Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

  You are ready. “Μυρίζω με τη μύτη μου [I smell with my nose]” is your response.

  “Μπορείτε να δείτε με τη μύτη σας [Can you see with your nose]?”

  “Όχι δεν μπορώ να δω με τη μύτη μου. Βλέπω με τα μάτια μου. Ακούω με τα αυτιά μου. Μασάω με τα δόντια μου.[No. I cannot see with my nose. I see with my eyes. I hear with my ears. I chew with my teeth].”

  And then the boss joins you in unison: “Πηγαίνω εδώ και εκεί με τα πόδια μου [I go here and there with my feet].”

  But the boss has not lost sight of the bottom line. “How about the widget?” he says.

  “Syzygy,” you say then. A term derived from Greek. You don’t know what it means. Remember: you can never appear to be cleverer than you are if you never fake anything.

  “Eh?” says the boss. “Hmm … Syz … Hm.” He doesn’t know what it means either.

  But he has not gotten where he is without acquiring certain resources. He flutters his keyboard, as if manipulating the widget. What he is actually doing is punching up his vocabulary — 400,000 words phonetically arranged.

  Now his look is sly: “I kinda have a notion,” he says, “that you don’t have in mind syzygy in the astronomical sense: the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system.” He winks. “No sir, I kinda think you have in mind the prosodical sense: a group of two coupled feet.”

  You don’t say anything.

  Now he presumably does have the widget on his screen. Foop f’lup, foop f’lup. “Group of two coupled feet, huh? It might be. By granny” — he slaps his desk resoundingly, manually — “it looks like feet. Lavonna [or-Jeff]! More soup!”

  The boss regards you with a new mellowness. Leans back in his chair and cups his belly: “Hm! You know what the fella says: ‘I used to look like a Greek god. Now I look like a g.d. Greek!’” Your boss laughs and laughs, till he is fit to be tied.

  So you tie him, with a length of technological cable, and stash him in the utility cubicle. By the time Lavonna or Jeff returns (in college you will not have known anyone like Lavonna or Jeff, who is not into mind trips, who is into taking care of certain nuts and bolts, who asks nothing more in return than to marry you resentfully and give you offspring, rarer than days in June, whom you will be putting through college for the rest of your life), you are ready for the soup.

  How to Raise Your Boy to Play Pro Ball

  SINCE I HAVE DONE a good deal of work in the sportswriting field, people ask me, “Where did you get that unusual tan?” (I go to a nearby tannery every spring, lay out twenty-eight dollars and a little something for the attendant, and have myself dipped.) ‘What is the right grip for squash?” (Grasp the squash firmly by the neck with your left hand, then take a knife with the right-hand and bring it down in short, crisp strokes on the part of the squash not covered by the left hand.) But most of all they ask me, “How do I raise my boy to be a professional football player?” This last question I answer by saying, “Set an example. Lay and finish nine sets of steps in one day.”

  And then I speak of concrete grit, pride of workmanship, and what Ray Mansfield’s father, the man who laid the steps, called “that preservation meanness.”

  Mansfield still sells his millions of insurance in Pittsburgh, but he has finished out his career on the gridiron, where, he once told me, he felt like a knight in armor. For over a decade, through 1976, he was the Steelers’ starting center, emergency placekicker, and stalwart of beer and stories. The Old Ranger, they called him. Still call him, actually. His father, Owen Mansfield, was proof that you can be legendary in your work even if your work isn’t something glamorous like bowling people over so that somebody can run a leather-covered bladder past them.

  In ’75 I went with Ray to visit Owen in Kennewick, Washington. Owen was a tall, well-preserved-looking man of sixty-five who had finally given up heavy labor because of his heart. He puttered around his small house, picked and sang Jimmie Rodgers songs, and reminisced about working and fighting.

  Owen grew up on an Arkansas farm. When he was no more than a sprout himself, he was “putting sprouts in the new ground. Start plowing and the plow would hit me in the stomach. Plow’d run into a root right under the ground, the mules would stop, the end of the plow would come around and hit me in the shin.” But he had the example of his father before him. “My dad. That was the workingest old man you ever saw. And he was a Christian, believed in living right. I remember one day my dad was getting the best of Uncle Port, and Uncle Port’s dog run up and bit him. He turned around and held Uncle Port and hollered, ‘Somebody kill that god-d … that dog.’ He thought better of himself, you see. Uncle Port was the meanest man that ever hit that country down there.”

  Since he couldn’t be the meanest or the most industrious man in Arkansas, in the late twenties Owen rode the rails west. He’d stop off and scratch around for work or live off the land. “I remember if somebody had eaten a lot of bananas, I’d pick up them banana peelings and eat ’em. They was good. I could eat a tree, I believe.” He dodged the railroad cops. “Texas Slim. He lined up forty of us one time and said, ‘All right. First one that catches the train, I’m going to shoot him.’ He wore a nice suit, a big white hat, two guns. He was a nice-looking guy. But a mean son of a gun. I just patted my hands when I heard he was killed. I wish I’d a been a fast draw, I’d a killed him.

  “I was ‘Slim,’ too, all my life nearly, working. Had the longest neck of anybody in the country.”

  His first job as a married man was splitting logs for rails. He and Mrs. Mansfield eventually had nine kids. When Ray was born, the family was living in a tent in a farm labor camp outside Bakersfield, California, and Owen was in the hospital with a rattlesnake bite. “They gave me a shot of some stuff and I started trembling all over, got quivery all through my body. I said, ‘Dag burn it, I guess I’m going to die in this little old place.’

  “Then, when I got well, our first daughter, Merelene, got pneumonia. They took Merelene to the same room I’d been in. Wasn’t long till she died. I tell you, it was hard times. She was seven and a half. Merelene. A name I studied out myself, to get something there wasn’t anything like.”

  “We all took Merelene back to Missouri,” Ray says. “Like the marines never leave their dead behind, my parents didn’t want to leave their child out there in California on the road. This was in ’forty-one. Dad put Merelene and all the rest of us except Gene, my oldest brother, on the train, and then he put a mattress on the back seat of the car and put Gene on it and just took off. I don’t know whether he got to Missouri before the train or just after it. Driving a broken-down 1929 Chevy. Mother said she saw my dad the whole day, off and on, when the road came close to the tracks.”

  Owen told me, “The car broke down once and I was fixing it and that train passed. Made me so lonesome I couldn’t sit still.”

  When they got Merelene buried back home, they headed back out looking for a place to settle. A few years later, living in Arizona, Owen flipped a coin to decide whether to go just to Joplin, Missouri, or all the way to the state of Washington. And Washington won. That’s where Ray grew up, in Kennewick, where Owen got into concrete. “One of the hardest jobs in America,” Ray says.

  “Dad was always top hand on the job,” says Ray’s younger brother Bill, who played football at Washington State and now is back in Kennewick, in concrete himself. “It’s a good thing he’s not working today. It’d kill him to see the way people work these days. He wasn’t any college professor, but he was as good as there was at what he did. Guys like him are gone forever. We’d lay a floor, I’d think it was finished — it would be, today — and he’d say, ‘Son, we can’t leave until you can dance on it.’

  “You talk to Dad’s old foreman and he says, ‘That Owen was the finest-working man I ever knew.’ When we’d work with him, he’d grab a shovel and al
l you’d see was sand. A forty-eight-year-old man outworking our ass. When he was fifty-nine years old, he was going full speed. My brother Gene kept saying, ‘Dad, cool it a little bit.’ He’d say, ‘Ah, let’s get the job done.’ Now it’s: make money and get by if you can. He never learned. …”

  Ray says, “We grew up expecting to work. It came with breathing air. He hired us out when I was in the second or third grade. Me and my sister and older brother, we’d be out at four in the morning cutting asparagus until eight, go right from work to school.

  “When I got older, I’d sell papers on the streets. I just loved being on the streets. Even though there wasn’t but one main street in Kennewick. I was afraid I would miss something.

  “I worked all one morning to get fifteen cents to go to the movie. I ran all the way to the movie and found out it was twenty cents. I ran all the way home, pissed off, kicking things. I told my father what was wrong. (He was home in between his work in concrete. He had to lay it in the morning, wait for it to set, and then go back late to finish it up.) He reached in his pocket, pulled out a handful of sand, and came up with a nickel. His fingers all dry and split open from the concrete. He gave me the nickel. It was probably the only nickel in the house. I ran all the way back to the movie: James Mason as Rommel in The Desert Fox.

  “When I came home, my father was back at work. I lay awake until one in the morning, when he came home. I sneaked downstairs and watched him get undressed and go to bed. I never thanked him. I just wanted to look at him and think what kind of dad I had.

  “There was so much warmth around the house,” Ray says. “We didn’t have any mean kids in our family. Everybody was loving of each other and tolerant of other people. I got into a lot of fights, but I didn’t like it especially. If you ever want to get a Mansfield mad, pick on another Mansfield. We’ve got almost too much family pride. I remember there was a big kid around Campbell’s Cabins, where we lived for a while. I did everything I could to avoid him. But he picked on my little brother Odie, and I went after him and nearly coldcocked him. I had no fear when one of my brothers was being picked on. But even after I whipped that big kid, I was still scared of him.”

  Bill tells an old family story: “This guy, thirty-five, got into an altercation with our grandfather, Pa, when Pa was sixty-five years old. Our Uncle Granville was seventeen, and he goes flying through the air, kicks the guy’s ass through the dusty streets till the guy whimpers like a dog and gets out of there. My dad’s eyes gleam when he tells about it. That’s why it was good having Moynihan in the U.N. You can’t take too much shit.”

  Ray and Bill Mansfield and I were drinking and getting profound in this place in Kennewick, and Bill said to Ray, “Remember when we were working out — I was just getting ready to go to Washington State — and you said, ‘Bill, don’t ever, ever accept getting beat. Don’t ever let a guy beat you and walk away and say, “Well, he beat me.” You have to fight and scratch and bite. If you’re bleeding and crying and scratching and shitting, keep on fighting and that guy will quit. As long as you don’t.’”

  Not many occupations today bring together fighting and working the way football does. But working was a kind of fighting for Owen. And both working and fighting were kinds of sports. “I’d get a kick out of troweling cement with other trowelers,” he said. “Out of staying about the length of this table ahead of the other fella. That would tickle me to death.” The story about their father that made Ray’s and Bill’s eyes light up the brightest — Bill almost boiled up out of his chair telling it — was the one about the steps.

  “He laid and finished nine sets of steps in one day. Did a Cool Hand Luke shot. Then two thousand, three thousand square feet of concrete. It was superhuman. How it happened: It was a Monday, and the man told him it had to be done by Wednesday. My dad said, ‘Don’t worry.’ The man said, ‘Well, you better get it done.’

  “That made my dad mad. So he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ And he did it all in eight hours. Edged it, everything. He was running the whole time, and he was forty-five. When he finished, there was smoke coming off his body, but there were the nine sets of steps. All those assholes were scratching their heads and saying, How did he do it? It’s still a legend around here.”

  Right after Ray’s last season, Owen was talking to Gene and Odie, and they told him he’d better do something about his hair — he’d let it grow awfully long. “I’m not going to get a haircut,” Owen said. “I’m going to go buy a dress.” And he rocked back laughing and suddenly died.

  Afterward, Ray’s brother told him Owen had been glad that Ray was retiring from football. Owen had said he’d always thought of Ray as a boy, of course, but that Ray was getting too old to play a kid’s game.

  How May Human Chimneys and Fresh-Air Fiends Share the Same World?

  TO CONFIRMED SMOKERS, SMOKE is a balm. To devout non-smokers, it is an abomination. Just what we need: another religious war.

  Cigarette smoking, I am smugly pleased to say, is one of the few halfway legal things that have never caught my fancy. I can enjoy a joint or a good cigar if someone hands me one (aren’t you glad people don’t pass the latter around the way they do the former?), and when I was younger I smoked a pipe often enough that I gave some thought to developing the knack of gesturing, in conversation, with the stem. Then one day I bade an expansive “Hey there!” to someone I knew, forgetting that my pipe was in my mouth, and the whole thing — stem, bowl, ashes, embers, and dottle — dropped into my lap. And I said to myself at the time, “Well, if you do this sort of thing very often, people may begin to think you are not a serious person.”

  I have never understood why so many people object more strenuously to cigar and pipe smoke than they do to, say, Merit vapors. A nice fresh dollar panatela or a brier packed with Virginia-and-latakia mixture smells like something flavorful cooking; filter cigarettes just smell like something thin burning.

  So I do not enjoy sitting next to some heathen (by “heathen” I mean someone who pisses me off) who holds a fumy Winston in just such a way as to snake a carcinogenic tendril directly into my nose.

  On the other hand, since I have never been able to stop doing anything that does catch my fancy, I feel a certain solidarity with tobacco addicts — some of whom, indeed, are my companions in other health-threatening pursuits, like talking at great length loudly until long after we have run out of ice. If I like somebody, and the room isn’t too small, I don’t mind their smoke any more than I really mind the fact that my dogs fart. I mean it registers on me occasionally, but I don’t dwell on it. And philosophically, although nothing constricts my breathing like the proximity of a libertarian in full espousal, I take a generally antiprohibitionist stance.

  However. Only the Shadow knows how many cancer-encouraging, heart-discouraging influences lurk in even a clean-living modern American’s system. A person I met recently who was in chemical research told me that plastic — for instance, refrigerator-storage wraps and bags — exudes carcinogenic molecules. I don’t see how I could live without plastic. Strangers’ cigarette smoke, though, I don’t need.

  So it is good that movie sweethearts rarely light up anymore. (Instead, they simulate oral sex.) It is good that more people notice that smoke bothers them. (I must say it never struck me as a clear violation of my personal space until recent years, but then neither did Republicanism.) If there were a nicotine head in my household, I might well remind that loved one occasionally, with tact (“Do you think there’ll be ashtrays in Heaven?”), of studies that find a high cancer rate among nonsmokers living with smokers. I have one new measure to propose:

  Waiting areas — in airports, hospitals, bus stations, Limbo — should be. divided into smoking and nonsmoking sections. Waiting in designated areas is, if not carcinogenic in itself, so dismal that it stimulates the smoking urge and also the outrage reflex. Puffers and huffers should be kept apart.

  But banning all smoking on airplanes and in other places where nicotinists must fidget for l
ong periods of time is too much like flogging. People who smoke writhe like salted caterpillars when they can’t. It is not excruciatingly difficult, most of the time, for nonsmokers to circulate through contemporary life without becoming trapped in the lesser distress that smoke-inhalation causes them.

  Far more obnoxious than smokers, to me, are people who seem to relish the opportunity to upbraid smokers for perceived foulness. I know lovely people who smoke; I once knew (not for long) a woman who found it refreshing to jog through the fumes of Central Park but would snarl “That’s a filthy habit” at people who smoked near her and, if they didn’t desist immediately, would actually snatch the smoking materials out of their mouths. It would not break my heart to hear that she had been run over by a truck full of Lucky Strikes.

  According to a cover story in Time, a revival of manners is under way. I would like to see manners flourish between smokers and nonsmokers.

  Let us go to one of those waiting areas I was talking about. In an airport. Any traveler knows that hell is other passengers. Especially when nothing is moving except passengers’ twitches.

  A man is sitting next to a woman with a small child who is running in tiny circles and then falling flat, rooting on the floor for a while, and then getting up to run in tiny circles some more — all the time engaging in an unengaging form of wordplay: “Blinkle blinkle blittle blar, blow I blunder blut you blare.”

  “Mind if I smoke?” asks the man.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, but I’m actually allergic to smoke,” says the woman civilly. “I suppose I could go over by the window.”

  The man does not say he is allergic to the woman’s small child. He says, “Wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll go over by the window.”

  Actually, of course, there is no openable window in the airport. But neither party acknowledges this fact, lest they begin to scream.