by Robert Riche
I know these press people, and am comfortable and informal with them. Even the guys I don’t know I greet familiarly, so that Frank, who is watching me closely, probably to discern any signs of lapsing dignity, will get the impression that my press contacts are indispensable to the company’s success.
“Hey, Joe! Good to see you, buddy!” Reading the name “Joseph Meechum” on the lapel of one fellow I have never before seen in my life.
“Is this the Sport Supporter press luncheon?” Mr. Meechum asks in a loud voice. Sport Supporter, our major competitor.
“Sh-h-h-h-h! Not so loud. Yes, it is, Joe. Sit right down. You’ll have the opportunity in a few minutes of meeting the president of our company!”
I tell Diana to get the guy aside, and run his ass the hell off the premises.
“Language!” she says.
With everyone seated, I greet the press corps in a casual kind of way, but with a dignified presentation, sort of the way a professional toastmaster might do it, not neglecting to underline the main point that in the press kits laid out on the tables at their various places they will be able to read about a prosthetic device that is “light years ahead of anything the industry has yet devised.”
“And here to describe the background connected with the development of Pro-Tec’s new Hand-Arbiter prosthetic device is the inventor himself, Dr. Wolfgang Feigenweiser!”
It is incredible to me to hear Dr. Feigenweiser speaking now, in his German accent, which somehow seems twice as impermeable as in normal conversation. With medical references to metatarsals and femurs and occipital regions, the press guys after the first five minutes are growing restive. Larry Hopkins, Editor-in-Chief, of The American Review, who is generally acknowledged as the dean of the prosthetic device journalists, sets what I suddenly have a premonition may turn out to be an unfortunate example by rising from his seat at about eight minutes into Feigenweiser’s dissertation and slipping over to me.
“Good meeting,” he says out of the side of his mouth. “I got all your stuff.” He pats the kit of press material. “I’ll do a nice job for you in the next issue.”
“Gee, thanks, Larry. Aren’t you going to stay for lunch?”
“I’d like to, really. But the Sport Supporter guys are having an affair in five minutes. I promised I’d show up.”
“Oh, well. Sure. I understand. Thanks for coming by, Larry.”
I am still shaking his hand goodbye, when Fred Payntor, Managing Editor of Precision Prosthetics, comes at me from the other side.
“Good meeting,” he says out of the side of his mouth. “I got all your stuff.” He pats the kit of press material. “I’ll do a nice job for you in the next issue.”
“Gee, thanks, Fred. Aren’t you going to stay for lunch?”
“I’d like to, really. But the Sport Supporter guys are having an affair in five minutes. I promised I’d show up.”
“Oh, well. Sure. I understand. Thanks for coming by, Fred.”
Two guys are standing next to me, the editor and the publisher of Prosthetic Technology, with the same story as the others.
Feigenweiser has fifteen minutes more to go, and the editors of my three top magazines of the industry have walked out. Surveying the room, I can see others in the audience, looking about them, vying to see who will be the next to rise and come over without appearing too unseemly about it.
Joe Meechum, the guy whom I did not know when I greeted him familiarly a few minutes before, is the next to approach me.
“Good meeting,” he says out of the side of his mouth. “I got all your stuff.” He pats the kit of press material. “I’ll do a nice job for you in the next issue.”
“Gee, thanks, Joe. Aren’t you going to stay for lunch?”
“I’d like to, really. But the Pro-Tec guys are having an affair in five minutes. I promised I’d show up.”
I’ve got to get Feigenweiser to cut his speech short before they all leave. I slip away from another reporter whom I see coming at me with regrets, and make my way up to the head table. I tiptoe around behind the Pro-Tec management people, trying to demonstrate that if I am not invisible, at least I am respectful. Out in the audience, two more journalists have moved to the back, and are waving at me, as they leave. I wave back, as Frank revolves his head on his neck in my direction, and glares at me. I sit down in an empty chair near Feigenweiser, and give him a little tap on the shoulder, as he drones on. But either he is so deep in concentration over his text that he is oblivious to all else, or his shoulder is made of some kind of artificial material that doesn’t respond to the touch. He does not pause.
“Ss-s-s-s-s-s-s-t-t-t-t-t, Dr. Feigenweiser,” I hiss at him.
“Quiet!” I hear behind me. It is Frank, looking as though he is about to get up from his seat and give me a dignified belt in the mouth.
There is nothing to do. Feigenweiser drones on. My press guys keep slinking out the back, looking up at the last minute, and making little A-OK signs with thumb and forefinger, or waving good-bye. One guy tosses me a kiss. Not so with Mary Deegan, Managing Editor of Arms, Legs, Etc. She waits to catch my eye, then rolls her eyes heavenward, as if commiserating with me, and turns and flees.
I sit with the others, as Feigenweiser, after close to twenty-five minutes, finally grinds to the end of his paper. “I zink zat gifs evwybody a pwetty gut picture of Hand-Arbeiter,” he says, reaching for a glass of water, “zo I vill now ask now my associates in ze audience to wise und ingwoduce zemselves to you, und you can ask zem anyzing you vish.”
At that point, the entire audience that remains seated in front of us rises, there being no journalists left among them, only the ten Krauts, who after a moment of looking consternated, turn to each other, and shake hands genially.
“I hope you will all stay for lunch,” I say quickly, and slink away from the table to the men’s room, both to be alone for a moment to think, and to wait until the nausea passes.
There is nothing to think about, except that probably I will be blamed for not tying the journalists to the tables, and the nausea does pass, so I go out to face the music.
“How did zey like my pwesentation?” Dr. Feigenweiser asks, intercepting me quickly.
“Not bad, Doctor. Not bad. I think we’ll get good press coverage.” Which is the truth. Though I will never have credibility with any of my contacts again.
“Gut,” he says, adding, “Frank is looking for you.”
I don’t want to see Frank, but, of course, there is no avoiding him. He is seated at a table with a plate already in front of him, chewing on a shrimp, and brandishing a glass of Diet Pepsi in one hand.”
“Wha’ hoppened?” he growls at me.
“Everybody had all the material they needed. We’ll get good press coverage, Frank.”
“Wha’d dey all walk out fa?”
Guess, you asshole! I almost say it, but thinking of my family, my company pension investiture (due not until another six months) I manage instead to smile thinly.
“Sport Supporter was holding a press conference simultaneously, Frank. The guys came to ours first as a courtesy to me, then felt they had to go over there.”
“Oh? Okay. Siddown and eat.”
And that’s the end of it. My part of the conference is over. I can catch a jet out that afternoon, comfortable in the knowledge that Feigenweiser will go back to Germany and tell everyone that they loved his presentation in Vegas; Frank is reasonably satisfied that we have held a successful press conference; Pro-Tec will get the publicity that the journalists promised; Tony will get his blow job; Morrie will have had two nights with Diana; and I go home with a cauliflower ear to see my dear wife and find out if there is news of how my son is doing at his prep school. These thoughts all occur as my mind races forward to the next step in my life, which will occur in my 51st year, because today, I suddenly remember, is my 50th birthday.
CHAPTER VI
I’m able to catch an evening 6:45 plane out of Vegas, which means that I’ll get into
LaGuardia at 12:30 midnight, Eastern time, just barely in time to catch the last limo to Connecticut, assuming we’re not late, in which case, if we are, to hell with it, I’ll splurge and take a taxi.
The convention will be going on for two more days, with a cocktail reception scheduled for tonight by the pool at Caesar’s Palace, which Tony and his sales group are putting on for about 150 Pro-Tec customers. They don’t need me any more, as the press is not invited. There will be a band, plus what I will describe in next month’s Pro-Tec News as a “sumptuous buffet,” and twenty minutes of one-liners by a Vegas comic who has been warned not to make sick jokes about paraplegics this time, as a certain lapse in taste two years ago cost Pro-Tec one of its biggest accounts.
“Welcome aboard Flight 567, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Captain Dowd—” Get outta here! Well, at least, if I need it, I’ve got a ride up to Connecticut from the airport in a Jeep Wagoneer.
We have a light load, and those aboard are subdued, having perhaps all thrown away their life savings at the gambling tables. The two seats next to me are empty, and once we are in the air I am able to sprawl out and slump down reasonably comfortably with a blanket and pillow. It is unlikely that I will be able to sleep, but lulled by the hypnotic thrum of the jet engines, and with the pressure of the cabin increasingly blocking my ears, I will turn within myself, as is my habitude on night flights such as these, and muse for a couple of hours.
As always, in such circumstances, what surfaces in my mind is the question, What am I doing with my life? Whether this kind of self-questioning is common to all business travelers, or unique to me, I am not sure. In any event, today particularly (on my 50th birthday), I cannot help but wonder, cannot escape the question. At precisely half a hundred years, statistically two-thirds of my life is behind me, gone. Maybe I have twenty-five years remaining. Of those, probably fifteen are left with any energy in them. I will die, and I will have accomplished: what?
Of course, the relevant question is what would I like to have accomplished? And, in truth, I am not really sure that I know, not sure really if there is anything I might have done, or even could do yet, that might fulfill the hopeful notions that I once had about my life. Whatever they were. I don’t know that they were ever that specific.
They were most intense, I suppose, in Paris, and would have had to do with being a poet, and doing exciting things. With emphasis, I think, largely on the doing of exciting things. Which is no more specific than what I can come up with now. Maybe I would have said travel. Hey, well, here I am, traveling.
Of course, this trip is not quite up to what I would have had in mind then, that being something more along the lines of, say, a trip to Sweden to accept the Nobel prize for poetry, with the world’s press crowding in on me at the reception and asking my opinion on important subjects such as human rights and perestroika.
Poetry is out. The only writing I do now is for Pro-Tec at the office, and once a month putting my signature on a batch of checks at my cluttered desk in my tiny den/office off the living room at home. Now and then I write a letter to my father, and once a year or so I get a letter off to the editor of the weekly Courier about something or other of importance, like the menace of dog-doo on the town sidewalks.
It is true, I do spend a lot of time in that little office. Sometimes at the cluttered desk, but more often in my Air-Flow recliner, chewing on a Bic or reading The New Yorker, or the Courier, or sometimes nodding off to sleep.
That is not the way I envisioned it would be when I was twenty-four and living in Paris.
Life was to be a perpetual Nobel Prize ceremony, and what it turns out to be is getting up at 6:30 a.m. five days a week (except when I take trips to Las Vegas and other places and get up at 4:30), driving to work in fairly heavy traffic, spending the day being cheerful and fending off requests to do things that I do not want to do for the likes of Diana, Tony, Morrie, Frank and a half dozen others. And arriving home at 6:30 at night, sitting with drink in hand in our country kitchen/family room while my wife steps around me and puts on dinner.
Generally, we finish dinner at eight. I watch one or two television situation comedies, waiting for the pre-meal cocktail and dinner wine to dissipate, and then drag myself into my den/office and instead of writing a poem, I stare at a report that Frank has been waiting to see for two weeks.
On weekends, I play tennis doubles on Saturday morning with a bunch of guys out here whom I don’t see except on the tennis court. Saturday afternoons, the kids and I take the garbage to the dump, then deposit bottles at the supermarket, and maybe there’s an hour or two left during which my wife and I go to local nurseries (in summer) and look at plants and come back and put them in the ground, or we go to the hardware store (in winter) and buy washers and nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and bang at this or that door, latch, cover, window frame, porch step, curtain rod, or whatever. Saturday nights my wife and I go out to dinner and to a movie, or once in a while to somebody’s house for a party, say, like Chet Dowd’s, which usually depresses me beyond bearance.
Sundays we read the Times, and try to avoid going to “brunches,” and catch up on yard work, and do something with the kids (who increasingly now don’t want to do anything with us, because they have things of their own to do), then watch “60 Minutes” in the evening before retiring back into my den/office to psyche up to get ready for another week at Pro-Tec.
This is not living. And yet, it is what I do. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Along the way we have a few laughs (not too many) and some fights (not too many, and noted previously). But there is missing that notion held once in Paris that life some day would be a continuing and an intense involvement with literary success and fame.
But this is useless woolgathering. Even if I had been any good as a poet and had stayed with it, I wonder if I wouldn’t be feeling the same sense of missed opportunities and regret that I feel now. The only one of our poetry group in Paris who actually did go on to pursue the literary life, Pritch Bates, managed to squeeze out a half-dozen largely ignored lifeless novels in which with increasing bitterness he blamed his mother, his father, his sister, his ex-wives and whatever former friends he once had for the miserable mess he has since made of his life. His most recent novel, A Loser, Whining, was dismissed by a reviewer for the Sunday Times Book Review with the cryptic summary: “Put it back in the sand, Pritch.”
Hemingway said somewhere, before he blew his head off, that the hardest thing in his life was getting through from one day to the next—after the day’s work was done.
I can understand that. Work, at least, while it was good, and made sense, gave Hemingway courage to live. Then the work got boring for him. And that was it.
What gives me courage? I don’t know. Certainly not my work. Fear, maybe. I live in terror, really, of being canned, though I make a manful effort to whatever extent I can not to think about it. What I do is I struggle mightily day after day to make myself indispensable to the company so that when they go through one of their periodic cost cutbacks and resultant “house-cleanings,” I won’t be swept out with the others. That’s all. I don’t feel any sense of “loyalty” to Pro-Tec. Any more than Pro-Tec’s powers-that-be feel any “loyalty” to me. If I weren’t selling plastic hand jobs for Pro-Tec, the first place I’d go looking to make a living for my family would be to Pro-Tec’s number one competitor, Sport Supporter. During the past ten years I’ve managed to survive three housecleanings, and each time it gets more terrifying, simply because the longer I am there, the larger my salary gets, and I live in fear that Mac McDougall, the Vice President of Finance, one of these days will get the bright idea that somebody else younger than I could do my job just as well (better?) than I can at half the salary. And he’s probably right! Sure, it would take them a year to break the guy in to the level of proficiency that I have, but they could do it. And I have no written contract with the company. Presumably they might give me three months’ severance pay, but three months isn’t
all that long to find a job on my level, and at my age. Even supposing somebody would want me. Who would want me? Sport Supporter? If I asked for the same salary I’m getting at Pro-Tec, they would pass. If I asked for less, they might wonder what the hell was wrong with me.
What if I had to move to another city? I mean, to someplace like Houston? I’ve got nothing against Houston, but I couldn’t live there. It’s just not me. It would be like taking a Macintosh apple tree and planting it in Texas. It would die. They have their own apples, and they’re probably pretty good, but they’re not Macintosh.
Naturally, I try to cover up my fears in the presence of other people. I suspect that Morrie and Tony think I’m one of the easiest-going guys they know, and Frank, as noted earlier, has a persistent suspicion that I am a wise guy and a con man. Which I am not! I was trying to be loose with the guy! To put him at ease by my own easiness with him. And because he has no sure confidence in himself, he mistook my easy style as some kind of lapse in dignity.
He doesn’t know what dignity is. Dignity isn’t wearing a navy blazer with Mickey Mouse brass buttons and gray flannels, and having a staff of 100 salesmen let little farts in their pants when you tour the premises.
Morrie thinks dignity lies in being called Morris, instead of Morrie, and wearing his hair in a sheaf tossed over his bald spot and showing off in front of the Krauts by scolding waiters about the wine. When he said, “Fuck the company” to Feigenweiser, that was dignity. And Morrie doesn’t even realize it. He’ll hate himself for having said it for the rest of his life, and if he tries to forget about it, Diana won’t let him; she will pester him for having lost his “composure” because he happened to have had enough dignity to resent Tony’s suggestion that she should give head for a hundred dollar bill.
Dignity, for Christ sake. Dignity is not sitting calmly in your chair looking like the RCA Victor pooch while the Krauts, or anybody else, spout insane ideas that should be shot down and shouted down for what they are, a lot of megalomaniacal self-serving shit! Sitting there and saying nothing may be an exercise in self-control, I’ll grant that. And no doubt, too, self-control is a virtue in life. But it is not really dignity.