Finally, I was on terra cognita and I immediately headed toward the olive-green, iron fencing with anti-loitering spikes that surround subway stairwells. Underground at last! I waited for an E train and headed out to Queens passing a long-since memorized sequence of stations to Union Turnpike which was the farthest out, and cleanest, of the three Forest Hills stops.
Nothing had changed. The Wrigley gum dispensers were still there, as too the multi-coloured gummy Chuckles machines. The only addition seemed to be newer soda machine which sold soda-pop in cans, replacing the old red Coca Cola machine which sometimes dispensed its bottles. Typically for this time of day, the station was deserted.
I headed up the stairs to street level, passing the same olive-green wrought iron fencing which abutted the entrance to one the grimiest cigar and newspaper stores anywhere. I had only been inside once or twice to buy cigarettes for my father or perhaps a copy of the Sunday Times. The place, with yellowing ads from the 1940's was so dark and grimy that it felt icky just to drink coke from a bottle. It was beyond belief that anyone would actually eat anything there, but evidently someone did. I passed the boarded up Gulf gas station which even before my time had ceased to pump gas and which served as some sort of car-storage site. Every once in a while a car that had been there for weeks if not months would no longer be there indicating that the place was in some kind of slow motion use. From there I walked through the tree-shaded streets and front lawns of 78th St. to Valeria Arms with its mock Tudor facade and lobby.
Forest Hills was somewhat unique in the topography of New York City. It was one of the city's first commuter ex-urbs, founded in 1911 and serviced by the Long Island Railroad rather than any subway. The development was designed to mimic an idealized English township in Surrey. It largely succeeded in providing, a non-trafficked, tree-shaded, space of curving roads with a quiet genteel, vaguely “country” atmosphere. There were no horses, but there was tennis, and the U.S. open was held here, in whites and on lawn, until 1970s
For all its WASP affectation, Forest Hills was surprisingly multi-ethnic. It may have started out as silk stocking Queens but by the 1940's it was open to Italians, Poles, Irish and Jews, although restrictive covenants excluded Negroes. It was also mixed income. On either side of the LIRR tracks either six storey apartments or rows of two storey duplexes had been built for people of more modest means, retirees, local tradesmen and shop owners. Vincent, the neighborhood's cobbler whose shop was next to the LIRR overpass lived with his family in one of the row duplexes on Burns Street.
Forest Hills was not New York City in the same way that Mill Valley was not San Franciso. Both provided a mock English ambience that was several levels more relaxed than the noise and tension of the city. Arriving in either place, my shoulders would relax downward as I heaved a sigh of relief. On many levels, Forest Hills was an urban success story, which goes to show that sometimes kitsch works!
My aunt Marguerite, to whom my grandmother's apartment now belonged, was “out west” pursuing an acting career in Los Angeles. She very generously allowed me to use the place for as long I wanted. I let myself in with the key I still had and made myself at home. Aside from its obvious feminine touches, Marguerite's theory of decoration was that all counter tops needed to be filled up with something, and preferrably something that would tip over and (if possible) break, like the soap dish that rested on the tail of some stylized, scaly fish. Making myself at home began with gently removing as much of this clutter as possible so I would not tip or trip over over things at every turn.
My first order of business after showering and going to sleep was to ring up all my friends and let them know that I was back. My second order of business was to head on over to the Boulevard Delicatessen for a roast beef and swiss with russian on rye. (And pickle.) There were of course other items to be had but I liked my markedly unkosher combo. I am sure the deli got its bread fresh twice a day. It was bought by the loaf and if you wanted it sliced they would place it between the interlocking steel combs of a bread slicing machine and then with an almost seamless motion slide the cut loaf into a paper bag. Tired as I was, and despite the infernal nic-nacs, it felt good to back.
My return to New York may have been footloose but it was not entirely fancy free. Earlier in the Spring, I had applied for and been accepted into a summer internship program run by the State Department. The only thing left to do was a security clearance interview with the F.B.I. So, a day or so after arriving, I set up an appointment with the Bureau on the top floor of the colonnaded Post Office Building on Eighth Avenue. Once there, I sat on a bench in a surprisingly dreary hallway painted pale Army green until a wood door with frosted glass was opened and I was summoned in.
I was met by two, tall men sporting close-cut crewcuts, short sleeved shirts and narrow ties. We sat opposite one another at a large table and my interviewers informed me that they would be asking a few routine background questions. I nodded. A few questions into the process one of the agents remarked that he had noticed I was carrying a book that appeared to have Russian lettering on it. Indeed I was, foolishly thinking that my Russian language text would impress the agents with my earnestness for a possible diplomatic career. “Why are you studying
Russian?” by which was meant, “Why are you studying the language of
the Enemy?” I was taken off-guard. Why not? Rather lamely, I tried to connect for them the dots between “diplomacy” and “foreign languages.” Was I studying any other languages? Why yes, in fact I was; Greek. This led into a relation of the College's classical studies program, which I don't doubt struck them as dubious as the studying of Russian.
“Do you masturbate?”
He might as well have punched me in that place.
“Uh....well... yeah....”
“How frequently?”
At this point, my mind began to race in that way that speeds through a hundred alternatives and implications within the short time frame of a natural sounding answer. Clearly, the issue here was not how many times
I masturbated but rather what was the United States Government's official guideline on what constituted normative, healthy, unsuspect masturbatory proclivity. I quickly decided that the answer couldn't be a specific number but rather had to be an acceptable range for someone of my sex and age who also played football, worked on the car and went fishing. As vaguely and off-handedly as possible, I replied.
“Oh... I guess several times a week.”
That seemed to satisfy them; but not their curiosity. Did I date girls? Oh yes.
“What do you do when you go out on a date?”
Suddenly, Annette Funicello came to mind. The correct Expected Normative Answer had to be whatever was shown on the
Ozzie and Harriet show.
“Oh...you know... we go to maybe a movie and then maybe get something to drink at a soda-fountain...”
“And...?”
And I did my best to paint a picture me and date sipping the shared milk shake through straws.
Did I go to parties? Yes. Did I drink? The legal limit in New York State was 18, so I could truthfully and lawfully say, “Sometimes.”
“Did you ever smoke marihuana or partake of the so-called L-S-D?”
They asked in the disjunctive, so I answered in the disjunctive.
“Drop acid? Me? No.”
If silence could clunk, it was dropped onto the table. The two agents looked at one another and then back at me.
“Uh... how is it that you, uhm, know the, uh, so-called vernacular?”
“Vernacular? Well, I donno, that's what everyone calls it.”
“Do you know people who ingest so-called L-S-D?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I donno... I never bothered counting but it's not exactly a secret.”
“We're troubled that you should know the so-called vernacular term. You know people who use L-S-D but you have never ingested any yourself?
“That's right.” (And that was the truth too.)
“Would you be willing to give us the names of the people you know who use L-S-D”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they're not applying for the internship; I am.”
I'm pleased to recall that I was surprisingly clear-headed; but, at this point, the interview more or less sputtered to its sorry conclusion. The agents said they would be filing their report with “the Bureau” which would take it from there. When, I asked, could I expect to hear back from the State Department? About a month or so. This was as vague an answer as the expected normative masturbation count but not so vague as not to make it clear that I wasn't going to be working in any internship this summer.
I took the E train back to Forest Hills in a decidedly dejected mood. Now what? At this point, I might as well have been an immigrant first off the boat. The image of Manhattan's skyline suddenly appeared cold and daunting. Where does one knock? On the following morning, I bought a copy of the Times.
The employment section was depressing. Almost all the offers required some sort of training I didn't have. None of them required knowledge of the motions of the heavenly bodies or the unquantifiable liberal talents of someone who had learned to parse Greek verbs or blow up test tubes in the lab. None at least until I stumbled upon one that was looking for assistants in an educational research project; training provided in house; great money making opportunity; apply at or call...
That evening, I was invited to dinner at the Fannings, long-time friends of my parents since at least when I was born and who now lived on the Upper West Side. Tom was a defrocked priest turned commercial artist who had married Luisa a portrait artist from Argentina who (I gather) had found it impossible to live under Perón. They were wonderful, erudite people and the very embodiment of what it meant to be a liberal intellectual. Luisa was also a fantastic cook. Over cocktails and then dinner I told them all about my year out west and my thumb-quest across the country. The Fannings, who were childless, rewarded me with their genuine interest and pertinent questions, the last of which was,
so now what?
I told them about the possible job in educational research which I would follow up on the following day. “Sounds like selling encyclopedias,” Tom said. “Oh no!” I said, “it's not that. There was no mention of selling anything.” Tom smiled in his gentle and benign way. “Well,” he said, “perhaps you are right. It can't hurt looking into.” As he turned off the lights to go to bed, I can now imagine him saying,“Poor boy....”
I reported to the indicated address on Lexington Avenue near to or perhaps in the Chrysler Building. My heart sank as I saw a bunch of other college boys my age also there. With so many applicants, my odds of getting the job would be greatly diminished. After a short while and all equally clueless, we were herded into something like a classroom where a tall man, who introduced himself as something or other “Altman,” told us to take a seat.
The company we would be working for, if we were hired, was engaged in promotional, research for an educational publishing company. The company was interested in gaining genuine reactions to and evaluations of its products. If hired, we would be trained (at no expense to ourselves) in how to engage people in the greater metropolitan New York area so as to obtain the data and testimonials required. Anyone not interested could leave now.
If staying was all I needed to do to get hired, I stayed for the next part. At this point Altman left and another shorter, stocky man carrying a heavy square briefcase took the floor. He pulled out a loose-leaf binder and flipped through several pages of typed and hand written testimonials in plastic covers which had been obtained from ordinary people and which were the objective of our research. He then pulled out a thick volume of what was obviously an encyclopedia and explained that this was subject of the sought after evaluations and testimonials.
This volume, he explained, was just an illustrative sample of the 20 volume set, demonstrating all the encyclopedia's exciting features including: bright color photos and easy to understand charts, articles written in simple English by leading experts, fold-outs for maps, something called an encyclotron which made searching for topics easy and understandable, a sturdy thick binding and, last but not least, specially coated pages so that if any kid were to drop peanut butter and jelly on them, they could be easily wiped off with no harm to the set. As a token of the company's appreciation for the family's time and effort in reviewing and evaluating the encyclopedia, a wood walnut book case would be included. At this point, the man held out and let drop a plastic sheet depicting rows of red/black volumes in a handsome, solid walnut book-case.
All this was being provided free of charge to the family to have and to hold forever solely in exchange for their undertaking to evaluate the product. The only thing the company asked for, as a small token of the family's commitment, was that they undertake to purchase the encyclopedia's yearbooks for five years. These were published every year and contained all the developments in knowledge made during the year, articles on celebrities, sports and the important, major events of historical importance -- things that people committed to a serious evaluation of the product would naturally be interested in. These yearbooks were especially fascinating to kids and their cost only amounted to pennies a day. The company would even provide three styles of piggy banks to choose from in which the kids could drop their daily pennies. The man pulled out one of the three styles. It would be fun!
The company never deviated from this fantastic orthodoxy. We were not selling encyclopedias; we were obtaining testimonials from people interested in their kids' education and willing to provide a genuine evaluation of the product. We would get paid approximately $70.00 for each commitment we obtained. If we were still interested, we should come back on the following day and we would be split up into teams.
Tom had been right. I would be selling encyclopedias but it didn't seem all that hard or bad and, besides, there wasn't anything else. Optimism and Necessity make us adapt to anything.
Just around this time, I got a call from one of the F.B.I. agents. For a split second, I had this soaring hope that he was calling to let me know that my clearance had gone through and I could contact State to find out where to report to for my internship. But no. He was following up on our interview and wanted to know why I refused to “cooperate” with them by providing the names of the people I knew who had used the so-called L-S-D. I asked him why he needed to know. Oh, he said, they just liked to compile lists of people who might “potentially” be involved in “something.” Lists were helpful to the F.B.I. in its work and it would be helpful if I cooperated. As politely as I could I told the agent that if anyone I knew were applying for a job that would be one thing but they weren't and I didn't believe in ratting out on people for no purpose other than to compile lists. “Well, alright then,” he said, obviously annoyed, “if you change your mind, you can call us at this number.” “Thank you; if I change my mind, I will.” I never heard from them again and, to my surprise, once I was back at St. John's in the Fall, I received a letter informing that I had passed the clearance. But that would be then and this was now.
One nice thing about my new educational research job, at least, was that it did not begin until about one in the afternoon which gave me plenty of time to stay in bed all morning, pondering answers to the FBI's questions.
Early Monday afternoon, I reported to the P.F.Colliers offices in coat and tie as instructed. Me and three other guys, Tom, Eddie and Al, were introduced to Jack Cerino who would be our team-leader and who would give us further instructions on what to do. Cerino was a medium weight, medium height, dark haired guy dressed in a short-sleeve shirt, a narrow tie, dark pants and a brightly checkered jacket. Non descript as he was, Jack was a true believer in educational research -- a fanatic in fact.
Jack knew the metropolitan New York area like the palm of his hand; which areas were upper middle class, which working class, which middle class and which, as he put it, were “garbage.” He had a instinctual sense of what neighborhoods were worth and what their social vulnerabilities were. His understanding of “demographics” made a mockery of academic sociology. The areas he liked best were lower middle class ones inhabited by people who had just risen or were just rising above working class, who had some pretensions for themselves, aspirations for their children and enough financial security to afford some of the better things in life, at least on time. “Berry patches” he called them. “Okay, boys,” he'd say, “today we're going to hit a really lush berry patch. It hasn't been picked over for a while, so the berries are there for the plucking. If you can't make a placement here, you'd probably starve in Eden.” (Actually what he said was, that if we couldn't make a placement here, we were fucking morons holding our dicks in our hands and should go serve hot dogs at Coney Island.) Whenever, jamed into his car, we headed out to one area or another, we got our ears filled with motivational speeches and wisdom. It was uncanny how ruthlessly Jack understood human nature. My heart might protest his cynicism but my head knew he was right.
On this first outing, Jack was going to give each of us individually an “on-the-job” demonstration of how to pitch our delivery, after which we would be on our own. One by one, Tom, Eddie, Al and myself accompanied him up the door steps as a “research assistant” and watched him run through the spiel. It was amazing how effortless everything was. Knock, knock.
Hello?
Hello, m'am; is your husband home?
(Always ask for the husband of the house, Jack said. If there's no man of the house, drop it. You don't pitch to single women.)
“Oh, yes; but I'm sorry, we're just sitting down to dinner.”
“That's OK, I don't mind.”
And with that non-sequitur the astonished in-dweller let us in. I watched as Jack went through the presentation as a knife through butter. Within twenty minutes he had made a placement, shaking hands with the happy new owners of a
Colliers Encyclopedia who could now return to their cold dinner.
“Once you get in,” Jack explained, “it's easy sailing. They're not going to let you in unless deep down they want it whether they know it or not.” The only hard part, he explained, was the “
conversion” -- that point in the presentation when free stuff became paid for stuff. “Everyone wants free stuff; getting them to agree to accept a free encyclopedia for some bullshit testimonial is a no brainer; it's hooking them on paying pennies a day for the supplement and getting an upfront down payment that's the hard part.” That was when the narrative converted and we had to make sure we didn't loose them at that point.
“Don't loose it!” Never let them talk about it. Don't let them go back into the kitchen to talk about it. Don't even let them look at one another. Keep control of the situation. If he turns to her and says, 'I donno honey, what do you think...?' If he does that, you've lost it. Don't let that happen. Keep talking. Engage each of them with eye contact. Keeping nodding your head. Get a 'yes' from him and then get a 'yes' from her. Ask them if they liked this or that feature. Even ask them if there was something they didn't like only don't let them mull it over. That was the purpose of the stupid piggy banks. We could talk about how cute the three styles of piggy banks were and how nice this or that one would look on Johnny's chest and how if he didn't like one style there was this other one that was just as cute and fun to drop pennies into. Anything to keep them divided and distracted through the “conversion” until they committed to giving instead of just receiving. “Once you're out the door, they're gonna talk about it. She's gonna say 'I only said 'yes', honey, because I thought you wanted it.' And he'll say, 'Naw.. .I didn't want the stupid thing, I only agreed because I thought you wanted it.' ” The demon in the checkered jacket snickered. “hah... but at that point what do you care? You got your berry.”
Actually, the company did care. A new law had just been passed giving people the right to rescind these sorts of contracts within two weeks. But the hope was that the print would be too small and the process too embarrassing that people would feel hooked whether they were happy about it or not. The concept of gaining agreement through division would have delighted Machiavelli, I'm sure.
After wrapping up his demonstration and pocketing the down payment Jack left me on my own. He would pick me up, at the gas station, at the corner over there, at whatever place it was, beween 8:30 and 9:00. I walked down the street, walked up to first door, took a deep breath and knocked....
I day or two later that week, I made my first conversion.
