The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (68 page)

With the exception of three heart-throb meteors: Russ Colombo, whose 'tragic' early death rivaled Valentino's as a chance for grieving fans to vie in displaying the degree of their grief, Rudy Vallee with his nasal, megaphoned, Ivy League whine; and the bone-less crooning of Bing Crosby; singers of the pre-war Big Band era were relatively unimportant side-bar performers. They did their one or two verses and a refrain, then returned to their chairs, where they served a largely decorative function. But with the loss of so many musicians to the services in 1942, bandleaders were replaced by singers as the stars of popular music, and lyrics took precedence over melody.

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52. '...precise diction was a bad'un' (p. 291)

This assumption was consonant with America's anti-elite, anti-urban, anti-cultural belief that education is the ultimate enemy of blind patriotism and blind religious conformity. The good cowboys, the Whitehats, said Yup and Shucks as they slurred their vowels and got tangled up in their consonants*—all proofs that they were pure of spirit, lofty of character, and uncontaminated by big city values and the soul-rot of education and culture; while the Blackhats, with their fancy waistcoats, combed hair and fluidity of speech, clearly lacked the folksy virtues of honesty, sincerity and compassion.

This widely-held Puritan identification of the angel with the hick and the devil with the sophisticate was uncomfortable for me, because I had a taste for learning and for delectable words well spoken, and yet I thought of myself as a Whitehat (indeed, in my story games I had been a successful and famous leader of a band of Whitehats). Fortunately for my self-esteem, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt, proof that a model of patrician upbringing and liberal education could not only be a Whitehat, but the Whitehat-in-Chief, at least to the Poor of America, if not to those capitalist drones who labeled him a 'traitor to his class'. Unfortunately, he was to be followed into office by one hick after another, politicians who knew they would have to chew their words and speak in clichés and slack idioms to avoid alienating the mass American who yearns to believe that he is led, not by a superior person educated to perform his role, but by a flawed and folksy reg'lar guy with whom the voter can personally identify. Such candidates for office as could not manage to dumb down sufficiently for the mass electorate, Adlai Stevenson, for instance, or Mario Cuomo, paid the price. But most candidates didn't have to dumb down. Reagan and the Bushes could play it straight, as they possessed the intellectual and cultural limitations necessary to getting elected in America, where all the successful candidate really must have is salient mediocrity, a shameless lust for power, and a willingness to be the creature of pharmaceutical/medical mafia, the petrochemical thieves, and agro-biz land-rapists, and the fundamentalist ochlocrats.

This tyranny of mediocrity, and the fact that candidates are obliged to sell their souls to powerful interests to amass sufficient funds for expensive television campaigns and mass smearing assaults, brings one to the saddening realization that no one who is able to get elected to the presidency of the United States deserves to hold that high office.

* As in reducing the four syllables of 'terrorism' to one chewed syllable and a hum: 'turzm'

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53. '...the audience cheers him on' (p. 292)

No American Indian soldiers appeared in these 'all-American platoons', notwithstanding the contribution of Navaho signal corpsmen to 'clear' radio communications that could be intercepted by enemy listeners, but not decoded. And certainly no Japanese-Americans were included; despite the fact that the Nisei 'Go for Broke' regiment was the most decorated unit in the war.

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54. '...nobody owned a car.' (p. 292)

Some years after the war, a hustler I met while traveling with the carnivals told me of a delightful scam that sprang up all across the country in the first weeks of gas rationing. (I call it delightful because the scam targeted only cheaters.) It went like this: the con would have a small gas tank installed in his trunk and connected to the engine, then he would block off his car's gas tank. This done, he would pull into a gas station, his engine coughing and sputtering as though he had just made it on his last drops of gas. (This was effected by pulling out the choke as he turned into the station.) Wiping his brow with relief, the con would say how lucky he had been to make it on a dry tank, and then he would ask the station owner (the scam worked better on owners than on mere attendants) to fill his tank with water.

“Water!? Are you out of your mind, buddy?”

The con would good-naturedly admit that possibility, but he would insist on having his tank filled with water.

“Okay, Mister. It's your ass.”

When the tank was full of water, the con would give the station owner a handsome tip for his service (as much as a quarter, maybe) then he would take a small box out of his pocket, extract a pill from it, drop it into the gas tank and replace the cap, carefully tightening the cap down as he explained that safety obliged him to avoid the 'effervescent back-spatter of chemical conmixation'. During the ten minutes required for the stuff to do what scientists call 'work', he would engage the owner in small talk: the weather, the war, is there any 'action' in this town, and hey, had he heard the latest one about the traveling salesman who...

...But the mark's curiosity and greed always got the best of him, and he would ask about the pills.

Pulling his most solemn face, the con would remind him that their country was at war, and gas was rationed because the boys over there needed every drop they could get to defeat the Nazis and the Nips.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, but what's the skinny on those pills of yours?”

“I can't tell you anything about these pills. We've taken an oath of secrecy and... well, never mind. I guess I'd better get going. Time is money, like the fella said.”

“Whoa there! Are you trying to tell me that those pills can turn water into gasoline?”

“I'm not trying to tell you anything, friend. In fact, I've been instructed to say that these tablets are aspirin. Ordinary, everyday aspirin. I'm sure you understand.”

“Yeah, but... how can a pill turn water into gas?”

“I'm instructed to tell you that it can't. Well, I'll see you around. Don't take any wooden nickels.”

“Wait a minute! Ah... you wouldn't be willing to sell a couple of those 'aspirin', would you? Just so I'd have something in reserve for special customers?”

“I feel for you pal, but I even if I wanted to sell you some of these pills, I couldn't, because this batch wasn't developed for sale. We're just testing them under normal driving conditions. Well, that should be enough time for the mixing process to have... ah... engendered.” With this, the con would return to his car and start up the engine. “Ah, listen to that. The marvels of modern science, eh!” But he wouldn't drive off. First, he asked if he could use the restroom.

By the time he got back, the service station owner had worked out what he wanted to say. “Look, buddy, tell you what. I'll give you ten bucks for each of those pills you can spare. Whaddya say? Who'd ever find out? You know I ain't going to tell.”

“Gosh, I'd like to be of service to you, but I'm not sure it's right to...”

“Ah, come on.”

“Well-l-l, I guess you might say I was just broadening the basis of the test...”

“There you go. That's all you'd be doing. Broadening your basis. How about it?”

“Well... Let's get one thing straight from the outset. I am obliged to inform you that these pills are only aspirin. Nothing else. Just ordinary aspirin.”

“Sure, sure. Aspirin. You bet.”

“In fact, they resemble aspirin down to the smallest detail. Take a look.” And the con would show the mark one of the pills with the name of the best-known aspirin manufacturer stamped on it in cruciform. “Do these look like ordinary aspirin, or what? I challenge you to tell the difference.”

The admiring mark would confess that no one could tell the difference.

“Those boys in camouflage know their business. But you better not get them mixed up on your medicine shelf, or your wife might go running down the road at sixty miles an hour.”

“Don't I wish.”

“Look, I've got to cover my backside. If I sell you some of these 'aspirin', I'll need you to sign a paper that says I told you right from the first that these were just ordinary aspirin. I don't want to lose my job, and they'd be real sore if they found out I'd let you have some of these experimental... ah... aspirin. You see my position, don't you?”

“Got you. Sure, I'll sign.”

The con would produce a form stating that he, party of the first part, had sold to Mr (you fill it in), party of the second part, a number of aspirin for sole and only purpose of relieving pain, and that at no time, nor in any way, fashion, or degree had he represented these aspirin to be anything else. The phony legalese wording was intended to dissuade the mark from blowing the whistle and ruining the scam, because he would appear to be a stupid ass if it got out that not only had he been conned into buying magic gasoline pills, but he had even signed a paper admitting that he knew all the time that these magic pills were aspirin.

Once the exchange of five aspirin for fifty dollars had been made, and the mark had topped up the tank in his own car with water and dropped in a tablet, the con would say he had to be on his way, but he would remind the mark to give the pill sufficient time to 'work' before starting up the engine.

“Right. Ten minutes you said?”

“Hm-m, maybe even fifteen to be on the safe side.”

Safe, of course, for the con, who needed some distance between them.

This scam was good for only a month or so before word of it got around, but in that month it was worked from Maine to California and it accounted for a considerable number of damaged engines, which made work for lots of mechanics, so it was for the general good of the economy in the long run.

During the time I drifted with carnivals, I learned that there are few things so beautiful as the well-run sting; and this one had some of the sweetest characteristics, like telling the mark exactly what he was getting right from the first (aspirin, in this case), and setting up the scam so that it is the mark who was pursuing and the con who is reluctant and coy.

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55. '...people with mental problems' (p. 295)

Possessing the state's principal nuttery was not Poughkeepsie's only distinction, nor was being the seat of a noted woman's college. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Poughkeepsie was chosen for their cough drop factory by the Smith brothers, William and Andrew (but generations of kids thought their first names were "Mark' and 'Trade' from the words beneath their images on the box). Children of my era felt indebted to these solemn bearded gentlemen because their black licorice discs were the only treat you could get away with sucking in school, except for the rival brand, Luden's, which tasted like hospital corridors smell, but we would suck them in school if that was all we had, because getting away with something was a joy in itself, even if the sucking was a distasteful task.

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56. '...come back safe and well' (p. 297)

This pious drivel comes from the tobacco industry that has knowingly addicted and ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of people and is today using every underhand ploy to derail the World Health Organization's campaign to save the Third World from the blight of lung cancer and heart disease that is ravaging the post-industrial West.

In the United States tobacco farmers receive generous subsidies, to which we must add the millions of dollars every year that Americans spend in hospital costs as tobacco brings hundreds of thousands of them to early deaths from heart and lung problems. But this murderous industry is well embedded in Congress through the long-serving congressmen from the tobacco belt, and the generosity of its support for presidential candidates is legendary.

We spend much more on supporting the tobacco industry with shadow subsidies than we spend in programs designed to warn our children away from the damage and danger of smoking. Politicians. They're not the kind of people one has to diner.

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57. '...the Castle Walk' (p. 298)

These last three were invented and popularized by Vernon and Irene Castle, a husband-and-wife team that single-handedly swept America into the great Dance Era preceding the First World War, in which Vernon Castle was killed. One of Mother's most prized possessions was a photograph of them signed by Irene Castle, who left it in lieu of a tip for the month's service she received when she was dining in the restaurant where Mother was her star-struck waitress.

Mother had a theory that names exercised a decisive but unrecognized effect on determining a person's future: that people were either launched or hobbled by their names. How far, she asked, would a man get in the catering trade if his family name was Schitz? She found support for her theory in the fact that Castle was only a stage name, the couple's real names being Vernon Blythe and Irene Foote. Blithe-Foot, for dancers? What more proof can you want?