Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

  But I can live with that. What bothers me is finding myself face-to-face with an actual human being who looks familiar, and who seems to know me (and why would he lie?), but whose name I am afraid I will not be able to dredge up until sometime next week, if then. Recently I spoke with my old college friend Lamar Alexander, who is now governor of Tennessee. (Which means that I can name one American governor. Didn’t governors used to be more vivid?) I asked him how he managed to remember all the people he must shake hands with. His answer was, he didn’t. He said that when somebody comes up to him with a certain sly grin and says, “I bet you don’t remember my name,” he often replies, “No, I bet I don’t.”

  Why can’t I do that? Why must I bluff and flounder? Why in the name of all that is holy do I say things like, “Oh! Hi! Great to see you again, ah, Hmblmbl”? What possesses me to plunge right into “Well! If it isn’t …” at the same time that I am thinking, “What if, in fact, it’s not?”?

  It is time for me to face up to the fact that I can no longer place implicit trust in the tip of my tongue. I can no longer assume that I virtually remember the name in question and if I just forge ahead with an honest heart … After your mind reaches saturation, an honest heart can’t carry it.

  Not long ago I was autographing books in a city where I had worked some years before. No matter how bad your handwriting, you can’t fake an inscription: “For Mmnlnnln — those were the days!” And if you say, “For the life of me, I can’t remember the spelling …” then the answer will be:

  “C-U-N …”

  “Right, right …”

  “… N-I-N …”

  “Oh, yeah, uh…”

  “… G … H …”

  “Ohhh, sure, … uh …”

  “… A …”

  “Oh! No! Of course! I don’t mean the Cunningham part! I mean your first —”

  “J-I-M”

  So I was delighted to see none other than Old Greer Chastain (not his real name) in front of me. “Hey, Greer!” I sang out.

  “This is old Greer Chastain,” I informed the bookstore’s proprietor. “Hell of a fisherman. Used to come into the office with a string that long of bass and bream and crappies and —”

  “Shea Whislet,” Greer said.

  “What say, Greer?” I said.

  “I’m Shea Whislet,” he said. (Not his real name.)

  “Oh,” I said. “I … What’s wrong with me! Thing is, I guess because you used to hang around so much with Greer Chastain, and —”

  “Noo,” he said, frowning.

  “That’s right! That’s right! I don’t know what made me … Nobody used to hang around with Greer Chastain! Nobody even liked Greer Chastain! He just stuck in my mind I guess because he was so unmemorable. Here, Shea, let me …”

  Even though I made a point of not having to ask him how to spell “Shea,” our grins were forced when he moved away and the next person came forward.

  “I’m Greer Chastain,” he said.

  The other day I was playing tennis with my friend Lois Betts when a mutual acquaintance stopped by with his dog. I was almost entirely sure that this man was the one I thought he was, whose name I had heard many times, with whom I had chatted several times, and to whom I had often said, “Hi, how you doing?” I felt that if I strained for about five minutes I would know his name from Adam.

  Furthermore, I felt that I would be able to stall for five minutes by focusing on the dog, whom I heard Lois call Bob. Unfortunately I am unable to focus casually on something I am not actually focusing on in my mind.

  “Bob? Hey, that’s a good name for a big old orange dog,” I said, tousling Bob’s ears. “What caused you to name him Bob?”

  “No … it’s Hobbit, actually,” said the man.

  “Oh,” I said heartily. “Thought Lois said Bob. Well, you’re a fine dog, Hobbit. Yes sir. Never knew a dog named Hobbit.”

  Meanwhile, I was thinking: Don’t babble. Concentrate. Wait a minute, it’s coming. Is it …? Not no, it probably isn’t. Don’t blurt it out! It probably isn’t!

  “I had a dog named Bob when I was a kid,” I went on. “Because of his tail. And then too, I had read Bob, Son of Battle. You know, that book by … Oh, you know. What’s his name? I know his name, it’s …”

  Meanwhile, I was thinking: Drop it. You’ve got enough to worry about. This man’s name. Concentrate.

  “Old Bob, yep. I guess whenever I think of dogs, Bob’s name comes to mind. He was my favorite dog.”

  Meanwhile, I was thinking: He was not! You’re lying about who your favorite dog was! Bob was no-account! Used to get lost all the time! Chipper was your favorite dog, and you know it! Somewhere in dog heaven, Bob is probably saying, “Hey, he never seemed to think I was all that great a dog when I was alive. Truth is I wasn’t all that great a dog. I was always getting lost. He knows that. I never realized he was so shallow.”

  After perhaps four and a half minutes, Hobbit and the man trotted off. I gazed after them, relieved and yet vexed. “Lois,” I said, “What is —”

  “Now that,” said Lois, “was awful.”

  “Well,” I said, “I was trying —”

  “The guy’s name is Bob,” she said.

  I could, I guess, call all men “Colonel” or “Big Fella.” That doesn’t address the problem of what to call women. “Sister”? I don’t think it would go over.

  For that matter you have to be a certain kind of person to carry off calling people Colonel or Big Fella. You have to be a person on the order of Babe Ruth, who never made any pretense of remembering anyone’s name, even longtime teammates’. Ruth called everyone “Jidge” a sort of affectionym for George, which was Ruth’s real first name. I believe Bobo Newsom, the old pitcher, called everyone “Bobo.” Or maybe it was Bobo Olson, the old fighter. I don’t think I want to call everyone “Roy.”

  I am reminded, however, that Byron Saam, the Philadelphia Phillies’ announcer, is said to have opened his broadcast once by exclaiming, “Hello, Byron Saam! This is everybody!”

  If only one were, in fact, everyone else. Then the burden would be on them.

  Simple Answers

  Why Did the President Hit Angie Dickinson?

  YOU KNOW RONALD REAGAN was originally set to play Rick in Casablanca. How different might the world be today if he’d done that, and Bogart had been elected President.

  Bogie and Bacall in the White House! That would be something, wouldn’t it? Old Gorbachev may be slick, but slicker than Sydney Greenstreet? I doubt it. You know what might have worked? The Carter administration with Bogart in the lead. Bogie wouldn’t have had to force the toughness, and therefore could have done something with the sentimentality, the outsiderism, the crisis of confidence.

  Bogart is all wrong for the Reagan years, of course, but who isn’t? Caspar Weinberger resembles the late William Holden with a headache, and Suzanne Pleshette, if she took amiability suppressants, could pass for Ann Gorsuch Burford. George Kennedy, with his head hunched down into his shoulders, could be George Schultz. But I don’t see much of a movie there. The President is too old to play himself, and no other actor projects his particular dispiriting innocence. Remember Gale Storm, of the old “My Little Margie” show? Perhaps she came closest.

  As for Mrs. Reagan, well, let’s see. Anybody want to speculate as to what it would be like if Jane Wyman were First Lady and Nancy were in “Falcon Crest”?

  I didn’t think so. The fascinating thing is that there is never anything interesting to say about the Reagans. Working oneself into a lather over them is like working oneself into a lather over, say, Mickey Rooney, It’s not going to do any good. Just as there are always going to be a certain number of welfare cheats, there are always going to be a certain number of people like the Reagans. It has never been my feeling that such people should be at our nation’s helm, but what do I know? I’m from Georgia.

  In Laurence Learner’s revealing yet less than riveting book, Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Re
agan, each Reagan gets typed pretty well. According to Clare Boothe Luce, Ron switched from left wing to right because “he was a healthy, normal guy who liked to saw wood. Then he started to socialize with the better class in L.A. People haven’t liked to admit that the rich are often smarter and better.”

  It was Jefferson, I believe, who said that as cream rises naturally to the top, so too will the better class in L.A. Which is exactly Nancy’s crowd. “Miss Donahue, Nancy’s favorite saleslady at I. Magnin’s, said of [Nancy and her friends], They’re professional ladies,’ referring to the profession of being a lady,” Learner says.

  Learner also discloses that, around Thanksgiving of 1960, Ron and Nancy played together in a “GE Theater” TV production of “A Turkey for the President.”

  The best observation about Ronnie in this book is Nancy’s: “He doesn’t understand undercurrents.” He may not even have any. When he cried out, “Where’s the rest of me?” in King’s Row it may have been his undercurrents he was missing, not his legs.

  Learner does not indulge in any such speculation. Astonishingly, he doesn’t even mention Reagan’s last movie, The Killers. He does dig up a 1950 quote from Ron in Silver Screen:

  “I’d love to be a louse. You know the kind of fellow who leers at the dolls and gets leered back at? The guy who treats women rough and makes them love it …? You know why I’d love to be a louse? Because the public loves him. He makes money for his employers. … And because the louse business is the sure, the open road to Fame in Films.”

  In The Killers, Ronald Reagan plays a louse. It is a strange feeling to watch the leader of the Free World aim a rifle down into the street from an overhead window (the movie was released within months after JFK’s assassination) and shoot Clu Gulager and Lee Marvin. It is even stranger to watch him take a punch at Angie Dickinson and knock her flat.

  Reagan is credible as a louse but not appealing, because he doesn’t seem to take much relish in anything, even Angie. I don’t know why commentators have focused so much on Bedtime for Bonzo and Knute Rockne, All American, when such a film as The Killers cries out for cinemo-political exegesis.

  I do know why Reagan (who is so sweet to Nancy) hits Angie Dickinson, and also why Americans elected Reagan President. Tired of undercurrents.

  Does Your Democrat Bite?

  GARY HART WON IN New Hampshire. I was in Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s state. The St. Paul Sunday Pioneer Press had a story: Hart knew how to talk on TV, Mondale didn’t. Said an unnamed producer of network news:

  “Hart speaks in sound bites: the fifteen- to twenty-second pithy statements that we absolutely must have to make a piece, statements with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  “When you try to cut into [Mondale], you always find that the complete thought he’s developing has a lot of pieces and structures. He doesn’t wrap it up well.

  “It bothers me that you can’t get the smartest people on TV just because they speak in dependent clauses.”

  The producer had used six dependent clauses himself. But he wasn’t on TV, he just produced it. Maybe I was into too many pieces and structures myself. Maybe America was. I did some research. These are dependent clauses:

  “… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …”

  “… that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

  “… whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

  Fine. But America needs new initiatives. Fresh energy. High concept. America responds to a person who will wrap it up. These are sound bites:

  “Give me liberty or give me death!”

  “Go for it!”

  “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”

  Sound bites turn people on. Do people dance to dependent clauses? “When the deep purple falls …” Not anymore. Now it’s “Beat it, beat it, beat it!” and “Ma-ni-ac, ma-ni-ac!” I resolved to move toward sound bites myself.

  Then Mondale won in Illinois.

  I was confused. Confusion and sound bites don’t mix. Time for more research. I went to a dinner party and found a network anchorman there.

  Dinner-party statements by anyone above cabinet rank are not for attribution. So the anchorman will go nameless. I asked him about the anonymous producer’s remarks. The anchorman spoke in a tone of professional appreciation:

  “Right. I’ve just been cutting Hart. Everything he says is clip-clipty-clop, clip-clipty-clop.”

  The anchorman moved his hand in a crisp, vigorous way.

  I had to like that rhythm. I spoke to our hostess. “Great baked ham.” I took a good, sound bite. I was getting pithier and pithier.

  Then Mondale won in New York.

  “Maybe I’ll ease partway back into dependent clauses,” I said to myself. But it might be too late. I couldn’t remember any subordinating conjunctions. I swallowed hard.

  More research. I watched Shirley MacLaine on “60 Minutes.” She was telegenic. She expressed firm opinions:

  You can learn from winning, you can learn from losing.

  There are no great people in politics anymore.

  The most brilliant poem ever written is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”

  Shirley MacLaine won the Academy Award.

  I looked that poem up. It is almost all dependent clauses.

  Then Mondale won in Pennsylvania.

  My mouth was dry. I had gone for sound bites hook, line, and sinker. Should I have kept at least one tooth in dependent clauses? I couldn’t answer that question. Not in sound bites.

  I needed more research.

  I read a Mondale statement on winning in Pennsylvania: “This is a big win. … I would anticipate several tough fights down the road.”

  Ahhhh.

  Relief at last.

  Of course Mondale was winning! He had caught on to sound bites. Probably read about them in the Sunday Pioneer Press, I thought back. When had Mondale brought his campaign into focus? After New Hampshire. How? By saying, “Where’s the beef?”

  I read a Hart statement on losing in Pennsylvania: “If it gets down to a candidate running for President, in effect, on the backs of only one constituent group, I think that doesn’t say much for the ability of the candidate to broaden that base.”

  Hart had drifted into dependent clauses.

  Not me. Clipty-clop. I wouldn’t say “if” if I had a mouthful of it.

  Shirley MacLaine may be right. But not about that poem.

  On Point of View

  It’s not just a question of what they say,

  But also of who is “they.”

  When cannibals speak of a gourmet dinner,

  They mean that they ate a gourmet.

  Do Camp and Lit Mix?

  (A Letter Home)

  Dear Unnatural Parent,

  IT IS 7:12 P.M. Dusk drags sunswollen feet. In the distance, strings are played (tennis: fwokt fwok). Through the wall, I hear adenoidal voices arguing the feasibility of an unpublished poets’ union. Some squat, indifferently plumed bird is gawping, insentiently, into my window. I am at literary camp. Hurrah.

  I could be at home, snug in my own room, munching fresh Mallomars and putting one more polish on Canto Five (“Greed Disgorges the Knight of Love”), but no. You insisted I come to Paper Mountain Writers’ Conference. Do you know, Next of Kin, what we do every morning? Every morning we do deconstruction. I defy deconstruction, anytime, anywhere. We are invited to deconstruct at 6:15 A.M., outdoors. Forty-five minutes’ supposed disabuse of our own texts, sur l’herbe. It is designed to tone us up.

  Pah!

  “Young people my own age” you desired me to meet. My roommate is a forty-seven-year-old driver of an Avis airport shuttle bus who is writing an account of his travels. Since 1972 he has been negotiating one 3.8-mile circle thirty to thirty-five times daily. “For eleven solid years,” he told me, “I tell myself, ‘Leland, this ain’
t no career. This ain’t leading anywhere, Leland.’ But then I took this writing course at the junior college, and the prof said, ‘Leland, write what you know.’”

  To begin with, he wrote rondels.

  Rondels!

  “Rondels are dead!” I told him. “Small things are dead! Verse is dead! Nothing can live save the major protean. We must return in one enormous motion to the epic-poetic and the great prose models!”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I tell myself, ‘Leland, if you put together a long enough sequence of rondels …’ But then I figure, ‘Leland, old buddy, let’s get practical: no movie in it. So let’s do it first as a novelized version. Take the money. Run. Then we’ve bought ourselves some time.’”

  Leland!

  “Influential people in the writing business” you desired me to meet. Last night there was a cocktail party in the Founder’s Residence. One popular (except among all those people who have met him) biographer of robber barons and dubious empresses exchanging insider-talk with a peer:

  “How many cities on your promotional tour?”

  “Ten.”

  “Really? I did seventeen cities myself.”

  “Yes, but mine weren’t all in the same state.”

  One novelist I have vaguely heard of (but whose novels I would not touch with a fifty-foot drop line) to another and vice versa:

  “You know, my last book sold quite well.”

  “Like hotcakes, I understand. But, then, the reviews were so flat.”