How the Dead Live (11 page)

Why aren’t I more frightened than I am, lying here, while the plummy radio accents describe rotten events? Unable to move, to escape. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia – all these years I’d thought they were to do with external spaces, but now I understand that both fears are – in Lichtenberg’s dumb jargon – ‘projections’. That it’s the body itself that is either too vast for the tiny mind that wanders over it, or too small to contain the myriad perceptions that pile up in its memory like dishes in a sink. Christ – I’m waxing philosophic and I’m waning into a reverie of Penn Station . . .

. . . which I trot through on clicking heels, from the tracks up the iron stairs, clack-clack-clack, and into the General Waiting Room, click-click-click. I move from one huge vaulted space to another, the distinction between them being that the body of the station is an exposed skeleton of cast-iron ribs, vaunting pelvises and soaring, arched spines, whereas the waiting room is fleshy with coffered plasterwork. You might think that Penn Station – or indeed any station – would be the last place I’d want to hang out, given that it has so much of the outside inside of it. Not so. I prefer to think of it as being solely an internal construction, a huge den tucked securely in a corner of the city. It helps with the claustro, eases the agro, that there’s a stench of train exhaust and the breakfast breaths of ten thousand thousand. It helps the station towards classical immortality that the facade was modelled on the Caracalla Baths. Not that this morning I pause under its heavy pediment – I’ve more important things on my mind.

Today is the launch of the new Rose’s Rocket – and I’m on the sharp end of a revolution in writing materials. Yup, it may be the closing stages for the war in the Pacific (VJ Day is only weeks away), but the only projectiles bothering me are Rockets with a cap ‘R’ – and the only flaks present will be wearing snap-brim hats. It’s the press day for the Rose’s Rocket, the first continuous-inkflow pen to hit the US market ever. Oh sure – the idea’s been around for ages, patented as far back as 1888, but hell, what’s inventing something when you can copy it? The laps created an entire manufacturing economy off the back of copying things after the war, but they copied the copying from the likes of Rose. Bob was well ahead of the game.

In Buenos Aires, to be precise, buying supplies of raw wool for his business. Rose was a Chicago businessman who’d made a wartime fortune out of stuffing things with wool: flying jackets, helmets, sleeping bags – you open it, he’d stuff it. In the Windy City they called him King Stuff. Anyway, Rose saw some of the original Biro pens on sale in a department store and, cottoning on instantly to their potential, bought them and brought them home intent on copying. Poor old Laszlo Biro; he sold his North American rights to Ever-sharp, but never bothered with a patent – the way was clear for both of them to be stuffed by the King.

Rose was an old college buddy of Kaplan’s. Kaplan was away at the war. That’s what we used to say: ‘He’s away at the war.’ It made flame-throwing Japs sound like a ball game and I liked it that way. I was a selfish, headstrong, oversexed girl of twenty-one when Kaplan was drafted; we’d been married a year. He was, as yet, without his pussy. A square-jawed, wiry man of medium height with brown, wavy hair, who could always raise a laugh with his ‘I changed my name to Kaplan’ routine, because he was so all-American as to have an indeterminate feel about him. He appeared no more Jewish than he did German, or Italian, or Irish, or anything else. Jolly Dave Kaplan, the genetic blender.

We had a cold-water apartment in the run-down wreck that was the Rhinelander Gardens on West 11
^th
Street. Not that there were that many hot-water apartments in Manhattan in those days – the war was on and so was the housing shortage. I had a job selling war bonds for a while, but then so did everyone else. I was crap at selling war bonds – Kaplan had infected me with his cafe communism, and his Jewish anti Semitism. Canter – that was the guy who ran the war-bonds outfit. Ratty little man – a British emigrant. I couldn’t stand him. ‘Your heart isn’t in this,’ he’d say pompously, sanctimoniously – as if I were personally responsible for Pearl-fucking-Harbor, and fucking over Mrs Miniver.

I did other war work for a while, putting radios into Flying Fortresses, which was kind of fun. I thought I looked good in an overall when I cinched it tight, but I had to go way out into the Jersey boondocks to get to the factory, and, well . . . I had a real yen for Manhattan at the time. Didn’t make any difference whether I was a V–8 or a V-girl – I still had to be sucking on that big lozenge of masonry.

So, anyway, I’m coming out of Penn Station, because I like to detour there on my way to Rose’s offices, which are in the mid–40s (I can’t remember where exactly – could you?), and I’m cock-a–hoop because we’re launching the first continuous-inkflow pen in the entire US of A. We’ve beaten Eversharp’s Capillary Action to the stores by five clear weeks, and the Rocket’s smooth, futuristic design sold it in as much as its revolutionary ink-delivery system. And who’s responsible for this design? Why, me of course. Little ol’ missy. I’d taken design classes as part of the art syllabus at Columbia, although I’d never intended becoming a professional. I didn’t want to do anything much at all when I was young. I saw myself as a Zelda Fitzgerald type, married to a successful writer or artist, running a salon, drinking too many highballs, crashing my Hispano-Suiza into the Mediterranean – whatever. I was a fantasist; the only part of it I could realistically manage was the drinking. The only things I had going for me were a big, blowsy body, a dirty imagination and a talent for back talk.

Rose sent me a wire because we didn’t have a phone. Like I say, I can’t recall exactly where his offices were, but from his window you could see the Times Tower. As for what the suite looked like – well, it was full of stuff, natch. Rose was – to my considerable chagrin – a big guy, a blond as myself. ‘I changed my name to Rose so people would think I was Jewish,’ he told me; ‘it’s the only way to get on in business.’ We laughed about this; then he showed me the designs he had for the pen, and asked if I thought I could help. He didn’t want to use any established product designers, this had to be done in total secrecy, I was his pinch hitter. ‘Like the atom bomb,’ he said, ‘this pen is going to revolutionise the world – you’ll see.’

Trouble was that as yet the Rocket was a stumpy, bulbous thing. The body of the pen and the mechanism had to be made as one unit. To keep costs down, Rose was planning on using the injection mould for a fountain pen. The original Rocket would’ve begun looking contemporary around 1971. I had a brainwave: ‘You say, Mr Rose – ‘

‘Call me Bob.’

‘Bob, then. You say, Bob, that the principle by which the ink is placed on the paper is a freely rotating steel ball in the very tip of the pen?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And you want the pen – the Rocket – to look like its namesake, to be aerodynamic, futuristic, huh?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘You recall the World’s Fair in ‘39?’

‘Who could forget it.’

‘Well, it seems to me that your tiny ball is like a small-scale version of the giant Perisphere they built for the Fair; and that it should be housed inside the Trylon.’

‘Trylon?’

‘You remember – that huge, tapering pillar; it was seven hundred feet high.’

Bob Rose stuck his hands in his waistcoat pockets and wiggled his fingers as if he were a marsupial. Gesture I usually remember – appearance I mostly forget. His eyes rounded with credulity. ‘That, Mrs Kaplan, is one helluva good idea.’

He paid me fifty bucks a week and I worked at my apartment. The Rocket had a detachable cap which closely resembled the nacelle of a fighter plane. I dropped the decorative aerofoil projections Rose had put on the base of the pen – they rubbed your hand when you wrote. I made the pen slimmer and steelier. It was an instant hit. At the press launch on that May day in ‘45 I sold units off of a tray, like a cigarette girl. We shifted nearly five hundred to the press and the flaks alone. The following week the Rocket blasted off at Gimbels and shifted ten thousand units in the first day. It was a dizzy time – and I made a point of going to Penn Station every day, whether I had to go uptown to the office or not. It was only there, inside the outside, that I could put my fierce pride in any kind of perspective – and my new anxiety. For at the same time as I was designing Rose’s wholesale Rocket for him, he was putting his retail one inside of me. His cock, I mean retractable ballpoints were ten years away yet.

He was quite a cocksman, old Bob Rose. We’d do it in his office, at my apartment, in hotels and flophouses, at parties wherever we could. He had deft fingers, Bob, he could get into my panties in seconds and out of them in minutes. It sounds kind of yucky – but believe me, it wasn’t. Bob was no hypocrite – he never talked crap about being ‘unhappy with my wife’. Not that I’d’ve taken it; I was young, I was proud, I was confident. I thought I’d soon be given a proper job with the company, that I was in the up elevator. I was already working on designs for a whole squadron of Rose’s Rockets when the troubles started. The Rocket was leaking, skipping and just plain wouldn’t
write.
The original manufacturing run of pens were still the ones on sale in Gimbels, so steep had the sales parabola been. It was the design that was at fault. Bob reamed me out: it was my sloppiness, my inexperience, my
amateurishness
that had led to this, this
débâcle.

He was actually inside me when he said this, the two of us screwing away on his desk, buck-naked from the waist down, me on top. People used to do this – talk when they screwed. Screwing itself was so novel– or seemed so novel, so twentieth century – that an etiquette for it had yet to develop. We would talk while we screwed, listen to music, smoke – which I always considered to be the best way of deflating a man’s ego – even drink a cocktail. Mind you, I wasn’t about to take this crap from Rose; I stood up over him and let the load he’d dumped in me trickle back down on top of him. ‘Your pen leaks, Bob,’ I said, ‘and so do I.’ He had, of course, promised he wouldn’t come. ‘And you wanna know why?’ By this time I was down off of the big desk, putting on my panties and untangling my stockings and suspenders.

‘Why?’ He was up on one elbow, looking flatly surreal, with his bare ass on the blotter and his naked foot resting against the intercom.

‘Because neither you, nor your fucking pen, has big enough balls.’

Good parting shot, huh? It was the best I ever came up with. And I was right – it
was
the balls. Ten years later they had tungsten-carbide balls with abrasive surfaces which held the ink perfectly, but the Rocket’s balls were only steel; too smooth – and too small. Rose’s business folded and the Eversharp Capillary Action pen never made it either. A decade later Parker brought out their Jotter ballpoint, and that little fucker sold 3½ million units in a year, priced at a mere three bucks. The Rocket was history – except for one minor point. When Bic bought out Waterman in the early sixties and began to dominate the ballpoint market with their still cheaper and still more efficient pens, I saw that they’d mooched one part of their design from me – the cap. Yup, even today the cap of a common-or–garden Bic Cristal (daily worldwide sales of 14 million units) is a direct steal from my original Rose’s Rocket.

Am I proud of this? You bet your ass. Very proud. Even now, a billion mouths must be blowing on something
I
shaped, a piece of plastic
I
gave form to, as surely as if my will had been the forces at work in the injection-moulding machine. Proud? Yeah – sure am. Very. It’s a beautiful irony that it should’ve been a woman who was responsible for crafting this tricky little prick, this rinky-dink dong, this tiddly wiener, which has annotated so much of the post-war world. I must be one of the most marginalised people this century – if you get my drift.

Did I go on after this débâcle? No. I never designed anything ever again for commercial sale. In the seventies I wrote to Berol. I suggested that they were making a profound mistake with the cap of their new Rollerball pen, which looked to me like an old Nazi pillbox. But they weren’t interested – although I got a polite enough reply from the R&D manager. In fairness to Berol, their Rollerball has been a great success. I saw Deirdre filling in her time sheet with one not ten minutes ago. No one appears to notice the little pillboxes they’re capped with – or perhaps they do? Maybe that’s exactly why they’re so popular?

Kaplan came back from the war and said to me, ‘Why the fuck did I bother to defend my country?’ when he found out I’d been screwing around. I said, ‘Why don’t you get down off of your character heights?’ And he did.

But the real pride I felt over the whole Rocket incident was that it gave me a grasp on progress, which not many people seemed to have at that time. The whole USA was on a binge of modernity after the war. The big-assed auto models of the thirties and forties gave way to the skinny-butt rapiers of the fifties – vehicular rockets if you will. Everything had fins – not only the cars. You could get spectacle frames with fins, radios with fins, shoes with fins, fridges with fins. By 1957 I wouldn’t have been that surprised if Dave Kaplan had pulled down his shorts to reveal that his cock had fins. Fins were the future and we were speeding towards it. I guess the point here is that the ballpoint pen could hardly have been said to be before its time – not in a world that, within weeks, witnessed the press launch for the atomic bomb, complete with its own dear little stubby fins. More than that, when I look back now, the idea that the world didn’t even have the
fountain pen
until the turn of the twentieth century seems preposterous, like some alternative sci-fi reality in which the Nazis won the war. Fuck it, until then they were dipping nibs, which to all intents and purposes were unchanged since Egyptian scribes squatted in front of papyri five thousand years ago, with fucking
reeds
in their hands. Progress – shmogress.

Pride is a cosy feeling wrapped round the individual and pumped full of wool. King Stuff. Is it pride or junk that’s making me cosy in my paralysis? It’s hard to say. Is this a real memory – or a false one? A ‘screen’ memory, as the Freudian motherfuckers would have it. Who knows. We allowed our lovemaking to become neurosis-manufacturing when we let those Jew-boy jokers loose on us; and we also allowed all our memories to become false floors, but thinly covering a yawning oubliette full of untold ghastliness. Memories like the corners of our minds – ever ready to snag a piece of clothing and tear the shirts off our psyches. I could do without them. Will do without them.