Not all labels are to be sneered at. The ones that are transparent so they can’t be used as masks, and give real names instead of aliases and real addresses you can be sent home to in case you’re hit by a truck or get clouded by amnesia, they can do something for you. Get you back where you’re known and belong, should you stray. Jog your memory as to your rank and serial number if you get a little hazy, as everybody does at times.
Nobody’s ever going to prove himself a writer by doing porno for the commercial market but it’s a hell of a good place to go to find out in a hurry if you can write. Some people take correspondence-school exams, some enter limerick contests, some keep composing letters to the editor—I tried my wings at porno, as will unfold here, and wump, I was airborne. If I was lucky to come across the porno barons in their time of need, they had an equally charmed moment, were really on the sunny side of the hedge, the day they found me needy and therefore available to them.
My hat’s off to those sharp-eyed people for seeing my stashed merits and drawing my attention to them.
The Eastern Seaboard was overrun with people not so sharp-eyed. Twentieth-Century-Fox said no, absolutely not, neither now nor in this lifetime, to my request for a post in their New York publicity office. Yale University Press, while granting that the subject might with profit be looked into sometime during the next hundred years by somebody who knew something about it, had turned down my project for a study of the tendency in even the most Jacobin of revolutions to lurch on to Thermidor. Over and over Time-Life had informed me that they had no openings I could fill and did not see a time in the next decades when they might have a space that odd-shaped.
That bothered me, since a lot of Yale graduates had the impression that the strongest qualification you could have for a staff job at Time-Life, next to writing sentences backward, was to be a Yale graduate, and I was. (I could also write sentences backward.) I was, of course, also a Jew (more accurately, was called that by others who seemed fairly sure of themselves), the son of a factory worker, and for some years a Trotskyite, moreover a recent member of Trotsky’s household staff, traits which very few Yale graduates could boast, especially in that rich mixture, especially those who made their way to Time-Life. If Henry Luce’s proconsuls failed to see the virtues in me that the porno people later spotted and bid for, the burden of explanation is on them, not me.
They didn’t need me and were determined not to make room for me on all the magazines and newspapers in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. They’d forged a policy of keeping me at a safe distance from all the Madison Avenue ad agencies, all the radio stations, small independents as well as big network affiliates. When I answered classified ads for trade papers and house organs, ghosting agencies and vanity presses, for jobs composing mail-order brochures, how-to-do manuals, throwaways, comic books, seed catalogues, they scrupulously did not let me hear from them.
There was a terrible depression on, sure, but even national calamity didn’t explain why all of American industry, even, as you’ll see in a minute, the sectors that made and sold things other than words, had gotten together to lock one man out. Say they did have grounds for suspicion when a Jew, a Yale graduate, a son of the proletariat and a recent Trotsky boarder showed up on their doorsteps all in one person. They still had no right to assume so automatically that the one reason a man so configurated would want to get on their premises was to blow them up—that’s stereotyped thinking and not in the American spirit of judging a man by what he can do rather than by what he came out of.
• • •
Most of the economy was still creaking along but one branch of it, war industry, was beginning to buzz. I went to a Manhattan employment agency that specialized in factory work. They said military-hardware plants were looking for technical writers. Was that in or around my line? I informed them that I’d taken a course in engineering drafting at Yale, that the blueprint hadn’t been drawn that I couldn’t read, that if they wanted the plain facts blueprints were my favorite reading matter.
Next morning I was sitting in the personnel office of a giant electronics firm over in New Jersey, so close to the Secaucus pig farms that you had to keep blowing your nose so they couldn’t tell you were holding it.
The manager gave me a blueprint. He wondered if I’d be good enough to point out what I recall as the intermeshing backup reverse-feed alternate-bypass switch-trip voltage-trap breaker circuit. Partial to curves of all types, I put my finger fast on an ingratiating cluster of chicken tracks in a circular pattern.
No, he said, this element wasn’t part of the wiring system. Then I got the whole truth: it didn’t have anything to do with the internals of this piece of apparatus, in fact what I was pointing to was one of the ball-shaped feet the console rested on, the right front one just this side of the tuning dial. The chicken tracks, I now saw, were just the draftsman’s indication of the roughened texture given to the foot’s plastic surface for a better purchase.
The reference to tuning interested me. What did this dial tune, I asked, a radio set?
Not exactly, he said, this was a control unit for the sonar sounding system for a submarine, useful in locating other subs and traveling torpedoes it would be good to know about. Besides, if I didn’t mind his mentioning it, what I now had my finger on wasn’t the tuning dial, it was the manufacturer’s trademark embossed on the casing.
Letdown, though I tried not to show it. For a quick minute I’d had the happy thought that I might be getting into the radio end of the up-and-coming communications industry, if only in the manufacture of consoles.
The manager asked if at some time in my early life I might have experienced a trauma with liquids, say a swimming accident that left me leery of waters over my head or any reminder of them. He thought this might be a possibility because the suggestion of deep waters seemed to panic me to the point of incoherence, not a good state of mind in which to study electronic circuits for sub-surface vessels nine to five. He wondered if a man with my emotional setup wouldn’t have a happier life writing assembly and operating manuals for a talking-doll factory, say, or the people who make Lionel trains.
I was in his palled eyes every inch a writer, that highly specialized type of writer who can’t read, and he wanted every inch ejected from his office so it could go back to smelling no worse than Secaucus.
Once, only once, I scared up some action from the help-wanteds.
A publisher was looking for a bright young man wanting to go places, good starting salary, unlimited opportunity, fast advancement. Said bright young man had to have a good plot mind and a knack for snappy dialogue. I knew I had a nimble plot mind, I’d been plotting for years to keep eating and so far wasn’t losing weight. I had proof of my knack for snappy dialogue in the number of times I’d been removed from rooms by other people who countered with their knack for it. Anyhow, I got off a letter full of unrestrained enthusiasm for myself. A man with a voice to dislocate seismographs called to invite me down for an interview.
The address was on the Lower East Side, just off Delancey Street. It turned out to be a fifth-floor loft that had to have seen better days, otherwise it would have been condemned by the building inspectors the day the roof went on. This I estimated was around the time Peter Stuyvesant was being fitted for his fourth or fifth pegleg. Possibly Peter was one of the building inspectors. The shredding wooden floor had a lot of holes that looked like knotholes but could have been pegleg perforations. The room was bare and dusty and smelled of printer’s ink. From another one to the rear came a labored chinking sound, the sort small printing presses make.
The man who greeted me had no part that was not alarmingly pendulant. All his tissues seemed to have been systematically displaced downward, as in a melt suddenly interrupted, giving the queer impression that forehead was where nose should be, nose where lips,