American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Ladella was choking. In case you were wondering, the abdominal thrust maneuver attributed to Dr. Heimlich apparently works.”

  The two sisters kept their silence for a moment longer and then Ladella, still looking at Fay, said, “I think you broke one of my ribs.” She touched the lower part of her rib cage gingerly.

  “You’re welcome,” said Fay. She pursed her lips, then released them. “Let me feel it. Maybe it’s just bruised.”

  As Fay was touching Ladella’s diaphragm, Ladella said, “I probably wouldn’t have choked on that pretzel if I hadn’t seen you and Truman driving up.”

  “Do you hate me that much, Ladella?” asked Fay, sitting back in her seat and folding her arms across her large breasts.

  “No more than you hate me,” said Ladella.

  “But I don’t hate you at all,” replied Fay. “I just don’t like you very much.”

  “Then why did you save my life? Or would you have saved whoever was choking at this table?”

  “Well, of course I would have done the same for anybody,” said Fay. “But it obviously mattered more to me because it was you. For good or bad, you’re still my sister.” Fay thought for a moment and then said, “When are we going to end all of this, Ladella? Does it go on like this until we’re both dead?”

  “Mama always favored you.”

  “And Daddy always favored you.”

  “The sad truth is that when it comes right down to it, they both probably always liked Marcus best.”

  Fay nodded. “He is the only son and he is the only one of us to give our parents grandchildren.”

  Ladella took a sip from the cup of water that the short order cook had brought her. “I never enjoyed any of those years of not having a sister.”

  Fay agreed with this statement by nodding pensively.

  Out in the parking lot, after their wives had gotten inside their respective AMC passenger vehicles, the rent between the two temporarily, perhaps even permanently mended, Truman said to Cleron, “Had we all decided to take you up on your idea of driving out together, this reconciliation might never have happened. The Lord, Brother Cleron, works in mysterious ways.”

  “Ain’t that a fact, Brother Truman. Ain’t that a fact.”

  1977

  RECTALLY REMUNERATIVE IN ILLINOIS

  The younger men sat around the table in their Tattersall check vests and their Tattersall shirts with buttoned-down collars noosed with silk challis ties—ties that spoke in the muted earth-toned voices of the brown-beige-forest green seventies. The older men wore pinstriped and herringbone double-breasted suits and straight, uncuffed trousers that signified money and prestige (given the venerability of the patricians in the room), while respecting the fashion of the day. Almost all of the men wore tassels on their wing-tipped shoes, which were constructed of soft leather and hardly pinched at all. This being the eighth year of the “Me” decade, the men preened a little, but not too much, because, after all, they were real men, and didn’t Anita Bryant remind them every other day how much God loved men who acted like real men and not like fruits?

  The conference room—a quarrel of chrome and cherry wood paneling—smelled of incinerated tobacco and Old Spice and Yardley Jaguar and Black Tie and Aramis and little of the Chicago smog which, Sandburg tells us, creeps into a room on little cat feet.

  The oldest of the room’s esteemed elders sat at the head of the table. His name was Bob Grady Senior, and he opened the meeting by asking where the hell the coffee was. He was reminded that, like every other company that vigilantly attended its bottom line, Grady Enterprises was boycotting coffee until the price came down, to which Bob Grady Senior responded in wonted curmudgeon fashion, “So when the hell are the Brazilians gonna get their act together and do something about the weather down there?”

  The men drank tea.

  Out of oversized, masculine coffee mugs.

  This being an early morning meeting, some of the men drank orange juice, just like Anita Bryant and the Florida Citrus Commission told them to.

  A man who resembled a younger version of the older man and was, in fact, his son, stood to address the group gathered around the table, interrupting cluttered cross-talk pertaining to last week’s bowl games and the recent death of Mayor Daley (this, again, being Chicago), the closed-door ascension of Michael Anthony Bilandic to that same office (ditto previous parenthetical), and Farrah Fawcett (this being 1977 and Farrah being, well, Farrah).

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” greeted Bob Grady Junior from his station at the other end of the table. Bob Grady Junior stood against a backdrop of easels and flip charts offering pies and bars in blazing primary and secondary colors. Then, eschewing all other preliminary pleasantries, Grady the younger called his colleagues’ attention to sales figures for the past quarter. “If you will please turn to page seventeen in the quarterly sales report, you’ll see that I’ve quantified the figures by product line. Note which of our lines have experienced a moderate decline in sales and which have lost all viability whatsoever in the marketplace.”

  As Bob Grady Junior directed his colleagues to page seventeen, thirteen of the fourteen men gathered around the cherry-wood conference table sought in concert that page so designated in their own copies of the quarterly sales report, all the riffling fingers creating in the aggregate a soft, susurrant rustle. The fourteenth man—the oldest in the room, whose name you now know to be Bob Grady Senior, founder and pater-emeritus of Grady Enterprises—did not turn his pages, but looked out the window at the City of Big Shoulders and hummed.

  “Gentlemen,” continued Bob Grady fils, whose voice sounded similar to that of Beatrice Arthur but with less of a sandpaper rasp, “please make note that the market share for eight of our ten best-selling products has dropped markedly in the last three quarters. I don’t have figures yet for the pre-Christmas sales, but projected earnings are far below those of the last five holiday cycles. I find it necessary at this juncture, poised as we are upon the cusp of our merger with Hawthorne-Hay Industries, to ask which of the following products we can afford to do without. Item.” The young Mr. Grady cleared his Maude-ish throat preparatory to placing several time-honored Grady Enterprises staples upon the merchandising chopping block. “Happy Tush Sanitized Rectal Wipes. Fifty-percent drop in sales over the last year. Quite dramatic. Mr. Powers, you wished to—”

  “Yes. I wanted to make note of the economic downturn.”

  “Actually, there was an up-tick,” said the man sitting next to Powers. This man’s name was Avernell. He was a large man, and he crowded his two neighbors.

  “Whether the economy is doing well or not,” pursued Young Grady, with a soupçon of exasperation, “I would not consider sanitized rectal wipes to be a discretionary purchase for most consumers of anal cleansing products. Is there anyone here who would dispute this fact?”

  A blond-haired man who looked to be in his late thirties raised his hand.

  “Yes, Henderson? Are you disputing this fact?”

  “No. I just wanted to say that there are at least three other products on this list whose sales have fared worse that Happy Tush Sanitized Rectal Wipes. Granted, the Rectal Appliances Division has taken a hit over the last year, but be fair, Grady. Every marketing study we’ve undertaken has demonstrated that the Stool-Eaze Anal Caliper Helpmate lawsuit was only marginally responsible for the drop in sales of our rectal wipes and pile balms. In fact, our Do-Your-Doody Extra-Strength Pile Balm and Fresh Booty Scented Sphincter Cream have actually each seen a marked increase in sales in the last two cycles.”

  Bob Grady the Elder now began to hum, inexplicably, “Love for Sale” by Cole Porter.

  Another man, Cass Jorgens, a balding fellow with canine-like flues, raised his hand to solicit attention. Without receiving acknowledgement by young Grady, he proceeded nonetheless to pronounce that the advertising agency recently retained by Grady Industries to sell Jorgens’ division’s products—namely Nip-It-in-the-Bud Nipple Hair Tweezers and the Umbil
i-lievable Belly Button Irrigation Kit—was confident that its new ad campaigns for each of these products would boost sales far beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. “I share their confidence,” said Mr. Jorgens, whose temples begat the sweat of a clearly anxious man, his division’s very reason for existence having now been placed in jeopardy.

  And so the morning’s executive meeting went: each division head defending his own products against hard statistics pointing to diminished sales, the usual level of public ridicule, and several nettlesome lawsuits: the vaginal douche, Yes-M’Lady, for example, having promulgated infections when improperly applied, and the Glad Glans uncircumcised penis antiseptic scrub pad, having been the focus of both lawsuits and a boycott after numerous reported chafings from over-diligent application.

  Of all the products brought to the forefront in the morning’s discussion, only the Wee Fingers therapeutic labia cuff and the Nutty Brother scrotal sling had achieved sales increases, due in both cases to subtle mentions by guests on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, each constituting an enthusiastic endorsement.

  The meeting concluded an hour later than scheduled, with drawn and wan faces accompanying plodding shuffles from the room, the only exception being the hopeful expression and near-prance of Henry Kierbaum, head of the Genitalia Accessories division, whose product line would not be put before the boards of both Grady Enterprises and its future partner Hawthorne-Hay Industries for the purpose of future assessment thanks to the aforementioned glowing Tonight Show endorsements by Sylvia Sidney and Sir John Gielgud. The room now having been emptied of everyone but father and son, Grady Junior crept up to Grady Senior, who, seemingly unaware that the meeting had been adjourned, stared wistfully out the window at the hazy Chicago skyline.

  “Hey, Pop,” said the son, “can I take you back home now?”

  “Is it time already?” asked the father.

  “I don’t know how much you got out of that meeting.”

  The father turned to look at his son. “Enough to know that this ship is going down in a hurry. I don’t know why H-H wants the merger. Unless they’re planning to scrub everything and start from scratch. We have a fine plant. I wouldn’t blame them.” Pivoting back to the window: “Look at all the pigeon shit. Why do pigeons fly all the way up to the twenty-first story of this building just to shit on our ledges?”

  When Bob Grady Junior saw his father’s face again, there were tears in the old man’s eyes. “I built this company from nothing. Just me and my dreams and that oversized rectal thermometer that took off like gangbusters in Greenwich Village and San Francisco, and, for some reason that I still can’t understand, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Now we’re floundering, Bobby. And I’m no help. I’m put out to pasture, son, like a half-dead horse.”

  “We’re going to turn this company around, Dad. I’ll make it my mission to put Grady Enterprises back in the black. I’ll make you proud.”

  Father and son stood at the window, the father’s thoughts drifting to memories of his glory days as a young entrepreneur in go-go Chi-town, the son’s thoughts wandering to how to improve the Bladder-Guard Antibacterial Urethra Shield. It wasn’t long before the father’s musings turned once again to pigeons. He thought he might like to be one himself so that he could fly away to a place where people still drank coffee and wanted to buy everything he had to sell, even though they would continue to do so with a blush.

  It was a chimerical wish—the impractical wish of a man who could no longer be of service to his company. And the reality of having lost his father to useless senility felt to Bob Grady Junior like a swift kick in the balls. Unfortunately, and to Bob’s disadvantage, Grady Enterprises had stopped making Tender Testicle Analgesic Cream a good five years ago.

  1978

  TRIPLE-TOASTED IN MISSOURI

  The three St. Louis men had a number of things in common, some more important than others, and one the most important of all. Dennis, Jock, and Marvin were all well into their thirties. Each hated Saturday Night Fever and disco in general and the Bee Gees in particular. It was Dennis, oldest of the three, who took the initiative and barked at the bartender to “please can the disco music. This is a bar, not a discotheque.”

  Kurt, the bartender, looked offended. “It’s four in the afternoon. Nobody’s here but me and the three of you, and Old Man Rivers, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass what music I play.”

  “Well, the three of us do,” Dennis shot back. “And if you’re unwilling to kill ‘Stayin’ Alive’ sometime in the next, let’s say, thirty seconds, we’re gonna pick ourselves up and go drink our expensive Scotch whiskies in some other Carondelet bar. Capice?”

  Kurt turned off the music.

  Marvin was laughing. Marvin was drunk. He’d gotten an early jump on his companions. “Ironic, too,” he added.

  “How’s that?” asked Jock. Then the answer came to him like a slap, and he nodded reflectively. “Kill. Alive. I get it.”

  Besides an acquired fondness for Scotch, which put each of the three men on an even footing with their hard-drinking colleagues at the two law firms and one district attorney’s office where they worked, there was also a strong interest in the sport of tennis, both as players and fans, over which they had inevitably bonded.

  Just the week before, Bjorn Borg had lost the U.S. Open Men’s Singles title to American Jimmy “Jimbo” Connors. Jimbo had won handily in straight sets. Marvin, who paid close attention to the minutia of the game, had opined moments before (while raising his voice to be heard over “How Deep is Your Love”), that Borg, who had earlier in the year captured singles titles at both the French Open and Wimbledon, was disadvantaged by his unfamiliarity with the new hard court surface, “DecoTurf,” that the recently opened tennis facility in Queens, New York, had laid in.

  “He got to the finals, didn’t he?” retorted Dennis, who looked a little like Borg: blond and Nordic, a contrast to his booth companions. (One of the differences among the three men: none bore even the slightest resemblance to his two companions. Another was Dennis’s pedigree: he was the grandson of Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Dennis Bailey).

  “The thing I read,” offered Marvin, who looked a lot like a young Arthur Miller—prominently spectacled and possessed of long vertical dimples that framed his voluble mouth like parentheses, “is that the new DecoTurf favors serve-and-volley players, not a baseliner like Bjorn.”

  “Your theory’s bullshit, Marvin,” pronounced Jock, who, having his side of the booth to himself, had spread his right arm across the top of the back cushion as if waiting for an adoring female to slide in next to him. Jock was arguably the least good-looking of the three. He was beef and brawn and proprietor of a hairline that was dramatically receding (a product, he often bragged, of a natural overproduction of testosterone), and a face that perhaps formerly had some nuance of shape to it, but was now lithically hard-set and jut-jawed like a bulldog’s.

  “Tell me why it’s bullshit,” said Marvin, enunciating each word carefully to keep from slurring.

  “Because this kid coming up through the ranks, McEnroe—he’s all volley and serve. It’s like he’s allergic to ground strokes.”

  “Or just a fucking hot dog,” observed Dennis, who waved his glass to get Kurt the bartender’s attention. Some of the remaining Dewars sloshed onto Marvin’s arm. “But yeah, yeah, I get your point—Connors cleaned his clock in the semi-finals.”

  Kurt, detecting movement in the periphery of his vision, looked up from his present task of pillowing Old Man Rivers’ toppled head with a couple of folded bar towels, to see Dennis summoning his attention from the booth the three men occupied. “Thanks. I mean the music,” Dennis shouted.

  “Pegged you three for either Billy Joel or Chuck Mangione,” Kurt called from behind the bar. Billy Joel was singing “Only the Good Die Young” over the bar’s speakers.

  Marvin snickered. “Another irony. The room is awash with them this afternoon.”

  “Almost creepy,” said Jock, sitting forwar
d and setting both arms heavily upon the woody tabletop.

  “I like ‘Brandy,’” admitted Marvin quietly and irrelevantly. “She’s a fine girl. What a good wife she would be.”

  “It’s getting late, fellows,” said Jock. “I’ve got to go pick up Scottie at his school. If I’m not there stroke of five thirty, soon as football practice ends, word gets back to Jill, and bingo! It’s like the opposite of that Ozark Air Lines jingle.” Jock suddenly became tuneful: “She doesn’t make things easy for me!”

  The men laughed. “Are you saying it’s time for the toast?” asked Dennis. “Are you rushing the toast, Jocko?”

  “I gotta rush the toast. Hey, we’ve been here over an hour. That ain’t bad.”

  “These reunions get shorter every year,” Marvin reflected.

  “That’s bullshit,” said Jock. “Christ, we were here well past the dinner hour last year. You should have heard the earful I got from Jill that night.”

  “I need to be heading out, too,” said Dennis. “I don’t live under the thumb of my wife like Jocko here, but I’ve still got my domestic responsibilities.” Both Dennis and Jock turned to Marvin. Dennis spoke for the both of them: “Insert obligatory observation here about the advantages of bachelorhood.”

  “Observation stipulated to,” said Marvin, his eyes now rheumy.

  “You’re taking a cab,” said Dennis. And then to Kurt: “Make sure our friend Marvin gets a cab home. Oh, and we’re ready for our toast. Black Label, please. Only the best for Tracie.”

  The bartender nodded and drew his bottle of twelve-year-old Johnnie Walker Black down from the back-bar shelf. The three men could hear the clink of the three ceremonial shot glasses as he plucked them up.

  When he reached the booth, Kurt asked, “How long have you three ambulance chasers been doing this? All I know about is the last three years since I’m here.”