present tension

No doubt about it, cigarette smoking is a disgusting habit—right up there with sex, nose-picking, and eating at McDonalds. But people persist, and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is determined to give some of them a good whack upside the head.

The Department’s main target is the mass of mulattoes and mestizoes from the Caribbean region. Last year they made a celebrity of one Ronaldo Martinez, a Puerto Rican who claims to have lost his voice box to cancer, supposedly brought on by cigarette smoking. His tale is doubtful, short on specifics. He claims to have lost his larynx at 39, but he looks about fifteen years older, while throat and laryngeal cancers seldom occur before age 45.

This season’s poster child is a mulatta who calls herself Marie and according to the NY Times is in her late 50s. All over town, on posters and subway car cards, she holds out her stumpy hands to you, claiming (in Spanish and English) that cigarette smoking caused her to have many amputations.

The image is shocking and grotesque, but really no worse than back issues of National Geographic and Holiday, wherein old crones of the New Guinea highlands were said to have their fingers amputated as “funeral gifts.” That’s just the way savages are. They have their little customs, and we should not be quick to judge them. Nor should we buy the nonsense that smoking cigarettes will make your fingers fall off. According to the Times, “Marie” has Buergger’s Disease, a rare circulatory ailment.

The big mystery here is why the Department of Health (etc.) has singled out Spanish-speaking mulattoes and mestizoes for this extra-special treatment. Surely don’t smoke any more than the rest of the population. Why are there no campaigns depicting domestic non-ethnic cigarette smokers? Wholesome, corn-fed, all-American Anglo-Saxon types, those 20- and 30-somethings who huddle in tavern doorways from 6pm to 2am every night. Are the bureaucrats scared of these fuming masses of hipsters, gays, and investment-banking analysts? That’s a possibility, though it’s more likely that they can’t imagine how to show off healthy young American smokers and and not have it look like a cigarette ad.

That’s the important thing. That’s what all primitive people really want to know about you.

They get to the point where they’ve figured out that you’re either male or female (even though they they can’t see either a penis gourd or pendulous dugs), and they know your approximate age (somewhere between adolescence and total decrepitude). Now they’re happily puffing away on your Philip Morris Commanders (king-size, unfiltered, good for jungle bugs) and they’re ready to move into the small-talk stage of your acquaintanceship.

And here it is. “Hey you! You got chillun? How many chillun?”

Go ahead and tell them. Anything you like. One kid, six kids, sixteen kids. It’s not like the little savages are going to write down your children’s birthdays so they can send them something nice (just imagine!). No, they’re just being innocently nosy. It’s something they ask of all strangers, and no one’s ever smacked them down for this rudeness so they keep on asking.

Sometimes the questions get detailed—"You have a boy? How old? Is he warrior? You have girl—how much you sell her for?” It is always best to be prepared for this. Along with the Philip Morris Commanders in the left side pocket of your photo-vest, bring a fact sheet about your kids. Maybe even some fuzzy snapshots.

My own prepared script goes basically like this. “Oh yes I have four children. Two girls, two boys. Between five and fifteen. Evenly spaced. Their names are Mary, Joan, John, and Robert. They live with their other parent, as I am usually away on business. The boys play baseball [a game formerly very popular in America] and the girls do ballet [this is a kind of theater-dance some people do in my country]. Who is oldest? Oh, that would be John. Then Mary. Then…”

Even a savage has limited attention for this sort of thing, and by this point my new friend is probably waving and nodding and inviting me into his hut to look at the shrunken heads.

I was telling my Old Friend Tom how I gave away 1555 pounds sterling to the rhinoceros charity last year.

I wanted to run the Flora London Marathon but the only way I could get a place was through one of the charity groups. The rhino charity looked like the pleasantest of the bunch–no dying baldheaded children or mental defectives, and there’s something very appealing about big wild beasts with horns. The rhino people were happy to have me when I said I’d raise 1500 or more in contributions.

I had vague plans to hit up my affluent friends and coworkers for a hundred dollars or pounds apiece, but soon realized I was too bashful for that. So a month after the marathon I cleaned out my London current account and sent it to the rhino folks.

I felt foolish about this venture, I told Tom. But on balance it was well worth it. I did okay in that Marathon and now had a time that qualified me for a Good for Age entry in the next one, so I could go back without any of this charity nonsense.

Tom laughed. “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to run it on your own?”

“On my own. You mean unofficially? Without a bib number?”

“Yeah.”

“Bandit the race? You think that’s easy to do?”

“Who’s going to stop you?”

“Crowds? Police? Security? They have it cordoned off, you know. Have you ever seen the London Marathon?”

“Couldn’t you just sneak in?”

“In theory, okay, look, yeah–I could probably make up a fake bib number. But what would be the point?”

“You wouldn’t have to go through all that rigamarole.”

“But it wouldn’t be official. I wouldn’t have a result. You look me up in the results on the internet and–I’m not even there. What would be the point?”

“Well you could do it for yourself, for your own enjoyment.”

“Enjoyment?” I said, really exasperated by now. “You think I would put myself through that kind of grueling hell for enjoyment?”

I was really annoyed at Tom for this line of conversation. I’ve been asked similar questions by other people, but they’re usually the kind of daft fatties who think that any road race is a marathon. Tom is a smart, fit, guy who ran track and cross-country back in his prep school and college days. On the other hand, he’s never run a marathon, and never had to qualify for any road race so it’s never occurred to him that getting in is half the struggle. He thinks only of the physical output during the event, so imagines it to be just a very long and exhausting workout–like three hours on the rowing machine at the gym–that one indulges in for a private sense of achievement. That, and maybe to drop a few pounds of flab as well.

Monday night I was flying to JFK from Heathrow and exhausted my reading material before we passed Newfoundland. I found Caddyshack listed on the in-flight movie menu, but everytime I looked for it on the assigned channel I got a mid-80s Molly Ringwald turkey instead. And I’d already seen the Narnia movie and the documentary about the German submarine. So I idly scrolled through the channels and came to rest at I Love Lucy.
It was an old episode. No, I mean really old, one of the early ones from the first (1951-52) season…Lucy and Ricky (and Fred and Ethel) as the broadest of broad comic characters, before they got backstory and nuance and visited Hollywood and Europe.
In fact, it was THE classic episode, the first one that pops into your mind, the one where the men and women “switch jobs.” They don’t literally switch jobs (Ricky was the only character who had real employment anyway), rather they switch breadwinner-homemaker roles. Ricky and Fred cook in the kitchen while Lucy and Ethel get assembly-line jobs in a candy factory. I’d seen this a million times–well, a dozen–but this time was utterly fascinated by all the details and subtexts and social propaganda.
1. The appliances in the Ricardos’ kitchen are bright and obtrusive. They aren’t just mute background furniture (like the succession of Macintosh computers you see in Jerry Seinfeld’s place). There’s a matched washer-dryer pair, and neither looks ever to have been used. There’s the distinct air of a TV commercial for Maytag or RCA Whirlpool. Message: “If your kitchen doesn’t look like this, well for heaven’s sake make it so. You can buy them now, you know. War production’s been over for six or seven years.”
2. Elsewhere there’s a real postwar look to the whole thing. Everybody’s fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and they’re all over-upholstered. Wide lapels, big shoulders and skirts. Showing off one’s bounty, you know. Now that the war’s over we can do that.
3. The effects of war on social roles are much in evidence. A man wears a suit and brings home the bacon, a woman wears frilly clothes and hangs out at home. Anything else is eccentric and laughable.
4. Women getting jobs means putting on waitress uniforms (like Mildred Pierce) and working on an assembly line (like Rosie the Riveter). Roz Russell career girls? Never heard of ‘em. If Ethel and Lucy got decent jobs, that would undercut the premise of the humor, which is that women in the workplace are pitiable fish out of water.

Rumbling-bumbling in the back of my brain, some tags of poesy and foggy images leap up and nag at me every so often.

I was about seven years old when I came across a short poem about a girl who was worried about having a dirty frock. The accompanying illustration, vaguely Tenniel-ish, showed a rather mature young lady (about 14, I might have thought) in Alice band and frilly 19th-century dress. She was looking down at the folds of her frock with a mildly perturbed expression.
I scarcely read the poem, but the last line jumped up and grabbed me: “Nor on my Pinafore.”

Pinafore! How I hated this aspect of children’s anthologies: the preciousness of so many of their selections, their cultish obsession with mid-Victoriana! I had the vague but distinct sense that such pieces reflected the taste of perverse old people who didn’t really like children at all: old maids with cats and tea cosies, strange men who dreamt about petticoats.

This, I fumed inwardly, is what is wrong with putting adults in charge of children’s literature!

I should note I was very down on Victoriana and pinafores anyway, having recently seen bits of H.M.S. Pinafore on the tube and finding it disgusting.

Anyway, here we are, thirty-odd or maybe forty years later, and the memory of the irritating poem and illustration comes back to me. I go to Google and find that the offending lines were an Edward Lear nonsense verse, called “Spots of Greece":

Papa once went to Greece,
And there I understand
He saw no end of lovely spots
About that lovely land.
He talks about these spots of Greece
To both Mama and me
Yet spots of Greece upon my dress
They can’t abear to see!
I cannot make it out at all–
If ever on my Frock
They see the smallest Spot of Greece
It gives them quite a shock!
Henceforth, therefore–to please them both
These spots of Greece no more
Shall be upon my frock at all–
Nor on my Pinafore.

Haw-haw! A real knee-slapper, eh? I probably noticed that it was Edward Lear, but this wouldn’t have impressed me awfully. So far as I was concerned he was a drooling quaintsy, self-satisfied, with a low-wattage sense of humor.

Lear’s stuff was all over those treasuries and anthologies of “children’s literature,” and constituted fully one-fourth of the contents of my edition of Ditties for the Nursery (so delightfully contrived that they may be either sung or said, by nurse or baby).

Today the Associated Press posted this photograph, without explanatory comment, on its website. If it truly is a photo of President Bush as he looked (say) thirty years ago, then his years of drink and drugs took much more of a toll than anyone has hitherto suspected.

I really did not intend this blog to be a public accounting of my road races and negative splits, it’s just that most of my idle thoughts—you might say chewing-gum ruminations or CGRs—are about running. Not long ago most of my CGRs were about all my personal failures and deficiencies, except in the early morning, when I raged and muttered about other people’s. Since I can’t do anything about my own failures and deficiencies, let alone other people’s, I am experiencing far less frustration these days as I go about my woolgathering.
Moreover, the running thing is as good a peephole as any other when you seek to make cultural criticism. The stuff you notice! The stuff you discover!
Take a good look at the accompanying image for the “Crazylegs Marathon” in 1972, which I just found on the NYRR website. In sheer repellent ugliness, this poster or flyer surpasses anything I’ve seen from that era. Note the “Deco"-style Letraset presstype used for the arching logotype—heavy influence from theatrical posters for “Dames at Sea,” “No, No, Nanette!” and “Follies.”
But that’s relatively minor, compared to the rich sociological ore to be dug up here. Look at those photos! Now this is 1972, remember, the high-tide mark of feminism. Ms. magazine had just been launched ("Jane O’Reilly on the Housewife’s Moment of Truth"). But there was no visual vocabulary for portraying a women-only road race. No toned bodies here, no high-fashion workout gear. My impression from the photos is that this event is some kind of a fun-run for flabby gals in Gussie Moran panties.
We are going back here to a forgotten mindset: an era before people commonly spoke of “jogging” (c. 1977) or “jogbras” (c. 1979), and when any run longer than a dash around the block might be called a marathon. Or maybe it’s not really a forgotten mindset at all, just a rather weirdly unexamined one. I know so many people, age 40 on up, who still look upon distance running, especially distance running by women, as a marginal and eccentric activity. The world’s moved on but the calendar in their heads is still dated 1972.
And what was the “Crazylegs Marathon"? Well it wasn’t a marathon, it was a 6-mile run, sponsored by Johnson’s Wax, which was launching a new leg-shave cream for women called Crazylegs. Originally they wanted to sponsor a marathon, then discovered there were no female marathoners—well, almost none. Crazylegs the shave cream vanished without a trace, thanks to a trademark-infringement suit. But the race itself survived, evolving into an annual 10k that reappeared every June, often with a new name and sponsor.
When I first became aware of it in the early 80s, it was called the “L’Eggs Mini Marathon” and all its branding was in hot pink. Not that big a leap, really, from leg-shave-gel to pantyhose. This in an era when the stereotypical workout wear for gym-bound gals was a stretchy striped leotard and leg-warmers.
Now it’s called the “Circle of Friends NY Mini 10K,” which if you ask me is even more confusing than “Crazylegs Marathon.” It’s not a mini-10k at all, and all Circle of Friends means to me is a bad Minnie Driver movie.
However, its ads and promotional materials are beautiful.
For more on this fascinating artefact, see this link:
http://www.mini10k.org/history.php#

Last Labor Day weekend I was up at five in the morning and noticed that some oddballs—advertising boffins, I supposed—were blocking off the street outside and setting up a series of double beds in the middle of Sixth Avenue and photographing them from a high rolling platform. Just now I follow a link to The Daily Telegraph’s site and find an animated GIF ad for British Airways that shows the image I’ve long been awaiting. I notice they’ve taken their six or so beds and Photoshopped them into a longer parade.

(Correction, please. It was not merely Photoshop. They painstakingly moved all six of the beds down the avenue and reshot them in position. Why the hell would you do that, when the cityscape light was changing every few minutes anyway, so that none of the shadows would exactly match and you’d have to retouch each tier of beds anyway? The photo retoucher has his reasons. See here for his description.)

A vile and mean-streaky harridan whom we used to call the Sausage Lady has published a “memoir” (quotations here suggesting a high degree of self-aggrandizing fictionalization) that tells how she was abused and victimized when she was a fat ugly little whelp. She keeps popping up in my occasional political cartoons, including this throwaway from 2003. Oh, yes—she’s the one with the bag of mail.

Postscript, May 2008. Not long after writing the above, I learned that the Sausage Lady was dead. Yes, even as her Fat Girl made her a bestselling author in her 60s, she was wasting away with many different forms of cancer (including pineapple cancer, which Harold liked best). Well lots of us get cancer from time to time, so there’s no gloating here. However, there was a time when I called upon the mischevious sprites of the world to fill her with tumors, and this was the first thing I thought of when I heard she was dead. This was about 15 years ago. Sausage Lady and some friends of hers were waging a campaign of horrific pranks at my expense. Everything from harassing phone calls to anonymous smears to physical threats. I hadn’t done anything against them, other than occasionally complain or fight back (feebly), though at long last I did engage an attorney to send threatening folderol to Sausage Lady’s employer. More decisive action was called for, I felt. So I built a Devil Doll of the Sausage Lady, shaped it out of Sculpey and froze it upside down in the fridge. Then I tied a miniature noose about its neck and hung it from the arched entrance to my kitchen. Finally I took it out into the alley and smashed it on the cobblestones. I put pieces into an envelope and addressed it to Sausage Lady, along with an anonymous note saying how sorry we all were to hear she was dying of colonic cancer.

So farewell then, George Kennan. Seems to me I’ve been hearing your obituary in my dreams for about ten days. How delightful to read in the Times that you were a gloomy, complicated and morose person, who despaired of conveying fine nuance in a world of political hackery. Whenever I thought of a foreign-service career for myself, you were always there in my mind as one of the Big Names. Somebody who’d hung around for decades—from the first delegation to the Soviet Hell in the early thirties, to an active career as an elder sage that ended only with his death at 101. I suppose now I shall have to think seriously about that graduate education in global whatsit and foreign relations. The baton passes.

The NYRR Snowflake 4-mile run, split up into men’s and women’s races, was this morning. I treated it casually. It didn’t bother me when everybody was passing me for the last mile and a half. This included a tall girl in an ungainly straw sombrero decorated with small toothpick models of The Gates. ‘Great hat!’ I heard when she was a few paces behind, and ‘great hat!’ again when she was twenty paces ahead. This sort of attention would turn my stomach. Maybe if you ask for attention you can deal with it. All I know is it distresses me mightily when goofballs stand by the side of the road, give the thumbs-up sign, and bellow, ‘All right! Looking good!’
After all that, my pace was 8:01 or a net of 32:07.
In other words, if I’d just goosed it a bit for the last quarter-mile, I could have broken the 8-minute barrier again, with room to spare.

To lunch with KP and Sylvia at Seppi’s. Seppi’s now offers their famous Alsatian tarte flambée rolled up with meat or fish, served with fries and soup and salad and bacon. I did not see the bacon, but I was very full. Sylvia had a regular tarte flambée, followed by a hot chocolate torte. I snapped a picture of her with my miniature Air France digital. We talked a bit of blogs. ‘Oh Sylvia,’ said I,’you ought to have a blog.’ She may be interested. A schoolmate was wearing a cap that said Blogger, and didn’t know what it was.

Then to The Container Store with Moki. Moki is in a refurbishing mood, and dreams of redoing the apartment with wire shelves and brackets. ‘No standards!’ I tell him. I’ve had lots more experience with wiry things and molly bolts than he has. Cleverly organized closets look really swell in the store, but they don’t work unless they’re made of solid materials. Moki plans to buy me a tall wiry mesh-drawer unit to keep my clothes in. That is a Margot classic. I’ve kept my clothes in things like that most of my life. Someday someone will give me a Biedermeier chest.

Back home I do a quick Google for Paris Marathon attendees and find Meg Hourihan. She’s not only doing the Paris, she’ll be running with me in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon on March 19th. I dropped her a note. I’d come across her site before. She is, coicidentally enough, the creator of Blogger, and quite famous in that little world. The New Yorker did a story on her a few years ago. If she writes back I’ll have a new friend in Paris for a few days, though I can’t imagine what we’d talk about.