Why do we linger in the wings?
What are we waiting for?
All systems say:
Go
THE GREAT AMERICAN “WHAT AM I DOING HERE, AND WHY DID I BUY THAT?” HARDWARE STORE
As I think Lawrence of Arabia once should have said, “I cannot supply you with camels or still the desert winds, but I can build you a mighty nation with a mighty dream.”
My somewhat more modest claim is to the title of Idea Man, a maunderer of notions who sometimes surprises himself at so-called brainstorming sessions.
I cannot blueprint you a building or rivet up a city… but I can, along the way, toss you a frivolous concept.
Such as:
The Great American “What Am I Doing Here, and Why Did I Buy That?” Hardware Store.
Rent me a space some 40-feet-wide by 70-feet-deep, with perhaps a cellar and maybe an empty attic where green garden hoses might coil like snakes, and I will hammer together the damndest late-night store in history.
Late night? Yes. I speak not for women, of course, though the peculiar frenzy I am about to describe may on occasion attack their reason and leave them trembling mad. But, consider—is there a sane man among you who hasn’t at ten minutes after midnight, midsummer, suffered the terrible urge to rise and go now to the bee-loud Ennisfree lead pipe, hammer and tongs, door-hinge thingumabob glade? There, in a wild dazzlement, to buy and lug home all those things you’ve always dearly wanted and will never use?
There, you see? Gotcha!
It is the dream that dare not speak its name.
Now that the robot cat is out of the aluminum bag, let us proceed to open that midnight hardware shop where men sleepwalk and wives rush to pick their pockets to protect their life’s savings.
What should the shop look like, outside and in?
Outside: a facade fount of bright gadgets, steel rickracks, brass scrimshaws, golden faucets, meteoric hammers, rainfalls of ice-trays, thumbtacks, hinges, corkscrews, nuts, bolts, and bandsaws. Looking up, we should, while staring hypnotically, murmur, “My God, there’s one of those things with no name that I must have or I shall die.”
Then, arms out stiffly, hands ready to snatch and grab, eyes glazed, in you go.
Past a facade, of course, that looks like the bright front side of a silvered robot factory, past front windows heaped with treasure. Which is to say a machine that makes penny-fresh brand new nails, a largish mechanical hat from which a bodiless hand pulls forth some new technological miracle every fifteen seconds, your latest mop head, tomorrow morning’s picture hangers, a Star Trek 2001 flashlight, some battery-operated mechanical vacuum mice that can run around the floor sucking dust, or, on occasion, an audio-animatronic rabbit with maniac eyes.
In the other front window, as you march by, siren-summoned, is an absolute viper pit of garden hoses, all sizes, identified as to country of origin, poisonous or non-poisonous, astir and ascramble, writhing to leap into your hand to freshen a garden and lay the dust.
Ready to step inside now? But wait!!!
There is a moment of trepidation. Fear glints in the eye. The palms grow sweaty. Why?
Well, most men are terrified, are they not, of shadowing the sill of any Berlitz shop that teaches French? So are most of us fearful of thresholding hardware emporiums because, while we may have a love object in mind, we rarely know the name of the damned thing.
It follows then that your prescient 2001 doodad shop must post a sign above the front door:
HARDWARE SPOKEN HERE
—so as to lull the panic and entice the shy buck-antelope.
Once inside, the labels of everything must be super-size, with perhaps a genealogy of where the blasted name came from in the first place.
But again, hesitation on the sill…
Should one go home and wake the ever-receptive son, that boy capable of infection by this midnight disease?
For let’s face it, don’t the rites of passage include a patriotic American father double-marching his lad to the nearest glue-bottle, whitewash, lawnmower, scythe and tack-gun place, to teach him how to buy junk and horde trash? And, if the boy doesn’t cotton to this, shouldn’t he be loaned out to an orphanage or stashed at a mean uncle’s?
No matter. Right now, it’s twenty after midnight. The shop will only be open another two hours, better hurry…
Inside now, what do we see?
Displays of hardware, like rare jewels.
Aren’t some of them close to being those objects d’art that old man Fabergé crafted for the Czar? Why not, in our new shop here, showcase on velvet pillows a golden sieve, brass washer earrings that might become necklaces? Plus a bathroom plunger fit to be carried at a king’s coronation or the beehive crowning of a Pope? And, framed in wall tuck-ins, the museum masterpieces that Raymond Loewy spawned when asked to redesign the Mixmaster, the telephone, or the 1929 pencil sharpener? And all through the store those surpassingly beautiful electric fans. The ones that look like Maserati wire-wheels, with sky-blue blades, whirring, and whispering to you as you pass:
Touch Me. Buy Me. Sneak Me Home.
Once around the shop, reading and touching and you’re ready for the old hot toddy and cold shower. Your wallet fibrillates.
Over here, for instance, we find one of those wondrous mirror-wells, reflecting dishes in which copper pennies or silver dollars seem to float suspended in mid-air. Reach out to seize the coin—it’s not there! Optical illusion. Well, then, instead of coins, why not a super-size, optical-illusion well on the surface of which, changing day by day, floats the latest screwdriver, monkeywrench, or one-thousand-day light bulb?
What a grand way to focus attention on all the latest damn fool devices that funnel into our computer-chips-for-breakfast lives.
There are other ways to show-and-tell, of course.
Why not more display boards on which you hang fresh varietals of gimcracks, thingumabobs, and whatchamacallits, wired for sound? Press the tab and a friendly robot voice tells you just what in blazes the spotlighted object is. Saves you the blush of addressing your ignorance to the nearest clerk who studied Contempt at Tiffany’s.
How else will our 2001 Hardware Shop differ from just yesterday’s egg-whisk, carpet beater, washboard emporium? Somewhere won’t we collide with the Radio Shack Video Vortex Shops and sell VHS tapes on woodworking, picture hanging, and how to speak to a thumb that has just been hammered?
What about computer graphics, electronic imaging?
What Vasarely and Mondrian did with rulers, T squares and compasses is now being toothpaste-tubed out by mindless electronic machines that see not, feel not, but deliver beauty.
Wouldn’t our store need one art gallery wall for all the latest “batteries included” dreams.
Then, men who wouldn’t be caught Déco in an art gallery might whisper “curiouser and curiouser” if they passed a kaleidoscopic graphic image light show, and discover it was done not by a crazed dropout but by a hairless computer.
And stay on to be further victimized by very high frequency clerks.
Stay on to buy laser equipment for the Mad Dad in his high-voltage basement. Holograms, homegrown, for the Grandpa who wants to stare around the sides and over the tops of his monstrous offspring.
So why not, since it is a toy shop to begin with, focus attention on the latest toys, perhaps only one or two centralized and spotlighted amidst the scrapers, varnishers and paint removers? For instance, any human in his or her right mind has got to want the latest etch-a-sketcher, yes? You not only etch your own sketch, but press a button and fabulous patterns are added electronically to your original art.
Or how about a Little Loader? Been around for years but still running fresh. It’s the set where you construct a plastic railway on which a battery-operated hopper runs back and forth picking up and delivering “rocks” over a circuitous track. Damn thing runs for hours back and forth. Better than watching paint dry. Owned one for years. Run it for my cats on Sundays. Gave one of these to a local orchestra conductor years ago. She has been my slave ever since.