Back in the crew car, Jim the cameraman said, “She’s full of shit, isn’t she? About that Y chromosome stuff?”
“Face it. You guys are going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon,” I said. “Just kidding. Yeah, she’s full of shit. The next guy thinks you guys will not only survive, but live longer than ever.”
The next interview, Dr. Budd Nukker, was a biochemist, a nutritionist, and an Extropian.
“Extropians aim for nothing less than literal immortality,” said Nukker, a muscular, healthy man who looked much younger than his seventy years. He was doing the interview while on a treadmill. He had wires running from his wrist and neck to various bodily monitors—our mike was wireless—and periodically he took big sips from a bottle of electrolyte-rich water.
“We believe a regimen of exercise, grain-based diet, vitamin, hormone, and enzyme therapies, along with advances in medical technology, will make immortality possible in our lifetimes,” Nukker said. “Current research indicates that men with no vices who do only the exercise and diet part of the regimen could live to be a hundred and forty. By the time they are a hundred and forty, further advances will make immortality conceivable.”
“But you have to spend almost all your free time working out and you eat nothing but macrobiotics,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, not seeing my point.
“Forever is a long time if you’re not having any fun,” I said.
“This is more fun than being dead,” he said, turning off the treadmill and detaching his wires. While stretching, he talked about some of the hundred or so pills he took every day and then informed us it was time for his weekly hormone shot, which he gave himself in his ass.
This seemed a propitious time to wrap up the interview and break the crew for lunch at Tycoon Doughnut. Keeping with my practice of multitasking, I called in for messages on my cell phone while I ate. That Jason person had called again, and my friend Tamayo had called from Tokyo to say she would be returning to New York “in a few weeks,” which could mean tomorrow or could mean next month, after a stop in Cairo or Budapest. With Tamayo, a comic actress and free woman … excuse me, “struggling demi-goddess on a great adventure,” you just never knew.
Benny Winter had not called.
That was a good sign, I figured, a very good sign, because an outright refusal would have come much quicker.
June Fairchild of the NYPD had called. When I returned the call, she asked, “Is your unit Special Reports or Investigative Reports?”
“Special Reports. Why?”
“Because someone from the Investigative Reports Unit at ANN just called me, wanted to know why you were at the morgue this morning.”
“What did you say?”
“That you came in to ID a John Doe, but you didn’t recognize him, and I told him what I told you about the John Doe. I don’t have any new information.”
“Thanks,” I said.
This was amusing. Reb Ryan and Solange Stevenson, those story stealers in Investigative, thought I was on to a story with the John Doe. Someone in homicide must have tipped them off about my visit. Ha. If I wasn’t so, you know, mature, and Taking the High Road, I might aid and abet them by feeding them a few false leads.…
“Time to go,” Jim said, wiping his mouth with the flimsy paper napkin. He was eager, which was unusual, but understandable. At lunch, after he finished trashing Alana DeWitt, he had talked to Sven about growing up with a picture of Gill Morton on the mantelpiece, as if Gill were one of the family. When we got to the Morton Building, Jim was like a kid in a toy store, bug-eyed and slack-jawed with fresh awe.
“Mr. Morton will be right down,” the security guard said.
We waited in the pre–art deco lobby, a great hall with vaulted archways, brass and glass lamps, high ceilings, and lots of marble inscribed with the quotes of Teddy Roosevelt—“I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man”—and Hock Morton: “a man makes his own luck.” It reeked of manhood.
One wall was hung with portraits of Morton men. The biggest of these was of founder Hock Morton. Hock Morton had bushy gray hair and a handlebar mustache. Judging by the expression on his face, he hadn’t been having a good day when he’d sat for this portrait back in, according to the brass plaque beneath it, 1929.
His son, Gray Morton, on the other hand, looked blankly sober, Gray’s son, Herbert, looked frail and sad, and Herbert’s son, William, stern and sturdy. William’s son, Gill Morton, robust and ruddy-cheeked, had chosen to be painted in outdoorsman gear, his retriever at his side. None of the men resembled one another in the least.
Below the portraits were display cases with the original Morton products: the Morton Mop, the Morton Scrub Brush, Morton Soap, and an antique bottle of Morton Mopwash.
At the other end of the hall was a statue of an angel holding a fallen doughboy under one arm.
Within five minutes, Gill Morton, a stocky, florid man with a blond brush cut, strode into the lobby. He seemed taller in his portrait, but maybe that was because the portrait was about twenty feet high. Behind him came his assistant, a young man named Ken Duffin, who handed me a packet of old press ads and some videos I had requested. Behind Duffin was Morton’s security detail, five beefy guys in black suits.
I introduced the crew and Jim mentioned that he had met Morton before, when Jim was seven and his dad had won a big sales award which he had kept with his most private things until the day he died. Morton was most gracious. He seemed touched and gave Jim a two-handed handshake, and in keeping with my careful study of men, especially men in power, I noticed that Morton didn’t feel the urge in the face of praise to immediately self-deprecate. Jim was tickled and I was glad for that too, because I was trying to be extra nice to Jim, on account of his wife having a second baby and … what was that other thing … oh yeah, because he was a lousy cameraman. Our several talks about improvements had yielded nothing, and I was going to have to demote him back to sound tech soon, a task I was putting off.
Morton had a weird voice, stiff, moderately deep, earnest, and totally fake-sounding. He sounded like the dubbed voice of Hercules or Sinbad in a cheesy foreign film from the fifties or sixties. You half expected to see his lips move out of sync with his words. It was hard to keep a straight face when talking to him.
After a few ham-handed pleasantries, Morton said, “Now, on to Phase Two.”
With a half wave, half salute to the crowd, he strode off with his men, me, and the crew scrambling to follow him through steel doors and a long hallway to the Phase Two Annex, a building next to the Morton Building that Gill Morton had purchased in order to convert it into the workplace of the future.
Duffin put his hand against a laser reader of some kind and another big steel door opened automatically.
“After you,” Morton said to everyone.
We went into a large office area, empty except for us. It was bright but not too bright—it had a soft, diffuse light—and clean, in pale cheery colors, with no sharp corners on any of the “ergonomically designed” office furniture. There were no windows.
As soon as Gill Morton stepped through the door, the room said, in a female voice, “Good morning, Mr. Morton. Don’t you look handsome!”
Morton laughed. “Couldn’t resist having the programmers do that,” he said, and led us through the unpeopled office, divided by semicircular partitions that allowed a small measure of privacy without making employees “feel boxed in.”
“This will be the ultimate in smart buildings when it is done. Just the technology in this part of the building alone involves over four hundred new patents,” Morton said. “It’s completely hypoallergenic. Sensors read each employee’s bar code. This tells the room what the employee’s temperature, allergies, and Muzak preferences are, and the main computer determines what will be acceptable to the most employees.”
“They’ll wear this bar code somewhere on their person?” I asked.
“To begin with,” he
said, flashing a smart badge containing encoded information about him. “Ultimately, we’ll just implant a chip in their brains.” Then he winked and laughed, and I knew he was joking about the brain chip. With eccentric moguls, you can’t be too sure sometimes.
“We’re also experimenting with high-oxygen air and hope to install a ventilation system that filters out radioactivity and destroys biological agents,” Morton went on, not laughing, and not winking.
“Why?”
“Who knows what the world will be like five, ten, fifty years from now. Even a year from now,” he said. “We’re going to do everything we can to make this building a refuge. This is all we have to show right now. The rest of the building is still under construction.”
Eventually, he said, he hoped to convert the next block to apartment buildings and services for his employees, and do the same thing with each of his plants.
When Morton opened the door to leave, the room said, “Good-bye, Mr. Morton. Come back soon. I’ll miss you.”
On the way out, Morton stopped in front of the dead doughboy statue and gave us the familiar history of Hock Morton and the Morton Company. People in the lobby began to gather around to watch—tourists, delivery guys, visiting “Morton Families” wearing special buttons. The crowd was respectful and stood back quietly, and though that may have had something to do with the security detail, it seemed to have something to do with Gill Morton too. The man had presence, an aura of power and vision.
“Remember: Courage, tenacity, and responsibility, that’s what makes a man, in the past, in the present, and into the future,” Morton said. “Look, there’s the courage of the common man, the courage that Morton has always supported and honored.”
He gestured toward the angel and doughboy.
Behind the statue was a large copper plaque, almost as big as the wall, listing Morton employees who had given their lives in this century’s many wars. There were at least a thousand of them. If you stand in that lobby and squint, you can imagine it is 1917, that the clerks and office boys are leaving their jobs to go off to some strange country to shoot Prussians and such. (It was sad, and only served to underscore Alana DeWitt’s point about men and war. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if women hadn’t provoked a war or two. We sure had supported a few. I remembered some old, jerk-time film footage I saw once that showed the streets full of doughboys and old women on corners handing out white flowers, to symbolize cowardice, to any man who had not enlisted.)
There was a small ethical problem in using Gill Morton in the series. We were essentially providing free advertising to the Morton Company at a time when our CEO Jack Jackson was courting Gill Morton to get some of his paid advertising. Call me suspicious, but I figured this was why Jack suggested I use Gill Morton and his archives in our series, to curry favor.
But Phase Two was too good to pass up over piddling ethical things, and when you threw in the Morton archives, it was irresistible. For example, one of the videos Morton’s man Duffin had given me was a tape copy of a film that had run in the Morton pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. The 1964 video would give us a RetroFuture angle, visions of our future from our past, to contrast with current visions. It would work especially well intercut with footage of the Phase Two Workplace of the Future.
Narrated by a bland, soothing male voice, the kind prevalent in educational films and advertising in the fifties and sixties, the 1964 Morton video guided us room by room through the brave new world. There was the kitchen with the perfunctory robot servants (actors in costumes clearly) doing household chores or giving the missus a manicure. The bedrooms had voice-activated lights, automatic pillow fluffers, and for the children, robot nannies to tuck them in and read them stories. The den had a giant wall television and a bar that mixed drinks with the press of a button. They managed to avoid the bathroom completely, so evidently we won’t be seeing any space-age toilets or automatic ass wipers.
Still, it was full of surprises. In the workplace of the RetroFuture, computers are really huge and do most of the work, all the secretaries are robots, and, of course, everyone zips around from home to work in rockets. Doctors smoke, of course, and their brand of choice is Morton Bolds. You may recall the slogan for Morton Bolds, “Calm your fears—with a Morton Bold.” Who knew courage could be inhaled? (Taken off the market after the tobacco arm of Morton was sold to Smith Tobacco in 1970, Bolds were also the cigarette of choice for Olympic swimmer Loffy Moffat, war hero Widdy Boone, and Father Frank Carpus, who smoked them while delivering his five-minute inspirational message at the end of the Morton Bold Variety Hour, which ran until 1956, when Father Carpus was found unconscious in bed with a dead Hollywood starlet, his opium pipe on the bedside table. But you probably know all this.)
In the year 2001, men will drink highballs and smoke cigarettes and women will be pampered by machines. And everyone in the future is white. Who knew? Boy, Yogi Berra was right. The future ain’t what it used to be.
CHAPTER FIVE
“When you were a kid, did you think the world would turn out this way?” I asked my cabdriver that evening. The cabbie had already told me that he thought being a man meant being strong, brave, and taking care of his family. The man had been quite cheerful when I got into the car, and so far, we had been talking like two human beings. But for some reason, this question rattled him.
“No, I thought the Palestinians would have a homeland and I’d be a millionaire with a beautiful wife,” he said sharply. After that he just glowered as he drove. In one fell swoop I had taken a happy man and turned him into a depressive. Not that that hadn’t happened before …
When the cab pulled up to my street, my elderly neighbor Mrs. Ramirez was just leaving, going out with her Chihuahua on one of her crime-fighting rounds, no doubt.
“Take me around the corner and down the block toward Eighth Street,” I said to the driver. “Drop me there.”
As he pulled away, I ducked down to escape the woman’s vicious but unreliable gaze. My theory was, Dulcinia Ramirez had an air bubble in one of her cerebral arteries or something, in addition to a huge rough stick up her ass. She looked at me and saw the Devil Incarnate, thought at various times that I was a call girl, a transvestite, a drug dealer, a madam, a child abuser—basically an all-around agent of iniquitous infection. Oh, and she was violent. More than once I’d felt the smack of her mighty oak cane on the top of my head and was unable to defend myself because she’s a tiny Catholic lady in her eighties with blue hair and pearls. Pummeling the elderly, even in self-defense, is frowned upon in our society—not to mention an awful hard sell to a jury. Recently, Mrs. R. had given up her cane in favor of her pistol. I’d always believed she needed the cane to walk, but it turned out she’d just used it as a weapon, before she joined the arms race.
The cab dropped me in front of a mom-and-pop bodega, a vanishing breed in the increasingly gentrified East Village, where I bought the evening newspapers, a piece of beige milk fudge from a large glass jar on the counter, and a six-pack of beer.
“You need two Posts?” The young guy behind the counter asked. Or that’s what I heard. He seemed to have trouble with English.
“You need two News-Journals?”
“Uh, no, just one is fine,” I said, and wondered if his English was this bad all the time, if he asked customers nonsensical questions all day or just hadn’t really grasped the concept of suggestive selling. Had to be hard, coming to a strange country and trying to make a go of it without being fluent in the language.
Walking back from the store, I ate my milk fudge and read the News-Journal, which had a small blip on the John Doe I’d seen at the morgue that morning. The only new info on John Doe was that a waitress named Gina at Erin’s Coffee House had identified him as an eccentric customer known only as Frenchie.
A lone dead man was a small story to the News-Journal. A bigger story was the update on the bees, a swarm of which had taken a sudden dislike to a bond trader, who was stung twenty-seven times and now calli
ng for the extermination of the bees.
An even bigger story was the one on Jack Jackson on page 5.
“JACK JACKSON—FRIEND OF WOMEN? OR A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING?” asked the headline.
Underneath this was an old photo of a much younger Jack Jackson slapping a famous feminist on the ass at the 1972 Democratic Convention and calling her “Honey,” according to the caption.
The text mentioned that Jack was the only man invited to speak on the last day of the women’s conference, and suggested this was a sellout by women on account of Jack’s massive sponsorship, along with other corporate giants, of the festivities. A collection of photos paired with historic quotes, or perhaps misquotes, from Jack followed, such as this one, from the early 1970s: “If God wanted women to be men, he would have made ’em men.”
Jack had, I was sure, changed his views since he made that comment. Also his clothes. Another picture showed a drunken, partying Jack at Studio 54. He was dressed in tight black satin bell-bottoms and a yellow shirt unbuttoned to his navel, and he still had hair then, a shaggy brown afro.
In a similar vein and around the same time, Jack had commented on the feminist truism, “If men had babies, they’d give out medals for it.”
“If men had babies,” Jack had said, “they’d be women.”
Lord Otterrill, who owned the News-Journal, was no historic friend of women and had once said that women were a lot more sensitive, vindictive, and petty than men. But that didn’t stop this overly sensitive sore loser from seizing the vindictive opportunity to poke Jack in the eye with a sharp stick. With a gossipy story, no less! Men are such gossips.
The coast was clear on Tenth Street. Mrs. Ramirez was nowhere to be seen. Sitting on my stoop was a young man in a baseball cap, bearing the logo of a famous hamburger chain, and dark glasses. When I approached, he said, “Hudson?”
The Last Manly Man Page 5
