose you know that the Emberson Study Group in Annapolis, Maryland, has recently finished its monumental study updating the averageness concept to fit the present and still-changing demographic and ethnomorphic aspects of our great nation.”

“No one told me about it,” George said.

“Sloppy, very sloppy,” the reporter said. “Well, incidental to the Study, the Emberson Group was asked if they could come up with some actual person who would fit and embody the new parameters of American averageness. The reporters wanted somebody who could be called Mr. Average American Man. You know how reporters are.”

“But what has this got to do with me?”

“It’s really remiss of them not to have notified you,” the reporter said. “They fed the question into their computer and turned it loose on their sampling lists, and the computer came up with you.”

“With me?” George said.

“Yes. They really should have notified you.”

“I’m supposed to be the Average American Man!”

“That’s what the computer said.”

“But that’s crazy,” George said. “How can I be the Average American Man? I’m only five foot eight and my name is Blaxter spelled with an ‘l’, and I’m of Armenian and Latvian ancestry and I was born in Ship’s Bottom, New Jersey. What’s
that
average of, for Chrissakes? They better recheck their results. What they’re looking for is some Iowa farmboy with blond hair and a Mercury and 2.4 children.”

“That’s the old, outdated stereotype,” the reporter said. “America today is composed of racial and ethnic minorities whose sheer ubiquity precludes the possibility of choosing an Anglo-Saxon model. The average man of today has to be unique to be average, if you see what I mean.”

“Well...what am I supposed to do now?” George asked.

The reporter shrugged. “I suppose you just go on doing whatever average things you were doing before this happened.”

There was a dearth of interesting news in London at that time, as usual, so the BBC sent a team down to interview George. CBS picked it up for a thirty-second human-interest spot, and George became a celebrity overnight.

There were immediate repercussions.

George’s novel had been tentatively accepted by the venerable British publishing firm of Gratis & Spye. His editor, Derek Polsonby-Jigger, had been putting George through a few final rewrites and additions and polishes and deletions, saying, “It’s just about right, but there’s still something that bothers me and we owe it to ourselves to get it in absolutely top form, don’t we?”

A week after the BBC special, George got his book back with a polite note of rejection.

George went down to St. Martin’s Lane and saw Polsonby. Polsonby was polite but firm. “There is simply no market over here for books written by average Americans.”

“But you liked my book! You were going to publish it!”

“There was always something about it that bothered me,” Polsonby said. “Now I know what that something is.”

“Yeah?”

“Your book lacks uniqueness. It’s just an average American novel. What else could the average American man write? That’s what the critics would say. Sorry, Blaxter.”

When George got home, he found Big Karen packing.

“Sorry, George,” she told him, “but I’m afraid it’s all over between us. My friends are laughing at me. I’ve been trying for years to prove that I’m unique and special, and then look what happens to me—I hook up with the average American man.”

“But that’s
my
problem, not yours!”

“Look, George, the average American man has got to have an average American wife, otherwise he’s not average, right?”

“I never thought about it,” George said. “Hell, I don’t know.”

“It makes sense, baby. As long as I’m with you, I’ll just be the average man’s average woman. That’s hard to bear, George, for a creative-thinking female person who is unique and special and has been the old lady of Larry Shark when he was with Brain Damage during the year they got a gold platter for their top-of-the-charts single, All Those Noses.’ But it’s more than just that. I have to do it for the children.”

“Karen, what are you talking about? We don’t have any children.”

“Not yet. But when we did, they’d just be average kids. I don’t think I could bear that. What mother could? I’m going to go away, change my name, and start all over. Good luck, George.”

After that, George’s life began to fall apart with considerable speed and dexterity. He began to get a little wiggy; he thought people were laughing at him behind his back, and of course it didn’t help his paranoia any to find out that they actually were. He took to wearing long black overcoats and sunglasses and dodging in and out of doorways and sitting in cafes with a newspaper in front of his average face.

Finally he fled England, leaving behind him the sneers of his onetime friends. He was bad-rapped but good. And he couldn’t even take refuge in any of the places he knew: Goa, Ibiza, Malibu, Poona, Anacapri, Ios, or Marrakesh. He had erstwhile friends in all those places who would laugh at him behind his back.

In his desperation he exiled himself to the most unhip and unlikely place he could think of: Nice, France.

There he quickly became an average bum.

Now stick with me, Joey, while we transition to several months later. It is February in Nice. A cold wind is whipping down off the Alps, and the palm trees along the Boulevard des Anglais look like they’re ready to pack up their fronds and go back to Africa.

George is lying on an unmade bed in his hotel, Les Grandes Meules. It is a suicide-class hotel. It looks like warehouse storage space in Mongolia, only not so cheerful.

There is a knock on the door. George opens it. A beautiful young woman comes in and asks him if he is the famous George Blaxter, Average American Man. George says that he is, and braces himself for the latest insult that a cruel and unthinking world is about to lay on him.

“I’m Jackie,” she says. “I’m from New York, but I’m vacationing in Paris.”

“Huh,” George says.

“I took off a few days to look you up,” she says. “I heard you were here.”

“Well, what can I do for you? Another interview? Further adventure of the Average Man?”

“No, nothing like that...I was afraid this might get a little uptight. Have you got a drink?”

George was so deep into confusion and self-hatred in those days that he was drinking absinthe even though he hated the stuff. He poured Jackie a drink.

“Okay,” she said, “I might as well get down to business.”

“Let’s hear it,” George said grimly.

“George,” she said, “did you know that in Paris there is a platinum bar exactly one meter long?”

George just stared at her.

“That platinum meter,” she said, “is the standard for all the other meters in the world. If you want to find out if your meter is the right length, you take it to Paris and measure it against their meter. I’m simplifying, but do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Blaxter said.

“That platinum meter in Paris was arrived at by international agreement. Everyone compared meters and averaged them out. The average of all those meters became the standard meter. Are you getting it now?”

“You want to hire me to steal this meter?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Look, George, we’re both grown-up adult persons and we can speak about sex without embarrassment, can’t we?”

George sat up straight. For the first time his eyes began tracking.

“The fact is,” Jackie said. “I’ve been having a pretty lousy time of it in my relationships over the past few years, and my analyst, Dr. Decathlon, tells me it’s because of my innate masochism, which converts everything I do into drek. That’s
his
opinion. Personally, I think I’ve just been running a bad streak. But I don’t really know, and it’s important for me to find out. If I’m sick in the head, I ought to stay in treatment so that someday I’ll be able to enjoy myself in bed. But if he’s wrong, I’m wasting my time and a hell of a lot of money.”

“I think I’m starting to get it,” George said.

“The problem is, how is a girl to know whether her bad trips are her own fault or the result of the hangups of the guys she’s been going with? There’s no standard of comparison, no sexual unit, no way to experience truly average American sexual performance, no platinum meter against which to compare all of the other meters in the world.”

It broke over George then, like a wave of sunlight and understanding. “I,” he said, “am the standard of American male sexual averageness.”

“Baby, you’re a unique platinum bar exactly one meter in length and there’s nothing else like you in the whole world. Come here, my fool, and show me what the average sexual experience is really like.”

Well, word got around, because girls tell these things to other girls. And many women heard about it, and of those who heard about it, enough were interested in checking it out that George soon found his time fully and pleasurably occupied beyond his wildest dreams. They came to him in unending streams, Americans at first, but then many nationalities, having heard of him via the underground interglobal feminine sex-information linkup. He got uncertain Spaniards, dubious Danes, insecure Sudanese, womankind from all over, drawn to him like moths to a flame or like motes of dust in water swirling down a drain in a clockwise direction in the northern hemisphere. And it was all good, at worst, and indescribable at best.