A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  Umbaugh, noticing me at last, acknowledged my presence.

  “You fought gamely and well. Feel no shame.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Round thirteen.”

  In silence, the gladiators put away their deadly potions. Somehow the crowd sensed that we had reached the turning point. Tension was so thick that it hung like a fine blue haze in the room. The rain had finally ceased and the first faint silver fingers of dawn had touched the ancient oaks of the Quad. Saturday was beginning to happen, the biggest Saturday of the season, in fact. We were playing Michigan today for the Big Ten championship, the winner, of course, to go to the Rose Bowl.

  Umbaugh leaned forward, his washed-out gray eyes peering unblinkingly into Big Al’s bbs. He whispered, barely audible to any outside the room, drawing out the syllables of his words to underline their import.

  “Rounnnnd … [long pregnant pause] four … teee …”

  Before he could complete his announcement, Big Al stiffened. An inchoate bellow of animal intensity shook the concrete walls.

  “UUUUUOOOOOONNNNNKKKKKK!”

  He lurched forward and then began to topple slowly, like a great redwood felled in the forest. Umbaugh, moving backward, with snakelike agility, his voice lashing out, warned:

  “Move back. This could be dangerous.”

  With a muffled thud that rocked our immense dormitory building, Big Al hit the floor, his red-and-white jersey darkened with sweat. The “6” of his famous number curled weakly under his bushy armpit.

  Umbaugh casually hoisted up his drooping shorts as he coolly stood over his fallen foe.

  “Jane Austen lives.”

  It was all over. My room was never the same again, even after hosing it down repeatedly and soaking the walls and floor and, yes, even the ceiling with powerful disinfectants. Big Al lay prone, his immense bulk quivering as giant spasms shook his frame. His followers, white-faced and stricken, rallied to his aid. They tugged and pulled his almost lifeless hulk down the hall, trailing noxious fumes. It was then that Umbaugh displayed the style of a true champion.

  “Well, boys.” He stretched luxuriously and scratched his ribs with satisfaction. “It’s been an exciting evening. And as a nameless Phoenician captain once wrote: When the ship sinks, you’ve lost the battle.”

  His followers, their eyes glowing with admiration, applauded their hero. I kept my silence. After all, he had disemboweled me.

  From far down the hall came the sounds of rushing water and the rumble of an expiring beast.

  Walking to the casement window, Umbaugh squinted out into the dawn, the faint red glow of Jack’s neon sign playing over his ascetic, chiseled features.

  “I feel like a spot of breakfast. A healthy hunger or, as the English would say, I’m a bit peckish. A stack of blueberry buckwheats drenched with maple syrup and a scoop of butter would just hit the spot. And since I am now somewhat flush this morning, I’ll treat the gang to what the old Golden Dome Diner has to offer. What do you say?”

  I lay back limply on my monk’s slab. Within moments the room was empty. The arena was silenced. Only the ghost of the heroic struggle remained.

  Later that fateful day our Alma Mater went down to humiliating defeat. Michigan, a decided underdog, had pulled off an upset. I still have a clipping that reads:

  LOSS OF ALL-AMERICAN COSTLY TO STATE

  (State Campus, AP) Missing his first game in three years of All-American play, Big Al Dagellio, State’s brilliant All-American tackle, was the probable cause of Saturday’s defeat. State’s losing 26–20 cost the home team a trip to the Rose Bowl and the league championship.

  The head coach refused to be interviewed after the game as to the cause of Dagellio’s failure to play, stating only: “The bum lost a lot of weight.” He would not elaborate.

  Dagellio himself was unavailable for comment and remained in seclusion today. Rumors that Dagellio had been suspended from the team were neither confirmed nor denied by officials, leading to further speculation.

  I shifted uneasily on that goddamn bean-bag loveseat, which I have hated since the day I bought it. Taking a deep, inhaling suck at my bourbon, I squinted closely at Umbaugh’s triumphant face on the screen.

  “I hope that some of our viewers today, Mr. Cooke, have come to appreciate the role Boredom has played in the world’s history. As a little-known Phoenician captain once inscribed: ‘When the ship sinks, you’ve lost the battle.’ Yes, Mr. Cooke, it is never wise to put your bets on the favorite. As the legend of Icarus shows …”

  The truth, after all these years, hit me. With a hoarse cry I toppled forward, knocking my precious Thomas Jefferson tumbler to the floor with a crash, his stony visage shattering into slivery shards, the rich amber bourbon staining the Times editorial page, thoroughly soaking a Tom Wicker column entitled: “The Intellectual; America’s Most Precious Asset.”

  You Benedict Arnold. You crummy, rotten Quisling. Selling out State to Michigan. You son of a bitch. For the first time I truly understood why the Archie Bunkers of the world, the slobs of the universe, instinctively distrusted the Intellectual. They were right all along!

  I moaned weakly in my shame. I had been cruelly used by this smarmy, poetry-quoting wimp. My simple, innocent lust for Fig Newtons had led to the defeat of my beloved State by the hated Wolverines. Oh, God, if the Alumni Journal ever gets wind of this!

  I took a deep swig of Jack Daniels straight from the bottle for sustenance, courage in my hour of self-revelation. I knew then with a deadly certainty that guilt would pursue me the rest of my life.

  THE BASTARD HAD LAID A BIG BET ON MICHIGAN!

  Me, and Goldberg, and poor dumb Big Al Dagellio were just pawns, shills if you will, in Umbaugh’s sinister game. No wonder he had all that dough to pay for those postgraduate credit hours, that convertible, that vintage Beaujolais, those stupid imported Egyptian cigarettes. Oh, Lord, will perfidy never end?

  A line from Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof came back to me in that moment of fevered illumination, Big Daddy bellowing, “Mendacity, my boy. Mendacity is what life is about!”

  I shook my head in rueful admiration, the kind of admiration that you feel for John Dean of Watergate fame, the little pimple pulling off the Big Steal and coming out of it rich. Umbaugh, you son of a bitch. Few people in the world know what your true talent is. The greatest Boomo-Lax hustler who ever lived. You hustled us, you talented horse’s ass!

  Once again I felt the terrible panging clutch in my vitals known to the trade as “Boomo-Lax Backlash.” I staggered toward the john, flipping off the TV just as Alistair Cooke said:

  “This has been a highly enlightening program. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Umbaugh for …”

  I gasped out, “Them dumb fuckers never learn!” as I barely made the blessed sanctuary.

  Sad but true, they don’t. Learn, that is. But did you note that the victim was heading for the right place to soothe his soul?

  So much of my best solid contemplation is done in the john. If venerated ancient thinkers hung around in ivory towers, it certainly follows that today’s pundits do a lot of serious work in tiled sanctuaries far from the madding throng. And no wonder, with the price of ivory.

  Archimedes hollered out “Eureka!” in his bathtub. No mention of his study or library. How many cosmic concepts came to Benjamin Franklin while in the privacy of what passed for a john in his day? Come to think of it, they had outhouses, didn’t they? Two-holers. Somehow, it’s a little unnerving to picture George Washington heading out into the rain, carrying a corn cob, while contemplating various profundities that would affect free men for centuries.

  Just where was Edison when the idea for the light bulb struck him? It would be easy to say, “The laboratory, stupid,” but is that true? Did he merely execute his idea in the laboratory?

  The fathead behind me gave out a loud blast on his air horns, jarring me out of my restless inner debate. That’s one of the things I find myself doin
g more and more, debating with myself. George Washington contemplating democracy while in the outhouse? No, you fool. He sat in his eighteenth-century study, scratching away with a quill pen on parchment, while wearing a powdered wig. Come on, you dummy, you know better than that.

  I noticed that the temperature gauge in my car was creeping up to around 200 degrees. Jesus Christ, overheating! Am I going to be the next yellow light? When was the last time I checked my radiator level?

  Ahead, the Rutgers crowd appeared to be singing. I glanced in the mirror. The Horn Creep was right on my rear bumper. Is that his tongue lolling out or is he sucking a popsicle? When will this ever end?

  My mind seized that thought like a rat terrier grabbing a chicken bone.

  After all this torture in purgatory, you end up in Jersey. Jersey, for Chrissake!

  The Light at the End of the Tunnel

  The moment that I peered out to sea through the unblinking eye of the magnificent Margate Elephant, I sensed that somehow I was in the spiritual heart of New Jersey. A gigantic wooden pachyderm of distinctly irritated mien, the Margate Elephant, constructed–if that is the proper word–about a century ago on a sandy remote beach, was an instant success among the stylish toffs of the period. New Jerseyites wearing beaver hats and sequined bustles jostled for reservations to spend a weekend, or perhaps a honeymoon, in its rooms, finished in polished teak and a curious combination of nautical and pseudo-Bombay décor.

  The Margate Elephant still stands, distinctly Jersey, radiating elephantine vitality; dignified in the W. C. Fields manner, yet slightly mad, a true Jersey work of art rivaled only by the Flagship, which decade after decade has sailed bravely upstream against the traffic on Route 22, its steel flanks rakishly cutting the potholed concrete, forever heading toward the Lincoln Tunnel bound on its own sinister voyage, currently carrying its cargo of cut-rate furniture.

  The Flagship could very well be the Margate Elephant of the twenty-first century, with committees of earnest, fluttery ladies circulating petitions for its preservation as a “historical monument.”

  There is something different about New Jersey. What it is, is difficult to define, but as a student of Jerseyana I can only describe some of its vague outlines. Jersey, we all know, has replaced Brooklyn as the subject of stand-up comedians’ gags, everywhere. A comic in a nightclub in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, can get an instant laugh by just belting out, “New Jerseyanski!” and rolling his eyes. The audience collapses, most of all any New Jerseyites that are in the crowd.

  It has been said by official pundits that you can take a man out of New Jersey but you can never take New Jersey out of the man. How can you best describe this mythical Jerseyite?

  First of all, there’s his driving. Sullenly reckless, lacking the kamikaze verve of the Californian, he is the world’s most dogged and dedicated tailgater. Any time I am a thousand miles from the state, driving along innocently, and a rusting Plymouth Fury lurches out of the blackness and clings tenaciously to my rear bumper, threatening to climb up over the trunk, I know without even seeing him that a Jerseyite is on his way to Disneyland.

  He has learned his New Jersey driving eccentricities negotiating that distinctive automotive hell known as the New Jersey Traffic Circle. Totally unknown to most of the civilized world, New Jersey’s traffic circles stand alone in their Margate Elephant–like craziness. The first time I saw one I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. After a lifetime of driving in other parts of the country, with conventional staid overpasses, viaducts, crossroads, stop-lights, etc., etc., suddenly I found myself going madly round and round, surrounded by hordes of blue-haired ladies piloting violet-colored Gremlins. In and out they wove. I passed my turnoff four times before I got control of my mind and was hurled out of the traffic circle by centrifugal force, back in the direction I had come. Good grief!

  But now, after years of New Jersey life I have become a master of the Hackensack Hesitation, the Clifton Carom, the Lyndhurst Lurch, the Camden Creep, the Vineland Veer, and, of course, the Fort Lee Finger; all necessary maneuvers for a skilled pilot in the gay, mad world of Jersey driving.

  Then, of course, there are other indelible Garden State characteristics. There is something truly lovable about summer at the New Jersey shore. Millions of sweltering Jerseyites packed chock-a-block into tiny wooden cubicles in a physical intimacy with one another that is rivaled only by the more densely packed districts of Calcutta. I once saw a happy New Jerseyite, clutching in his fist a can of Piels Real Draft Style beer, suddenly seized by a fit of sneezing in his Jersey shore cottage. In the next cottage the top of his innocent neighbor’s tuna salad sandwich flew off violently and lodged in the curtain rod amid the summer cottage cobwebs. That slab of Arnold Stone-ground Wheat bread caused much friendly snickering in the neigborhood and a lot of talk down at the local gin mill, which, of course, is decorated with plastic anchors, fake fish net, and for some reason a portrait of Woodrow Wilson done in needlepoint.

  Don’t get the idea that I don’t like Jersey. On the contrary, I love it. And why not? Life there is never dull. It can be many other things: irritating, terrifying, but dull–no.

  Take a friend of mine, an elegant, very social, much-monied doctor residing in a very lovely suburb in the Watchung Hills. For months he and his wife planned a summer gala; barbecued pheasant, cheese dips flown in from Switzerland, liveried batmen dispensing canapés from the kitchens of Maxim’s of Paris, the works.

  The guests assembled on his lush estate, the rich New Jersey grass cropped to putting-green silkiness. Women were never lovelier, nor men more handsome. The Japanese lanterns flickered in the soft summer air, when suddenly, with no warning, what at first had appeared to be an approaching curtain of smoke struck, and within an instant the elegant party had disintegrated into a whooping, hollering, slapping mob. A vast formation of New Jersey mosquitoes, flying in echelon, had attacked with the deadly efficiency of a squadron of P-51s strafing Berlin.

  Within moments the bedraggled mob, covered with lumps and scratching unashamedly, huddled in the living room, myself among them, taking solace in the obvious fact that Mother Nature bites and stings all men, rich and poor alike, especially in Jersey.

  And there is something distinctly real about a phenomenon which I have observed and which I call here New Jersey Nostalgia. One night in a remote college town in Colorado (and no state could be more different from New Jersey than Colorado, believe me), I was wandering along a darkening frontier street when suddenly my nose detected the sharp, poignant fragrance of Home. My nose began to sweat in excitement as I dashed down the street, following the scent. I rounded a corner and there it was–BIG VINNIE’S NEW JERSEY PIZZERIA. There, nestled amid the taco parlors, the chili joints, and the alfalfa sprout dispensaries (Colorado abounds in health nuts) was the Real Thing; a pizzeria straight out of Camden or Lodi, or Jersey City for that matter.

  An instant later I was inside, had ordered a rich slab of the Mother Food of New Jersey. Known to the pizza aficionado as a “Full-tilt Boogie,” it had everything: anchovies, sausage, green peppers, double cheese, onions, and the greasy thumbprints of Vinnie himself.

  I was back home. Two sweating former Jerseyites manned the place for expatriots, their accents redolent of the Meadowlands. One shouted at me over the hullabaloo:

  “Y’wanna bee-yah to go with it?”

  “Yeah!” I hollered over the din.

  “How ’bout a Rheingold?” he yelled back. “Real bee-yah, not like this Coors sissy stuff they drink out here.”

  “They used to sponsor the Mets games,” I contributed at the top of my voice.

  “Them were the days.” Vinnie smiled benignly as he shoved the beer toward me and nodded to a fading photograph of Bud Harrelson which hung over the cash register. It was signed To Vinnie, from a Pizza nut–Bud.

  For a few moments I was back in the land of the Margate Elephant, the Flagship, the Leaning Tower of Pizza, Two Guys from Harrison, Route One on Saturday night–in short, the ho
meland.

  Yes, there are times when I head west out of Manhattan at 4 A.M., hurtling through the deserted, spooky Lincoln Tunnel for an eternity, and then with a feeling of relief I spot the Light at the End of the Tunnel, and it hits me again. Yep, the Light at the End of the Tunnel that everyone is always talking about is New Jersey!

  The light at the end of the Tunnel–New Jersey?

  Awful thought! But then, maybe the Ship of State which Presidents are always threatening to pilot at last into A Safe Harbor could be the Staten Island Ferry, plowing through the murky waters of the bay amid orange peelings, 7-Up cans, and the occasional deceased Mafioso come loose from his concrete moorings at the bottom of the sea.

  Good Lord! Right above me a couple of those gunsels wearing cement sneakers could be stuck in the mud, looking down at me. Oh, ugh.

  I glanced to my right. Why the hell do I always manage to land in the slow lane? My lane had come to a complete halt. The temperature gauge crept over 200. Oh, God.

  I deliberately forced my imagination to rescue me from this dismal trap. Think uplifting thoughts, that’s the ticket. Truth. Beauty. Liberty. The one thing you don’t get in a tunnel–Liberty. A mental picture of the great statue flashed in my brain.

  Yes, the Statue of Liberty, as awesome a piece of Slob Art as the Margate Elephant ever was, also stares out over the dark ocean’s waters. Was it the Statue of Liberty herself that set the whole pattern for American tourism, culminating in Disneyland with its incredible transistorized Abe Lincoln?

  Disneyland could only have been created in America. My country ’tis of thee, of thee I sing. What is it in our national psyche that makes us create Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy; the Emerald City and Fantasyland, U.S.A.? Nowhere else in the world do they build fake rivers filled with plastic crocodiles and mechanical natives hurling dummy spears at rubber rhinos, complete with little orange-and-yellow signs reading PICTURE TAKING SPOT so that this curious adventure can be recorded for those poor souls left at home.