Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

by Calvin Trillin

  Besides, I don’t know any other dentists. I don’t admit that to Sweeney Todd, DDS, of course. In fact, I’ve been telling him for years that some friends of mine are always singing the praises of the dentist they all go to—a relatively recent arrival from Kyoto known to his grateful patients as Magic Fingers Yamamoto.

  “They say he’s got the touch of an angel,” I said of Yamamoto, as I settled into the chair and prepared myself for the assaults of a deeply tanned Sweeney Todd, DDS. I had to raise my voice a bit, since Sweeney, in his effort to recover a mirror he had dropped, had knocked the rest of his instruments onto the floor.

  “Open wide, please,” Sweeney said. He has never been affected in the slightest by talk of Magic Fingers Yamamoto.

  “Also, Yamamoto belongs to some Buddhist sect that believes the exchange of large sums of money corrupts the soul,” I continued. “For crowns and bridges, he does wonders with the same material used for the common paper clip. His fees, of course, are nominal. Basically, he seeks his rewards in inner fulfillment. He spits on money—or he would if he weren’t so polite.”

  “Spit, please,” Sweeney said.

  Sweeney had stopped his banging around and was standing next to his instrument cabinet peering at some X rays. “What do you see there, Sweeney?” I asked. “A new transmission for your BMW? A long weekend with the missus in the Adirondacks?”

  Sweeney held the X rays up to the window to get a better look. “Won’t be able to get away for the next few weekends,” Sweeney said. “We’re doing an addition to the kitchen.”

  “You never cease to amaze me, Sweeney,” I said. “I’ve seen those television commercials that show doctors seeing all sorts of little bitty doo-dads through the miracle of CAT scans—or not seeing them, really, because all of the patients in those commercials turn out to be okay—but you’ve got to be the only medical man who can look at an X ray with the naked eye and see an addition to your kitchen. What’s your secret?”

  “I have a better X ray machine,” Sweeney said, knocking over the water glass as he turned toward me. “But it’s expensive. Very expensive. Open wide, please.”

  1989

  Backwards Ran the Clock

  On a Wednesday afternoon just before Christmas, the wall clock in our kitchen began to run backward. I’m not talking about a literary device here; I’m talking about a clock. Suddenly, this clock’s sweep second hand was moving in a direction that can only be described as counterclockwise. There were witnesses. Alice was having a meeting in the living room. The washing machine repairman was present. In fact, there are those who say that he had something to do with the clock’s sudden switch in direction, since he was fiddling with the circuit breakers upstairs. But the washing machine repairman is almost always at our house, fiddling with the circuit breakers upstairs. He likes to fiddle with circuit breakers. The only piece of modern technology that repels him is the automatic washer.

  The wall clock in our kitchen does not have numbers. It has letters that spell out Hecker’s Flour, except for the apostrophe. Having a clock with only letters on it means that my daughters, before they learned to tell time, would occasionally say something like “the little hand’s on the R and the big hand is just past the C,” but I do not consider that a strong disadvantage in a clock. The face of our clock can be illuminated by two lightbulbs with a glow so strong that I used to assume pilots were using it at night to take a bead on LaGuardia. We no longer keep lightbulbs in the clock, because my daughters say that would be a waste of energy. As I interpret my daughters’ views on the energy crisis, they believe that a patriotic American household should use no energy except that required to power a computer game called Merlin and a Tyco Super-Dooper-Double-Looper Auto Track. In addition to knowing a lot about how much fossil fuel we’re wasting, my daughters are already learned on the subject of cholesterol in Italian sausage and carcinogens in beer. Their command of a broad range of such information, in fact, has made it obvious to me why some children in our public elementary schools have difficulty reading and writing: Their teachers spend most of the day teaching them how to depress their parents.

  One morning at breakfast, my younger daughter asked me if it would soon be yesterday. I told her it would be if we were talking about a literary device rather than a clock. She asked me why the clock was running backward, and I told her to pay more attention to her cereal eating, my alternative being to admit to her that the only explanation I had been able to think of was that our clock had been invaded by a dybbuk, a bloody-minded cousin of the dybbuk in our washing machine. It happened to be a time when I was feeling the weight of my ignorance more acutely than usual. I had not distinguished myself in the assembling of the Tyco Super-Dooper-Double-Looper Auto Track. I had just been forced to admit to my older daughter that I did not know how to get the square root of anything. All in all, I would have preferred a clock that ran in the conventional direction. Not knowing enough Yiddish to speak to the dybbuk in his native tongue, I tried to reason quietly with him in what I perceived to be English of Yiddish inflection (“So go! I’ll pack you a lunch.”), but the clock continued to run backward.

  In this mood, I went to my next-door neighbor’s for a cup of seasonal cheer, and met a friend who said she was worried about the world because Afghanistan had the H-bomb. This was before the Russian adventure, and Afghanistan was not a country often mentioned when holiday discussions ventured from the Brandy Alexander recipe toward sophisticated weapons systems.

  “Afghanistan does not have the H-bomb,” I assured her.

  “They’ve got it,” she said. “I read it in the Times.”

  “There’s a progression in these matters,” I said. “First a country gets a drugstore. Then it gets the H-bomb.”

  “I saw it in the Times,” she repeated. “The leader of Afghanistan has slicked-down hair and one of those waxed mustaches. I know he wouldn’t use it right.”

  “General Zia!” I said. “That’s Pakistan.”

  She was comforted, and I felt more in control for a while—until I began to wonder what was so comforting about Pakistan’s having the H-bomb. Would they use it right? What was the right way to use it?

  It was in this mood that I happened to mention our clock to Noam Spanier, who goes to Stuyvesant High School—a seat of learning so high-powered that it offers courses other than Serum Cholesterol 121 and Ravages of Booze 202.

  “Your polarity is reversed,” Noam said.

  “Watch your mouth, kid,” I said, taking a quick check of my clothing.

  We went next door. Noam unplugged my clock, turned the plug around, and plugged it in again. The clock began to run clockwise.

  “Obviously,” I said.

  Noam nodded.

  “It’s obvious,” I repeated. “You scared the hell out of the dybbuk.”

  1980

  Smart Camera

  When we were about to take a trip to Italy, somebody offered to lend me one of those cameras that knows everything. The camera knows how to focus itself. It knows when to speed itself up and when to slow itself down. It knows when to flash its flashbulb. If you point the camera at a mountain, the camera knows that it’s pointed at a mountain. If you suddenly swing the camera away from the mountain, point it at your Uncle Harry, and say to the camera, “This is also a mountain,” the camera is not fooled. The camera knows your Uncle Harry from a mountain. The camera knows everything.

  I told my wife that I was uneasy about carrying around a camera that knows everything. There are certain things I’d just as soon keep to myself.

  “The camera doesn’t know everything,” my wife said. “It just knows more about taking pictures than you do.”

  I told my wife that I was uneasy about carrying around a camera that knows more than I do. It’s bad enough that both of my daughters now know more than I do. If there were a ranking done in our house according to who knows the most, at least I’d come in a strong fourth. (We don’t have a dog.) Who wants to be edged out by a camera?
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  My wife told me that I was being silly. She said to take the camera. I finally took the camera. My wife knows more about these things than I do.

  One of my daughters offered to teach me how to use the camera.

  “Why do I need you to teach me?” I said. “If this camera knows everything, it can teach me itself.”

  My daughter told me I was being silly. So I accepted her offer. She knows more about these things than I do. She can set one of those watches that work with tiny buttons on the side and will give you the month and year and the military time in Guam if you know which buttons to push. Sometimes, if there’s a lull in the conversation at the dinner table, my daughter will say, “It’s eighteen hundred hours in Guam.” Or at least she did until the night I responded by announcing, “All enlisted personnel are required to finish their broccoli before leaving the mess hall.” That was just before she got so she knew more than I did.

  So she taught me to use the camera. She read the instruction booklet (several years ago, I swore off instruction booklets) and studied the camera from a number of angles. Then, this is what she taught me: “Just press the button. The camera does the rest. The camera knows everything.”

  So I took the camera to Italy. The first thing I did was to point it at a mountain. Then I pressed the button. The camera seemed to know just what to do. It focused itself. It slowed itself down, or maybe speeded itself up. It decided not to use its flashbulb. When I pushed the button, it advanced itself to the next picture with a contented buzzing sound, like a horsefly that has just had a bite of something good.

  I felt proud of my camera. “Hey, this camera knows everything,” I told my wife.

  “Let’s hope so,” my wife said.

  Just to make sure, I pointed the camera at my wife and said to it, “This is my Uncle Harry.” But the camera knew better. I could tell by the contented buzz. The camera took a picture of my wife. The camera knows everything.

  So I started taking a lot of pictures. I took the usual kind of pictures—shadows falling in quaint piazzas and fishermen unloading their catch and Americans slapping themselves in the head when a waiter in a café tells them how much their two beers and a Coke cost.

  The camera buzzed and buzzed. Pretty soon, I was so accustomed to the buzzing that I thought I could detect not just the camera’s mood but what it was trying to say. When I took a picture of an old market-vendor selling onions, I thought I heard the camera say “Nice shot!”

  Then, as I was taking a picture of a raggedy little boy talking to a splendidly dressed policeman, I thought I heard the camera say “Corny, cor-ny.” That afternoon, when I was taking a picture of my wife in front of a statue of Zeus, I clearly heard the camera say “You’re cutting off his head, dummy.”

  So I quit using the camera. I told my wife I had run out of film. She suggested I buy some. “If the camera’s so smart,” I said, “let it buy its own film.”

  1988

  Ouch!

  Not long ago, I ran across a man who pulls his own teeth. As my father used to say, you meet all kinds. I suppose you’re wondering how the subject came up. I suspect you think it came up during one of those frivolous summertime conversations on the beach, when people try to be clever as a way of diverting attention from their waistlines. Somebody says something like, “The way the book business is going these days, I half expect to turn on a talk show and see some shrink in a turtleneck sweater pushing a bestseller called How to Take Out Your Own Appendix and Find the Real You.” Everyone chuckles, but then one person on the edge of the crowd—a rather intense-looking person who is wearing sandals and black socks and has a thermos full of lukewarm mineral water with him—says, “As a matter of fact, I pull my own teeth and I just signed a contract with a publisher for a six-figure advance.” That is not the way it happened at all.

  Now that you know that, you probably think I simply read about this in the newspaper, because a lot of newspaper stories these days are about the sort of people who go on talk shows in turtlenecks to discuss taking out your own appendix. “Two years ago,” you imagine the newspaper story saying, “nobody could have predicted that Dr. Marvin Smolin, a successful and conventional suburban dentist, was destined to become the leader of a movement advocating that people pull their own teeth. Dr. Smolin then had a prosperous practice in Bergen County, New Jersey, and was widely known in the New York television world as the technical consultant to the long-running network series based on a father-and-son dental practice—The Extractors. He was active in the American Dental Association, having served for three years running as chairman of the ADA’s Special Committee on Tax Shelters. ‘I was Joe Establishment, DDS, but I really didn’t know who I was,’ Dr. Smolin said yesterday, while in town to conduct a four-day seminar on auto-extractics. ‘Just for a start, I thought I was Joe Establishment, DDS, and I was really Marvin Smolin.’ ” That’s not how it happened. Not even close. The subject of auto-extraction came up because I noticed a man who was jumping up and down.

  It happened in front of a fruit-and-vegetable stand in my neighborhood. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the man who was jumping up and down, because I assumed he was just reacting to the price of raspberries. That happens a lot in my neighborhood. I’ve seen a man stomping on his own hat over what an avocado costs these days. I once saw someone who looked perfectly normal—which is not, as it happens, the way most people in my neighborhood look—lying on his stomach in a produce store and banging on the floor with his fists in response to what they had the nerve to charge for one lousy watermelon.

  This jumping up and down had nothing to do with the price of fruit and vegetables. The man involved was jumping up and down to demonstrate how he diverts the blood supply from his mouth so there is less pain when he pulls his own tooth. That you never guessed. That is how it happened. He was explaining the entire process to a friend. I overheard everything. He takes some pill; I can’t remember the name of it, but from the way he described it I assume it’s the sort of thing that might make you feel like having a go at your spleen once you had your infected molar out of the way. Then he jumps up and down, and then—whammo!—he pulls his own tooth. Other than that, he looked like an unremarkable fellow, except that he was missing a lot of teeth. I got the feeling he might pull a perfectly healthy one now and then just to keep in practice.

  I don’t want to talk about the question of whether a man who pulls his own teeth is the one true practitioner of holistic medicine. That’s not what this is all about. I know that the local causemeister we call Harold the Committed would have you believe that this just goes to show that Brute Capitalism, which treats the health of the people as a commodity to be bought and sold, has forced auto-extractic practices on decent working men. Sometimes I get awfully tired of Harold the Committed. He may well be right about Brute Capitalism, but as I sized up this fellow who pulls his own teeth—and I’ll admit that sizing up a fellow is not that easy to do if he keeps jumping up and down and trying to simulate the effects of a pill that makes you want to have a go at your own spleen—I figured he might be interested in pulling his own teeth even if he could afford the watermelon at my neighborhood fruit and vegetable store.

  I don’t want to pull my own teeth. I am still amazed, though, at how plausible it all sounded at the fruit stand. I remember thinking that pulling an upper tooth down would be a lot easier than pulling a lower tooth up. I could almost see myself pulling an upper tooth. I belly up to the mirror, open my mouth wide, and say, “Is it just my imagination, or does that bicuspid look a little shaky?” I take the pill. I jump up and down. Then, whammo!

  1982

  Unplugged

  A day or two after the Webers’ son, Jeffrey, age twenty-six, finally moved out of the house, they realized that they had lost the ability to tape. I heard about this from my friend Horace, who seems to specialize in stories about our contemporaries—people who are in that awkward phase between the end of paying tuition and the beginning of playing with grandchil
dren. Very few of those people are much good with a VCR.

  Until Bennett and Linda Weber discovered the effect that Jeffrey’s move had on their taping operation, Horace told me, they had been pleased by his departure. It wasn’t that they weren’t fond of Jeffrey, who had always been a bright and sweet-tempered boy. It was simply that, as Linda Weber sometimes put it, “If Jeffrey’s going to find himself, it would probably help for him to look somewhere other than his own room.”

  Jeffrey, who sometimes worked as a technician for avant-garde theater productions, had moved into a cheap railroad flat found by his college friend Jason, who was clerking at a record store while he carried on what he sometimes referred to as his true life’s work—trying to decide whether to go on to graduate school. Helen, the third roommate, was working as a waitress while she took acting lessons, although she made it clear that the object of the lessons had never been a career in the theater.

  Since not just Jeffrey but all three roommates were sometimes described as trying to find themselves, Bennett Weber sometimes referred to them collectively as “The Lost Patrol,” the name of his favorite old Victor McLaglen movie—which was, ironically, the movie he was about to copy off one of the cable channels until he realized that Jeffrey was the only person in the family who knew how to tape from the excruciatingly complicated cable box.

  “I had a lot of sympathy with his predicament,” Horace said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried taping off one of those cable boxes without a kid around, but it’s no joke. The other night, I figured I’d tape Charade, with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and I found myself trying to hold three different remote-control gizmos, plus the instructions. I finally put everything down and called my daughter in Phoenix.”