The Ferrari in the Bedroom (27 page)

DR
STRAUSS:
“Yes? What happened after you bought the radio?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Well, the next day I see another one in a window over on 42nd Street that had a special band that got the Mexican ball scores. Which mine didn’t. So I picked it up. And then a couple of days later I spotted this stereo FM tuner that was built into a Viennese beer keg. You turn the spigot on and the sound comes out of the bung hole. So naturally I figured it would go good in the den, and since Marcia’s birthday was coming up I wasn’t really being extravagant or anything. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. I should have known then what was happening. Especially after she got kind of sore when I turned the beer keg on and it blew the fuses in the basement, and one of the kids got a shock from the bung hole. After I got the matched
Wrist Radios and the Walkie-Talkies, things began to change.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“In what way?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Well, I got in with this gang of ACs who hung around Hammacher Schlemmer on a lunch hour. I started with a Radar Instant Hot Dog Frizzer. The radio thing was getting a little touchy around home, and we had a lot of fun with the Frizzer the first day.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Frizzing hot dogs?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“The only trouble is, we’re both on diets all the time, so we don’t eat hot dogs. We just frizz ’em. It’s got a Radar Proximity Radiation Indicator that lights up when the hot dog is frizzed. You ought to see it go. The kids love it.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“But if you don’t eat hot dogs, it seems to me…”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah, there’s that, but it is great to see it light up. It’s got this buzzer that goes off. And then I brought home this Handi Insta Cuberino. She really blew her stack on that one.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Handy Insta-Cubereeno?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Damnedest thing! Makes ice cubes in twelve and a half seconds flat, in any shape you want. It’s got these little plastic molds. You make ice cubes in the shape of footballs, turtles, and they got this naked girl one for parties. You put this coloring stuff in, and you can make red, white and blue ice cubes in twelve and a half seconds.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“I see.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“I got two of them. In case one blew out during a party. You never know. Then, the very next day, at Macy’s, I come across this Musical Ironing Board that had a tape deck that played Rock so that Marcia could kinda groove when she was doing the ironing. Only trouble is, one
of the rubber feet fell off a couple of days after it came, and the dog ate it. So we stuck it in the basement. Among with the Electro-Pop that I got her for Christmas.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Electro-Pop?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Pops corn. It’s transistorized. There’s something about anything that’s transistorized that gets me right down in the gut. Just the word is kinda nice to say:
Transistorized!
Gives you a feeling of security. You know, Doc, like it’s Now. Yeah, it pops corn. You just set it and it squirts this low-cal butter on the popcorn when it’s done. We only used it twice, because of the hum. Made Marcia’s teeth hurt, so she stuck the Groove-A-Rock Ironing Board down in the basement next to the Electro-Pop, and that’s when she found the thirty-seven transistor radios that I hid under the basement stairs.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Thirty-seven?”
(It was here that I suspected that he was showing a typical Slanski Numero Exaggerative Syncope;
ALD Journal, Proceedings, December 1935, entry 762, [incl.] Isadore Slanski.)

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah, I was getting embarrassed about them. And I began to have trouble finding places around the house where I could hide stuff.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Excuse me, Abercrombie, but what is a… how did you put it…AC?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Ha! I keep forgetting. You’re not one of us. An Appliance Cuckoo, of course. I know one guy bought twenty-three turnip dicers in one month alone. Talk about a monkey!”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Appliance Cuckoo, hmmmm.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“It gets you gradually, and
the next thing you know you’re on the street.” (He slumped despondently; his voice lowered perceptively. He was going deeper into himself.) “One day you find that all you can think about is the next thing you’re going to buy. You can’t think of anything else! I remember one time: I’m making love to Marcia, and I kept thinking of that two-cylinder convertible lawnmower, with a trailer attachment where you can carry beer bottles when you’re mowing the lawn, and I could tell she knew something’s wrong. You know, I can’t sleep sometimes, knowing what drove me to the top at the agency. Everyone…”(Patient sobbed briefly and went on brokenly.) “thinks that I’m dedicated. Ha, what a joke! Boy, that’s a hot one. Dedicated to my work! Doctor, I
gotta
make dough! I’m a Vice President because I got this goddamn monkey on my back. Doc, do you know what it costs to spend your lunch hours at Abercrombie & Fitch? And your Saturdays at Sears, and Wednesday night at Montgomery Ward, and all the time reading catalogs and sneaking down to the Post Office with your coat collar rolled up so nobody will recognize you to pick up your stainless steel Swedish wind-up apple corer from Haverhill’s? I gotta bust it, I gotta do something! Oh my God, where’ll it ever end?” (Abercrombie began to pace furiously. He stopped suddenly, and his whole mood changed.) “Hey Doc, where’d you get that great looking Lucite clock?”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“My wife picked it up somewhere. I never notice those things.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“You never notice those things! My God, that’s
all
I notice! And you haven’t heard the worst. I got a monkey on my back that weighs in at better than five hundred dollars a week. There hasn’t been a week in two years that I haven’t spent five bills! That Marcia never knows about. She thinks I’m knocking down twenty-five thou at the agency, when last year I was good for fifty-one, and I’m up to my ass in pawn checks!”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“You say you’re a…an…AC?” (I wanted
him to expand on the term for my own professional reasons. Somewhat unethical, I’ll admit, but in the interest of Science. I perceived that Abercrombie’s case could well be seminal.)

ABERCROMBIE:
“I was. Then I moved into the big stuff. Like my Aqua-Skoot. That started it.” (He trailed off.)

DR.
STRAUSS:
(after pause) “Yes? Go on.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“That god damned Aqua-Skoot! Me and Howie from the office were on the seventh floor of Abercrombie & Fitch when he spots this damn thing, and I knew I hadda have it. It was all I could think about for three whole days, and I finally went in and popped for it.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“You say an…Aqua-Skoot?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah, they’re these motor-driven water skis. Twelve hundred bananas! I got so scared of what Marcia’d say after I bought ’em that I hid ’em in the mail room at the office. And then I got this Cine Slica-Drive, which is this indoor driving range that shows movies of famous fairways, like in Honolulu, and you hit this goddamn golfball, and you pretend like you’re playing against Arnold Palmer, and his score is flashed up on the screen. Christ, Doc, I don’t even play golf! Thirty four hundred smackers! Thirty four hundred! The goddamn thing weighed a ton. How the hell could I have them deliver
that
at home? I knew that the guy in the mail room would flip, and I hadda do something!”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“There, there.” (He was getting hysterical and I was afraid he might slip into a typical post gravital decline. Drs. Emory, Knabell,
Yokohama Psychiatric Quarterly,
Volume III, pp. 9 and 10 ibid.)

ABERCROMBIE:
“You don’t know how it is. It’s hell! It was even worse than when I was going through the HWM scene. God, it took me six months to break that one. Even now, sometimes I find myself going back on it!”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“HWM? Is that some sort of drug?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Christ, I wish it was! That would be easy to handle. Doc, an HWM is one of the worst kind. A Home Workshop Maniac! You can blow your whole goddamn life on it. Jesus, do you realize you can get a home Blast-O-Forge that’s a whole home-operated foundry, where you can mold sinks and make Christ-knows-what!? Fenders for your car! Steel pogo sticks! They give you plans for all of them. Oh God almighty, where will it end? It goes for seventeen thousand, not including jackhammers! You get the HW thing going and you’re damn near a gonner. I know one guy has a home workshop worth damn near fifty thousand big ones. And all he ever made on it was a Chinese ormulu knickknack table. He don’t give a damn about making things. He just likes to go down and pat the machines. He just moved into a bigger house so he can put a drop-forge out in the garage in case he wants to make his own nails. He figures if you make your own nails you can save dough, since the drop forge only costs twelve G’s! But that’s the way the HWs think, and I was one of the worst, do you hear that, I’m admitting it! But I still can’t stop!” (At this point Abercrombie lapsed into silence. I felt it best to allow him to continue at his own pace, utilizing, of course, the technique so brilliantly developed by Dr. Stefan Schnauzer in his work with the Albertson Psychiatric Advisory Unit. His, Abercrombie’s, silence was timed on my chronograph at four minutes, seventeen and three-tenths seconds.)

ABERCROMBIE:
“Doctor, it’s getting late and I don’t know how to tell you this. You won’t think I’m sick or anything, will you? But last summer I took the
final
step. I fought it. God knows how I fought it! But there was no way out. After the Slica-Drive I knew I had to do something. This thing came in a box car! Now don’t get me wrong—it’s beautiful. I’d do it again, I tell you! I love to just turn it on and watch
those fairways pop up and down, those lights flash on and off, and Jack Nicklaus’ score or Sam Snead’s rings the bell. But I hadda do something, see? I had stuff hidden in the trunk of the car, in the garage, in my office, I even had nineteen lockers at Grand Central Station that I had to stick quarters in every day.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Yes, Abercrombie, what did you do?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“I rented a warehouse in Brooklyn!”

DR.
STRAUSS:
(Admittedly I committed a gross breach of good technique, but I was startled and failed to conceal it.) “A warehouse? Really?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Almost a block square. Three stories high. I’m looking around for another one. I’m running short on space. Every night, after work, I go and sit and look at all my great things. Sometimes I run a can opener, or hook up my magical Race-O-Track and run the cars, or maybe I just go and plug in some radios, but those hours that I spend in my warehouse are the only times that I know peace, Doc. But deep down inside, I know it’s not right, and I just gotta get this monkey off my back.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Sorry, Abercrombie, your fifty minutes are up. Shall we continue next Tuesday?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“I don’t know, Doc, if I can afford it. I just ordered this Fold-A-Slope, and I don’t know if I can continue with you.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Fold-A-Slope?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah, it’s really great! I saw it at Abercrombie & Fitch last week. It’s a folding ski slope. See, it’s got this big electric motor, and the snow goes upward and you stand on it on your skis. And there’s this fiberboard screen that shows pictures of the Canadian Rockies, and…”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Excuse me, Abercrombie, but my next patient is waiting.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Not only that, but it has this polyethlene snow that is washable, and you can do shusses, and if you turn up the speed they’ve got this Giant Slalom attachment where you can go around these rubber barrels, and…” (At this point I rang for my nurse, who overpowered Abercrombie who appeared to be going into a fit much like the one reported by Dr. Emil Orbach in his provocative essay
Ein Kleine Nachtmusic; A Problem, Proceedings of DLO, January, 1913.
Using the standard armlock she quickly had him out in the street.)

Prognosis:
Abercrombie is suffering from a comparatively new, yet widespread malady which seems to have primarily affected males of the Western Hemisphere: compulsive and insatiable hunger for useless yet highly symbolic gadgets, coupled with a well-developed sense of guilt and associated manic defense mechanism. I am conducting further experiments on this Complex, which bears the tentative appellation Abercrombie’s Bitch.

D
R.
A
BRAHAM
S
TRAUSS
N
EW
Y
ORK,
1972