The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  —him and this apartment, which cost him $75,000 in 1972; $20,000 cash, which came out of the $25,000 he got as a paperback advance for his fourth book, Under Uncle’s Thumb, and $536.36 a month in bank-loan payments (on the $55,000 he borrowed) ever since, plus another $390 a month in so-called maintenance, which has steadily increased until it is now $460 a month … and although he already knows the answer, the round number, he begins punching the figures into the calculator … 536.36 plus … 460 … times 12 … and the calculator keys go chuck chuck chuck chuck and the curious little orange numbers, broken up like stencil figures, go trucking across the black path of the display panel at the top of the machine, giving a little orange shudder every time he hits the plus button, until there it is, stretching out seven digits long—11956.32—$12,000 a year! One thousand dollars a month—this is what he spends on his apartment alone!—and by May he will have to come up with another $6,000 so he can rent the house on Martha’s Vineyard again chuck chuck chuck chuck and by September another $6,750—$3,750 to send his daughter, Amy, to Dalton and $3,000 to send his son, Jonathan, to Collegiate (on those marvelous frog-and-cricket evenings up on the Vineyard he and Bill and Julie and Scott and Henry and Herman and Leon and Shelly and the rest, all Media & Lit. people from New York, have discussed why they send their children to private schools, and they have pretty well decided that it is the educational turmoil in the New York public schools that is the problem—the kids just wouldn’t be educated!—plus some considerations of their children’s personal safety—but—needless to say!—it has nothing to do with the matter of … well, race) and he punches that in … 6750 … chuck chuck chuck chuck … and hits the plus button … an orange shimmer … and beautiful! there’s the figure—the three items, the apartment in town, the summer place, and the children’s schooling—$24,706.32!—almost $25,000 a year in fixed costs, just for a starter! for lodging and schooling! nothing else included! A grim nut!

  It’s appalling, and he’s drowning, and this is only the beginning of it, just the basic grim nut—and yet in his secret heart he loves these little sessions with the calculator and the checks and the stubs and the bills and the marching orange numbers that stretch on and on … into such magnificently huge figures. It’s like an electric diagram of his infinitely expanding life, a scoreboard showing the big league he’s now in. Far from throwing him into a panic, as they well might, these tote sessions are one of the most satisfying habits he has. A regular vice! Like barbiturates! Calming the heart and slowing the respiration! Because it seems practical, going over expenses, his conscience sanctions it as a permissible way to avoid the only thing that can possibly keep him afloat: namely, more writing … He’s deep into his calculator trance now … The orange has him enthralled. Think of it! He has now reached a stage in his life when not only a $1,000-a-month apartment but also a summer house on an island in the Atlantic is an absolute necessity—precisely that, absolute necessity … It’s appalling! —and yet it’s the most inexplicable bliss!—nothing less.

  As for the apartment, even at $1,000 a month it is not elegant. Elegance would cost at least twice that. No, his is an apartment of a sort known as West Side Married Intellectual. The rooms are big, the layout is good, but the moldings, cornices, covings, and chair rails seem to be corroding. Actually, they are merely lumpy from too many coats of paint over the decades, and the parquet sections in the floor have dried out and are sprung loose from one another. It has been a long time since this apartment has had an owner who could both meet the down-payment nut and have the woodwork stripped and the flooring replaced. The building has a doorman but no elevator man, and on Sundays the door is manned by a janitor in gray khaki work clothes. But what’s he supposed to do? He needs seven rooms. His son and daughter now require separate bedrooms. He and his wife require a third one (a third and fourth if the truth be known, but he has had to settle for three). He now needs, not just likes, this study he’s in, a workroom that is his exclusively. He now needs the dining room, which is a real dining room, not a dogleg off the living room. Even if he is giving only a cocktail party, it is … necessary that they (one & all) note—however unconsciously—that he does have a dining room!

  Right here on his desk are the canceled checks that have come in hung over from the cocktail party he gave six weeks ago. They’re right in front of him now … $209.60 to the florists, Clutter & Vine, for flowers for the hallway, the living room, the dining room, and the study, although part of that, $100, was for a bowl of tightly clustered silk poppies that will become a permanent part of the living-room decor … $138.18 to the liquor store (quite a bit was left over however, meaning that the bar will be stocked for a while) … $257.50 to Mauve Gloves & Madmen, the caterers, even though he had chosen some of the cheaper hors d’oeuvres. He also tipped the two butlers $10 each, which made him feel a little foolish later when he learned that one of them was co-owner of Mauve Gloves & Madmen … $23.91 to the grocery store for he couldn’t remember what … $173.95 to the Russian Tea Room for dinner afterward with Henry and Mavis (the guests of honor) and six other stragglers … $12.84 for a serving bowl from Bloomingdale’s … $20 extra to the maid for staying on late … and he’s chucking all these figures into the calculator chuck chuck chuck chuck blink blink blink blink truck truck truck truck the slanted orange numbers go trucking and winking across the panel … 855.98 … $855.98 for a cocktail party!—not even a dinner party!—appalling! —and how slyly sweet …

  Should he throw in the library stairs as a party expense, too? Perhaps, he thought, if he were honest, he would. The checks were right here: $420 to Lum B. Lee Ltd. for the stairs themselves, and another $95 to the customs broker to get the thing through customs and $45 to the trucker to deliver it, making a total of $560! In any event, they’re terrific … Mayfair heaven … the classic English type, stairs to nowhere, going up in a spiral around a central column, carved in the ancient bamboo style, rising up almost seven feet, so he can reach books on his highest shelf … He had had it made extra high by a cabinetmaking firm in Hong Kong, the aforementioned Lum B. Lee … Now, if the truth be known, the stairs are the result of a habit he has: he goes around the apartment after giving a party and stands where he saw particular guests standing, people who stuck in his mind, and tries to see what they saw from that position; in other words, how the apartment looked in their eyes. About a year ago he had seen Lenny Johns of the Times standing in the doorway of his study and looking in, so afterward, after Lenny and everyone else had gone, he took up the same position and looked in … and what he saw did not please him. In fact, it looked sad. Through Lenny Johns’s eyes it must have looked like the basic writer’s workroom out of Writer’s Digest: a plain Danish-style desk (The Door Store) with dowel legs (dowel legs!), a modernistic (modernistic!) metal-and-upholstery office swivel chair, a low-slung (more Modernismus!) couch, a bank of undistinguished-looking file cabinets, a bookcase covering one entire wall but made of plain white-painted boards and using the wall itself as its back. The solution, as he saw it—without going into huge costs—was the library stairs—the stairs to nowhere!—an object indisputably useful and yet with an air of elegant folly!

  It was after that same party that his wife had said to him: “Who was that weepy-looking little man you were talking to so much?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “The one with the three strands of hair pulled up from the side and draped over his scalp.”

  He knew she was talking about Johns. And he knew she knew Johns’s name. She had met him before, on the Vineyard.

  Meeting Lenny Johns socially was one of the many dividends of Martha’s Vineyard. They have been going there for three summers now, renting a house on a hill in Chilmark … until it has become, well, a necessity! It’s no longer possible to stay in New York over the summer. It’s not fair to the children. They shouldn’t have to grow up that way. As for himself, he’s gotten to know Lenny and Bill and Scott and Julie and Bob and Dick an
d Jody and Gillian and Frank and Shelly and the rest in a way that wouldn’t be possible in New York. But quite aside from all that … just that clear sparkling late-August solitude, when you can smell the pine and the sea … heading down the piney path from the house on the hill … walking two hundred yards across the marshes on the pedestrian dock, just one plank wide, so that you have to keep staring down at it … it’s hypnotic … the board, the marsh grass, your own tread, the sound of the frogs and the crickets … and then getting into the rowboat and rowing across the inlet to … the dune … the great swelling dune, with the dune grass waving against the sky on top … and then over the lip of it—to the beach! the most pristine white beach in the world! and the open sea … all spread out before you—yours! Just that! the sand, the sea, the sky—and solitude! No gates, no lifeguard stands, no concessions, no sprawling multitudes of transistor radios and plaid plastic beach chairs …

  It is chiefly for these summers on the Vineyard that he has bought a car, a BMW sedan—$7,200—but very lively! It costs him $76 a month to keep it in a garage in the city for nine months of the year, another $684 in all, so that the hard nut for Martha’s Vineyard is really $6,684—but it’s a necessity, and one sacrifices for necessities. After three years on the Vineyard he feels very possessive about the place, even though he’s a renter, and he immediately joined in with the move to publish a protest against “that little Albanian with a pickup truck,” as he was (wrongly) called, some character named Zarno or something who had assembled a block of fifty acres on the Vineyard and was going to develop it into 150 building lots—one third of an acre each! (Only dimly did he recall that the house he grew up in, in Chicago, had been on about one fifth of an acre and hadn’t seemed terribly hemmed in.) Bill T———wrote a terrific manifesto in which he talked about “these Snopes-like little men with their pickup trucks”—Snopes-like! —and all sorts of people signed it.

  This campaign against the developers also brought the New York Media & Lit. people into contact for the first time with the Boston people. Until the Media & Lit. people began going there about ten years before, Martha’s Vineyard had always been a Boston resort, “Boston” in the most proper social sense of the word. There wasn’t much the Boston people could do about the New York people except not associate with them. When they said “New York people,” they no doubt meant “Jews & Others,” he figured. So when he was first invited to a Boston party, thanks to his interest in the anti-developers campaign, he went with some trepidation and with his resentment tucked into his waistband like a .38. His mood darkened still more when he arrived in white ducks and an embroidered white cotton shirt, yoke-shouldered and open to the sternum—a little eccentric (actually a harmless sort of shirt known in Arizona as Fruit Western) but perfectly in the mood of standard New York People Seaside Funk—and found that the Boston men, to a man, had on jackets and ties. Not only that, they had on their own tribal colors. The jackets were mostly navy blazers, and the ties were mostly striped ties or ties with little jacquard emblems on them, but the pants had a go-to-hell air: checks and plaids of the loudest possible sort, madras plaids, yellow-on-orange windowpane checks, crazy-quilt plaids, giant houndstooth checks, or else they were a solid airmail red or taxi yellow or some other implausible go-to-hell color. They finished that off with loafers and white crew socks or no socks at all. The pants were their note of Haitian abandon … weekends by the sea. At the same time the jackets and ties showed they had not forgotten for a moment where the power came from. He felt desolate. He slipped the loaded resentment out of his waistband and cocked it. And then the most amazing thing happened—

  His hostess came up and made a fuss over him! Exactly! She had read Under Uncle’s Thumb! So had quite a few of the men, infernal pants and all! Lawyers and investment counselors! They were all interested in him! Quite a stream—he hardly had to move from the one spot all evening! And as the sun went down over the ocean, and the alcohol rose, and all of their basted teeth glistened—he could almost see something … presque vu! … a glimmer of the future … something he could barely make out … a vision in which America’s best minds, her intellectuals, found a common ground, a natural unity, with the enlightened segments of her old aristocracy, her old money … the two groups bound together by … but by what? … he could almost see it, but not quite … it was presque vu … it was somehow a matter of taste … of sensibility … of grace, natural grace … just as he himself had a natural feel for the best British styles, which were after all the source of the Boston manners … What were the library stairs, if they weren’t that? What were the Lobb shoes?

  For here, now, surfacing to the top of the pile, is the check for $248 to John Lobb & Sons Ltd. Boot Makers—that was the way he wrote it out, Boot Makers, two words, the way it was on their bosky florid London letterhead—$248!—for one pair of shoes!—from England!—handmade! And now, all at once, even as chuck chuck chuck he punches it into the calculator, he is swept by a wave of sentiment, of sadness, sweet misery—guilt! Two hundred and forty-eight dollars for a pair of handmade shoes from England … He thinks of his father. He wore his first pair of Lobb shoes to his father’s funeral. Black cap toes they were, the most formal daytime shoes made, and it was pouring that day in Chicago and his incomparable new shoes from England were caked with mud when he got back to his father’s house. He took the shoes off, but then he froze—he couldn’t bring himself to remove the mud. His father had come to the United States from Russia as a young man in 1922. He had to go to work at once, and in no time, it seemed, came the Depression, and he struggled through it as a tailor, although in the forties he acquired a dry-cleaning establishment and, later, a second one, plus a diaper-service business and a hotel-linen service. But this brilliant man—oh, how many times had his mother assured him of that!—had had to spend all those years as a tailor. This cultivated man!—more assurances—oh, how many yards of Goethe and Dante had he heard him quote in an accent that gripped the English language like a full nelson! And now his son, the son of this brilliant, cultivated but uneducated and thwarted man—now his son, his son with his education and his literary career, his son who had never had to work with his hands more than half an hour at a stretch in his life—his son had turned up at his funeral in a pair of handmade shoes from England! … Well, he let the mud dry on them. He didn’t touch them for six months. He didn’t even put the shoe trees (another $47) in. Perhaps the goddamned boots would curl up and die.

  The number … 248 … is sitting right up there in slanted orange digits on the face of the calculator. That seems to end the reverie. He doesn’t want to continue it just now. He doesn’t want to see the 6684 for Martha’s Vineyard up there again for a while. He doesn’t want to see the seven digits of his debts (counting the ones after the decimal point) glowing in their full, magnificent, intoxicating length. It’s time to get serious! Discipline! Only one thing will pull him out of all this: work … writing … and there’s no way to put it off any longer. Discipline, Mr. Wonderful! This is the most difficult day of all, the day when it falls to his lot to put a piece of paper in the typewriter and start on page 1 of a new book, with that horrible arthritic siege— writing a book!—stretching out ahead of him (a tubercular blue glow, as his mind comprehends it) … although it lifts his spirits a bit to know that both The Atlantic and Playboy have expressed an interest in running chapters as he goes along, and Penthouse would pay even more, although he doesn’t want it to appear in a one-hand magazine, a household aid, as literary penicillin to help quell the spirochetes oozing from all the virulent vulvas … Nevertheless! help is on the way! Hell!—there’s not a magazine in America that wouldn’t publish something from this book!

  So he feeds a sheet of paper into his typewriter, and in the center, one third of the way down from the top, he takes care of the easy part first—the working title, in capital letters:

  RECESSION AND REPRESSION

  POLICE STATE AMERICA

  AND THE SPIRIT OF ’76
/>   VIGNETTES

  t

  THE LOWER CLASSES

  No. 1. The Down-filled People

  They wear down-filled coats in public. Out on the ski slopes they look like hand grenades. They have “audio systems” in their homes and know the names of hit albums. They drive two-door cars with instrument panels like an F-16’s. They like High-Tech furniture, track lighting, glass, and brass. They actually go to plays in New York and follow professional sports. The down-filled men wear turtleneck sweaters and Gucci belts and loafers and cover parts of their ears with their hair. The down-filled women still wear cowl-necked sweaters and carry Louis Vuitton handbags. The down-filled people strip wood and have interior walls removed. They put on old clothes before the workmen come over. In the summer they like cabins on fresh water and they go hiking. They regard Saturday Night Live and Steve Martin as funny. They say “I hear you,” meaning “I understand what you’re saying.” They say “Really,” meaning “That’s right.” When down-filled strangers are at a loss for words, they talk about real-estate prices.

  No. 2. Bliss SoHo Boho

  Oh, to be young and come to New York and move into your first loft and look at the world with eyes that light up even the rotting fire-escape railings, even the buckling pressed-tin squares on the ceiling, even the sheet-metal shower stall with its belly dents and rusting seams, the soot granules embedded like blackheads in the dry rot of the window frames, the basin with the copper-green dripping-spigot stains in the cracks at the bottom, the door with its crowbar-notch history of twenty-five years of break-ins, the canvas-bottom chairs that cut off the circulation in the sural arteries of the leg, the indomitable roach that appears every morning in silhouette on the cord of the hot plate, the doomed yucca straining for light on the windowsill, the two cats nobody ever housebroke, the garbage trucks with the grinder whine, the leather freaks and health-shoe geeks, the punkers with chopped hair and Korean warm-up jackets, the herds of Uptown Boutique bohemians who arrive every weekend by radio-call cab, the bag ladies who sit on the standpipes swabbing the lesions on their ankles—oh, to be young and in New York and to have eyes that light up all things with the sweetest and most golden glow!