How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  Trouble was that as yet the Rocket was a stumpy, bulbous thing. The body of the pen and the mechanism had to be made as one unit. To keep costs down, Rose was planning on using the injection mould for a fountain pen. The original Rocket would’ve begun looking contemporary around 1971. I had a brainwave: ‘You say, Mr Rose – ‘

  ‘Call me Bob.’

  ‘Bob, then. You say, Bob, that the principle by which the ink is placed on the paper is a freely rotating steel ball in the very tip of the pen?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘And you want the pen – the Rocket – to look like its namesake, to be aerodynamic, futuristic, huh?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘You recall the World’s Fair in ‘39?’

  ‘Who could forget it.’

  ‘Well, it seems to me that your tiny ball is like a small-scale version of the giant Perisphere they built for the Fair; and that it should be housed inside the Trylon.’

  ‘Trylon?’

  ‘You remember – that huge, tapering pillar; it was seven hundred feet high.’

  Bob Rose stuck his hands in his waistcoat pockets and wiggled his fingers as if he were a marsupial. Gesture I usually remember – appearance I mostly forget. His eyes rounded with credulity. ‘That, Mrs Kaplan, is one helluva good idea.’

  He paid me fifty bucks a week and I worked at my apartment. The Rocket had a detachable cap which closely resembled the nacelle of a fighter plane. I dropped the decorative aerofoil projections Rose had put on the base of the pen – they rubbed your hand when you wrote. I made the pen slimmer and steelier. It was an instant hit. At the press launch on that May day in ‘45 I sold units off of a tray, like a cigarette girl. We shifted nearly five hundred to the press and the flaks alone. The following week the Rocket blasted off at Gimbels and shifted ten thousand units in the first day. It was a dizzy time – and I made a point of going to Penn Station every day, whether I had to go uptown to the office or not. It was only there, inside the outside, that I could put my fierce pride in any kind of perspective – and my new anxiety. For at the same time as I was designing Rose’s wholesale Rocket for him, he was putting his retail one inside of me. His cock, I mean retractable ballpoints were ten years away yet.

  He was quite a cocksman, old Bob Rose. We’d do it in his office, at my apartment, in hotels and flophouses, at parties wherever we could. He had deft fingers, Bob, he could get into my panties in seconds and out of them in minutes. It sounds kind of yucky – but believe me, it wasn’t. Bob was no hypocrite – he never talked crap about being ‘unhappy with my wife’. Not that I’d’ve taken it; I was young, I was proud, I was confident. I thought I’d soon be given a proper job with the company, that I was in the up elevator. I was already working on designs for a whole squadron of Rose’s Rockets when the troubles started. The Rocket was leaking, skipping and just plain wouldn’t write. The original manufacturing run of pens were still the ones on sale in Gimbels, so steep had the sales parabola been. It was the design that was at fault. Bob reamed me out: it was my sloppiness, my inexperience, my amateurishness that had led to this, this débâcle.

  He was actually inside me when he said this, the two of us screwing away on his desk, buck-naked from the waist down, me on top. People used to do this – talk when they screwed. Screwing itself was so novel– or seemed so novel, so twentieth century – that an etiquette for it had yet to develop. We would talk while we screwed, listen to music, smoke – which I always considered to be the best way of deflating a man’s ego – even drink a cocktail. Mind you, I wasn’t about to take this crap from Rose; I stood up over him and let the load he’d dumped in me trickle back down on top of him. ‘Your pen leaks, Bob,’ I said, ‘and so do I.’ He had, of course, promised he wouldn’t come. ‘And you wanna know why?’ By this time I was down off of the big desk, putting on my panties and untangling my stockings and suspenders.

  ‘Why?’ He was up on one elbow, looking flatly surreal, with his bare ass on the blotter and his naked foot resting against the intercom.

  ‘Because neither you, nor your fucking pen, has big enough balls.’

  Good parting shot, huh? It was the best I ever came up with. And I was right – it was the balls. Ten years later they had tungsten-carbide balls with abrasive surfaces which held the ink perfectly, but the Rocket’s balls were only steel; too smooth – and too small. Rose’s business folded and the Eversharp Capillary Action pen never made it either. A decade later Parker brought out their Jotter ballpoint, and that little fucker sold 3½ million units in a year, priced at a mere three bucks. The Rocket was history – except for one minor point. When Bic bought out Waterman in the early sixties and began to dominate the ballpoint market with their still cheaper and still more efficient pens, I saw that they’d mooched one part of their design from me – the cap. Yup, even today the cap of a common-or–garden Bic Cristal (daily worldwide sales of 14 million units) is a direct steal from my original Rose’s Rocket.

  Am I proud of this? You bet your ass. Very proud. Even now, a billion mouths must be blowing on something I shaped, a piece of plastic I gave form to, as surely as if my will had been the forces at work in the injection-moulding machine. Proud? Yeah – sure am. Very. It’s a beautiful irony that it should’ve been a woman who was responsible for crafting this tricky little prick, this rinky-dink dong, this tiddly wiener, which has annotated so much of the post-war world. I must be one of the most marginalised people this century – if you get my drift.

  Did I go on after this débâcle? No. I never designed anything ever again for commercial sale. In the seventies I wrote to Berol. I suggested that they were making a profound mistake with the cap of their new Rollerball pen, which looked to me like an old Nazi pillbox. But they weren’t interested – although I got a polite enough reply from the R&D manager. In fairness to Berol, their Rollerball has been a great success. I saw Deirdre filling in her time sheet with one not ten minutes ago. No one appears to notice the little pillboxes they’re capped with – or perhaps they do? Maybe that’s exactly why they’re so popular?

  Kaplan came back from the war and said to me, ‘Why the fuck did I bother to defend my country?’ when he found out I’d been screwing around. I said, ‘Why don’t you get down off of your character heights?’ And he did.

  But the real pride I felt over the whole Rocket incident was that it gave me a grasp on progress, which not many people seemed to have at that time. The whole USA was on a binge of modernity after the war. The big-assed auto models of the thirties and forties gave way to the skinny-butt rapiers of the fifties – vehicular rockets if you will. Everything had fins – not only the cars. You could get spectacle frames with fins, radios with fins, shoes with fins, fridges with fins. By 1957 I wouldn’t have been that surprised if Dave Kaplan had pulled down his shorts to reveal that his cock had fins. Fins were the future and we were speeding towards it. I guess the point here is that the ballpoint pen could hardly have been said to be before its time – not in a world that, within weeks, witnessed the press launch for the atomic bomb, complete with its own dear little stubby fins. More than that, when I look back now, the idea that the world didn’t even have the fountain pen until the turn of the twentieth century seems preposterous, like some alternative sci-fi reality in which the Nazis won the war. Fuck it, until then they were dipping nibs, which to all intents and purposes were unchanged since Egyptian scribes squatted in front of papyri five thousand years ago, with fucking reeds in their hands. Progress – shmogress.

  Pride is a cosy feeling wrapped round the individual and pumped full of wool. King Stuff. Is it pride or junk that’s making me cosy in my paralysis? It’s hard to say. Is this a real memory – or a false one? A ‘screen’ memory, as the Freudian motherfuckers would have it. Who knows. We allowed our lovemaking to become neurosis-manufacturing when we let those Jew-boy jokers loose on us; and we also allowed all our memories to become false floors, but thinly covering a yawning oubliette full of untold ghastliness. Memorie
s like the corners of our minds – ever ready to snag a piece of clothing and tear the shirts off our psyches. I could do without them. Will do without them.

  Radio 4 has become the World Service as I skip over the surface of consciousness then dip beneath it. I’ve slept like this for the last ten years – with the radio pancaked beneath my ear. The wholesome, middle-class, middle-aged, well-spoken announcers substitute for all the wholesome, middle-class, middle-aged, well-spoken lovers I’ve never had. They murmur consolingly to me of war and famine and insurrection. Then they murmur consolingly to me of horsey victories, tennis tourneys and cricket scores. They are the world’s grounds-men, gently dragging an enormous groundsheet of dull comprehension over the darkening playing field.

  Chapter Five

  The semi on Crooked Usage was absolutely that – half a house, with its own disordered demi-monde. Half cluttered with the Yaws family pieces, which had been kicked down the generations – heavy sideboards, heavier bookcases, solid and ugly chairs. And the other half decked out with the half of nothing much salvaged from my first marriage, crated and freighted to this damp isle. There was nothing beautiful in the house, or loved, or remotely modern – save for little Natty.

  A red-brick garage was tucked up beside it in its privet bed. The house was never clean or tidy, but even if I managed – along with Mrs Jenks, my dirt-rearranger – to get it into some semblance of order, there was always the garage to serve as a museum of chaos. That garage – no object that entered it evere-emerged. It was a memorial to going nowhere. The family car camped out in the driveway. That the garage was built to match the house – red brick, slate mansard, metal mullions -belittled the latter rather than exalting the former. As for the interior, a cenotaph of steamer trunks was piled up in the middle of the floor, and a tea-chest columbarium ranged along the back wall. In the far corners, old bags of Yaws’s golf clubs lowered in the gloom, like outsize dental instruments, once used for messy operations on mossy mouths. Crooked usage indeed. A family grouping of decaying bicycles – mummy, daddy, baby-with–stabilisers – leant against one another, festooned in cobwebs, roughened with rust. Those were the main props in this Garage of Usher, but there were also sodden newspapers aplenty, books ditto, bulging cardboard boxes prolapsed with mildewed old clothing, toys; all kinds of trash no one had troubled to sort through, bothered to discard. Over all of this there hung the distinctive – almost sacred – odour of Three-in–One oil.

  The girls played in there when they were small. Or rather, Charlotte – true to character – attempted to impose the order that so eluded her mother. It was Bob-a-Job week times fifty-two for that little miss – while her sister smashed old panes of glass or imprisoned pigeons the cats had maimed. The garage was beyond Yaws’s ken. As I’ve said, he sauntered through his life as if it were an unusually large cathedral close, and although he could drive, his expression as he pushed down the accelerator, and the Bedford – or the Austin, or whichever crap car it was we currently suffered –lurched backwards out of the drive, was one of clerical distaste. He was the only man I’ve ever known who drove a car as if it were an unseemly act; as if he were committing adultery by betraying his own, huge feet.

  Mindjew, this wasn’t an act of betrayal that would’ve truly bothered him. (‘Bothered’ – another great Yaws word, used as noun, as verb and even – Oh! corny hallelujah! – as an exclamation.) Yaws was tight-fisted with his things, his piddling private income and his pathetic mementos of the Yaws family. When tipping girls (whether servants or his own children – both were liabilities to this neo-Victorian), he’d often be unable to let go of his end of a ten-shilling note. If they snatched, father, daughter and bill were divided.

  Tight with things but free with his body. He stalked the unlovely environs of Crooked Usage in his yellow flannel underwear, one thick sock in his hand, plainting, ‘Bother! Lily, have you seen my other sock?’ Which I’d hear, natch, as ‘have you seen my other cock?’. ‘Think back to which frumpy cunt you last saw it in!’ I’d snap – and he’d look bemused, or else rise to ire: ‘Now look here, Lily!’ Jesus, he was an asshole. Christ, he had a skinny Shylock for a heart, enfolded in his fat form. He was that emotionally tight-fisted a man – with his smile which was like a ‘Keep Out’ sign.

  If the late sixties proved anything to me it was that not all phobias are irrational. There was I – who’d spent the first half of the decade prostrate beneath the bed covers, as if they’d shelter me and my babies from the fallout – striding out into chilly arena of Grosvenor Square in order to hurl my hoarse barbs at the American Embassy. So dumb to be protesting when I was always happier to be alone in bed, reading recipes and cracking up with Jacob’s Cream Crackers. But I knew I wasn’t a little girl running down a mud road with a napalm cloak flaring from my shoulders; and I knew I wasn’t a Viet Cong suspect, dying in a short-sleeved, tartan-patterned shirt, from one of General Loan’s bullets. Strangely, the very intimacy of these extinctions – now brought to us near instantaneously – made them quite inapplicable to my sad sack. I was safe while all the baddies were off on a peasant shoot in Indo-China. Safe enough for idealism to blossom anew in the neglected, North London borders of my mind. Safe enough to lust after Gus.

  Gus, who strode athletically off the plane, and came to us from London Airport wearing the American student uniform of the time – blue jeans, college sweatshirt, sneakers and duffel coat. Within ten years this gear had been fully adopted as an off-the-peg, pre-unwashed, counter-cultural, dressing-up costume, but then it was preppily pressed. Decadences are just that. I remember the crowds at Grosvenor Square only too well, the young men with parted hair and heavy-framed spectacles, the young women in thrifty knitwear, some even sporting twinsets. My girls now ask me what the sixties were like – and the answer’s simple enough: the fifties. Yup, just like the fifties; the great mass of youth merely aped the styles and modes of their elders who’d advanced half a generation further into the future fray. Naturally, the fifties themselves were not unlike the late forties, which in turn were umbilically linked to before the war. And to me England was a retard society anyway, empty of fridges, devoid of drive-ins. If I squinted at the Aldermaston crowds of plump-faced CND demonstrators only a little, they became hollow-cheeked Jarrow marchers.

  Anyway, Gus was the son of one the Eight Couples Who once Mattered, and – far more pertinently – one of Dave Junior’s friends, the mud-streaked skinny-dippers who’d been playing the nigger game on the day my love died. Gus, who’d mysteriously fallen through all the bafflers of influence and gratings of exemption designed to prevent good middle-class boys from going down the Vietnam pan. Gus, who’d actually been drafted; and who then took to his heels, hiking his way out along the Long Trail into Canada, where he waited for a money order to arrive from his parents before jetting on to Europe.

  There was no room in the house – so Gus moved into the garage. He bivouacked in among the discarded luggage of the previous two decades. In order to dodge the VC he had to hunker down in the dark jungle of my peripatetic life. I’d never been anywhere for long – he was not to be long in the leavings of it. Nights we’d watch the nine o’clock news together, our asses rammed to the back of the vomit-coloured, oatmeal-textured divan. Yaws took a similar line on Vietnam to the one he’d taken on the Cuban missile crisis: this too would pass, leaving the Warden intact, a crumpet en route to his lips. Yaws didn’t suspect anything sexual between me and the kid. It wasn’t so much that he’d rationally dismissed the idea, rather, it couldn’t even register on his smutty radar. Gross. I can’t have slept with Gus more than four times – five at most. All that stuff about teaching young men the ways of love is so much horse shit. All you have to do is feed ‘em into the groove and they’ll do the hammering. Every time we did it I was amazed that he wasn’t discommoded by my sour smells and puckering cellulite. But I guess there was plenty of vagina, heaps of bosom.

  It was last time in my life that sex held any quality of conviction for me. I
n the cooling pretzel of tatty linen, still aromatic with Yaws, we’d thrash about. He did it hobbled by his jeans. I did it hobbled by Librium. It was a big period of mental freedom for me. I hauled myself up in the morning and cooked the kiddy-winkies breakfast in my nightie. Then I drove them to school in my nightie. Then I came back to Crooked Usage, took my nightie off, and climbed back into bed. I felt like I was on the night shift. Haig was the blended Scotch people drank in those days. It was advertised with the catch-line ‘Don’t be vague’, when that’s exactly what it did to you. To me.

  On that particular cold March afternoon, shlepping from Marble Arch with all the other bleeding hearts and closed minds, I was tired. I was always fucking tired. Natasha’d kicked seven kinds of hell out of the insides of me; I still smoked forty a day; I was often vague – and there was the Librium. It didn’t lay you out like sodium amytal, but it still made me pretty laid back. Laid back on a cushion of Librium, my young lover by my side, I railed by the railings at the boob-helmeted policemen. Over the grey haunch of the American Embassy the tessellated greenery of Hyde Park tossed with wind and drizzle. The coppers linked arms and forced the beatniks and beatific old Quaker women back from the entrance. Lots of the duffel-coat–wearers – and Gus, to my shame – began to chant, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi–Minh!’ Absurd what did they think an ageing, intellectual, highly ascetic, Vietnamese Communist Party cadre would have to do with these truants from the bourgeoisie?

  That’s all gone now, social revolution as an aspect of the gap year. It’s all there was to left-wing radicalism in the West after the war anyway; doctoring the social fringes was as much a fashion statement as cutting your hair, or growing it, or shaving it off. I fell for these cheap nostrums as did many others. Protest marches were my weight-watching; and I used to see plenty of other women, nearing middle age, verging on being pear-shaped, who smiled ruefully at me as they toted their placards.