And hemorrhoid commercials — I don’t have to watch them anymore, either. Do they still run the one where the woman is talking about her hemorrhoids and underneath her face it says, “Roxanne Burgess, Hemorrhoid Sufferer”?
I used to wonder how they found that woman. It’s not the sort of thing you hold tryouts for, I don’t suppose. How would you keep each contestant’s score?
Do you know what really would be a marvelous invention? A remote control device for life. Whenever you found yourself in an unpleasant situation, you would pull out your remote control and switch around until you found a situation you liked better.
Let’s say you’ve been out half the night with your rowdy friends. You come home singing drunk, and your wife greets you at the door and begins calling you horrible names. Not to worry. You simply pull out your remote control and ZAP!, you’re right back with your rowdy friends drinking beer and telling lies again.
* * *
So, you see, there are a few modern inventions that I enjoy, but there are many more that have weasled their way into our lives and have become great nuisances.
Take airplanes, for example. I realize that they date all the way back to the Wright Brothers, but airplanes didn’t come into my life until after I was old enough to understand that anything going that fast and that high is inherently dangerous.
I fell in love with trains as a small boy. Somebody — it may have been what’s-his-name, the guy who writes the daffy poems — once said, “After spending a day watching trains, baseball seems a silly game.” (I just thought of his name: Rod McKuen, and that’s the only thing he ever said worth remembering.)
Trains make sense to me. The engine moves and the cars attached behind it follow.
Trains are also romantic, especially their names. I mentioned earlier that I wrote a song about a train called the “Nancy Hanks.” It ran between Atlanta and Savannah on the Central of Georgia line. Once, while riding the “Nancy Hanks” from Atlanta to Savannah, I drank fourteen beers, in the club car — which was not that big a deal, but getting up and walking to the restroom twenty-six times on a train that is rocking back and forth may yet be a record for American railroads.
Another time I rode a train called the “San Francisco Zephyr” from Chicago to Frisco. (A “zephyr” is a west wind, incidentally.) Somewhere between Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming, I met an Italian fellow in the club car. He spoke very little English; I spoke no Italian. I did, however, manage to get his name and to ask, “What do you do for a living in Italy?”
“I am painter,” Oscar said.
See how romantic it is traveling by train? Have you ever had a drink with an Italian artist somewhere between Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming, while traveling in an airplane? Neither have I.
“And what do you paint?” I asked my Italian friend. “Landscapes, still-lifes, pastels?”
“Houses,” Oscar answered. “I am house painter.”
Okay, so how many Italian house painters have you met on airplanes?
Eventually, my profession led me to travel a great deal. When you write books, you have to go many places in an attempt to sell those books. Also, people will invite you to make speeches in front of large groups (that frankly would rather have skipped the dinner and the speaker and kept the cocktail party going).
It soon became evident to me that either I would have to give up the rails as my primary mode of transportation or get a new profession, such as working in a liquor store.
In a more civilized time, a book publisher would say, “Could you be in Bakersfield, California, by Friday?” They would say that on the previous Saturday.
“Certainly,” you would answer. “I can connect with the ‘Super Chief’ in Chicago and be there in plenty of time.”
But book publishers don’t say that anymore. Now they say, “Can you be in Bakersfield by five this afternoon?”, and they say that at ten in the morning. And you answer, “No problem. I’ll shave and shower and catch the noon flight, and with the time change, I’ll be able to get a haircut at the the airport in L.A.”
Anyway, the guy at the liquor store said he didn’t need any help, so I had to take up flying.
The main reason I’ve never liked flying is that I’m terrified at the very thought of it. My friends have all attempted to make me feel better by pointing out that more people die from slipping in the bathtub than in commercial airplane crashes. If there were any way to travel by bathtub, I tell them, I certainly would do it.
If airplanes are so safe, why do they make you strap yourself in the seat? And why do they always point out, “Your seat cushions may be used for flotation”? If I had wanted to float to Bakersfield, I would have chartered a canoe.
And I still don’t understand how those big suckers fly. I have a friend who is brilliant in the area of engineering and such. One day, we were riding near the airport and a large plane took off over our car.
“What makes those big suckers fly?” I asked him.
“Well, you see, there is the air foil and lift and blah, blah, blah, technical, technical....”
“I know all that,” I said, “but what I really want to know is, What makes those big suckers fly?”
Faced with the option of either flying or drawing unemployment, I searched for ways to control my terror. For the benefit of others who may feel the same, here is how I cope with my own fear:
—I drink a lot before getting on the plane. I’m not talking about having one drink or two. I’m talking about joining all the airlines’ private clubs, where the booze is free, and drinking six or eight double screwdrivers and then calling for one of those buggies they carry handicapped people in to take me to my gate.
—I drink a lot while I’m in the air, and I ask the stewardesses to allow me to mix my own drinks, so they’ll be very strong. The only problem with drinking this much is that sometimes when the airplane lands, I get off and cannot remember what city I was traveling to. So I ask and somebody tells me, but then I can’t remember what I was supposed to do when I got there, so I go back to Delta’s Crown Room or Eastern’s Ionosphere Lounge and have another drink.
—When I have a choice, I prefer to fly with the airline that has had the latest crash. I figure my odds are better on an airline that isn’t due.
—I never fly on the national airlines of Communist countries, or countries where they think cows are sacred and allow them to wander around in the streets.
—I never fly on commuter airlines. If the pilots are so good, why are they stuck flying for Air Chance (“We’ll take a chance, if you will”)? Besides, you know what they serve you to eat on airlines like that? The stewardess passes around an apple and a pocket knife.
—No matter what, I never go to the toilet in an airplane to do anything I can’t do standing up. This eventually may lead to a very embarrassing situation for me, but I don’t want them to pick through the charred remains of a crash and find me with my pants down sitting on a toilet.
—I call the pilot the night before takeoff to make certain that he isn’t drinking and that he is in bed early.
—I am able to relax a bit after the seat belt sign goes off and the pilot comes on the intercom. If they’ve turned off the warning light and the pilot doesn’t have anything to do but talk on the intercom, I figure all is well in the cockpit. On some flights, the pilot never comes on the intercom. I order another drink when that happens.
—I pray a lot. There are no atheists in a foxhole, and I doubt there are any in a 727 that is passing through heavy turbulence after takeoff from Philadelphia at night. I try never to have any dirty thoughts on an airplane, so God will like me and listen to my prayers.
Even if airplanes weren’t frightening, they still would be a large pain. The food, of course, is awful; all airports are crowded; and there’s usually a baby crying on every airplane (must be some sort of FAA regulation).
Planes are also frequently late, they can’t take off or land in heavy fog, and sometimes too many planes are waiting
to land or take off. Waiting to take off isn’t that unsettling, but circling around waiting to land, knowing that a frustrated and overworked air controller is the only thing between you and a mid-air collision, is not a happy thought.
Keeping up with airline fares these days is also a big headache. I always feel guilty when I fly because I might not have gotten the best fare. You have to be careful trying to get too good a deal, however. I saw advertised recently a flight between Atlanta and New York for $26. I called the airline to inquire. The hitch was that you had to ride in a crate in the cargo hold.
Think how much better the world would be today if the airplane had never been invented. There wouldn’t be any threat of nuclear war. How are the Russians going to drop a bomb on us without an airplane? They sure couldn’t throw it out the back of a panel truck.
And if flying had never been invented, we wouldn’t have spent all that money on the Space Program, in which we sent a bunch of people to the moon to find out that it looks a lot like Nevada.
If we didn’t have airplanes and still took trains, we would know a lot more about our country. You would be surprised how much of the country you can see from a train window. Did you know, for instance, that there are more piles of junk in Newark, New Jersey, than anywhere else in America?
If there were no airplanes, we wouldn’t have to put up with Frank Borman, and no matter what a terrorist threatened to do, there is no way he could hijack a train to Cuba. And did you ever lose your bags on a train trip? Of course not. I took a flight between Atlanta and Charlotte once, but the airline sent my bags to Caracas.
Planes cause people to be in a rush. They cause them to go a lot of places they probably wouldn’t go to if they thought about it long enough — places like Nassau and New York City and Cannes, France, where I flew to once. After about an hour, watching barebreasted women gets boring; then you have to go back to the hotel, where every Algerian and his brother-in-law is in the lobby having a loud argument.
And finally, if we hadn’t been smart enough to invent airplanes, we likely wouldn’t have been smart enough to invent computers, either; and I definitely could do without computers. In fact, I may be one of the last holdouts against computers, and I can prove it by explaining that I am typing these very words on a 1959 manual Royal typewriter for which I paid ninety bucks and wouldn’t sell for five times that, because I don’t know if I would be able to find another one.
People in the swing of modern ways often say to me, “Why don’t you get yourself one of those word processors? It would make writing a lot easier for you.”
No, it wouldn’t. First, I would have to sit for hours at a time staring at a television screen with words on it. It would be like watching one of those cable television stations where they play music in the background and words appear on the screen, giving you the news and baseball linescores.
If I watch one of those stations for longer than ten minutes, I get sick to my stomach. It’s the same feeling I get when I try to read in a car.
Also, I don’t know where the words go in one of those word processors. You type a lot of words onto the screen, which will hold just so many, and then they disappear. What if they accidentally went into somebody else’s word processor? Not that anybody else would want my words, but some things I write never appear in print and would tend to embarrass me if somebody else were to look at them.
All of journalism has gone to computers these days. In fact, nobody types on paper anymore. When I was an editor, we had paper all over the place, especially on the floor. It gave the office a homey look. Now, there is no paper and there is carpet on the floor. I walk into a newspaper office today and I feel like opening a checking account.
When I write, I like to hear some noise. I enjoy hearing the tap-tap-tap of the keys on my Royal manual. When I hear that sound, especially if I hear it without interruption, I know I’m getting something accomplished. As with any machine, however, minor problems occasionally occur with my typewriter. For instance, I once wrote an entire book without the letter “e” available to me, because the “e” character had broken on its key.
When I handed in my manuscript, the editor said, “What are all these blank spaces on your manuscript?”
“Wherever you see a blank space,” I said, “that’s where an ‘e’ goes.”
There’s also the small matter of maintaining a fresh ribbon in a manual typewriter, and sometimes the keys get stuck together and you get ink all over your hands trying to pry them apart. I’m constantly getting the “g,” “j,” and “f’ keys stuck together, because I have bricks for hands. But at least my manual typewriter can’t be knocked out by lightning and won’t go on the fritz if I happen to spill coffee on it.
Frankly, I don’t dislike computers as much as I dislike people who spend a lot of time operating them. They speak to one another in a language I don’t understand, and I’m convinced they think they’re a lot smarter than people who don’t know anything about computers. I have a feeling that these are the same people who carried around slide rules when I was in high school and college and thought spending an afternoon discussing logarithms was keen fun.
Computers also have become an excuse. For example, “Pardon me, but is flight 108 to Cleveland on time?”
“Sorry, sir, but our computer is down.”
I think what they really mean is that they have lost flight 108 to Cleveland but won’t admit it. That’s something else I never had to deal with when I rode trains.
“Is ol’ 98 running on time?”
“She was about two minutes late into Steamboat Junction, but she’s highballin’ now.”
Once, a large company owed me some money. It never came. I called and inquired about my check.
“Our computers have been down,” I was told.
“Isn’t there a company officer somewhere who can simply write a check and then you could mail it to me?”
“All our checks and mailing are done by computer.”
I know what they were doing. They were using my money to pay for the repairs on their stupid computers.
I’m afraid we are ruining an entire generation of Americans by getting our children involved in computers at a very young age. In some elementary schools today, kids bring their own computers to class. All I needed in elementary school was a box of crayons and milk money.
You give a kid a computer and strange things can happen. One of the little boogers eventually will figure out how to launch a Pershing missile, and try explaining to what’s left of the Kremlin that little Johnny Manderson of Fort Worth, Texas, was just kidding around on his computer. I say put a twenty-one-year-old age limit on computers and send the kids outside to play ball or go drag racing. Should a kid really know his user I.D. before he knows how many fingers to hold up for his age?
My first experience with computers came when I entered college. They handed me computer cards as I enrolled in different classes. Each computer card had written on it, “Do not fold, bend, staple, or mutilate.” I wondered what would happen if I should fold, bend, staple, or mutilate one of the cards.
My curiosity finally got to me, so I bent and folded and stapled and mutilated and even poured catsup on my computer card. There were no serious injuries or substantial penalties forthcoming, but it took me two quarters to get my standing as a home economics major changed.
All sorts of things puzzle me about computers:
—Computer shopping: Do we really want to shop by computer? The instant you see a TV commercial, you press a button on your computer and a conveyor belt delivers Ginsu knives to your kitchen and deducts $14.95 from your account. Could you really tell if a pair of loafers would fit by looking at them on a video monitor?
—Easy-to-use computers: That’s easy for somebody else to say. I can barely operate a bottle of aspirin.
—Talking computers: Now there are even cars that talk to you. “You need gas, you need gas,” says your car. Talking cars give me gas.
—Understanding
computers: Where do all those cables on computers go to? Is there a little Oriental guy in a room somewhere with an abacus going a mile a minute? What’s the difference between “software” and “hardware”? Is one part wool and itches a lot? Is a “semiconductor” a person who works for the railroad part-time?
—Computer dating: What if the computer doesn’t mind girls who don’t shave their legs and gets me a date with one? I’m the one who has to kiss her goodnight, not the computer.
—Personal computers: I don’t want to get personal with a computer. I wasn’t compatible with three wives. How am I supposed to be compatible with IBM?
You know something else about computers? There’s nothing funny about them. In doing research for this chapter, I looked in several computer magazines. There was not a single joke section or cartoon in any of them.
The big question we must all ask is, Where is this computer business going to end? How much of our lives are they going to take over? The first computer filled a warehouse. Now, a computer the size of your fingernail can do the same amount of computing. Will they eventually be like contact lenses, only worse? You see somebody down on their hands and knees and you say, “Lose something?”
“Yeah,” comes the answer. “I dropped my computer. I know it’s here in the grass somewhere.”
Computers can even talk to each other now, so what’s to keep them from plotting against us? And here is something else to worry about: What if all the computers on earth went down at one time? Life as we know it would come to a standstill all over the planet. The only people who would know how to carry on would be natives who live in the African bush who never have heard of computers, and me, who has steadfastly refused to learn to operate one.
Frankly, I’m sort of looking forward to that day. I could dress up in a loin cloth with my friends from the bush, and we could dance up and down and I could laugh and say, “I told you so,” and poke all those uppity computer-types in their butts with my spear.
Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Page 20
