Every day I would rush home from school and ask:
“Is there any mail for me?”
Day after day, eon after eon. Waiting for three weeks for something to come in the mail to a kid is like being asked to build the Pyramids singlehanded, using the #3 Erector set, the one without the motor. We never did get much mail around our house anyway. Usually it was bad news when it did come. Once in a while a letter marked OCCUPANT arrived, offering my Old Man $300 on his signature only, no questions asked, “Even your employer will not be notified.” They began with:
“Friend, are you in Money troubles?”
My Old Man could never figure out how they knew, especially since they only called him OCCUPANT. Day after day I watched our mailbox. On Saturdays when there was no school I would sit on the front porch waiting for the mailman and the sound of the yelping pack of dogs that chased him on his appointed rounds through our neighborhood, his muffled curses and thumping kicks mingling nicely with the steady uproar of snarling and yelping. One thing I knew. Trusty old Sandy never chased a mailman. And if he had, he would have caught him.
Everything comes to he who waits. I guess. At last, after at least 200 years of constant vigil, there was delivered to me a big, fat, lumpy letter. There are few things more thrilling in Life than lumpy letters. That rattle. Even to this day I feel a wild surge of exultation when I run my hands over an envelope that is thick, fat, and pregnant with mystery.
I ripped it open. And there it was! My simulated gold plastic Decoder pin. With knob. And my membership card.
It was an important moment. Here was a real milestone, and I knew it. I was taking my first step up that great ladder of becoming a real American. Nothing is as important to an American as a membership card with a seal. I know guys who have long strings of them, plastic-enclosed: credit cards, membership cards, identification cards, Blue Cross cards, driver’s licenses, all strung together in a chain of Love. The longer the chain, the more they feel they belong. Here was my first card. I was on my way. And the best of all possible ways—I was making it as a Phony. A non-Ovaltine drinking Official Member.
BE IT KNOWN TO ALL AND SUNDRY THAT MR. RALPH WESLEY PARKER IS HEREBY APPOINTED A MEMBER OF THE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE SECRET CIRCLE AND IS ENTITLED TO ALL THE HONORS AND BENEFITS ACCRUING THERETO.
Signed: Little Orphan Annie. Countersigned: Pierre André. In ink.
Honors and benefits. Already, at the age of seven, I am Mister Parker. They hardly ever even called my Old Man that.
That night I can hardly wait until the adventure is over. I want to get to the real thing, the message. That’s what counts. I had spent the entire day sharpening pencils, practicing twirling the knob on my plastic simulated gold Decoder pin. I had lined up plenty of paper and was already at the radio by three-thirty, sitting impatiently through the drone of the late afternoon Soap Operas and newscasts, waiting for my direct contact with Tompkins Corners, my first night as a full Member.
As five-fifteen neared, my excitement mounted. Running waves of goose pimples rippled up and down my spine as I hunched next to our hand-carved, seven-tube Cathedral in the living room. A pause, a station break.…
“Who’s that little chatterbox….
The one with curly golden locks….
Who do I see …?
It’s Little Orphan Annie.”
Let’s get on with it! I don’t need all this jazz about smugglers and pirates. I sat through Sandy’s arfing and Little Orphan Annie’s perils hardly hearing a word. On comes, at long last, old Pierre. He’s one of my friends now. I am In. My first secret meeting.
“OKAY, FELLAS AND GALS. GET OUT YOUR DECODER PINS. TIME FOR THE SECRET MESSAGE FOR ALL THE REGULAR PALS OF LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, MEMBERS OF THE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE SECRET CIRCLE. ALL SET? HERE WE GO. SET YOUR PINS AT B-12.”
My eyes narrowed to mere slits, my steely claws working with precision, I set my simulated gold plastic Decoder pin to B-12.
“ALL READY? PENCILS SET?”
Old Pierre was in great voice tonight. I could tell that tonight’s message was really important.
“SEVEN … TWENTY-TWO … THIRTEEN … NINETEEN …EIGHT!”
I struggled furiously to keep up with his booming voice dripping with tension and excitement. Finally:
“OKAY, KIDS, THAT’S TONIGHT’S SECRET MESSAGE. LISTEN AGAIN TOMORROW NIGHT, WHEN YOU HEAR.…”
“Who’s that little chatterbox….
The one with curly golden locks.…”
Ninety seconds later I am in the only room in the house where a boy of seven could sit in privacy and decode. My pin is on one knee, my Indian Chief tablet on the other. I’m starting to decode.
7….
I spun the dial, poring over the plastic scale of letters. Aha! B. I carefully wrote down my first decoded number. I went to the next.
22….
Again I spun the dial. E.…
The first word is B-E.
13 … S…
It was coming easier now.
19 … U.
From somewhere out in the house I could hear my kid brother whimpering, his wail gathering steam, then the faint shriek of my mother:
“Hurry up! Randy’s gotta go!” Now what!
“I’LL BE RIGHT OUT, MA! GEE WHIZ!”
I shouted hoarsely, sweat dripping off my nose.
S … U … 15 … R … E. BE SURE! A message was coming through!
Excitement gripped my gut. I was getting The Word. BE SURE …
14 … 8 … T … O … BE SURE TO what? What was Little Orphan Annie trying to say?
17 … 9 … DR … 16 … 12 … I…9 … N … K … 32 … OVA … 19 … LT…
I sat for a long moment in that steamy room, staring down at my Indian Chief notebook. A crummy commercial!
Again a high, rising note from my kid brother.
“I’LL BE RIGHT OUT, MA! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.”
I pulled up my corduroy knickers and went out to face the meat loaf and the red cabbage. The Asp had decapitated another victim.
MY OLD MAN AND THE LASCIVIOUS SPECIAL AWARD THAT HERALDED THE BIRTH OF POP ART
I “hmmmmed” meaningfully yet noncommittally as I feigned interest in the magnificent structure before us. “Hmmmm,” I repeated, this time in a slightly lower key, watching carefully out of the corner of my eye to see whether she was taking the lure.
A 1938 Hupmobile radiator core painted gaudily in gilt and fuchsia revolved on a Victrola turntable before us. From its cap extended the severed arm of a female plastic mannequin. It reached toward the vaulted ceiling high above us. Its elegantly contorted hand clutched a can of Bon Ami, the kitchen cleanser. The Victrola repeated endlessly a recording of a harmonica band playing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The bronze plaque at its base read: IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET.
The girl nodded slowly and deliberately in deep appreciation of the famous contemporary masterwork, the central exhibit in the Museum’s definitive Pop Art Retrospective Panorama, as the Sunday supplements called it. I closed in:
“He’s got it down.”
I paused adeptly, waited a beat or two and then, using my clipped, put-down voice:
“… all of it.”
She rose to the fly like a hungry she-salmon:
“It’s The Bronx, all right. Fordham Road, squared. Let 'em laugh this off on the Grand Concourse!”
I moved in quickly.
“You can say that again!”
Hissing in the venomous sibilant accents of a lifelong Coffee Shop habitué that I always used in the Museum of Modern Art on my favorite late afternoon time-killer—Girl Tracking—which is the art most fully explored and pursued at the Museum of Modern Art. Nowhere in all of New York is it easier, nor more pleasant, to snare and net the complaisant, rebellious, burlap-skirted, sandal-wearing CCNY undergraduate. Amid the throngs of restless Connecticut matrons and elderly Mittel European art nuts there is always, at the Museum, a roving eddying gulf stream of Hunters and the Hunted.
It was the work of an instant to bundle her off to the outdoor tables in the garden where we sat tensely; date and cream cheese sandwiches between sips of watery Museum of Modern Art orange drink.
“Marcia, how many of these clods really dig?” I shrugged toward all the other tables around us. “It’s really sickening!!”
“Bastards!”
She whistled through her teeth. I sensed the stirrings, faint but unmistakable, of an Afternoon Love. Up to her pad off the NYU campus, down to the Village by subway for a hamburger, and then.…
“Only the other day,” she continued, “at the Fig, I said to Claes: ‘Pop Shmop. Art is Art, the way I see it’….”
She trailed off moodily and then bit viciously into the raisin nut bread, her Mexican serape sweeping the ashes from her cigarette into my salad.
“Good old Claes.” I followed her lead, “He lays it on the Phonies!”
I wondered frantically for a brief instant who the hell Claes was!
“And they lap it up,” she added.
Our love duet was meshing nicely now. Point and counterpoint we wove our fabric of Protest, Tristan and Isolde of the Hip.
A light fog-like rain descended on us from what passes for sky in New York. We ignored the dampness as we clutched and groped toward one another in the psychic gloom.
“What do these Baby Machines know of Pop Art?”
I nodded toward a covey of Connecticut ladies eating celery near us. Our eyes met intensely for a long, searing moment. Hers smoldered; mine watered, but I hung in there grimly. And then, her voice low, quivering with emotion, deliberately she spoke:
“Pop Art, as these fools call it, is the essential dissection of Now-ness, the split atom of the Here moment.”
We looked deep into each other’s souls for another looping instant. I took three deliberate beats and countered:
“Now-ness is US, baby. The Now of Here!”
Her hand clutched convulsively at the smudged and dogeared paperback copy of Sexus. A Henry Miller. I knew my harpoon had struck pay dirt!
Suddenly, without warning, she stood up and called out in a loud voice:
“Steve! Oh Stevie, over here!”
I turned and saw striding toward us over the marble palazzo, past a Henry Moore fertility symbol, a tall broad-shouldered figure wearing black cowboy boots and tight leather pants. Marcia hurriedly darted forward.
“I’ve been waiting, Stevie. You’re late.”
Stevie, her high cheekbones topped by two angry embers for eyes, snapped:
“Let’s go, baby. I’m double-parked. And the fuzz tag a Harley-Davidson around here quicker than a kick in the ass. Let’s go.”
Her rich bass voice echoed from statue to statue. Marcia, weakly indicating me, said:
“Uh … this is … uh … uh.…”
“Pleased ta meetcha, Bud,” Stevie barked manfully, her thin moustache bristling in cheery greeting. They were off arm in arm. Once again I was alone amid the world’s art treasures.
“You can’t win ’em all.”
I muttered under my breath as I wolfed down what remained of Marcia’s sandwich, salvaging what little I could from the fiasco. The competition for girls in New York is getting rougher and more complex by the moment. I ironically raised my paper cup of tepid orange drink to the gray heavens, sighting over its waxen brim the glowering bronze head of Rodin’s Balzac outlined craggily against the jazzily lit museum interior, the pink plaster arm of IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET seeming to reach out of Balzac’s neck.
“To good old Claes. And Pop Shmop.”
I drained the miserable orange drink with a single strangled gulp. Then it happened. Somewhere way off deep down in that dark, buried coal bin of my subconscious a faint but unmistakable signal squeaked and then was silent. A signal about what? Why? What was Balzac trying to say? Or was it Rodin? Once again I sighted over the statue’s head and aligned the mannequin arm at exactly the same position that had set off that faint ringing. The rain drifted down silently while I waited. Nothing.
I tried again; still nothing. My eye fell on Marcia’s half-empty cup. Could there be a connection? Carefully realigning the arm and statue, I sipped the sickening liquid. Far off, unmistakably, once again the bell tolled for me. There was no question about it. Unmistakably there was a connection between the orange drink and that arm, not to mention glowering old Balzac, the original woman hater.
By now the rest of the tables had been deserted by my fellow Pop Art lovers. Alone, I sat in the museum garden, contemplating the inexplicable. The pieces began to assemble themselves with no help from me. I slowly began to realize that I had been fortunate enough to be present at the very birth of Pop Art itself. And had, in fact, known intimately the very first Pop Art fanatic who had endured, like all true avant-garde have always, the scorn and jibes of those nearest to them. His dedication to his aesthetic principles almost wrecked our happy home. My father was a full generation ahead of his time, and he never knew it.
The Depression days were the golden age of the newspaper Puzzle Contest. Most newspapers had years before given up the futile struggle to print News, since nothing much ever happened and had turned their pages over to comic strips and endless Fifty Thousand Dollar Giant Jackpot Puzzle Contests. Dick Tracy became a national hero. Andy Gump was more widely quoted than the President. Orphan Annie’s editorializing swayed voters by the million. Popeye raised the price of spinach to astronomical heights, and Wimpy spawned a chain of hamburger joints.
As for puzzles, when one ended, another began immediately and occasionally as many as three or four colossal contests ran simultaneously. NAME THE PRESIDENTS, MYSTERY MOVIE STARS, FAMOUS FIGURES IN HISTORY, MATCH THE BABY PICTURES. On and on the contests marched, all variations on the same theme, page after page of distorted and chopped-up pictures of movie stars, kings, novelists, and ballplayers, while in the great outer darkness, for the price of a two-cent newspaper, countless millions struggled nightly to Hit The Jackpot. They were all being judged for Originality, Neatness, and Aptness of Thought. All decisions, of course, were final.
Occasionally the tempo varied with a contest that featured daily a newspaper camera shot taken of a crowd at random—walking across a street, waiting for a light, standing at a bus stop. IS YOUR FACE CIRCLED? IF IT IS, CALL THE HERALD EXAMINER AND CLAIM FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS!! The streets were full of roving bands of out-of-work contestants, hoping to have their faces circled. My father was no exception. One of his most treasured possessions was a tattered newspaper photo that he carried for years in his wallet, a photo of a crowd snapped on Huron Street that showed, not more than three inches away from the circled face, a smudged figure wearing a straw skimmer, looking the wrong way. He swore it was him. He had invented an involved story to corroborate this, which he told at every company picnic for years.
He was particularly hooked on FIND THE HIDDEN OBJECTS and HOW MANY MISTAKES ARE IN THIS PICTURE?, which consisted of three-legged dogs, ladies with eight fingers, and smokestacks with smoke blowing in three directions. He was much better at this game than the Historical Figures. No one in Hohman had ever even heard of Disraeli, but they sure knew a lot about smokestacks and how many horns a cow had, and whether birds flew upside down or not.
Contest after contest spun off into history. Doggedly my father labored on. Every night the Chicago American spread out on the dining-room table, paste pot handy, scissors and ruler, pen and ink, he clipped and glued; struggled and guessed. He was not the only one in that benighted country who pasted a white wig on Theodore Roosevelt and called him John Quincy Adams, or confused Charlemagne with Sitting Bull. But to the faithful and the persevering and to he who waits awards will come. The historic day that my father “won a prize” is still a common topic of conversation in Northern Indiana.
The contest dealt with GREAT FIGURES FROM THE WORLD OF SPORTS. It was sponsored by a soft-drink company that manufactured an artificial orange drink so spectacularly gassy that violent cases of The Bends were common among those who bolted it down too fast. The color of this volatile liquid was a blinding iridescent shimmering, luminous orange that made real oranges pale to the color of elderly lemons by comparison. Taste is a difficult thing to describe, but suffice it to say that this beverage, once quaffed, remained forever in the gastronomical memory as unique and galvanic.
All popular non-alcoholic drinks were known in those days by a single generic term—“Pop.” What this company made was called simply “Orange pop.” The company trademark, seen everywhere, was a silk-stockinged lady’s leg, realistically flesh-colored, wearing a black spike-heeled slipper. The knee was crooked slightly and the leg was shown to the middle of the thigh. That was all. No face; no torso; no dress—just a stark, disembodied, provocative leg. The name of this pop was a play on words, involving the lady’s knee. Even today in the windows of dusty, fly-specked Midwestern grocery stores and poolrooms this lady’s leg may yet be seen.
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