Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  Elroy opened the Directory. There, all by itself on the last page, he found the Lefkowitz Ego Removers of Flushing, New York.

  Beneath their ad was this: “Warning. The Surgeon-General Has Determined that Ego Removal May Be Injurious to Your Health.”

  Joseph Elroy hesitated, considered, weighed factors. He was momentarily perplexed. But then the Mystery Guru popped into the room again and said, “It’s a seven-to-five shot at the Big Spiritual Money, and besides, what have you got to lose?” He exited, a master of timing.

  Elroy punched out the big combination on the console.

  Not long afterward there was a knock at the door. Elroy opened it to the Lefkowitz Ego Removal Squad.

  They left. Then there was only the console, winking and leering and glittering at itself. And then even that was gone and there was nothing whatever in the room except a disembodied voice humming “Amapola.”

  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 about 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

  SHOOTOUT IN THE TOY SHOP

  The meeting took place in the taproom of the Beaux Arts Club of Camden, New Jersey. It was the sort of uptight saloon that Baxter usually avoided—Tiffany lampshades, tables of dark polished wood, discreet lighting. His potential customer, Mr. Arnold Conabee, was in a booth waiting for him. Conabee was a soft-faced, fragile-looking man, and Baxter took care to shake his hand gently. After squeezing his bulk into the red leatherette booth, Baxter asked for a vodka martini, very dry, because that was the sort of thing people ordered in a joint like this. Conabee crossed him up by asking for a margarita straight up.

  It was Baxter’s first job in nearly a month, and he was determined not to blow it. His breath was kissing sweet, and he had powdered his heavy jowls with talcum powder. His glen plaid suit was freshly pressed and concealed his gut pretty well, and his black police shoes gleamed. Looking good, baby. But he had forgotten to clean his fingernails, and now he saw that they were black-rimmed, he wanted to keep his hands in his lap, but then he couldn’t smoke.

  Conabee wasn’t interested in his hands, however. Conabee had a problem, and that was why he had arranged this meeting with Baxter, a private detective who listed himself in the Yellow Pages as the Acme Investigative Service.

  “Somebody is stealing from me,” Conabee was saying, “but I don’t know who.”

  “Just fill me in on the details,” Baxter said. His voice was the best part of him, a deep, manly drawl, exactly the right voice for a private investigator.

  “My shop is over at the South Camden Mall,” Conabee said. “Conabee’s Toys for Children of All Ages. I’m beginning to acquire an international reputation.”

  “Right,” Baxter said, though he had never heard of Conabee’s scam.

  “The trouble started two weeks ago,” Conabee said. “I had just completed an experimental doll, the most advanced of its kind in the world. The prototype utilized a new optical switching circuit and a synthetic protein memory with a thousand times
the order of density previously achieved. It was stolen on the first night of its display. Various pieces of equipment and a quantity of precious metals were also taken. Since then, there have been thefts almost every night.”

  “No chance of a break-in?”

  “The locks are never tampered with. And the thief always seems to know when we have anything worth stealing.”

  Baxter grunted and Conabee said, “It seems to be an inside job. But I can’t believe it. I have only four employees. The most recent has been with me six years. I trust them all implicitly.”

  “Then you gotta be hooking the stuff yourself,” Baxter said, winking, “because somebody’s sure carting it off.”

  Conabee stiffened and looked at Baxter oddly, then laughed. “I almost wish it were me,” he said. “My employees are all my friends.”

  “Hell,” Baxter said, “anybody’ll rip off the boss if he thinks he can get away with it.”

  Conabee looked at him oddly again, and Baxter realized that he wasn’t talking genteelly enough and that a sure seventy-five dollars was about to vanish. He forced himself to be cool and to say, in his deep, competent, no-nonsense voice, “I could hide myself in your shop tonight, Mr. Conabee. You could be rid of this annoyance once and for all.”

  “Yes,” Conabee said, “it has been annoying. It’s not so much the loss of income as...” He let the thought trail away. “Today we got in a shipment of gold filigree from Germany worth eight hundred dollars. I’ve brought an extra key.”

  Baxter took a bus downtown to Courthouse Square. He had about three hours before he was to stake himself out in Conabee’s shop. He’d been tempted to ask for an advance, but had decided against it. It didn’t pay to look hungry, and this job could be a fresh start for him.

  Down the street he saw Stretch Jones holding up a lamppost on Fountain and Clinton. Stretch was a tall, skinny black man wearing a sharply cut white linen suit, white moccasins, and a tan Stetson. Stretch said, “Hey, baby.”