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

by Lillian Ross

  “I can’t go to the party?” one of the fifteen-year-olds says. “My father grounded me? Because I was smoking?”

  “My mom is trying to like ship me off to a fucking school in fucking Spain?” another girl says. “Unless I you know quit smoking?”

  “I want to quit, but I can’t? I don’t have a choice? It’s too late?” one fatalist says.

  The party entrepreneur explains that she is working with six other presenters to spread the invitations around, to telephone friends at the schools to the east, west, north, and south, and to obtain the services of a really topnotch d.j. They are working with a well-to-do party producer, whose take of the proceeds will be forty per cent, the balance to be divided evenly among the seven presenters. Admission to the party will be twelve dollars per person.

  “This rich, older guy is like experienced you know?” she says. “He’s twenty-nine?”

  The mention of the number draws forth gasps.

  “Fucking twenty-nine,” one of the girls says. “That’s the age of those actors in that mindless ‘90210’ or that mindless ‘Melrose Place.’ They’re twenty-nine, and they’re like playing our age.”

  At any rate, there are plans to be made. The party is going to start at 10 P.M. The girls will spend the afternoon before in preparations.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” the entrepreneur says. “We need five hours. You three come to my house you know at five? You bring all your clothes? I take everything out of my closet and spread everything out on the floor? We try on all the stuff? Depending on what kind of mood we’re in, we make our selection?”

  “We have to be fucking blunt,” one of the potential guests says. “About what like looks good on us.”

  “Then we take showers? Half an hour? Then we like shave our legs? Half an hour? Then we like put cream on our legs? Half an hour? Then we call up everybody who’s been like grounded? We talk to them for at least an hour? Maybe we give them an hour and a half? Then we go out and buy a quart of vodka and some orange juice and cranberry juice? Then we go to somebody else’s house and drink vodka with orange juice or vodka and cranberry juice? Then we get dressed? Then we get another quart of vodka and go to somebody else’s house? We become like outgoing? And we make calls to friends and invite them over? By then, we’ll be ready to go?”

  ON the first school day after the weekend, promptly at 12:36 P.M., the tenth graders are back in place at Jackson Hole, smoking, chewing gum, eating fries and onion rings, and reviewing the party. “I like feel real ripped off?” the young Farside presenter-entrepreneur is saying. “Too many people came to the party, which was at this nice club on West Forty-seventh Street? There were hundreds pushing and shoving and clogging the street, and the police came? And they said we had to be carded, because they had a bar? And we you know didn’t like have cards, so this twenty-nine-year-old rich guy said the fee for getting the club had to be raised from three thousand dollars to eight thousand dollars, because they had to close the bar and were not allowed you know to sell us drinks? And everybody had to pay twenty dollars instead of twelve dollars just to get in? So, but even so, nobody like wanted to leave? And it was so crowded you couldn’t even dance? And at the end of it the twenty-nine-year-old rich guy took forty per cent, and all I got was about fifty fucking dollars, after I did all the fucking work and made a million phone calls?”

  She chews on a French fry, accepts a glowing Marlboro Light from the girl beside her at the table, and takes a quick puff. The chubby, dark-eyed girl who was stressed out by her French teacher comes over from another table and gives the entrepreneur a soft, comforting kiss on the cheek, and one by one all the other tenth graders in the area come over and do the same.

  1995

  AFTER MIDNIGHT — William Finnegan

  HIGH above the East River, on a dark maintenance platform under a well-known bridge, a young jeweller named Gregory crouched and, with the help of a flashlight, studied a fat rubber cord. This was long after midnight a couple of weeks ago. All around Gregory, shadowy figures climbed ladders, spread tarps, covered girders with blankets, and rigged complicated harnesses. Gregory, his jeweller’s concentration fully engaged, inspected the cord—forty feet long unflexed—lying coiled on the platform. It was composed of hundreds of thin beige strands, cinched together every foot or so. There was a fair amount of fraying, particularly toward one end. Gregory fingered the busted strands thoughtfully. Did he really want to bet his life on this thing?

  A few feet above his head, trains and cars roared and whined, shaking the platform. Nearby, a steel floor plate had been removed and a coffin-size hole yawned. A hundred and thirty-five feet below, the river’s surface, seen through the hole, looked solid, a whorled gray slab in the yellow lights of the Brooklyn waterfront. There was a police car parked on the waterfront, near the base of the bridge. One of Gregory’s confederates, a bartender and college student named Ian, was monitoring the police car through a pair of binoculars while listening to police-radio transmissions on a pair of headphones. Such, such are the rigors and peculiar precautions of guerrilla bungee-jumping.

  The owner of the cord was Michael O’Mahony, a former tent rigger for the Big Apple Circus. Brooklyn-born and bred, thirty years old, he was also the evening’s jumpmaster. When he had finished rigging harnesses, he addressed the group. “This will happen fast,” he said. “We got eight people jumping tonight. Some of you, it’s your first time, I know, and you may feel you need some extra time, but, with the cops sitting down there, I could be making a two-thousand-dollar mistake, so it’s three minutes in the hole each person. If you haven’t jumped after three minutes, I’ll pull you out of there, right? Now, I’m going first. Who’s going second?”

  “I’ll go second,” Gregory said. The cord had apparently passed inspection.

  O’Mahony set a blue night-light on a girder and demonstrated how to hook a carabiner from the jump harness to a retrieval rig that would be lowered to him. Tall and thin, with a huge head of red curls, O’Mahony made an unlikely drill sergeant, but he had plenty of commando intensity. “This life jacket has a beacon,” he said, flicking on a bright light attached to his chest. “I’ve never had an accident on one of my jumps, but if something happens and you do hit the water, hit the beacon. You’ll find razors in the pocket here. Use them to cut the cord, then kick toward shore. I’ll call 911 on this cell phone. A speedboat will come.”

  O’Mahony moved to the hole in the platform, stepping carefully through it to stand on a pair of light crossbars a foot or two beneath the floor. The cord hung from his waist in a thick, vaguely obscene forty-foot loop. “Boat check!” he called.

  Two people crawled away to scan the river. If O’Mahony was a strange-looking sergeant, he had some appropriately improbable recruits. They included Alison, a fashion model with slim hips and a dry wit; Eric, an angel-faced motorcycle racer with a long blond ponytail; Chris, a round-faced bicycle salesman who admitted to “a profound fear of heights”; and Jon, a film-prop builder with the poise of a ballet dancer, a tiny steel barbell through his left eyebrow, and a powerful physique.

  O’Mahony, who has led some twenty late-night bridge expeditions, finds his jumpers where he can—“I just look for people who seem ready to get out past the outer edge of life somewhat,” he says—and he claims to get an astounding positive-response rate to his invitations. (Astounding, that is, when one considers that he is proposing something illegal, dangerous, unremunerative, and terrifying.) He does it, apparently, just for the adrenaline hell of it. “And because I can,” he says. The hipster individualists whom he drafts seem surprisingly ready to submit to military-type discipline. At least, they seemed so that night—stealthily climbing catwalks onto the bridge in teams of three, giving come-aheads over walkie-talkies, using code names like Mr. Red and Mr. Black without a smirk.

  The lookouts came clambering back across the platform. “No boats down-river.” “Nothing upriver.”

  O’Mahony bent his big head and seemed to disapp
ear into himself. A tarp snapped in the wind. Nobody spoke. Finally, O’Mahony jumped up slightly, brought his feet together, and was gone. He fell swiftly toward the swirling gray slab of river, his uplifted face shrinking to dot size with alarming speed. Then the cord reached its limit—a hundred and twenty feet—and he came bouncing back toward the bridge. The group peering through the hole gave a sharp collective exhalation. A few more vast human-yo-yo bounces, and it was time to send down the recovery rig. Under the direction of Glenn Vegezzi, an experienced jumper, who was the night’s second-in-command, O’Mahony was hauled back to the platform. When he arrived, grinning maniacally, he seemed, if such a thing were possible, even more wired than before.

  Gregory, who was making his first jump ever, did not use a large fraction of his allotted three minutes in the hole. Talking into a tape recorder, he answered some questions from O’Mahony about his vital statistics, plus one about whether he was making this jump of his own free will. Then he was gone.

  After he returned, he shyly reported feeling “hyper-alert.”

  All the jumps went smoothly. The hard part, clearly, was the waiting. Jon, the film-prop builder, hunkered in the dark, silently chain-smoking, for at least an hour. Then, when his turn came to jump, a party boat appeared, chugging slowly upriver, its lights pulsating, and he had to wait, already harnessed to the cord, for many more long minutes. After his jump, his friend Alison took him aside and solemnly kissed him on the mouth.

  Chris, when his turn came, muttered that he had “the shakes,” and went back to the end of the line.

  Alison vamped while O’Mahony cinched the harness on her, fore and aft, and when, as she stood in the hole, he asked her age, she said, “I hope to be twenty-nine soon.” To the will-and-volition question, she replied, “Utterly, dude.”

  This was her second jump. She leaped with style.

  Chris went last. As he stood in the hole, answering questions for the tape recorder, O’Mahony said to him, “You are not going to die tonight.” Chris looked unconvinced. When he finally jumped, he disobeyed instructions and grabbed the cord, mildly abrading his forearm, and when the recovery rig was lowered he was disoriented and had trouble attaching the carabiner.

  The eastern sky was whitening as Chris was hauled back up through the platform floor. The police car was still parked on the waterfront. O’Mahony, becoming frantic about the dissipating darkness, directed a furious restoration of the platform, replacing the floor plate, packing up his equipment, and putting all the tarps and ladders back where the bridge workers had left them. Then the group moved out, jogging silently down the catwalks in teams of three, reconvening briefly at the base of the bridge for handshakes and goodbyes, then melting off in different directions into the dawn-crisp city.

  1995

  A BATTALION OF BELLAS — James Traub

  “THE world is suffering a global nervous breakdown,” Bella Abzug barks. You may remember Abzug as the human bullhorn of the nineteen-sixties and seventies: congresswoman, feminist at the barricades, and living symbol of the brassiness and bravado of her native New York. Now, at seventy-five, she has traded in the bullhorn for a fax machine and has gone international. As co-founder of the Women’s Environment & Development Organization, Abzug organizes women around such global issues as economic development and access to political power. Late last week, she left for the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, where she plans to hold the world’s feet to the fire on pretty much every issue you can think of.

  Though not quite the volcanic force she once was, Abzug is still a seriously blunt instrument. On a recent afternoon, she was sitting in her crowded midtown office wearing a three-piece purple silk suit, purple platform shoes, and a straw hat—the signature Abzug accessory—with a parrot-green brim and a purple crown. A purple crystal dangled from a chain around her neck. “It’s supposed to have calming qualities,” she said with a derisive laugh. Serenity is not in her repertoire.

  At the moment, Abzug was exercised over suggestions that Hillary Clinton ought not to attend the Beijing conference, because the Administration was at odds with China over human-rights issues. (The Chinese had not yet released Harry Wu.) “It’s political!” she rasped, throwing out her hands in the classic New York go-soak-your-head gesture. “She’s not there on a diplomatic mission. She’s there to join women and their government delegations to see what they can do to improve the conditions of women and children, which she’s been working on all her life.” Reminded that the President’s own Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, had expressed concern about the First Lady’s plans, Abzug rolled her eyes beneath a cloud of gray hair and said, “He’s a fuddyduddy. He doesn’t get it.”

  Lining a narrow corridor outside Abzug’s office were boxes of literature waiting to be shipped off to Beijing. WEDO, as her group is called, will be playing a central role for the thirty-five thousand members of nongovernmental organizations expected to converge on the conference. “We’ve had a lot of words on equality,” Abzug says. “Now we want the music, which is action.” WEDO will be coordinating strategy among the N.G.O.s and convening a daily Women’s Linkage Caucus; a giant scoreboard will list the dozen planks in the momentous-sounding Plan of Action the conference is to adopt, and will chart the specific commitments made by various nations. Abzug’s faith that nations will make serious efforts to eradicate poverty or restrain “corporate greed” or cut defense spending just because they’ve pledged to do so seems almost touching, but she insists that words publicly uttered take on a real moral force. And women, she says, “are being mobilized by these meetings like crazy, all over the world.”

  BELLA ABZUG has been Bella Abzug for so many years now that she has apparently become not only an icon but an international brand name. At a recent meeting, she reports, “this young woman came in and said, ‘Hi, I’m the Bella Abzug of Mongolia.’ ” WEDO itself represents a convening of such Bellas-in-training. After she finished talking, Abzug heaved herself to her feet and proudly introduced her colleagues, who included young women from Louisiana, Tanzania, Bangladesh, India, Korea, and Turkey. They represented the future; but Abzug also carries her past with her. WEDO’s other co-founder is Mim Kelber, a friend of hers from Hunter College, and one of the volunteers is Eva Lederman, who was Abzug’s high-school gym teacher, and who, at seventy-nine, remains dauntingly trim. Bella, she reports, was a terrific dancer.

  1995

  A DICKENSIAN TASK — Brendan Gill

  MANY people fear that our ever-increasing dependence on computers will have an adverse effect on traditional intellectual pursuits, but among much evidence to the contrary is the forthcoming publication of a three-volume work of literary scholarship entitled “Everyone in Dickens,” which would have been impossible to accomplish in a single lifetime without the aid of a computer. In this work, published by Greenwood Press with a list price of two hundred and seventy-five dollars, a sixty-four-year-old white-bearded pianist-singer-soldier-lawyer-banker-bibliophile named George Newlin lists thirteen thousand one hundred and forty-three names of characters, fictional and nonfictional, that appear somewhere in the vast Charles Dickens œuvre, whether in his novels, magazine articles, speeches, plays, poetry, or collaborations. Twelve separate indexes identify characters by name, family relationships, and occupation, and also give a one-line description that leads elsewhere in the text to more lengthy descriptions of them in Dickens’s own words. And if, as a Dickens addict, you recall a favorite beadle or undertaker who happens not to have achieved the dignity of a name, Newlin has listed over four thousand of these humble folk according to their occupations. He also finds room in his twenty-five hundred and sixty-eight pages to deal with topics like “Major Characters’ Names Used Only Once,” “Striking Omissions in Characters’ Given Names,” and “Pet and Other Animal Names.”

  It was Newlin’s trusty computer that enabled him to organize the immense mass of Dickens material, searching out a word with the tap of a single key, shifting thousands of words i
n bulk from one place to another with another tap, and so by electronic manipulation avoiding the repetitious donkeywork imposed on scholars in earlier times. He undertook the task as a consequence of becoming obsessed with Dickens seven years ago, when the breakup of his marriage prompted him to seek emotional refuge in his library. Among the books he turned to was “The Old Curiosity Shop,” and he found it a far better novel than he had remembered. Armed with blocks of yellow and blue Post-its, he kept marking passages that he might one day wish to return to. Before he knew it, he had launched himself on a new career. Having already taken care to accumulate what he calls “an adequate cushion” in the world of finance, he set out, as an amateur scholar, to devote himself to a project that many Dickens academic scholars had dreamed of but had assumed to be unthinkably difficult.

  Specifically, what made it possible for Newlin to complete the task in six years was his now archaic Macintosh SE and an equally archaic ink-jet printer. “Every word, every punctuation mark was typed by me,” he says. “I’ve been a concert pianist, and probably for that reason I became a rapid typist and often had to wait for my screen to show me what I’d already written. Today I am in a position to take advantage of a laser printer, and can work much faster than I used to.”

  Which is Newlin’s way of hinting that the Dickens obsession has not yet run its course, and that the publication of a fourth volume, which Newlin tentatively calls “A Dickens Topicon,” can be looked for within a year or so. The “Topicon”—the title is a Newlin neologism—will be a thematic concordance dealing with every aspect of life that Dickens happened to note and set down except people: places, social conditions, inventions, and the like. Once that task has been accomplished, other authors in need of Newlinian analysis hover invitingly on the horizon. Backed by the latest resources of computerization, Newlin contemplates taking on Thackeray, Trollope, and George Eliot. He flexes his fingers over an imaginary keyboard and exclaims, “I can hardly wait.”