Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

  “‘Okay, all you bad teachers! Come on!’”

  Not a peep from the wrench.

  “So,” I said. “The only reason I bring all this up is — one day Link and I walked by the composing room Coke machine. And someone had stuck a note on it. You know how people will do.”

  “Not really,” said the wrench.

  “Well, they will. Stick notes on machines. Or at least they used to, before machines talked. Anyway, here’s what the note on the Coke machine said:

  “‘This machine owes me thirty-five cents.’”

  “See. And … the point I’m coming to: Link, who thought in Linklets — Link took out a pencil and … People will do that. See something written on a wall or somewhere, they’ll add a comment.

  “So,” I went on, “here’s what Link wrote:

  “‘As if a machine could owe.’”

  Silence from the wrench.

  “Was what he wrote,” I said. “‘As if… a machine could owe.’ And … I just wondered —”

  “Hey,” said the wrench.

  And there was something so dismissive in the tone.

  “Tell me about it,” said the wrench.

  I just sat there. I looked at the wrench.

  “Great!” I said. “Thanks a lot! I need irony from a wrench!”

  I glared at the wrench.

  “Listen. You think I enjoy sitting here opening up to a damn wrench? Huh? But you can’t unbend a bit, can you? You aren’t interested in chicken tendons. You don’t want to hear any Linklets. You’re no different from any other hunk of gimmickry! Contraption! Doohickey! Thingamajig!”

  A moment passed. Then:

  “My — head — has — been — immersed — in — viscid — water. Please — blow — hot — dry — air — into — my wiring — cavity — now. Failure — to — do — so — will — result — in — corrosion — of— my — communications — circuitry. The — choice — is — yours.”

  Mine. Mine! Why is it always mine?

  How to Pack It All In

  WHEN PACKING FOR A trip, bear this principle in mind: it is better, in a public place like an airport, to be bedraggled than naked. If you squeeze all your clothes into a carry-on bag — I don’t care if it is so cannily constructed, according to the airline-magazine ads, that you can live out of it for the rest of your life — your clothes are going to get wadded up. And you will look as if you have been raiding the Goodwill collection box.

  But if you take several pieces of proper luggage that have to be checked, the airline will lose them, and your one set of clothes will become so vile in a few days that in all decency you will be forced to travel nude.

  I don’t know why airlines always lose checked baggage. You would think they might at least warn you, as they are briskly slapping on tags, that “it is the policy of this airline that we have no earthly idea where we are checking these bags through to.” But they don’t. They behave for all the world as if they were flying your luggage to your destination.

  But when you reach that place, you will stand sweatily, anxiously, among the teeming, shouldering masses at the conveyor belt for an hour or so while skis, pineapples, caged weimaraners, duffel bags marked WARNING, kayaks, bass viols, and mysterious large trapezoidal crates belonging to someone click-clack past, but your own bags will not appear. So you will go to the baggage-service desk, where a semi-functionary considerably less apologetic than Richard Nixon will give you a long form to fill out. Or you may elect to save the form and wear it the following day. The baggage-service person does not find it remarkable, does not see it as any business of his, or of yours, that his airline has lost your property. “These things happen,” he may say, if you insist on his saying something. If you rave and fume, the upshot will be that your only shirt gets sweatier sooner.

  So you must pack everything in a carry-on bag. Now, I see some people walking through airports with trim, flat carry-on bags. These are presumably the same people who carry wafer-thin wallets. My own wallet — perhaps because it holds my entire fortune, and also “What to Do in Case of Sunstroke,” and also the card of a police detective I met one night in Indianapolis (if I ever throw these out, I will get sunstroke and be arrested in Indianapolis within twenty-four hours) — looks like a camel’s snout. My carry-on bag looks like a greatly enlarged bacon cheeseburger on a sesame roll with extra onions.

  If your business, like mine, tends to take you from Hartford to Detroit via Richmond, Virginia; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Jackson, Mississippi, you will need to bring along an overcoat, a heavy suit, a light jacket, shorts, snow boots, sneakers, long underwear, flip-flops, canned heat, bug repellent, and a hat with earflaps. And six shirts. And some pants that will go with either the light jacket or the suit coat. And some wool socks and some thin socks. And a pair of gloves. And a briefcase, and some papers that won’t fit into the briefcase, and a typewriter. And a book, in case you have read every novel about mad dogs haunting a seventeenth-century Scottish manse available in the airport shop. And some decongestant pills so your head cold won’t be driven into your inner ears by cabin pressure. Also eight or nine different toiletries (you can, and will, leave some of these behind and purchase replacements in a hotel shop, but you should bear in mind that they will cost $13.95 per tube).

  So if you have a king-size bed at home, you spread all these things out on it and then unzip all the zippers on your carry-on bag and spread it out alongside. Then you step back, survey the prospect, and wonder whether it might be possible just to roll the whole prospect up, mattress and all, and carry that aboard; or whether it might be possible to stay home. But no. Neither thing is possible. You have miles to go before you …

  Well, a little nap would be refreshing. There was a study in the paper the other day showing that people pack better when they are rested. But there is no room on the bed. Besides, your plane leaves in an hour and fourteen minutes, and the airport is forty minutes away, and you haven’t bought your ticket yet.

  So! Let’s get packing. First get the cat out of the socks.

  Now! Let’s get down to it.

  Say your carry-on bag is of the folded-over hanging variety, with lots of pockets. Those little pockets look easy. Put a tie in each one. You really need only one tie, but there are four of those little pockets; so put a tie in each one of them. That’s a start.

  Now. Get the cat out of the socks again.

  Now. Large hanging items. Sport coats, shirts. These must be laid carefully, smoothly, the arms folded over just so, in the large cavity where the coat hangers are.

  Where the coat hangers were.

  Where are the coat hangers?

  You find some coat hangers, but they are not the same ones that came with this bag; they are the ones that came with a previous bag that exploded in Des Moines. So they don’t quite hook on to the little hook-on thing right. So you have to bend their little hooks. And the little hook-on thing. So you know they are going to come loose.

  Still, you load several changes of clothes onto the hangers and work the whole mass somehow into the large cavity. And try to zip it up. It is like trying to zip three Serbian trappers into the same sleeping bag. So you figure you’ll get it completely zipped later, after you’ve loaded the pockets on the other side. So you turn the bag over and start loading those pockets with miscellanea. But arms are flopping out of the large cavity. So you turn the bag back over, and everything you have loaded into the pockets falls out, including the cat.

  But you get the whole thing pulled together. Oh yes, yes you do. You curse, and you kick, and you forget to put in any underwear, but you do get the whole thing pulled together. Because you are an American traveling person, and if you give up and stay home you will have to do something even worse than traveling, like straightening out your life.

  Getting your stuff together, of course, does not mean being able to lift it. You have to jettison something. Ties. That’s why we put extra ties in to begin with. Ties are easy to jettison. Jettisoning a jacket, sa
y, would mean going back into the major cavity again, and the stuff in the major cavity has begun to swell visibly.

  Now you can lift it. You can carry it out to the car. You can drive it to the airport. And you can drag it through the parking lot and all the way to the ticket counter. And by then your bag’s contents have rearranged themselves into shifting, ill-balanced clumps that cause other travelers to stare.

  So — partly to cut down on the number of times you will lurch into walls between ticket counter and gate, and partly so that people will no longer suspect you of transporting nearly suffocated chimpanzees — you do a little unzipping and repacking. Before you know it, your white shirt has stuck to the heel of a hurried traveler, and he is dragging it off toward the Green Concourse, and people are sneering at your wardrobe, and you discover that your athlete’s-foot powder has come open and coated everything in your Dopp kit, including notably your toothbrush, and your deodorant stick is rolling off toward the newsstand. And — oh-h, surprise! — there is the cat.

  You can deal with all this, though. You are a seasoned traveler. And you are on the first leg of your trip. Your bag hasn’t split open yet and its handle hasn’t come loose at one end yet and its main zipper hasn’t jammed yet and shirts that you spilled beer on haven’t gotten mingled in with the other shirts yet and you haven’t acquired any keepsakes yet.

  Keepsakes can be a problem. In the course of your travels, you will pick up gifts for loved ones back home — hats, conch shells, wooden airplanes that do loops if they aren’t broken. And if you pass through Tennessee or Georgia, you will want to pick up a couple of bottles of Lem Modow whiskey, which is a younger, cheaper, and I be damned if not better-tasting version of Jack Daniel’s and is available in only those two states. If you get down into south Georgia during May or June, you’ll want to get some Vidalia onions. If you’re in New Orleans, you had better grab a couple of Dixie beers to take back with you; in Milwaukee you may score a wurst; and you might come by a comical alligator poster in Tampa and a cactus in Tucson. Let’s face it, you can’t get these things at home.

  You won’t be able to get every one of these things into your carry-on bag. So you’ll acquire several auxiliary tote bags and will begin to resemble the baseball pitcher Satchel Paige at the age of seven, when he got his nickname hustling baggage at a railroad depot in Mobile. “I rigged up ropes around my shoulders and waist,” Paige once said, “and I carried a satchel in each hand and one under each arm. I carried so many satchels that all you could see were satchels. You couldn’t see no Leroy Paige.”

  By then your baggage will have acquired its own momentum, and you won’t be able to exert much influence over it; so you can relax, and remember these pointers:

  When in a hurry to check out of a hotel, just pack everything that will fit into your bag or bags, and wear what’s left over. If three shoes are left over, leave one as a tip.

  If your bag has a waterproof compartment for wet things, that is a good place to stow anything that doesn’t have spaghetti sauce on it yet.

  If, when you shove your carry-on bag under the seat in front of you, the passenger in that seat jumps straight up into the air, this may be a sign that you will have some trouble getting the bag out again. Politely introduce yourself to the passenger in question, and ask if he or she would mind your pressing downward on his or her head and shoulders in order to flatten out any bag protuberances.

  Don’t let your cat wear anything identifying him as your cat. He will be perfectly okay hanging around your hometown airport, with all the other inadvertently packed cats, until you get back. If your name is on him, however, you may be required to repack him and take him with you wherever you go. And many airlines do not allow bags containing cats to be stowed in overhead compartments.

  Should you wind up with someone else’s bag by mistake, take the following quiz: I am traveling to Palm Springs

  Tokyo

  Worcester

  I have been on the road one day

  two days

  two weeks

  I am a cocaine dealer

  chief executive officer

  serious writer

  I am taking this quiz with a gold pen

  gold pencil

  ballpoint that says PEEGEE’S PARTS, spokane

  I am traveling from Acapulco

  Palm Beach

  Amarillo

  If the answers are c, c, c, c, and c, and you want to get ahead in the Reagan era, keep the other person’s bag.

  If Sheepskin, So Can You

  (Some Friendly Remarks to Graduates)

  I KNOW YOU YOUNG people are asking, “Will I be able to make it as a yuppie in the real world?”

  Fortunately, most of you have had the foresight to equip yourselves with Greek. The real world is basics. In the real world the key thing is to get off a Greek allusion at the right moment.

  Your department head buzzes you:

  “Why the bejabbers haven’t you pulled together that report on the substantiational aspects of that widget?”

  You know what widget he means. The widget that your firm’s new slickware floppy, the QUASi-2000, enables customers to visualize, in high-definitional three-dimensionality, on their cozily greenish screen.

  “On the one hand …,” you reply, as you used to reply in seminars on Roots of the Renaissance to buy time. But time does not come so cheap in the real world. The intercom crackles. “I want to see both your hands on deck in about half a New York minute,” snaps your crusty superior.

  On your way to his module you pass the break area for employees who did not attend college. They are eating crude pastries from a machine and saying, “When you think of how bowling’s changed in the last … it’ll scare you.” It is the job of a friend of yours in Human Resources to interface with these employees. “Don’t ask,” he has said.

  With a smile virtually indistinguishable from the smile on your ID badge, you pass security and enter the highest corridor you are cleared for. There are no windows here, and the ducts are veiled by heavy mesh, but the air is ionized, so as to make you feel coiled as you never felt in halls of ivy. You enter the boss’s module through his portico — an effect created by photographic enhancement, as he is only upper-middle management, but imposing just the same. His administrative assistant, Lavonna or Jeff, moves noiselessly, sinuously, into an alcove, where she or he takes care of certain nuts and bolts.

  “For corn sakes-a-jumpin’-mighty!” expostulates the Old Man, who is staring moodily at his screen, presumably at the widget in question. (He always keeps his office console situated so that only he can see the screen.) “We know it’s highly defined. We know it’s three-dimensional. We know we can cathodically cause it to rotate through three hundred sixty degrees on any of its five construable axes, or to go inside out and back again and inside out and back again and inside out and back again, foop f’lup, foop f’lup, foop f’lup. But what is it? It looks like a, oh, what am I thinking of? A …” For the first time he cuts his eyes at you.

  “Self-slicing zucchini?” you hazard.

  “No! That’s not what I was thinking of at all!” the boss exclaims. He dashes a mugful of Hearty Fella Mock Cheese Soup across your shirtfront and ID badge. This is one way in which the real world differs from academe. Professors did not throw soup on you for wrong answers. Because your salary did not come through them. The situation was almost vice versa, in fact. Sure, your professors had their own research deal with the American Better Lipids Council. (“There Are Lipids, and Then There Are Lipids.”) But if your parents had not been ponying up $14,000 a year for your education then your professors would have had to be directly employed by the ABLC, on a salaried rather than a funded basis, and would have lost their independence. ABLC department heads would have been throwing soup — and fatty soup, frankly — on them. So your professors took a professorial, which is to say a crypto-truckling, tone with you.

  N
ot so in the real world. Here it is all what-are-you-packing and hey-nonny-nonny. Your boss can roll you up in a strip of carpet and whale the living daylights out of you with a length of technological cable if he so elects. He is interested in one thing — performance and performance only.

  Because, remember: his department has to perform if he is to get the bonus that will enable him to pony up $14,000 a year for each of his offspring to attend college for five, six, seven years. (Today’s offspring take longer and longer to emerge into the real world.) If in order to get performance out of you he has to be a hard guy occasionally, then so be it. Furthermore, in the real world bosses must finally come to terms with the fact that they enjoy whaling the daylights out of people less highly placed than themselves.

  But Greek resounds across the ages. Presumably you have been an officer in your sorority or fraternity, and therefore are privy to classical rites. And you have read the rushing narratives of Xenophon in the original — probably staying up all night the night before the exam, pizza and No-Doz and the ancient texts, you can’t tell me anything, I’ve been there.

  Okay. You’ve got your good grounding in Greek. Use it.

  It is a mistake to venture a guess about what the boss has in mind as to what the widget actually is. If the boss actually has anything in mind, it is beside the point. Process is the point. Go with your Greek.

  “Τι μπορείτε να κάνετε με τα χέρια σα [What can you do with your hands]?” you say.

  Your boss concedes you a small smile.

  “Μπορώ να δουλέψω με τα χέρια μου [I can work with my hands],” he says.

  “Τι μπορείτε να κάνετε με τα πόδια σας [What can you do with your feet]?” you go on.

  His smile grows somewhat larger. “ ‘Μπορώ να περπατήσω με τα πόδια μου [I can walk with my feet],” he replies. “Now one for you: Τι θα κάνετε με τη μύτη σας [What do you do with your nose]?”