In the newsroom of the New York Post, reporters are watching the CBS Evening News with Frankly Unctuous substituting for the vacationing Dan Rather.
"...And in Manhattan tonight, an ironic drama is going on at one of those automatic teller machines we all love to hate," says Frankly. "It seems that early this afternoon, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board – the man who is chiefly responsible for this nation's monetary policy – was attempting to get a cash advance from his credit card when the machine apparently got stuck. Now, some four hours later, the Fed Chairman is still at the teller machine, waiting for his money. Susan Spencer is on the scene. Susan?"
"Yes, Frankly, this is quite an eventful event here. Hundreds of people have come to this Chase Manhattan twenty-four-hour bank at Broadway and West 82nd Street to watch. The Fed Chairman, as you stated, is awaiting his money. Earlier, I talked with David Rockefeller, former head of the Chase Manhattan Bank..."
The Post reporters continue to watch the news as they work on their stories. One reporter writes about The Cereal Killer, a fiend who bludgeons people to death people while they eat their breakfast.
Another works on an article about a Tofutti vendor who went berserk on Wall Street and put ringing AT&T Nomad cordless phones next to the ears of passing stockbrokers as he said, "It's for you." The subsequent noise permanently deafened these men.
Another reporter is about to take off for Coney Island, where a splinter group of terrorists is making life miserable for barefoot beachgoers on the boardwalk.
"Somebody, go uptown and cover that teller machine story!" shouts the city editor. He is an Australian.
The Fed chairman's mother is out of the hospital, where they gave her the universal antidote to liquid Tylenol.
She has seen the headlines and the TV broadcasts, and she is worried about her son.
It is after 11 p.m. and Eyewitness News is on. The sportscaster is just finishing up.
"...and in extra innings, it was Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 7, Secular Humanists 5. That's all the scores I have for tonight, Dweezil," he says to the anchorman.
"Well, speaking of scores," the anchorman says, "scores of people were injured tonight in West Beirut..."
The Chairman's mother switches back to her VCR tape, looks at the image of her late husband, and says aloud, "Nigel, what can I do to help my son?"
"Ambassador Park here," says the voice on the telephone. "I mean, Ambassador An here," he corrects himself.
"This is the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency in Washington," says the other voice. The voices are talking long distance on U.S. Sprint, not AT&T, but they can hear each other just fine.
"Yes, sir, what can I do with you?"
"You know about this trouble with the Fed chairman in New York. We'd like you to lower your discount rate, stimulate your economy, buy more U.S. exports, and offer something besides sushi in your restaurants. Not all Americans like to eat raw fish, you know. The microorganisms in them can be dangerous for pregnant women."
"Excuse me, sir, I think you want the Japanese ambassador. I'm from South Korea."
"Oh, really? Sorry to have troubled you for nothing, Ambassador Park."
"An."
“And what?"
"Never mind."
It's midnight. On the Disney channel, they're showing a film called The Horrorville Amity, wherein monsters of all different races and nationalities live together in harmony in a town in Long Island.
I love fantasy, thinks Quynchi Cao as she watches TV.
Then she thinks about her nights with Xerox Sankabrand.
The Fed Chairman is still at the ATM, still waiting for his Visa cash advance. The police, reporters, the mayor, the Comptroller of the Currency, and even the President have implored him to just go home. But the Fed Chairman will not be deterred.
He is staying till he gets his money, his Visa card, and yes, even a record of his transaction. He has faith in the banking system, even in states like Oklahoma. As he looks down at the empty crack vials at his feet, he thinks about the last meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee and how they debated whether to ease or tighten monetary policy, whether to buy or sell U.S. government securities, whether to lower or raise reserve requirements, and whether to order out for sushi or bagels from H & H.
The Chairman is becoming delirious.
At 3 a.m., Quynchi Cao has fallen asleep in front of her TV, which is playing the video of "Information in Motion." Ambassador An has fallen asleep in the Perry Ellis sweater and skirt ensemble he bought earlier at Benetton. The Comptroller of the Currency has fallen asleep in his wife's arms.
Even midtown Manhattan is mostly quiet.
Suddenly the elderly mother of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board can be seen at her window on the forty-second floor of Trump Tower. She opens the window and her ample body rises off the floor and makes its way through the window.
To people on the ground she looks like a balloon.
The Fed Chairman has finally given up his quest for his $200 cash advance. Walking wearily through Central Park, he looks up at the sky, only to see his mother wafting through the night breezes.
She must be hundreds of feet up.
The Chairman's mother floats over Central Park to the east, past Fifth and Madison and Park Avenues.
At the Citicorp Center, with its sloped top, she stops for a minute and kisses the Citicorp logo.
The Citicorp logo looks a lot like the logo for NATO.
The Fed Chairman, for the first time in many long hours, feels something akin to relief.
It's the float, he thinks. It's the float.
Two weeks later, the President of the United States announces the retirement of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and his replacement by Xerox Sankabrand, former lead singer of The Vomit Seekers. (The group will now change its name to Special Drawing Rights.)
At the news conference the broad-shouldered, boyish punk rocker says, "The business of America is show business," and at homes across the nation, people like Quynchi Cao and Ambassador An and the non-cost-effective children of the Comptroller of the Currency nod their heads.
On upper Broadway, maintenance men replace a broken automatic teller machine with a newer model that has a computer-generated voice.
Twelve Step Barbie
1. Van Nuys Barbie
Passing the window of a Judaica store in a strip shopping center on Victory Boulevard, she catches her reflection and instinctively begins to turn her head. But no, this time she will stop and look. Behind the oversized dark glasses she peers at the woman in the tangerine jogging suit with pink fuzzy trim. Barbie frowns.
What a disaster.
The young Latino boys coming out of the health food store don’t even see her, or if they do, they think she’s some housewife looking at Kiddush cups and books about the Holy Land.
The nausea she vaguely feels is probably hunger, she decides, and she heads for the McDonald’s at the corner. She knows she probably should go home and fix herself a salad, but she’ll order the garden salad at Mickey D’s. And the McLean Deluxe.
But when the perky black teenager at the counter asks, “May I take your order?” she finds herself saying: “Big Marc, small fries, large Diet Coke.”
2. Small Businesswoman Barbie
She’s tried to dress for the interview with the loan officer. Everything hurt when she got up
at 5 a.m. Barbie tried those stretches recommended by Amy, the blonde exercise leader on the Homestretch TV show, but they didn’t help much.
Barbie exercises only at home now; she won’t go to the health club anymore. She likes Amy because Amy seems down-to-earth, says never to do more than you can do without pain, has a bad shoulder herself. It’s the two women on the raised row behind Amy she hates: the perfect ones, even if they say they’ve had two children.
When they do bench step exercises on Homestretch, Barbie uses a scale because she hasn’t gotten around to buying a bench step yet.
The loan officer at the Takemishuga Bank has been dealing with her for two years now, ever since she and her partner started the asbestos removal business, but the man never seems to remember Barbie’s name.
He has to look for it on the application form for the new loan. The loan officer is about twenty-seven, a redhead with freckles. Barbie notices a wedding band on his left hand, a photo of a pretty blonde woman on his desk. He is definitely the kind of guy who would have memorized not only her name but her face and every inch of her body in the past.
But today the talk is credit crunch, amortization, and asbestos. He’ll let her know, she hears as they shake hands. He tries to be hopeful: “At least you’ve found a niche: cleaning up dangerous messes.”
Barbie smiles for the first time that morning.
3. Dysfunctional Barbie
Every time Skipper calls, all Barbie hears is how much pain she’s in. Skipper was never as strong as Barbie. Barbie was the good child, the older sister who knew everything. Now that she and Skipper were in the same boat, Barbie hated having to comfort her all the time, give her advice, jolly her along through another day.
She never thinks to ask me about my symptoms, Barbie thinks as Skipper’s sobs reach the 818 area code.
4. Sun Block Barbie
In the shower, she feels that tingle in the middle of her back, in the place she can’t reach. The little scar there is the least of her health problems these days, but she wonders why there’s that tingle sometimes when water hits it.
The dermatologist told her it was unrelated to the immune system problems. No, the little basal cell carcinoma was common for L.A. kids like her who’d spent so much time at Zuma Beach. She didn’t tell him about Island Fun Barbie. The sun was the same, Barbie knew, in Southern California as in the Caribbean, but she blamed the tiny cancer on what she thought of as the “foreign” sun.
Today she’ll pull her hair – at least that’s still pretty good – back in a pony tail. Barbie will use a rubber band, not her old pink skirt that doubled as a pony tail holder. She uses that when she cleans the Toyota now.
5. One Day at a Time Barbie
In the smoky room Barbie holds the sweaty hands of two other people as they stand up and pulse: “Keep coming back, it works if you work it.” And then what would be the usual sigh if the AA meeting were a person.
She prefers the people at this Burbank church to the non-smokers who meet on Tuesdays in the Presbyterian church closer to her house. Over there, too many people know who she was. Barbie’s better coming off with the smell of cigarettes on her clothes. She remembers not to wear her good clothes to the Burbank church meetings.
6. Laissez Faire Barbie
Midge and Allan are arguing again. Barbie hates when they go out to a restaurant and do that. Midge is so petty sometimes, argues just to see how much Allan will take before exploding. Barbie wonders if Allan has ever hit Midge. She looks down at her calamari and doubts it.
Barbie takes a sip of water and thinks about the burn Midge had on her cheek last month. It was probably just what Midge said: that problem with the hibachi. Still. She sips more water.
Despite all the recent rain, the storms didn’t get up north, where the reservoirs are. Barbie tries to be good about conserving water, but even though she lives by herself she can’t bear the thought of not flushing the toilet after each time.
Midge gives Allan a look that says, You’re embarrassing me in front of our friends again.
Barbie couldn’t care less.
7. Bilingual Barbie
Barbie is talking to a health education class in a Long Beach high school. Scooter got her started doing that a few months ago, and while Barbie was reluctant at first, she found that she enjoyed the experience. It wasn’t the kind of attention she got as Style Magic Barbie or California Dream Barbie, but she liked seeing the faces of the sixteen-year-old girls, so different from the face she had once seen in the mirror of her old fluorescent vanity.
The faces of the girls in this class are mostly Mexican and Cambodian. The teacher told her that several of the girls already have babies. Barbie once did a whole talk in Spanish for a class in East L.A., but here she talks in English, without the uhms and ahhs that used to punctuate her speech. She still says “like” more than she’d like. But that only makes her more believable to these girls.
A Cambodian girl asks her about condoms, and Barbie’s mind flashes back to Ken. With Ken, of course, condoms were never an issue.
Barbie answers all the questions, even the personal ones about what her body looks like now. As the bill rings, the health education class applauds Barbie and a group of Mexican girls ask Barbie to sign the back of their jackets.
8. Reflective Barbie
Driving back from Long Beach, Barbie feels so good about the appearance at the high school that she doesn’t notice the pains in her fingers. She has the radio on but doesn’t hear Shadow Traffic telling her about the five-car accident on the Hollywood Freeway by Universal Studios, so she gets stuck in the middle lane. Her mind wanders.
Shutting off the all-news station when she hears the same story about canceling the Japanese rail cars for the third time, Barbie pops in the tape player. Expecting to hear Billy Joel, she gets Public Enemy instead.
Yesterday her cousin Jazzy’s rad boyfriend Dude borrowed the car; she lets him help out on the asbestos removal jobs after school. Barbie is about to shut off the rap music, but she discovers, when she can make out the words, that the lyrics make a lot of sense.
“911 is a joke,” raps Chuck D.
Damn right, Barbie thinks. Once again the picture of Ken pops into her head. In the old days she would josh Ken by calling him “Hardhead” because his hair wouldn’t move – unlike her own thick, lustrous mane. For a couple of years in the early Seventies, he tried being Mod Hair Ken but it didn’t suit him and he returned to his former style.
Ken learned to laugh when Barbie called him “Hardhead.” It wasn’t the part of his body that was really the problem.
9. Bill-Paying Barbie
At her desk, Barbie listens to her pet tropical bird make its odd sound. Not a coo, not a chirp, a sort of sick sound. She got rid of most of her old things, but she couldn’t bear to part with the bird with its reversible two-color wings. The Mattel people never should have done that to a bird. In her checkbook register are records of several checks made out to Friends of Animals.
Writing out a check for the minimum payment on her I. Magnin bill, Barbie wonders if the bird with the artificial reversible wings also had a suppressed immune system.
10. Pissed-Off Barbie
When Skipper whines again about how bad she has it, Barbie finally loses it.
She laces into Skipper, bringing up things from the past, things better left unsaid. Skipper is shocked into silence.
Later the sisters talk, really talk for the first time in years, over Red Zinger Tea and Entenmann’s fat-free Louisiana crunch cake.
“You’d think our both getting sick would have made us closer,” Barbie says, “but in a way I think it’s, I don’t know…”
Skipper nods. “Yeah, I’ve been a pain in the ass.”
Barbie smiles. It isn’t the perky smile or the come-hither smile or the smile on the face of Fun to Dress Barbie in the old days. “Yeah,” Barbie says. “I should have told you before.”
Skipper nods again. And Barbie talks about the Cambodian high school girls in Long Beach and what their parents must have gone through when the killing fields were going on. Barbie rented the movie three times. She couldn’t understand how she missed the Cambodian holocaust when it was going on, but in those days she was Young Republican Barbie and she supported President Nixon on the war.
I Hate All of You on This L Train Page 4