Then he tells me things to try to make me laugh. How a tattooed sailor in New Orleans once offered to support him for a year. How Libby’s mother used hair spray instead of antiperspirant after her shower that morning. How Ellen looks when she wakes up after an all-night drunk.
I feel a little better and begin driving back to Park Slope.
At the Judsons’ door I ask Hitler if he ever feels bitter.
“Useless,” he says.
I do not know if he is talking about anger or himself or myself. In the end it doesn’t matter.
Hitler puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me to sleep well.
I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is getting a $200 Visa cash advance at a Chase Manhattan ATM on Broadway. He is waiting patiently to hear the sound of money being counted in the teller machine. Already he has put in his card, identified his PIN number – 1933, the year the Glass-Steagall Act was passed – and given the necessary commands.
Looking down, the Chairman notices empty crack vials at his feet. The tops of them are mostly yellow, with some blue and a few black. The Chairman wonders who manufactures these vials, what kind of profit they make, whether they pay federal taxes, and if any Federal Reserve member banks have lent them money.
Still nothing is happening at the ATM.
The woman at the ATM next to the Chairman's, an actress whose character on a soap opera hasn't had a story line in a year and who is now used only in crowd scenes like funerals and weddings, has already gotten her $100 from her Chase checking account. And she punched in her PIN number – 6606, assigned to her by the bank – two minutes after the Chairman punched in his.
The actress takes back her ATM card and the receipt, which shows that she has $456.34 in checking, and glancing at the Chairman, leaves the lobby. To do this, she must press a button that makes a high-pitched sound. The door opens, and she is on Broadway.
Her place is taken at the lefthand ATM by a man who has tested positive for the HTLV-3 antibody but has no symptoms of AIDS. He wants to deposit a check from his aunt.
The Chairman is still waiting for the money-counting sound to begin.
In her apartment in Trump Tower, the Chairman's mother is waiting for him.
She has been disconsolate since her husband, the Chairman's stepfather, died of lung cancer last year. Her late husband had smoked two packs of Pall Malls every day since he was fourteen.
He died at seventy-nine, which the Chairman thought was pretty good for someone who had been that familiar with nicotine for so long. The Chairman smokes only cigars.
Naturally he does not inhale.
Oh Nigel, the Chairman's mother thinks, I miss you so.
Thinking that her son must be delayed by important Federal Reserve Board business, she decides to take from her videocassette library a certain tape. She places the tape at the mouth of her VCR, which swallows it obligingly.
Turning on the TV monitor to channel 3, the Chairman's mother simultaneously presses the "record" and "play" knobs of the VCR and then realizes in horror that she is erasing the tape she wants to play.
Pressing the "stop" button, she rewinds the tape to its beginning and then presses only the "play" button.
Chuck Woolery is asking the audience whether they think Roger, a black Army captain, should go out with date number one, number two, or number three. The Chairman's mother has inadvertently taped a minute of The Love Connection.
Then there is a moment of grey fuzziness and belching noise before she sees the video image of her late husband.
Nigel's daughter had interviewed him two months before he died. She wanted to know all about her father's life.
"The games we kids played in those days were fun," says the dead Nigel. "Stoop ball, punch ball, johnny-on-the-pony, ringalevio..."
Stepping back, holding the remote control unit, his widow presses the freeze-frame button.
Nigel is frozen in mid-reminiscence. His mouth is open. A Pall Mall is about to enter it.
The Chairman's mother reverses the action, watches her late husband backwards.
On The Love Connection, the audience has selected date number two for Roger. Roger seems very happy about it.
At LaGuardia Airport, in view of the Fed Chairman's mother should she turn her glance away from the TV and out her western window, the Comptroller of the Currency is on the Eastern shuttle.
He has to get back to Washington.
He has gotten his ticket by using his Diners Club card, given to him by the federal government. The Comptroller of the Currency has pushed his charge card through a scanner which has read the magnetic stripe on its back side and has spit out his ticket. The ticket costs $60.
The Comptroller of the Currency is uncomfort-able in his seat.
These shuttles are like cattle cars, he thinks. No wonder Eastern Air Lines is in such bad financial shape that it has to be taken over by another airline, the parent company of its LaGuardia shuttle rival. On the other airline they give passengers bagels, even on evening flights.
The Comptroller of the Currency doesn't mind not getting a bagel, for in his carry-on luggage is a shopping bag filled with a dozen bagels from
H & H Bagels on Broadway. They are the best bagels in the world. H & H's slogan is "There is no substitute for excellence."
If H & H has not been written up in the new edition of "In Search of Excellence," the Comptroller of the Currency thinks, it is only because the company is too small or because the authors have not sunk their teeth into one of H & H's warm, soft sourdough bagels.
In Washington you cannot get a good bagel.
“Excuse me," says the fourteen-year-old girl sitting in the seat next to the Comptroller of the Currency.
"Yes?" he says.
"Aren't you somebody famous?" the girl asks. "I think I've seen your photo in The Wall Street Journal."
"Young lady," says the Comptroller of the Currency, "The Wall Street Journal does not print photographs."
"Then maybe it was in Vanity Fair," she says.
Reaching into his carry-on bag, the Comptroller of the Currency offers her a sesame bagel.
Three blocks from H & H Bagels and their excellent slogan, the Fed Chairman is still waiting for his Visa cash advance.
"Uh, sir, maybe you should call for assistance," says a man on line, the deputy press secretary for the Controller of the City of New York, a politician under indictment on seven counts of extortion.
"What do you know?" says the Chairman sarcastically. "Your boss can't even spell his job title right."
Nevertheless, he picks up the phone next to the ATM. A woman's voice comes on the line.
"Thank you for calling AT&T," she says.
"You're welcome," says the Chairman. "I'm trying to get money from my Visa and it's not working."
"Have you tried selling it to Haitians?" she asks. "Or those refugees from Sri Lanka, I forget what they're called. Those people would pay a pretty penny for a valid visa."
"My Visa is valid," the Chairman explains. "The ATM seems to be stuck."
"That's why you should choose AT&T for your long distance service," says the woman on the phone. "Companies like ATM may promise lower fees but their service is horrible. Does ATM give you automatic credit for wrong numbers?"
"I'm sure I entered the right number," the Chairman tells her. "I'm the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I ought to know my own PIN. Can't you give me any information?"
"Try NYNEX for directory assistance," the phone woman offers.
Some of the people on the line at Chase Manhattan get impatient. Two of them are carrying handguns.
The Comptroller of the Currency hates takeoffs. At LaGuardia there's one runway that goes out into Long Island Sound and he hates the idea of ending up in the water if the takeoff doesn't go right.
But it does go right, and the Comptroller of the Currency is on his way to the nation's capital.
Below, an air traffic con
troller at LaGuardia files a report of a "near miss." It is her third this week.
Her superior, who's been around since 1967 and who didn't go out on strike and get fired in 1981, takes the report and shrugs.
"Are the Mets playing at Shea tonight?" he asks the air traffic controller who filed the report.
"I can't keep up with everything!" the air traffic controller shouts. In a minute her tears will be smudging her mascara.
Twelve thousand feet up, the Comptroller of the Currency feels relieved when the seat belt light goes off. The girl next to him is on her second raisin bagel.
The Ambassador from South Korea is walking out of the Benetton store in Trump Tower's rose-marble atrium. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, one of his countrymen, has declared the Benetton stores a front for a Soviet spy ring. "Look at the crazy symbol on their logo," the Rev. Moon is quoted as saying. "That has to be some kind of Communist thing."
The Ambassador thinks not, glad he has bought a Perry Ellis matching sweater and skirt ensemble. In the middle of the night he will go into his bathroom in the embassy and try it on.
"Ambassador Park," says an elegant old lady. He knows he has met her somewhere, but these American faces are all the same. "We met at the Leveraged Buyout Ball at the Helmsley Palace last autumn," says the lady. "I'm the mother of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board – you know, the man who controls the monetary supply."
"Ah yes," says the Ambassador. "I remember you well. And how is your pragmatic son?"
"I'm afraid he's stood me up for dinner. I was about to walk down Fifth Avenue to the Godfather's pizza restaurant across from the library and get myself something. Would you care to join me, Ambassador Park?"
"Delighted, dear lady," he responds. "But I am Ambassador An, not Ambassador Park."
The mother of the Chairman smiles. She is too old to be embarrassed. "Well, I knew you were Korean, so I figured I had a good shot with Park. Most of the fruit stands in Manhattan are run by people with that name. And some of the Hyundai dealerships too, no doubt."
Passing St. Patrick's Cathedral, Ambassador An is about to give his companion a faint rebuke, but he notices that she looks faint. Then she passes out.
"Dear lady!" he says. "Help me, someone, this elderly racist has collapsed!"
A police officer comes to the rescue. She bends down close and puts her hand on the old woman's neck.
"Does she have a pulse?" asks the Ambassador. A crowd is beginning to gather around a mime around the corner. The mime is making fun of the way people walk and gesture. Since the mother of the Chairman is unconscious, she is of no use to the mime or to the crowd.
The police officer, also Korean, touches her hand to her nose and sniffs. "The lady has a pulse, all right," she tells the Ambassador. "What I was doing was smelling the perfume on her neck. Unfortunately, I think your companion is the latest victim of the newest wave of product tampering."
"My goodness," says the Ambassador. "What is it?"
"We got word from Bloomingdale's that some joker has been taking bottles of Poison perfume and filling them with liquid Tylenol. Apparently this lady was wearing the tainted scent..."
An ambulance pulls up to the curb, and paramedics take away the Chairman's mother while the Ambassador is questioned by young Officer Park.
Meanwhile, back at the ATM on the Upper West Side, the Chairman is still waiting for his Visa cash advance. Everyone else is using the other teller machine. The Chairman, chief regulator of all Federal Reserve System banks – the Comptroller of the Currency regulates all nationally chartered banks that are not part of the Fed – believes that it is only a matter of a little more time before he has ten twenty-dollar bills in hand.
In the meantime the thirty-fourth floor has gone up on the new co-op across the street and one of the homeless people who was displaced by the new construction has died of old age on one of the benches on the islands on Broadway.
Passing the Chase Manhattan branch where the Chairman is awaiting contact with Visa or the Plus nationwide teller system, a man walking a purebred Jack Russell terrier points to a "NO RADIO" sign on a parked car's windshield and tells his wife, "See, I told you people are getting less materialistic."
She sighs. "I know, I know, if we wait long enough, the Sixties will come back again."
Getting off the Eastern shuttle at National Airport, the Comptroller of the Currency is summoned by the public address system.
He takes the call at a ticket counter where a perplexed customer service representative is looking at the latest automated reservations system work station and thinking, I remember when printers were people like my Uncle Joe and not just peripherals.
"Comptroller of the Currency here," says the Comptroller, ignoring the woman's thoughts.
"This is the Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation."
"Yes?"
"We've got trouble."
You're telling me, the Comptroller thinks. Wait till my wife finds out there are only eight bagels left.
On the twenty-first floor of the World Financial Center, Quynchi Cao, proofreader and word-processor in the Junk Bonds Division of Shearson Lehman/American Express, is reading legal documents that are a necessary concomitant to the coming merger of the nation's biggest auto supply company and the third-largest bank in Tennessee.
Someone could make a fortune if they knew this news, thinks Quynchi. Too bad for me I'm too poor to indulge in insider trading. You really need a million-dollar-a-year salary to do that right, setting up phony bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and such. I have a hard enough time finding anything I can afford at Benetton.
"Well, enough multitasking for one night," says Quynchi's nominal boss's boss, an investment banker who wants to get back to his family in Orange County.
"Did you leave the Wysiwyg report for me to proofread?" asks hard-working Quynchi.
"No, unfortunately not. I took the floppy that contained it home with me last night and was working on it on my PC when my wife called me into dinner. When I came back to our media room, my little boy was playing some adventure game on the computer."
"So?"
"So my son says that the Wysiwyg document is now in a cave guarded by a sleeping dragon. Extreme caution is called for."
Quynchi nods.
As she looks out the river to New Jersey, she wonders if this could be as bad as the typo that got by everyone at The Wall Street Journal. When a columnist touted "punk bands" instead of "junk bonds," the office was in turmoil for weeks – though Quynchi did get to meet those very nice guys in The Vomit Seekers.
In their Georgetown home, the children of the Comptroller of the Currency are watching MTV.
In a La-Z-Boy recliner in the back of the room, their father wonders why he had children. They are no longer an asset, he thinks, but a discretionary acquisition that requires tremendous upkeep for twenty years.
The Comptroller's female discretionary acquisition is watching the broad shoulders and boyish smile of Xerox Sankabrand, lead singer of the Vomit Seekers in the group's top ten video, "Information in Motion."
Clutching dollar bills and plastic money, Xerox is surrounded by scantily-dressed girls as he sings:
I pay my Visa bill with my MasterCard
So what's the commotion?
Money's just information in motion,
Information in motion,
Information in motion...
In his La-Z-Boy, the Comptroller of the Currency eats the last of the H & H Bagels, more convinced than ever that there is no substitute for excellence and that children are not cost-effective.
I Hate All of You on This L Train Page 3
