Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  Kids going to school are lucky. When you see what a mess we make of our civilization, it’s amazing we have local governments that govern us, water and sewer systems that work and pipes and wires that supply us with electricity and telephone communications.

  As civilized as all these things are, nothing we have done with our world is any better than our determination to educate our young.

  Phrases like “Experience is the best teacher” and “There are a lot of things you can’t learn from books” are fine to pull out once in a while. These sayings are partly true but they’re most popular with people who feel inferior because they didn’t get a good education. They’re trying to convince themselves and their friends they didn’t miss anything. They missed something and they know it.

  Setting out to learn something in a program designed by professionals to teach the most about a subject in the shortest time is a wonderfully civilized thing to do and by far the most efficient way to learn. Putting aside a major portion of your life—often more than twenty years—to cram in facts that might otherwise never come to your attention is infinitely more efficient than experience. Learning from experience is slow and painful. Anyone can gain scientific knowledge about temperature by spilling boiling water on himself, but it’s the hard way. Experience is a good teacher but it’s no substitute for a real, live one.

  The facts and background of subjects like literature, history, science and arts never come to the attention of people whose only teacher is experience because these people choose to quit school and go to work. Millions of people in the world less lucky than most of us never even have the opportunity to quit school. They go from their mothers’ arms to work.

  The institution of school in our society is almost too good to believe. In school you aren’t expected to be doing anything else. You don’t normally have a job or, ideally, even any major worries about money. You have special hours to learn in and a special place to go. Almost none of us recognize how good life is in school until we’re out of it.

  With all the kids going to school, we should all take some satisfaction in having done this one thing right.

  Playgrounds for Grown-ups

  One of the saddest days of my life was the day I realized I’d played my last football game. As a young boy I played in pickup games in vacant lots on Saturdays in the fall. I was already certain that I loved the game better than any other.

  All through high school and into college I played my favorite game and then, one day, it was over. It was my last game and I knew it.

  There are school administrators who emphasize to students the good sense of playing what they call “carryover” sports in high school and college. These are the games like golf and tennis that you continue to play as you age. I understand the argument in their favor but as bad as I felt the day of that last football game, I wouldn’t trade my football days if I could have started playing golf in grade school and grown up to be Arnold Palmer.

  It’s a problem, though. The problem is that too many games we play in our youth turn us into fans instead of participants when we’re older. There’s no question that Americans are watching too much and doing too little when it comes to sports.

  If I ever run for office—and you’re safe because I never will—I’d run on a ticket that endorses spending federal, state and local-government money for an adult sports facility in every village, town and city in the country. They would be on equal footing with our schools, our museums and our libraries.

  There ought to be a big field house in every community where adults could play the year round. There’s no reason for gymnasiums to be limited to the use of school kids. I don’t know many adults who wouldn’t get a lot more exercise and enjoy themselves playing games that demanded some physical exertion if there were facilities for it in their communities.

  Would it really be too expensive for this rich country to have buildings with racquetball and tennis courts, swimming pools, gymnasiums, weight and exercise rooms and good locker-room facilities? I always look toward our $300 billion defense budget. Just give us one of those billions and we can build a thousand adult sports complexes and spend $1 million each on every one of them.

  I’ve never spent much time in a women’s locker room but there’s something very open, friendly and honest about a men’s locker room. I like the smell, the steamy atmosphere, the camaraderie and the disheveled look of it. They’re islands of civilization in a mean world. (I have heard … and this is only hearsay, mind you … that in a women’s locker room the showers are usually divided into individual stalls so that women have privacy bathing. If this is true, it wouldn’t have the same spirit as a men’s locker room. If elected to office, I will vote to take down the walls in the women’s shower rooms all across the country. Women, like men, have got to face the fact that we’re all a little funny-looking naked.)

  Athletic clubs in most big cities have good facilities but until recently they’ve been exclusively men’s clubs and they’re prohibitively expensive. Membership in the New York Athletic Club costs thousands of dollars and it doesn’t let everyone in who has the money, either. Even at the famous West Side YMCA in New York, membership in the Business Men’s Club is $810 the first year.

  As a result of all the high-priced athletic clubs in town and the exclusive golf and tennis clubs in the country, not many people can afford to do much about sports, once they’re adults, except sit and watch the games on television.

  I hereby propose an adult sports facility for every community in the United States.

  One Hot Ticket

  The medium-size fellow wearing the blue baseball cap looked OK to me as I got off the bus in front of the stadium for the Giants-Dallas game. I was carrying a small canvas bag with my radio, binoculars, two tuna-fish sandwiches, four cookies, a thermos of coffee with cream and no sugar, and a raincoat. In my pocket was an extra ticket to the game.

  My idea of a week’s vacation is going to a Giants game alone on a Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t have been happier. If I could whistle, I’d have been whistling.

  There were a dozen young hustlers all around yelling for tickets.

  “Who’s got one? I need a ticket here.”

  Most of them were scalpers who would resell any ticket they got at a profit. The guy in the blue cap didn’t look like a scalper, and I felt selfish going into the stadium with two tickets so I went up to him. “You looking for a ticket?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Sure would like to see the game. I went to school with Lawrence Taylor.”

  It amused me to see the look on his face when I handed him the ticket and walked away. “Mr. Nice Guy,” I thought to myself about myself.

  Even though I go to the games alone, my friend Gene sits immediately in front of me, and I’m surrounded by dozens of other friends whose names I don’t know because we have met only two hundred times, at eight Giants home games a year for the past twenty-five years. I don’t know their politics, their religion or what they do for a living. They may steal for all I know but eight times a year for three hours they’re my closest friends.

  “What did you do with your other ticket?” Gene asked.

  “I gave it to a guy out front,” I said. “He was OK.”

  “He’ll sell it,” Gene said.

  “No,” I said. “He was OK. If the guy who comes isn’t wearing a blue cap, you’re right.”

  As I was bending over to dig my sandwiches out of the canvas bag, a voice said, “Pardon me. I have that seat.”

  The black guy standing next to me with the ticket stub was six feet four inches and must have weighed 240 pounds. He should have been down on the field.

  Gene turned, gave me a look and said, “Where’s the blue cap? You’re some judge of character, Rooney.”

  “Where’d you get the ticket?” I asked the man.

  “Outside,” the big guy said. “Paid fifty dollars for it.”

  Mad is too mild a word for how I felt over having been taken.

  I settle
d down to enjoy the game and the big guy turned out to be an OK fan, but I was still mad. At halftime, the big guy went out back. He returned with a Coke and said he’d just seen the fellow who sold him the ticket.

  I jumped out of my seat and ran up the stairs and through the tunnel to the refreshment area.

  The guy with the blue cap was just coming out of the men’s room. I grabbed him by the arm.

  “Give me the fifty dollars,” I screamed.

  “Let me explain,” he said as his face went white.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t know who’s gonna win this fight but we’re gonna have one.”

  At that moment, my friend Gene appeared at my left shoulder.

  “Is this the guy?” Gene asked menacingly.

  Gene looks and talks like a retired New York City cop.

  “I don’t have the fifty dollars,” the wimp said. “I’m with some other guys. We needed three tickets.”

  “I’m gonna get the fifty dollars,” I said.

  “Look,” he said, showing me his empty wallet.

  I reached quickly for his wallet and took out an American Express card.

  “When you get the fifty dollars, I’ll give it back,” I said, and we left him.

  Midway through the third quarter, the wimp in the blue cap appeared, holding a lump of bills.

  “Here,” he said, handing me the bills, “but I want to explain.”

  “Get lost,” I said, taking the money and returning his American Express card. I passed the $50 on to the big guy and went back to the game.

  On the bus home Gene said, “Did the big guy ever pay you seventeen dollars for the ticket?”

  “Listen,” I said, “when the Giants beat Dallas, it’s worth thirty-four dollars to me.”

  The Best Hotel Room I Ever Had

  Anyone who’s never been broke cannot possibly appreciate having money as much as someone who has been broke. I never thought I’d live to think so but I know now that it was a good thing for me to have lived through a serious, jobless depression of my own years ago. I never get over appreciating being OK now.

  I got thinking about being broke this morning because I just read that YMCAs across the country are closing their residential rooms. Twenty years ago Ys across the country had sixty-six thousand rooms they rented to young men looking for temporary places to stay. Last year they were down to thirty thousand rooms and more are closing.

  During a period of almost a year when I was desperately broke, I often came to New York City looking for work or for someone who’d buy an article I’d written. My budget allowed little for a hotel room and I often stayed at the YMCA on Thirty-fourth Street for 50 cents a night.

  Of all the things I’ve ever bought with money, nothing compares with what I got for that 50 cents. The rooms were tiny. I suppose their dimensions were something like twelve feet long and eight feet wide. The bed took up most of the room. Beyond the bed there was a small dresser on one side of a little window and one chair on the other. When you checked in, there was one clean towel, a washcloth and a small bar of soap waiting for you on the bed. The bathroom was down the hall.

  One bitter-cold January day I arrived in New York during a raging snowstorm with nothing but a small suitcase, a portable typewriter and high hopes for a job from an interview I was to have with an advertising agency. The job interview left a bad taste in my mouth for job interviews that lingers after thirty years. Who do job interviewers think they are? They sit there, all smug and certain of their righteousness, ready to blackball the applicant for the look of his haircut, the sound of his voice or because of his “bad attitude.”

  I was curtly dismissed after a brief interview and walked out into the snow that was swirling through the canyons of the city. How would I tell Margie the interview came to nothing and that I was still without a job? It was 4:30 and darkening. I walked the fourteen blocks to the Y with my suitcase and typewriter. It was important to save the dime a bus ride would have cost me.

  At the front desk at the Y they weren’t sure they could give me a room. Please wait and come back in half an hour. I went to a nearby Automat cafeteria and spent 55 cents for dinner—a hard roll, rice and fricassee chicken.

  The Automat was good and there were always people there worse off than I was. The desperate ones made soup by pouring ketchup in the bottom of a cup and adding the free hot water meant for tea.

  I felt better after my dinner and made my way back to the Y. Glory be, a room was available. I took the key, bought a nickel candy bar at the newsstand and went to the room.

  That may have been the best hotel room I ever had. It was warm and cozy. Through the window I could see the cold, cruel world outside and that made it seem even better. I turned over one of the drawers in the dresser and slid it back in upside down so that I could use the bottom of the drawer as a table for my typewriter.

  Because the rooms were all occupied by men, you could walk down the hall wrapped in a towel then. I undressed, tied on my towel and walked to the bathroom, where I took a beautifully warm, steamy shower. How good, I thought, that the YMCA can provide such hot water on so cold a day.

  Back in my room, I put on my pajamas, unwrapped the Milky Way and sat down in front of the upside-down drawer to write.

  The job interviewer at the ad agency was rotten, I thought to myself, but the whole world is not rotten … not when the people at the YMCA provide something like this for an anonymous person like me.

  Dear Sir, You Jerk

  For every letter I actually write and mail, I compose a hundred in my head. Here are some samples of the kinds of letters I think of writing.

  To the boss.

  DEAR BOSS:

  You can be a real jerk sometimes. If I didn’t need the money, I’d have walked out of here about ten times in the last nineteen years.

  You know how to make money, I’ll admit that, but you don’t know how to treat people. Once you hand out that little Christmas bonus, with the snappy memo saying what loyal employees we all are, you think you’re Mr. Nice Guy. Big deal. Could you really afford the bonus after the profit the company made last year?

  If things weren’t so bad and if I was younger and if I didn’t have three kids in college, I’d be out of here.

  I’d come here early in the morning to clean out my desk. I’d park in your place by the front door marked RESERVED FOR THE PRESIDENT. When you dragged your butt in here around ten o’clock, there wouldn’t be anyplace to park.

  Maybe I’ll see you in the company cafeteria at lunch and give you a piece of my mind. Ha! That’ll be the day when you eat the garbage they serve us.

  Sincerely,

  Andrew R.

  P.S.: By the way, what did your snooty secretary do with all those ideas I put in the suggestion box? I suggested your company car ought to be a Ford instead of a Cadillac, for instance.

  To the owner of the gas-station garage.

  DEAR ED,

  I just got your bill for the job you did on my car. Isn’t $237.50 a little stiff … considering parts and labor were extra?

  What’s this third item here? It says GRDLLCK MAC’ET INST FRD OPP. (BOTH SIDES) $81.65.

  You have a sign posted over your cash register that says LABOR $45 AN HOUR. If your mechanic works ten hours a day five days a week and four hours on Saturday, he could be making $126,360 a year. Or don’t you give him all of it? You’re always complaining about how bad business is. If business is so bad, how come I have to book three weeks in advance to get the air changed in my tires?

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  I’ve often written unmailed letters to the president of the bank:

  Ralph Forsythe

  President

  First National American United Home Federal Bank

  DEAR MR. FORSYTHE:

  If there was a second National American United Home Federal Bank, I’d take my money out of your bank and go to it.

  What’s all this gobbledygook you send me every month? I can’t r
ead it. Just tell me how much money I have left and how much I spent. That’s all I want to know. I don’t need a lot of your numbers.

  How come the number on my checking account is bigger than the total number of people in the United States? And how come you send me my statement on the sixteenth instead of on the first day of the month? It’s real convenient … for you but not for me.

  Those cash machines you’ve put in must be saving you a lot of money because you don’t have to hire so many cashiers—whom you paid $3.50 an hour to handle $500,000 a day.

  Customers no longer have to stand in line waiting for the cashier to cash their checks. Now we stand in line waiting for one of the machines.

  Sincerely,

  0072294783279

  (You wouldn’t know my name even though I’ve been banking there for twenty-three years.)

  Look at it this way. I’ve just saved myself 75 cents for not mailing these.

  Play It Again, Sam

  It would be nice if all of us could use the instant-replay system in our lives to decide whether we made the right decision.

  For those of you who don’t follow professional football, it should be explained that when the officials on the field make a call and there’s some doubt about whether they are right, other officials in a booth above the playing field review the play from all camera angles available to them on television. If there are eight cameras trained on the action, all shooting from a different position, the officials can look at the play from all eight angles and have a better chance of deciding what really happened.

  That’s what I’d like to do with my life. I’d like to have eight cameras trained on everything I do and then, when I make a mistake, I could replay it and see what I did wrong. Too often I can’t remember exactly what I did or why I made the decision I did.

  Last night I started to pull the car into the garage. I’ve done it thousands of times but this time I heard a terrible scraping, crunching noise and realized I’d caught the right side of the car on the side of the garage door. I’d like to review that.