life, after the cafeteria he had frequented every day for so many years was scheduled for demolition, managed to unfasten the lock and smuggled his lunch onto the condemned premises. Passersby spied his humped figure through a soaped-over window and contacted the police.
When they arrived, the man was layering his daily bagel with sugar-free strawberry jam (a concession to his doctor’s advice about improving his diet). “Five minutes more, please,” he said, and they saw no harm in stepping back and allowing him the courtesy of finishing his lunch before taking him into custody.
As I would have. For I, too, customarily protect and prolong my lunch as much as possible and would elevate every lunch to the level of fetish or ritual if the workday permitted. I, too, expend loving attention upon the embellishment of my bagel and find trenchancy in the trifles that accompany the task. Just consider the cunning little tub of jelly that is given free of charge with each day’s selection. I find it touching to think that it is someone’s job to detach the packets from their frames, the orderly corpuscular networks in which they are shipped from Mason, Ohio (the home of PPI Corporation), and to position them in wire baskets (unless this second procedure is entrusted to a second employee), where they gleam like isolettes in a nursery for the delectation of lucky lunchers like me. Each plump packet has a simultaneous quality of sturdiness and give, a sensation at once agreeable and disquieting, with something of the heft and suppleness of a small toad resting squat in your palm. It makes a shearing sound as its epidermal seal is pulled away, like a rake’s screech against pavement or what I imagine the legendary mandrake root would cry if it were abruptly stripped from its bed. The silver underside of the cellophane gleams in the fluorescent light of the lunchroom, and there is always a translucent blood blister of jelly adhering there, a jellied ectoplasm, which gleams, too, and which, like the general experience of the jelly packet, is at once agreeable and disquieting as well. Such sweetness concentrated in a condiment! Such ingenuity and simple grace, free for the taking, for as long as one’s lunch allows. (Begging Mrs. Sparsit’s pardon for my dilations, but a lunch hurried is a lunch dishonored.) Had police denied that poor, hungry soul, not to mention any given luncher, so little as five minutes’ lingering to satisfy so modest and sublime an appetite as that, they’d have committed a crime worse than the one they’d been summoned to interrupt.
Recognizing that age only intensifies our addictions and that custom beds down so deeply in us that not even dementia can extinguish it, the corporation that had bought out the cafeteria decided not to press charges. For if lunch is a weakness, Mrs. Sparsit, lack of compassion is a greater one.
Any upscale store worth its standing recognizes that the first item to be manufactured and sold is desire. Before Sharper Image and other such companies brought esoteric needs into being and focus for us, who knew enough to want to want their products?
Bookended mid-row by a couple of massive, implacable sleepers during a flight from Austin to Tulsa, I paged through my complimentary copy of Sky Mall, one of those magazines dedicated to the proposition that passengers are so desperate for means of passing the claustrophobic span of their captivity that they’ll not only prolong and savor a bag of pretzels from the snack cart but will also read anything, even if it’s a magazine that’s 100% advertising. But as I thumbed through Sky Mall, I found myself authentically absorbed. If the chief quality of a perfect gift is that it is something one would never think to buy for himself, I’d hit the mother lode. I learned that a motorized Turbo-Groomer for trimming nose and ear hair and featuring rotary blades that whirl at over 6000 rpm goes for $59.95. A remote control for paging one’s keyrings, memo pads, and other elusive possessions, which the owner would electronically “tag,” can be had for $49.95; for that matter, a caddy for holding all of one’s remote controls (made of solid maple and available in either cherry or mahogany finish) costs $69.00. If that’s too dear a price for the coach passenger to afford, an automatic, silver-plated business card dispenser runs $37.95. A canister of Oxygen Shot, for that quick blast of cell-cooling refreshment, is only $29.00 for a three-pack. The same $29.00 will also buy a Lip Enhancer Vacuum for creating fuller, more voluptuous lips, an effect that lasts up to twelve hours per treatment. A fair price? Who can say what the market will bear when the market did not previously exist?
It requires a special sort of genius to ensure that eccentricity does not diminish as budgets tighten. A pair of lawn aerator sandal attachments—you walk your lawn in these special elongated spikes to revitalize your grass and rid it of thatch build-up—is only $12.99. So is a decorative sink strainer / stopper, which comes in white, almond, blue, or gray speckle (this last ideal for a stainless steel sink). And a mere $8.50 buys a Bracelet Buddy, which by helping someone fasten her own bracelet puts an “end to another of life’s little frustrations.” On the other hand, and at the higher end of the consumer scale, you can replace nearly anything you own, from your showerhead to your hubcaps to your putter to your garden gnomes, with gold. Also, there are countless products that allow you to similarly couch, swaddle, and otherwise pamper your pets, including, for $189.00, a PetStep Ramp to aid arthritis-stricken or injured dogs in getting into and out of the van. And my favorite, for the person so utterly endowed that his possessions seem impregnable to precedent-setting presents, there’s the Sparta Watch Winder, which uses a “natural swinging action” to wind any automatic watch. It takes only two D batteries and $225.00 to guarantee that look that says, “You know, I never would have gotten this for myself.”
It’s like my father’s friend Maury once told me: if the customer already wants it, you don’t have to sell it to him. “When noon rolls around, you don’t have to sell a guy lunch. He comes into the restaurant because he’s hungry already—he’s ready to buy, right? There’s nothing for you to do except maybe get out of his way or refill his coffee. That’s not selling. Selling is persuading someone that he has to have something he doesn’t know he has to have and maybe really doesn’t have to have. More important, that he has to have the one something you’ve got to sell him.”
“I don’t get it.”
“What is it you don’t get?”
“I don’t get how you know people want the stuff you’re selling.”
He leaned in meaningfully. “That is exactly the wrong question. How do they know that they don’t want the stuff I’m selling? That’s the right question. That’s the last twenty-seven years of my life, from my car to my clothes, from that question.” Then the big signature smile of his opened over his cigar. “It’s a lot more interesting than taking orders from off a menu, right? And even though it’s not such a secret, most of the schmucks out there act like it was. Believe it.”
I did. A compelling fellow, Maury, who had the knack of making people feel smart because they listened without contradicting him. Smart the way guys whose pens contain currency translation programs, who travel with laser-sleek leather document organizers, and who store their liquor in massive walnut Old World globes feel smart. Or so I can only suppose, having none of those items and, truthfully, not wanting them either, a fact that does make me feel free, but only when someone like Maury isn’t around to dispel my contentment.
Twenty-five volumes constitute the full set of the American Review, which ran for ten years, from 1967 to 1976, on the literary journal scene. Twenty-five, plus a special valedictory volume compiled once the extinction of the series had been determined. I happened upon my first volume while I was browsing through a used book bin at a university bookstore. My rule of thumb is that a journal must contain at least two items to which I suspect I might want future access before I buy it, and AR #9 readily passed the test. A week or so later, I happened upon AR #7 in that same bin—the merchandise is fluid, and regular customers have the best crack at securing the treasures—and #5 and #6 showed up later that semester. AR #8 appeared on, of all places, a grocery store close-out rack, idly at swim among the reduced plastic wrap and Graham crackers, the remaindered Grishams and Krantzes.
It
