Chapter Six

'm able to catch an evening 6:45 plane out of Vegas, which means that I'll get into LaGuardia at 12:30 midnight, Eastern time, just barely in time to catch the last limo to Connecticut, assuming we're not late, in which case, if we are, to hell with it, I'll splurge and take a taxi.

The convention will be going on for two more days, with a cocktail reception scheduled for tonight by the pool at Caesar's Palace, which Tony and his sales group are putting on for about 150 Pro-Tec customers. They don't need me any more, as the press is not invited. There will be a band, plus what I will describe in next month's Pro-Tec News as a "sumptuous buffet," and twenty minutes of one-liners by a Vegas comic who has been warned not to make sick jokes about paraplegics this time, as a certain lapse in taste two years ago cost Pro-Tec one of its biggest accounts.

"Welcome aboard Flight 567, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Captain Dowd —" Get outta here! Well, at least, if I need it, I've got a ride up to Connecticut from the airport in a jeep Wagoneer.

We have a light load, and those aboard are subdued, having perhaps all thrown away their life savings at the gambling tables. The two seats next to me are empty, and once we are in the air I am able to sprawl out and slump down reasonably comfortably with a blanket and pillow. It is unlikely that I will be able to sleep, but lulled by the hypnotic thrum of the jet engines, and with the pressure of the cabin increasingly block- ing my ears, I will turn within myself, as is my habitude on night flights such as these, and muse for a couple of hours.

As always, in such circumstances, what surfaces in my mind is the question, What am I doing with my life? Whether this kind of self-questioning is common to all business travelers, or unique to me, I am not sure. In any event, today particularly (on my 50th birthday), I cannot help but wonder, cannot escape the question. At precisely half a hundred years, statistically two-thirds of my life is behind me, gone. Maybe I have twenty- five years remaining. Of those, probably fifteen are left with any energy in them. I will die, and I will have accomplished: what?

Of course, the relevant question is what would I like to have accomplished? And, in truth, I am not really sure that I know, not sure really if there is anything I might have done, or even could do yet, that might fulfill the hopeful notions that I once had about my life. Whatever they were. I don't know that they were ever that specific.

They were most intense, I suppose, in Paris, and would have had to do with being a poet, and doing exciting things. With emphasis, I think, largely on the doing of exciting things. Which is no more specific than what I can come up with now. Maybe I would have said travel. Hey, well, here I am, traveling.

Of course, this trip is not quite up to what I would have had in mind then, that being something more along the lines of, say, a trip to Sweden to accept the Nobel prize for poetry, with the world's press crowding in on me at the reception and asking my opinion on important subjects such as human rights and world peace.

Poetry is out. The only writing I do now is for Pro-Tec at the office, and once a month putting my signature on a batch of checks at my cluttered desk in my tiny den/office off the living room at home. Now and then I write a letter to my father, and once a year or so I get a letter off to the editor of the weekly Courier about something or other of importance, like the menace of dog-doo on the town sidewalks.

It is true, I do spend a lot of time in that little office. Sometimes at the cluttered desk, but more often in my Air-Flow recliner, chewing on a Bic or reading The New Yorker, or the Courier, or sometimes nodding off to sleep.

That is not the way I envisioned it would be when I was twenty-four and living in Paris.

Life was to be a perpetual Nobel Prize ceremony, and what it turns out to be is getting up at 6:30 A.M. five days a week (except when I take trips to Las Vegas and other places and get up at 4:30), driving to work in fairly heavy traffic, spending the day being cheerful and fending off requests to do things that I do not want to do for the likes of Diana, Tony, Morrie, Frank and a half dozen others. And arriving home at 6:30 at night, sitting with drink in hand in our country kitchen/ family room while my wife steps around me and puts on dinner.

Generally, we finish dinner at eight. I watch one or two television situation comedies, waiting for the pre-meal cocktail and dinner wine to dissipate, and then drag myself into my den/office and instead of writing a poem, I stare at a report that Frank has been waiting to see for two weeks.

On weekends, I play tennis doubles on Saturday morning with a bunch of guys out here whom I don't see except on the tennis court. Saturday afternoons, the kids and I take the garbage to the dump, then deposit bottles at the supermarket, and maybe there's an hour or two left during which my wife and I go to local nurseries (in summer) and look at plants and come back and put them in the ground, or we go to the hardware store (in winter) and buy washers and nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and bang at this or that door, latch, cover, window frame, porch step, curtain rod, or whatever. Saturday nights my wife and I go out to dinner and to a movie, or once in a while to somebody's house for a party, say, like Chet Dowd's, which usually depresses me beyond bearance.

Sundays we read the Times, and try to avoid going to "brunches," and catch up on yard work, and do something with the kids (who increasingly now don't want to do anything with us, because they have things of their own to do), then watch "60 Minutes" in the evening before retiring back into my den/office to psyche up to get ready for another week at Pro-Tec.

This is not living. And yet, it is what I do. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Along the way we have a few laughs (not too many) and some fights (not too many, and noted previously). But there is missing that notion held once in Paris that life some day would be a continuing and an intense involvement with literary success and fame.

But this is useless woolgathering. Even if I had been any good as a poet and had stayed with it, I wonder if I wouldn't be feeling the same sense of missed opportunities and regret that I feel now. The only one of our poetry group in Paris who actually did go on to pursue the literary life, Pritch Bates, managed to squeeze out a half-dozen largely ignored lifeless novels in which with increasing bitterness he blamed his mother, his father, his sister, his ex-wives and whatever former friends he once had for the miserable mess he has since made of his life. His most recent novel, A Loser, Whining, was dismissed by a reviewer for the Sunday Times Book Review with the cryptic summary: "Put it back in the sand, Pritch."

Hemingway said somewhere, before he blew his head off, that the hardest thing in his life was getting through from one day to the next—after the day's work was done. I can understand that. Work, at least, while it was good, and made sense, gave Hemingway courage to live. Then the work got boring for him. And that was it.

What gives me courage? I don't know. Certainly not my work. Fear, maybe. I live in terror, really, of being canned, though I make a manful effort to whatever extent I can not to think about it. What I do is I struggle mightily day after day to make myself indispensable to the company so that when they go through one of their periodic cost cutbacks and resultant "house-cleanings," I won't be swept out with the others. That's all. I don't feel any sense of "loyalty" to Pro-Tec. Any more than Pro-Tec's powers-that-be feel any "loyalty" to me. If I weren't selling plastic hand jobs for Pro-Tec, the first place I'd go looking to make a living for my family would be to Pro-Tec's number one competitor, Sport Supporter. During the past ten years I've managed to survive three housecleanings, and each time it gets more terrifying, simply because the longer I am there, the larger my salary gets, and I live in fear that Mac McDougall, the Vice President of Finance, one of these days will get the bright idea that somebody else younger than I could do my job just as well (better?) than I can at half the salary. And he's probably right! Sure, it would take them a year to break the guy in to the level of proficiency that I have, but they could do it. And I have no written contract with the company. Presumably they might give me three months' severance pay, but three months isn't all that long to find a job on my level, and at my age. Even supposing somebody would want me. Who would want me? Sport Supporter? If I asked for the same salary I'm getting at Pro-Tec, they would pass. If I asked for less, they might wonder what the hell was wrong with me.

What if I had to move to another city? I mean, to someplace like Houston? I've got nothing against Houston, but I couldn't live there. It's just not me. It would be like taking a Macintosh apple tree and planting it in Texas. It would die. They have their own apples, and they're probably pretty good, but they're not Macintosh.

Naturally, I try to cover up my fears in the presence of other people. I suspect that Morrie and Tony think I'm one of the easiest-going guys they know, and Frank, as noted earlier, has a persistent suspicion that I am a wiseguy and a con man. Which I am not! I was trying to be loose with the guy! To put him at ease by my own easiness with him. And because he has no sure confidence in himself, he mistook my easy style as some kind of lapse in dignity.

He doesn't know what dignity is. Dignity isn't wearing a navy blazer with Mickey Mouse brass buttons and gray flannels, and having a staff of 100 salesmen let little farts in their pants when you tour the premises.

Morrie thinks dignity lies in being called Morris, instead of Morrie, and wearing his hair in a sheaf tossed over his bald spot and showing off in front of the Krauts by scolding waiters about the wine. When he said, "Fuck the company" to Feigenweiser, that was dignity. And Morrie doesn't even realize it. He'll hate himself for having said it for the rest of his life, and if he tries to forget about it, Diana won't let him; she will pester him for having lost his "composure" because he happened to have had enough dignity to resent Tony's suggestion that she should give head for a hundred dollar bill.

Dignity, for Christ sake. Dignity is not sitting calmly in your chair looking like the RCA Victor pooch while the Krauts, or anybody else, spout insane ideas that should be shot down and shouted down for what they are, a lot of megalomaniacal self-serving shit! Sitting there and saying nothing may be an exercise in self-control, I'll grant that. And no doubt, too, self-control is a virtue in life. But it is not really dignity.

I may not know what it is, dignity. And maybe it is something that forever will elude me. But I know what it is not. And I know, further, that whatever it is, or however one finds a way of living with it, it must have something to do with kindness, or compassion, or gentleness, or something very close to those three things. Which, to my mind, are not merely words to be mouthed in order to dupe others into accepting whatever deceptions at the moment serve one's self-interested purposes.

I think that very likely I am not attuned to the world. Probably I am a misfit, though I am able to hide it from most people. A neurotic. Certainly I am confused. Bemused, too. And bewildered. My powers laid waste, I feel. Late and soon, getting and spending, my heart given away. How do those lines go? "—

Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,"
(Half sleeping while Chet flies the plane)
"Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

Jesus! Who wouldn't have wanted to be a poet after reading that for the first time?

My son, whom I have not thought of in two days, is entering into this world that I find myself overwhelmed by. Without ever having read Wordsworth or even The New York Times, he recognizes that we are preparing him for a bucket of shit. Is it any wonder that he wants no part of anything that he associates with his old man, which in his mind is indistinguishable from adult life? He sees himself as an outlaw, and nourishes the fantasy. An outlaw in the sense that he is outside the constraints of the rest of us, even though it is not in his nature, I don't think, to break any actual laws. It is the notion of himself as outside, the hobo around the campfire, that he cherishes right now. And who is to say that he is wrong? And yet, what are we doing, my wife and I? We hope that if that $11,000-a-year school that we are sending him to does its job right, within four years he will be elbowing others out of the way to get into Harvard Business School and come out and get his own job in marketing and join the parade. Believe me, if he wants to be a poet, and shows the slightest talent at it, he'll get no argument from me. I'll help him. I'm not trying to force him into anything. Give him his shot in life. Maybe I will write this down, and give it to him. It will help us to understand each other better. He is, in a sense, the only monument that I will ever create, and all I ask is that it turn out right.

© Robert Riche