A Fistful of Fig Newtons (21 page)

“Yep. How ’bout poor Herbie Morrison and the TBPA? That’s a real bad one.”

“TBPA?” I asked.

“Turkey Breeders’ Protective Association. Every time a real stinkeroo opens on Broadway, what do they call it? A turkey! Why not a duck? For my money, a duck is a damn sight funnier than a turkey. Or maybe an ostrich. No, it’s always a turkey! Burt Reynolds’ last three pictures almost killed poor Herb. It was turkey-turkey-turkey, night and day. Sometimes he comes to our meetings and just sits in the corner and cries.” Howard brushed away a tear.

“Well, how do you fight this thing?” I asked.

“Well,” Howard went on pensively, “we try everything. For example, we spent about a quarter of a million tracking down just how this damn lemon business began. And we found out that it all started with some dumb clodhopper named Bergen W. Clutterback, who was a dirt-track racer in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He sold plows on the side. Well, in 1903 he got beat by six laps in a ten-lap race at the Kalamazoo Fair. He was driving an Ajax-Kavanaugh Kangaroo. After the race, the press quoted him as saying: ‘This dang pile of junk ain’t got no more spunk than a three-cent sour lemon.’ The phrase caught on, and ever since, bad news cars are invariably lemons. We tried to counteract it by releasing press blurbs to the effect that Clutterback never saw a
lemon in his life, and furthermore, was quite possibly a blood relative of Clayton L. Clutterback, Jr., a notorious checkkiter and confidence man from West Pumphandle, Kentucky, and hence a man not to be trusted in any way. Not a single damn car magazine ever carried the story! And why? Because they like to call cars lemons, that’s why! It sure as hell beats me. We elected a National Lemon Queen, and do you think that Johnny Carson interviewed her? Are you kidding? We had a forty-six-page
Lemon Lovers’ Cookbook
published. It cost a bundle. In six months it sold a hundred and forty-eight copies. And now this damn want ad in the
Times!”

I cleared my throat and made another game attempt to cheer up my friend. “Well, Howard, it’s true that you and the lemon people, and the baloney and the turkey guys, are fighting an uphill battle. But there must be plenty of people who have it worse than you.”

The bartender brought us another round and set another dish of pretzels down in front of Howard.

“Yeah,” he muttered, “I suppose that’s true. Lemons ain’t so bad, I suppose. It could be a lot worse. Every time I have a really rotten day I remind myself of what happened to poor old Sylvester Snead. Over at Y&R. You probably read about it. It happened three, maybe four months ago, but already it seems like years back. He was one of the nicest guys I ever knew.”

“Yeah,” I interrupted, “I think I read something about him. Sylvester Snead. A
Times
obit, am I right?”

“Yep”—Howard’s voice sounded sad and a little tired—“went off the George Washington Bridge at high noon. Just couldn’t take it any more. He was the founder of the BNAs. Old Sylvester began the club, and I can tell you we all miss him. And since he’s gone, it ain’t the same without him. He had the worst account of all. Had the account for seven years, longer than anybody in history.”

Howard moodily dipped into the pretzels. Hesitantly, I asked, “What was his account?”

“The ICM. That’s what killed him! I wake up nights in a cold
sweat, afraid they’re gonna assign that damn account to me. The ICM is one of our top accounts, but I–personally–would just as soon have a good case of leprosy. Lemons are bad enough!”

“ICM …” I mused. “Don’t they make some kind of computers or something?”

Howard rolled his ice cubes angrily. “Buddy, if they did, Sylvester would still be with us today, telling his rotten jokes and playing handball. ICM does not make computers, not by a long shot.”

“Okay, Howard, let’s have it,” I said. “ICM means what?”

Howard, with his inborn sense of dramatics working at full blast, intoned: “International Crock Manufacturers.”

“My God!” I gasped. “Poor Sylvester!”

“Now you know what some guys have to face.” Howard wearily sipped the last of his drink. “Sylvester spent his life fighting the phrase ‘It’s a crock.’ A crock of what? Well, both you and I know. Nobody ever says, ‘It’s a cup,’ or ‘It’s a galvanized pail.’ No, it’s always a crock, and it finally killed poor old Sylvester. And one day lemons are gonna get me.”

My agent nearly killed me for that one. In fact, she said that she would much rather handle a writer who is a drunken bum than one who deliberately bites the hand that feeds him. Madness, all is madness. What could I say to her, that if I had been born in India I would have been one of those guys who spends his life stretched out on a bed of nails, peering up at the sun? Actually, I did tell her that. She did not laugh. Neither did the editor of
Friends
magazine. I had lost my only friend at Chevrolet
.

The little electric car that runs on the track along the wall of the tunnel whipped past me, driven by a tired-looking cop wearing a crash helmet. He was heading toward the front of the line, and the trouble that had brought on the blinking yellow light
.

“Christ,” I muttered, “what a job. Being a cop and spending your life in the goddamn tunnel.” Do they still have eyes, or are they like those fish that live in the caves?

I studied the tile wall of the tunnel next to me. No graffiti. Must be the only public wall in any city in America that doesn’t have illiterate crap scrawled all over it by the barbaric horde
.

Strange thing, this tunnel. You go through it all your life, and you hardly ever think of it. I remember watching a 4
A.M.
movie in
a hotel room, and it turned out to be about a bunch of tough guys building the tunnel. It was called
Sand Hogs
or something, and Victor McLaglen had his shirt off all the time and was covered with sweat. Truly heroic. How come they don’t make movies about stuff like that any more, about guys that really do things? The world has been overrun by a niggling, scurrying pack of Al Pacinos, Woody Allens, and Dustin Hoffmans
.

I hunched in my steaming car, musing on and on into further, more alien destructive areas. How about a movie about the guys who built the Verrazano Bridge? That’s a hell of a thing. I suppose today the only movie you could sell would be a bunch of guys blowing up the Verrazano Bridge, led by Lee Marvin and his gang of crazies. Well, we live in self-destructive times, and I’m right in there with the rest, right? With that “Lemons” piece
.

Four or five cars in my line began honking angrily. This wait was getting to us
.

A giant New Jersey commuter bus in the other lane stopped. I felt a row of commuter eyes peering down into my lap. It had a four-color advertising sign emblazoned on its side, plugging an elegant English gin, tropical shores, sparkling seas, and waving palm trees. I studied the scene. A gin and tonic would taste good down here in the bowels of the pyramids. I gazed hungrily at the gin ad. The beach scene looked far more real than anything down here. Probably was. The commercials today are more real than the products. Means transcending ends
.

If this goddamn tunnel collapsed with all of us down here, a thousand years from now they’d dig up the bus and there would be that picture. I imagined the art director of the agency in conference with the gin guys; endless hassling over the second palm tree from the right, and whether the girl should wear sandals or not. I had been there. New York, the commercial capital of the world, like Paris used to be the art capital
.

The cardboard water sparkled, the trees rustled silently, and the crystal bottle of gin looked cold and remote
.

The expedition had been working the site, with minimal success, for some time. Tempers were frayed. Even the most civilized and erudite members of the party were nipping at one another. The rains, alternating with the searing heat, had worn down all of them. That and, of course, the looming sense of failure. None of them, in spite of earlier optimism, had the vaguest idea that they were about to make a strike that would rival, and indeed surpass, the discovery of the fabled Rosetta Stone of millennia past.

Little was known of the area where the expedition was working. The few facts, only partially substantiated, were that thousands of years or more in the opaque past a great city had flourished on the site. The area had been under the sea for centuries during the last Ice Age and had only re-emerged in recent geological times.

There was much dispute and there were many theories about what this settlement had once been called. A few hints were available to scholars who could decipher and understand the scarce archeological references, which were all in an ancient, dead language. It had been fairly well established that the site had been known as the Big Apple, which led to a theory, since it was known that apple referred to some sort of fruit, that the place had been devoted to agriculture. A small but vocal element of academics, admittedly unorthodox in their views, had recently unearthed a reference or two among the fragmentary records of the past to something called Fun City. The translation of the word
city
was sure, meaning a large, organized gathering of creatures, but a battle was still raging over the meaning of the
word fun
. Some felt that it was used in reference to a religion of the time. Others scoffed, maintaining that the civilization being studied had no discernible
religion and hence “Fun” was just a meaningless proper name of no significance. Then, of course, there had been the discovery of that curious, deeply buried monolith that read QUEENS PLAZA IND, which, according to a recent treatise, pointed to the conclusion that the settlement had been some sort of matriarchy, if in fact there had been any form of government at all.

But to the members of this expedition, all such views were merely speculative. What was real was the mud, the boredom, and the lack of rest. The leader had considered closing out the operation and in fact had already begun to compose in his mind the message that he would send back to headquarters informing those in control of his decision, when the big strike occurred, a find that was to open up the truth of this ancient lost civilization in all its bizarre romantic glory and barbaric splendor, far more revealing than any of the poor fables and tepid myths these peoples had left behind, which they called Art and Literature. These childish scrawls had dealt mainly with the endless pursuit of something they termed sex, or even more curious, self-fulfillment. Little was ever mentioned about the actual life, the day-to-day existence of the bygone times. But today’s epic discovery would change all that.

Like many significant finds, this strike came about as a result of a fortuitous accident, deep in the tunnel that had so far yielded nothing but disappointing bits and pieces of incomplete artifacts, although one curious, perhaps meaningful minor find had been made. A number of small plates bearing the enigmatic inscription IBM Selectric had surfaced. According to the leading technicians, these plates had apparently been attached to some kind of machine, although its use was not known.

The machines themselves had long since largely disintegrated. Only a few cogs and wheels had survived the millennia. One small container made of an unknown flexible substance had been found. It bore the inscription DANNON YOGURT, which was obviously the proper name of a long-dead native who had used this receptacle for some purpose or other as yet not
established. Other digs had unearthed quantities of these containers, which indicated that YOGURT was a very numerous tribe, rivaled only by one that appeared to be called DELI and a third named, enigmatically, CHOCK FULL O’ NUTS.

A brace had given way, causing a large section of the tunnel wall to collapse, partly blocking the passageway. Members of the expedition quickly moved to clear away the mud and other debris. Suddenly they beheld a sight that none of them would ever forget. A great gray metal vault gleamed dully under the lights. The leader was summoned immediately. The very air was charged with excitement as he peered at the mysterious discovery. A small label attached to the front bore the inscrutable letters BBD&O and, in smaller script, TV 60 SEC COMMERCIALS.