The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  As the owner of the equipment on which Echo runs, Horn has absolute power over what goes on in the Echo community; it is not unusual to see her referred to on-line as “Lord Horn.” One of her achievements has been to attract women to the bulletin board—they make up nearly forty per cent of Echo’s membership—and she has done so, in part, by strongly discouraging electronic sexual harassment, which is an unpleasant aspect of the vast, chaotic sprawl of bulletin boards and other on-line services that constitute cyberspace. “If someone is sending electronic messages saying ‘Ooh, baby, baby, what’re you wearing,’ you can tell me, and I’ll send that person E-mail telling him that what he’s doing is uncool,” Horn said. If someone persists in behaving in an offensive manner, Horn added, she can kick that person off Echo—an electronic banning known on this bulletin board as a “kevorking.”

  Earlier this month word spread on Echo that a self-selected group of perhaps forty members were quietly meeting (via modem) at an exclusive night club, Xenophobia, between the hours of 11 P.M. and 7:30 A.M. Xenophobia was established as a “private conference,” which means it was fitted with a software “filter” designed to keep uninvited people out. But unlike other private conferences on the bulletin board—for example, the 12 Step conference for recovering addicts—membership in Xenophobia was based simply on whom you knew. Moreover, the conference was not announced on Echo’s list of conferences (as, say, the 12 Step is), which made some people think that it was supposed to be a cliquish kind of secret. Clubs like Xenophobia are, of course, a fact of life in the real, concrete-and-glass world of Manhattan, but in cyberspace they are almost unknown. Many people join electronic communities like Echo precisely because they offer a refuge from the snobbery of the f2f (face-to-face) world which can make people unhappy and lonely, and some members of Echo were startled and hurt to find out that this sort of thing existed in the electronic world, too, and that once again they were left out.

  At the behest of those members troubled by the opening of Xenophobia, Horn created a space on Echo (that is, on the hard drive of her computer) that enables people to discuss their feelings about Xenophobia. From there, the following messages (known as “posts”) have been taken.

  80:2) Yuri Prizel 03-APR-94 19:33

  The concept of Echo, as I was given to understand, was to give people a forum to exchange ideas, points of view, concepts, philosophies, etc. The very existence of an “in crowd” is in direct contradiction to everything Echo allegedly stands for.

  80:4) Gabriel 03-APR-94 19:37

  Could someone identify this “in” crowd? You post as if it is already determined that such a crowd exists, but, frankly, I ain’t convinced of it.

  Some people argued that it was a mistake for people to have supposed that exclusivity wouldn’t exist in cyberspace:

  80:21) Jonathan Hayes 03-APR-94 21:42

  I enjoy the myth that cyberspace is democratic. I think it’s hilarious.

  80:71) Steve B. 04-APR-94 13:17

  Since Echo is a NY kind of place, then to be true to our physical surroundings we ought to have in-crowds and especially burly bouncers and haughty maître d’s. Echo subscribers would be cheated out of the NY experience if we didn’t have them.

  80:74) Kevin 04-APR-94 14:10

  Can I be the burly bouncer?

  Others remained adamantly opposed to the principle of an exclusive night club in cyberspace.

  80:224) Aurora Borealis 09-APR-94 12:35

  Exclude me from your “club.” If what you’re doing is talking behind my back, do so. Believe me, I can take it. But there’s no way on God’s green earth you’re going to convince me that what you’re doing is either right or fair.

  The final decision on what to do about Xenophobia rests, of course, with Lord Horn. For now, she said, she had no plans to close the club down. Though she is not a Xenophobia regular, she has visited, and reports that it’s a place where some of the earliest members of Echo like to hang out and play electronic jokes on one another—computer-hacker-type things that, she said, outsiders would find hard to understand. “I know the idea of a private club is sort of unkind, and people may be hurt by it, but there’s just no way you can stop things that happen in the physical world from being projected into the electronic world,” she said.

  But hadn’t some people joined Echo in order to get away from exclusivity?

  “People who join the electronic world expecting it to be better than the physical world will be disappointed,” Horn said. “And if you expect everyone is going to be your friend, you’ll be disappointed, too. I’m sorry. Echo is not Oz.”

  1994

  TOU-TOU-TOUKIE, HELLO — Hilton Als

  TOUKIE SMITH, who is the owner, the maître d’, and more or less the chef behind Toukie’s, the new restaurant on West Houston Street, has a big voice and a big smile and big earrings and a big body, all of which, in her unbridled enthusiasm for things quintessentially Toukie—“meeting and greeting and eating, darling”—she has poured into her new venture. Toukie’s menu is one of the most autobiographical we have ever seen—offerings include “My My Those Fries,” “Honey That House Salad,” and “Black Bottom Pie.”

  Operating in a manner more animated than that of the still model she was known as in the mid-seventies (when she was a muse to the artist Jean-Paul Goude before Grace Jones, the photographer Guy Bourdin, and the designer Issey Miyake), Toukie says, by way of greeting, “Give me some sugar, baby,” followed, whether she knows you or not, by a kiss and a hug. Sometimes she says, “Give me some sugar now, before you try my biscuits, girlfriend,” regardless of gender. At Toukie’s, Toukie follows everything her patrons do (ordering a drink, finishing dinner) with applause or a hug or a kiss—a red, red kiss.

  Red, which is Toukie’s preferred color and is generally present on some aspect of her person at all times (nails, dress, bracelets, lips), is also the color of the leather banquettes at Toukie’s—a low-ceilinged, dimly lit room with about twenty-four tables. And it is also the color of a boldly painted mural on one of the restaurant’s walls, an image that includes her ninety-four-year-old grandmother Gladys, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dorothy Dandridge. They are all women whom Toukie admires, because, she says, “they were always real, giving back to the people. Which is a very real reality.”

  The number of very real realities Toukie has had to contend with in recent years include the death, from AIDS, of her brother, the designer Willi Smith; the end of her long-term relationship with Robert De Niro (“Oh, child, please”); the end of her modelling career (“Girlfriend, the industry is not ready for me loving my 34D-cup-size self”); the current return, in the fashion industry, to seventies glamour (“Darling, nothing is as fierce as I was back then, going to Tokyo to smile, to Paris to smile, to Milan to smile. You can’t duplicate that innocent energy now; we know too much”); and the establishment, in honor of her brother, of a foundation to promote AIDS awareness in inner-city high schools and hospitals across the country. “I tell my kids to look it straight in the eye—and then avoid it.”

  The last time we had seen Toukie, she was dining out with Robert De Niro. She’d kept urging Mr. De Niro to eat, demonstrating the delectability of his food by eating half of it herself. When we recently saw her again, after what had been a long time, candlelight bounced off of her double row of enormous silver earrings, her forearms were covered in beaded bracelets, and her red lips were moist. “I’m just loving this,” she told us. “I’m just loving all this life.”

  1994

  RUSSIAN TENNIS: ADVANTAGE YELTSIN — George Plimpton

  IN Moscow this past November, Eugene Scott, the director of the Kremlin Cup tennis tournament, had an idea for his annual Christmas card: he would mosey up to where Boris Yeltsin, a great tennis fan, was sitting in the stands of the vast Olympic arena and get a courtside photographer to snap a picture of the two of them, apparently in amiable conversation.

  In fact, Scott and Yeltsin have more than a nodding acquaintance. Two years
ago, Scott, a nine-letter athlete at Yale, a member of the Davis Cup teams of ’63 and ’65, and the editor of the magazine Tennis Week, was summoned from his tournament duties on the morning of the finals to play in a doubles match with the President. “What happened,” Scott said the other day, “was that my partner, Gennady Burbulis, the former State Secretary, and I had won the pro-celebrity tournament, which is called the Big Hat. The winners put on this huge hat with two holes for their heads, and the photographers take pictures. Quite ridiculous—cartoonish. At any rate, we were challenged by Yeltsin and his partner, Shamil Tarpishev, a former Davis Cup player and a former captain of the U.S.S.R. team. They hadn’t played in the Big Hat—Yeltsin apparently didn’t want to play in public.”

  The match took place on an indoor court. Each player had a separate three-room suite in which to change, and while Scott was getting into his tennis clothes Tarpishev invited himself in and began talking about Yeltsin’s game. The gist of it was that the President had been in an automobile accident a few months before, and his back was in bad shape. Thus he didn’t like high shots to his backhand; didn’t like balls hit to him with big topspin; didn’t mind short lobs; but certainly did mind those that were deep and threatened to go over his head. It was during this litany that Scott realized that what he was being asked to do was not to hit to Yeltsin’s weaknesses. Quite to the contrary, he was supposed to set him up—like serving up clay pigeons. “I’ve been in a number of situations like this before,” Scott said. “Pro-am tournaments, or corporate outings where you were expected to dump one to please the C.E.O. I would start off with noble intentions, but in the end my competitive instincts would take over. Never had I thrown a match, and I wasn’t sure about this one.”

  The four competitors met out by the net. Yeltsin was wearing Adidas sneakers and socks, Reebok outerwear, and a Fila shirt, and was carrying a Prince racquet. “Physically, he’s very impressive,” Scott recalled. “He’s six four, and he stands unbelievably erect, as if he had a steel pipe in his back. His hands are huge and enveloped mine when we shook hands at the net. In stride he reminded me of Don Budge, who always moved in the gait of a champion, even long after his retirement.”

  THE four men went out onto the court to warm up. “I felt I was inside a pinball machine,” Scott remembered. “Yeltsin’s idea is to hit every ball as hard as he can. They were careening off the walls. He was quite undaunted—big smile, and then he’d crack another. I was reminded of the two theories about learning golf: one of them is that you start off with a slow, easy swing, eventually increasing it to full power, but the problem here is that you pick up mistakes as you increase the swing. The other theory, totally contradictory, is that you start by belting the ball hard, the idea being that if you can groove the swing you haven’t had the opportunity to cultivate errors. This latter is the Yeltsin principle.”

  In the match itself, there were a lot of double faults and a number of aces, even against as skillful a retriever as Scott. “He could really fire them,” Scott said. “Hit or miss. A number of the aces weren’t really aces, though. Part of the deal was that he had to win his serve, so that when one of those blinding second serves would miss a line by a foot or so, the idea was to raise a hand and call out ‘Khorosho,’ which means ‘good,’ or even ‘Ochen khorosho,’ which means ‘very good.’ Yeltsin never seemed to complain about these odd calls. He’s very competitive.”

  Rather as predicted, the Yeltsin-Tarpishev team prevailed.

  “It was an interesting experience,” Scott said. “But you won’t catch me doing anything like that again unless Yeltsin is involved. I enjoyed him. His tennis is rather like George Bush’s. Both have an exaggerated sense of how good they are, which makes them more effective players. They’d have a really good match.”

  Gene Scott got his Christmas-card picture. Seated right behind Yeltsin at the Olympic arena, he leaned forward so that the photographer courtside snapped him in conversation.

  “I was saying, ‘Ochen khorosho,’ ” he said.

  1995

  THE SHIT-KICKERS OF MADISON AVENUE — Lillian Ross

  THE tenth graders heading up Madison Avenue at 7:30 A.M. to the private high schools are freshly liberated from their dental braces, and their teeth look pearly and magnificent. They are fifteen years old. During the week, they arrive, by bus or on foot, singly or in pairs or in clusters, and they make their way up the west side of Madison—they call it the “cool” side—toward their schools: Dalton, on East Eighty-ninth; Sacred Heart and Spence, on East Ninety-first; Nightingale-Barnford, on East Ninety-second; the Lycée Français, on East Ninety-fifth. Brearley and Chapin are farther east; Collegiate, Columbia Prep, and Trinity are in the west; Browning is south; Horace Mann, Riverdale, and Fieldston are in the north. On the weekends, the tenth graders from all points will find a way to get together. Today is only Tuesday.

  Boys and girls spill out of the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown buses at Madison Avenue and join the flow of their counterparts heading north. The walking tenth graders greet one another in soft, kindly rhythms, in polite, gentle tones. The boys greet one another with high fives. Girls with girls and girls with boys bestow quick, sweet kisses on one another’s cheeks—some cheeks still not completely rid of hints of baby fat. No routine air kisses from these kids. Their kisses are heartfelt, making their unity, their devotion to and trust in one another, palpable. Kisses from their mouths are like the cool little first nippy smacks of a very young baby.

  MOST of the tenth graders are in the habit of leaving home without eating any breakfast. Still in clusters, with fifteen minutes to get to school, they pause in doorways. One girl in a cluster of five takes out a pack of Marlboro Lights— the brand favored at the moment—and each member of the cluster participates in lighting the cigarette, striking the match, guarding the flame, offering a propane lighter. They share. The lighted cigarette is passed from mouth to mouth. They all inhale, the girls twisting their mouths like tough pros, exhaling the smoke from a tiny corner opening on one side of the lips.

  One angelic-looking blond beauty with raw, red nostrils takes a puff, inhales deeply, and says wearily, “I’ve like got the fucking flu or something.”

  “Fuck the you know fucking germs,” another one says smoothly, reassuringly, a positive reinforcer.

  “I got home like three?” another member of the cluster says, making her statement in the form of a question. “I sweat Henry? Who you sweat? Anybody?”

  The others regard her skeptically. “Nobody,” one says.

  “I sweat the shit out of Henry,” the one who got home at three says mildly.

  On the feet of all the members of this cluster are boots, not quite Timberland. The girls, some wearing black panty hose or black kneesocks, have on chic black laceups, all with Vibram soles, all with steel tips. One girl wearing laceups two feet high lifts a knee, turning the booted foot this way and that. “New shit-kickers!” she squeals, but in subdued, ladylike tones.

  “Cool,” the angelic-looking one with the flu says. “Cool shit-kickers.”

  They crush out their shared cigarette with the heels of their shit-kickers, and they go to school.

  WHENEVER the tenth graders have a break in their school program, and daily at 12:35 P.M., they head for one of their hangouts. The second floor of Jackson Hole, at the southwest corner of Ninety-first and Madison, is in at the moment. On this Tuesday, at 12:36 P.M., six four-place tables and a couple of two-place tables, accommodating twenty-eight customers, are filled. Ketchup bottles absolutely full are at the ready on every table. A teen-age Al Pacino– look-alike waiter serves them their first meal of the day: lone platters of ketchup-doused French fries or fried onion rings, or combo French fries and onion rings, and Cokes. A late arrival, dark-eyed, and smaller and chubbier than the ones settled in, turns up, and a place is found for her. Tearfully, she reports that her French teacher sprang a surprise test on her class, and she thinks she did badly on it.

  “Don’t like get fucking
stressed out,” a girl says, offering that same kindly positive reinforcement.

  “Fucking teachers,” a companion says, chewing on a fry and simultaneously taking a drag on a cigarette and passing it on. “I’m on my way you know to lunch, and the fucking teacher asks where I’m going?” The statements continue to sound as though they were questions. “I don’t want teachers being like into my you know business?”

  “I miss the teacher who used to be a model and then left the school and went to Africa to be a nun?” someone says. “She would like talk you know about her experiences? She was very like open to everybody?” The others at the table and the girls at all the other tables agree that they miss the teacher who went to Africa to be a nun.

  One of the girls, very pretty, with long dark hair, is “presenting” a party and hands out printed invitations. She has dark glasses pushed up on top of her hair. She wears silver loop earrings, a double in the left ear, a single in the right. At her throat hangs a large wooden cross. The invitation shows a picture of Stonehenge on one side, and the other side has a long list of names of people supporting the party, which has a title: “The Farside.”