Lucky Stars (7 page)

e
ight

A
fter a ten-minute wait, during which my mother and I sat in the small lobby leafing through uninvolving trade journals having to do with the canned goods industry, Corbin Beasley, public relations director of Fin’s, emerged.

“Welcome, Mrs. Reiser,” he said, extending his hand toward my mother’s. The extension, by the way, was no small matter, as Corbin, a thirtysomething with a geeky grin, was easily six foot six to my mother’s five foot two. “Great to meet you. It’s always a delight to re
late to our customers on a face-
to-face, one-to-one basis.”

“Thank you,” she said briskly, indicating she had come for the inspection, not for the pleasantries. “This is my daughter, Stacey. It was her can of Fin’s that contained the bone, as a matter of fact. If I hadn’t been at
her apartment that day, she could have been the one to choke and die.”

Corbin smiled inappropriately, exposing jack-o-lante
rn
teeth. “I’m terribly sorry you were alarmed,” he said to both of us. “But I’m here to assure you that, while bones do find their way inside the cans on occasion, your experience is not the usual course of events here at Fin’s. Not by any means.”

“Then what is?” said my mother.

“What’s what?” said Corbin.

“The usual course of events here at Fin’s. That’s what I came here to investigate. I’m not one for frivolity so why don’t we get started?”

“With?”

“The tour. The inspection. The step-by-step look-see. In your letter you invited me to pay you a visit and check out your quality control. Since you’re such a busy man, let’s get on with it already.”

Clearly, Corbin had been under the illusion that he could pop out of his meeting with the advertising people, shake my mother’s hand, do a little bowing and scraping, and send her on her merry way. Wrong.

“I expect the grand tour—start to finish, ste
rn
to ste
rn
, A to Z,” she said, running out of
clichés
, mercifully. “I want to observe the entire process.”

Corbin checked his watch. “I do have to get back to my meeting,” he said, “but I’d be privileged to give you a quick tour of the facilities. Follow me.”

We followed Corbin through the lobby door, down a carpeted hall, and into his cushy office where he handed us two construction worker-type hard hats and asked us to put them on. “Everybody touring the cannery has to wear one,” he said. “It’s a safety regulation.”

“I approve wholeheartedly,” said my mother, donning her hard hat. “Safety first.”

I was less enthusiastic. I was anticipating a bad case of helmet hair.

Our field trip took us outside the executive offices, across a parking lot, and out to a marina, where several large boats were being unloaded in the water.

“These just came in,” said Corbin, pointing to the recently docked boats. “They come in every day, all day, filled with catches from local waters as well as elsewhere in the Pacific. The fish are frozen at twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit as soon as they’re caught, then they’re brought to us in storage containers.”

“How does Fin’s know the fish on these ships is any good?” asked my mother. “You hear stories. My friend Esther ate at one of the best seafood restaurants in Cleveland—she had grilled swordfish, if memory serves. Anyhow, she got so sick she couldn’t look at fish ever again.
She won’t even touch scrod now, poor soul.”

Corbin tried to seem empathetic. “At Fin’s we’re very mindful of possible spoilage, and we take great pains to prevent it.”

“Name one great pain that you take,” challenged my mother.

“Well, we cut samples from eight fish out of every load, and these eight samples go straight to our lab, which I’ll show you later if you like. Our technicians
test the samples for the histamine levels in the fish, which tell us if there’s been spoilage from high temperature. Then they do anot
her test to determine the acid
content in the fish, in case there’s been spoilage from low temperature. And finally they test the percentage of salt in the fish, which should be in the one-point-five to
one-point-
seven range. If any
o
f the test results look the
least bit suspicious, we throw the entire shipment of fish out.”

“Good riddance,” I said. I was bored silly, but thought I should inte
r
ject a remark now and then, so they’d know I was breathing. My mother, on the other hand, was fascinated by every morsel of trivia Corbin threw at her.

“All right, ladies, let’s move ahead to the thawing facility,” he said, leading us over to an area where rows and rows of containers held tuna—big tuna, medium tuna, small tuna, blue fin tuna, yellow fin tuna, More tuna than you’d ever want to deal with. They were stiff—dead-body stiff—and were waiting to be thawed. “See how that one’s eyes are clear, not cloudy?” Corbin had selected a rather colorful fish for his show-and-tell and was running his fingers all over it. “And see how the skin is shiny and firm, not mushy to the touch?”

My mother leaned over and fondled the fish herself. “I do see,” she acknowledged.

I should add here that the smell of fish was as omnipresent as it was vile. There was no q
uestion that I would have to burn
the clothes I was wearing, especially the shoes, which were covered in
jus de
fish guts.

“The fish will be thawed over here,” said Corbin, moving into an area with giant hoses everywhere, along with more containers of frozen tuna. “They’ll be soaked in water for five hours until the backbone temperature is thirty-five degrees. Then, our people will remove the entrails and cut the fish into chunks and cook them at two hundred and fifty degrees for forty-five minutes to four hours, depen
ding on the size of the fish.”

While I attempted to keep my breakfast down, Corbin walked us into yet another area. “I call this the London Fog room,” he said, gesturing into the air, which was fetid with steam haze and foul with fish fumes. “It’s
sixty degrees in here and a hundred percent humidity, so the fish can cool down enough for the skin to be cut off easily.”

“And then what happens?” asked my mother. “Because I have a feeling we’re getting to the crucial stages of the process.”

Corbin concurred. “I’m about to take you into what is essentially our mission control.” He laughed. Even he knew how stupid this exercise was.

He escorted us into a warehouse-type space where there were hundreds of women with plastic caps on their heads and plastic aprons over their clothes and small instruments that looked like carrot peelers in their fast-moving hands. They stood shoulder to shoulder—as close together as sardines in a can (sorry, but I’ve got smelly fish on the brain)—at a conveyor belt that ran the length of the room.

“Look how hard they work,” my mother marveled as we passed by the women, who were chattering amongst themselves in Spanish. As I had studied the language in both high school and college and become even more proficient in it after moving to Latino-populated L.A., I understood what they were saying. (“My back is sore.” “My car needs new tires.” “My husband sings in the shower, like he thinks he’s Ricky Martin.” Nothing of consequence, in other words.)

“They do work hard,” said Corbin. “They’re the core of our operation, the heart and soul. They skin and bone the fish—by hand, hour after hour, day after day—and place the cleaned product onto the conveyor, which carries the fish down to the canning area. Then the fish is put into the cans, either with our vegetable broth or in oil, and steam heated in an oven to kill any possible bacteria.”

“Very responsible,” my mother mused. “About killing the bacteria, I mean.” She leaned over and spoke to one of the women, who was, at that moment, cutting the bones out of a tuna. “How do you know you’ve gotten them all?”

“Excuse?” said the woman.

“I’m talking about the
bones,
”
yelled my mother, as if the woman were hard of hearing, not foreign in extraction. “How do you know if you’ve taken them all out?”

“Ah, bones,” said the woman. “I know because I do for thirty years. When you do for long time, you know how.”

“I suppose that’s very true,” said my mother, thinking, no doubt, of how she had been nagging me for thirty years and that, therefore, she knew how. She and the fish-bone cutter-outer were kindred spirits, that’s what they were, and who could have predicted it. “But occasionally, you make mistakes, right? Not on purpose, of course, but a bone
can
slip through, isn’t that so?”

“Could get hit by bus, too,” said the woman in an utterance of wisdom that provoked a vigorous nod from my mother.

“After the canned fish is steamed, it’s cooled,” said Corbin, hurrying us along on the tour. “Then the cans are lidded, labeled, and shipped. And that, ladies, is that. End of story.”

“Very impressive, I must say,” my mother declared. “I don’t know what I expected, but it looks as though Fin’s has its act together.”

Corbin seemed greatly relieved. Perhaps he’d taken my mother’s
Dateline
threat seriously.

“What would completely restore my confidence in Fin’s, however,” she went on, “would be to get a sense
of the chief executive here, the man or woman in charge of the company, the person who sets the tone when it comes to quality control. I’d like to meet with him or her while I’m here, Mr. Beasley. Just for a few minutes
.
”

“I’m sorry, but he’s with our advertising agency this morning,” he said. “He’s in the same meeting that I should be getting back to. So I’m afraid—”

“But
you
were able to take time out from the meeting,” she interrupted. “I’m only asking for a moment or two with the president of Fin’s, to ask him a few questions. My daughter and I did nearly die, Mr. Beasley. And it was your company that would certainly have been liable.”

God, she was a battle-ax. Why wasn’t I even more screwed up than I was, I wondered, growing up with a mother who demanded audiences with presidents of tuna fish companies?

Corbin sighed. “Let me see what I can do.” He left us back in the lobby with the receptionist while he went off to either find the president or pretend to. We waited.

“Why don’t we just go?” I suggested at one point. “They were nice enough to show us around. Isn’t that enough?”

“Stacey, there’s something you don’t understand, dear.”

There was a lot I didn’t understand. Like why I was in a tuna cannery in San Pedro instead of on the set of my own TV series in Hollywood.

“I’m not doing this for myself,” my mother continued. “I’m here to represent all the little people, the people who are too frightened or sick or busy to rise up and complain about their consumer goods. I’m staying for them. I want to make sure that they don’t get bones in
their tuna fish. I want them to feel safe when they go to their pantries to make lunch.”

“A noble, noble cause,” I said, wishing there were a video of this. I could have sent it to one of those funniest bloopers shows and given my mother’s “little people” a very big laugh.

Just then, Corbin reappeared, breathless with news. “Mr. Terwilliger, the president of Fin’s, will see you, ladies. But his time really is limited today, so I’ll have to insist that your visit be a short one—about five minutes, tops.”

“Five minutes is all I’ll need with him,” she told Corbin, squaring her shoulders and winking at me. “I’ll state my case and you can all get back to business.”

“Then follow me,” said Corbin, taking us to his leader.

n
ine

W
e had expected to be shown into Mr. Terwilliger’s office for our brief meeting, but we were ushered, instead, into the executive conference room.

“Wait. Isn’t there some big powwow going on in here with your advertising agency?” I asked nervously as Corbin was about to open the heavy paneled door. “My mother only wanted to—”

“She wanted to speak to Mr. Terwilliger,” he said. “For that to happen, she’s going to have to speak to him in front of the little group we’ve assembled today. He doesn’t have time for a private meeting, as I explained.” We walked into the room, where at least a dozen people were gathered around a long rectangular table. I figured that the man at the head of the table, the one with the gray hair and gray suit and gray complexion, was
Terwilliger. He was also the one without a pen and legal pad in front of him, which tipped me off that he was the boss, the guy who didn’t have to take notes.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Corbin, getting everyone’s attention. “Say hello to Mrs. Helen Reiser and her daughter, uh—”

“Stacey Reiser,” I volunteered and gave them my best actress-y smile. I wondered if any of them recognized me, either from the commercials or the TV guest spots or even from
Pet Peeve.
Yup, I decided. That cute guy in the co
rn
er knows I’m an actress. I can tell by the way he’s looking at me, trying to figure out what he’s seen me in and which part I played and whether I’ll give him my autograph when the meeting is over. Fame was fun, I had to admit. Even at my level.

“Mrs. Reiser wrote to Fin’s a few weeks ago with a complaint about our product,” Corbin went on, directing his remarks toward Mr. Terwilliger. “In response, I invited her to tour our cannery and see for herself that we care very much about quality control and that we’d like her to remain a loyal Fin’s customer.” He turned to my mother. “Mrs. Reiser, why don’t you tell Mr. Terwilliger what’s on your mind as succinctly as you can, and then we’ll let you drive back to Los Angeles with your daughter, all right?”

“All right,” said my mother, who, I suddenly realized, had not the slightest trace of performance anxiety, despite the fact that she was about to speak in front of a roomful of strangers. Actors are trained to deal with such anxiety—I had taken several courses in overcoming stage fright—but she neither shook nor sweated nor blinked an inordinate nu
mber of times. She was as self-
possessed as if she were about to lecture me on the
su
b
ject of my messy kitchen. “But before
I
speak,
I’d prefer
to know to whom I’m speaking. Would those around the table please state their name and position with the company?”

Boy, she had a set of balls, didn’t she?

Without missing a beat, each person identified himself, humoring her, I assumed. Among the star attendees of the meeting were Frank Terwilliger, president and CEO of Fin’s Premium Tuna; Gregg Hillman, vice president of marketing for Fin’s; Louise Cardoza, vice president of product development for Fin’s; Peter Sacklin, vice president of Wylie & Wohlers Advertising; Julie Denton, creative supervisor of W&W; Susan Hardaway, W&W’s art director; and Larry Franzen, a copywriter at W&W. All professionals in their field. My mother wasn’t intimidated by that fact, either.

“Thank you,” she said, stepping further into the room and planting herself next to an easel. It held a poster depicting a large can of tuna that appeared to be swimming in a body of water by virtue of its cute little
fins.
“First of all, I want to thank Mr. Beasley for responding so quickly to my letter of complaint.” She nodded at Corbin. “But most of all, I want to thank Mr. Terwilliger for allowing me to get a few things off my chest.” She nodded at him, too, but she accompanied the nod with actual finger pointing in his direction. He flinched slightly but let her keep talking. “I was visiting my daughter Stacey one afternoon and suggested I prepare us both lunch. I rummaged around in her pantry and found a can of Fin’s premium solid white albacore tuna packed in water, the brand our family has always preferred. As I was emptying the tuna into a bowl, prior to adding mayonnaise and other seasonings, I spotted a large bone. That’s right, Mr. Terwilliger, a bone. The kind of bone you don’t always spot because it blends in
with the tuna, color wise. The kind of bone you can swallow accidentally. The kind of bone that can become lodged in your throat and cause you to choke. The kind of bone that can kill you, Mr. Terwilliger.” She let her words sink in, for effect, the way she always did with me. “Now, I don’t mind telling you I was furious at Fin’s, because I trusted your brand, was a loyal customer, stayed with you even though you were the last tuna company to come out with single-serving-size cans. In other words, I
believed
in Fin’s and yet
this
is how you reward me? By nearly
killing
me?” I glanced around the table to see if there was eye rolling, snickering, squelching of laughter, but everyone was riveted, apparently. Either that or they were asleep with their eyes open. “However,” she went on, “after my tour of the cannery today, after inspecting your operation, after observing the safety and health features you have in place, after watching the women slaving away on that assembly line—those good, decent, hardworking women—I have reached the conclusion that your quality control is what it should be and that the bone I found was an honest mistake and that I can probably make a tuna sandwich for my daughter without fear.” She paused again, this time to press her hand to her heart and heave a deep sigh. “Surely, you can understand how mothers strive to protect their children,” she said, regrouping, gaining momentum. “It’s our God-given impulse. Our biological need. We can’t live with the thought that the contents of a can of tuna fish might harm our loved ones. We must have a sense of security when it comes to our food. We must have a sense of confidence in all our consumer products. We must and we should and we will, if
I
have anything to say about it!” She stopped to raise her fist in the air, a Jewish Erin Brockovich. “But the person
with the power to fully restore my confidence in Fin’s is Mr. Terwilliger. So, I’m going to shut up now and let him have the floor.”

There was silence, nothing but dead air for about a second or two. And then, before Mr. Terwilliger could utter a single syllable, the executives at the table applauded loudly, wildly, as if my mother had just delivered the State of the Union Address. One of them—I think it was the ad agency’s creative supervisor—even gave her a standing ovation. I was astonished by their reaction, amazed that they would respond positively to her browbeating when I had always responded negatively to it. What in the world was going on here?

“Mrs. Reiser,” said Mr. Terwilliger after the applause had died down. He was a thin-lipped man with sunken cheekbones and a dour expression. I had a hunch he wasn’t a picnic to work for. “I’m sorry that you were put through such anguish over our product, but I’m a man who appreciates bluntness and you were blunt here today. I won’t promise that there will never be another bone in a can of Fin’s premium tuna, but I will promise you that we’ll continue to do our best to cut down on the problem. It’s customers like you who remind us that we’re not just catching fish and canning it and shipping it out to faceless individuals, but that we’re providing healthy, nutritious meals to real human beings with real concerns. As a matter of fact, you’re exactly the kind of person we’re trying to reach with our television advertising. That’s what we’ve been doing here all morning, you know—talking about our advertising. Our agency seems to think our customers are morons, as evidenced by the crap they wanted us to go with today.” He glowered at the easel with the poster of the tuna can doing the backstroke. “It’s an embarrassment, isn’t it? So now
that I’ve rejected it, they’ve got exactly two weeks to come up with something we won’t be ashamed to put on the air.” He glowered again, this time at the W&W folks. “Well, this isn’t your concern, Mrs. Reiser.
Helen.”
He rose from his chair and shook my mother’s hand. Mine, too, although he didn’t call me Stacey; he didn’t call me anything. “Thanks for stopping by and reading us the riot act We could all use a little cold water thrown at us from time to time.” He turned to Corbin. “See that we send Helen a complimentary case of tuna, would you, Beasley?”

Corbin said he would, then hustled over and escorted us out the door of the conference room. “Wow. You were a big hit,” he told my mother during our stroll back toward the lobby of the building. “Mr. Terwilliger doesn’t usually dole out parting gifts. He’s on the frugal side, just between us.”

“We won’t tell a soul,” I said, dying to get away from this bizarro tuna company and wondering why I consented to be dragged along in the first place.

We were chitchatting with Corbin and giving him my mother’s mailing address and inching toward freedom when one of the men from the ad agency sprinted down the hall and rushed over to us.

“Don’t go, Mrs. Reiser,” he said breathlessly, grabbing her hand and pumping it. “I’m Peter Sacklin, a vice president of Wylie and Wohlers. I’m the W and W executive in charge of the Fin’s account and I wonder if you’d mind coming back into the conference room for a few minutes.”

My mother’s eyes narrowed. “What for?”

“We’d like to talk to you about the television advertising we’re doing for Fin’s.”

“Talk to me? What do I know about that kind of
thing? It’s my daughter who knows about commercials. Personally, I never watch them—except the ones she’s in, of course.”

Peter Sacklin gave me a puzzled look, as if trying to figure out what she could have meant. Obviously, he’d missed me as the Irish Spring Lady, the Taco Bell Lady, etc.

“If you’d just give us a few more minutes of your time, Mrs. Reiser,” he said, “we’ll explain everything.”

My mother shrugged in resignation. “Sure. Why not? I’ve got nothing else to do today.”

Peter Sacklin smiled, took her arm in what I thought was a rather courtly gesture, and walked her back toward the conference room. I, meanwhile, was left standing there with Corbin Beasley, feeling like I’d been turned down for parole.

“Are we supposed to go with them?” I asked.

“We could,” he said. “I’m curious about what they plan to talk to your mother about, aren’t you?”

Was I curious? A little. I just figured that since Terwilliger appreciated my mother’s bluntness, he wanted her blunt opinion of the agency’s
ideas. Mostly, I was just glad
I
wasn’t the recipient of her bluntness for a change.

C
orbin and I followed them back into the conference room, pulled up a couple of chairs, and listened.

“Sorry this is so impromptu,” Peter Sacklin was saying to my mother, who had been given a prominent position at the head of the table, to Mr. Terwilliger’s right. “Obviously, we haven’t had time to prepare a storyboard, let alone a script. But as you heard before, Mrs. Reiser, our client has rejected our latest TV ad campaign and our backs are against the wall here. We need to go
on the air with something dynamite and soon—something that will gain market share for Fin’s, something that will really grab the public. Star-Kist has Charlie the Tuna. Chicken of the Sea has the mermaid. And Bumble Bee has the bumblebee. What we want—what we
n
eed—is for Fin’s to have you, Mrs. Reiser. Just you, talking to the camera in the same tough, no-nonsense manner that you used with us.”

I bolted up in my chair, felt my stomach tighten, felt my eyes bug out of my head. They wanted my mother to star in their commercial? My mother, who didn’t have a nanosecond of experience as an actress? My mother, who was, well, my mother?

Ridiculous, I scoffed. She’ll never do it. She hates show business and everything remotely related to it. They’ll have to hire some other complaining consumer as their pitchwoman.

“I’m very flattered,” my mother responded, “but I can’t imagine why you’d put me, an ordinary woman in her sixties with the crow’s feet to prove it, on TV. Not when you could get a young one like Heather Locklear.”

Everyone laughed. Everyone except me. Why didn’t she say,
Not when you could get a young one like my daughter Stacey?
Did she suddenly develop a brain cramp and forget that I did commercials for a living? Did it slip her mind that I was in a goddamn Jim Carrey movie? Did she go nutso during the tour of the cannery—someplace between the fog room with the 100 percent humidity and the thawing room with the smelly fish fumes?

“The reason we want you, Mrs. Reiser,” W&W’s creative supervisor piped up, “is because you’re so credible, so
real.
When you tell the public about Fin’s, they’ll listen. They’ll listen and they’ll buy.”

“Exactly right,” said Terwilliger, the big cheese. “You have that bluntness we discussed earlier, Helen—a directness that translates into trustworthiness. If you say Fin’s is the best tuna, everyone will believe you.”

My mother tapped his arm. “But I found a bone in my can of Fin’s,” she reminded him. “That’s why I came here in the first place—to complain about your tuna. Now that I’ve seen your operation and met your employees, I understand that mistakes happen every now and then, but it doesn’t mean I would I go on television and endorse your product. I have no intention of lying to the viewers. A bone is still a bone.”