Thinking about this gave me the answer. I could make money here the same way I had been making it in 2003. They had plenty of crime in 1941, if motion pictures were accurate sources of information. I’d just set myself up as a detective here, and wait for the space/time continuum to make a mistake and give me an opportunity to get back home.
I looked at my watch. It was too late to start being a detective today. The sun was going down and people were heading for home. They wouldn’t need any detectives until tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. at the earliest. So what was I going to do for food and shelter tonight? I saw a drunk across the street weaving into a particularly rundown and inexpensive looking hotel called The Colossal-Majestic.
The roof of The Colossal-Majestic was sagging and a lot of the windows were out, and while I was looking at it an entire layer of paint peeled off and a bed slid out of a window and landed in the alley. A sign out front of the hotel said “Rooms With Heat: $2 a night. Rooms Without Heat: $1. Rooms Without Anything: Ten Cents a night.” Another sign said “We Don’t Examine Money Very Closely”. This was the hotel for me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I woke up the next morning cold and cramped. The room, as advertised, was a miracle of understatement. No heat, no lights, no blankets, no bed, just me. I washed my face in some snow that had drifted in through the window, and dried it on a handy rodent. Then, refreshed, disheveled, smelly, and hopeful, I headed out to make my mark in prewar America.
I found a likely looking street corner, one with lots of foot traffic and no competing detectives, and began accosting passersby, asking them if they had any crimes that needed solving today.
“Detective?” I yelled. “Crime solved, mister? Trace something for you, ma’am? Who else wants a detective?”
Business was bad at first. Everyone was evidently satisfied with their current detective. But I finally attracted the attention of a man who, as luck would have it, was actually on his way downtown to hire a detective. This chance meeting would save him some shoe leather, he informed me, rubbing his hands. He asked me if I came highly recommended and I said I sure as hell did. That was all he needed to know, and he started explaining his problem to me.
Unfortunately, the lunch hour was just starting and the foot traffic on my street corner suddenly increased. Pedestrians kept pushing their way between us, and a street vendor rolled up and set up shop next to us, yelling out the good news that he had peanuts for sale.
My prospective client asked me: “Do you have someplace else we could talk? Someplace quieter? Like an office?”
I told him yes, I did have an office, but we couldn’t use it right now. He asked me why not and we stared at each other until both of us started to go to sleep. Finally he realized I was never going to answer him.
“Well, we’ll do it here then,” he said. “The thing I want you to investigate is connected with the Danielson Case.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, the ferry boat scandal over in Marina City.”
“Where’s that?”
“Never mind.”
So I lost my first client. I realized I was going to have to bone up on the current events and geography around here if I was ever going to be of any value to my clients. I made a mental note to see if there was a library in this town.
While I was making, and admiring, this mental note, a cop nudged me with his nightstick.
“Move along,” he said. “You can’t be a detective here.”
I didn’t want any more trouble with the police, so I moved to an area where no pedestrians were walking, which satisfied the cop, but made it harder for me to conduct my business. I could yell and wave at passersby to come over to where I was in the flowerbed, but no one seemed to want to do that. If anything, they moved farther away from me the louder I shouted and the more I waved and made faces at them.
I reassessed my situation. It was clear that if I was going to be a successful detective here, I needed an office. That would cost money. And I’d need furnishings; a desk, file cabinets, a client chair, and so on.
That meant that at least for awhile, I was going to have to get some other kind of job, a less glamorous job, until I could build up some capital. This was a little depressing for me, because I like the power and prestige that goes with being a shamus more than the power and prestige that goes with, say, pushing a mop. But I cheered up when I remembered that I was the Man From The Future. I was 62 years ahead of these pre-1950 yokels mentally. I’d wow em back here in the primitive past.
The first thing I did was check out the want-ads in the paper. But I was in for a disappointment there. Every job seemed to require some experience or skills I lacked. Do you know how to be the comptroller for a canning company? Or how to build infernal machines for Anarchists? I don’t.
And the lowest level jobs were out too, because they insisted that I not have some of the qualifications I did have. Like they didn’t want me to have more than a third grade education, because they felt that if I had a fourth grade education, or its equivalent, I wouldn’t be carrying sewer pipes for them very long. It would just be a pit stop for me professionally. So it seemed I was overqualified for some jobs, and underqualified for the rest. The general impression I got was that 1941 could get along perfectly well without me.
But if there’s one thing you can say about us Burlys (okay, Torgesons. See chapter 1), it’s that we don’t give up right away. We don’t give up for months. So I went out on a series of job interviews and tried to bluff my way through them, saying yes I was a fully qualified whatever-you-said, or no, I’ve never heard of the Union movement, what’s that? - whatever I guessed they wanted to hear. Lying like this works pretty well, I’ve always found. Because it allows you to tell a prospective employer things you could never tell him if you were being truthful. But you tell that to the youth of today and they won’t listen. They think they know it all.
The only times I ran into trouble were when I didn’t lie. Like when I inadvertently filled out employment application forms with accurate information. My birth date, for example, raised a lot of red flags.
“Born in 1965, eh?” some personnel guy would say.
“Yes.”
“I guess that makes you about minus 24 years old.”
“I’m more mature than my age would indicate.”
Sometimes I’d get over all the other hurdles and they’d take me out to the work site to see me in action before they hired me. To see me demonstrate the expertise I had bragged about on my application form. This was a problem, because it’s easier to bluff your way through a written test than it is to bluff your way through real life.
They would ask me, for example, to run along a steel girder 20 stories above the pavement carrying a bucket of rivets. And I would, using this same example, fall off. So there goes that job.
But just when I was thinking I’d never be able to make any money in this time period, I found exactly what I was looking for. I was walking down the street, fingering the 3 cents I had in my pocket and discovering that I now only had 2 cents because I had fingered one of them to pieces, when I passed by a window with a sign in it that said “Day Jobs: No Experience Necessary”. Other signs in the window were even more encouraging. “No Experience? No Problem!”, “Prison Record? Hooray!”, “Can’t Read? Read This!”
I went inside and in almost no time I was earning real 1941 style money. My first job involved being set on fire in a vacant lot so the fire department could practice putting people out. I made five dollars doing that. And the sign in the window was right. No experience was necessary. All I had to do was stand there and scream. Anybody can do that.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Things were looking up for me now. I had five dollars. But I felt I was making money too slowly and painfully, and they hadn’t discovered antibiotics yet. This was what gave me my big idea.
It occurred to me that the big advantage I had here in the past was that I knew what the future was going to look like.
None of these jackasses did. I had been to the future, and even taken a picture of it. I could use that advance knowledge to make myself rich overnight. All I had to do was pick out something that was common in my time but wasn’t available here yet, and then “invent” it. It would be hard luck on whoever was destined to really invent the thing, but I figured screw him.
I got some sheets of writing paper from the lobby in my hotel, then started writing down all the things I’d noticed weren’t available in these primitive days. The list was surprisingly long, starting with the ball point pen I asked the guy behind the registry desk for. He’d never heard of such a thing and looked at me like I was a witch. So I settled for a pencil.
1941, I wrote, didn’t have ball point pens, transistors, long playing records, TV dinners, electric toothbrushes, push button telephones, tubeless tires, microwaves, penicillin, VCRs, or almost anything made out of aluminum or plastic. Those were still exotic materials in this time period. Practically everything in 1941 was made of iron, wood, glass, or mud.
For the next few nights I worked feverishly, spending all my spare time and all the money I was making on my day jobs, trying to build a high definition television. Finally I gave up on that and switched to a ball point pen. After my prototype had flown to pieces for the fourteenth time, embedding the little ball in my cheek for the ninth time, I pushed all my inventing equipment out of the window and went out to get drunk. At least I had the skill to do that.
I hadn’t realized that I never actually had a clue as to how any of the inventions of my era worked. Why hadn’t somebody told me I was ignorant? What was the big secret?
After I’d had a few beers, and had taken out my anger and frustration on some smaller drunks, I started to cheer up again. I realized the mistake I had made was in trying to duplicate the actual important achievements of my time, the things that made life better, the things with moving parts. I could make just as much money, maybe more, by duplicating the crap of my era.
So I got to work again, trying to cash in, in advance, on some of the nationwide fads that I knew were coming. Davy Crockett hats, disco, that sort of thing. But I’ll tell you a secret – most people wouldn’t tell you this, but I will. I’m your friend - it’s hard to get a nationwide fad going. The nation is a big place. You can get, say, Cincinnati whipped into a frenzy about your product, but just as you’re just finishing that, now Detroit is starting to calm down, so you have to run back there. The whole thing is harder than it sounds.
After two weeks of work, all I had managed to sell were three Davy Crockett Caps, two Ralph Kramden Bus Driver Games, and one recording of me singing “Stayin’ Alive”. And the people who bought them weren’t very excited about their purchases after awhile, and a couple of them wanted to sell them back to me, but I wasn’t interested.
I’d like to report to you that it wasn’t long after this that I figured a way out of my predicament and got back to the good old present day, but it didn’t turn out to be that easy. It was eight long months before my chance came to get home.
I spent those eight months continuing to earn a small humiliating living doing day jobs. I never could quite get enough money saved up to get my detective business going, mostly because I kept coming up with brilliant ways to triple my money overnight. I kept thinking I could remember which Bum of the Month was going to beat Joe Louis, but it was never any of the guys I put money on. So I had to keep starting over. I pushed mops all over 1941, passed out handbills, posed for “Before” pictures, and so on. My one big payday was a one-day gig I had doing a cameo appearance in the movie The Pride Of The Yankees. In the scene where Lou Gehrig finds out he’s dying, I’m the guy who’s pointing at him and laughing.
To save money I tried living with my grandparents for awhile, but they were uncomfortable having me around. I kept hearing them muttering things like “It’s not natural”, “Who is he?” and “Space/time continuum”. So after a couple of weeks I split.
One money making idea I had during this period promised to be a gold mine for me. I wrote out motion picture scripts that were word for word transcriptions of successful films I had seen in the 1990’s, then shipped them off to Hollywood and sat back to wait for the checks to come rolling in. All the scripts were returned to me, with rejection slips that said they stunk to high heaven. I read the scripts again and they did! This made me mad on several levels.
Despite my shortage of money, life in 1941 wasn’t too bad. Like I said before, I’m not a history buff, but the past did have its charms. The food didn’t have any preservatives or vitamins in it, so it had a pleasant, dangerous taste that was new to me. There weren’t any safety rules anywhere, so if you hurt yourself, at least you didn’t get yelled at too. And the whole year was in full natural color, not the grainy black and white I was led to expect. It was all kind of pleasant. A restful period in our history to be alive, I felt. It’s true that there was a war going on in Europe, but Europe was a long ways away. You couldn’t hear any of the screaming where I was.
The only time the war entered my life at all in those days was the afternoon I was walking down the street and Rudolf Hess landed on me. I told him he was supposed to land in Scotland, not on top of me, and I expected the Third Reich to replace my hat with one just as good. I hinted that otherwise there would be trouble. Germany was already fighting with France and England. They didn’t want to piss me off too.
He tried to surrender to me, but I didn’t have any facilities for housing any prisoners at that time. He would have had to sleep in my bed with me. So I told him he’d better just move along. He wandered off, dragging his parachute behind him, looking back at me like I was a jerk or something. The feeling is mutual, pal. I guess he eventually got to Scotland and lost the war for his country all right.
I wasn’t the only person who was ignoring the war. Nobody in our town was interested. It was too far away, and no one liked those Europes anyway. The thing the people in our town wanted to talk about – the thing that really got the newspapers excited - was the race for District Attorney. This race looked like it was going to be not so much an election, but a coronation, for the incumbent, a guy by the name of Mandible, oddly enough. I wondered if he was any relation. He was the most popular man in the city, and everyone from the Mayor down was stumping for him. But I wasn’t really following the election. I wasn’t eligible to vote in this time period anyway, not being alive in any way that could be measured.
Most of my leisure time was spent in bars, where I would regale the locals with my exciting tales of the future.
“In the future,” I informed my slack-jawed audience, “there will be gas pumps that talk.”
“What will they talk about?” hushed voices would ask.
“Gas.”
This didn’t seem so much unbelievable as boring to them.
“So?” asked one of them.
“So, that’s something that I know and you don’t know. Advantage, me.”
This got them confused. “But you just told us all about it,” said one.
“Everybody in the place knows it now,” said another.
“We can’t stop thinking about it at this point,” added a third.
My superior grin faded into an equal scowl. They were right. I vowed not to tell them any more about the future. Why should I give away my advantage? But it’s hard not to show off how smart you are. All smart guys know this. After a couple more drinks I was back to dispensing knowledge again.
“In the future,” I intoned, “there will be fins on cars. Then they will be gone. And someday there will be a man named Hitler or Hister who will cause a great war…
Someone raised their hand. “You mean that war that’s been going on in Europe for the last two years?”
“Yes!” I said impressively.
The more I talked about the future, the more interested they got. “What’s going to happen in 1977?” asked one.
“I forget.”
“How about 1978?”
“Forget. Wait, I think I remember something… no, it’s gone.”
“Gee, the future sounds real exciting,” one of the drunks sneered.
“Hey, lay off the future,” I warned him. “It’s all right.”
Sometimes I got competition from other drunks in the bar who claimed they were from a more interesting future than I was.
“In the future I’m from,” said one drunk in the back, “everybody is movie stars. And we’re all married to Carole Lombard. And our dogs crap money.”
I didn’t remember any of that, and doubted that this man had ever traveled to the future at all, but he certainly had a more riveting story to tell than I did. After awhile I found myself making up stuff too. I didn’t feel good about that, but I didn’t want to lose my audience. Once you’ve been the center of attention, it’s hard to go back to being one of the guys in the corner.
Through all of this, I never gave up trying to find a way to get back to 2003. I made it a point to always stand within five feet of anyone I saw carrying a briefcase, just on the off chance he was a time traveler. I haunted briefcase stores. I even listened to The Briefcase Hour on the radio for awhile. But that was a stretch, and the show was pretty terrible so I switched to Edgar Bergen.
Once, in desperation, I tried to attract attention to my plight by damaging the space/time continuum, figuring science would eventually trace the problem back to me. So I booed the hell out of Citizen Kane Part Two, the film that focuses on what Kane said after “Rosebud” - all those long sentences he yelled out real fast at the end there, and that song he sang - trying to make the movie into a flop, instead of the biggest blockbuster in film sequel history. I figured future film critics would sense something was wrong, alert the scientific community, and maybe come to my rescue somehow. It flopped all right, thanks to me, but no film critics ever showed up. Lazy bastards.
The Time Machine Did It Page 7
