Confessions of a Crap Artist

  The article told how ships got drawn in and trapped, and how no one ever got away. There were so many that they were side by side, for miles. Every kind of ship that existed, although later on when there were steamships, fewer ships got stuck, obviously because they didn't depend on wind currents but had their own power.

  The article affected me because in many ways it reminded me of an episode on Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, that had seemed very important to me, having to do with the Elephants' Lost Graveyard. I remember that Jack had had a metal key that, when stuck, resonated strangely, and was the key to the graveyard. For a long time I knocked every bit of metal I came across against something to make it resonate, trying to produce that sound and find the Elephants' Lost Graveyard on my own (a door was supposed to open in the rock somewhere). When I read the article on the Sargasso Sea I saw an important resemblance: the Elephants' Lost Graveyard was sought for because of all the ivory, and in the Sargasso Sea there was millions of dollars worth of jewels and gold, the cargoes of the trapped ships, just waiting to be located and claimed. And the difference between the two was that the Elephants' Lost Graveyard wasn't a scientific fact but just a myth brought back by fever-crazed explorers and natives, whereas the Sargasso Sea was scientifically established.

  On the floor of our living room, in the house we rented back in those days on Illinois Avenue, I had the article spread out, and when my sister came home with my mother and father I tried to interest her in it. But at that time she was only eight. We got into a terrible fight about it, and the upshot was that my father grabbed up the American Weekly and threw it into the paper bag of refuse under the sink. That upset me so badly that I had a fantasy about him, dealing with the Sargasso Sea. It was so disgusting that even now I can't bear to think about it. That was one of the worst days in my life, and I always held it against Fay, my sister, that she was responsible for what happened; if she had read the article and listened to me talk about it, as I wanted her to, nothing would have gone wrong. It really got me down that something so important, and, in a sense, beautiful, should be degraded the way it was that day. It was as if a delicate dream was trampled on and destroyed.

  Neither my father nor mother were interested in science. My father worked with another man, an Italian, as a carpenter and house-painter, and, for a number of years, he was with the Southern Pacific Railroad, in the maintenance department at the Gilroy Yards. He never read anything himself except the San Francisco Examiner and Reader's Digest and the National Geographic. My mother subscribed to Liberty and then, when that went out of business, she read Good Housekeeping. Neither of them had any education scientific or otherwise. They always discouraged me and Fay from reading, and off and on during my childhood they raided my rooms and burned everything in the way of reading material they could get their hands on, even library books. During World War Two, when I was in the Service and overseas fighting on Okinawa, they went into my room at home, the room that had always belonged to me, gathered up all my science-fiction magazines and scrapbooks of girl pictures, and even my Oz books and Popular Science magazines, and burned them, just as they had done when I was a child. When I got back from defending them against the enemy I found that there was nothing to read in the whole house. And all my valuable reference files of unusual scientific facts were gone forever. I do remember, though, what was probably the most startling fact from that file of thousands. Sunlight has weight. Every year the earth weighs ten thousand pounds more, because of the sunlight that reaches it from the sun. That fact has never left my mind, and the other day I calculated that since I first learned the fact, in 1940, almost one million nine hundred thousand pounds of sunlight have fallen on the earth.

  And then, too, a fact that is becoming more and more known to intelligent persons. An application of mind-power can move an object at a distance! This is something I've known all along, because as a child I used to do it. In fact, my whole family did it, even my father. It was a regular activity that we engaged in, especially when out in public places such as restaurants. One time we all concentrated on a man wearing a gray suit and got him to reach his right hand back and scratch his neck. Another time, in a bus, we influenced a big old colored woman to get to her feet and get off the bus, although that took some doing, probably because she was so heavy. This was spoiled one day, however, by my sister, who when we were concentrating on a man across a waiting room from us suddenly said,

  “What a lot of crap.”

  Both my mother and father were furious at her, and my father gave her a shaking, not so much for using a word like that at her age (she was about eleven) but for interrupting our mind concentration. I guess she picked up the word from some of the boys at Millard Fillmore Grammar School, where she was in the fifth grade at that time. Even that young she had started getting rough and tough; she liked to play kickball and baseball, and she was always down on the boys' playground instead of with the girls. Like me, she has always been thin. She used to be able to run very well, almost like a professional athlete, and she used to grab something like, say, my weekly package of Jujubees that I always bought on Saturday morning with my allowance, and ran off somewhere and ate it. She has never gotten much of a figure, even now that she's more than thirty years old. But she has nice long legs and a springy walk, and two times a week she goes to a modern dance class and does exercises. She weighs about 116 pounds.

  Because of being a tomboy she always used men's words, and when she got married the first time she married a man who made his living as owner of a little factory that makes metal signs and gates. Until his heart attack he was a pretty rough guy. The two of them used to go climbing up and down the cliffs out at Point Reyes, up where they live in Marin County, and for a time they had two Arabian horses that they rode. Strangely, he had his heart attack playing badminton, a child's game. The birdie got hit over his head— by Fay—and he ran backward, tripped over a gopher hole, and fell over on his back. Then he got up, cursed a blue streak when he saw that his racket had snapped in half, started into the house for another racket, and had his heart attack coming back outdoors again.

  Of course, he and Fay had been quarreling a lot, as usual, and that may have had something to do with it. When he got mad he had no control over the language he used, and Fay has always been the same way—not merely using gutter words, but in the indiscriminate choice of insults, harping on each other's weak points and saying anything that might hurt, whether true or not—in other words, saying anything, and very loud, so that their two children got quite an earful. Even in his normal conversation Charley had always been foul-mouthed, which is something you might expect from a man who grew up in a town in Colorado. Fay always enjoyed his language. The two of them made quite a pair. I remember one day when the three of us were out on their patio, enjoying the sun, when I happened to say something I think having to do with space travel, and Charley said to me,

  “Isidore, you sure are a crap artist.”

  Fay laughed, because it made me so sore. It made no difference to her that I was her brother; she didn't care who Charley insulted. The irony of a slob like that, a paunchy beer-drinking ignorant mid-westerner who never got through high school, calling me a “crap artist” lingered in my mind and caused me to select the ironic title that I have on this work. I can just see all the Charley Humes in the world, with their portable radios tuned to the Giants' ballgames, a big cigar sticking out of their mouths, that slack, vacant expression on their fat red faces … and it's slobs like that who're running this country and its major businesses and its army and navy, in fact everything. It's a perpetual mystery to me. Charley only employed seven guys at his iron works, but think of that: seven human beings dependent on a farmer like that for their very livelihood. A man like that in a position to blow his nose on the rest of us, on anybody who has sensitivity or talent.

  Their house, up in Marin County, cost them a lot of money because they built it themselves. They bought ten acres of land back in 1951, when they f
irst got married, and then, while they were living in Petaluma where Charley's factory is, they hired an architect and got their plans drawn up for their house.

  In my opinion, Fay's whole motive for getting mixed up with a man like that in the first place was to finally wind up with a house such as she did wind up with. After all, when he met her he already owned his factory and netted a good forty thousand a year (at least to hear him tell it). Our family had never had any money; we ate off a set of dime store blue willow for ten years, and I don't think my father ever owned a new suit at any time in his life. Of course, by winning a scholarship and being able to go on to college, Fay started meeting men from good homes—the frat boys who always horse around with big-game bonfires and the like. For a year or so she went steady with a boy studying to be a law student, a fairy-like creature who never did appeal much to me, although he liked to play pinball machines—to learn the mathematical odds, as he explained it. Charley met her by chance, in a roadside grocery store on Highway One near Fort Ross. She was ahead of him in line, buying hamburger buns and Coca-Cola and cigarettes, and humming a Mozart tune which she had learned in a college music course. Charley thought it was an old hymn that he had sung back in Canon City, Colorado, and he started talking to her. Outside the grocery store he had his Mercedes-Benz car parked, and she could see it, with that three-point star sticking up from the radiator. Naturally Charley had on his Mercedes-Benz pin, sticking out of his shirt, so she and the rest of the world could see whose car it was. And she had always wanted a good car, especially a foreign one.

  As I construct it, based on my fairly thorough knowledge of both of them, the conversation went like this:

  “Is that car out there a six or an eight?” Fay asked him.

  “A six,” Charley said.

  “Good god,” Fay said. “Only a six?”

  “Even the Rolls Royce is a six,” Charley said. “Those Europeans don't make eights. What do you need eight cylinders for?”

  “Good god. The Rolls Royce a six.”

  All her life Fay had wanted to ride in a Rolls Royce. She had seen one once, parked at the curb by a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. The three of us, she and I and Charley, walked all around it.

  “That's a terrific car,” Charley said, and proceeded to give us details on how it worked. I couldn't have cared less. If I had my choice Fd like a Thunderbird or a Corvette. Fay listened to him and we walked on, and I could see that she wasn't too interested either. Something had distressed her.

  “They're so flashy-looking,” she said. “I always thought of a Rolls as a classic-looking car. Like a World War One military sedan. An officer's car.”

  Consider to yourself if you've ever actually seen a new Rolls. They're small, metallic, streamlined but also chunky. Heavy-looking. Like some of the Jaguar saloon models, only more impressive. British streamlining, if you get the picture. Personally I wouldn't have one on a bet, and I could see that Fay was wrestling with the same reaction. This one had a silver-blue finish with lots of chrome. In fact the whole car had a polished look, and this appealed to Charley, who liked metal and not wood or plastic.

  “There's a real car,” he said. Obviously he could see that he wasn't getting across to either of us; all he could do was repeat himself in his customary clumsy way. Beside his gutter words he had the vocabulary of a six year old, just a few words to cover everything. “That's a car,” he said finally, as we got to the house we had come to San Francisco to visit. “But it would look out of place in Petaluma.”

  “Especially parked in the lot at your plant,” I said.

  Fay said, “What a waste it would be—putting all that money into a car. Twelve thousand dollars.”

  “Hell, I could pick up one for a lot less,” Charley said. “I know the guy who runs the British Motor Car agency down here.”

  No doubt he wanted the car, and, left to himself, he possibly would have bought it. But their money had to go into their house, whether Charley liked it or not. Fay wouldn't let him buy any more cars. He had owned, besides the Mercedes, a Triumph and a Studebaker Golden Hawk, and of course several trucks for the business. Fay had told the architect to put radiant heating into the house, the resistance wire type, and up in the country where they were, it would cost them a fortune in electricity. Everyone else up there uses butane or burns wood. On the cow pasture Fay was having a swanky modern San Francisco type of house built, with recessed bath tubs, plenty of tile and mahogany paneling, fluorescent lighting, custom kitchen, electric washer and drier combination—the works, including a custom hi-fi combination with speakers built right into the walls. The house had a glass side looking out on to the acres, and a fireplace in the center of the living room, a circular barbecue type with a huge black chimney stuck over it. Naturally the floor had to be asphalt tile, in case logs rolled out. Fay had four bedrooms built, plus a study that could be used by guests. Three bathrooms in all, one for the children, one for the guests, one for herself and Charley. And a sewing room, a utility room, a family room, dining room—even a room for the freezer. And of course a tv room.

  The whole house rested on a concrete slab. That, and the asphalt tile, made it so cold that the radiant heating could never be shut off except in the hottest part of summer. If you shut it off when you went to bed, by morning the house was like a cold-storage unit. After it had been built, and Charley and Fay and the two children had moved into it, they discovered that even with the fireplace and radiant heating the house was cold from October through April, and that during the wet season the water failed to drain off the soil, and, instead, seeped into the house around the frames holding the glass and under the doors. For two months in 1955 the house sat in a pool of water. A contractor had to come out and build a whole new drainage system to carry water away from the house. And in 1956 they put 220 volt wall heaters with manual switches and thermostats both into every room of the house; the damp and cold had begun to mildew all the clothes and the sheets on the bed. They also found that in winter the electric power was interrupted for several days on end, and during that time they could not cook on the electric stove, and the pump that pumped their water, being electric, failed to pump; the water heater was electric, too, so that everything had to be cooked and heated over the fireplace. Fay even had to wash clothes in a zinc bucket propped up in the fireplace. And all four of them got the flu every winter that they lived up there. They had three separate heating systems, and yet the house remained drafty; for instance, the long hall between the children's rooms and the front part of the house had no heat at all, and when the kids came scampering out in their pajamas at night they had to go from their warm rooms into the cold and then back into the heat of the living room again. And they did that every night at least six times.

  Worse than anything else, Fay could never find a baby sitter up there in the country, and the consequence was that gradually she and Charley stopped visiting people. People had to visit them, and it took an hour and a half of difficult driving to get up there to Drake's Landing from San Francisco.

  And yet, they loved the house. They had four black-faced sheep cropping grass outside their glass side, their Arabian horses, a collie dog as large as a pony that won prizes, and some of the most beautiful imported ducks in the world. During the time that I lived up there with them, I enjoyed some of the most interesting moments of my life.

  3

  In his Ford pick-up truck he drove with Elsie on the seat beside him, bouncing up and down as they turned across the gravel, from the asphalt, using the shoulders of the road. On the hillside sheep grazed. A white farmhouse below them.

  “Will you get me some gum?” Elsie asked. “At the store? Will you get me some Black Jack gum?”

  “Gum,” he said, clutching the wheel. He drove faster; the steering wheel spun in his hands. I have to get a box of Tampax, he said to himself. Tampax and chewing gum. What will they say down at the Mayfair Market? How can I do it?

  He thought, How can she make me do it? Buy her T
ampax for her.

  “What do we have to get at the store?” Elsie chanted.

  “Tampax,” he said. “And your gum.” He spoke with such fury that the baby turned to peer fearfully at him.

  “W-what?” she murmured, shrinking away to lean against the door.

  “She's embarrassed to buy it,” he said, “so I have to buy it for her. She makes me walk in and buy it. “ And he thought, I'm going to kill her.

  Of course, she had a good excuse. He had the car—had been at friends, down in Olema … she phoned, said would he pick it up on his drive back. And the Mayfair closed in an hour or so; it closed either at five or six, he could not remember exactly. Sometimes one time, some days—weekdays—another.

  What happens? he wondered, if she doesn't get it? Do they bleed to death? Tampax a stopper, like a cork. Or— he tried to imagine it. But he did not know where the blood came from. One of those regions. Hell, I'm not supposed to know about that. That's her business.

  But, he thought, when they need it they need it. They have to get hold of it.

  Buildings with signs appeared. He entered Point Reyes Station by crossing the bridge over Paper Mill Creek. Then the marsh lands to his left … the road swung to the left, past Cheda's Garage and Harold's Market. Then the old abandoned hotel.

  In the dirt field that was the Mayfair's parking lot he parked next to an empty hay truck.

  “Come on,” he said to Elsie, holding the door open for her. She did not stir and he grabbed her by the arm and swung her from the seat and down; she stumbled and he kept his grip on her, leading her away from the car, toward the street.

  I can buy a lot of stuff, he thought. Get a whole basketful and then they won't notice.

  In the entrance of the Mayfair, fright overcame him; he stopped and bent down, pretending to tie his shoe.

  “Is your shoe untied?” Elsie asked.