The Last Manly Man (30 page)

“I was just reading this thing by Benjamin Franklin,
Fart Proudly
, about how much pain and embarrassment is caused because we can't fart freely without offending others. Benjamin Franklin proposed creating some drinkable tonic that would perfume people's intestinal gas, so we could fart without offending others with an unpleasant odor.”

“You know, with America's appetite for deodorants, it's amazing someone hasn't invented and marketed just such a thing,” I said. “People would be a lot happier if they could fart perfume.”

“But you'd still have to do something about the sound, wouldn't you?” Jack said. “It's worth looking into though. I've got me an ethicist now, may get an anthropologist, why not a biochemist?”

“Why not, Jack?”

“Now I have to run. I have a date.”

“Oh? With whom?”

“Shonny Cobbs,” he said.

Something about the way he smiled just then made me wonder if all of this—Jack trying to understand and empathize with women, his sponsorship of and speech to the women's conference, even this new network—was more about winning back Shonny than making a quick buck off women. Probably it was both. Two birds, one stone.

I had to run too. Had to stop by Litigious Liz's house and make sure she was okay, despite that broken arm, and head over to the Bog to meet Jason.

“More soda?” asked the Rasta bartender.

“Thanks,” I said. “How is Dewey?”

“Much better,” Jason said. He was dressed like a man again. “But he is disappointed he wasn't part of the actual bonobo liberation.”

“He was a big part of it overall though,” I said. “How's his vocabulary?”

“Improving. So, you want to join the Organization?”

“I'm a journalist. I have to try to be objective. Besides, it sounds nice in theory, Jason, this Disney utopia of happy animals and happy indigenous peoples, with no sexism or racism and all that. But I don't know if I want to live in some multicultural unisex world where everyone speaks Esperanto. I kinda like people's differences, you know?”

“I may yet convert you to the shining path,” he said, taking a swig of his organic microbrew and swallowing hard. “Are you still going to eat meat, in spite of everything?”

“I'm giving up meat,” I said.

“Really?”

“No. I'm just kidding. I like meat. My body absolutely craves it at least once a month,” I said. “Don't you ever miss it?”

“No.”

“Have you ever had a Beauchamp Inn ham?”

“God, no.”

“They poke holes all over it and then cover it with an inch-thick crust of bourbon, brown sugar, and spices and then they slow-bake it so the ham absorbs all but a quarter inch of the crust. The meat is so juicy, and the mixture of the apple-smoked ham, the bourbon, the brown sugar, the spices … it is heaven.”

“It's a pig's ass.”

“And so tasty. What about bacon? The smell of hickory-smoked bacon and coffee when you're out camping.… C'mon, don't you ever miss having a big juicy steak at a barbecue or a ballpark hot dog and a beer at a baseball game?”

“Eat a cow? Ugh.”

“You want everyone to stop eating cows, don't you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I could go for everyone cutting back to once or twice a month, for health reasons …”

“And because, for example, valuable rain forest is cleared to provide grazing land for beef cattle,” Jason said.

“True. But no more beef, ever?”

“If I were dictator of the world, yes,” he said.

“But if we stop eating beef, what are you going to do with all the cows? Kill the ones who can't be dairy cows? Can't have them just standing around gobbling up valuable land, breeding …”

“You could neuter the males.”

“Don't kill 'em, just maim them … so they can't have sex! But give them a long useless life chewing the same patch of grass in the same field day in, day out, emitting methane gas into the air and screwing up the atmosphere.”

“You could put them to work.…”

“Doing what? Train them to be watchdogs? Or circus cows? I guess a few dozen of them could haul Amish plows, but what kind of life is that? Hauling a plow all the time. I believe in giving them quality of life, and then slaughtering them humanely, and then eating them.”

“Eating them is the humane option? Please. How would you feel if some superior species landed on this earth and because it ranked higher in the food chain, it got to eat you?”

“Well, presumably, I'd win them over with my endearing personality,” I said. “And they'd make me a house pet while they ate all the animal rights activists and vegetarians.”

He laughed.

“Endearing personality? You'd be lunch,” Jason said. “They'd keep the vegetarians as pets, because we are more highly evolved.”

I laughed. “And too skinny to make good eating.”

“You know, I'm a nice guy,” Jason said. “You bring this nasty side out in me.”

“Way to take responsibility.”

He just smiled at me. Wow. Jason and I were finally at a point where we could discuss this stuff without any antagonism and name-calling. There was hope for the world yet.

EPILOGUE

So, you see, I saved the world from the past, saved the world from returning in the future to a time of docile, contented women and overly aggressive men. Oh, I'm not saying I did it alone. Reb got the official credit, along with “unidentified animal rights activists,” and I don't mean to deny Reb or the others their due, seeing as they saved my life and all. But they couldn't have done it without me. If I hadn't stopped for the man in the hat, if I hadn't gone to 7 Mill Street, if I hadn't stumbled into a story and unwittingly led Reb and Solange in that direction.… Well, you know.

Miss Trix has now fully recovered. Most of the damage was from smoke inhalation, but there was some facial scarring and she required plastic surgery on her face to erase signs of the fire. People who have seen us both say we no longer resemble each other. I never thought we did to begin with.

The first thing Hufnagel did after the conference ended was file a patent for Adam I, not because he wanted to market it, but because he wanted to keep it off the market. The patent ties it up for a long time. Nobody else can make the stuff now without his permission. Hufnagel is going back to face the embezzlement charges against him, and it looks like he'll probably get probation or a pardon.

Mandervan is in jail. Gill Morton, meanwhile, escaped and at this writing has not been located. Escape is easy when you're rich. It's tougher if you're a regular slob like me. However, one of his men turned state's evidence against the guy who shot at me, another of Morton's men, despite their assurances at the time that the bullet had come from elsewhere.

Though hindsight is not always twenty-twenty, sometimes things do seem clearer later, after you have more facts. Morton's motivations for being involved in Mandervan's scheme, aside from the moneymaking potential involved in making women more docile and getting them to use more cleaning products, became clearer to me after I again read through all the Morton materials I had. One old ad struck me, a Morton ad that ran in the back of
Popular Mechanics
, circa 1957. A dejected looking man, wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt and high-waisted trousers with a perfect crease, was eavesdropping on a circle of boys. Underneath was the caption: “When the other boys ask ‘What does your dad do?' how does
your
boy answer them?” Then, in smaller type: “So your job isn't what it should be, maybe you had to leave school early, maybe the war interfered. Don't let these things stop you. Start a dynamic new career and be your boy's hero. Be a Morton Man!”

Below, it showed a man in a hat and a suit, carrying his Morton Products sample case, which came free with the purchase of a “starter kit.” The man was smiling confidently and looking slightly upward toward the Gleaming White Future, while his boy stood beside him looking up at his dad worshipfully.

“All it takes is a small investment and the desire to be a business success. Have you got what it takes?” it asked.

Hard to believe now that any man who had the brains and ability to be any kind of business success would be naïve enough to fall for this manipulation. But hundreds of thousands of men did over the years, and many succeeded.

That man in the ad, and all the men he represented, made me so sad. How could he know that in just a few years, chances were his boy would either be off fighting in Vietnam or wearing his hair long “like a girl” and protesting the war. The son might look at him not as a hero but as an Establishment toady who compromised his values for the sake of a dollar. The man couldn't know that in another decade, his wife might be burning her bra and exploring her own sexuality and raising her consciousness. The future he'd been promised by the Morton Company, which was also Gill's vision, had been betrayed.

It just served to underscore that old saying, that when people make plans, God laughs and cries. Or, to put it more succinctly: Murphy's Law.

Whatever can go wrong, will. That had certainly been true in my life, time and again. After you've seen enough evidence of the law in action, you find it hard to put much faith in anything, even evolution.

After all this, I took a little time just to try to figure out what life lessons could be pulled out of all this. You know, it's a curse to be as smart as me. I'm not boasting—I'm just smart enough to know how stupid I am, and that's a curse. Isn't there a saying that man is the only animal who knows how stupid he is? If there isn't, there should be.

You just don't know what to expect, do you? Who knew, at the end of the millennium, that bowling and square dancing would be “hip”? Did you ever in a million years think you'd hear a newscaster say the phrase “money-laundering Buddhist nuns"?

It's a strange new world. Today I read that a scientist has found a way to implant the natural behavior of one animal into another species, creating a chicken that acts like a quail. Last week, I read that in the Khansi tribe in northern India, roles are completely reversed. Women are considered the more successful businesspeople, and so they have always run the outer society while men have stayed home to cook, clean, and look after the kids. But the Khansi men are rebelling, and the women are trying to keep them to their traditions.

Maybe I'll do a program on them.

Going completely behind the scenes as a programming exec, and going off the air, should make me more anonymous. I'm looking forward to that. On the other hand, it has put Solange Stevenson directly in the firing line as president of the new, risky network. I hear Lynn Hirschberg from
Vanity Fair
wants to interview her.

Solange and I have had a few preliminary meetings, and I can foresee some trouble down the road. After all this, I went to her and said, “Look, I know I haven't always been fair to you, and I really respect what you've done and how you've succeeded despite the ill will of slobs like me.” I meant it too. And I figured she'd respond by saying, “Yes, I haven't always been fair to you, and I respect what you've done, etc.” A little give-and-take, is that so much to ask? But instead she said, “I'm glad you're strong enough to acknowledge that, Robin.” That's it. No give on her part. And I have to work with her, and my oily former boss, Jerry Spurdle.

But I'm going to give Solange her due, because she's taking the heat with the new network, and I'm having all the fun … for now.

Dewey and Jason disappeared with the wind, off to rescue animals somewhere, before I remembered to ask Jason to help me find the mad cow hoax culprits.

The bees disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived, following their queens elsewhere.

Blue Baker is still dating his ex-wife.

Among the perks that resulted from this whole thing was that I got to hear some of the stuff people said about me when they thought I was dead. It was very Tom Sawyeresque. Louis Levin made a dub of the on-air report, including the Huddon obit and the president's relieved comment that Robert Huddon was not dead, Robin Hudson was dead. Louis also gave me a copy of the rumor file postings during “my” death and hospitalization. People called me brave, outspoken, funny, and several men I'd never dated claimed they had dated me. Life is great and people love ya when you're dead.

Things like this happen and your life changes almost completely. Take Mrs. Ramirez. Now she likes me, which is a curse in and of itself, because every time she sees me, she wants me to come sit in her apartment, drink tea, and listen to her tell me, as a member of the media, everything that's wrong with the media, the world, the younger generation, and whatever else has lodged up her backside.

But … sometimes I listen, because she's an old lady all alone in the world, with her own point of view, and I respect her because she has persevered on her own, like Mr. Chicken, despite her handicaps and despite the risks.

In the end, after all that, I only did one piece of the Man of the Future report, the summation, a collage of visionaries from DeWitt to Nukker to the At-Home Dads. Liz wrote and voiced the rest, and that makes her the first blind reporter on network television. She's coming to work with me at the new network, and not only because she has promised not to sue me ever, but because she's pushy and perseveres beyond her limitations. My friend Louis Levin and a few choice others are also coming aboard. I never did demote Jim the cameraman, adhering to one of the important management lessons I learned along the way: Pass the buck to someone else. He's working in the Fashion Unit now, gets to shoot pretty young models all day.

Some things may never change. I bet, fifty years from now in winter, you could walk down Fifth Avenue between the Plaza and Saks and see a succession of fat, bald guys in expensive overcoats, each with a much taller, much thinner, much younger woman in a fur coat. There will always be unattractive, piggish, control-freak men who use their wealth and/or power to obtain and control attractive, underfed women, and there will always be attractive, submissive young women for sale or rent. Funny thing is, these guys consider themselves to be the elite, the upper crust. And they are just so caveman, the great white hunters with their nubile young women wrapped in dead animal skins.