Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (37 page)

Now that you know that, you probably think I simply read about this in the newspaper, because a lot of newspaper stories these days are about the sort of people who go on talk shows in turtlenecks to discuss taking out your own appendix. “Two years ago,” you imagine the newspaper story saying, “nobody could have predicted that Dr. Marvin Smolin, a successful and conventional suburban dentist, was destined to become the leader of a movement advocating that people pull their own teeth. Dr. Smolin then had a prosperous practice in Bergen County, New Jersey, and was widely known in the New York television world as the technical consultant to the long-running network series based on a father-and-son dental practice—
The Extractors
. He was active in the American Dental Association, having served for three years running as chairman of the ADA’s Special Committee on Tax Shelters. ‘I was Joe Establishment, DDS, but I really didn’t know who I was,’ Dr. Smolin said yesterday, while in town to conduct a four-day seminar on auto-extractics. ‘Just for a start, I thought I was Joe Establishment, DDS, and I was really Marvin Smolin.’ ” That’s not how it happened. Not even close. The subject of auto-extraction came up because I noticed a man who was jumping up and down.

It happened in front of a fruit-and-vegetable stand in my neighborhood. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the man who was jumping up and down, because I assumed he was just reacting to the price of raspberries. That happens a lot in my neighborhood. I’ve seen
a man stomping on his own hat over what an avocado costs these days. I once saw someone who looked perfectly normal—which is not, as it happens, the way most people in my neighborhood look—lying on his stomach in a produce store and banging on the floor with his fists in response to what they had the nerve to charge for one lousy watermelon.

This jumping up and down had nothing to do with the price of fruit and vegetables. The man involved was jumping up and down to demonstrate how he diverts the blood supply from his mouth so there is less pain when he pulls his own tooth. That you never guessed. That is how it happened. He was explaining the entire process to a friend. I overheard everything. He takes some pill; I can’t remember the name of it, but from the way he described it I assume it’s the sort of thing that might make you feel like having a go at your spleen once you had your infected molar out of the way. Then he jumps up and down, and then—
whammo!
—he pulls his own tooth. Other than that, he looked like an unremarkable fellow, except that he was missing a lot of teeth. I got the feeling he might pull a perfectly healthy one now and then just to keep in practice.

I don’t want to talk about the question of whether a man who pulls his own teeth is the one true practitioner of holistic medicine. That’s not what this is all about. I know that the local causemeister we call Harold the Committed would have you believe that this just goes to show that Brute Capitalism, which treats the health of the people as a commodity to be bought and sold, has forced auto-extractic practices on decent working men. Sometimes I get awfully tired of Harold the Committed. He may well be right about Brute Capitalism, but as I sized up this fellow who pulls his own teeth—and I’ll admit that sizing up a fellow is not that easy to do if he keeps jumping up and down and trying to simulate the effects of a pill that makes you want to have a go at your own spleen—I figured he might be interested in pulling his own teeth even if he could afford the watermelon at my neighborhood fruit and vegetable store.

I don’t want to pull my own teeth. I am still amazed, though, at how plausible it all sounded at the fruit stand. I remember thinking that pulling an upper tooth down would be a lot easier than pulling a
lower tooth up. I could almost see myself pulling an upper tooth. I belly up to the mirror, open my mouth wide, and say, “Is it just my imagination, or does that bicuspid look a little shaky?” I take the pill. I jump up and down. Then,
whammo!

1982

A day or two after the Webers’ son, Jeffrey, age twenty-six, finally moved out of the house, they realized that they had lost the ability to tape. I heard about this from my friend Horace, who seems to specialize in stories about our contemporaries—people who are in that awkward phase between the end of paying tuition and the beginning of playing with grandchildren. Very few of those people are much good with a VCR.

Until Bennett and Linda Weber discovered the effect that Jeffrey’s move had on their taping operation, Horace told me, they had been pleased by his departure. It wasn’t that they weren’t fond of Jeffrey, who had always been a bright and sweet-tempered boy. It was simply that, as Linda Weber sometimes put it, “If Jeffrey’s going to find himself, it would probably help for him to look somewhere other than his own room.”

Jeffrey, who sometimes worked as a technician for avant-garde theater productions, had moved into a cheap railroad flat found by his college friend Jason, who was clerking at a record store while he carried on what he sometimes referred to as his true life’s work—trying to decide whether to go on to graduate school. Helen, the third roommate, was working as a waitress while she took acting lessons, although she made it clear that the object of the lessons had never been a career in the theater.

Since not just Jeffrey but all three roommates were sometimes described
as trying to find themselves, Bennett Weber sometimes referred to them collectively as “The Lost Patrol,” the name of his favorite old Victor McLaglen movie—which was, ironically, the movie he was about to copy off one of the cable channels until he realized that Jeffrey was the only person in the family who knew how to tape from the excruciatingly complicated cable box.

“I had a lot of sympathy with his predicament,” Horace said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried taping off one of those cable boxes without a kid around, but it’s no joke. The other night, I figured I’d tape
Charade
, with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and I found myself trying to hold three different remote-control gizmos, plus the instructions. I finally put everything down and called my daughter in Phoenix.”

I counted my blessings: I have a daughter who lives just around the corner. “So what did Bennett do?” I asked.

“He called Jeffrey, of course, who printed out instructions for taping that even Bennett could understand, and took them over there. Jeffrey’s okay. I wouldn’t call him highly motivated, but he’s okay.”

“If he has an extra copy of those instructions, I wouldn’t mind seeing it,” I said. “Just out of curiosity.”

“The next time Bennett called Jeffrey,” Horace continued, “Jeffrey said, ‘What happened, Pop? You lose the instructions and now there’s a Perry Como retrospective you want to save for posterity?’ The kid’s clever. Anyway, that wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that the Webers’ answering machine got unplugged, and Bennett didn’t know how to reset the access mechanism.”

“I think there’s a little thing in the back,” I mumbled. “The last time that happened to ours, my daughter happened to be home using the washer, so naturally …”

“So Jeffrey went right over and reset the access mechanism,” Horace said. “And while he was there he showed Bennett how to set the alarm on his digital watch. Bennett can now do it himself perfectly.”

“It sounds like Jeffrey might have a gift for helping pre-microchip people survive,” I said.

“Exactly what Bennett and Linda thought,” Horace said. “And out of that came Jeffrey’s company—TechnoKlutz Ltd. He does an in-home
course on how to work your machines. Most of his customers are people whose kids have just moved out. He’s doing so well he might franchise.”

“The Webers must be proud of him,” I said.

“They are,” Horace said. “In fact, Linda told him that a big executive like him shouldn’t be living in a crummy railroad flat. She’s hoping that he’ll move back home.”

1994

FOREIGNERS

“I set the record for consecutive columns by an American columnist on Canada. Two.”

Daddy, I don’t understand what it means that we’ve finally recognized China. Was it wearing a disguise or something?”

“Yes. For twenty-five years, China pretended to be the Republic of Rwanda. Naturally, we had no idea who it really was, although the disguise was much too small for it, and China bulged out all over, sometimes into Tibet or North Korea. We knew it wasn’t the Republic of Rwanda, of course, because there already was a Republic of
Rwanda in Africa. Also, no Chinese diplomat could pronounce the Republic of Rwanda.”

“Mommy says she can never get a straight answer out of you either.”

“Well, diplomatic recognition is a very complicated question. Why don’t you ever ask me the kind of questions other little girls ask their fathers? The capital of North Dakota, how to spell ‘disgusting’—that sort of thing.”

“What
is
the capital of North Dakota?”

“That’s a very complicated question. Do you want more Cheerios?”

“Didn’t I hear you talking to Uncle Bill about the time we lost China?”

“I’m pleased that you happened to hear one of our foreign policy discussions. Your mother would have people believe that Uncle Bill and I talk about nothing but sex and violence and exotic flavors of ice cream.”

“If China’s so big, how could we lose it?”

“We didn’t lose it that way. We lost it the way Uncle Bill sometimes says that he had the Giants and ten points, and lost his shirt.”

“But if we lost it, we must have had it.”

“Well, we had what Uncle Bill would call a piece of the action. Then there was a civil war, and the people we didn’t like because they were Communists beat the people we had a piece of, so our people had to take over somebody else’s island and call that China.”

“You mean there was an island disguised as China?”

“Exactly. The disguise was too big for the island, of course, and we had to keep stuffing it with foreign aid to make it fit.”

“So who lost the real China? And please don’t start talking about Uncle Bill’s shirt again, Daddy. It just mixes me up.”

“Your Uncle Bill had nothing to do with losing China. I’ll admit that he may do some fiddling with the laws governing New York State sales tax now and then, but basically your Uncle Bill is a loyal citizen.”

“Then who lost it?”

“Well, fortunately, there were a lot of hearings and investigations at the time, and it was decided that China was lost by the people who were right about which side was going to win the war. To use a very
simple analogy, it’s as if Uncle Bill’s bookie predicted that the Giants would lose, then the Giants do lose, so the people who bet on the Giants have the bookie jailed for breaking and entering.”

“I hate your analogies, Daddy. Just tell me in a regular way: Are the people who lost China the same people who won it back?”

“Oh no. The people who lost China lost their jobs for losing China and had to live in disgrace the entire time that China was disguised as the Republic of Rwanda.”

“Then please just give me a straight answer: Who won it back?”

“Richard M. Nixon won it back.”

“Richard M. Nixon!”

“See how boring straight answers are?”

“And he wasn’t one of the people who lost it in the first place?”

“Certainly not. In fact, he called the other people traitors for losing it, and he insisted for twenty years that only traitors would point out that the disguise of the island we had disguised as China was getting baggy around the knees. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk about sex and violence and exotic flavors of ice cream?”

“I think I understand. If recognizing China twenty years ago was losing it and recognizing it now is winning it, the people we didn’t like there must have become a lot nicer, so now we like them. What have they done since we lost them?”

“Well, they killed a lot of our soldiers in Korea and they called us running dogs of capitalism. Also imperialistic lackeys.”

“Then why do we think they’re so nice now?”

“Because they also called the Russians running dogs of capitalism. The way our foreign policy works, it’s okay to kill people and call people rude names as long as you don’t like the Russians, because the Russians are Communists.”

“But I thought you said the Chinese were Communists, and that’s why we didn’t recognize them.”

“Are you sure you don’t want any more Cheerios? They’re stinky with riboflavin.”

“Really, Daddy.”

“Pierre.”

“Pierre’s a Communist? Pierre who?”

“Pierre is the capital of North Dakota.”

“Daddy, Pierre is the capital of
South
Dakota, you dum-dum.”

“Well, it’s a very complicated question.”

1979

2003

When I read
Newsweek
’s cover story on what the world thinks of America and Americans, I happened to be in France, so I naturally took advantage of my morning croissant run to check out the
Newsweek
findings.