Through accounting procedures I cannot possibly hope to explain, I am able to write off the operation of my five cattle ranches to Thingie®-Gazillion International in a most attractive way, to the benefit of your eventual portfolios, which will be nicely balanced with two and a half million acres of scenic real estate each upon my departure from the world. Your grandmother claims the only way she can tell one ranch from another is by the hardness or softness of the beds. Rather than try endlessly and pointlessly to explain the differences to her, I reluctantly adopted her naming system: The Low Hard Bed Ranch; the High Hard Bed Ranch, where you, Rowena fell off that horse; the Waterbed Ranch; the Sagging Soft Bed Ranch; and Rancho Insomnia—something about night owls and coyotes right under the window. And where you, Fabian, found a diamondback in your cabin under the bed. Not that Deirdre goes to any of them anymore.
But though I have moved up to be the second largest private landowner in the country, I still squirm at the thought of turning the lovely south-slope lawns and pastures of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Manor into a manure-strewn organic farm. Indeed, I weep.
Take note of this, my little bunnies whom I used to love to see in your fuzzy pajamas as you jumped up and down on the way upstairs to bed, on those rare evenings I was allowed into your parents’ home, and before you got too adolescent shy to be seen in fuzzy pajamas.
Be that as it may, take note of this: your grandfather weeps. This is a historic event.
Once again, my little Fabian, or less little Fabian, because I see you have started to grow into your father’s gangly hatchet-faced structure, though somewhat improved by a much better set of teeth, good Delahunt teeth—and thank god without his short little legs—once again we must have one of our little man-to-man talks about the relations between the sexes. By the way, I was able to catch the last few minutes of your soccer match, which I nearly missed owing to the usual delay trying to get out of Dallas-Fort Worth and by having to make a slight detour over the newly completed Thingie®-Gazillion Spire in the Loop, which my architect insisted I do during this first clear day since its completion. I was impressed by your running speed but a little disturbed at how you seem to avoid the action around the ball, failing utterly to make contact with it during my brief presence at the end. To her credit, your mother Deedums insisted you had actually kicked the ball twice and had, fortunately unseen by the umpire, kicked another player in the behind. And of course it was good to see you with blond hair all tousled and cheeks flaming red from the exertion.
Or imagined little talks because at your still tender age you are only just becoming aware of the vast unknown territory that spreads out before you and which offers so many opportunities for confusion, ambush, embarrassment, disgrace, and fiasco. Even the very small handful of men who throughout history have attained the sort of pinnacle of success that I have—they have still been bedeviled by the question. Unless they have simply tried to ignore it, as I so often have. Yet sooner or later, at any age, at all ages, pressures build and build. A useful engineering analogy might be the teakettle whose stopper is completely sealed after it has been filled with water and placed on a burner, turned up high when young, low when old, or older. The water inside simmers away slowly and languidly, quite pleasantly at first, and then slower or faster becomes hot and begins to expand as it approaches boiling temperatures. Either way things eventually reach the bursting point.
As they did the other night between your grandmother and me. Well, I can’t speak for her. I had reached the boiling point. Foot brace off, chest brace off, I was ready to go. Owing to my often all night telephone calls needed to keep in touch with Thingie®-Gazillion, our bedrooms, hers in the south wing, mine in the new north wing, are separated by a very long hallway. Having straightened things out nicely in Prague, emergency cell phone in my bathrobe pocket, I emerged at midnight from my bedroom and strode resolutely down the hall and turned the corner and marched the width of the second floor, and turned the corner and came to a halt before my wife’s bedroom door.
Sex, I called out, it’s time for sex, my dear. Please open your door, my dear, so that I may enter and we can have some sex. Recreational sex? Athletic sex? Industrial sex? Wet sex? Dry sex? You name the sex, my dear, and we will have it—even all five if you wish. I find it useful, which I offer as a tip, Fabian, to contemplate the inner workings of a 1937 Cadillac V-16 engine as its twin banks of pistons rise and fall in sequence, in the steel cylinder sleeves of its cast-iron block, while I am at work in these labors. But if you can’t get off on that, think about how the oil pump works. Come, come, my dear, let’s not be shy or coy, it’s time once again for sex, spelled S-E-X. Let’s go for the S, let’s go for the E, but let’s especially go for the X. Yoohoo, sex time, Deirdre.
After another ten minutes of my love calls—an approach favored by large mammals, science assures us—I am quite indefatigable at this hour—though I was once summarily thrown out of a hotel in Kuala Lumpur before I could explain that I had quite forgotten where I was, owing to time-zone-induced confusion—which held up their Thingie® licensing agreements for more than three years until I was finally issued an official apology—I heard the lock click and then, miracles of miracles, the door slowly swung open.
The point I’m trying to make for you, Fabian, is that if at first you don’t succeed, just keep trying. Sooner or later they’re bound to give in.
One more thing. When it rains it pours. I have just thrown down in disgust little Ralphie Fitch’s second piece of trash, his unauthorized biography Feet of Clay, Toes of Steel: How Thingie International Price-Fixed, Gouged, and Litigated Its Way to Global Dominance: Another American Success Story. I ordered my chief steward to tear it into little bits and open a hatch and scatter it over the Atlantic. From the very first line, when he quotes some old wives’ tale to the effect that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, to the very last line of the last footnote, it is all pure unmitigated garbage. Worse, the other night I could have sworn that your father Chip stuffed a copy behind his back while sitting in his fireside armchair just as I rounded the corner into your living room, which explains why for the first time in thirteen years he did not stand up with his usual distasteful grimace and limp liberal democrat handshake. He offered me two faux-deferential sirs instead. And eyes too wide, too bright.
And how are we this evening, sir? he chattered. Collarbone still sending out those shooting pains? Finally bring the Chinese around, did you? Pleased with the market today, sir?
Of course I’m pleased whenever the market adds two billion to my net worth. Who wouldn’t be? Very chatty you are tonight, Chip.
Be that as it may—it’s a free country and your father can read anything he wants, though it may cost him dearly in the end. I took umbrage in particular at chapter five about our undergraduate years and little Ralphie Fitch’s tendentious version of the rivalry between the third-floor Wrist-Pin Society, of which I was a founding member, and the fourth-floor Crankshaft Group, to which he briefly belonged before being, please note, dishonorably expelled for his miserable and possibly failed performance. This was in the days before anyone had even thought up the idea of coeducational dormitories. As a result you had whole buildings filled with hot-blooded young engineers each with his teakettle about to explode.
Point of all this is that a true and unbiased account of these activities is a chapter in my privately printed Manual of Industrial Sex, all copies of which have been secured in the basement vault of the archives wing of the Manor. You will receive one for your eighteenth year, the right age for such useful information. Or perhaps less useful to you than it would have been to me at that age, at a time when coeducational dormitories became the rage—leading unfortunately to the demise of the Wrist-Pin Society and its many rivals. Little Ralphie Fitch casts his chapter as a breathless exposé of the real meaning behind my generous endowment of the Wrist-Pin Society Chair of Advanced Internal Combustion Design—when the mundane fact of the matter was there were considerable tax adv
antages for doing so at that particular time.
As for those other rumors, innuendoes, half-truths, distortions, lies, outright fabrications, and fantasies—I comfort myself with the vision of them reduced to confetti, tumbling in the slipstream behind my 737, on the night of the full moon as I flew back from Paris, and sinking through the air until they hit the water, floating briefly, before heading for the bottom of the Atlantic. A comforting vision marred only by the chief steward’s words to the effect that there was no hatch he could safely open while travelling at 550 miles per hour.
Nonetheless I ordered him to tear the pages one at a time into tiny pieces. And where I could see him doing it.
28. 1:8 SCALE 1995 BENTLEY TURBO RL SALOON
IT IS UNDER VARIOUS CLOUDS THAT I STRUGGLE TO anticipate with my usual joy my next birthday, another big one, and so soon. You may think that a man who has everything might be losing his taste at my age for more. But in fact I don’t have everything, which is probably impossible. If I had everything nobody else would own anything at all, and as desirable as that might seem, I fear it’s impossible. But between what I own and what everyone else still owns, there remains a large—if narrowing—gap in which to flex my wants and desires. Of course I continue to do just that. So what, my little ones, do you think your grandfather wants for his next birthday? But lest you worry, I have instructed your mother in this demanding task, to assist you in selecting a really big present for me.
The 1:8 scale models of the 1995 Bentley Turbo R I’m adding to your collections along with full-length glass display cabinets to house them in—no occasion I can think of, just sheer grandfatherly generosity—represent the car I arranged for the corporation to buy for me for my last big one five years ago. When I had it flown to Montana to test the top speed on a reputedly straight country road, I was very disappointed that it failed to reach its advertised top speed of 137 MPH by 21 MPH. I complained vigorously to the company, which tried to weasel out of its claims by suggesting that the 7,000-foot altitude may have been a factor. I thought they drove these things up Everest to test them, but apparently not. And some company underling they flew over from Crewe, England, to inspect the wreck had the temerity to suggest that I was going too fast as it was, given the effects of an unposted dip through a drywash, from which the five-thousand-pound sedan and I and my two bodyguards emerged airborne at 116 MPH. We were never able to ascertain whether all four tires blew out in the wash or when we came back to earth. In any case it came down like a pancake and hit with a gush of fluids (oil, antifreeze, transmission fluid, mineral oil) and all eight airbags deployed when all four wheels literally came off as we plowed through the sage brush. The whole underbody of the car was distributed randomly over about an acre. The insurance company sold what was left for salvage with less than 200 miles on the odometer. Boys will be boys, as we used to say back in engineering school.
At any rate, in warm anticipation of my next big one I was able to tolerate your father Chip’s annual report to the family on the state of his law firm—the one occasion on which I allowed him to rub my face in the environment, so to speak, and get away with it, more or less. So during his pale knock-off of my grander annual presentations, I tried to think of other things—it was a magnificent wreck, I must say, and the whole thing was captured from the air by CNN—while he prattled on about whales, polar bears, elephants, rhinos, house mice, and English sparrows, the dropping out of the sky of which is now apparently cause for big bucks litigation. So with a benign smile fixed on my face and ears quite firmly closed as I recalled the post-mortem helicopter survey of the scene of the wreck—black tire marks on the leading edge of the dip and then a hundred feet or more of nothing and then the wide black smears where the tires touched down and then a succession of dark stains where the fluids emptied out over the pavement and then the raw track out into the sagebrush, a tangle of barbed wire and fence posts in its wake and the wheelless black hulk gleaming in the bushes—I believe the paint was called “Mason’s Triple Black”—a magnificently crafted automobile despite its unfounded claims—when something your father said brought my senses back to the present and I decided reluctantly to pay attention.
I am restrained, he was saying, by family loyalty from litigating against any of your holdings, sir, but I would suggest that you listen to a little bird perched at your ear which might be trying to say that Thingie®-Gazillions might soon experience a unique challenge by a certain labor union.
Thanks for the tip, Chip.
Not a tip. I believe it might already have been filed, sir.
Where?
Not at liberty, sir.
Of course he knows perfectly well that all I have to do is call my friend who runs the Journal and find out what’s going on. In fact I probably already knew what was going on but they just hadn’t got around to telling me yet. But your mother wisely announced that dinner was about to be served and would we please adjourn to the dinner table and defer all business talk to coffee and brandy, for the sake of our digestion. And for the sake of the children.
After the usual difficult long silence which I was about to break with some random reflections on the state of your parents’ grounds—driveway trees needing to be trimmed, grass growing in a crack in the pavement about a quarter mile down your driveway, weather vane arrow frozen pointing north—your grandmother Deirdre decided to make an announcement.
I’ve made a discovery, she said brightly.
And what might that be? I inquired.
I’ve seen my first junkyard.
First? Junkyard? I ventured. Please explain, my dear. I am preparing myself to be fascinated.
This lovely homeless woman down at the shelter needed a car, you see, she began with a little flush and a fluttering of hands, sure signs that she was taking up the banner of yet another lost cause.
Yes, there is a crying need among the homeless for cars. But since the homeless are also by definition garageless, we might be creating yet more social problems by giving them cars. So many liberal democrat programs are like that.
Please go on, I prompted.
And she said she could get one very cheaply at this junkyard place. “Would you like to go there?” she asked. “Why yes,” I said, “I’ve never been to one of those.” Her boyfriend told her about it, you see.
Her homeless but not carless boyfriend?
I think she told me he had just had his stolen, which is why I gave her a ride.
Proceed, I suggested. Given the rapt expressions on all your faces, Deirdre could as well have just returned from the moon.
So we arrive at this place, called something like Manny’s Motors, and he shows her this nice car—
Which you buy for her? I hinted.
I helped her buy it, yes. But anyway, while she was filling out some papers I stood up and looked out the extremely dirty window, and there spread out before me was this most amazing collection of cars, some of them upside down and others laying on their sides, but what looked to me like perfectly good solid nice cars. My first thought was that there’s something wrong with this.
More exactly, I corrected, something very wrong with each and every one of them. That’s why they’re there. There’s something wrong with them. They don’t run. They don’t start. They don’t stop. They don’t back up.
After a little flurry of objections and explanations from your mother and father attempting to explain to your grandmother what she had in fact actually seen, as opposed to what she thought she saw, I tapped my water glass with my knife. You didn’t buy the junkyard, did you, Deirdre?
She ignored my question, an ominous sign.
And on the way home I began thinking about all those cars sitting out there in that place—well, it was worse. I began noticing junkyard after junkyard on the way back to the shelter. Thinking about how each one had probably once belonged to some happy young couple with a couple of children, just like you Rowena and you Fabian, sitting in the back seat, with their dog. And then all of a sudden
something terrible happened. And there they are, in the homeless shelter. And their cars in the junkyard. And their dog probably languishing in the animal shelter.
I see, I said.
Then it’s simple, she said. You must absolutely call up your friends in Detroit or wherever it is and tell them to stop making new cars, that there are plenty of perfectly good old ones to fix up.
Right on, Chip suggested.
But if there were dots here, they were not connecting. If we fix up old cars for the garageless (never mind the consequences for the moment) then there will be no need to close down Detroit. If we close down Detroit, on the other hand, the supply of old cars will vanish, leaving the garageless/homeless carless, just like they are now, fortunately.
Just tell me this, Deirdre, I said instead of laying out the theory of the marketplace for perhaps the hundredth time. Did you buy the junkyard?
Not exactly, she said while glancing down at her nails.
“Not exactly” suggests a clever subterfuge, my dear. Come on, out with it.
The shelter bought the junkyard.
With of course her money, which is also my money. Though the money she has available for her lost causes is based on a complex formula calculated to maximize on our so-called unearned Thingie®-Gazillion income, combined with her share of the resurrected Delahunt fortune.
Grandma, can I go see the junkyard? came your excited cracking voice, Fabian, at my left elbow.
And yours from across the table, Rowena: Can I come too?
Well, said Deirdre, quite pleased by the reception of her ideas among the younger generation, why don’t we all drive down and have a look?
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