The Last Manly Man (6 page)

We were met at the door of her Greenwich Village town house by DeWitt's niece and personal assistant, a doughy-faced young woman with rimless glasses. After showing us into DeWitt's study, she excused herself and closed the door.

There was some muffled arguing outside—I couldn't make out the words—and DeWitt came in. DeWitt was in her sixties, of average weight, average height, with long hair dyed jet-black. All her wrinkles pointed downward. She scared the shit out of me.

“I have a question for you to begin with, Ms. Hudson,” DeWitt said, usurping control of the interview immediately.

“Yes?”

“You're a woman. There's a big women's conference in town. How come you're doing a story about the
Man
of the Future?” she asked, suspicious. “Women are the story.”

No doubt about it, women were hot, I agreed. The politicians had discovered the gender gap, companies had discovered women's megaspending power, and Soccer Moms swayed the presidential election. Employers were sponsoring on-site day care centers and parental leaves in record numbers to lure and keep talented women on their staffs and Madison Avenue was falling all over itself to play to dames. Though feminism was in disarray, women overall were doing well.

“It seems obvious that, generally speaking, women will just continue getting stronger, smarter, sexier, more secure, and more independent, wielding increasing influence over society and the world, from the workplace and from the home,” I said, and I wasn't
just
spouting the party line. I believed it. “What I can't get a grip on is how all this will affect men, generally speaking, and how men will adapt to it or rebel against it.”

“They'll do neither for very long,” she said, and went into her usual rap, women were evolving, men were not, the Y chromosome was devolving, and women would rule the world in the foreseeable future. When Alana DeWitt talks, don't even try to interrupt her until she takes a deep breath, because she'll just talk louder and roll right over you. As she spoke her face grew redder and redder, in splotches, like a rash.

“But let's say we
don't
evolve beyond men. In that case, how do you see men evolving, and adapting to evolving women?”

“I don't. That is why we must evolve beyond them. They're brutes,” she said.

“You can't envision any scenario where men will evolve enough so you could get along with them, just for argument's sake?” I asked. “What if they refuse to become extinct?”

“Nature will take care of it,” she said. “The Y chromosome will grow smaller and weaker and I believe fewer and fewer male children will be conceived until men just disappear.”

To lighten the genocidal tone of things a bit, she told a feminist joke from
Hysteria
magazine, about the army's new weapon, the estrogen bomb. You drop it and all the combatants throw down their arms, hug, and cry out, “I'm sorry. It's all my fault.”

“Seriously, though,” I said. “The estrogen bomb would only work if all the women had aligned menstrual cycles and were all postmenstrual and in Good Jesus mode …”

“Good Jesus mode?” she said.

Now I'd done it. Lost control of my tongue and blurted out the name of a very specific man.

“Humble, self-sacrificing, I-feel-your-pain Jesus,” I explained.

“As opposed to …”

“Mean Jesus, turn the other cheek, and if that one gets slapped too, kick 'em where it hurts and run like hell. You know, tearing through the temple overturning money changer tables,” I said. “Like when you're premenstrual …”

“I'm the same way no matter the time of month. And you were clearly warped by patriarchal religion. This interview is over now.”

With that, she rose, her fists clenched, and stormed out of the room like a stevedore. Didn't much matter that she was pissed off—the woman was always pissed off—and we had what we needed, a few provocative sound bites from a so-called expert, a controversial, academic feminist.

DeWitt got me thinking about the John Doe again. Now there was one less man, or “testosterone-addled mammal” to use her preferred term, on earth for her to worry about. Somehow, I knew that DeWitt would have been cheered by this. For all her talk about the moral superiority and caring-sharing ethos of women, she was sure lacking in the milk of human kindness her own self. Speaking of violence … the woman was known to be a terror on a book tour and had allegedly bitch-slapped a small Mexican man in her Acapulco hotel last year because of a reservation mix-up.

Maybe it was as Wallace Mandervan had said in an article a couple years before, that people crazy enough to envision utopias usually design utopias they themselves could never live in because of their nutty individualism. If DeWitt got her all-woman world, it would just be a matter of time before she'd try to take power, purging disloyal women. Before you know it, it would be a full-fledged Reign of Terror, and women like me would end up with our heads in straw baskets.

Back in the crew car, Jim the cameraman said, “She's full of shit, isn't she? About that Y chromosome stuff?”

“Face it. You guys are going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon,” I said. “Just kidding. Yeah, she's full of shit. The next guy thinks you guys will not only survive, but live longer than ever.”

The next interview, Dr. Budd Nukker, was a biochemist, a nutritionist, and an Extropian.

“Extropians aim for nothing less than literal immortality,” said Nukker, a muscular, healthy man who looked much younger than his seventy years. He was doing the interview while on a treadmill. He had wires running from his wrist and neck to various bodily monitors—our mike was wireless—and periodically he took big sips from a bottle of electrolyte-rich water.

“We believe a regimen of exercise, grain-based diet, vitamin, hormone, and enzyme therapies, along with advances in medical technology, will make immortality possible in our lifetimes,” Nukker said. “Current research indicates that men with no vices who do only the exercise and diet part of the regimen could live to be a hundred and forty. By the time they are a hundred and forty, further advances will make immortality conceivable.”

“But you have to spend almost all your free time working out and you eat nothing but macrobiotics,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, not seeing my point.

“Forever is a long time if you're not having any fun,” I said.

“This is more fun than being dead,” he said, turning off the treadmill and detaching his wires. While stretching, he talked about some of the hundred or so pills he took every day and then informed us it was time for his weekly hormone shot, which he gave himself in his ass.

This seemed a propitious time to wrap up the interview and break the crew for lunch at Tycoon Doughnut. Keeping with my practice of multitasking, I called in for messages on my cell phone while I ate. That Jason person had called again, and my friend Tamayo had called from Tokyo to say she would be returning to New York “in a few weeks,” which could mean tomorrow or could mean next month, after a stop in Cairo or Budapest. With Tamayo, a comic actress and free woman … excuse me, “struggling demi-goddess on a great adventure,” you just never knew.

Benny Winter had not called.

That was a good sign, I figured, a very good sign, because an outright refusal would have come much quicker.

June Fairchild of the NYPD had called. When I returned the call, she asked, “Is your unit Special Reports or Investigative Reports?”

“Special Reports. Why?”

“Because someone from the Investigative Reports Unit at ANN just called me, wanted to know why you were at the morgue this morning.”

“What did you say?”

“That you came in to ID a John Doe, but you didn't recognize him, and I told him what I told you about the John Doe. I don't have any new information.”

“Thanks,” I said.

This was amusing. Reb Ryan and Solange Stevenson, those story stealers in Investigative, thought I was on to a story with the John Doe. Someone in homicide must have tipped them off about my visit. Ha. If I wasn't so, you know, mature, and Taking the High Road, I might aid and abet them by feeding them a few false leads.…

“Time to go,” Jim said, wiping his mouth with the flimsy paper napkin. He was eager, which was unusual, but understandable. At lunch, after he finished trashing Alana DeWitt, he had talked to Sven about growing up with a picture of Gill Morton on the mantelpiece, as if Gill were one of the family. When we got to the Morton Building, Jim was like a kid in a toy store, bug-eyed and slack-jawed with fresh awe.

“Mr. Morton will be right down,” the security guard said.

We waited in the pre–art deco lobby, a great hall with vaulted archways, brass and glass lamps, high ceilings, and lots of marble inscribed with the quotes of Teddy Roosevelt—“I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man”—and Hock Morton: “a man makes his own luck.” It reeked of manhood.

One wall was hung with portraits of Morton men. The biggest of these was of founder Hock Morton. Hock Morton had bushy gray hair and a handlebar mustache. Judging by the expression on his face, he hadn't been having a good day when he'd sat for this portrait back in, according to the brass plaque beneath it, 1929.

His son, Gray Morton, on the other hand, looked blankly sober, Gray's son, Herbert, looked frail and sad, and Herbert's son, William, stern and sturdy. William's son, Gill Morton, robust and ruddy-cheeked, had chosen to be painted in outdoorsman gear, his retriever at his side. None of the men resembled one another in the least.

Below the portraits were display cases with the original Morton products: the Morton Mop, the Morton Scrub Brush, Morton Soap, and an antique bottle of Morton Mopwash.

At the other end of the hall was a statue of an angel holding a fallen doughboy under one arm.

Within five minutes, Gill Morton, a stocky, florid man with a blond brush cut, strode into the lobby. He seemed taller in his portrait, but maybe that was because the portrait was about twenty feet high. Behind him came his assistant, a young man named Ken Duffin, who handed me a packet of old press ads and some videos I had requested. Behind Duffin was Morton's security detail, five beefy guys in black suits.

I introduced the crew and Jim mentioned that he had met Morton before, when Jim was seven and his dad had won a big sales award which he had kept with his most private things until the day he died. Morton was most gracious. He seemed touched and gave Jim a two-handed handshake, and in keeping with my careful study of men, especially men in power, I noticed that Morton didn't feel the urge in the face of praise to immediately self-deprecate. Jim was tickled and I was glad for that too, because I was trying to be extra nice to Jim, on account of his wife having a second baby and … what was that other thing … oh yeah, because he was a lousy cameraman. Our several talks about improvements had yielded nothing, and I was going to have to demote him back to sound tech soon, a task I was putting off.

Morton had a weird voice, stiff, moderately deep, earnest, and totally fake-sounding. He sounded like the dubbed voice of Hercules or Sinbad in a cheesy foreign film from the fifties or sixties. You half expected to see his lips move out of sync with his words. It was hard to keep a straight face when talking to him.

After a few ham-handed pleasantries, Morton said, “Now, on to Phase Two.”

With a half wave, half salute to the crowd, he strode off with his men, me, and the crew scrambling to follow him through steel doors and a long hallway to the Phase Two Annex, a building next to the Morton Building that Gill Morton had purchased in order to convert it into the workplace of the future.

Duffin put his hand against a laser reader of some kind and another big steel door opened automatically.

“After you,” Morton said to everyone.

We went into a large office area, empty except for us. It was bright but not too bright—it had a soft, diffuse light—and clean, in pale cheery colors, with no sharp corners on any of the “ergonomically designed” office furniture. There were no windows.

As soon as Gill Morton stepped through the door, the room said, in a female voice, “Good morning, Mr. Morton. Don't you look handsome!”

Morton laughed. “Couldn't resist having the programmers do that,” he said, and led us through the unpeopled office, divided by semicircular partitions that allowed a small measure of privacy without making employees “feel boxed in.”

“This will be the ultimate in smart buildings when it is done. Just the technology in this part of the building alone involves over four hundred new patents,” Morton said. “It's completely hypoallergenic. Sensors read each employee's bar code. This tells the room what the employee's temperature, allergies, and Muzak preferences are, and the main computer determines what will be acceptable to the most employees.”

“They'll wear this bar code somewhere on their person?” I asked.

“To begin with,” he said, flashing a smart badge containing encoded information about him. “Ultimately, we'll just implant a chip in their brains.” Then he winked and laughed, and I knew he was joking about the brain chip. With eccentric moguls, you can't be too sure sometimes.

“We're also experimenting with high-oxygen air and hope to install a ventilation system that filters out radioactivity and destroys biological agents,” Morton went on, not laughing, and not winking.

“Why?”

“Who knows what the world will be like five, ten, fifty years from now. Even a year from now,” he said. “We're going to do everything we can to make this building a refuge. This is all we have to show right now. The rest of the building is still under construction.”

Eventually, he said, he hoped to convert the next block to apartment buildings and services for his employees, and do the same thing with each of his plants.