by Helen Dewitt
There’s nothing like the feeling that you’ve had an idea that everyone expected to fail, and gone and made a success of it. And yet it’s funny to think how big a part luck plays in these things.
If I hadn’t walked to the 7-Eleven that day and seen that heron, I might be selling vacuum cleaners to this very day, he thought.
“You’ve been lucky so far, Joe. You’ve already succeeded at what you set out to do. But don’t ever take that for granted. There’s bad luck as well as good in this world. You can’t afford to rest on your laurels.”
The sky was darkening, but it was not yet dark. In the west the molten gold of the setting sun slipped through the hills, and in the darkening hollow the yellow arches and the 7-Eleven and the Waffle House and the TCBY were glowing in the golden light. High above a flock of geese sped southward in a V formation, and on the highway the cars and trucks sped north and south.
He remembered standing on a beach in early morning watching the pelicans. A pelican does what it’s designed to do. A sandpiper does what it’s designed to do. A goose instinctively heads south in a V-formation in a V formed of other geese instinctively heading south. It doesn’t check out the beach and experiment with a sandpiper lifestyle. It does what it’s designed to do.
The thing about animals, though, is that they live in this incredibly beautiful world without noticing. It can be the most beautiful morning since the world began and a bird will be out there going after worms, oblivious to the beauty that surrounds us. Whereas a human can just stop the car and get out and look around and think What am I doing with my life?
We all have a choice, thought Joe. Every single one of us has a choice. Look at all those hundreds of people driving up and down I-95. Every single one of them could pull over to the side of the road. There’s nothing to stop someone pulling over to the side and looking around at this beautiful sunset and choosing to follow a different path.
What he thought was, An animal can’t decide to be a better animal. It doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, so maybe there’s no such thing as being a better animal. It just has to do what comes instinctively. Whereas sometimes what comes instinctively for a human can be actually wrong. That’s why it’s important to remember that there’s more to life than being a success. Sure, if you do something it’s important to give it your best shot. But it’s also important to be a good person. You can’t ever take that for granted either.
“Look at Ian,” Joe told himself. “Here’s a guy who never did anybody any harm, one day he’s just sitting on the bus minding his own business, looking forward to reading page three of The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor, and out of the blue some guy from Keene, New Hampshire asks him a question and gratuitously makes an allusion to his size. Instead of making an offensive reply right back, which would have been only too easy to do, the guy just quietly answers the question. If that’s not turning the other cheek, I don’t know what is. The fact is, he’s a better person than I am. By a long shot. I may have done something to raise public awareness of the need for height-friendly facilities, but I’ve got a lot of work to do on myself. A lot of work.”
He stood looking out. TCBY, 7-Eleven, and the Waffle House were now in shadow.
Suddenly—whether by accident or through the mysterious workings of some higher power—he felt the need to take a leak.
He walked into the bathroom, and a big grin broke out on his face. A sign on the wall said: FOR YOUR COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE WE HAVE INSTALLED AN ADJUSTA™ HEIGHT-FRIENDLY TOILET. FOR MAXIMUM SAFETY IN USING THE ADJUSTA™, PLEASE FOLLOW THESE SIMPLE INSTRUCTIONS. Underneath the instructions was a sign in red letters. PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW CHILDREN TO PLAY WITH THE ADJUSTA™. THE ADJUSTA™ IS NOT A TOY. PENALTY FOR MISUSE $200.
Joe pressed the height button and the Adjusta went whirring right on down and stopped a few inches above floor level. It obviously wasn’t hooked up for the lightning rod application, so there was no need for the facility to take it below the floor; no, they’d just installed it as their standard john. Joe pressed the seat button and the seat went right on in to the point where a two-year-old could have sat on it without falling through. Far out.
He stood there pressing the buttons while the Adjusta went up and down and in and out because hell, he invented the damn thing. It gave him a warm, happy feeling just finding it there unexpectedly. Because this was a major chain motel. All over the United States people would be checking in and whether they had little kids with them or just happened to be personally on the small side they would find conveniences that did not discriminate. Plus, you just knew those kids would get a real kick out of trying it out. Whatever the motel management might decree.
Then he remembered that he had come in here for a reason. He answered the call of nature, and he was just zipping up his pants when something occurred to him. If you’re an ideas man you never know when or where your next idea is going to hit you. It can happen at the craziest times, times when the last thing you’d think you’d be thinking of would be ways to improve the lot of your fellow man.
What he suddenly thought was that he had designed a toilet that went down, and later he had enhanced the product with a seat that went in. It had never even crossed his mind that you could have a seat that went out.
“You know, Joe,” he said. “There is something you can do. Something you can get to work on right now, before you start introducing a product into new markets in a form that may not be appropriate to those markets.”
Because the thing that occurred to him, thinking back to that incident all those years ago on the bus, was that he had been way too judgmental about the guy with the paunch. So he was fat. Is that a crime? What right did he have to go around condemning people? Sixty per cent of Americans are obese. Or it might be more. Was he going to go around condemning sixty per cent of the population?
“Because the thing is, Joe, it’s no good saying lots of other people feel the same way. You’re in a position where that kind of attitude has consequences. You saw for yourself the trouble the guy had finding a seat he could fit into. This could have been an opportunity for you to think seriously about the product. But no, you went and introduced enhancements that would benefit one person in 14,000, without even thinking of enhancements that could be of value to the male half of sixty percent of the population. Well, I’m telling you here and now, Joe, that’s not just bad moral sense—it’s bad business sense. And here you are, thinking of moving into the Bible Belt—a region of the country that has way more than its fair share of persons in the jumbo category—and instead of taking reasonable precautions you’re about to do just what you did when you were starting out and didn’t know what you were doing. Rushing in without stopping to think.”
Sometimes you have to be hard on yourself. It’s easy to make excuses; sometimes you have to just refuse to accept those excuses. He walked back into the bedroom and started pacing up and down.
On the toilet side, of course, it wasn’t strictly true that the Adjusta benefited only a small minority of the population. But all you had to do was look around you to see that there were a lot of people whose needs were not being catered for. If somebody happens to have thighs that are four feet in circumference, you don’t have to be a genius to see that a toilet seat with a maximum span of fifteen inches, and a rim three inches wide, is not what the doctor ordered. In fact, if you think about it, the whole rim concept starts to look like a blind alley. What you want, at least in public conveniences, is a bench with a hole in it. An adjustable hole to accommodate persons of small stature. It’s obvious when you think about it, but then sometimes that’s all genius amounts to—seeing something that’s obvious when you think about it that nobody ever thought about before.
Joe was still pacing up and down when something else occurred to him. For whatever reason, he had suddenly remembered a program he had once seen on the Discovery Channel about sumo wrestlers. One gross detail of the sumo lifestyle had stayed with him all these years, and th
is was the fact that the guys were so fat they couldn’t wipe themselves—that little job got delegated to some other lucky son of a bitch.
Well, it may be gross, but you can say this for the Japanese, unlike us they’re not ashamed of the body so they actually dealt with the problem. In our society, on the other hand, people are so totally grossed out by this kind of fact of life that even toilet manufacturers don’t want to know. Because if you think about it, it would be the easiest thing in the world to fit every john with a kind of upside-down shower head, so people could clean down there at the press of a button without having to actually get within arm’s reach. But as far as our society is concerned the hygienic problems of people of above-average size are just that: their problem. You’d think people would be ashamed to condemn their fellow-citizens to substandard hygiene in public conveniences. It doesn’t work like that. What people do is, first they provide inadequate facilities; then they blame the fat person for not achieving a standard of cleanliness that can only be achieved with adequate facilities.
The more Joe thought about it, the more he couldn’t believe he’d never thought about it before. Instead of addressing the problems of the obese individual responsibly, insofar as those problems impacted on his own line of the country, he’d just sat back and jeered. Well, in all probability that jeering had cost him an obscene amount of lost business. All he could say was, if he was going to take that kind of attitude, he had it coming to him. Because the more he thought about it, the more he could see the oversize market had significant implications for the lightning rod trade.
“For better or worse, Joe, we live in a society where fat is not perceived to be physically attractive. If sixty per cent of the population are perceived to be physically unattractive, you know there’s a lot of sexual frustration going on there, which in an office environment can be deadly.”
It was dark outside. Where the highway snaked through the hills the bright white headlights, the small red taillights of the north and southbound cars were all that could be seen.
“Besides which, it’s not just a question of purely commercial considerations. A better business environment is important in achieving a better balance sheet. Sure. But there’s more at stake here than money. Because the thing of it is, if a class of people is perceived to not be physically attractive, a disproportionate proportion of those people are going to be turning for satisfaction to commercial sex anyway. With all the risks that entails. Well, if people are already disadvantaged by their appearance, it’s just not right that they should be further disadvantaged by being put at the mercy of prostitutes and pimps. Surely we, as a society, should not be forcing oversized individuals to choose between sexual deprivation and disgrace. Surely we should not be adding to their burden but, on the contrary, doing what we can to lighten the load.”
The McDonalds, the TCBY, the Waffle House, and the 7-Eleven were brightly lit, and the parking lots they stood in were lit by tall streetlights whose dull yellow light fell here and there on the scattered cars.
“Besides which, there are other people we should be taking into account. What if someone gets married and then puts on the pounds? You just know something like that is going to put a strain on a relationship. The couple may have all kinds of things in common, there’s just this one little source of friction. If you were able to remove that source of friction you’d be doing everyone a favor.”
The geese were fifty miles further on their journey, winging their way swiftly southward in the soft night sky.
“It’s up to you to start taking your responsibilities seriously and do something about that. There comes a time when it’s not enough to just go on taking. There comes a time when you have to give something back.”
Joe stopped by the window. High above, in the black sky, was one bright star.
“I’ll try to be more considerate in future,” he vowed. “I’ll try to be a better person. I’ll try to let my success be a force for good. After all, all any of us can ever do is try. All you can ever do is do the best you can.”
AT’S ALL, FOLKS
Opinion will probably always be divided as to the ultimate value of Joe’s contribution. It would be hard to find anyone with a bad word to say for the Adjusta; many people, however, would have thought better of Joe if the height-friendly conveniences had been his sole claim to fame. The lightning rods seem destined to remain controversial.
The narrow purview of the program, focusing as it does on the presumed needs of heterosexual men, has attracted widespread concern among heterosexual women and the GLBT community alike. Its unquestioned dismissal of hard-won gains in the realm of sexual expression, many fear, has grave implications for the prospect of genuine equality in the twenty-first century.
Others have challenged the very foundations of the enterprise.
When a top litigation lawyer and a justice of the Supreme Court have come up the lightning rod route, it’s clear that the program offers genuine opportunities to the right individuals. What’s more, the successful marriage of a former lightning rod and one of the country’s richest men, a self-confessed heavy lightning rod user, shows that the facility is not necessarily damaging to the private lives of participants. And even the bitterest enemies of the program admit that the sex scandals of the late twentieth century seem to be a thing of the past. The lightning rods achieved exactly what Walter hoped they would achieve: They took the lid off the pressure cooker. Insiders at the Department of Homeland Security, moreover, have voiced unqualified admiration for this safeguard to our imperilled democracy.
On the other hand, the successful lightning rods were all pretty exceptional individuals. Joe’s original quest for the woman in a thousand was an apt one. He might have added to that a quest for the man in a thousand who could see the work in the same light: In spite of several media campaigns to re-educate the public, most men continue to be uncomfortable with women in their family making this kind of contribution to the corporate environment. Critics argued that the vast numbers of women involved in the program inevitably placed pressure on people who are not exceptional and couldn’t be expected to be. In fact, some people took this to the extreme of arguing that it should never have been decriminalized in the first place.
There is a streak of Puritanism in the American psyche that goes right straight back to the Pilgrims, and that streak has been an unmitigated blessing to the American criminal since time immemorial. What these critics fail to recognize is that if a demand exists for a service, and you criminalize that service, the only people who benefit are organized crime. As it happened, however, Joe was working hand in glove with Walter Pike, and as everyone knows, organized crime doesn’t stand a chance when the FBI is on the job.
Joe had stopped worrying about the legalities, or rather he had stopped thinking he might one day have to start worrying about the legalities, as soon as he and Walter shook hands on the deal. And in fact Joe had nothing to worry about.
Walter had nothing but praise for Joe’s outreach work among the Christian community. He was equally supportive of Joe’s plans to develop a service for people who were uncomfortable with the concept of a lightning rod. He reiterated that Joe had nothing to worry about, and as it turned out Walter was as good as his word.
To insist on a strict observance of the written law over the laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger would be absurdly sacrificing the end to the means—nobody puts these things better than Thomas Jefferson, and Walter was second to none in admiration for our third President. Still, there’s no point going around looking for trouble. Nobody at the FBI likes breaking the law unnecessarily. In the long term, if inappropriate legislation happens to be in place, the simplest thing is to just get rid of it and replace it with something feasible. It’s just a matter of knowing who to call.
There are pieces of legislation which would leave everyone better off which would be political suicide for a politician to be seen to vote for, let alone propose.
/> Every politician knows that. Luckily, over the years ways have been found to get around one of the drawbacks of a democratic system. For example, a good way to get around the problem of the vote is to tack the piece of legislation on as a clause in some other piece of legislation, something everyone would want to be seen to vote for, like Hurricane Disaster Relief. Hurricane Disaster Relief is a good example, as a matter of fact, because everyone is going to realize you have to get something like that passed into law with a minimum of delay, you wouldn’t expect someone to hold up a bill like that nitpicking at this or that amendment.
That just leaves the politician who has to put his John Hancock on the actual proposal that is going to get tacked on. A tried-and-true method of getting around this problem is to frame the language of the bill in such a way that it does not specifically mention the thing that would be political suicide. A skilled politician knows how to express himself so that the language will permit a desirable set of events to fall within the law, without allowing it to appear that he anticipated anything of the kind.
If something is in the interests of national security a man with the good of his country at heart will do things he might not do for purely personal gain. A member of Senator Johnson’s staff drew up an amendment relating to Vending Machines and Workplace Stress Reduction, so that it was ready to spring into action at the first suitable opportunity. He included a school milk provision just to be on the safe side.
It sometimes happens that nature is not as dramatic as we might like her to be. For some reason there just weren’t any floods or other natural disasters of a scale to hit the national press. He was beginning to think he was going to have to tack it onto a Fisheries and Forestry act, which was always a possible—sometimes you can get away with slipping the legislation into something so boring you wouldn’t expect anyone to read it. But luckily a small hurricane swept in out of the Gulf of Mexico in the nick of time. The Vending Machines and School Milk Amendment got quickly added to the Hurricane Ethel Disaster Relief Bill, which was rushed right through out of concern for the victims of Hurricane Ethel.