A Fistful of Fig Newtons (2 page)

Other victims of tunnel madness have an uncontrollable urge to blow their horns, apparently in the feeble hope that the echoing din will reassure them that they are still alive. I’ve always thought that a deep study of the effect of long, sinister tunnels on the mind of commuters would be a valuable one, perhaps giving us a clue to the rising incidence of madness, breakdowns, and broken marriages among ex-urbanites
.

I crept forward. Overhead, little yellow lights blinked, indicating some poor bastard was in trouble ahead
.

Purgatory. That’s what the tunnel is. I’m suspended between heaven and hell; no time, no seasons, accompanied only by my sins and fears. My personal tunnel defense has evolved over years of driving. I let my mind roam free as a bird, shutting out the gloomy Now
.

Ahead of me in a heavily souped-up Dodge Charger (a true Kid car), a crowd of male college students swilled cans of Budweiser. A peeling decal on the rear window read RUTGERS SCARLET KNIGHTS GO! I could see a hulking undergraduate in the rear seat, blowing large pink bubbles of the finest Fleers. He wore a scarlet-and-black Rutgers T-shirt with the numerals 69 obscenely emblazoned for the world to see. The bubble burst, draping his nose with pink, rubbery chewing gum
.

“Ah,” I muttered, “the cream of our youth, the future hope of America.”

A can flew out of the window and bounced off the tile walls of the tunnel, ricocheting onto my hood where it dug a neat gouge in the expensive paint
.

“Hey, Sixty-nine, you slob!” I yelled into the echoing din; fruitlessly, of course. My tunnel-loosened mind darted nimbly to another T-shirt, another university many states away
.

Old Number 76, where is he today? My mind savored his Armageddon, his defeat, his disgrace
.

The squat, chunky glass nestled chill and reassuring in my hand. It was one of my treasured set of matched old-fashioned glasses
celebrating the long-past Bicentennial of our blessed land. Each tumbler bore in magnificent cut-glass bas-relief a portrait of a Founding Father. Thomas Jefferson, his face stern and yet patriotically inspiring, sweated slightly on the side of my icy glass. Under his portrait, etched with authority, was a quote from the Great Democrat himself:

I believe in The People.

I stood at the window of my fourteenth-story apartment and stared listlessly out into the gathering gloom. Far below me were hordes of wandering picketers, their signs waving in the dusk, distance muting their hoarse obscenities. Occasionally a siren wailed, accompanied by the distant wink of red flashers. The apartment lights dimmed momentarily but struggled bravely back on, narrowly averting the third blackout of the week. The Jack Daniels glowed deep in my interior. Going about its therapeutic work, it warmed me.

I glanced down at Jefferson, whose ear was just under my right thumb.

“Tom, I’m not sure it’s working out.”

Another muttering wave of distant protest filtered through my dusty venetian blinds. One of the problems of living fourteen stories above the city is that you tend to see things too clearly, especially after a jot or two of bourbon. Down on the street, amid the pitched battles for survival, you get caught up in the fray. In the continuous pinball game of life, shouldering old ladies aside for a vacant cab, thumping children in the ribs for a seat on the subway, kneeing a nun in the groin for the last remaining hot pretzel engrosses you and you fail to see, ultimately, that the whole damn thing is falling apart. But high over the city, after a desperate Friday at the office and the final flurry of insulting memos to cap the day, the vision sharpens; the mind tears aside the veil of wishful thinking, and there it is.

Incidentally, you can call me Dave if you like. That’s not my real name, but I prefer to remain anonymous, for reasons that will become obvious.

I sipped more bourbon and, struck by a sudden transient urge, ripped the cover off the current issue of
New York
with its gleaming white headline reading: 101 Free FUN Things to Do in the City! With smooth, adept, practiced skill I quickly folded the cover into a paper airplane. It was an art which I had not used in many years, and one which I had perfected grade after grade at the Warren G. Harding School. I fished around in one of the rickety, creaky drawers of my Swedish Moderne Finish-It-Yourself desk and found a red felt-tip marker which had insolently leaked over a pile of unpaid bills. I quickly scrawled on one wing of my airplane:

Look out–I’m coming to get all of you.

On the other wing, I signed: GOD.

It looked good. Inching my window open a crack so as not to let in too much soot and noxious carbon compounds, I launched the plane out into the darkened canyon. It rose swiftly on an up-draft, banked to the left, and began gracefully volplaning down, bearing with it my hopes for a better world. Down, down it drifted until, finally lost from view, it disappeared into the mob. A few white faces suddenly peered up at me. It might have been imagination, but they seemed frightened. One face, however, mouthed a foul word.

“And the same to you, Jack, with bells on it.”

I smiled my carefully cultivated Dick Cavett smirk and settled squashily into my amazingly uncomfortable bean-bag loveseat. A distant phone tinkled and I knew that the elderly maiden lady who lived in the next apartment was getting the first of her nightly obscene phone calls. Even chaos and barbaric anarchy have their routines.

The morning’s
Times
lay scattered about my feet. ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT: hostages, wars, perversions, the crossword puzzle, which had lately itself begun to reflect the age; an occasional shocking four-letter word creeping in here and there: Reston’s calm voice daily chastising the world for its follies.

I flipped the switch on my TV set, the Cassandra of our days.
Mayor Koch’s face appeared, his white shirt rumpled with sweat, his tie hanging at half-mast. Flashbulbs popped. His eyes rolled wildly in the glare.

I muttered: “By God, he still looks like Frank Perdue, the Chicken King.”

“I have informed the strikers’ representatives that this city can no longer tolerate …”

I flipped the channel. Koch again. Another flip; another Koch. On all the channels nothing but Koches. If Karl Marx were alive today, he would have written: ABC is the opiate of The Masses.

Then I knew what I had to do. Desperation has its limits. My hand turned the channel selector to that one island of total, tranquil, heart-warming escapism: Public Television. Where else can you relive the entire Victorian era in endless reruns, a world peopled with simple, honest maids and butlers, and square-jawed English squires? Occasionally the fare shifts even further back in time and Shakespeare’s Henry V rides out again into battle, but
such fun, poetic battles. French chefs eternally prepare arcane treats featuring fish available only off the coast of Normandy and then for only a fortnight out of the year, when they are running. I settled back, prepared to enjoy an hour or two of total, heavily endowed Culture.

“The following PBS program was made possible by a grant from the Mobil Corporation.”

“Aha,” I hissed, “the Petroleum Broadcasting System is still greasing the ways.”

A blast of atonal, formless electronic music consisting of a series of a-rhythmic beeps and assorted transistorized hooting, the kind of fanfare that always precedes a “serious” program on PBS, filled the room. The credits unrolled endlessly, a series of tricky little exploding letters, where most of the rich endowments go. Jazzy titles ain’t cheap.

“ ‘America … [Pause. Another blast of beeps] the Aesthetics of Transition …’ [Pause. Assorted hoots] the sixth program in a series of twenty-four … [More credits exploded into multicolored space] moderated by Alistair Cooke.”

I settled back deeper into my bean bag, wondering briefly why every program about America is hosted by an Englishman and knowing damn well that the reverse certainly wasn’t true, that the BBC would never use Jack Lemmon to discuss the Plantagenet line.

Mr. Cooke’s calm face appeared. In the background, an imposing wall of heavy leather-bound volumes gave the scene weight and depth. As his cultured tones, cool, calm, unemotional, droned, I reached down to the floor for my Jack Daniels bottle. Several cockroaches retreated hastily. More sirens wailed, punctuated by the furious klaxons bearing the wounded to Bellevue.

“Our guest tonight is the distinguished visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago …”

Another face appeared on the screen, smiling with well-bred diffidence, a face clearly at home amid the dusty stacks, a face obviously prepared to hold its own in the highest literary soirees in
the land. I leaned forward, the expensive lima beans beneath my rump rattling and tinkling as they sought other positions of discomfort.

By God, I knew that face, that cool smile, that drooping left eye, that rumpled tweed jacket with its faint but heavy growth of moss. I knew that face! Was it the bourbon? Was it another symptom of my approaching madness?

“Dr. Umbaugh, we are pleased and honored to have the privilege of discussing the aesthetics of frontier courage and the emergence of …”

Good Christ Almighty! Umbaugh! UMBAUGH! Good God! I clutched the Great Democrat tightly and took a mighty swig, followed immediately by an uncontrolled belch.

“…  why yes, Mr. Cooke, the unique talent and attitude bred on the frontier of barbarian America were the result of many factors. Chief among them, I must say, was cosmic Boredom, and …”

I struggled to my feet. Umbaugh, you son of a bitch! Tell ’em, you bastard, tell ’em!

I threw a pair of ice cubes into my glass, eager to listen to the words of the most talented, fiercely, nay, ferociously courageous man I had ever known.

Doctor Umbaugh. Of course. That was inevitable, at the very least. Umbaugh was one of those to whom the academic atmosphere was akin to milk and honey, the Promised Land. He fed on academia the way a whale inhales plankton, whereas I and most of my comrades back in those days when my life briefly impinged on Umbaugh’s struggled ceaselessly against it, alternating between the stark terror of imminent failure and crashing, utter boredom, boredom of a mind-numbing nature so palpable and real that you could almost see it growing up the walls of our poured-concrete prison.

The midwestern university that I had recklessly elected to attend on the GI Bill of Rights, a charitable outpouring of public monies which has led to the psychic downfall of multitudes of erstwhile worthy garage mechanics and plumber’s helpers, had
been designed by one of those architects of the French school known, in translation, as: Art is Truth, Ugliness is always honest; hence Art is ugly, and there are few materials in the world as ugly as poured concrete. Attending the university was much like living in a vast, glass-enclosed concrete viaduct. It was the concrete more than anything else, I suspect now, that set the wheels in motion which catapulted Umbaugh into the realm of Legend.

It was 2
A.M.
of a rainy, dreary fall night that it happened, a Friday in fact. I paced restlessly about my poured-concrete cell in a dormitory ironically named after one of America’s more sickeningly romantic early poets. We, the inmates, referred to it as “U. S. Gypsum Hall.” The twin dormitory next to us was called “The Portland Cement Arms” by its natives. The rain splashed against the pitted aluminum window casement forever sealed against outside reality by modern design. Either that, or some prudent administrator had had the windows protected against the threat, always present, of suicide. I paced as much as an eight-by-six-foot room would allow, a room with its poured-concrete desk, its poured-concrete bureau with its endearing little poured-concrete knobs. I wore only a pair of sagging Jockey shorts, my Fruit of the Looms being at the laundry. I had $2.82 between me and the bottom of my financial tank. I was running on the fumes. It was ten days before my next GI check was due from Uncle Sugar. Any student who could get up the scratch had long since fled this vast concrete carbuncle in the midst of the cornfields for weekend solace in the nearest big city. Not me. Not with $2.82 in my Levi’s and an Organic Chemistry exam coming up first period Monday morning. The only citizens left on campus were the destitute, the about-to-be-failed, and the truly zealous.

I peered out of the window into the sleety rain. Far below, a coed struggled against the storm, dimly lit by one of the “colorful” fake turn-of-the-century gas lamps that had been installed in the Quad to counteract, theoretically, the plastic ivy which was attached to the exterior walls of our dorm. Real ivy does not grow in that climate, so the alumni of an earlier class had contributed
the plastic variety to our well-being. It came from Montgomery Ward and was the best quality plastic ivy obtainable. It, at least, enabled the university to legally get away with the line: The restful, ivy-covered walls of tradition-laden …

The starlings loved it, yelling and honking amid the rattling leaves at all hours of the night, carrying on the obscene activities that set starlings apart from the rest of the more civilized bird world. The coed moved through the dim light below. I listlessly peered down at her. About five feet tall, going maybe a hundred and eighty pounds, she wore skin-tight toreador pants which showed off her vast hams to best advantage. Her head covered with pink plastic barrels, she was typical of the campus queens the school specialized in: corn-fed, gum-chewing Home Ec majors. No wonder
Playboy
was passed from sweaty hand to sweaty hand until its pages were limp and ragged. It was the only port in a storm.