Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (36 page)

“Come to think of it,” I said. “I now realize why cigarette companies started sponsoring golf and tennis tournaments, around the time they could no longer advertise on television—because they wanted to encourage all of us to get outside in the fresh air so that every single one of us could look like their models.”

My friend glanced around nervously—apparently looking for a telephone, or maybe a policeman.

“This is the new me,” I explained.

In that spirit, it occurred to me that if the cigarette manufacturers want to be even more efficient in their efforts to improve the education statistics, they might ask the government to use some longer words in the surgeon general’s warning—words that the average high school dropout simply wouldn’t understand. If that doesn’t work well enough, maybe the warning could be written in Latin.

1989

My dentist—Sweeney Todd, DDS—had his receptionist phone me to say that I should come in for an appointment. I figured Sweeney was having cash flow problems again.

“What is it this time?” I asked the receptionist.

“He says that he was looking at your X rays, and you need a crown in the lower left something or other,” she said.

“I don’t mean what is it with me,” I said. “What is it with him? Did the kid’s college tuition bill just come in? Wife redecorate the rumpus room? Would you mind just shouting back there and asking him how much he owes for what? I’d like to get myself prepared.”

“I can’t,” the receptionist said. “He’s in the Caribbean until next Tuesday.”

“I was afraid of something like this,” I said.

“Before he left, he gave me a list of patients to call,” she said. “He told me that he’ll need you for an hour on the first appointment.”

“An hour on the first appointment?” I said. “Sounds like Jamaica. Or maybe Antigua. This is definitely no cheapie to the Bahamas. That time he went to the Bahamas he only needed me for a half-hour session with the dental hygienist. May I ask if he took the wife and kids?”

“And his in-laws,” the receptionist said.

“Erghh,” I said, with some feeling. “I think we’re talking gold crown here. Maybe even root canal. That mother-in-law of his lives high off the hog.”

I showed up for the hour appointment anyway. What’s the alternative? I could switch dentists, of course, but I’ve become sort of used to old Sweeney. If you listen closely while he’s working on your teeth—you have to listen closely because, being rather clumsy, he makes a lot of noise banging around the instruments—you can hear
him mumbling about whatever expense in the Todd family it was that got you into the chair in the first place. After years of that, I suppose I’d feel something was missing if a dentist didn’t accompany his drilling with a lot of talk about how much electricians charge for a simple rewiring job these days.

Besides, I don’t know any other dentists. I don’t admit that to Sweeney Todd, DDS, of course. In fact, I’ve been telling him for years that some friends of mine are always singing the praises of the dentist they all go to—a relatively recent arrival from Kyoto known to his grateful patients as Magic Fingers Yamamoto.

“They say he’s got the touch of an angel,” I said of Yamamoto, as I settled into the chair and prepared myself for the assaults of a deeply tanned Sweeney Todd, DDS. I had to raise my voice a bit, since Sweeney, in his effort to recover a mirror he had dropped, had knocked the rest of his instruments onto the floor.

“Open wide, please,” Sweeney said. He has never been affected in the slightest by talk of Magic Fingers Yamamoto.

“Also, Yamamoto belongs to some Buddhist sect that believes the exchange of large sums of money corrupts the soul,” I continued. “For crowns and bridges, he does wonders with the same material used for the common paper clip. His fees, of course, are nominal. Basically, he seeks his rewards in inner fulfillment. He spits on money—or he would if he weren’t so polite.”

“Spit, please,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney had stopped his banging around and was standing next to his instrument cabinet peering at some X rays. “What do you see there, Sweeney?” I asked. “A new transmission for your BMW? A long weekend with the missus in the Adirondacks?”

Sweeney held the X rays up to the window to get a better look. “Won’t be able to get away for the next few weekends,” Sweeney said. “We’re doing an addition to the kitchen.”

“You never cease to amaze me, Sweeney,” I said. “I’ve seen those television commercials that show doctors seeing all sorts of little bitty doo-dads through the miracle of CAT scans—or not seeing them, really, because all of the patients in those commercials turn out to be okay—but you’ve got to be the only medical man who can look at an
X ray with the naked eye and see an addition to your kitchen. What’s your secret?”

“I have a better X ray machine,” Sweeney said, knocking over the water glass as he turned toward me. “But it’s expensive. Very expensive. Open wide, please.”

1989

On a Wednesday afternoon just before Christmas, the wall clock in our kitchen began to run backward. I’m not talking about a literary device here; I’m talking about a clock. Suddenly, this clock’s sweep second hand was moving in a direction that can only be described as counterclockwise. There were witnesses. Alice was having a meeting in the living room. The washing machine repairman was present. In fact, there are those who say that he had something to do with the clock’s sudden switch in direction, since he was fiddling with the circuit breakers upstairs. But the washing machine repairman is almost always at our house, fiddling with the circuit breakers upstairs. He likes to fiddle with circuit breakers. The only piece of modern technology that repels him is the automatic washer.

The wall clock in our kitchen does not have numbers. It has letters that spell out Hecker’s Flour, except for the apostrophe. Having a clock with only letters on it means that my daughters, before they learned to tell time, would occasionally say something like “the little hand’s on the
R
and the big hand is just past the
C
,” but I do not consider that a strong disadvantage in a clock. The face of our clock can be illuminated by two lightbulbs with a glow so strong that I used to assume pilots were using it at night to take a bead on LaGuardia. We no longer keep lightbulbs in the clock, because my daughters say that would be a waste of energy. As I interpret my daughters’ views on the
energy crisis, they believe that a patriotic American household should use no energy except that required to power a computer game called Merlin and a Tyco Super-Dooper-Double-Looper Auto Track. In addition to knowing a lot about how much fossil fuel we’re wasting, my daughters are already learned on the subject of cholesterol in Italian sausage and carcinogens in beer. Their command of a broad range of such information, in fact, has made it obvious to me why some children in our public elementary schools have difficulty reading and writing: Their teachers spend most of the day teaching them how to depress their parents.

One morning at breakfast, my younger daughter asked me if it would soon be yesterday. I told her it would be if we were talking about a literary device rather than a clock. She asked me why the clock was running backward, and I told her to pay more attention to her cereal eating, my alternative being to admit to her that the only explanation I had been able to think of was that our clock had been invaded by a dybbuk, a bloody-minded cousin of the dybbuk in our washing machine. It happened to be a time when I was feeling the weight of my ignorance more acutely than usual. I had not distinguished myself in the assembling of the Tyco Super-Dooper-Double-Looper Auto Track. I had just been forced to admit to my older daughter that I did not know how to get the square root of anything. All in all, I would have preferred a clock that ran in the conventional direction. Not knowing enough Yiddish to speak to the dybbuk in his native tongue, I tried to reason quietly with him in what I perceived to be English of Yiddish inflection (“So go! I’ll pack you a lunch.”), but the clock continued to run backward.

In this mood, I went to my next-door neighbor’s for a cup of seasonal cheer, and met a friend who said she was worried about the world because Afghanistan had the H-bomb. This was before the Russian adventure, and Afghanistan was not a country often mentioned when holiday discussions ventured from the Brandy Alexander recipe toward sophisticated weapons systems.

“Afghanistan does not have the H-bomb,” I assured her.

“They’ve got it,” she said. “I read it in the
Times.
”

“There’s a progression in these matters,” I said. “First a country gets a drugstore. Then it gets the H-bomb.”

“I saw it in the
Times,
” she repeated. “The leader of Afghanistan has slicked-down hair and one of those waxed mustaches. I know he wouldn’t use it right.”

“General Zia!” I said. “That’s Pakistan.”

She was comforted, and I felt more in control for a while—until I began to wonder what was so comforting about Pakistan’s having the H-bomb. Would they use it right? What was the right way to use it?

It was in this mood that I happened to mention our clock to Noam Spanier, who goes to Stuyvesant High School—a seat of learning so high-powered that it offers courses other than Serum Cholesterol 121 and Ravages of Booze 202.

“Your polarity is reversed,” Noam said.

“Watch your mouth, kid,” I said, taking a quick check of my clothing.

We went next door. Noam unplugged my clock, turned the plug around, and plugged it in again. The clock began to run clockwise.

“Obviously,” I said.

Noam nodded.

“It’s obvious,” I repeated. “You scared the hell out of the dybbuk.”

1980

When we were about to take a trip to Italy, somebody offered to lend me one of those cameras that knows everything. The camera knows how to focus itself. It knows when to speed itself up and when to slow itself down. It knows when to flash its flashbulb. If you point the camera at a mountain, the camera knows that it’s pointed at a mountain. If you suddenly swing the camera away from the mountain, point it at your Uncle Harry, and say to the camera, “This is also a mountain,” the camera is not fooled. The camera knows your Uncle Harry from a mountain. The camera knows everything.

I told my wife that I was uneasy about carrying around a camera that knows everything. There are certain things I’d just as soon keep to myself.

“The camera doesn’t know everything,” my wife said. “It just knows more about taking pictures than you do.”

I told my wife that I was uneasy about carrying around a camera that knows more than I do. It’s bad enough that both of my daughters now know more than I do. If there were a ranking done in our house according to who knows the most, at least I’d come in a strong fourth. (We don’t have a dog.) Who wants to be edged out by a camera?

My wife told me that I was being silly. She said to take the camera. I finally took the camera. My wife knows more about these things than I do.

One of my daughters offered to teach me how to use the camera.

“Why do I need you to teach me?” I said. “If this camera knows everything, it can teach me itself.”

My daughter told me I was being silly. So I accepted her offer. She knows more about these things than I do. She can set one of those watches that work with tiny buttons on the side and will give you the month and year and the military time in Guam if you know which buttons to push. Sometimes, if there’s a lull in the conversation at the dinner table, my daughter will say, “It’s eighteen hundred hours in Guam.” Or at least she did until the night I responded by announcing, “All enlisted personnel are required to finish their broccoli before leaving the mess hall.” That was just before she got so she knew more than I did.

So she taught me to use the camera. She read the instruction booklet (several years ago, I swore off instruction booklets) and studied the camera from a number of angles. Then, this is what she taught me: “Just press the button. The camera does the rest. The camera knows everything.”

So I took the camera to Italy. The first thing I did was to point it at a mountain. Then I pressed the button. The camera seemed to know just what to do. It focused itself. It slowed itself down, or maybe speeded itself up. It decided not to use its flashbulb. When I pushed the button, it advanced itself to the next picture with a contented
buzzing sound, like a horsefly that has just had a bite of something good.

I felt proud of my camera. “Hey, this camera knows everything,” I told my wife.

“Let’s hope so,” my wife said.

Just to make sure, I pointed the camera at my wife and said to it, “This is my Uncle Harry.” But the camera knew better. I could tell by the contented buzz. The camera took a picture of my wife. The camera knows everything.

So I started taking a lot of pictures. I took the usual kind of pictures—shadows falling in quaint piazzas and fishermen unloading their catch and Americans slapping themselves in the head when a waiter in a café tells them how much their two beers and a Coke cost.

The camera buzzed and buzzed. Pretty soon, I was so accustomed to the buzzing that I thought I could detect not just the camera’s mood but what it was trying to say. When I took a picture of an old market-vendor selling onions, I thought I heard the camera say “Nice shot!”

Then, as I was taking a picture of a raggedy little boy talking to a splendidly dressed policeman, I thought I heard the camera say “Corny, cor-ny.” That afternoon, when I was taking a picture of my wife in front of a statue of Zeus, I clearly heard the camera say “You’re cutting off his head, dummy.”

So I quit using the camera. I told my wife I had run out of film. She suggested I buy some. “If the camera’s so smart,” I said, “let it buy its own film.”

1988

Not long ago, I ran across a man who pulls his own teeth. As my father used to say, you meet all kinds. I suppose you’re wondering how
the subject came up. I suspect you think it came up during one of those frivolous summertime conversations on the beach, when people try to be clever as a way of diverting attention from their waistlines. Somebody says something like, “The way the book business is going these days, I half expect to turn on a talk show and see some shrink in a turtleneck sweater pushing a bestseller called
How to Take Out Your Own Appendix and Find the Real You
.” Everyone chuckles, but then one person on the edge of the crowd—a rather intense-looking person who is wearing sandals and black socks and has a thermos full of lukewarm mineral water with him—says, “As a matter of fact, I pull my own teeth and I just signed a contract with a publisher for a six-figure advance.” That is not the way it happened at all.