Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  “The comic code?”

  “Yes. Our advertising budget runs about one or two hundred thousand dollars a year. No, that’s too high. Probably it’s something under a hundred thousand. We do about a third of our advertising in hobby type books, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Field and Stream, and another third in miscellaneous places and, of course, comic books.”

  Oh, the Comic Code. I remember the Comic Code, the official-looking little cartoon seal like a stamp burning on a passport, remember the slick inside front cover of the comic book, the squeezed, tightly printed brick ads like a high wall of the classified, the windows with their smear of illustration, the reduced crosshatch of woodcut like spoiled fingerprint or an imposition of fur, all the faces—who knew they were German?—bearing their stigmata of muddy track like galosh-marked rugs in the hall. Recall—but one was babied, only-childed, holier than thou—the sense one had that there was something not just illicit but perhaps actually illegal about the devices offered there, like flying soiled flags or photographing money. Maybe it had to do with state lines, maybe that’s how they could do it. There was, when I was a boy in the thirties, a teenager in the forties, a mystique about state lines.

  State lines were, for a few miles on this side and a few more on that, free ports of a kind, where ordinary ordinance and day-to-day due process could be fudged—law’s and territory’s olly olly okshen free, an odd three-mile limit where fireworks were openly sold, liquor and cigarettes at reduced rates, where kids could drive cars and people could get married without waiting for blood tests, where you could bet on horses or buy lottery tickets and the pinball machines paid off in cash, where whorehouses thrived and gambling in roadhouses, where soiled flags were flown and money photographed. West Memphis, Arkansas, and West Yellowstone, Montana, and Covington, Kentucky, and Calumet City, Illinois, and Crown Point, Indiana—American Ginzas. “Wide open,” Father said, but somehow working both ways and watch out for the speed traps. Everything up front, Wisconsin pushing its cheeses at you as soon as you left Illinois, Georgia its pecans. So maybe that’s how they worked it, because it was all through the mails and they couldn’t see you were a kid.

  “The biggest problem of the mail-order business is finding an unusual item that’s economical to ship and will get there without being broken. Another problem is handwriting. Sometimes I have to try to interpret what’s wanted.”

  We are examining the 1974 catalog, the sixtieth-anniversary edition.

  “It’s only eighty pages.

  “Our 1929 catalog was seven hundred sixty-eight pages. My father wrote virtually all the copy for that. I guess the last really hefty catalog we put out was in 1952. That was five hundred seventy-six pages. That catalog could be published for forty cents. We couldn’t do that now. ”

  As one goes through the 1974 edition, one notices certain things; it is changed yet unchanged. It’s true that there is nowhere to be found among its sixteen hundred items—the 1929 edition must have had at least seven thousand—the “NIGGER MAKEUP WITHOUT BLACKING.” (“Slipped on or off in a minute. No burnt cork or muss.”) And I cannot find “THE JOLLY-NIGGER PUZZLE.” (“The grinning nigger clings on to the brightly polished steel ball in his mouth. . . .”) Or even “the JEWISH NICKLE.” (“A very clever pocket joke. Hand it to a friend, streetcar conductor, or a storekeeper and watch his face as he examines it.” The illustration shows the pawnshop’s odd testiculars on one side and on the obverse an anonymous, head-covered, pubic-bearded man with a great hooked nose.) But even in the current catalog there is #2870, a “BIG NOSE & GLASSES” set. The copy describes the nose as “realistically formed” and ambiguously advises the reader that he can “make fun of city slickers.” City slickers? City slickers? Izzy, if the nose fits . . .

  And if there is a tendency in the new Johnson Smith to pull punches—#2092 is a “JAW HARP” and #1171, “1001 INSULTS,” contains a section called Transylvania Jokes and Slams: “Sign on a Transylvania Garbage Truck: WE CATER WEDDINGS”; “Did you hear about the Transylvania beauty contest? Nobody won”—there is a strong, if deliberately vague, crime-in-the-streets orientation to the inventory. Along with the traditional five-foot shelf of body-building pamphlets and the more faddish how-to Kung Fu stuff, there is the “Pocket Shriek Alarm—You can Almost Knock ’em down with Sound”; a “Wide Angle Door Peek—See without being seen. Gives full view. No need to open door”; there is #1306, DEFENSE TACTICS FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT (“Deal effectively with the most common assault situations without reliance on weapons. Covers the wide range of problems the policeman encounters on the job”). There are regulation police handcuffs, badges and badge cases, “official looking . . . realistic, ” the rubrics carefully imprecise: “Special Investigator,” “Special Police,” “Private Detective.” The badge case is “perfect for use with all three badges” and comes with a “police identification card.” And there are, if all else fails, weapons: an eight-inch “Zip Knife. Opens quickly and locks into position”; “Paratrooper” knives; knives for “emergencies”; ten-inch Bowie knives, designed by “Jim Bowie, great pioneer knife-fighter.” (None of these may be sold in the Detroit area.) There are explosive pellets (“For use with slingshots”) and shoulder holsters (“Conceal most any pistol under coat, shirt, jacket, etc. Similar holster often worn by special agents, commandos, detectives, etc. Takes most size handguns”).

  “I’ll tell you the type of letter we get a lot of. It’s kind of interesting. We get letters from a fella who will say, ‘Gee, will you send this catalog to my son? I remember ordering from you in the thirties and I had more fun. You got me into more trouble, but I want my son to have the experience, or to have the fun. They don’t have the fun they used to.’”

  Who is this man who floats above the levelers he flogs, this detached dealer who, trading in tricks, turns none? Who is he, this married-with-kids man—a son eleven, a daughter fifteen—this ecumenical Episcopalian who goes to church with his Catholic wife and drops in at the synagogue once in a while, who lives in Grosse Pointe Colonial and goes skiing in Colorado in the wintertime or down the man-made stuff in Michigan?

  He writes copy, plants subliminal and liminal suggestions. I mention a friend who once ordered a microphone from his company that was supposed to let him broadcast his voice through the family radio, but who could never get it to work, who’d have had to have been an engineer just to attach it. “Yes. We get enthusiastic in describing the ads. I think the children’s imaginations carry them a little further. But there used to be more embellishing of the article. Basically, in our business we sell an item in its original development form. The ballpoint pen when it first came out was a good mail-order seller, but if anyone remembers, I’d say fifty to seventy-five percent of them didn’t work for any length of time. And that’s the type of state in which we usually get an item, when it’s in its semideveloped form because it’s a novelty and everyone wants to buy it. Sometimes it does what’s promised but usually it’s a little bit overstated.” He fingers the novelties at the Leipzig Trade Fairs, rummages the gadgets at the Chicago and New York ones (though not so much anymore, not so much, only occasionally now). Who is he? An American. A-merican, like some ingrained quality of the privative as in amoral or apolitical, asymmetric, and maybe that’s what America means finally, to be in but not of, some condition of dizzying assimilation, the state lines all erased and the country clean as a whistle.

  And isn’t my catalog of the catalog misleading? Hasn’t Johnson Smith always given equal time? On page 369 of the big 1929 catalog, the company published a full-page advertisement for a volume called Morgan’s Exposure of Free Masonry. On the next two pages it lists twenty-six “Books for Masons.” Some are neutral, three or four hostile, and the majority pro-Mason. On page 227 of the same catalog there is an ad for something called “The Alabama Coon Jigger,” a mechanical black man standing on a platform of his own machinery. (“Perfect Time. Wonderful Agility. Marvelous Heel and Toe Work. You have only to wind up the very pow
erful spring mechanism, and the Coon will ‘shake his legs’ in the most amazing way.”) But on page 372 there is a full-page ad for a book called Ku Klux Klan Exposed, the copy for which rages against the practices of the Klan, particularly in its treatment of Negroes.

  Johnson Smith still has it both ways. Crime stoppers, and a course on locksmithing and key-making—“How to pick locks . . . make master keys. . . . Many ‘tricks of the trade.’” There is Houdini on escapes—“Special emphasis on handcuff and jail escapes,” bold-print Paul Smith’s. A book on how to pick pockets without detection. “An invaluable guide to magicians,” writes Smith in the copy. Marked cards and a two-headed coin. A cigarette maker. “Use any tobacco to suit your taste.” (One is thinking now of Transylvania, of Transylvanian sausage and the Transylvania Corridor.) There is “phony money.” (“With a bunch of these bills, it is easy for a person of limited means to appear prosperous by flashing a roll and peeling off a generous bill or two from the outside of the roll.”) And electronic bugs. There is a secret money belt: “Wear under shirt. . . . Used in bandit country, smuggling. . . .”

  “We’re the biggest company in the world of this specialized type. Basically there’s a limit to how big we can grow. First of all, our customers go into a phase where they’re interested in practical jokes; and after a person has done a few, then he grows up and drifts away from these novelties. It’s not a repeat business. The longevity of our customers is relatively short. So we have to keep getting the youngsters.”

  And “Life-Like Rubber Masks.”

  “The rubber masks have been used in holdups. As a matter of fact, that Brinks robbery in Boston—the F.B.I. came and went through our letters for a year back and tried to locate . . . They took every order for rubber masks and checked it. ”

  “Were they your rubber masks?”

  “Oh no, but every once in a while I’ll read where a gas station has been held up and the thieves were wearing rubber masks.”

  “Does that sort of thing happen often? I mean when your merchandise is used to . . . ?”

  “I don’t think so. Not often. Some boy will steal some money or he’ll forge a check, and the police will go to his room and they’ll find something that he’s bought by mail, and they’ll want to know if it was ordered from us, so we’ll try to look up the order.”

  And if Johnson Smith sells marked cards, it sells marked men as well. Shoe lifts to make you taller, “bigger and stronger.” Even “chest” hair: “Instant virility. If mother nature forgot you, simply press on this chest piece. So authentic that no one can tell the difference. On or off in seconds. Apply anywhere.” The illustration depicts a three- or four-inch triangle of mat and, for my $1.95, it may be the most bizarre item in the catalog.

  “Teenage boys are our biggest market. Very few girls seem interested in our items.”

  So. A-merican. Privative. Something neutral in things, in things themselves, something both-sides-against-the-middle. Something guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people, and cigarettes-don’t-cause-cancer, people-smoking-cigarettes-cause-cancer. In the Johnson Smith Catalog, the Peace patch lies down with the Swastika, the Love band with the Skull ring. Something neutral in things, on the fence, the democracy of matter. Something in things, perhaps, that does away with the fence entirely. And still I’m unfair to the catalog. I haven’t talked about the engines and motors, the optics, computers, the coins and the stamps, the cameras, recorders, sporting goods, planes, the watches and rockets, art supplies, banks. (Catch the rhythm? There is rhythm in chaos.)

  We are in the warehouse. Blue-jeaned women come down the aisles, order slips in their hands, bearing shallow tin trays. Abstracted, they fill the orders. They might be shoppers, housewives in some A&P of the odd, or browsers, perhaps, in the stacks of a wide Borgesian library of merchandise. They reach into bins consecutively numbered in shipping-clerk Dewey decimal, little Jacqueline Horners of the extraordinary, and pluck out the cloacal geegaws, a Noisy Nose Blower here, there some brown and yellow plastic upchuck like melted peanut brittle or cold pizza. Deadpan—Johnson Smith’s on Automation Road—one girl lifts out a rubbery coil of dog poop like a shit rattlesnake and places it in her tray.

  “We accept Bank-Americard and Master Charge now. We fill two hundred fifty thousand orders a year, but I would say the average order doesn’t run more than a dollar fifty or three dollars, so our sales are somewhere in the high six figures.”

  It is like strolling through some comic, transmogrified version of Victor Hugo’s basement Paris, a sewery landscape of mucous membrane and intestine. Past the loaves of toilet paper—“Birthday Toilet Tissue” (“The only gift everyone can—and has to—use. Comic birthday wishes printed on each section. ‘Relax and do a good job on your birthday!’”), and toilet paper printed in the form of money, and “Used Toilet Tissue” (“Oops! Looks like someone forgot to throw this roll away. You can bet nobody is going to be anxious to use it!”). Past the pay-toilet coin slots you attach to your bathroom door. Past the cigarette (spelled “cigaret” in the catalog) dispensers, the jackass that drives a cigarette at you out of his behind when you pull his ear, the elephant when you pull his tusk. (A-political.) Past life-size Peeping Tom torsos you put in the toilet bowl, and past the Whoopee Cushion (“When the victim unsuspectingly sits upon the cushion, it gives forth noises better imagined than described”), to the “Hilarous Talking Toilet” (“No more rest in your rest room! When victim sits down, ‘someone down there’ speaks out. Real surprise for party poopers!”).

  I ask Mr. Smith if I may listen to the talking toilet, and he finds a battery somewhere and rigs it quickly. He presses the white rubber bulb that triggers the mechanism.

  “HEY! CAN’T YOU SEE I’M WORKING DOWN HERE?”

  And the feeling reinforced as we pass the last bins of the cloacal—the “Disgusting Mess” (fake dog mess and vomit), the “Oops! Somebody Missed!” contour turd you fix to the lid of your toilet like a bracelet. As we pass “GLOP,” pass “Funny Phony Bird Mess” (two smeared yolks on a palette of fried eggs). “The S.S. Adams Company does those. Now to my mind the S.S. Adams Company of Neptune, New Jersey, is the most famous joke company in America. Mr. Adams, he was the one who had the best line of good-quality jokes in the U.S. In fact, Mr. Adams invented and sold the Joy Buzzer, which I would think comes pretty close to being our all-time best seller and still is a good item. Now it’s made in Japan but Mr. Adams held the patents on it.”

  And into another section—what? What can we call this? Petit Guignol? There are “Realistic Bloody Life-Sized Butchered” hands, realistic giant flies with “hairy legs, transparent wings,” “real-looking fake blood . . . like the kind used in the movies, wrestling, roller derby, etc. Make cuts, bruises, gashes, scars. Great way to get sympathy.” There are plastic eyeballs that float in your drink (“weighted so pupil always looks up”), dummy nails and bandages, the bloody razor blade that “snaps on finger or toe.”

  “Shirley Temple used to be a customer in her heyday. Orson Bean, Johnny Carson, Rudy Vallee in the thirties. We had an order from the King of Nepal two or three months ago. It was for two or three hundred dollars. He sent two or three orders before that.”

  There is the amputated bloody finger and the magic finger chopper and a skull “molded directly from a real human skull.” (Real. Real. You could reel from real.) And I’m thinking of the voice of the toilet again, of the niche all men must have if there can be a talking toilet. Molded directly from a real human skull! Who knew him, Horatio? Who was he? Some silent toilet star who couldn’t make it when the jakes went talkie? Who? Who? And one sees in this warehouse of toy pain and joke shit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy.

  “Our all-time most popular item is the midget Bible. It’s the size of a postage stamp”—things in Johnson Smith’s Gulliver world are often the world’s largest or smallest; I had already seen the world’s largest bow tie, its longest necktie—“and we print it
ourselves. In volume sales it’s our biggest seller—two hundred thousand a year. We used to print a hundred different books. I wrote some of them myself. ”

  “What books have you written?”

  “Let’s see, what books have I written? I wrote a book, one book on dance steps. I wrote most of my books before the Second World War.”

  “Were you in the war?”

  “No. I was at the University of Chicago during the war.”

  “Inventing the atom bomb?”

  “No. Working on it. I understood the science and I knew what was happening, but I was in administration, in purchasing.”

  Of course, he had decoded the catalog. No question. By dint of his legacy, his inheritance, middle child of the middleman. Middleman himself, from the exploding cigar to the atomic bomb, a purveyor of practical jokes, harmless and ultimate, to all the world.

  And there is one last thing, item. One is rounding off the Borges image of the warehouse library. (The catalog holds a fun-house mirror up to men’s desirings and imaginings, the hope of the heart, writ small. Eschatological and scat—midget Bibles and counterfeit poop—the dream of power—the strongman’s copper wristband—and treasure—metal detectors that may strike you rich in longshot’s dirt landscape—all, all, everything, all, every last kick in the mind’s cakewalk wardrobe.) Number 1929 in the new catalog is a reprint of the 768-page Johnson Smith catalog of 1929, #1169 a book on how mail-order fortunes are made. Paul Smith, who wants to retire, who has other interests, whose calculus is ruined, and whose eyes bother him, who feels compelled to learn as much as he can, who no longer goes to the trade fairs, and who never really cared much for practical jokes, wrote the copy himself. “Live,” goes the last line, “like you’ve always wanted to live.”