Tax Attacks

   Note: This is my annual column on how to fill out your income-tax return. As you read it, please bear in mind that I am not a trained accountant. I am the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Nevertheless, if you have any questions whatsoever about the legality of a particular tax maneuver, you should call the special Toll-Free IRS Taxpayer Assistance Hotline Telephone Number in your area and listen to the busy signal until you feel you have a better understanding of the situation.
   There are a number (23,968,847) of significant differences between this year’s tax form and last year’s, but let’s first look at the two things that have not changed:
   1. The commissioner of Internal Revenue is still named “Roscoe,” and
   2. Roscoe is evidently still doing situps under parked cars, because he once again devotes the largest paragraphs on page one to telling us taxpayers how we can send in “voluntary contributions to reduce the federal debt.”
   As I interpret this statement, Roscoe, by using the word “voluntary,” is saying that even though your government finds itself in serious financial trouble owing to the fact that every time an Acting Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Something changes offices, he spends more on new drapes than your whole house is worth, the IRS does not require you to send in extra money, beyond what you actually owe. No sir. You also are allowed to send in jewelry, stocks, canned goods, or clothing in good condition. Roscoe is a 42
   regular.
   Everything else about the tax form is different this year, but it shouldn’t be too much trouble as long as you avoid Common Taxpayer Errors. “For example,” reminds IRS Helpful Hint Division Chief Rexford Pooch, Jr., “taxpayers who make everything up should use numbers that sound sort of accurate, such as $3,847.62, rather than obvious fictions like $4,000. Also, we generally give much closer scrutiny to a return where the taxpayer gives a name such as Nick ‘The Weasel’ Testosterone.”
   With those tips in mind, let’s look at some typical tax cases, and see how they would be handled under the new tax code. TAX CASE ONE: Mrs. Jones, a 7 1—year-old widow living on social security with no other income, is sound asleep, one night when she has an incredibly vivid dream in which her son dies in an automobile crash in California. Suddenly, she is awakened by the telephone; it is a member of the California Highway Patrol, calling to remind her that she does not have a son. Stunned, she suffers a fatal heart attack.
   QUESTION: Does Mrs. Jones still have to file a tax return? ANSWER: Yes. Don’t be an idiot. She should use Form DPFS-65, “Dead Person Filing Singly,” which she can obtain at any of the two nationwide IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers during their normal working hour.
   TAX CASE TWO: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, both 32, are a working couple with two dependent children and a combined gross net abstracted income of $27,000. During the first fiscal segment of the 1984 calendar year, they received IRS Form YAFN-12, notifying them that according to the federal computer, they owe $179 billion in taxes. They have a good laugh over this and show the notice to their friends, thinking that it is such an obvious mistake that the IRS will correct it right away and they might even get their names in the newspaper as the victims of a typical humorous government bonehead computer bungle.
   QUESTION: Can the Smiths deduct the cost of the snake-related injuries they suffered when they were fleeing the federal dogs through the wilderness? ANSWER: They may deduct 61 percent of the base presumptive adjusted mean allocated cost that is greater than, but not exceeding, $1,575, provided they kept accurate records showing they made a reasonable effort to save little Tina’s ear. Except in states whose names consist of two words.
   TAX CASE THREE: Mr. A. Pemberton Trammel Snipe-Treadwater IV has established a trust fund for his six children under which each of them, upon reaching the age of 21, will receive a subcontinent. One afternoon while preparing to lash a servant, Mr. Snipe-Treadwater has a vague recollection that in 1980—or perhaps it was in 1978, he is not sure—he might have paid some taxes.
   QUESTION: What should Mr. Snipe-Treadwater do? ANSWER: He should immediately summon his various senators and congressmen to soothe his brow with damp compresses until he can be named ambassador to France.

Yup The Establishment

   Obviously, we—and when I say “we,” i mean people who no longer laugh at the concept of hemorrhoids—need to come up with some kind of plan for dealing with the yuppies. In a moment I’ll explain my personal proposal, which is that we draft them, but first let me give you some background.
   If you’ve been reading the trend sections of your weekly news magazines, you know that “yuppies” are a new breed of serious, clean-cut, ambitious, career-oriented young person that probably resulted from all that atomic testing. They wear dark, natural-fiber, businesslike clothing even when nobody they know has died. In college, they major in Business Administration. if, to meet certain academic requirements, they have to take a liberal-arts course, they take Business Poetry.
   In short, yuppies are running around behaving as if they were real grown-ups, and they are doing it at an age when persons of my generation were still playing Beatles records backwards and actively experimenting to determine what happens when you drink a whole bottle of cough syrup.
   NOTE TO IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG READERS: Don’t bother. All that happens is you feel like you could never, ever cough again, even if Professional torturers armed with X-acto knives ordered you to, then you develop this intense, 10-to-12-hour interest in individual carpet fibers. So it’s not worth it, plus I understand the manufacturers have done something wimpy to the formulas.
   What bothers me about the yuppies is, they’re destroying the normal social order, which is that people are supposed to start out as wild-eyed radicals, and then gradually, over time, develop gum disease and become conservatives.
   This has always been the system. A good example is Franklin Roosevelt, who when he was alive was considered extremely liberal, but now is constantly being quoted by Ronald Reagan. Or take the Russian leaders. When they were young, they’d pull any kind of crazy stunt, kill the czar, anything, but now they mostly just lie around in state.
   So I say the yuppies represent a threat to society as we know it, and I say we need to do something about them. One possibility would be to simply wait until they reproduce, on the theory that they’ll give their children the finest clothing and toys and designer educations, and their children will of course grow up to absolutely loathe everything their parents stand for and thus become defiant, ill-dressed, unwashed, unkempt, violently antiestablishment drug addicts, and society will return to normal. The problem here is that yuppies have a very low birth rate, because apparently they have to go to Aspen to mate.
   So we’ll have to draft them. Not into the Armed Forces, of course; they’d all make colonel in about a week, plus they’d be useless in an actual war, whapping at the enemy with briefcases. Likewise we cannot put them in the Peace Corps, as they would cause no end of ill will abroad, crouching among the residents of some poverty-racked village in, say, Somalia, and attempting to demonstrate the water-powered Cuisinart.
   No, what we need for the yuppies is a national Lighten Up Corps. First they’d go through basic training, where a harsh drill sergeant would force them to engage in pointless nonproductive activities, such as eating moon pies and watching “Days of Our Lives.” Then they’d each have to serve two years in a job that offered no opportunity whatsoever for career advancement, such as:
   –bumper-car repairman; —gum-wad remover; —random street lunatic; —bus-station urinal maintenance person; —lieutenant governor; —owner of a roadside attraction such as “World’s Largest All-Snake Orchestra.”
   During their time of service in the Lighten Up Corps, the Yuppies would of course be required to wear neon-yellow polyester jumpsuits with the name “Earl” embroidered over the breast pocket.

Pain And Suffering

   As an american, you are very fortunate to live in a country (America) where you have many legal rights. Bales of rights. And new ones are being discovered all the time, such as the right to make a right turn on a red light.
   This doesn’t mean you can do just anything. For example, you can’t shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. Even if there is a fire, you can’t shout it. A union worker has to shout it. But you can—I know this, because you always sit right behind me—clear your throat every 15 seconds all the way through an entire movie, and finally, at the exact moment of greatest on-screen drama, hawk up a gob the size of a golf ball. Nobody can stop you. It’s your right.
   The way you got all these rights is the Founding Fathers fought and died for them, then wrote them down on the Constitution, a very old piece of paper that looks like sick puppies have lived on it, which is stored in Washington, D.C., where you have the right to view it during normal viewing hours. The most important part of the Constitution, rightswise, appears in Article IX, Section II, Row 27, which states:
   If any citizen of the United States shall ever at any time for any reason have any kind of bad thing happen to him or her, then this is probably the result of Negligence on the part of a large corporation with a lot of insurance. If you get our drift.
   What the Constitution is trying to get across to you here is that the way you protect your rights, in America, is by suing the tar out of everybody. This is an especially good time to sue, because today’s juries hand out giant cash awards as if they were complimentary breath mints.
   So you definitely want to get in on this. Let’s say your wedding ring falls into your toaster, and when you stick your hand in to retrieve it, you suffer Pain and Suffering as well as Mental Anguish. You would sue:
   –The toaster manufacturer, for failure to include, in the instructions section that says you should never never never never ever stick your hand in the toaster, the statement: “Not even if your wedding ring falls in there.” —The store where you bought the toaster, for selling it to an obvious cretin like yourself. —The Union Carbide Corporation, which is not directly responsible in this case, but which is feeling so guilty that it would probably send you a large cash settlement anyway.
   Of course you need the help of a professional lawyer. Experts agree the best way to select a lawyer is to watch VHF television, where more and more of your top legal talents are advertising:
   “Hi. I’m Preston A. Mantis, President of Consumers Retail Law Outlet. As you can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of equal height on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney. Do you have a car or a truck? Do you ever walk around? If so, you probably have the makings Of an excellent legal case. Although of course every case is different, I would definitely say that, based on my experience and training, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t come out of this thing with at least a cabin cruiser. Remember, at the Preston A. Mantis Consumers Retail Law Outlet, our motto is: “It is very difficult to disprove certain kinds Of Pain.”
   Another right you have, as an American, is the right to Speedy justice. For an example of how Speedy justice works, we turn now to an anecdote told to me by a friend who once worked as a clerk for a judge in a medium-sized city. my friend swears this is true. It happened to an elderly recent immigrant who was hauled before the judge one day. The thing to bear in mind is, this man was not actually guilty of anything. He had simply gotten lost and confused, and he spoke very little English, and he was wandering around, so the police had picked him up just so he’d have a warm place to sleep while they straightened everything out.
   Unfortunately, this judge, who got his job less on the basis of being knowledgeable in matters of law than on the basis of attending the most picnics, somehow got the wrong folder in front of him, the folder of a person who had done something semiserious, so he gave the accused man a stern speech, then sentenced him to six months in jail. When this was explained to the man, he burst into tears. He was thinking, no doubt, that if he had only known they had such severe penalties for being elderly and lost in America, he would never have immigrated here in the first place.
   Finally, about an hour later, the police figured out what happened, and after they stopped rolling around the floor and wetting their pants, they told the judge, and he sent them to fetch the prisoner back from jail. By now, of course, the prisoner had no idea what they’re going to do to him. Shoot him, maybe. He was terrified. So put yourself in the judge’s position. Here you have a completely innocent man in front of you, whom you have scared half to death and had carted off to jail because you made a stupid mistake. What is the only conceivable thing you can do? Apologize, right?
   This just shows you have no legal training. What this judge did was give a speech. “America,” it began. just the one word, very dramatically spoken. My friend, who saw all this happen, still cannot recount this speech without falling most of the way out of his chair. The gist of it was that this is a Great Country, and since this was a First Offense, he, the judge, had had a Change of Heart, and had decided to give the accused a Second Chance. Well. Once they explained this to the prisoner, that he was not going to jail after all, that he was to be shown all this mercy, he burst into tears again, and rushed up and tried to kiss the judge’s hand. Who could blame him? This was probably the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. What a great country! What speedy justice! I bet he still tells his grandchildren about it. I bet they tell him he should have sued.

The Deadly Wind

   What prospective buyers said, when they looked at our house, was: “Huh! This is ... interesting.” They always said this. They never said: “What a nice house!” Or: “We’ll take this house! Here’s a suitcase filled with money!!” No, they said our house is interesting. What they meant was: “Who installed this paneling? Vandals?”
   Sometimes, to cheer us up, they also said: “Well it certainly has a lot of possibilities!” Meaning: “These people have lived here for 10 years and they never put up any curtains.”
   We were trying to sell our house. We had elected to move voluntarily to Miami. We wanted our child to benefit from the experience of growing up in a community that is constantly being enriched by a diverse and ever-changing infusion of tropical diseases. Also they have roaches down there you could play polo with.
   The first thing we did, when we decided to move, was we rented a dumpster and threw away the majority of our furniture. You think I am kidding, but this is only because you never saw our furniture. It was much too pathetic to give to The Poor. The Poor would have taken one look at it and returned, laughing, to their street grates.
   What we did give to The Poor was all my college textbooks, which I had gone through, in college, using a yellow felt marker to highlight the good parts. You college graduates out there know what I’m talking about. You go back, years later, when college is just a vague semicomical memory, and read something you chose to highlight, and it’s always a statement like: “Structuralized functionalism represents both a continuance of, and a departure from, functionalistic structuralism.” And you realize that at one time you actually had large sectors of your brain devoted to this type of knowledge. Lord only knows what The Poor will use it for. Fuel, probably.
   One book we did keep is called Survive the Deadly Wind. I don’t know where we got it, but it’s about hurricanes, and so we thought it might contain useful information about life in Miami. “Any large pieces of aluminum left in a yard are a definite hazard,” it states. “Each piece has a potential for decapitation. Hurled on the tide of a 150-mile-an-hour wind, it can slice its way to, and through, bone.” Ha ha! Our New Home!
   After we threw away our furniture, we hired two men, both named Jonathan, to come over and fix our house up so prospective buyers wouldn’t get to laughing so hard they’d fall down the basement stairs and file costly lawsuits. The two jonathans were extremely competent, the kind of men who own winches and freely use words like “joist” and can build houses starting out with only raw trees. The first thing they did was rip out all the Homeowner Projects I had committed against our house back when I thought I had manual dexterity. They were trying to make the house look as nice as it did before I started improving it. This cost thousands of dollars.
   I think there should be a federal law requiring people who publish do-it-yourself books to include a warning, similar to what the Surgeon General has on cigarette packs, right on the cover of the book, stating:
   WARNING: ANY MONEY YOU SAVE BY DOING HOMEOWNER PROJECTS YOURSELF WILL BE OFFSET BY THE COST OF HIRING COMPETENT PROFESSIONALS TO COME AND REMOVE THEM SO you CAN SELL YOUR HOUSE, NOT TO MENTION THE EMOTIONAL TRAUMA ASSOCIATED WITH LISTENING TO THESE PROFESSIONALS, AS THEY RIP OUT LARGE CHUNKS OF A PROJECT, LAUGH, AND YELL REMARKS SUCH AS: “HEY! GET A LOAD OF THIS.”
   After the jonathans took out all my projects, the house mostly consisted of holes, which they filled up with spackle. When prospective buyers asked: “What kind of construction is this house?” I answered: “Spackle.”
   The only real bright spot in the move was when I got even with the television set in our bedroom, which had been broken for years. My wife and I have had the same argument about it maybe 200 times, wherein I say we should throw it away, and she says we should get it repaired. My wife grew up in a very sheltered rural Ohio community and she still believes you can get things repaired.
   Over the years, this television had come to believe that as long as my wife was around, it was safe, and it had grown very smug, which is why I wish you could have seen the look on its face when, with my wife weakened by the flu, I took it out and propped it up at the end of the dumpster, execution-style, and, as a small neighborhood crowd gathered, one of the jonathans hurled a long, spear-like piece of Homeowner Project from 20 feet away right directly through the screen, into the very heart of its picture tube. It made a sound that I am sure our other appliances will not soon forget.
   But the rest were mostly low points. I looked forward to the day when somebody bought our house, perhaps to use as a tourist attraction (SPACKLE KINGDOM, 5 MI.), and we could pack our remaining household possessions—a piano and 48,000 “He-Man” action figures—into cardboard boxes and move to Miami to begin our new life, soaking up the sun and watching the palm trees sway in the tropical breeze. At least until the aluminum sliced through them.

The House Of The Seven Figures

   Before my wife, Beth, left on the jet airplane to buy us a new house, we sat down and figured out what our Price Range was. We used the standard formula where you take your income and divide it by three, which gives you the amount you would spend annually on housing if you bought a house that is much cheaper than the one you will actually end up buying.
   With that figure in mind, Beth took off for our new home-to-be, South Florida, and my son and I, who had never been in charge of each other for this long before, embarked on the following rigorous nutritional program:
   BREAKFAST: Frozen waffles heated up. LUNCH: Hot dogs heated up. DINNER: Choice of hot dogs or frozen waffles heated up.
   Also in the refrigerator were many health-fanatic foods such as pre-sliced carrot sticks placed there by Beth in hopes that we would eat something that did not have a label stating that it met the minimum federal standard for human armpit hair, but we rejected these because of the lengthy preparation time.
   Some of you may be wondering why, considering that this is the most important financial transaction of our lives, I didn’t go with Beth to buy the house. The answer is that I am a very dangerous person to have on your side in a sales situation. I develop great anxiety in the presence of sales people, and the only way I can think of to make it go away is to buy whatever they’re selling. This is not a major problem with, for example, pants, but it leads to trouble with cars and houses.
   Here is how I bought our last car. I didn’t dare go directly to the car dealership, so, for several consecutive days—this is the truth—I would park at a nearby Dairy Queen, buy a chocolate cone, then amble over to the car lot, disguised as a person just ambling around with a chocolate cone, and I would try to quickly read the sticker on the side of the car where they explain that the only part of the car included in the Base Sticker Price is the actual sticker itself, and you have to pay extra if you want, for example, transparent windows. After a few minutes, a salesman would spot me and come striding out, smiling like an entire Rotary Club, and I would adopt the expression of a person who had just remembered an important appointment and amble off at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour. What I’m saying is, I shopped for this car the way a squirrel hunts for acorns in a dog-infested neighborhood.
   When I finally went in to buy the car, I was desperate to get it over with as quickly as possible. Here is how I negotiated:
   SALESPERSON: (showing me a sheet of paper with figures on it): OK, Dave. Here’s a ludicrously inflated opening price that only a person with Rice-A-Roni for brains would settle for. ME: You got a deal.
   I am worse with houses. The last time we were trying to buy a house, I made Beth crazy because I was willing to make a formal offer on whatever structure we were standing in at the time:
   ME: This is perfect! Isn’t this perfect?! BETH: This is the real-estate office. ME: Well, how much are they asking?
   So this is why Beth went to Miami without me. Moments after she arrived, she ascertained that there were no houses there in our Price Range. Our Price Range turned out to be what the average homeowner down there spends on roach control. (And we are not talking about killing the roaches. We are talking about sedating them enough so they let you into your house.)
   Fortunately, Beth found out about a new financial concept they have in home-buying that is tailor-made for people like us, called Going Outside Your Price Range. This is where she started looking, and before long she had stumbled onto an even newer financial concept called Going Way Outside Your Price Range. This is where she eventually found a house, and I am very much looking forward to seeing it someday, assuming we get a mortgage.
   They have developed a new wrinkle in mortgages since the last time we got one, back in the seventies. The way it worked then was, you borrowed money from the bank, and every month you paid back some money, and at the end of the year the bank sent you a computerized statement proving you still owed them all the money you borrowed in the first place. Well, they’re still using that basic system, but now they also have this wrinkle called “points,” which is a large quantity of money you give to the bank, right up front, for no apparent reason. It’s as though the bank is the one trying to buy the house. You ask real-estate people to explain it, and they just say: “Oh yes, the points! Be sure to bring an enormous sum of money to the settlement for those!” And of course we will. We consumers will do almost anything to get our mortgages. Banks know this, so they keep inventing new charges to see how far they can go:
   MORTGAGE OFFICER: OK, at your settlement you have to pay $400 for the preparation of the Certificate of Indemption. CONSUMER: Yes, of course. MORTGAGE OFFICER: And $430 for pastries.
   But it will all be worth it, to get to our house. It sounds, from Beth’s description, as though it has everything that I look for in a house: (1) a basketball hoop and (2) a fiberglass backboard. I understand it also has rooms.

Can New York Save Itself?

   At The Miami Herald we ordinarily don’t provide extensive coverage of New York City unless a major news development occurs up there, such as Sean Penn coming out of a restaurant. But lately we have become very concerned about the “Big Apple,” because of a story about Miami that ran a few weeks ago in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times. Maybe you remember this story: The cover featured an upbeat photograph of suspected Miami drug dealers being handcuffed face-down in the barren dirt next to a garbage-strewn sidewalk outside a squalid shack that probably contains roaches the size of Volvo sedans. The headline asked:
   CAN MIAMI SAVE ITSELF?
   For those readers too stupid to figure out the answer, there also was this helpful hint:
   A City Beset by Drugs and Violence
   The overall impression created by the cover was: Sure Miami can save itself! And some day trained sheep will pilot the Concords!
   The story itself was more balanced, discussing the pluses as well as the minuses of life in South Florida, as follows:
   –Minuses: The area is rampant with violent crime and poverty and political extremism and drugs and corruption and ethnic hatred. —Pluses: Voodoo is legal.
   I myself thought it was pretty fair. Our local civic leaders reacted to it with their usual level of cool maturity, similar to the way Moe reacts when he is poked in the eyeballs by Larry and Curly. Our leaders held emergency breakfasts and issued official statements pointing out that much of the information in the New York Times story was Ancient History dating all the way back to the early 1980s, and that we haven’t had a riot for what, months now, and that the whole drugs-and-violence thing is overrated. Meanwhile, at newsstands all over South Florida, crowds of people were snapping up all available copies of the New York Times, frequently at gunpoint.
   All of which got us, at the Miami Herald, to thinking. “Gosh,” we thought. “Here the world-famous New York Times, with so many other things to worry about, has gone to all this trouble to try to find out whether Miami can save itself. Wouldn’t they be thrilled if we did the same thing for them?” And so it was that we decided to send a crack investigative team consisting of me and Chuck, who is a trained photographer, up there for a couple of days to see what the situation was. We took along comfortable walking shoes and plenty of major credit cards, in case it turned out that we needed to rent a helicopter, which it turned out we did. Here is our report:
   DAY ONE: We’re riding in a cab from La Guardia Airport to our Manhattan hotel, and I want to interview the driver, because this is how we professional journalists take the Pulse of a City, only I can’t, because he doesn’t speak English. He is not allowed to, under the rules, which are posted right on the seat:
   NEW YORK TAXI RULES
   1. DRIVER SPEAKS NO ENGLISH.
   2. DRIVER JUST GOT HERE TWO DAYS AGO FROM SOMEPLACE LIKE SENEGAL.
   3. DRIVER HATES YOU.
   Which is just as well, because if he talked to me, he might lose his concentration, which would be very bad because the taxi has some kind of problem with the steering, probably dead pedestrians lodged in the mechanism, the result being that there is a delay of 8 to 10 seconds between the time the driver turns the wheel and the time the taxi actually changes direction, a handicap that the driver is compensating for by going 175 miles per hour, at which velocity we are able to remain airborne almost to the far rim of some of the smaller potholes. These are of course maintained by the crack New York Department of Potholes (currently on strike), whose commissioner was recently indicted on corruption charges by the Federal Grand jury to Indict Every Commissioner in New York. This will take some time, because New York has more commissioners than Des Moines, Iowa, has residents, including the Commissioner for Making Sure the Sidewalks Are Always Blocked by Steaming Fetid Mounds of Garbage the Size of Appalachian Foothills, and, of course, the Commissioner for Bicycle Messengers Bearing Down on You at Warp Speed with Mohawk Haircuts and Pupils Smaller Than Purely Theoretical Particles.
   After several exhilarating minutes, we arrive in downtown Manhattan, where the driver slows to 125 miles so he can take better aim at wheelchair occupants. This gives us our first brief glimpse of the city we have come to investigate. It looks to us, whizzing past, as though it is beset by serious problems. We are reminded of the findings of the 40member Mayor’s Special Commission on the Future of the City of New York, which this past June, after nearly two years of intensive study of the economic, political, and social problems confronting the city, issued a 2,300-page report, which reached the disturbing conclusion that New YOrk is “a nice place to visit” but the commission “wouldn’t want to live there.”
   Of course they probably stayed at a nicer hotel than where we’re staying. We’re staying at a “medium-priced” hotel, meaning that the rooms are more than spacious enough for a family of four to stand up in if they are slightly built and hold their arms over their heads, yet the rate is just $135 per night, plus of course your state tax, your city tax, your occupancy tax, your head tax, your body tax, your soap tax, your ice bucket tax, your in-room dirty movies tax, and your piece of paper that says your toilet is sanitized for your protection tax, which bring the rate to $367.90 per night, or a flat $4,000 if you use the telephone. A bellperson carries my luggage—one small gym-style bag containing, primarily, a set Of clean underwear—and I tip him $2, which he takes as if I am handing him a jar of warm sputum.
   But never mind. We are not here to please the bellperson. We are here to see if New York can save itself. And so Chuck and I set off into the streets of Manhattan, where we immediately detect signs of a healthy economy in the form of people squatting on the sidewalk selling realistic jewelry. This is good, because a number of other businesses, such as Mobil Corp., have recently decided to pull their headquarters out of New York, much to the annoyance of Edward Koch, the feisty, cocky, outspoken, abrasive mayor who really gets on some people’s nerves, yet at the same time strikes other people as a jerk. “Why would anybody want to move to some dirt-bag place like the Midwest?” Mayor Koch is always asking reporters. “What are they gonna do at night? Huh? Milk the cows? Are they gonna wear bib overalls and sit around canning their preserves? Huh? Are they gonna ... Hey! Come back here!”
   But why are the corporations leaving? To answer this question, a polling firm recently took a scientific telephone survey of the heads of New York’s 200 largest corporations, and found that none of them were expected to arrive at work for at least two more hours because of massive transit delays caused by a wildcat strike of the 1,200-member Wildcat Strikers Guild. So you can see the corporations’ point: It is an inconvenience, being located in a city where taxes are ludicrously high, where you pay twice your annual income to rent an apartment that could easily be carried on a commercial airline flight, where you spend two-thirds of your work day trying to get to and from work, but as Mayor Koch philosophically points out, “Are they gonna slop the hogs? Are they gonna ...”
   Despite the corporate exodus, the New York economy continues to be robust, with the major industry being people from New jersey paying $45 each to see A Chorus Line. Employment remains high, with most of the new jobs opening up in the fast-growing fields of:
   Person asking everybody for “spare” change. Person shrieking at taxis. Person holding animated sidewalk conversation with beings from another dimension. Person handing out little slips of paper entitling the bearer to one free drink at sophisticated nightclubs with names like The Bazoom Room.
   As Chuck and I walk along 42nd Street, we see a person wearing an enormous frankfurter costume, handing out coupons good for discounts at Nathan’s Famous hot dog stands. His name is Victor Leise, age 19, of Queens, and he has held the position of giant frankfurter for four months. He says he didn’t have any connections or anything; he just put in an application and, boom, the job was his. Sheer luck. He says it’s OK work, although people call him “Frank” and sometimes sneak up and whack him on the back. Also there is not a lot of room for advancement. They have no ham burger costume. “Can New York save itself?” I ask him.
   “If there are more cops on the street, there could be a possibility,” he says, through his breathing hole.
   Right down the street is the world-famous Times Square. Although this area is best known as the site where many thousands of people gather each New Year’s Eve for a joyous and festive night of public urination, it also serves as an important cultural center where patrons may view films such as Sex Aliens, Wet Adulteress, and, of course, Sperm Busters in comfortable refrigerated theaters where everybody sits about 15 feet apart. This is also an excellent place to shop for your leisure product needs, including The Bionic Woman (“An amazingly lifelike companion”) and a vast selection of latex objects, some the size of military pontoons. The local residents are very friendly, often coming right up and offering to engage in acts of leisure with you. Reluctantly, however, Chuck and I decided to tear ourselves away, for we have much more to see, plus we do not wish to spend the rest of our lives soaking in vats of penicillin.
   As we leave the area, I stop briefly inside an Off-Track Betting parlor on Seventh Avenue to see if I can obtain the Pulse of the City by eavesdropping on native New Yorkers in casual conversation. Off-Track Betting parlors are the kinds of places where you never see signs that say, “Thank You for Not Smoking.” The best you could hope for is, “Thank You for Not Spitting Pieces of Your Cigar on My Neck.” By listening carefully and remaining unobtrusive, I am able to overhear the following conversation:
   FIRST OFF-TRACK BETTOR: I like this (very bad word) horse here. SECOND OFF-TRACK BETTOR: That (extremely bad word) couldn’t (bad word) out his own (comical new bad word). FIRST OFF-TRACK BETTOR: (bad word).
   Listening to these two men share their innermost feelings, I sense concern, yes, but also an undercurrent of hope, hope for a Brighter Tomorrow, if only the people of this great city can learn to work together, to look upon each other with respect and even, yes, love. Or at least stop shoving one another in front of moving subway trains. This happens a fair amount in New York, so Chuck and I are extremely alert as we descend into the complex of subway tunnels under Times Square, climate-controlled year-round at a comfortable 172 degrees Fahrenheit.
   Although it was constructed in 1536, the New York subway system boasts an annual maintenance budget of nearly $8, currently stolen, and it does a remarkable job of getting New Yorkers from point A to an indeterminate location somewhere in the tunnel leading to point B. It’s also very easy for the “out-of-towner” to use, thanks to the logical, easy-to-understand system of naming trains after famous letters and numbers. For directions, all you have to do is peer up through the steaming gloom at the informative signs, which look like this:
   A 5 N 7 8 c 6 AA MID-DOWNTOWN 73/8
   EXPRESS LOCAL ONLY LL 67 +
   DDD 4 I K AAAA 9 ONLY
   EXCEPT CERTAIN DAYS BB eg 3
   MIDWAY THROUGH TOWN 1 7 D
   WALK REAL FAST AAAAAAAAA 56
   LOCALIZED ExpREss-6
   llyy 4 1,539
   AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
   If for some reason you are unsure where to go, all you have to do is stand there looking lost, and within seconds a helpful New Yorker will approach to see if you have any “spare” change.
   Within less than an hour, Chuck and I easily located what could well be the correct platform, where we pass the time by perspiring freely until the train storms in, colorfully decorated, as is the tradition in New York, with the spraypainted initials of all the people it has run over. All aboard!
   Here is the correct procedure for getting on a New York subway train at rush hour:
   1. As the train stops, you must join the other people on the platform in pushing forward and forming the densest possible knot in front of each door. You want your knot to be so dense that, if the train were filled with water instead of people, not a single drop would escape.
   2. The instant the doors open, you want to push forward as hard as possible, in an effort to get onto the train without letting anybody get off. This is very important. If anybody does get off, it is legal to tackle him and drag him back on. I once watched three German tourists—this is a true anecdote—attempt to get off the northbound No. 5 Lexington Avenue
   IRT train at Grand Central Station during rush hour. “Getting off please!” they said, politely, from somewhere inside a car containing approximately the population of Brazil, as if they expected people to actually let them through. Instead of course, the incoming passengers propelled the Germans, like gnats in a hurricane, away from the door, deeper and deeper into the crowd, which quickly compressed them into dense little wads of Teutonic tissue. I never did see where they actually got off. Probably they stumbled to daylight somewhere in the South Bronx, where they were sold for parts.
   Actually, there is reason to believe the subways are safer now. After years of being fearful and intimidated, many New Yorkers cheered in 1985 when Bernhard Goetz, in a highly controversial incident that touched off an emotion-charged nationwide debate, shot and killed the New York subway commissioner. This resulted in extensive legal proceedings, culminating recently when, after a dramatic and highly publicized trial, a jury voted not only to acquit Goetz, but also to dig up the commissioner and shoot him again.
   Chuck and I emerge from the subway in Lower Manhattan. This area has been hard hit by the massive wave of immigration that has threatened to rend the very fabric of society, as the city struggles desperately to cope with the social upheaval caused by the huge and unprecedented influx of a group that has, for better or for worse, permanently altered the nature of New York: young urban professionals. They began arriving by the thousands in the 1970s, packed two and sometimes three per BMW sedan, severely straining the city’s already-overcrowded gourmet-ice cream facilities. Soon they were taking over entire neighborhoods, where longtime residents watched in despair as useful businesses such as bars were replaced by precious little restaurants with names like The Whittling Fig.
   And still the urban professionals continue to come, drawn by a dream, a dream that is best expressed by the words of the song “New York, New York,” which goes:
   Dum dum da de dum Dum dum da de dum Dum dum da de dum Dum dum da de dum dum.
   It is a powerfully seductive message, especially if you hear it at a wedding reception held in a Scranton, Pennsylvania, Moose Lodge facility and you have been drinking. And so you come to the Big Apple, and you take a peon-level position in some huge impersonal corporation, an incredibly awful, hateful job, and you spend $1,250 a month to rent an apartment so tiny that you have to shower in the kitchen, and the only furniture you have room for—not that you can afford furniture anyway—is your collection of back issues of Metropolitan Home magazine, but you stick it out, because this is the Big Leagues (If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere), and you know that if you show them what you can do, if you really go for it, then, by gosh, one day you’re gonna wake up, in The City That Never Sleeps, to find that the corporation has moved its headquarters to Plano, Texas.
   Now Chuck and I are in Chinatown. We pass an outdoor market where there is an attractive display consisting of a tub containing I would estimate 275,000 dead baby eels. One of the great things about New York is that, if you ever need dead baby eels, you can get them. Also there is opera here. But tonight I think I’ll just try to get some sleep.
   At 3:14 A.M. I am awakened by a loud crashing sound, caused by workers from the city’s crack Department of Making Loud Crashing Sounds during the Night, who are just outside my window, breaking in a new taxicab by dropping it repeatedly from a 75-foot crane. Lying in bed listening to them, I can hardly wait for ...
   DAY TWO: Chuck and I decide that since we pretty much covered the economic, social, political, historical and cultural aspects of New York on Day One, we’ll devote Day Two to sightseeing. We decide to start with the best-known sight of all, the one that, more than any other, exemplifies what the Big Apple is all about: the Islip Garbage Barge. This is a barge of world-renowned garbage that originated on Long Island, a place where many New Yorkers go to sleep on those occasions when the Long Island Railroad is operating.
   The Islip Garbage Barge is very famous. Nobody really remembers why it’s famous; it just is, like Dick Cavett. It has traveled to South America. It has been on many television shows, including—I am not making this up—”Donahue.” When we were in New York, the barge—I am still not making this up—was on trial. It has since been convicted and sentenced to be burned. But I am not worried. It will get out on appeal. It is the Claus von Billow of garbage barges.
   Chuck and I find out from the Director of Public Affairs at the New York Department of Sanitation, who is named Vito, that the barge is anchored off the coast of Brooklyn, so we grab a cab, which is driven by a man who of course speaks very little English and, as far as we can tell, has never heard of Brooklyn. By means of hand signals we direct him to a place near where the barge is anchored. It is some kind of garbage-collection point.
   There are mounds of garbage everywhere, and if you really concentrate, you can actually see them giving off smell rays, such as you see in comic strips. Clearly no taxi has ever been here before, and none will ever come again, so we ask the driver to wait. “YOU WAIT HERE,” I say, speaking in capital letters so he will understand me. He looks at me suspiciously. “WE JUST WANT TO SEE A GARBAGE BARGE,” I explain.
   We can see the barge way out on the water, but Chuck decides that, to get a good picture of it, we need a boat. A sanitation engineer tells us we might be able to rent one in a place called Sheepshead Bay, so we direct the driver there (“WE NEED TO RENT A BOAT”), but when we get there we realize it’s too far away, so we naturally decide to rent a helicopter, which we find out is available only in New jersey. (“NOW WE NEED TO GO TO NEW JERSEY. TO RENT A HELICOPTER.”) Thus we end up at the airport in Linden, New jersey, where we leave the taxi driver with enough fare money to retire for life, if he ever finds his way home.
   Chuck puts the helicopter on his American Express card. Our pilot, Norman Knodt, assures me that nothing bad has ever happened to him in a helicopter excepting getting it shot up nine times, but that was in Vietnam, and he foresees no problems with the garbage-barge mission. Soon we are over the harbor, circling the barge, which turns out to be, like so many celebrities when you see them up close, not as tall as you expected. As I gaze down at it, with the soaring spires of downtown Manhattan in the background gleaming in the brilliant sky, a thought crosses my mind: I had better write at least 10 inches about this, to justify our expense re ports.
   Later that day, I stop outside Grand Central Station, where a woman is sitting in a chair on the sidewalk next to a sign that says:
   TAROT CARDS
   PALM READINGS
   I ask her how much it costs for a Tarot card reading, and she says $10, which I give her. She has me select nine cards, which she arranges in a circle. “Now ask me a question,” she says.
   “Can New York save itself ?” I ask.
   She looks at me.
   “That’s your question?” she asks.
   “Yes,” I say.
   “OK,” she says. She looks at the cards. “Yes, New York can save itself for the future.”
   She looks at me. I don’t say anything. She looks back at the cards.
   “New York is the Big Apple,” she announces. “It is big and exciting, with very many things to see and do.”
   After the reading I stop at a newsstand and pick up a COPY Of Manhattan Living magazine, featuring a guide to condominiums. I note that there are a number of one-bedrooms priced as low as $250,000.
   Manhattan Living also has articles. “It is only recently,” one begins, “that the word ‘fashionable’ has been used in conjunction with the bathroom.”
   DAY THREE: just to be on the safe side, Chuck and I decide to devote Day Three to getting back to the airport. Because of a slipup at the Department of Taxi Licensing, our driver speaks a fair amount of English. And it’s a darned good thing he does, because he is kind enough to share his philosophy of life with us, in between shouting helpful instructions to other drivers. It is a philosophy Of optimism and hope, not just for himself, but also for New York City, and for the world:
   “The thing is, you got to look on the liter side, because HEY WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU (very bad word) Because for me, the thing is, respect. If a person shows me respect, then HAH? YOU WANT TO SQUEEZE IN FRONT NOW?? YOU S.O.B.!! I SQUEEZE YOU LIKE A LEMON!! So I am happy here, but you Americans, you know, you are very, you know WHERE IS HE GOING?? You have to look behind the scenery. This damn CIA, something sticky is going on WHERE THE HELL IS THIS STUPID S.O.B. THINK HE IS GOING? behind the scenery there, you don’t think this guy what his name, Casey, you don’t LOOK AT THIS S.O.B. you don’t wonder why he really die? You got to look behind the scenery. I don’t trust nobody. I don’t trust my own self. WILL YOU LOOK AT ...”
   By the time we reach La Guardia, Chuck and I have a much deeper understanding of life in general, and it is with a sense of real gratitude that we leap out of the cab and cling to the pavement. Soon we are winging our way southward, watching the Manhattan skyline disappear, reflecting upon our many experiences and pondering the question that brought us here:
   Can New York save itself? Can this ultrametropolis—crude yet sophisticated, overburdened yet wealthy, loud yet obnoxious—can this city face up to the multitude of problems besetting it and, drawing upon its vast reserves of spunk and spirit, as it has done so many times before, emerge triumphant?
   And, who cares?

A Boy And His Diplodocus

   We have been deeply into dinosaurs for some time now. We have a great many plastic dinosaurs around the house. Sometimes I think we have more plastic dinosaurs than plastic robots, if you can imagine.
   This is my son’s doing, of course. Robert got into dinosaurs when he was about three, as many children do. It’s a power thing: Children like the idea of creatures that were much, much bigger and stronger than mommies and daddies are. If a little boy is doing something bad, such as deliberately pouring his apple juice onto the television remote-control device, a mommy or daddy can simply snatch the little boy up and carry him, helpless, to his room. But they would not dare try this with Tyrannosaurus Rex. No sir. Tyrannosaurus Rex would glance down at Mommy or Daddy from a height of 40 feet and casually flick his tail sideways, and Mommy or Daddy would sail directly through the wall, leaving comical cartoon-style Mommy-or-Daddy-shaped holes and Tyrannosaurus Rex would calmly go back to pouring his apple juice onto the remote-control device.
   So Robert spends a lot of time being a dinosaur. I recall the time we were at the beach and he was being a Gorgosaurus, which, like Tyrannosaurus Rex, is a major dinosaur, a big meat-eater (Robert is almost always carnivorous). He was stomping around in the sand and along came an elderly tourist couple, talking in German. They sat down near us.
   Robert watched them. “Tell them I’m a Gorgosaurus,” he said.
   “You tell them,” I said.
   “Gorgosauruses can’t talk,” Robert pointed out, rolling his eyes. Sometimes he can’t believe what an idiot his father is.
   Anybody who has ever had a small child knows what happened next. What happened was Robert, using the powerful whining ability that Mother Nature gives to young children to compensate for the fact that they have no other useful skills, got me to go over to this elderly foreign couple I had never seen before, point to my son, who was looking as awesome and terrifying as a three-year-old can look lumbering around in a bathing suit with a little red anchor sewn on the crotch, and say: “He’s a Gorgosaurus.”
   The Germans looked at me the way you would look at a person you saw walking through a shopping mall with a vacant stare and a chain saw. They said nothing.
   “Ha ha!” I added, so they would see I was in fact very normal.
   They continued to say nothing. You could tell this had never happened to them over in Germany. You could just tell that in Germany, they have a strict policy whereby people who claim their sons are dinosaurs on public beaches are quickly sedated by the authorities. You could also tell that this couple agreed with that policy.
   “Tell them I’m a meat-eater,” the Gorgosaurus whispered.
   “He’s a meat-eater,” I told the couple. God only knows why. They got up and started to fold their towels.
   “Tell them I can eat more in ONE BITE than a mommy and a daddy and a little boy could eat in TWO WHOLE MONTHS,” urged the Gorgosaurus, this being one of the many dinosaur facts he got from the books we read to him at bedtime. But by then the Germans were already striding off, glancing back at me and talking quietly to each other about which way they would run if I came after them.
   “Ha ha!” I called after them, reassuringly.
   Gorgosaurus continued to stomp around, knocking over whole cities. I had a hell of a time getting him to take a nap that day.
   Sometimes when he’s tired and wants to be cuddled, Robert is a gentle plant-eating dinosaur. I’ll come into the living room, and there will be this lump on my wife’s lap, whimpering, with Robert’s blanket over it.
   “What’s that?” I ask my wife.
   “A baby Diplodocus,” she answers. (Diplodocus looked sort of like Brontosaurus, only sleeker and cuter.) “it lost its mommy and daddy.”
   “No!” I say.
   “So it’s going to live with us forever and ever,” she says.
   “Great!” I say,
   The blanket wriggles with joy.
   Lately, at our house we have become interested in what finally happened to the dinosaurs. According to our bedtime books, all the dinosaurs died quite suddenly about 60 million years ago, and nobody knows why. Some scientists—this is the truth, it was in Time magazine—think the cause was a Death Comet that visits the earth from time to time. Robert thinks this is great. A Death Comet! That is serious power. A Death Comet would never have to brush its teeth. A Death Comet could have pizza whenever it wanted.
   Me, I get uneasy, reading about the Death Comet. I don’t like to think about the dinosaurs disappearing. Yet another reminder that nothing lasts forever. Even a baby Diplodocus has to grow up sometime.

Young Frankincense

   My most vivid childhood memory of Christmas that does not involve opening presents, putting batteries in presents, playing with presents, and destroying presents before sundown, is the annual Nativity Pageant at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Armonk, New York. This was a major tradition at St. Stephen’s, which had quite a few of them. For example, at Easter, we had the Hoisting of the Potted Hyacinths. Each person in the congregation was issued a potted hyacinth, and we’d sing a song that had a lot of “alleluias” in it, and every time we’d get to one, we’d all hoist our pots over our heads. This is the truth. Remember it next time somebody tells you Episcopalians never really get loose.
   But the big event was the Nativity Pageant, which almost all the Sunday School kids were drafted to perform in. Mrs. Elson, who had experience in the Legitimate Theater, was the director, and she would tell you what role you would play, based on your artistic abilities. Like, if your artistic abilities were that you were short, you would get a role as an angel, which involved being part of the Heavenly Host and gazing with adoration upon the Christ Child and trying not to scratch yourself. The Christ Child was played by one of those dolls that close their eyes when you lay them down because they have weights in their heads. I know this because Neil Thompson and I once conducted a research experiment wherein we scientifically opened a doll’s head up with a hammer. (This was not the doll that played the Christ Child, of course. We used a doll that belonged to Neil’s sister, Penny, who once tied her dog to the bumper of my mother’s car roughly five minutes before my mother drove the car to White Plains. But that is another story.)
   Above your angels, you had your three shepherds. Shepherd was my favorite role, because you got to carry a stick, plus you spent most of the pageant waiting back in the closet with a rope that led up to the church bell and about 750,000 bats. Many were the happy rehearsal hours we shepherds spent back there, in the dark, whacking each other with sticks and climbing up the ladder so as to cause bat emission products to rain down upon us. (“And lo, when the shepherds did looketh towards the heavens, they did see, raining down upon them, a multitude of guano ...)
   When it was our turn to go out and perform, we shepherds would emerge from the closet, walk up the aisle, and hold a conference to determine whether or not we should go to Bethlehem. One year when I was a shepherd, the role of First Shepherd was played by Mike Craig, who always, at every rehearsal, would whisper: “Let’s ditch this joint.” Of course this does not strike you as particularly funny, but believe me, if you were a 10-year-old who had spent the past hour in a bat-infested closet, it would strike you as amusing in the extreme, and it got funnier every time, so that when Mike said it on Christmas Eve during the actual Pageant, it was an awesome thing, the hydrogen bomb of jokes, causing the shepherds to almost pee their garments as they staggered off, snorting, toward Bethlehem.
   After a couple of years as shepherd, you usually did a stint as a Three King. This was not nearly as good a role, because (a) you didn’t get to wait in the closet, and (b) you had to lug around the gold, the frankincense, and of course the myrrh, which God forbid you should drop because they were played by valuable antique containers belonging to Mrs. Elson. Nevertheless, being a Three King was better than being Joseph, because Joseph had to hang around with Mary, who was played by (YECCCCCHHHHHHH) a girl. You had to wait backstage with this girl, and walk in with this girl, and needless to say you felt like a total wonk, which was not helped by the fact that the shepherds and the Three Kings were constantly suggesting that you liked this girl. So during the pageant joseph tended to maintain the maximum allowable distance from Mary, as though she were carrying some kind of fatal bacteria.
   On Christmas Eve we were all pretty nervous, but thanks to all the rehearsals, the pageant generally went off with only 60 or 70 hitches. Like, for example, one year Ernie Dobbs, a Three King, dropped the frankincense only moments before showtime, and he had to go on carrying, as I recall, a Rolodex. Also there was the famous incident where the shepherds could not get out of the bat closet for the longest while, and thus lost their opportunity for that moment of dramatic tension where they confer and the audience is on the edge of its pews, wondering what they’ll decide. When they finally emerged, all they had time to do was lunge directly for Bethlehem.
   But we always got through the pageant, somehow, and Mrs. Elson always told us what a great job we had done, except for the year Ernie broke the frankincense. Afterwards, whoever had played Joseph would try to capture and destroy the rest of the male cast. Then we would go home to bed, with visions of Mattel-brand toys requiring six “D” cell batteries (not included) dancing in our heads. Call me sentimental, but I miss those days.

Peace On Earth, But No Parking

   Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space.
   We try to keep our bumper about four inches from the shopper’s calves, to let the other circling cars know that she belongs to us. Sometimes two cars will get into a fight over whom the shopper belongs to, similar to the way great white sharks will fight over who gets to eat a snorkeler. So we follow our shoppers closely, hunched over the steering wheel, whistling “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” through our teeth, until we arrive at her car, which is usually parked several time zones away from the mall. Sometimes our shopper tries to indicate that she was merely planning to drop off some packages and go back to shopping, but when she hears our engine rev in a festive fashion and sees the holiday gleam in our eyes, she realizes she would never make it.
   And so we park and clamber joyously out of our car through the windows, which is necessary because the crack Mall Parking Space Size Reduction Team has been at work again. They get out there almost every night and redo the entire parking lot, each time making the spaces smaller, until finally, they are using, say, a Jell-O box to mark the width between lines. “Let’s see them fit in there,” they say, laughing, because they know we will try. They know that if necessary, we will pull into the parking space balanced on two left-side wheels, like professional stunt drivers, because we are holiday shoppers.
   I do not mean to suggest that the true meaning of the holiday season is finding a parking space. No, the true meaning of the holiday season is finding a sales clerk. The way to do this is, look around the store for one of those unmarked doors, then burst through it without warning. There you will find dozens of clerks sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth and whimpering from weeks of exposure to the holiday environment. Of course as soon as they see you, a shopper, they will bolt for the window. This is why you must carry a tape recorder.
   “Hold it!” you shout, freezing them in their tracks. “I have a tape recorder here, and unless somebody lets me make my holiday purchases, I’m going to play ‘Frosty the Snowman.’”
   Cruel? Inhuman? Perhaps. But you have no choice. Because this is the holiday season, and you have to buy thoughtful gifts for all of your Loved Ones, or they will hate you. Here are some helpful suggestions:
   GIFTS FOR CHILDREN: To find out what children want this year, I naturally called up the headquarters of the Toys Backward ‘R’ Us Corporation, which as you parents know is now larger than the Soviet Union. I talked with a spokesperson who told me that last year the corporation’s net sales were $2.4
   billion (I assume she meant in my immediate neighborhood).
   The spokesperson told me that one of the hot toys for boys this year, once again, is the G.I. Joe action figure and accessories,” which is the toy-industry code Word for “guns,” as in: “Don’t nobody move! I got an accessory!” The little boy on your list can have hours of carefree childhood fun with this G.I. Joe set, engaging in realistic armed-forces adventures such as having G.I. Joe explain to little balding congressional committee figures how come he had to use his optional Action Shredder accessory.
   Another hot item is Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, a toy system that—here is a coencidence for you—is featured on a Saturday-morning TV show. The heart of this system is an electronic accessory that the child shoots at the TV screen to actually kill members of the Bio Dread Empire. The spokesperson did not say whether it also would work on Geraldo Rivera.
   For little girls, the toy industry is once again going way out on a limb and offering a vast simpering array of dolls. The big news this year, however, is that many of these dolls have computer chips inside them, so they can do the same things that a real baby would do if it had a computer chip inside it. Some dolls even respond according to the time of day. In the morning, they say: “I’m hungry!” In the evening, they say: “I’m sleepy!” And late at night, when the house is dark and quiet, they whisper into the child’s ear: “I think I hear Mr. Eyeball Plucker in the closet again!”
   GIFTS FOR GROWN-UPS: I don’t want to get too corny here, but I think the nicest gift you can give a grown-up, especially one you really care about, is not something you buy in a store. In fact, it costs nothing, yet it is a very precious gift, and one that only you can give. I’m talking about your parking space.

Hey Babe Hum Babe Hum Babe Hey ...

   The crack of the bat ... the roar of the crowd ... the sight of slug-shaped, saliva-drenched gobs of tobacco seeping into the turf and causing mutations among soil-based life forms. ...
   Baseball. For me, it’s as much a part of summer as sitting bolt upright in bed at 3:30 A.M. and trying to remember if I filed for an extension on my tax return. And the memories baseball season brings back! Ebbetts Field, for example. That’s all I remember: Ebbetts Field. What the hell does it mean? Is it anything important? Maybe one of you readers can help.
   Why does baseball hold such great appeal for Americans? A big factor, of course, is that the Russians can’t play it. Try as they might, they can’t seem to master infield chatter, which is what the members of the infield constantly yell at the pitcher. A typical segment of infield chatter would be:
   Hey babe hum babe hum babe hey no batter hey fire that ball hum that pellet whip that hose baby sling that sphere c’mon heave that horsehide right in there c’mon dammit we’re bored we’re really bored bored bored bored out here hunched over in these cretin pants c’mon let’s fling that orb let’s unload that globe you sum-bitch let’s THROW that ball please for God’s sake let’s ...
   The infield’s purpose in chattering at the pitcher like this is to get him so irritated that he deliberately throws the ball at the batter’s face, which minimizes the danger that the batter will swing and thus put the infield in the position of having to stand in the path of a potentially lethal batted ball. American boys learn infield chatter as very young children, but the Russians have tremendous trouble with it. The best they’ve been able to do so far is “Holy mackerel, you are putting forth some likely shots now, ho ho!” which is pretty good for only five years’ effort, but hardly the level of chatter they’ll need in international competition.
   Another reason why Americans are Number One in baseball is the phrases yelled by fans to encourage the players. American fans generally use the three basic phrases:
   Boo. You stink. You really stink, you stupid jerk.
   These phrases of encouragement have dominated baseball since the 1920s, when the great George Herman Ruth made baseball history at Yankee Stadium by pointing his bat at the stands and correctly identifying them in only four attempts. But in recent years, a large cold-air mass of change has begun to form in the North, where fans of the Montreal Expos, who all know how to speak French because there’s nothing else to do in Canada after 4 P.m., have developed some new and very competitive phrases, such as:
   –Vous bumme, il y a un poisson dans votre bibliotheque. (You bum, there is a fish in your library.) —Boux. (Boo.)
   Thus encouraged, the Expos have become a baseball Powerhouse. They probably would have won the World Series by now except that the players refuse to return from spring training until Labor Day.
   So the United States is still the best, and you can bet the mortgage that the World Series, which is open to any city in the world that has a major-league franchise, will this year be won once again by a team consisting of U.S. citizens plus maybe two dozen guys named Julio from friendly spider-infested nations to the south. In fact, the only real problem facing major-league baseball at the moment is that everybody associated with it in any way is a drug addict. This is beginning to affect the quality of the game:
   ANNOUNCER: For those viewers who are just joining us, the game has been delayed slightly because the umpires really wanted some nachos, and also the Yankees keep turning into giant birds. I can’t remember seeing that happen before in a regular season game, can you, Bob? COLOR COMMENTATOR (shrieking): THESE aren’t my crayons!
   So baseball has problems. So who doesn’t? It’s still a very national pastime, and I for one always feel a stirring of tremendous excitement as we approach the All-Star Game. I’m assuming here that we haven’t already passed the All-Star Game.
   What I like about the All-Star Game is that the teams aren’t picked by a bunch of experts who use computers and care only about cold statistics—what a player’s batting average is, how well he throws, whether he’s still alive, etc. No, the All-Star teams are chosen by the fans, the everyday folks who sit out in the hot sun hour after hour, cursing and swilling beer that tastes like it has been used to launder jockstraps. The fans don’t care about statistics: They vote from the heart, which is why last year’s starting American League lineup included Lou Gehrig, O.J. Simpson, and Phil Donahue.
   And what lies ahead, after the All-Star break? I look for several very tight pennant races, with many games ending in scores of 4-2, 5-1, and in certain instances 2-0. In the National League, I think we’ll see a sharp late-season increase in the number of commercials wherein players employ inappropriate baseball imagery, such as, “Hit a home run against nasal discharge.” And in the American League, I look for Dave Winfield to be attacked by seagulls. As always, pitching will be the key.

Red White And Beer

   Lately I’ve been feeling very patriotic, especially during commercials. Like, when I see those strongly pro-American Chrysler commercials, the ones where the winner of the Bruce Springsteen Sound-Alike Contest sings about how The Pride Is Back, the ones where Lee Iacocca himself comes striding out and practically challenges the president of Toyota to a knife fight, I get this warm, proud feeling inside, the same kind of feeling I get whenever we hold routine naval maneuvers off the coast of Libya.
   But if you want to talk about real patriotism, of course, you have to talk about beer commercials. I would have to say that Miller is the most patriotic brand of beer. I grant you it tastes like rat saliva, but we are not talking about taste here. What we are talking about, according to the commercials, is that Miller is by God an American beer, “born and brewed in the U.S.A.,” and the men who drink it are American men, the kind of men who aren’t afraid to perspire freely and shake a man’s hand. That’s mainly what happens in Miller commercials: Burly American men go around, drenched in perspiration, shaking each other’s hands in a violent and patriotic fashion.
   You never find out exactly why these men spend so much time shaking hands. Maybe shaking hands is just their simple straightforward burly masculine American patriotic way of saying to each other: “Floyd, I am truly sorry I drank all that Miller beer last night and went to the bathroom in your glove compartment.” Another possible explanation is that, since there are never any women in the part of America where beer commercials are made, the burly men have become lonesome and desperate for any form of physical contact. I have noticed that sometimes, in addition to shaking hands, they hug each other. Maybe very late at night, after the David Letterman show, there are Miller commercials in which the burly men engage in slow dancing. I don’t know.
   I do know that in one beer commercial, I think this is for Miller—although it could be for Budweiser, which is also a very patriotic beer—the burly men build a house. You see them all getting together and pushing up a brand-new wall. Me, I worry some about a house built by men drinking beer. In my experience, you run into trouble when you ask a group of beer-drinking men to perform any task more complex than remembering not to light the filter ends of cigarettes.
   For example, in my younger days, whenever anybody in my circle of friends wanted to move, he’d get the rest of us to help, and, as an inducement, he’d buy a couple of cases of beer. This almost always produced unfortunate results, such as the time we were trying to move Dick “The Wretch” Curry from a horrible fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to another horrible fourth-floor walkup apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and we hit upon the labor-saving concept of, instead of carrying The Wretch’s possessions manually down the stairs, simply dropping them out the window, down onto the street, where The Wretch was racing around, gathering up the broken pieces of his life and shrieking at us to stop helping him move, his emotions reaching a fever pitch when his bed, which had been swinging wildly from a rope, entered the apartment two floors below his through what had until seconds earlier been a window.
   This is the kind of thinking you get, with beer. So I figure what happens, in the beer commercial where the burly men are building the house, is they push the wall up so it’s vertical, and then, after the camera stops filming them, they just keep pushing, and the wall crashes down on the other side, possibly onto somebody’s pickup truck. And then they all shake hands.
   But other than that, I’m in favor of the upsurge in retail patriotism, which is lucky for me because the airwaves are saturated with pro-American commercials. Especially popular are commercials in which the newly restored Statue of Liberty—and by the way, I say Lee Iacocca should get some kind of medal for that, or at least be elected president—appears to be endorsing various products, as if she were Mary Lou Retton or somebody. I saw one commercial strongly suggesting that the Statue of Liberty uses Sure brand underarm deodorant.
   I have yet to see a patriotic laxative commercial, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time. They’ll show some actors dressed up as hardworking country folk, maybe at a church picnic, smiling at each other and eating pieces of pie. At least one of them will be a black person. The Statue of Liberty will appear in the background. Then you’ll hear a country-style singer singing:
   “Folks ‘round here they love this land; They stand by their beliefs; An’ when they git themselves stopped up; They want some quick relief.”
   Well, what do you think? Pretty good commercial concept, huh?
   Nah, you’re right. They’d never try to pull something like that. They’d put the statue in the foreground.

Why Not The Best?

   Excellence is the trend of the eighties. Walk into any shopping-mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the bestsellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you’ll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don’t Steal It, etc.
   The message of these books is that, here in the eighties, “good” is no longer good enough. In today’s business environment, “good” is a word we use to describe an employee whom we are about to transfer to a urinal-storage facility in the Aleutian Islands. What we want, in our eighties business executive, is somebody who demands the best in everything; someone who is never satisfied; somebody who, if he had been in charge of decorating the Sistine Chapel, would have said: “That is a good fresco, Michelangelo, but I want a better fresco, and I want it by tomorrow morning.”
   This is the kind of thinking that now propels your top corporations. Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: “Imagine what it does to your teeth!” So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve.
   But then along came Pepsi, with the bold new marketing concept of saying that its carbonated beverage was better, a claim that Pepsi backed up by paying $19 trillion to Michael Jackson, the most excellent musical genius of all time according to the cover story in Newsweek magazine. And so the folks at Coca-Cola suddenly woke up and realized that, hey, these are the eighties, and they got off their butts and improved Coke by letting it sit out in vats in the hot sun and adding six or eight thousand tons of sugar, the exact amount being a trade secret.
   Unfortunately, the general public, having failed to read the market surveys proving that the new Coke was better, refused to drink it, but that is not the point. The point is, the Coke executives decided to strive for excellence, and the result is that the American consumer is now benefitting from the Most vicious carbonated-beverage marketing war in history. It wouldn’t surprise me if, very soon, one side or the other offered to pay $29
   trillion to Bruce Springsteen, who according to a Newsweek magazine cover story is currently the most excellent musical genius of all time, preceded briefly by Prince.
   This striving for excellence extends into people’s personal lives as well. When eighties people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an eighties couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves, waiting, their beepers going off like creckets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn’t have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli.
   An excellence-oriented eighties male does not wear a regular watch. He wears a Rolex, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Goer Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote excellence:
   “The Rolex Hypetion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and discriminating hand-craftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by hand. Fabricated of 100percent 24 karat gold. No watch parts or anything. just a great big chunk of gold on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the individual who is very secure. Who doesn’t need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near as successful as he is now. Maybe he’ll go to his twentieth reunion, and they’ll see his Rolex Hypetion. Hahahahyahahahahaha.”
   Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today’s competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents’ faces. As an adult, he’ll carry around a little wallet card that says “7 x 9 = 63,” because it will remind him of mother.
   I recently saw a videotape of people who were teaching their babies while they (the babies) were still in the womb. I swear I am not making this up. A group of pregnant couples sat in a circle, and, under the direction of an Expert in These Matters, they crooned instructional songs in the direction of the women’s stomachs. Mark my words: We will reach the point, in our lifetimes, where babies emerge from their mothers fully prepared to assume entry-level management positions. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has noticed, just wandering around the shopping mall, that more and more babies, the really brand-new modern ones, tend to resemble Lee Iacocca.

Making The World Safe For Salad

   I’ve been thinking about technology of late, because, as you are no doubt aware (like fudge, you are), we recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Etch-a-Sketch. I think we can all agree that, except for long-lasting nasal spray, this is the greatest technological achievement of all time. Think, for a moment, of the countless happy childhood hours you spent with this amazing device: Drawing perfect horizontals; drawing perfect verticals; drawing really spastic diagonals; trying to scrape away the silver powder from the window so you could look inside and try to figure out how it works (Mystery Rays from space, is what scientists now believe); and just generally enjoying the sheer childhood pleasure of snatching it away from your sister and shaking it upside down after she had spent 40 minutes making an elaborate picture of a bird.
   Think how much better off the world would be if everybody—young and old, black and white, American and Russian, Time and Newsweek—spent part of each day playing with an Etch-a-Sketch. Think how great it would be if they had public Etch-a-Sketches for you to use while you were waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. And imagine what would happen if, instead of guns, our young soldiers carried Etch-a-Sketches into battle! They would be cut down like field mice under a rotary mower! So we can’t carry this idea too far.
   So anyway, as I said, this got me to thinking about technology in general. Too often—three or four times a week, according to some figures—we take technology for granted. When we drop our money into a vending machine at our place of employment and press the button for a tasty snack selection of crackers smeared with “cheez,” a nondairy petroleum subproduct approved for use on humans, we are blithely confident that the machine will automatically, much of the time, hurl our desired selection down into the pickup bin, using a computerized electronic snack-ejection device that gives our snack a bin impact velocity of nearly 70 miles an hour, which is what is required to reduce our crackers to a fine, dayglow-orange grit. We rarely stop to consider that without this device, the only way the vending-machine manufacturers would be able to achieve this kind of impact velocity would be to use gravity, which means the machines would have to be 40 feet tall!
   Of course, not all technology is good. Some is exactly the opposite (bad). The two obvious examples of this are the hydrogen bomb and those plastic “sneeze shields” they put over restaurant salad bars for your alleged hygiene protection. I have said this before, but it needs to be said again: Sneeze shields actually spread disease, because they make it hard for a squat or short-armed person to reach back to the chick peas and simulated bacon, and some of these people inevitably are going to become frustrated and spit in the House Dressing (a creamy Italian).
   But this does not mean we should be against technology in general. Specifically, we should not be so hostile toward telephone-answering machines. I say this because I own one, and I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say—they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College—”I just hate to talk to a machine!” They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn’t go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society, OK?
   Meanwhile, technology marches on, thanks to new inventions conceived of by brilliant innovative creative geniuses such as a friend of mine named Clint Collins. Although he is really a writer, Clint has developed an amazingly simple yet effective labor-saving device for people who own wall-to-wall carpeting but don’t want to vacuum it. Clint’s concept is, you cut a piece of two-by-four so it’s as long as your vacuum cleaner is wide, and just before company comes, you drag it across your carpet, so it leaves parallel marks similar to the ones caused by a vacuum. Isn’t that great? The only improvement I can think of would be if they wove those lines into the carpet right at the factory, so you wouldn’t even need a two-by-four.
   Another recent advantage in technology comes from Joseph DiGiacinto, my lawyer, who has developed a way to fasten chopsticks together with a rubber band and a little wadded-up piece of paper in such a way that you can actually pick up food with them one-handed. You don’t have to ask your waiter for a fork, which makes you look like you just tromped in from Des Moines and never even heard of sweet and sour pork. If you’d like to get in on this high-tech culinary advance, send an envelope with your address and a stamp on it to: Chopstick Concept, C/o Joseph DiGiacinto, Legal Attorney at Law, 235 Main Street, White Plains, NY 10601, and he’ll send you, free, a Chopstick Conversion Kit—including a diagram, a rubber band, and instructions that can be wadded up for use as your paper wad—just as soon as I let him know that he has made this generous offer. He also does wills. And what other advances does the future hold, technology-wise? Even as you read these words, white-coated laboratory geeks are working on a revolutionary new camera that not only will focus automatically, set the exposure automatically, flash automatically, and advance the film automatically, but will also automatically refuse to take stupid pictures, such as of the wing out the airplane window.

Trouble On The Line

   I want them to stop explaining my long-distance options to me. I don’t want to know my long-distance options. The more I know about my long-distance options, the more I feel like a fool.
   They did this to us once before, with our financial options. This was back in the seventies. Remember? Up until then, if you had any excess money, you put it in a passbook savings account paying 51/4 percent interest, and your only financial options were, did you want the toaster or the electric blanket. For a really slick high-finance maneuver, you could join the Christmas Club, where you gave the bank some money each week, and, at the end of the year, the bank gave you your money back. These were simple, peaceful times, except for the occasional Asian land war.
   And then, without warning, they made it legal for consumers to engage in complex monetary acts, many of them involving “liquidity.” Today, there are a whole range of programs in which all that happens is people call up to ask what they should do with their money:
   “Hi, Steve? My wife and I listen to you all the time, and we just love your show. Now here is the problem: We’re 27 years old, no kids, and we have a combined income of $93,000, and $675,000 in denatured optional treasury instruments of accrual, which will become extremely mature next week.”
   Now to me, those people do not have a problem. To me, what these people need in the way of financial advice is: “Lighten up! Buy yourself a big boat and have parties where people put on funny hats and push the piano into the harbor!” But Mr. Consumer Radio Money Advisor, he tells them complex ways to get even more money and orders them to tune in next week. These shows make me feel tremendously guilty, as a consumer, because I still keep my money in accounts that actually get smaller, and sometimes disappear, like weekend guests in an old murder mystery, because the bank is always taking out a “service charge,” as if the tellers have to take my money for walks or something.
   So I feel like a real consumer fool about my money, and now I have to feel like a fool about my phone, too. I liked it better back when we all had to belong to the same Telephone Company, and phones were phones—black, heavy objects that were routinely used in the movies, as murder weapons (try that with today’s phones!). Also, they were permanently attached to your house, and only highly trained Telephone Company personnel could “install” them. This involved attaching four wires, but the Telephone Company always made it sound like brain surgery. It was part of the mystique. When you called for your installation appointment, the Telephone Company would say: “We will have an installer in your area between the hours Of 9 A.M. October 3 and the following spring. Will someone be at home?” And you would say yes, if you wanted a phone. You would stay at home, the anxious hours ticking by, and you would wait for your Phone Man. It was as close as most people came to experiencing what heroin addicts go through, the difference being that heroin addicts have the option of going to another supplier. Phone customers didn’t. They feared the power of the Telephone Company.
   I remember when I was in college, and my roommate Rob somehow obtained a phone. It was a Hot Phone. Rob hooked it up to our legal, wall-mounted phone with a long wire, which gave us the capability of calling the pizza-delivery man without getting up off the floor. This capability was essential, many nights. But we lived in fear. Because we knew we were breaking the rule—not a local, state, or federal rule, but a Telephone Company rule—and that any moment, agents of the Telephone Company, accompanied by heavy black dogs, might burst through the door and seize the Hot Phone and write our names down and we would never be allowed to have phone service again. And the dogs would seize our pizza.
   So the old Telephone Company could be tough, but at least you knew where you stood. You never had to think about your consumer long-distance options. Whereas today you cannot turn on the television without seeing Cliff Robertson, standing in some pathetic rural community with a name like Eye Socket, Montana, telling you that if you don’t go with his phone company, you won’t be able to call people in rural areas like this, in case you ever had a reason to, such as you suddenly needed information about heifers. Which sounds reasonable, but then Burt Lancaster tells you what a jerk you are if you go with Cliff because it costs more. But that’s exactly what Joan Rivers says about Burt! And what about Liz? Surely Liz has a phone company!
   So it is very confusing, and yet you are expected to somehow make the right consumer choice. They want you to fill out a ballot. And if you don’t fill it out, they’re going to assign you a random telephone company. God knows what you could wind up with. You could wind up with the Soviet Union Telephone Company. You could wind up with one of those phone companies where you have to crank the phone, like on “Lassie,” and the operator is always listening in, including when you call the doctor regarding intimate hemorrhoidal matters.
   So you better fill out your ballot. I recommend that you go with Jim & Ed’s Telephone Company & Radiator Repair. I say this because Jim and Ed feature a service contract whereby you pay a flat $15 a month, and if you have a problem, Jim or Ed will come out to your house (Jim is preferable, because after 10 A.M. Ed likes to drink Night Train wine and shoot at religious lawn statuary) and have some coffee with you and tell you that he’s darned if he can locate the problem, but if he had to take a stab, he’d guess it was probably somewhere in the wires.

Read This First

   CONGRATULATIONS! You have purchased an extremely fine device that would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that you undoubtedly will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer maneuver. Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD’S SAKE READ THIS OWNER’S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE. YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN’T YOU? YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND SET IT ON “FAST FORWARD,” THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS, RIGHT? AND YOU’RE JUST STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, RIGHT??? WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK ALL THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT?
   We’re sorry. We just get a little crazy sometimes, because we’re always getting back “defective” merchandise where it turns out that the consumer inadvertently bathed the device in acid for six days. So, in writing these instructions, we naturally tend to assume that your skull is filled with dead insects, but we mean nothing by it. OK? Now let’s talk about:
   1. UNPACKING THE DEVICE: The device is encased in foam to protect it from the Shipping People, who like nothing more than to jab spears into the outgoing boxes. PLEASE INSPECT THE CONTENTS CAREFULLY FOR GASHES OR IDA MAE BARKER’S ENGAGEMENT RING WHICH SHE LOST LAST WEEK, AND SHE THINKS MAYBE IT WAS WHILE SHE WAS PACKING DEVICES. Ida Mae really wants that ring back, because it is her only proof of engagement, and her fiance, Stuart, is now seriously considering backing out on the whole thing inasmuch as he had consumed most of a bottle of Jim Beam in Quality Control when he decided to pop the question. It is not without irony that Ida Mae’s last name is “Barker,” if you get our drift.
   WARNING: DO NOT EVER AS LONG AS YOU LIVE THROW AWAY THE BOX OR ANY OF THE PIECES OF STYROFOAM, EVEN THE LITTLE ONES SHAPED LIKE PEANUTS. If you attempt to return the device to the store, and you are missing one single peanut, the store personnel will laugh in the chilling manner exhibited by Joseph Stalin just after he enslaved Eastern Europe.
   Besides the device, the box should contain:
   –Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say: “WARNING” —A plastic packet containing four 5/17-inch pilfer grommets and two chub-ended 6/93-inch boxcar prawns.
   YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram cable.
   IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: YOU immediately should turn to your spouse and say: “Margaret, you know why this country can’t make a car that can get all the way through the drive-thru at Burger King without a major transmission overhaul? Because nobody cares, that’s why.” (Warning: This Is Assuming Your Spouse’s Name Is Margaret.)
   2. PLUGGING IN THE DEVICE: The plug on this device represents the latest thinking of the electrical industry’s Plug Mutation Group, which, in the continuing effort to prevent consumers from causing hazardous electrical current to flow through their appliances, developed the Three-Pronged Plug, then the Plug Where One Prong Is Bigger Than the Other. Your device is equipped with the revolutionary new Plug Whose Prongs Consist of Six Small Religious Figurines Made of Chocolate. DO NOT TRY TO PLUG IT IN! Lay it gently on the floor near an outlet, but out of direct sunlight, and clean it weekly with a damp handkerchief.
   WARNING: WHEN YOU ARE LAYING THE PLUG ON THE FLOOR, DO NOT HOLD A SHARP OBJECT IN YOUR OTHER HAND AND TRIP OVER THE CORD AND POKE YOUR EYE OUT, AS THIS COULD VOID YOUR WARRANTY.
   3. OPERATION OF THE DEVICE:
   WARNING: WE MANUFACTURE ONLY THE ATTRACTIVE DESIGNER CASE. THE ACTUAL WORKING CENTRAL PARTS OF THE DEVICE ARE MANUFACTURED IN JAPAN. THE INSTRUCTIONS WERE TRANSLATED BY MRS. SHIRLEY PELTWATER OF ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE, WHO HAS NEVER ACTUALLY BEEN TO JAPAN BUT DOES HAVE MOST OF SHOGUN ON TAPE.
   INSTRUCTIONS: For results that can be the finest, it is our advising that: Never to hold these buttons two times!! Except the battery. Next, taking the (something) earth section may cause a large occurrence! However. If this is not a trouble, such rotation is a very maintenance action, as a kindly (something) viewpoint from Drawing B.
   4. WARRANTY: Be it hereby known that this device, together with but not excluding all those certain parts thereunto, shall be warrantied against all defects, failures, and malfunctions as shall occur between now and Thursday afternoon at shortly before 2, during which time the Manufacturer will, at no charge to the Owner, send the device to our Service People, who will emerge from their caves and engage in rituals designed to cleanse it of evil spirits. This warranty does not cover the attractive designer case.
   WARNING: IT MAY BE A VIOLATION OF SOME LAW THAT MRS. SHIRLEY PELTWATER HAS SHOGUN ON TAPE.

The Urban Professionals

   I’m going to start a rock ‘n’ roll band. Not a good band, where you have to be in tune and wear makeup. This will be a band consisting of people who are Approaching Middle Age, by which I mean they know the words to “Wooly Bully.” This will be the kind of band whose members often miss practice for periodontal reasons—and are always yelling at their kids for leaving Popsicles On the amplifiers. We will be called the “Urban Professionals,” I will be lead guitar.
   I miss being in a band. The last band I was in, the “Phlegmtones,” dissolved a couple of years ago, and even that was not truly a formal band in the sense of having instruments or playing them or anything. What it was, basically, was my friend Randall and myself drinking beer and trying to remember the words to “Runaround Sue,” by Dion and the Belmonts.
   Before that, the last major band I was in was in college, in the sixties. It was called the “Federal Duck,” which we thought was an extremely hip name. We were definitely 10 pounds of hipness in a 5-pound bag. We had the first strobe light of any band in our market area. We were also into The Blues, which was a very hip thing to be into, back in the sixties. We were always singing songs about how Our woman she done lef’ us and we was gon’ jump into de ribba an’ drown. This was pretty funny, because we were extremely white suburban-style college students whose only actual insight into the blues came from experiences such as getting a C in Poli Sci.
   In terms of musical competence, if I had to pick one word to describe us, that word would be “loud.” We played with the subtlety of above-ground nuclear testing. But we made up for this by being cheap. We were so cheap that organizations were always hiring us sight unseen, which resulted a number of times in our being hired by actual grownups whose idea of a good party band was elderly men in stained tuxedos playing songs from My Fair Lady on accordions at about the volume of a drinking fountain.
   When we would come in and set up, with our mandatory long hair and our strobe light and our 60,000 pounds of amplifiers, these people would watch us in wary silence. But once we started to play, once the sound of our pulsating beat filled the air, something almost magical would happen: They would move farther away. They’d form hostile little clots against the far wall. Every now and then they’d send over an emissary, who would risk lifelong hearing damage to cross the dance floor and ask us if we knew any nice old traditional slow-dance fox-trot-type songs such as “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” which of course we didn’t, because it has more than four chords. So we’d say: “No, we don’t know that one, but we do know another one you might like.” Then we’d play “Land of 1,000 Dances,” a very big hit by Cannibal and the Headhunters on Rampart Records. This is a song with only one chord (E). Almost all of the lyrics consist of the statement, I said a na, as follows:
   I said a na Na na na na Na na na na, Na na na, na na na; Na na na na.
   Our best jobs were at fraternity parties. The only real problem we’d run into there was that every now and then they’d set fire to our equipment. Other than that, fraternity brothers made for a very easy-going audience. Whatever song they requested, we’d play “Land of 1,000 Dances,” and they’d be happy. They were too busy throwing up on their dates to notice. They are running the nation today.
   Me, I am leading a quiet life. Too quiet. This is why I’m going to form the Urban Professionals. Right now I am actively recruiting members. So far I’ve recruited one, an editor named Tom whose musical qualifications are that he is 32 years old. He’s going to play some instrument of the type you got handed in rhythm band in elementary school, such as the tambourine. just judging from my circle of friends, I think The Urban Professionals are going to have a large tambourine section.
   Once we start to catch on, we’ll make a record. It will be called: “A Moderate Amount of Soul.” After it comes out, we’ll go on a concert tour. We’ll stay in Holiday Inns, and sometimes we’ll “trash” our rooms by refusing to fill out the Guest Questionnaire. Because that’s the kind of rebels the Urban Professionals will be. But our fans will still love us. When we finish our act, they’ll be overcome by emotion. They’ll all rise spontaneously to their feet, and they’ll try, as a gesture of appreciation, to hold lighted matches over their heads. Then they’ll all realize they quit smoking, so they’ll spontaneously sit back down.

The Plastic, Fantastic Cover

   I have just about given up on the Tupperware people. I’ve been trying to get them interested in a song I wrote, called “The Tupperware Song,” which I am sure would be a large hit. I called them about it two or three times a week for several weeks.
   “You wrote a song?” they would say.
   “Yes,” I would say.
   “About Tupperware?” they would say.
   “It’s kind of a blues song.”
   “Yes,” I would say.
   “We’ll have somebody get back to you,” they would say.
   For quite a while there I thought I was getting the run-around, until finally a nice Tupperware executive named Dick called me up. He was very honest with me. “There’s a fairly limited market for songs about Tupperware,” he said.
   “Dick,” I said. “This is a killer song.” Which was true. It gets a very positive reaction whenever I perform it. Of course, I perform it only in those social settings where people have loosened up to the point where they would react positively if you set their clothing on fire, but I still think this song would have widespread appeal.
   I wrote it a while back, when friends of mine named Art and Dave had a big Tupperware party in their apartment. It was the social event of the month. Something like 50 people showed up. When the Tupperware Lady walked in, you could tell right away from her facial expression that this was not the kind of Tupperware crowd she was used to. She was used to a subdued all-female crowd, whereas this was a large coeducational crowd with some crowd members already dancing on the refrigerator. The Tupperware Lady kept saying things like: “Are you sure this is supposed to be a Tupperware party?” And: “This doesn’t look like a Tupperware party.” She wanted to go home.
   But we talked her into staying, although she never really accepted the fact that Art and Dave were her Tupperware hostesses. She wanted to deal with a woman. All of her communications with Art and Dave had to go through a woman interpreter:
   TUPPERWARE LADY (speaking to a woman): Where do you want me to set up? WOMAN (speaking to Art, who is standing right there): Art, where do you want her to set up? ART: How about right over here on the coffee table? WOMAN (to the Tupperware Lady): Art says how about right over here on the coffee table. TUPPERWARE LADY: Fine.
   Once we got everybody settled down, sort of, the Tupperware Lady wanted us to engage in various fun Tupperware party activities such as “brain teasers” wherein if we could name all the bodily parts that had three letters, we would win a free grapefruit holder or something. We did this for a while, but it was slowing things down, so we told the Tupperware Lady we had this song we wanted to perform.
   The band consisted of me and four other highly trained journalists. You know what “The Tupperware Song” sounds like if you ever heard the song “I’m a Man” by Muddy Waters, where he sings about the general theme that he is a man, and in between each line the band goes Da-DA-da-da-DUM, so you get an effect like this:
   MUDDY WATERS: I’m a man.
   BAND: Da-DA-da-da-DUM
   MUDDY WATERS: A natural man.
   BAND: Da-DA-da-da-DUM
   MUDDY WATERS: A full-grown man.
   And so on. This is the general approach taken in The Tupperware Song, except it is about Tupperware. It starts out this way:
   Some folks use waxed paper
   Some folks use the Reynolds Wrap
   Some folks use the Plastic Baggie
   To try to cover up the gap
   You can use most anything
   To keep your goodies from the air
   But nothing works as well
   As that good old Tupperware
   (CHORUS)
   ’Cause it’s here Whooaaa
   Take a look at what we got
   If you don’t try some and buy some
   Don’t blame me when your turnips rot.
   It has two more verses covering other important Tupperware themes. Verse Two stresses the importance of “burping” the air out of your container to make sure your lid seals securely, and Verse Three points out that you can make money by holding a Tupperware party in your home.
   As you might imagine, the crowd was completely blown away by this song. The Tupperware Lady herself was near tears. But the important thing was, people bought a lot of Tupperware that night. People bought Tupperware they would never in a million years need. Single men who lived in apartments and never cooked anything, ever, that could not be heated in a toaster, were ordering Tupperware cake transporters. It was obvious to me right then and there that “The Tupperware Song” was a powerful marketing tool.
   I explained all this to Dick, of the Tupperware company, and he said I could send him a cassette tape of the song. Which I did, but I haven’t heard a thing. Not that I’m worried. I’m sure there are plenty of other large wealthy corporations out there that would be interested in a blues song about Tupperware. In fact, I’m getting offers in the mail almost every day. Most of them are for supplementary hospitalization insurance, but that’s obviously just a negotiating ploy.

Bang The Tupperware Slowly

   When I die, I want my obituary to read as follows:
   “Dave Barry is dead. Mr. Barry and his band, the Urban Professionals, once performed ‘The Tupperware Song’ before 1,000 Tupperware distributors.”
   This is the truth. We really did perform before 1,000 Tupperware distributors, and they gave us a standing ovation, although in the interest of accuracy, I should tell you that just before we performed, they also gave a standing ovation to a set of ovenware. But I don’t care. This was without question the highlight of my entire life.
   The way it came about was, the Tupperware people finally saw the musical light and decided to invite me to perform my original composition, “The Tupperware Song,” before a large sales conference at Tupperware headquarters, located in Orlando, Florida, right next to Gatorland, an attraction where (this is true) alligators jump into the air and eat dead chickens hung from wires. Naturally I accepted the invitation. A break like this comes along once in your career.
   I formed a new band, the Urban Professionals, especially for this performance. I chose the members very carefully, based on their ability to correctly answer the following question: “Do you want to go to Orlando at your own expense and perform before Tupperware distributors?” (The correct answer, was: “Yes.”) Using this strict screening procedure, I obtained three band members, all trained members of the Miami Herald staff. I’m the lead guitar player and singer and also (I’m not bragging here; these are simply facts) the only person in the band who knows when the song has started or ended. The other members of the band just sort of stand around looking nervous until I’ve been going for a while, and then, after it penetrates their primitive musical consciousnesses that the song has begun, they become startled and lurch into action. Likewise it takes them up to 30 seconds to come to a complete stop after the song is technically over.
   The only other normal instrument in the band is a harmonica, played by Gene. Gene has been attempting to play the harmonica for a number of years, and has developed a repertoire of several songs, all of which sound exactly like “Oh, Susannah!” “Here’s another one!” he’ll say, and then he plays “Oh, Susannah!” He plays it very rapidly, totally without pauses, as if he’s anxious to get back to journalism, so if you tried to sing along, you’d have to go: “Icomefromalabamawithmybanjoonmyknee,” etc., and pretty soon you’d run out of oxygen and keel over onto your face, which Gene wouldn’t notice because he’d be too busy trying to finish the song on schedule.
   The other two instruments in the band are actually Tupperware products, played rhythmically by Tom and Lou, who also dance. How good are they? Let me put it this way: If you can watch them perform and not wet your pants then you are legally blind. For one thing, they are both afflicted with severe rhythm impairment, the worst cases I have ever seen, worse even than Republican convention delegates. You ask Lou and Tom to clap along to a song and not only will they never once hit the beat, but they will also never, no matter how eternally long the song goes on, both clap at the same time. On top of which you have the fact that they do not have your classic dancer’s build, especially Lou, who is, and I say this with all due respect the same overall shape as a Krispy Kreme jelly doughnut.
   When we got to the Tupperware convention center we became a tad nervous, because (a),it turns out that Tupperware is a large business venture that many people take very seriously and (b) we had never even practiced as a total band. The bulk of our musical preparation to that point had consisted of deciding that our band outfits should include sun glasses.
   Fortunately, the Tupperware distributors turned out to be extremely peppy people, prone to applauding wildly at the slightest provocation. They especially loved Lou and Tom lunging around waving their Tupperware products in what they presumably thought was unison, looking like the Temptations might look if they were suddenly struck onstage with severe disorders of the central nervous system.
   After we got off the stage, Lou announced that it was the most exciting thing he had ever done. Gene kept saying: “A professional musician. I’m a professional musician.” A Tupperware person came up and asked if we’d be willing to perform again, and of course we said yes, although I am becoming concerned. Tom has announced, several times, that he thinks next time the dancers should get a singing part. I can see already that unless we hold our egos in check, keeping this thing in perspective, we could start having the kind of internal conflicts that broke up the Beatles, another very good band.

Bite The Wax Tadpole!

   Now we’re going to look at some important new developments in the U.S. advertising industry, which continues to be a hotbed of innovation as well as a source of pride to all Americans regardless of intelligence. This country may no longer be capable of manufacturing anything more technologically sophisticated than breakfast cereal, but by God when it comes to advertising, we are still—and I mean this sincerely—Number One.
   Our first bit of advertising news will come as a happy surprise to those of you who lie awake nights asking yourselves: “Whatever happened to Mikey, the lovable chubby-cheeked child who hated everything until he tasted Life brand breakfast cereal in the heartwarming television commercial that we all saw 63,000 times back in the seventies?”
   The good news is: Mikey is coming back, as part of a major advertising campaign! The Quaker Oats Co. sent me two large press kits on this, both quoting a Quaker Oats executive as saying: “We’ve received thousands of letters over the years asking what’s become of him. ... We thought it would be fun to satisfy America’s curiosity by conducting a nationwide search to reveal his present-day identity.”
   Ha ha! Fun is hardly the word! I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be waiting on tenterhooks until the big moment comes when the Quaker Oats Co., in a national press conference, finally reveals what “tenterhooks” are. No, seriously, they’re going to reveal who Mikey is, so that the thousands of people who wrote to them about this important matter can go back to learning how to eat with real utensils.
   Speaking of adorable and talented young actors whose moving commercial performances have tugged at the heartstrings of our minds, I wonder whatever happened to that little boy who used to do the Oscar Mayer commercials. Remember? The one who claimed his baloney had a first name, and it was O-S-C-A-R? I wonder if that child didn’t run into problems later in life. (“OK, pal. You and Oscar there are under arrest.”).
   Another commercial personality I was wondering about is the man who used to promote Ti-D-bol brand automatic commode freshener by rowing his boat around inside the tank of a giant toilet. I mean, it must have been difficult for him, going back to normal life after having reached a show business pinnacle like that. So I called the Knomark company, which makes Ti-D-bol, and I found out an amazing fact: The role of the original Ti-D-bol man was played by none other than “Miami Vice” ‘s Don Johnson! Isn’t that an incredible celebrity gossip tidbit? I hope to see it reprinted in leading supermarket tabloids everywhere, although in the interest of fairness and objectivity I should point out that I just now made it up.
   The actual truth, according to Bill Salmon, Knomark’s marketing director, is that there were a number of Ti-D-bol men. “The Ti-D-bol man,” he said, “was anybody who put on the blazer and the white hat and got in the boat.” The current Ti-D-bol man, he said, is a cartoon character who remains on dry land. “Right now he is not in a toilet tank in a rowboat, but that does not mean we would not use the Ti-D-bol man in the tank again at a future time,” Salmon stressed.
   By the way, I was disappointed to learn from Salmon that the rowboat commercials were done with trick photography, meaning there never was a 50-foot-high toilet. I think they should build one, as a promotional concept. Wouldn’t that be great? They could split the cost with the jolly Green Giant. I bet he sure could use it. I bet he’s making a mess out of his valley. Ho ho ho!
   I found our next news item in the Weekly World News, a leading supermarket tabloid, and it is just so wonderful that I will reprint it verbatim:
   “The Coca-Cola Company has changed the name of its soft drink in China after discovering the words mean ‘bite the wax tadpole’ in Chinese.”
   I called Coca-Cola, and a woman named Darlene confirmed this item. She also said the company decided to go with a different name over in China, which I think is crazy. “Bite the Wax Tadpole” is the best name I ever heard for a soft drink. Think of the commercials:
   (The scene opens uP with a boy in a Little League uniform, looking very sad. His father walks up.)
   FATHER: What’s the matter, Son? SON: (bursting into tears): Oh Dad, I struck out and lost the big game.
   (Sobs.) FATHER (putting his arm around the boy’s shoulders): Hey! Forget it! Let’s have a nice cold can of Bite the Wax Tadpole! SON: And then I murdered a policeman.

The Rules

   Recently I read this news item stating that the U.S. Senate Finance Committee had printed up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. The Senate Finance Committee did this on purpose. It wasn’t the kind of situation where they got the document back from the printer and said: “Hey, Every single word in this document is crossed out! We’re going to fire the zitbrain responsible for this!” No. A 452-page document with all the words crossed out was exactly what the Senate Finance Committee wanted.
   This news item intrigued me. I said to myself: There has to be a logical explanation for this. So I called Washington, D.C., and over the course of an afternoon I spoke to, I don’t know, maybe 15 or 20 people, and sure enough it turned out there was an extremely logical explanation: The Senate Finance Committee was following the Rules. As well it should. You have to have rules. This is true in government just as much as in sports. Think what professional baseball would be like if the pitcher could just throw the ball right at the batter whenever he felt like it, or the batter could turn around after a called third strike and try to whomp a major cavity in the umpire’s skull. It would be great. I’d buy season tickets. But you can’t have that kind of behavior in your government. This is why, back when we bombed Libya, the Reagan administration made such a large point of the fact that we were not trying to kill Moammar Khadafy. I think most of us average citizens had assumed, since the administration had been going around announcing that it had absolute proof that Khadafy was an international baby-murdering scumball, that the whole point of the raid was to kill him, and although we didn’t want to see innocent persons hurt, we certainly wouldn’t have minded if say a half dozen fatal bombs had detonated inside Moammar’s personal tent.
   So I, for one, was quite surprised when right after the raid, President Reagan himself said, and this is a direct quote: “We weren’t out to kill anybody.” My immediate reaction, when I read this statement, was to assume that this was another of those unfortunate instances where the president’s advisers, caught up in the excitement of planning a major military operation, had forgotten to advise the president about it. But then other top administration officials started saying the same thing, that we weren’t trying to kill anybody, and specifically we weren’t trying to kill Khadafy. you following this? We announced we have proof the guy is a murderer; we announce that we are by God going to Do Something about it; we have large military airplanes fly over there and drop bombs all over his immediate vicinity; but we weren’t trying to kill him. You want to know why? I’ll tell you why: The Rules.
   That’s right. It turns out that we have this law, signed in 1976 by Gerald Ford, who coincidentally also pardoned Richard M. Nixon, under which it is illegal for our government to assassinate foreign leaders. So we can’t just hire a couple of experienced persons named Vito for 100 grand to sneak over there one night in dark clothing and fill up Moammar’s various breathing apertures with plumber’s putty. No, that would be breaking a Rule. So what we do is spend several hundred million dollars to crank up the entire Sixth Fleet and have planes fly over from as far away as England, not to mention that we lose a couple of airmen, to achieve the purpose of not killing Moammar Khadafy. We did kill various other random Libyans, but that is OK, under the Rules. Gerald Ford signed nothing to protect them.
   OK? Everybody understand the point here? The point is: You have to follow the Rules. Without Rules, you would have anarchy.
   And that is exactly why the Senate Finance Committee had to print up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. What this document was, originally, was the tax-reform bill passed by the House of Representatives. It seemed the Senate Finance Committee didn’t like it, so they wrote a whole new bill, with all different words. Their new bill is 1,489 pages long. Also they wrote another 1,124 pages to explain how it works. (Sounds like our new reformed tax system is going to be mighty simple, all right! I can’t wait!)
   OK So the Finance Committee had 2,613 pages worth of tax reform to print up, but that was not all. They also printed the entire House bill, the one they rejected, with all the words crossed out to show where they disagreed with it. According to the 15 or 20 people I talked to on the phone, the committee had to do this. I asked them if maybe it wouldn’t have been more economical, and just as informative, if the Finance Committee had stuck a note on the front of their bill saying something like: “We thought the whole House Bill was pig doots and we chucked it,” but the 15 or 20 people assured me that, no, this was not possible, under the Rules. I was skeptical at first, but I heard this same explanation over and over, all afternoon, from people who all sounded like very bright college graduates, so that by the end of the day I was beginning to think that, yes, of course, it made perfect sense to print 4,500 copies of a document with every word crossed out. I felt like a fool for even bothering to think about it.
   By the way: This document is for sale. This is the truth. You can actually buy a document that your government has used your tax money to print up with all the words crossed out. It’s called HR 3838 As Reported in the Senate, Part 1.
   The Government Printing Office is selling it for—I swear—$17. So far they have sold 1,800 copies. And I don’t even want to know who is buying them. I am sure that whoever they are, they’re going to claim every single cent they spent on these documents as a tax deduction. But I don’t care. I’m through asking questions.
   I also don’t want to know how much we spend each year for the upkeep on Richard M. Nixon.