The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  Somehow she had managed to make it all look beautiful, Japanese globe lamps made of balsa strips and paper, greenery, great lush fronds of some kind of plant, several prints on the wall, one an insanely erotic water-color nude by Egon Schiele, various hangings, coverings, drapings of primitive textiles, monk’s cloth, homespuns, a little vase full of violet paper flowers, a bookcase, painted white, full of heavyweight, or middleweight, paperback books, The Lonely Crowd, The Confessions of Felix Krull, African Genesis—brave and tender!—all of these lithe young girls living in dreadful walk-up flats, alone, with a cat, and the faint odor of cat feces in the Kitty Litter, and an oily wooden salad bowl on the table, and a cockroach silhouetted on the rim of the salad bowl—and yet there was something touching about it, haunting, he wanted to say, the desperate fight to stay in New York amid the excitement of money and power, the Big Apple, and for days, if he is to be honest about it, he had the most inexplicably tender memory of—all right!—the poor sad way the water had lazed down in the toilet bowl. That poor, marvelous, erotic girl. At one point she had told him she had learned to put a diaphragm on in 15 seconds. She just said it, out of thin air. So bald.

  Early the next morning he took a cab back to his hotel to change for the day and the driver tried to project the thing in manic bursts through the rush-hour traffic, lurches of acceleration, sudden braking, skids, screeches, all the while shouting out the window, cursing and then demanding support from him—“Dja see that! Guy got his head up his ass. Am I right?”—and strangely, he found himself having a thoroughly American reaction, actually answering these stupid questions because he wanted to be approved of by this poor bastard trying to hurtle through the money-and-power traffic, answering a cab driver who said, “Guy got his head up his ass, am I right”—because suddenly he found himself close to the source, he understood this thing—the hell with scarves, Pitt Clubs and pale silk ties, and watch out England, you got your head up your ass, and here comes a Mid-Atlantic Man.

  His career back with the———Agency in London picked up brilliantly for Mid-Atlantic Man. His momentum was tremendous when he came back. London was a torpid little town on a river. He began to cultivate the American members of the firm. Certain things about the advertising business that he had never been able to stomach, really, but nevertheless swallowed silently—suddenly he began to realize that what it was, these things were American, bald and cynical, only now he … understood. Yea-saying!

  There was one American woman in the firm, and in the most unconcerned way she would talk about the opening of a big new American hotel that had gone up in London and how the invitation list was divided into (1) Celebrities, (2) VIPs, (3) CIPs and (4) just Guests. Things like that used to make his flesh crawl, but now—now—the beautiful part was the CIPs—Commercially Important People, people important to the hotel for business reasons but whose names meant nothing in terms of publicity, however. Marvelous!

  He got to be a good friend of hers. One day they went out to lunch, and there were a lot of people on the footpaths, and suddenly she spotted a woman about 20 feet away and said, “Look at her! The perfect C-1.” One of the innovations, for the purpose of surveys and aiming campaigns accurately, had been to break down consumers into four categories: A, B, C-1 and C-2. A was upper class, B was middle class, C-1 was upper working class or lower middle class, in that range, and C-2 was plain working class.

  “The perfect C-1!” she said.

  “The perfect C-1?”

  “Yes! Look. She’s done her hair herself. She’s wearing a Marks & Spencer knitted dress. She bought her shoes at Lotus. She’s carrying a shopping basket”—with this she moved right up next to the woman and looked in the shopping basket—“she’s bought pre-cut wrapped bread”—she only barely turns back to him to announce all this out loud—“she’s bought a box of Wiz detergent with five free plastic daffodils inside”—and the poor woman wheels her head around resentfully—but he wants to shout for joy: Bald! Delicious! A running commentary on a London street about a perfect C-1!

  That night he took her to the———Trattoria, underneath those inevitable white plaster arches and black metal cylinder lamps. He came on breezy, first-naming the waiters as he walked in, like … a pal. Over the avocado vinaigrette he told her, conspiratorially, that the Agency was still hopelessly backward because it was run, in England, by the kind of Englishmen who think a successful business is one where you can get educated men to work for you for £2,000 a year and come to work dressed as if they make £10,000. After the wine he told her: “I’ve got the neuroses of New York and the decadence of London.”

  She thought that was—god!—great. So he sprang it, spontaneously as he could manage it, on many occasions thereafter. He also took to wearing black knit ties. Somehow they have become the insignia of Mid-Atlantic Man. He got the idea from David Frost, who always wore one.

  Instead of using Cockney or Liverpool slang for humorous effect, narked, knickers-job and all that, he began using American hip-lower-class slang, like, I mean, you know, baby, and a little late Madison Avenue. “Why, don’t we throw it—” he would be speaking of somebody’s idea—“and see if it skips across the pond.” He always brought the latest American rock ‘n’ roll records back with him from New York, plus a lot of news of discotheques, underground movies, and people like Andy, Jane, Borden, Olivier. He always made a big point of telling everyone that he was expecting a call from New York, from David—and everyone knew this was a big New York advertising man—David!—David!—New York! New York!—hot line to the source! —land of flamingo legs and glass cliffs!—mine! mine!—

  But then there were a few disquieting developments. The waiters at the———Trattoria began treating him like an American. He would come on all pally—and they would do things like this: He would order some esoteric wine, Château whateveritwas, and they would bring him a bottle and pour out a little in his glass and he would taste it and pronounce it good and then one of his … pals, a waiter, would say, right out loud, in front of the girl he was with: We didn’t have any more Château whateveritwas, sir, so I brought you Château thing, I hope it’s all right, sir. All he can do is sit there and nod like a fool, because he has already tasted it and pronounced it good Château whateveritwas—oh Christ.

  And then, at the Agency, the Americans began to treat him as one of them. There was this stupid moment when A—, an American who ranged just above him, was going off on holiday, and he said to him, very solemnly, in front of several Englishmen:

  “Think about Pube-Glo for me while I’m gone.”

  Not “think about the Pube-Glo account” or “work on the Pube-Glo campaign,” but think about Pube-Glo, with that pure, simple American double-think loyalty to the product itself. He had to stand there, in front of other Englishmen, and solemnly agree to think about Pube-Glo. What was worse, he would have to show some evidence of having thought about Pube-Glo when A—came back, which meant he would actually have to spend time out of his life thinking about this vile fake-erotic concoction named Pube-Glo.

  The hell of it was, he gradually found himself thinking English, not necessarily wisely, but rather fundamentally. Two New York Italians came over to take over—“hype up” was the term transmitted from New York—the art department, and he looked at them. They were dressed in flash clothes, sort of Sy Devore of Hollywood style, wearing tight pants like a chubby hairdresser, and right away they began changing this and that, like some sort of colonial inspector generals. They were creeps even by New York standards. Even? Where was his love of that delicious, cynical … baldness …

  Part of it was back in New York trampled to death. Jaysus, he didn’t want to say anything, but the more he went to New York … sometimes the whole … attitude in New York was hard to take. He was in New York, staying at George’s big apartment on East 57th Street, and he had to get out to the airport. He had two huge heavy bags because it was just before Christmas and he was bringing back all sorts of things. So he half trundled them
out to the elevator, and at length it arrived and he said to the elevator man: “Could you give me a hand with these, please?”

  “I’m sorry, Mac,” the elevator man said, “I can’t leave this elevator. My job is running this elevator. It’s against the law, I can’t leave a running elevator,” and so forth and so on, even after he had dragged the bags on himself, a lecture all the way down.

  At the ground floor the doorman opened the door for him but looked at the bags as if they were covered with flies. Outside it was slushy and rainy, and there was a pond of slush out from the curb. So he said to the doorman—this time summoning up the ancient accent of British command:

  “Could you get me a cab, please.”

  “No, I couldn’t,” the man says, with just a hint of mockery. “I would, Buddy, but I can’t. I can’t get no cab on a night like this. You’ll have to take your best shot.”

  Finally he flags down a cab, and both the doorman and the driver watch, with great logistic interest, as he navigates the bags through the pond of slush, getting his shoes and socks wet. In the cab he tells the man he wants to go to the airport, and he answers, in a hideous impersonation of a Cockney accent:

  “Ow-kay, guv.”

  Then he turns up the car radio very loud to WQXR, the classical music station, apparently to impress him. The piece is something horribly morose by that old fraud Stravinsky.

  Back in London he learns that a few changes have taken place. The Hon.———, a melon-jawed ball of fire who is 31 and once had a job doing whatever it was, somewhere, has been brought in at a high level as a “consultant,” and so has young Lady———. Meantime, Peter ———, an Etonian, an Oxonian, first cousin of Lord———, has suddenly been elevated to his level after ten months with the firm. And gradually it becomes obvious. Advertising may be a new industry, it may be an American art, it may be a triumph of the New World, but in the competition for new accounts, the clients—English new money as well as foreign clients—they want to be dealing with an upper-class Englishman, want to feel they are buying upper-class treatment for their £20,000 or whatever, want to let their blood vessels dilate and their egos dilate over lunch at the Connaught with upper-class Englishmen—

  —but wait a minute, it can’t all go back to that, he will hang in there, try to get that inviolable feeling again, the best of both worlds, and here amid the lyre-splat chairs, the bullion-fringe curtains, the old blacky Raeburn-style portraits, Roger! Have you met George? Cyril! Have you met George? Keith! Have you—

  —and Peter. Pe-t-e-r … he watches Peter’s lip curdle. It is as if it is taking forever, as in a Cocteau film, old George’s eyes are frozen in the panic-grinning bobble, and—oh God of Fabrilex!—none of these smart bastards are coming over for sherry after all, are they, ever, ever.

  The Generation Gap

  On Parents Day

  “Puh-leeze, Mummy, nobody wants to hear about coke, Acapulco, or Fleetwood Mac.”

  ON THE BUS

  j

  I couldn’t tell you for sure which of the Merry Pranksters got the idea for the bus, but it had the Babbs touch. It was a superprank, in any case. The original fantasy, here in the spring of 1964, had been that Kesey and four or five others would get a station wagon and drive to New York for the New York World’s Fair. On the way they could shoot some film, make some tapes, freak out on the Fair and see what happened. They would also be on hand, in New York, for the publication of Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, early in July. So went the original fantasy.

  Then somebody—Babbs?—saw a classified ad for a 1939 International Harvester school bus. The bus belonged to a man in Menlo Park. He had a big house and a lot of grounds and a nice set of tweeds and flannels and eleven children. He had rigged out the bus for the children. It had bunks and benches and a refrigerator and a sink for washing dishes and cabinets and shelves and a lot of other nice features for living on the road. Kesey bought it for $1,500—in the name of Intrepid Trips, Inc.

  Kesey gave the word and the Pranksters set upon it one afternoon. They started painting it and wiring it for sound and cutting a hole in the roof and fixing up the top of the bus so you could sit up there in the open air and play music, even a set of drums and electric guitars and electric bass and so forth, or just ride. Sandy went to work on the wiring and rigged up a system with which they could broadcast from inside the bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it would blast outside over powerful speakers on top of the bus. There were also microphones outside that would pick up sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the bus. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road. You could also broadcast over a tape mechanism so that you said something, then heard your own voice a second later in variable lag and could rap off of that if you wanted to. Or you could put on earphones and rap simultaneously off sounds from outside, coming in one ear, and sounds from inside, your own sounds, coming in the other ear. There was going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn’t tune in on and rap off of.

  The painting job, meanwhile, with everybody pitching in in a frenzy of primary colors, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, was sloppy as hell, except for the parts Roy Seburn did, which were nice manic mandalas. Well, it was sloppy, but one thing you had to say for it; it was freaking lurid. The manifest, the destination sign in the front, read: “Furthur,” with two u’s.

  They took a test run up into northern California and right away this wild-looking thing with wild-looking people was great for stirring up consternation and vague befuddling resentment among the citizens. The Pranksters were now out among them, and it was exhilarating—look at the mothers staring!—and there was going to be holy terror in the land. But there would also be people who would look up out of their poor work-a-daddy lives in some town, some old guy, somebody’s stenographer, and see this bus and register … delight, or just pure open-invitation wonder. Either way, the Intrepid Travelers figured, there was hope for these people. They weren’t totally turned off. The bus also had great possibilities for altering the usual order of things. For example, there were the cops.

  One afternoon the Pranksters were on a test run in the bus going through the woods up north and a forest fire had started. There was smoke beginning to pour out of the woods and everything. Everybody on the bus had taken acid and they were zonked. The acid was in some orange juice in the refrigerator and you drank a paper cup full of it and you were zonked. Cassady was driving and barreling through the burning woods wrenching the steering wheel this way and that way to his inner-wired beat, with a siren wailing and sailing through the rhythm.

  A siren? It’s a highway patrolman, which immediately seems like the funniest thing in the history of the world. Smoke is pouring out of the woods and they are all sailing through leaf explosions in the sky, but the cop is bugged about this freaking bus. The cop yanks the bus over to the side and he starts going through a kind of traffic-safety inspection of the big gross bus, while more and more of the smoke is billowing out of the woods. Man, the license plate is on wrong and there’s no light over the license plate and this turn signal looks bad and how about the brakes, let’s see that hand brake there. Cassady, the driver, is already into a long monologue for the guy, only he is throwing in all kinds of sirs: “Well, yes sir, this is a Hammond bi-valve serrated brake, you understand, sir, had it put on in a truck ro-de-o in Springfield, Oregon, had to back through a slalom course of baby’s bottles and yellow nappies, in the existential culmination of Oregon, lots of outhouse freaks up there, you understand, sir, a punctual sort of a state, sir, yes, sir, holds to 28,000 pounds, 28,000 pounds, you just look right here, sir, tested by a pure-blooded Shell Station attendant in Springfield, Oregon, winter of ’62, his gumball boots never froze, you understand, sir, 28,000 pounds hold, right here—” Whereupon he yanks back on the hand-brake handle as if it’s attached to something
, which it isn’t, it is just dangling there, and jams his foot on the regular brake, and the bus shudders as if the hand brake has a hell of a bite, but the cop is thoroughly befuddled now, anyway, because Cassady’s monologue has confused him, for one thing, and what the hell are these … people doing. By this time everybody is off the bus rolling in the brown grass by the shoulder, laughing, giggling, yahooing, zonked to the skies on acid, because, mon, the woods are burning, the whole world is on fire, and a Cassady monologue on automotive safety is rising up from out of his throat like weenie smoke, as if the great god Speed were frying in his innards, and the cop, representative of the people of California in this total freaking situation, is all hung up on a hand brake that doesn’t exist in the first place. And the cop, all he can see is a bunch of crazies in screaming orange and green costumes, masks, boys and girls, men and women, twelve or fourteen of them, lying in the grass and making hideously crazy sounds—christ almighty, why the hell does he have to contend with … So he wheels around and says, “What are you, uh—show people?”

  “That’s right, officer,” Kesey says. “We’re show people. It’s been a long row to hoe, I can tell you, and it’s gonna be a long row to hoe, but that’s the business.”

  “Well,” says the cop, “you fix up those things and …” He starts backing off toward his car, cutting one last look at the crazies. “ … And watch it next time …” And he guns on off.