THE LIFE OF ANYBODY
Last night, as I lay on the couch watching The Late Show; a camera and sound crew came to my apartment to film a segment of a TV series called The Life of Anybody. I can’t say I was completely surprised, although I had not anticipated this. I knew the rules; I went on with my life exactly as if they were not there. After a few minutes, the camera and recording crew seemed to fade into the wallpaper. They are specially trained for that.
My TV was on, of course; I usually have it on. I could almost hear the groans of the critics: “Another goddamned segment of a guy watching the tube. Doesn’t anybody in this country do anything but watch the tube?” That upset me, but there was nothing I could do about it. That’s the way it goes.
So the cameras whizzed along, and I lay on the couch like a dummy and watched two cowboys play the macho game. After a while my wife came out of the bathroom, looked at the crew, and groaned, “Oh, Christ, not tonight.” She was wearing my CCNY sweatshirt on top, nothing on the bottom. She’d just washed her hair and she had a towel tied around her head. She had no makeup on. She looked like hell. Of all nights, they had to pick this one. She was probably imagining the reviews: “The wife in last night’s turgid farce . . .”
I could see that she wanted badly to do something—to inject a little humor into our segment, to make it into a domestic farce. But she didn’t. She knew as well as I did that anyone caught acting, fabricating, exaggerating, diminishing, or otherwise distorting his life, would be instantly cut off the air. She didn’t want that. A bad appearance was better than no appearance at all. She sat down on a chair and picked up her crocheting hook. I picked up my magazine. Our movie went on.
You can’t believe it when it happens to you. Even though you watch the show every evening and see it happen, you can’t believe it’s happening to you. I mean, it’s suddenly you there, lying on the couch doing your nothing number, and there they are, filming it and implying that the segment represents you.
I prayed for something to happen. Air raid—sneak Commie attack—us a typical American family caught in the onrush of great events. Or a burglar breaks in, only he’s not just a burglar, he’s something else, and a whole fascinating sequence begins. Or a beautiful woman knocks at the door, claiming that only I can help her. Hell, I would have settled for a phone call.
But nothing happened. I actually started to get interested in that movie on TV, and I put down my magazine and actually watched it. I thought they might be interested in that.
The next day my wife and I waited hopefully, even though we knew we had bombed out. Still, you can never tell. Sometimes the public wants to see more of a person’s life. Sometimes a face strikes their fancy and you get signed for a series. I didn’t really expect that anyone would want to see a series about my wife and me, but you can never tell. Stranger things have happened.
Nowadays my wife and I spend our evenings in very interesting ways. Our sexual escapades are the talk of the neighborhood, my crazy cousin Zoe has come to stay with us, and regularly an undead thing crawls upstairs from the cellar.
Practically speaking, you never get another chance. But you can never tell. If they do decide to do a follow-up segment, we’re ready.
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 ab
out 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.
Blaxter is independently wealthy now, thanks to the gifts pressed on him by grateful female admirers of all nations, types, shapes, and colors. He lives in a fantastic villa high above Cap Ferrat, given by a grateful French government in recognition of his special talents and great importance as a tourist attraction. He leads a life of luxury and independence, and refuses to cooperate with researchers who want to study him and write books with titles like The Averageness Concept in Modern American Sexuality. Blaxter doesn’t need them. They would only cramp his style.
He leads his life. And he tells me that late at night, when the last smiling face has departed, he sits back in his enormous easy chair, pours himself a fine burgundy, and considers the paradox: his so-called averageness has made him the front-runner of most, if not all, American males in several of life’s most important and fun areas. Being average has blessed his life with uncountable advantages. He is a platinum bar sitting happily in its glass case, and he would never go back to being simply unique, like the rest of the human race.
This is the bliss that averageness has brought him: The curse that he could not shake off is now the gift that he can never lose.
Touching, isn’t it?
So you see, Joey, what I’m trying to tell you is that apparent liabilities can be converted into solid assets. How this rule can apply in your own particular case should be obvious. In
case it isn’t, feel free to write to me again, enclosing the usual payment for use of my head, and I will be glad to tell you how being known far and wide as a lousy ripoff shortchange goniff (and a lousy lay, in case you hadn’t heard) can be worked to your considerable advantage.
Yours in Peace,
Andy the Answer Man
ROBOTGNOMICS
The machines did all the dirty work for free—so what was the catch?
Magic is not to be found in the desperate suburbs. The split-level home, once so eagerly desired, has become oppressive to Edmond Ives’s spirit. Here he is, propped up in the superfirm king-size bed, watching a rubber-faced comedian on the bedroom TV.
His wife, Marissa, lies beside him, satin sleep mask in place, mouth tense, awaiting her nightly journey to oblivion on the good ship Valium. Is this what life is all about?
Marissa isn’t fun anymore. She isn’t even cute anymore. She’s no longer right for Ives, a man hungering for a new spirit and a new life.
For these and other vague but compelling reasons, Edmond Ives left his wife and moved back to New York City.
Ives was an account executive at Smith, Levy, Durstin & Tamerlane, an advertising agency looking forward to better times. Ives was thirty-four, of medium height, with hazel eyes, light-brown hair, and small, even features. He just missed being handsome without the compensation of looking interesting. In a TV drama, Ives might have played the star’s old college friend who killed the blond hitchhiker in the first act for reasons that never become entirely clear.
In New York, Ives looked at a few apartments, all unsatisfactory for one reason or another. Then he was shown a multilevel place in the East Sixties. The broker who accompanied him had the air of a man explaining divine mysteries. “It’s unusual to find a place like this on today’s market,” he pointed out. “Dustin Hoffman once sublet here, you know.”
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