The Moth

  I never thought of him, though, when this question of astrology first came up, and in fact I had puzzled over it a week before it occurred to me he was the one guy on earth to take it over and do something with it. I had dropped in, on a routine visit, to one of our Seven-Star filling stations, the one on 101, just above Long Beach, where she and I had parked the stuff the morning I saved the shack. And out back of the pumps, over near the tire shop, I noticed a transit, the same one, as I could see from marks on the tripod, as I had parked there three years before. When Ed Moore, the manager, got through gassing a car, I apologized to him for leaving it, but said I’d forgotten it and would send for it the next day. “Well, fact of the matter, Mr. Dillon, I’d forgotten it too. It was put with the rest of the stuff you left here, but then when the files were taken out it was shoved in a corner with a stack of exhaust pipes in front of it, and I didn’t even know it was there until one day, when I was moving things around and happened to notice it. And then I got to wondering if that glass was a telescope, and whether it would work on the moon. So I got it out and set it up, and come to find out it worked fine. Always been interested in the moon. Read a lot about it. Always wanted to study it with a nice glass, but till now never had the chance.”

  “O.K., but if it’s in your way—”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  He looked a little funny, then went on: “And fact of the matter, I’ve been intending to call you up about it, because I think it’s helping business.”

  “... In what way?”

  “People come in, just to look through it.”

  “At the moon?”

  “At the moon, and then they buy gas. And at the North Star and Evening Star and whatever else we’ve got, too. And some of them fool around telling fortunes. That’s what I was going to call up about. Somehow, I can’t shake out of my mind there’s a merchandising angle there. I don’t know how much telescopes cost, but I know this much: Once you got ’em, they don’t eat, and they don’t burn any gas.”

  I thought about it, or went through the motions of thinking about it, for two or three weeks. At the end of that time, I knew I wasn’t doing well. Putting telescopes in each of our stations, mounting them on tripods, and hanging a sign on them, “See the Moon,” was about all I could think of in the way of promotion, and that didn’t seem very good. Pretty soon I laid it down in front of her, and we took a ride to Ed’s station, watched kids peeping through the glass and listened to couples arguing about the zodiac. She asked me what I thought we ought to do, but when I told her what I’d been thinking up she shook her head. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it’s not your racket. Putting down wells, pumping oil, cutting it up to sell—on that you’re fine. But this is retail. This is one-hundred-per-cent bunk, but it has to make sense, like Jack Benny. It takes a special kind of intellect. It takes some-body that can make a scientific study of bunk.”

  That’s when I thought of Denny.

  “But of course, Jack! I may have laughed at your stories about him, but I may as well tell you I always thought there was something in him—that his ‘initiative’ was something a business could use. Bring him out on a tentative basis, and if it doesn’t work out you’re not hooked, but at the same time you haven’t got yourself involved with one of these Los Angeles high-pressure boys who wants a mortgage on everything I’ve got.”

  He got off the plane at Burbank with an Eastern suit, an Eastern topcoat, an Eastern hat, and an Eastern color. But, except for some gray over the ears and a little more weight, he was the same old Denny, with that country-club good looks, and the quick, warm smile that really did things to you. I had reserved an apartment for him next to mine, and while we were running down he caught me up a little bit on himself, how he’d been driven, since the death of his father, trying to settle an estate that wasn’t worth settling, how his aunt was taking care of his mother, how he’d had three jobs in the last five years, each of them in businesses that folded before he’d been with them a month. Then he asked me what it was I had waiting for him and when I told him he lit up. By that time we were within a mile of Ed’s station and I asked him how he’d like to stop by and look things over. He wanted to, so I pulled in there and Ed gave him the works, everything he’d noticed, since the glass had been set up there. He asked how many of the customers were daytimers that switched to night on account of the glass, how many were people that had been buying some opposition gas, then switched, how many had a real interest in astronomy, how many were astrology bugs, how many were just peepers, on their way to the rest room, trying to get something free. He saw angles I hadn’t thought of, and what he didn’t see, Ed did. When we left he had a big stack of sales sheets Ed gave him, so he could tot day sales separate from night sales, and maybe get more angles. When we finally got to the apartment it was time to go out to lunch, so we did, and from lunch to the Jergins Trust Building and from there to the hill. I introduced him to everybody, and they all fell for him, which you would expect, anyway the secretaries. But when Rohrer fell for him, that was different. Rohrer knew a little of what he’d been brought out for, and between the looking around and explaining, he said to me: “He’s going to be a wonderful help, that young fellow is. He asks! He’s not ashamed to let on he don’t know!”

  So when we changed into black ties, and I drove him up to Beverly and he made a hit there, I wasn’t surprised, but I was relieved. With her, he made his hit when she was stirring Martinis before dinner, with a couple of fast gags he kind of shook off the end of his cigarette. She knew he was her kind then, and played him up big when the picture people began dropping in around ten. They fell for the gags too, but one of the girls fell for something else, and began propositioning him to play tennis on her court. He sideslipped it, and Hannah liked how he did it. “He’s done plenty of chasing, that one has. But when a guy knows all the answers and then keeps still, just because he’s married and decent and in love with his wife, what do you do then?”

  “Well, what do you do?”

  “You hand it to him.”

  Considering Denny’s broad-minded ideas on what he owed himself in the way of leisure when we were kids, it was surprising the way he bore down on this little problem of the telescope. He was at it morning, noon, and night, going over Ed’s sheets, taking a job in the filling station, putting on coveralls, and studying every man, woman, and child that went near the damned transit. He moved it to this place and that place, to check which was transit trade and which was rest-room trade. He tried it with a sign and without a sign. He took it away and checked how many people asked about it. At the end of a week, one Sunday morning when he, she, and I had just finished breakfast in Beverly, he said: “Well, chilluns, I guess you’re getting a little impatient, but I’m on the trail of something, and I want time. For just a pretty good job, I could begin now. The main point about this, as I suppose you know, is that it prolongs your period of activity from daytime into the night. It can add—it doesn’t now, but we’re talking about the future and promotion possibilities—it could add at least ten per cent to your sales, which is terrific. On top of that, for a daytime bulge and general sales angle that has a potential I haven’t been able to calculate, there’s the astrology. That lets in a radio show, a cheap one, that we can put on with just an astrologer and some records—fifteen minutes a day, on the coast network, or better still, one of the local stations that’ll cost next to nothing but give us city coverage. So far, fine, it’s cheap and it’s good, and the telescopes don’t, as you say, eat anything. But—it lacks something. I know what I’m doing here. After all, we’re talking about stars, and I want something with some reach to it. Something good.”

  She said: “What do you think, Jack?”

  “Let him meditate.”

  “Think, pretty creature, think.”

  I found a note under my door, at the apartment, one Thursday afternoon, two or three weeks after that, that said he was going off by himself a few days, and to count him out over the wee
k end. I didn’t pay much attention, except that by then I kind of looked forward to him, and she did. But I’d turned the utility car over to him, and if he wanted to drive off somewhere it was O.K. by me. But Sunday morning, around eight, when I was taking a few turns up and down her pool, I felt somebody around and when I looked, there he was, on the other side of the wall. When I waved he came over on a vault, in a sweat shirt, Western slacks he’d got for himself, and no shave. Then he began walking up and down. “Well, you big ape, I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”

  “Swell, but it’s early yet, so take it easy.”

  “O.K., but I’VE GOT IT!”

  “Sh!”

  But before I could shut him up, she said something from upstairs, and from the sound of her voice she wasn’t even out of bed yet. In a couple of minutes, she was down, in shorts, without make-up, her hair twisted up in a knot. No servants were up, so she got breakfast herself, and served it on the table at the corner of the pool. But as soon as she had brought the eggs she told him to get going. “Laws, Hannah—you heard of them?”

  “You mean like against arson, murder, mayhem—”

  “I mean like gravity, forces, light—”

  “Oh, physical laws!”

  “That’s it. Who found them?”

  “Why—didn’t Sir Isaac Newton? That apple hitting him on the—oh no, that can’t be right.”

  “It is, though, you had it, first guess. And that reminds me to look up that guy’s public-relations stuff. Did it ever occur to you that’s the only scientific man an American has ever heard of, really to know who he was? They couldn’t tell Archimedes from Hippocrates on a bet, and yet—”

  “I said get going.”

  “I will, don’t worry. So we show him. We put out a regular, special picture of him, all over the billboards, on every piece of advertising we run, there on the grass, with his apple. Dreaming up his law. But our scientists—get a load of this, Hannah—they study the stars!”

  “We got scientists?”

  “Jack’s a B.S.”

  “Why does Jack study the stars?”

  “To find new elements, or whatever they’ve got up there. Because that’s our twist. The new way, they don’t work with apples, they do it with a telescope, or spectroscope, or some kind of goddam scope, don’t pin me down which, because I don’t know what it is yet but I’ll get it. The main point is, when you got some law like gravity, some element like neon, before they put it in a test tube, some slug with a glass found it in a star. Then they started looking for it here, in the middle of the Gobi Desert or some place. They—”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Then ask Jack.”

  “Scientist, is he kidding me?”

  “No.”

  “O.K., smart guy. They—”

  “They had to know it existed before they could go looking for it and put it in quantity production. You can’t find gold in them thar hills till you heard of gold.”

  “So?”

  “We’re putting out a new gas.”

  “Are we, Jack?”

  “Gas is gas. Why not?”

  “Observatory gas, Hannah.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “I’m telling you—our scientists study the stars, and we’ve got to put out a new gas to put that point over. For all that special ethyl that our gas has got, for that high-octane pick-up, for that good old power, for those extra miles per gallon, our scientists, the ones with smocks on their backs and slide rules in their hand and telescopes to their eyes, study the stars! And if you don’t believe it, stop at the nearest Seven-Star observatory and look at a star yourself!”

  “We got observatories?”

  “We will have.”

  “Yeah, telescopes, but—what do you mean, observatories?”

  “I mean the works.”

  “But—with domes on them?”

  “And telescopes pointing up in the air—ten feet.”

  “Who’s paying for this?”

  “You are.”

  “I like that.”

  He’d been half gagging up to then, but all of a sudden he got serious and began popping it off the end of his cigarette, like he did when he was trying to put something over. He said it actually wouldn’t cost a lot, as that was what he’d been looking into, these last two days since he took his powder. The telescopes, he said, you got from the Amateur Astronomers’ Association, and there were at least a dozen members of it that he had already talked to, who were just praying for the chance to get a job together for us, and so cheap you could hardly believe it. The domes would be plastic, and he’d already got a price from two or three companies that would be almost within the estimates that had been turned in for new rest rooms on several of the stations, which had to be built anyway, and could be designed to let a dome in as well as not. That was the thing to remember, he said: the observatory, the rest room, the soft-drink vendor, the water bubbler, and all the rest of it should be one unit, a feature with some individuality. He kept talking about clean, nice rest rooms, and spoke about Standard and how many people go there just because of lavatory facilities. This, he said, would be the same idea, with the observatory an extra attraction. It would be in front of the rest rooms, and revolve with a mechanism he had already got a price on, from a junk dealer, who had a dozen circular tracks, seven feet across, with cogs on them, and pinions to fit, all for some cockeyed low price. The control wheels, so each customer could turn the dome, or turret, whatever way it suited him, he said had to be shiny brass, and he’d got quotations from another junkyard. But the big surprise for me and Hannah came when he told about the big tube of brass that sticks out of the top of a dome, and works in a slot that cuts it in half. “That thing isn’t for any purpose at all but to shut out light, so you can see the moon in the daytime of you want to look, and so at night light from the Milky Way doesn’t get in. The works of a telescope, what you see with, goes in a grip you can carry in your hand. The rest is just window dressing. Those tubes we get at a sheet brass works, and I’ve got quotations on them right here. They roll up a piece of brass to our order, catch it with rivets, deliver when we’re ready to install—and there’s our observatory. It shines like a fireman’s hat, sticks away up in the air so you can see it a mile, it’s cheap, and it’s scientific! And on top of that we’ve got the astrology. But why the hell I’ve got to argue so much about it, I don’t—”

  “Sold, Denny. That is, if Jack—”

  “Sounds O.K.”

  “I just love it!”

  He organized it, I’ll say that for him, right down to the last picture, copy, and release date, a regular southern California production job. We’d been making more money than I had really told her, so we could afford what he was doing easy enough, even if I did put the brakes on him here and there, just from habit, or sense of duty, or whatever it was. But it cost even less than I figured on, mainly because all that stuff, the domes, telescopes, brass wheels, and so on, looked a lot more expensive than they were. And whatever it cost, I think I would have O.K.’d it, because it was opening up something that until then I’d paid no attention to at all. I mean, it dealt with people. Up to then, my life had been things. Music, my voice, had been things, and a football was a thing, as a boxcar was, and a fruit spray, and a well. But this started with stars, the domes, and the glasses, and went on to how people felt about them. Denny tried his slogans, copy, and pictures, on everybody, from Rohrer and Lida and me and Hannah to Joe Doaks. Every reaction he’d get, he’d rethink and rewrite and redraw. After he’d tried the stuff on two hundred different people Sir Isaac was out. “It’s O.K., Jack, it’s simple and they can understand it, but in the first place it’s comedy and in the second place it’s crumby. I mean, we want everything streamlined, and then we show a fat old bastard in a Quaker Oats suit, sitting under a tree, rubbing his head with one hand and holding an apple with the other—and it’s wrong. We’ll take care of that stuff about the elements that were discovered on Mars before they were d
iscovered on earth, or wherever they were discovered, but we’ll do it in copy. We’ll have a nice, refined column, no more than ten picas wide, running down one side of the page explaining about it, but the rest of it’s got to soar. It’s got to go sailing right off the page—out into the wide blue yonder so we lift ’em. You get it, Jack? It isn’t only that we got telescopes. It’s got to be a symbol of a whole world, of the world they live in—of infinity with a supercharger.”

  I guess it sounds corny, more like Eddie Guest than Walt Whitman, but it was poetry, just the same, to him, and I’ve got to admit it, to me. It opened up things, not quite the world he was talking about, but another world I never heard of just the same, the world that you scored in by controlling people’s minds, and I don’t mind saying I bought it all, and hard. We made our first announcement with a page ad in Westways, which is a magazine put out by the Automobile Club of Southern California, and he knocked me over with it, because he caught me completely by surprise. For the picture, he ran a photo of her, Hannah, I mean. But it was a special kind of photo, and caught her at night, all smeared up with some kind of glycerin so she shone like a glowworm, with a white silk jersey swimming outfit that showed every curve she had, but somehow looked scientific at the same time. I mean, she had on big, wide glasses with white rims and white pieces running back over her ears, and she was standing under one of our telescopes, with her hand on it like she was just about to peep through it, but looking up at the sky like she was going to make sure, first, what she was going to peep at. And those thick, solid shoulders somehow meant business, more than a hundred slim cuties could have meant, and caught the spirit of this new world he was trying to put across, and gave it that thing he was talking about, lift, the spring that carried it right off the page. On the left, where you didn’t notice it till about the dozenth time you turned to the page, was the column of small type about the elements, and underneath a wide picture of one of our stations, showing the dome and glass sticking up. Up above were the stars, and Seven-Star had been changed from a circle cluster to the Big Dipper. But the main thing was that girl, with something classical about her pose that made it seem all right about the curves, and the way she was looking up, and the expression on her face. I went for it all, and I didn’t miss it that other people would too. He was hardly out with the ad, and some newspaper stuff that released a little later, and hadn’t even got started on the radio program yet, when he was invited up to L.A., to address the biweekly luncheon the Advertising Club holds on Tuesdays at the Biltmore. I didn’t go, but she did, and sat out in the lobby and listened, and when she came back she dropped in my office to give me a special report. Then she said: “He’s big time, your friend Mr. Deets. I hope we can hold him.”