“Why wasn’t it feasible?”
“What’s that, friend?”
“Why wasn’t it feasible for the laundry to rent shirts?”
“Oh. They have those now too. There’s a firm that does that now. Not the one that said it wasn’t feasible. … It’s timing. It’s timing and force. A schemer has to have those too. He has to know when to plunge.”
“I see.”
“Desalinization — that’s where the money is. Or steam cars, electric, you’d think you’d clean up. But it isn’t feasible, Detroit says. I dream of getting in on the ground floor of these things. And the Americanization of Europe, of Africa, the far East. Jungle drive-ins and ice cream on the Amazon and suits off the rack on Savile Row. The bottom of the sea — there’s a ground floor for you. The whole world is ground floor if you know where to stand.
“I’m a schemer. I’m a schemer and dreamer. In the army — Korea was on back then — I figured if you were in the Canine Corps they’d have to keep you stateside that much longer. It stands to reason — you train at the brute’s rate. A dog’s brain isn’t as quick as a man’s. Then I wondered if there might not be a difference between leashed dogs and unleashed. That figures too. Well, reason it out. A dog on a leash can be forced to do what you want. It’s harder when he’s not connected to you. So I put in for unleashed and saw to it that I was assigned the dumbest dog there. I stalled them for months. Then I applied for kennel master. My CO. told me it wasn’t feasible to make me kennel master. You had to be a vet.
“I’m scheming still. Sometimes the ideas come so thick and fast I can’t keep up with them — laundromats in motels, movies in airports, house sitters for people away on vacation. You know something? There’s never been a Western on the stage. I’m no writer, but something like that would go over big. If you could figure out what to do about the horses and cattle drives it might be feasible. I have these ideas. I swear to you, I no sooner begin the research on one plan when another pops into my mind. I count opportunities like sheep. How many of your listeners are like me? I’d be interested to know.”
“We’ll try to find out for you.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks for your call.”
“I was doing some reading about wines. There’s this one wine— Lafitte Rothschild — which sells for eighty to ninety dollars a bottle once it’s mature. It takes years to mature properly, years. In France, down in cellars, it’s carefully turned — they call that ‘laying wine.’ A man could spend his whole life on the job turning it, and then it might be his son or even his grandson who’s finally the one to bring it up. That’s why it’s so expensive. But once in a while they put it out on the market for the wine buffs before it’s ready. That’s called ‘first growth,’ and it can sell for as low as $2.00 a bottle. Well, I had an opportunity to buy out a shipment of this ‘first growth’ wine. I thought about it carefully. I considered it from every angle. I tried to look at it from the point of view of the big distributors. I weighed the pros and I weighed the cons, and finally I decided to do it. I invested all my savings and bought up about three thousand bottles at $2.38 a bottle. I built this special cellar and spent a lot of money to get it at the right temperature, and now I go down and I turn the bottles — a quarter turn clockwise in winter, a quarter turn counter clockwise in fall. And once a year I bring the bottles up to stand in the shade for a day in the spring when the barometer’s low. It’s a long shot, don’t think I don’t know it, a long-term proposition — thirty years, maybe more — but I’m a schemer, no pipe dreamer, I mind the feasibility and to hell with your get-rich-quick.”
“Well good luck,” Dick Gibson said.
“This year I had a heart attack — not a bad one, very mild really. ‘You can live a long time yet,’ the doctor told me. ‘Just get plenty of rest and try not to worry.’
“Say I do get plenty of rest, say I don’t worry. It isn’t feasible.”
Toward the end of that evening’s program, the anthropology professor called for the first time in months. Dick had never learned his name but always looked forward to one of his calls. The anthropologist was full of fascinating information; he was one of the few callers who apparently had no interest in talking about himself but simply enjoyed sharing some of the conclusions of his research with Dick and his audience. They chatted pleasantly for a time, the anthropologist feeding Dick a lot of interesting facts about the Seminole Indians who lived along the Tamiami Trail just west of Miami. Dick had seen their wretched cardtables along the roadside, makeshift lean-to “stores” hardly more sophisticated than a child’s lemonade stand, and had glimpsed their terrible hovels through the broken fences meant to screen them from the sight of tourists.
“They’re so poor,” Dick said.
“Oh Dick, the Navajos could give them a run for their poverty. Many tribes could. That’s not the point. The Seminoles are the only tribe that makes its camp outside a great metropolitan area. They’ve always done this. They did it when the land still belonged to the Indians. They lived on the doorstep of the Creek and Chickasaw and Choctaw. Seminole—Sim-a-nóle, or Iste Siminóla—means ‘separatist’ or ‘runaway’ in the Muskogean language.”
“I didn’t know that,” Dick Gibson said.
“They were the first suburbanites, you see. They conceive of their destiny as a Mighty-Have-Fallen warning to other peoples. In times of slavery they set up their villages outside the slavequarters. They were offering the example of their condition as a gift to the slaves.”
“Gee.”
“There’s a deep instinct at work here. Follow closely. The significance of the suburbs — I’m doing work on this — is that all peoples are in exile. Your two-week summer vacation is an example. (Traffic patterns and roads, by the way, follow morale patterns closely.) It’s all related to the Vacant-Throne theory of history. The czar had his summer palace, the President his summer White House. These are Diaspora symbols.”
Unfortunately it was time for Dick to sign off. He had to break in on the professor.
“Put me on hold,” the anthropologist whispered, “I have something to tell you.” Dick regularly received such requests, and sometimes the phones were lit up for as much as an hour after he went off the air. It may have been that people felt that reaching him privately lent a distinction even more profound than speaking to him on the air. Recently he had frequently obliged them, sometimes hearing terrible things in this way — awful things. People who were well spoken on the air often made no sense at all when they spoke to him privately afterwards — or they might suddenly lapse into some of the vilest language he had ever heard.
After signing off he came back to the professor. “What did you want to say?” he asked.