Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (29 page)

I can imagine many people in England trying to reassure one another with such thoughts as they read increasingly grim speculation about the pigeons in the morning papers. “Don’t look so glum, Alfie,” Alfie’s wife says, as she puts the eggs and grilled tomato and thick-cut bacon in front of him. “Maybe this was some nice gentleman who has a home for older pigeons in a lovely part of Sussex where they don’t have to be around those nasty foreigners.”

It may be, of course, that Alfie was looking glum because, breakfast traditionally being the only edible meal in England, he knew his day had already peaked well before nine in the morning. But he was probably thinking of those pigeons. The English are known for having almost unlimited sympathy for animals that are unromantic or even animals that Americans might describe as having a bad case of the uglies. The United Kingdom is a country in which the monarch harbors corgis.

Apparently, there was, at first, hope that the pigeons had been taken by some poor lad who desperately wanted to race pigeons but lacked the wherewithal to buy his own flock. Alfie was able to imagine the Trafalgar Square pigeons soaring gracefully over the Somerset moors or being pampered by a kindly pigeon fancier like that nice detective on
NYPD Blue
.

But I heard on the radio that the pigeon-racing authorities dismissed that theory, explaining that Trafalgar Square pigeons are too old and out of shape to be competitive racers.

“I was thinking they might have special races for older birds,” Alfie may have said when that news came out. “Like the over-50 division in tennis.”

I have to say that I was pessimistic from the start. Any sensible analysis of the case has to start with a brutal but undeniable fact: People eat pigeons.

When the New American Cuisine began to take hold in northern California, I remember beginning each visit to San Francisco by checking to make certain there were still pigeons in the parks. My fear was that between my trips to the city, all the poor birds might have been snatched up by what I think of as sleepytime restaurants
(everything is on a bed of something), smoked, and served on a bed of radicchio.

I don’t think the Trafalgar Square caper indicates that smoked pigeon on radicchio has replaced bangers and mash in the hearts of the English. The pigeons could be served as anything. As Escoffier, or one of them, may have said, “Chopping up is the great leveler.”

In fact, a young man, who told
The Sun
that he had taken fifteen hundred of the pigeons and sold them to a middleman, said, “As far as I know, they go to curry houses all over Britain.”

We all hope he’s wrong. People who would snatch Trafalgar Square pigeons for restaurant stewpots would snatch almost any animal, no matter how repulsive—although the Queen will be relieved to hear they’d probably draw the line at corgis.

1996

For years, whenever I took an out-of-town guest on a walking tour of Lower Manhattan, I always included the opportunity to play tic-tac-toe against a chicken in Chinatown. I try to hit the highlights. The chicken was in a Mott Street amusement arcade otherwise known for the decibel level attained by its electronic games. Next to a game with a name like
Humanoid Avenger
, there was a glass cage that held an ordinary-looking live chicken. The player pressed buttons on the scoreboard to indicate his own choices, then waited with trepidation as the chicken, pecking at a board in a private area of his cage behind some opaque glass, registered his invariably brilliant countermoves. Backlit letters came on to keep track of the X’s and O’s and to announce “Your Turn” or “Bird’s Turn.” Anyone who beat the chicken got a huge bag of fortune cookies that must have been worth at least thirty-five or forty cents, and it only cost fifty cents to play.

Years ago, the writer Roy Blount, Jr., told me he’d heard that the
chicken had been trained by a former student of B. F. Skinner, the legendary Harvard behaviorist. I used to tell my guests that. It was a way of refuting the false teaching that graduate work is of no value in the workaday world. Blount, as it turned out, was absolutely correct. I later spoke to that former graduate student and to a few other animal trainers in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which had become the small-animal training capital of the world. (It is also Bill Clinton’s hometown, but I like to think there’s no connection.) Mark Duncan, who ran a place called Educated Animals, told me that he offered—in addition to a parrot that rides a scooter, a macaw that plays dead, a raccoon that shoots baskets in answer to mathematical problems (you ask what two and two equals, he shoots four baskets), a rabbit that shoots off a cannon, a Vietnamese pig that drives a Cadillac, and a rooster that walks a tightrope—a chicken that dances while a rabbit plays the piano and a duck plays the guitar.

“What tune do they play?” I asked.

“Their choice,” he said.

If you were my guest, of course, playing the chicken in Chinatown didn’t even cost fifty cents. As the host, I put up the money. Invariably, the guest would take stock of the situation and then say, “But the chicken gets to go first.”

“But he’s a chicken,” I would say. “You’re a human being. Surely there should be some advantage in that.”

Then, I have to admit, a large number of my guests would say, “But the chicken plays every day. I haven’t played in years.”

I suppose you can’t blame people for getting the excuses out of the way before the game begins, and in that arcade it proved necessary. I never saw any of my guests do better than a draw against the chicken.

Then, in the early nineties, the chicken died. In
The New York Times
, Michael Kaufman wrote a nice send-off. I said at the time that there have been congressmen laid to rest with less effusive obituaries. I was sad, of course, but I comforted myself with the certainty that those geniuses in Hot Springs could train another chicken to play tic-tac-toe quicker than a rooster can walk a tightrope.

That was not to be. Apparently, the arcade was getting pressure from the animal people (by “animal people,” I don’t mean people who were abandoned in the woods as children and raised by a pack
of wolves; I mean people who are intensely concerned about the welfare of animals). The animal people said that playing tic-tac-toe on Mott Street was demeaning to the chicken. Demeaning? I never saw the chicken lose a game. It might interest the animal people to know that I eventually saw a film clip of B. F. Skinner himself playing the chicken in tic-tac-toe. Skinner is smiling, but it looks to me like a whistle-past-the-graveyard sort of smile. The chicken looks confident, as well he might.

1993

ENGLISH AND SOME LANGUAGES I DON’T SPEAK

“As far as I’m concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.”

Short bursts of language attract me. I’m keen on slogans. I also like mottos—license plate mottos, for instance, like New York’s “The Empire State,” or New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die.” Not long ago, some residents of Wisconsin started a campaign to change the state license plate motto—they didn’t feel they were truly captured by the motto “America’s Dairyland”—and someone suggested “Eat Cheese
or Die.” At one point, I got interested enough in license plate mottos to offer suggestions for states that don’t have any mottos at all. The motto I suggested for the Nebraska license plate, for instance, was “A Long Way Across.” I’m still working on a motto for Arkansas. The one I have so far seems a little verbose: “Not as Bad as You Might Have Imagined.”

Midwesterners have to avoid boastful mottos. Oklahoma’s license plate motto, for instance, is “Oklahoma’s OK.” If the Midwest had a regional license plate motto, it would be “No Big Deal.” Although the hamburger restaurant I was addicted to when I was growing up in Kansas City happened to have what connoisseurs agreed were the best hamburgers in the world, its motto was not “The Best Hamburgers in the World” but “Your Drinks Are Served in Sanitized Glasses.” I have to say, parenthetically, that restaurant mottos are generally weak, although I admired the motto of a barbecue restaurant in western Kentucky that specialized in barbecued mutton: “Mary Had a Little Lamb. Why Don’t You Have Some, Too.”

I’ve also been active in political mottos and campaign slogans. I suppose my most successful slogan was one I made up for a candidate who was running for mayor of Buffalo: “Never Been Indicted.” Politicians love mottos, and ever since the New Deal there have been attempts to attach motto-like names to administrations. There was a brief attempt in the Carter administration to use the motto “A New Foundation.” Every time I heard it, I could see some beady-eyed contractor standing in front of my house, shaking his head back and forth, and saying, “I’m afraid what you need, my friend, is a whole new foundation.”

By chance, this was during a period when I was imagining mottos for families in our neighborhood. The Bartletts, down the street, had the motto “A Triumph in Group Therapy.” The Bernsteins would be calling themselves “The Best Mixed Marriage Yet.” Our family tried a number of mottos, and then we settled on the one my family had used when I was a child: “Zip Up Your Jacket.”

The Reagan administration, the administration of the Great Communicator, naturally coined some lasting phrases. One of them was “the truly needy”—the people who weren’t just malingering. I wasn’t
certain what they meant by “truly needy” until a lawyer from Greenwich who’d been appointed chairman of the Federal Synfuels Corporation said, in 1981, that the salary of $150,000 was so far below a living wage that he’d have to move out of Greenwich if he accepted the job. I envisioned everyone who made less than $150,000 having to move out of Greenwich. I could imagine them packing up their station wagons and heading west in a caravan, like a preppy
Grapes of Wrath
. I could see them in their little camps outside Lake Forest and Sewickley, making their suppers of cold breast of chicken and white wine on the tailgates. The local people, referring to the Greenwich refugees contemptuously as “Greenies,” would greatly resent them, of course, as people willing to be bank executives for $135,000 a year. Whenever the greenies would go into town for supplies—a decent piece of brie, for instance—people would say, “G’wan, we don’t need your kind here.”

Political columnists have pet phrases, mostly to hide ignorance. “Too soon to tell” is the rare phrase that permits you to sound more informed by saying you don’t know. I use it myself. If I’m asked what long-term effect on the economy the deficit is going to have, I say, “It’s too soon to tell.” The other night, one of my daughters asked me how to find the area of an isosceles triangle, and I said, “Too soon to tell.”

A few months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine named Nick, who’s sixteen, about what we always call Rule #6. When Nick was a little boy, he was a handful, and his mother got a little desperate. So she posted some rules on the refrigerator door. The only one of the rules Nick and I have been able to remember was Rule #6: “Enough’s enough.” Just after we had our chat about life under Rule #6, I read in the
Times
about an attempted robbery at a branch bank in Brooklyn by a sort of amateur robber. He got away with some money, but the assistant bank manager, a woman in her middle years, chased him out the door, pursued him down the street, tackled him, and had to be restrained by some passing sanitation workers from doing him serious physical damage. When she was asked why she had done all of this, she said that the bank had been robbed just six months before and “enough’s enough.”

Well, of course, the robber had no way of knowing this. I think the bank should have been required to post a warning sign, like those signs that warn you that a microwave is in use:
WARNING. RULE #6 STRICTLY ENFORCED AT THIS BRANCH
.

1990

Things have finally returned to normal among the teenagers I know, after a spring filled with vocabulary tension brought on by the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.

“Relax,” I kept saying to S., the teenager I know best, as the pressure in her crowd mounted. “I read that a lot of colleges don’t pay much attention to SAT scores anyway. Also, you can always go to work in the dime store.”

“Relaxing would be a Herculean task—meaning a task very difficult to perform,” S. said. “Because among my friends there’s no dearth of anxieties. A dearth is like a paucity—a scarcity or scanty supply. In fact, most of the people I know have a plethora of anxieties—a surfeit, an overabundance.”

All of S.’s friends were talking that way. One evening, when we were giving S.’s friend D. a ride uptown, D. said, “I’ll be on the corner of Thirteenth and Sixth Avenue, in proximity to the mailbox.”

“In proximity?” I said.

“Kind of in juxtaposition to the mailbox,” D. said. “That’s a placing close together, or side by side. If I get tired while I’m waiting, you’ll find me contiguous to the mailbox.”

“What if someone wants to mail a letter?” I asked.

“If that eventuality—that contingent event, that possible occurrence or circumstance—occurs,” D. said, “I’ll move.”