suit for the Yale student) for this kind of work and those in charge were smart enough to spot them. What puzzles me is how.
Whether or not I was a writer I could do the things that writers do and that the porno people wanted done. I had the looked-for talents, if not the vocation. The thing that shook me was that my employers could see them when they were nowhere on display.
I thought for a long time they were seeing things and trying to suck me into their hallucination. They did convince me, finally. They paid me good money for my products and everybody knows that money talks louder than words, loud enough sometimes to drown out all other sounds; including those of your own doubts.
A voyage of self-discovery. Shit to the moon and back, we’d better find a way to talk to each other for a change, that isn’t language that can get some human facts across it’s writing. The sort that people who write do more than writers.
Say I entered into the porno world shapeless, nameless, a blob, a nobody, and came out of it wearing a badge of office that wouldn’t rust too fast and could be accepted without giggle by the outside world and, more importantly, me. It wasn’t a perilous sailing on the high inner seas, or a long and parched staggering across the baking deserts of alienation to the oasis of healed identity, or a mountain climber’s inch-by-inch crawl up the sheer cliffs of inauthenticity to the sunny if austere peaks of inner-direction. No, sir, it didn’t have any of the high-rise drama found so regularly in poets’ trips and so rarely in real-life ones, it can’t be called anything so dramatic as discovery if that means some moment of rosy epiphany dispatched from stage-wise heavens with a Jack Lemmon sense of timing, say, rather, it was a game of slow-motion tag, that’s closer. Not all the way there, but close enough. A game I came out of with an identification tag on me that was useful and even comforting.
Not all labels are to be sneered at. The ones that are transparent so they can’t be used as masks, and give real names instead of aliases and real addresses you can be sent home to in case you’re hit by a truck or get clouded by amnesia, they can do something for you. Get you back where you’re known and belong, should you stray. Jog your memory as to your rank and serial number if you get a little hazy, as everybody does at times.
Nobody’s ever going to prove himself a writer by doing porno for the commercial market but it’s a hell of a good place to go to find out in a hurry if you can write. Some people take correspondence-school exams, some enter limerick contests, some keep composing letters to the editor—I tried my wings at porno, as will unfold here, and wump, I was airborne. If I was lucky to come across the porno barons in their time of need, they had an equally charmed moment, were really on the sunny side of the hedge, the day they found me needy and therefore available to them.
My hat’s off to those sharp-eyed people for seeing my stashed merits and drawing my attention to them.
The Eastern Seaboard was overrun with people not so sharp-eyed. Twentieth-Century-Fox said no, absolutely not, neither now nor in this lifetime, to my request for a post in their New York publicity office. Yale University Press, while granting that the subject might with profit be looked into sometime during the next hundred years by somebody who knew something about it, had turned down my project for a study of the tendency in even the most Jacobin of revolutions to lurch on to Thermidor. Over and over Time-Life had informed me that they had no openings I could fill and did not see a time in the next decades when they might have a space that odd-shaped.
That bothered me, since a lot of Yale graduates had the impression that the strongest qualification you could have for a staff job at Time-Life, next to writing sentences backward, was to be a Yale graduate, and I was. (I could also write sentences backward.) I was, of course, also a Jew (more accurately, was called that by others who seemed fairly sure of themselves), the son of a factory worker, and for some years a Trotskyite, moreover a recent member of Trotsky’s household staff, traits which very few Yale graduates could boast, especially in that rich mixture, especially those who made their way to Time-Life. If Henry Luce’s proconsuls failed to see the virtues in me that the porno people later spotted and bid for, the burden of explanation is on them, not me.
They didn’t need me and were determined not to make room for me on all the magazines and newspapers in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. They’d forged a policy of keeping me at a safe distance from all the Madison Avenue ad agencies, all the radio stations, small independents as well as big network affiliates. When I answered classified ads for trade papers and house organs, ghosting agencies and vanity presses, for jobs composing mail-order brochures, how-to-do manuals, throwaways, comic books, seed catalogues, they scrupulously did not let me hear from them.
There was a terrible depression on, sure, but even national calamity didn’t explain why all of American industry, even, as you’ll see in a minute, the sectors that made and sold things other than words, had gotten together to lock one man out. Say they did have grounds for suspicion when a Jew, a Yale graduate, a son of the proletariat and a recent Trotsky boarder showed up on their doorsteps all in one person. They still had no right to assume so automatically that the one reason a man so configurated would want to get on their premises was to blow them up—that’s stereotyped thinking and not in the American spirit of judging a man by what he can do rather than by what he came out of.
• • •
Most of the economy was still creaking along but one branch of it, war industry, was beginning to buzz. I went to a Manhattan employment agency that specialized in factory work. They said military-hardware plants were looking for technical writers. Was that in or around my line? I informed them that I’d taken a course in engineering drafting at Yale, that the blueprint hadn’t been drawn that I couldn’t read, that if they wanted the plain facts blueprints were my favorite reading matter.
Next morning I was sitting in the personnel office of a giant electronics firm over in New Jersey, so close to the Secaucus pig farms that you had to keep blowing your nose so they couldn’t tell you were holding it.
The manager gave me a blueprint. He wondered if I’d be good enough to point out what I recall as the intermeshing backup reverse-feed alternate-bypass switch-trip voltage-trap breaker circuit. Partial to curves of all types, I put my finger fast on an ingratiating cluster of chicken tracks in a circular pattern.
No, he said, this element wasn’t part of the wiring system. Then I got the whole truth: it didn’t have anything to do with the internals of this piece of apparatus, in fact what I was pointing to was one of the ball-shaped feet the console rested on, the right front one just this side of the tuning dial. The chicken tracks, I now saw, were just the draftsman’s indication of the roughened texture given to the foot’s plastic surface for a better purchase.
The reference to tuning interested me. What did this dial tune, I asked, a radio set?
Not exactly, he said, this was a control unit for the sonar sounding system for a submarine, useful in locating other subs and traveling torpedoes it would be good to know about. Besides, if I didn’t mind his mentioning it, what I now had my finger on wasn’t the tuning dial, it was the manufacturer’s trademark embossed on the casing.
Letdown, though I tried not to show it. For a quick minute I’d had the happy thought that I might be getting into the radio end of the up-and-coming communications industry, if only in the manufacture of consoles.
The manager asked if at some time in my early life I might have experienced a trauma with liquids, say a swimming accident that left me leery of waters over my head or any reminder of them. He thought this might be a possibility because the suggestion of deep waters seemed to panic me to the point of incoherence, not a good state of mind in which to study electronic circuits for sub-surface vessels nine to five. He wondered if a man with my emotional setup wouldn’t have a happier life writing assembly and operating manuals for a
