To her credit, your grandmother at least understands this, the final outcome, though not the intervening processes in which mountains are moved and whole forests are pulped in order to provide her two little darlings with new bedding and new pajamas every month. As for everything else, I throw up my hands in despair. Deirdre simply does not understand that in a world in which things are accorded their proper respect, people will be forced to simplify their innate complexity and focus much more steadily on the needs and demands of their things and machines, a useful discipline and therefore a force for public good. It is for excellent reasons that mankind has begun to achieve a world in which more and more messy, complex people are attached to this or that machine and required to behave accordingly by punching buttons, moving mice, pushing pedals and levers, turning wheels, and switching on and off switches of various kinds. You may now and then see on TV crowds of people rampaging through streets and overturning cars and smashing windows, for which there is a simple explanation: these are people who have failed to find a machine to bond with and who are therefore expressing their resentment against all of the rest of us who have.
Complexity, in short, is a bonding mechanism, my pets, which you need to remember every time something goes wrong with a toy of yours or—later on in your lives—a tool or a complicated piece of equipment or machinery. We engineers are trained to make things as complicated and inscrutable as possible, which are clever and useful ploys to make people pay attention to their things and therefore bond to them—and also to bond in advance to the upcoming generations of even more complex things.
A last thought here will have to wait. In exactly two minutes a call will be coming over the red phone from the President. He’s been very chatty of late.
22. O–GAUGE 1928 PULLMAN PRIVATE OBSERVATION CAR
THE PURCHASE OF THIS PRIVATE RAILWAY CAR WAS the most stressful addition ever to my personal rolling stock in part because I realized far too late that I had been sucked into—at some investment consortium board meeting—a little rivalry game among several of my fellow entrepreneurs who had all recently out-vied themselves by snapping up a number of antique private railway cars that had come on the market. Never encouraged by my father in the first place, my interest in rail transportation ended definitively at the age of seven when I assembled my second-hand Lionel electric train set on a piece of cardboard on the upper bunk of my bunk bed. Everything connected, I ran the engine and tender and a boxcar and a flatcar and a tank car and a caboose around and around its circle until I threw the switch that sent the train down a dead-end spur and over the edge of the mattress, at the precise moment when Bobby Finn, who had spent the night in the lower bunk, stuck his head out. He required seven stitches in his scalp and I renounced all interest in rail transportation for many decades.
This O-gauge model that I am adding to your collections, Fabian and Rowena, on the occasion of your eighth birthday, Rowena, was custom-made from the ground up by a specialty firm, who gave only a slight discount for my ordering four instead of one. That’s me waving from the observation deck—which, given the smallness of the scale, is not entirely clear. My experience with the actual private rail car was never satisfactory. Twice I was stranded on sidings in the middle of Ohio, owing either to mechanical problems in the trains my private car was attached to or the tracks that it was on, and I was forced to summon a company helicopter to rescue me. Anyone can understand that someone with my annual income from all sources, which amounts to more than $300,000 an hour per eight-hour day, cannot simply afford to sit around for several hours twiddling their thumbs while some union crew up the tracks holds seminars on how to attach a nut to a bolt. Not that I only work eight hours a day. Eighteen is more like it, not counting flying time, such as right now, passing over the lights of Vancouver-Seattle at 2:00 A.M.
A mistake, a mistake, but there you have it. I have just watched the video of you two accepting your Pullman Private Observation Cars and I can’t say I blame you for your lack of enthusiasm expressed by somewhat sour looks. But where’s the engine? you wanted to know, Fabian. I was interested to note that neither of you thanked me this time for the gifts; nor did your mother Deedums bother to prompt you. The malign influence of your father, no doubt, who has not said thank you in my presence for the last decade. Neat, cool, hey, nice, rich, yes, but never thank you.
Be that as it may, the events surrounding the wretched private railcar stimulated me to bring my theory on the uses of mobility at last to fruition, both in practice and as a published volume. This coincided nicely with the somewhat unexpected runaway success of the Thingamabob®—which in fact robbed sales from the mid-line Thingamajig®, finally dropped only two years after its introduction—a success that enabled me to begin investing heavily in food-service paper goods and finally directly in food service itself, setting the groundwork for some radical fast-food improvements at a time when the great era of innovation was generally considered to be over.
Originally intended to be a privately-printed companion to my earlier tome on Industrial Sex, my new book, A General Theory of Mobility, was put in the hands of nine ghost-writers and shaped in record time into a long-term bestseller, helped by the fact that I suggested that I would be very pleased if every last one of my tens of thousands of loyal employees would buy a copy at the full retail hardback textbook price by means of painless electronic paycheck deductions. There are of course other inventive ways to make best-sellerdom happen, though that was the most profitable. Be that as it may, my theory states that in essence consumption of fuels and energy in general, in addition to food and non-durable goods, is an accelerating function of mobility as measured by speed. In other words, that is in words you two will soon understand but are probably not there yet, the more you move around and the faster you move around the more gasoline you or your parents will buy and use up and the more food, particularly fast food, and all the packaging attached thereto, you will consume, and the more likely you are to acquire other goods, perishable and even occasionally even durable, so-called, like new cars and pickups and SUVs. The Thingie® is one of those simple devices which lubricates and facilitates mobility, and of course the more mobile you become, the more Thingies® and Thingamabobs® you run through.
It follows then that, from the point of view of the enlightened entrepreneur, such as your grandfather, the more we get people to move around, to the point of having them constantly mobile, or almost constantly mobile, then the higher our profits will be and the higher the value of our shares and related investments will rise, and ultimately the greater will be your inheritances, my little ones. Human beings, however, even though they are increasing their tolerance for non-stop mobility, still apparently need to come to rest now and then. This is where television has proven so handy, in the way it continues the sensation of mobility by other means. My General Theory of Mobility posits that within the near future the experience of actual mobility and the experience of watching TV will ultimately merge and become indistinguishable; in other words, people won’t know (or care) whether they are driving around or watching TV. I call it taking the “wind” out of the windscreen.
Our involvement in food-service paper goods led to a revolutionary increase in the speed of fast food through the pre-cooking and pre-assembly of hamburgers and related foods, in state-of-the-art semi-automated hamburger assembly plants in Latin America and the Indian Subcontinent, via a fleet of what some wag called the Burger Bombers on the financial pages until we put a stop to those articles. We have set an industry record not likely to be challenged for the speed with which we are able to convert equatorial grassland on the site of former useless impenetrable jungle into beef patties and into hamburgers, and the speed with which we can wrap and box and pallet the finished hamburger. We now supply nearly thirty-seven percent of the fast-food outlets in the major metropolitan areas of the country with our burgers, which skid down the chutes quite as if they were cooked in the virtual kitchens backstage, as it were, from which are
emitted digital sounds of frying and genetically engineered cooking odors. The return flights of our fleet of—well, why not?—Burger Bombers are filled with biodegradable waste products from these same fast-food outlets which are specially treated in separate wings of our burger assembly plants, producing a palatable and nutritious food supplement for the next generation of free-range beef cattle and chickens and hogs and farmed fish. I can’t begin to list the labor and tax savings of these offshore operations, not to speak of the relief from so-called environmental regulations, the sum total of which have resulted in both plummeting prices and soaring profits.
The Burger Bomber system was one of those little unexpected gifts from my General Theory of Mobility, specifically from the proposition that posits that the more anything and everything and everybody moves, the greater the profit margin, against all reasonable expectations. Only a few years ago it was calculated that farm produce traveled a mere 1,500 miles from field or orchard to table. Today the average hamburger flies nearly 7,000 miles from factory to little plastic table.
Now that, my little ones, is progress with a capital P.
23. 1:18 SCALE 1991 FERRARI 400L TURBO
I HAD NO SOONER FINISHED CHATTING WITH YOUR mother Deedums on the phone about your grandmother’s recent bizarre behavior and was settling into my bed when the captain informed me that he’s going to have to make an unscheduled landing in Honolulu owing to some pressure irregularities in the hydraulic system. He’s already lined up, good man, either a Learjet or a 767 to get me to Chicago in time for an important evening meeting. The 767 is rather badly appointed, he said, but it would get me there quicker.
On the occasion of Groundhog Day, I have somewhat reluctantly offered you, Fabian and Rowena, an Italian custom-made model of my red 1991 Ferrari 400L Turbo, whose V-12 locked up on me on the Ohio Turnpike at 110 miles per hour and then disintegrated, throwing the car into a spin which eventually stabilized into a backward slide that subsequently gutted the eight-speed transmission and caused the car to pile backward into a bridge abutment, fortunately padded with huge yellow drums of sand. I walked away unscathed, but the westbound lanes of the turnpike were closed for three hours to remove other cars disabled by the Ferrari’s disintegrating engine, transmission, and running gear parts. Needless to say I was enraged at the cost of replacing the entire engine and drive-train—which had to be custom-fabricated from scratch and was not covered by insurance—which came to just under $400,000. I sold the car like a hot potato. And have attempted to obliterate all traces of it from my memory, but unsuccessfully, as you can see. So let it serve as a warning.
You should probably pretend that there’s nothing unusual about your grandmother’s new so-called living arrangements, although it might be useful for you to suggest—from the mouths of babes, though you are both putting on height—that living in a tent down in the pasture is probably against the zoning laws of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village—even though we are technically not within the village boundaries. Technically it is the other way around as several obscure covenants make clear: Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village and Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village Estates, plus Langston Farm and Turf Estates, are all part of Fairview-Fairlawn Lake Manor, and any and all improvements are subject to the approval of the owner of the Manor, namely me, though I have never personally vetoed any such improvements—only my lawyers have. At any rate, you will probably not understand, fortunately, her prattle about living lightly on the land and refusing to ever again drive a car. She will soon enough discover what going shopping on foot to Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village will involve, if she takes a direct route, cutting through heavy-duty field fencing with bolt cutters a mile down the pasture and then scaling a brick wall topped in razor-wire (made by a branch of her own family, coincidentally) and then wandering around the curving streets for at least a mile to Pâté & Pâté in the Village where she will have a world-class choice of pâtés, plus one local and two national newspapers.
I suppose this has been a long time coming, and I suppose I have chosen to ignore the signs or have simply not seen them because I have been away so much on business travel and so single-minded at building the family fortune into an impregnable fortress, and because of this I have tended to believe that her pining for the simple life was one of those themes she chooses to bring up whenever she feels the need to aggravate me, usually just after I get back from somewhere like Bombay, Jakarta, or Cape Town. She did not react well over dinner last week when I said, If you want to live lightly on the land we can hire a hot-air balloon, which amused you a little too much, Fabian, to the point that we had to excuse you from the table, suggesting that you take your giggling and hiccups elsewhere.
I have ordered a tent, she said.
A tent? Whatever for?
I’m moving into a tent down in the field, she said, looking down at her plate.
A tent? A tent? What will the neighbors say? A foolish question: we have no neighbors within two miles.
I want to live simply, she said. On a little air mattress, in a little sleeping bag, with a little stove to heat tea on.
Where did you ever get such insane ideas? Another foolish question. Obviously she was hankering for a return to our old newlywed camping days of long ago, having mentally airbrushed away the bugs and mud that had once put a damper on her notions of the simple life.
From this little catalogue I’ve ordered it all from.
A thought flashed through my brain. I could call my friend who runs the FBI and see if they couldn’t seize the shipment. Impound the UPS truck as evidence of a plot. Filled with camping gear and possibly even explosives. Very suspicious, I could hint.
She went on with a wave of the hand around our dining room. I’m so tired of all this.
What? Tired of the one-ton chandelier, assembled out of 4,424 separate crystals, which took seven weeks to correct a westward list and hang properly? Tired of the oriental rugs rolled and dragged and no doubt probably stolen along the way from the far corners of the Orient? Tired of the inlaid Troisième Empire dining table that when fully extended can seat thirty-six? Tired of the Barbed Wire Robber Baron’s silver service made from an especially pure vein of Bolivian silver? How could she be tired of the very things that exhilarate me through their heft, their weight, their bulk, their polish, their woof and warp, their fine details, their wonderful complexity, their rarity, and their preciousness? How could she be tired, except perhaps physically, or strolling through or hiking up and down the hallways, upstairs and downstairs, and in and out of 120 perfectly furnished rooms and the seventeen galleries housing all my collections?
And this little plastic solar-heated shower thing you hang from a tree. And a cute little portable potty thing. She was becoming dangerously radiant, lifting her eyes and sweeping the table defiantly. Rowena, you were far too rapt.
I see, I said. So when is all this happening?
Tonight. I’m moving there tonight. And with a slow dramatic gesture she swiveled around in her chair and pointed to the French windows. Indeed, there it was, a corner of the green tent peeking out from behind a chestnut tree, a hundred yards down the field beyond the lawn.
At this point your mother Deedums finally spoke up. But Mother you can’t be serious. Rain, snow, ice. It’s been a lovely February but—
There are things for that in the catalogue.
Your father, fortunately, was silent as a stone. Had he said a single word, even Pass the butter, please, I would have removed the Barbed Wire Robber Baron’s Colt .45 from the gun case in the hall and shot him dead. And then calmly carved a fourth notch in the wooden butt with a steak knife. The three others were business rivals, according to the Delahunt family lore that comes out after a few bourbons.
I completed our Sunday dinner without further comment as I was deep in mental calculations about where to set up various telescopes and infrared spotting scopes from either the upstairs bedroom window or my study windows next door and wondering how and when exactly I should or should
not ask your grandmother whether her new simple life would permit the laying down of a phone line to her tent or whether she would take her cell phone with her—or whether I should simply let her solve these problems as they came to her.
I offered brandy with coffee but there were no takers except me. Nonetheless I raised my hand and offered a guileless smile along with a toast:
Happy Groundhog Day!
24. 1:24 SCALE 1992 LINCOLN TOWN CAR STRETCH LIMOUSINE
ANOTHER ONE I HAVE DEBATED NOT INCLUDING BUT have included owing to its worth as an example of the folly of social pressure. Are you surprised, my little ones, that someone who has reached such a pinnacle of success is subject to what other people think? What you will not realize for some years is that prominence is largely a matter of managing what other people think. I refuse to calculate the hours I waste each week posing for photographs. For someone of my stature, this is the work of a staff of twenty, who in this particular situation issued a strong recommendation, virtually an order, that I purchase the longest Lincoln Town Car Stretch Limousine ever to be made, by three inches, because they believed that my official car, the 1980 Ford Fairmont Station Wagon, even if armored and provided with a supercharged V-8 engine, was beginning to be spun in odd and unpredictable ways by political cartoonists. And Howie, my driver of three years, was also reporting too many unsavory exchanges with other drivers while waiting for me outside restaurants and hotels, particularly on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
This was nothing compared to the public relations nightmare occasioned by Dierdre’s tent and her so called seclusion in the pasture known as Martha Washington’s Nap, where her friends began flocking to her in droves and even camping out at night with her. Martha Washington reputedly paused there for an afternoon nap in 1793 under the now-vanished elms. Something about the main route being flooded and the party having to seek higher ground. The Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village Council was unfortunately unwilling to ban low-level helicopter flights—too many CEOs fly to work from their back yards—despite my sizeable contribution for a new clubhouse swimming pool. In desperation I had to call an old friend at the CIA and have him extend a no-fly corridor out from the nearby air base, which the agency runs under some fictitious name. But by then the damage was done and her little tent city and the golf carts that she used for ferrying her friends from the parking area in front of the Manor down across the grass had become the subject of photos spread out all over checkout stands throughout the nation, I have been told, and indeed the world—except in Pâté & Pâté in Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village. Including scurrilous doctored photographs showing older women with obviously too young bodies allegedly dancing on the grass. I do not consider these photos suitable for your young eyes but have saved them in the archives for the very distant future when we can all have a hearty laugh about the days of Deirdre’s Folly.
Petroleum Man Page 10
