Edsel Read online

  His handshake was strong enough, his smile firm and white and unstudied behind a moustache that looked like cinnamon caught in cobwebs. I gave back as much, maybe too much in the grip, and then I made it worse.

  “Minor.”

  The pinkish eyes flickered. “I’m sorry?”

  “You said Meaner. It’s pronounced Minor. It’s an impossible name,” I added.

  “Nonsense. It’s real. All the names around here are real: Gunsberg and Butsikitis and Skjaerlund and Washington and Brennan. Where I come from they all sound like brands of English beer. I was born in Southampton, Long Island.”

  “I used to know a woman from Southampton.”

  “What’s her name? I might know the family.”

  “Probably not. She married a Jewish gangster here and dropped out of sight after he got shot to pieces.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Minor. What’s good here?”

  I recommended the Reuben, and of course it was bad that day. I was losing track of just how many ways a man can screw up when he’s playing with scared money. Hall had tea, I had coffee. As he bobbed the bag up and down inside his cup I noticed he wore a Princeton ring on his index finger, of all places. I twisted my worn U of D ring and wondered if we were going to be able to stand each other’s society.

  “My partner recognized your name,” he said. “He started as a copy boy for the Times. You left shortly after he came on.”

  “Friendly divorce. Mr. Hearst took a personal interest back then and it was tough writing around all those pictures of Marion Davies.”

  His expression was uncomprehending. The name meant nothing to him. I was beginning to wonder how young he was.

  “Anyway, your familiarity with this area is important. I’d expect you to know all the best photo opportunities.”

  I lifted my eyebrows, making an eager sponge of my face. I’d never heard the term before.

  “Have you seen our magazine?” he asked.

  “No. I didn’t know you’d published.”

  “We sent out a trial run of six thousand copies.” He lifted the flap of a tan leather briefcase with a sling handle that reminded me too much of a ladies’ shoulder bag and withdrew a slick rectangle the size of a placemat, laying it on my side of the table.

  The cover was glossy, saddle-stapled, and consisted entirely of a black-and-white photo of Ava Gardner, who seemed to be having difficulty keeping both straps on her shoulders. It was the tightest, largest close-up I’d ever seen. Her lips were the size of brass knuckles; you could have inserted a quarter in either one of her nostrils. The only printing, aside from the month and year and the twenty-five-cent price, was the magazine’s title, PIX!, in letters two inches high, each one a different primary color.

  “I thought it was a local publication. What’s Ava Gardner got to do with the Great Lakes?”

  “My partner wanted to run a picture of Tahquamenon Falls, but I vetoed it. What is journalism’s first responsibility, Mr. Minor?”

  “To make money.”

  He beamed, the proud tutor. “Natural wonders don’t sell magazines.”

  “The National Geographic will be sorry to hear it.” I turned the slippery pages. The first several were full-page advertisements, Dyna-Flo transmissions and halitosis and Ronald Reagan sucking on a Camel. “National accounts?”

  “Actually, we lifted them out of other publications. It makes a better impression and we’re hoping they’ll be grateful for the free ride. The real stuff’s in back.”

  I skipped over. Four pages cut into quarters. Milo’s Auto Repair, the Elite Clothiers, a coupon for a free shampoo and set at Dixie’s Beauty Academy. It looked like the back of a high school yearbook.

  “We expect to publish at a loss the first two years,” Hall said. “We’ve got enough backing for the first year. By then we should have the circulation numbers to attract the big accounts. That’s why we need talent.”

  “There’s not much text.” The bulk of the magazine was devoted to pictures of boats on Lake Huron, a baton-twirling contest in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a two-page spread on the Ford River Rouge plant, a row of cigar-shaped houses under construction in Toledo. The accompanying “articles” ran no longer than a paragraph, isolated in sixteen-point Plantin in the middle of fields of white space a child could draw on.

  “The written word can’t hope to compete with television. At one time the human brain was thought capable of taking in only twenty-four pictures per second, the pace of the so-called motion picture. We know now that it can consume more than a hundred. Experiments are being conducted to determine how many more it can gobble up without even being aware of it. Meanwhile its capacity for taking in words has remained a stolid ten. How can Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address aspire to create as strong an impression as Uncle Miltie in an evening gown?”

  I lowered Pix!’s cover carefully, like a coffin lid. “When I was ten years-old I entered a hot dog eating contest at the state fair. I swallowed eleven dogs in ten minutes. I threw up the whole batch in less than five. Taking in isn’t retaining.”

  “All we ask is that they remember the name of the magazine from week to week. It’s a killer schedule and chews up talent. How are you on deadlines, Mr. Minor?”

  “I haven’t missed one since nineteen twenty-eight, when Dusty Steinhauser kidnapped me and kept me playing poker behind the Polar Bear Cafe until he won back what he owed me.

  “What sort of photographer are you?”

  “I’m thinking of getting one of those Polaroids and save paying for developing when I take a picture of my thumb.”

  “That won’t do. Right now our photojournalists are using Speed-graphics but we’re switching to those Japanese jobs.”

  “What’s a photojournalist?”

  “The magazine business is different from most. While everyone else is specializing, we find it more feasible economically to double up. Nobody’s hiring photographers and writers any more. If you want to grow with Pix!, you’ll have to become equally proficient with a typewriter and a camera.”

  “In other words, two jobs, one salary.”

  “To be blunt.”

  “Thanks for lunch, Mr. Hall.” I stood.

  “You don’t want the job?”

  “I’m a good writer. That’s my talent. I’m a great reporter. That’s my skill. I’ll never be anything more than a mediocre photographer and I’m too old for that. Good luck finding your photojournalist. I never met a good button-pusher who could write a caption to save his life.”

  “Frankly I’m relieved. This is a job for a young man. You older types are too cynical.”

  “I hope I never get so old I wind up as cynical as you.”

  Seabrook Hall and I didn’t cross paths again, nor did I ever see another issue of Pix! A couple of years later, killing time in a Rexall downtown before another interview, I saw his name on the statement of ownership page of a comic book. The cover featured a gelatinous green mass with eyes and teeth devouring a half-naked woman who looked like Ava Gardner.

  3

  ONE DAY IN 1953, GIVEN a choice of magazines in a dentist’s waiting room that included Jack ’n’ Jill, Popular Science, and a fourteen-month-old copy of Argosy, I picked up House Beautiful to look at the homes shaped like boxes of Fig Newtons with tricky siding in front and as dull as an Eisenhower speech in back, and stopped at a line in the editor’s column: “You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization.” That statement remained with me long after I had ceased thinking about two-toned refrigerators and the artist’s conception of a living room with space for the family car. Every now and then I hauled it out like the Riddle of the Sphinx or an elaborately tangled string of Christmas bulbs and tried to make sense of it. I still do, and have come to believe that once I have I will have succeeded in figuring out that whole era. Like the time itself, the line is as simple and diabolical as the mind of a child.

  Nothing about it, line or time, should have surprised me. In my youth, we ha
d fought a war to put the world back the way it was before the war started, only to find that the fighting itself had changed it radically and forever. It began with men in paper collars waltzing with women in toe-length hems to “After the Ball” and ended with those same men tipping up hip flasks and watching women’s reflections on glossy tabletops as they wriggled to “The Black Bottom” in brief skirts and no underwear. Now we had gone to war again, first with cavalry, then with rockets. If nothing much changed between FDR’s snooty profile on a newsreel screen and Frankie Orr’s humble face on the box in the living room, from that point forward nothing stayed put. Clark Gable’s cocky grin dissolved into Marlon Brando’s Neanderthal pout. Buicks sprouted holes that had no function. Sing “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” as loudly as she could, Patti Page couldn’t drown out a groin-beat with roots in Africa thumping up from the South, childish and primitive, that caused an age group we didn’t know existed, something called a Teen Ager, to tear apart the seats and rip the sconces off the walls of theaters where “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” pulsed beneath the credits of The Blackboard Jungle. The Russians, who claimed to have invented everything from air travel to the Flo-Thru tea bag, suddenly left off trading the Czar’s cufflinks for coarse bread and booted a football-size sphere studded with spikes beyond our atmosphere, adding the Space Race to the Arms Race and throwing the course of all our lives into high gear. Furniture, hitherto solidly grounded to the floor, canted backward and began to float on spidery metal legs. Block-shaped, cozy corner markets stretched and flattened like everything else into air-conditioned barns lined with aisles stacked to the ceilings with fourteen more varieties of everything than anyone required. And then there was the shadow of that acacia-shaped cloud in the East, shading all our futures with sense-memories of those vaporized crowds in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Only we didn’t really believe it, because if General Motors thought there was anything to it they wouldn’t be offering two-year financing on the Chevy Bel-Air. So we dug fallout shelters and hired Joe McCarthy to sweep commies out from under the bed and sang along to the example of Burt, the animated TV turtle:

  Duck—and cover!

  Duck—and cover!

  He did what we all must learn to do;

  You and you and you and you—

  Duck—and cover!

  You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization. I still can’t explain it, or why it seems more appropriate the further the time slips behind.

  In the fall of 1954—I remember the year because it was Fred Hutchinson’s last season managing the Tigers and I had his autograph on my scorecard from the last at-home game with the Yankees—I paused on my way to my car to fill out the roll of film in my Argus and changed my destiny. The picture happened to show a dusty yellow Caterpillar climbing a hill of rubble in the condemned section south of Jefferson where the new Civic Center was going in, against the granite pile of the Penobscot Building, whose sawhorses I had detoured around back in 1928 when it was under construction. It turned out to be the best shot on a roll of blurred images of a rookie named Kaline attempting to steal second and a number of unidentified plays snapped from behind the sunburned bald head in the seat in front of me, but I didn’t think about it from the first time I saw it in the drugstore where I had the film developed until Slauson & Nichols needed one more picture to complete the brochure it was putting together for the Detroit Chamber of Commerce.

  It was one of those “Dynamic Detroit” pamphlets available in racks at the airport and bookstore local interest sections, with a historical text written by a steel-haired retired lady journalist with nicotine-colored lipstick and progressive puff about the city’s future provided by the flacks at Slauson, of which I was still one. The drugstore bag containing the photograph I’d taken was in the top drawer of the desk where I’d stashed it the day I picked it up, and I was moving it to get to an eraser when a lightbulb flared over my head just like in Morty Meekle. When I showed the picture to the art director, a narrow-shouldered grump named Fleenor with a Hitler moustache and black hair parted in the middle like Tom Dewey’s, he glanced at it, skated it across the top of his desk toward me, and told me to convince him with a caption.

  I was still using the old Royal I’d liberated from the offices of the old Banner when the sheriff was in the hall; black and silver and dinged all over from the times it had danced off its rickety stand, it had outgrown the bounds of linear order and begun to turn out copy that looked like ransom notes. My fingers had rubbed the letters clean off several of the keys and the space gear was worn to the extent that when I hit the lever I never knew whether I was triple-spacing or about to strike over the line I’d just typed, but I had a lot more things wrong with me, and in those days we didn’t get a divorce just because the wife’s breasts hung like onions and her feet were as cold as river stones. Besides, those new electric jobs made whirring noises when you switched them on, waiting for you to create. It was pressure I didn’t need. I rolled a fresh sheet of Rexall stock into the machine and typed:

  Like a vital organ, the city is forever regenerating itself, replacing old cells with new, proud of its history but dedicated to its future.

  I was glaring at this bit of non-rhyming doggerel, loathing it, when Fleenor crept up behind me on his Neoprene soles, breathing Maxwell House fumes over my shoulder as he read. Without warning he reached past my head and tore the sheet out of the platen. The racheting noise sounded like a game of Russian Roulette. I never saw the line again until the brochure came back from the printers. I didn’t like it any better in Bodoni bold than I had in faded pica.

  A lot of nothing happened for a while after that. The brochures were picked up by a pair of Wayne State University student volunteers in butch cuts and pink crew-neck sweaters and I forgot about them as soon as they were out of sight. Slauson & Nichols landed the Armor-Bilt Aluminum Siding account, I did some down-and-dirty research into Howard Pyle and Harold Lamb and came up with a knighthood-in-flower theme, complete with a moat and a drawbridge and a gleaming white aluminum-clad castle that had as much to do with the practical applications of the product as a grubby downtown construction project had to do with the regenerative properties of the human liver. It had taken me years and a couple of trips to the unemployment office to learn that advertising copy is best written sideways. One of Fleenor’s drafting-board jockeys came back with a sketch of the castle surrounded by pastel balloons labeled Flamingo, Twilit Gray, Celery, Gulf Stream Blue, Canary, and Sand Beige.

  “Why would anyone want celery-colored aluminum siding?” I asked.

  The artist, a beatnik complete with goatee and a paint-streaked sweatshirt with the sleeves rucked up past his elbows, moved his shoulders. “Why would anyone want aluminum siding?”

  “Whatever happened to white?”

  “Shows the fallout. You want to initial this or what?”

  I initialed the sketch and he slouched on out, sandals slapping the soles of his bare feet like Japanese fans. I wondered how he explained flamingo-pink aluminum siding to his friends at the coffeehouse. I wondered when was the last time I had promoted something someone could use. I wondered if I should sneak out and go home and clean out my refrigerator, the last white one east of Woodward Avenue.

  The telephone, a Depression-era relic of black steel with a receiver the size of an army boot, jangled. I considered waiting it out, then got up and put it out of its misery. My office mate, the owner’s son-in-law, never came in before two o’clock and I spent much of my time taking messages from his legion of close cousins who all seemed to be stewardesses on layover from San Francisco.

  “Doug’s in a meeting.”

  Air stirred on the other end. “And who might Doug be?”

  One of those microphone-trained voices, bounding up from the diaphragm and trundling out of the mouth like a big ball bearing; an original echo.

  “A guy who’s in a meeting. This is Connie Minor. What can I do for you?”

&
nbsp; “You can come see me when you have time. My name is Israel Zed. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Minor, I’ve had the devil’s own time tracking you down.”

  The name struck a dull chord, a rubber mallet bumping a bell wrapped in wool. For no clear reason I saw a flash of red-white-and-blue bunting and confetti hailing down. I said, “I’ve been here right along. Do you have something you need advertised?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Can you meet me at the Ford Motor Company Administrative Center Sunday morning at eight? I apologize for the choice of days, but I’m flying to Washington Monday and I can’t work Saturday.”

  “On Schaeffer in Dearborn?”

  “No, the new one. It’s on American Road near Michigan.”

  I hung up.

  It rang again two minutes later. I was looking for a telephone number in my desk but I went over and caught it on one.

  “Bad gag, brother,” I said. “As long as you were planning to get me out to a weedlot, you should have passed yourself off as Joe McCarthy or Clarabelle, someone whose name I could place. If you’re out to rob me you dialed the wrong number. I haven’t had more than forty dollars in my pocket at any one time since the Bank Holiday.”

  “I assure you, I’m calling from the center right now.” He didn’t sound upset at having to call back.

  “I grew up with this town. Dearborn dies at the end of American. Past that point there’s nothing but cows and silos. A windmill’s the closest thing to a skyscraper for a dozen blocks.”