Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip K. Dick
“Hello,” he said genially.
Ross said, “We won’t bother you for more than a minute.”
“Not at all,” Harman said, resting his chin on his folded arms in order to see them.
“We’re heading for Fort Bragg,” Ross said, “to track down some unsigned barbershop quartet groups.”
At once Harman said, “Oh no.”
“Why not?” Al said.
“That’s not the area at all. Fort Bragg is too close to the water. It’s cold and foggy up there along the coastline. That’s lumber country. Where you’ll find barbershop is in the farm towns. In the Sacramento Valley, or the Sonoma Valley. Where it’s hot and dry and flat. I’ll tell you.” He scrambled to a sitting position. “This is not to deride your judgment, Miller, but you go over to Sonoma County and have a look around Petaluma.”
“You’re familiar with Petaluma?” Al said.
“Oh certainly,” Harman said, smiling. “I’m over there all the time. The chicken and egg capital of the world.”
“We’ll go there,” Ross said. “That’s only about two hours at the most.”
“And remember,” Harman said, with his cultured, affable smile, “there are other towns nearby. Sebastopol, Santa Rosa, Novato. That’s a well-settled farm area, and very hot. A very dull area. Just right for barbershop.” He rose to his feet and began putting a blue and white robe around him, which he tied with a cord sash. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity to exercise your judgment as time goes on, Miller,” he said. “Sorry to have to overrule you, but as Ross well knows, I have a good sense about this sort of thing.”
“That’s been my experience,” Ross said.
“I’m glad to learn something,” Al said. “I consider myself as being reasonably good in this particular field, but I can always learn. A man is never finished in the school of life.”
Harman said, “How about something to drink? Before you take off on that long hot trip?”
“That would be terrific,” Ross said.
“Thanks,” Al said. “It really would be appreciated.”
“Excuse me then,” Harman said. He disappeared through a French door, into the house, leaving the two men alone on the patio. The FM radio continued to play music.
“You’ll learn a lot more,” Ross said, presently, “working in the Harman organization. Chris is truly an astonishing man, a real giant. You’ve probably got the idea, for instance, that Chris is plainly involved in the record business. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Basically, he’s an investor.”
“I see,” Al said.
“He’s worth about two million dollars,” Ross said. “All told. And yet he’s one of the major contributors to the A.D.A. in Oakland. He’s supported all manner of liberal causes, over the years. He’s a kindly, educated man, with a great deal of background in the humanities. For one thing, I know he’s read Plato in the original Greek. One of his hobbies is stamps. He’s got as good a collection of early British as anyone on the West Coast.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Al said.
“He’ll be having you over to the house,” Ross said, “now that you’re a part of the group. Everyone comes over. Chris has absolutely no sense of snobbery; he wouldn’t even know what it meant. When he goes into a store to buy something, the morning paper for instance, he’s as gracious and polite to the clerk—” Ross gestured “—as he is to his family and friends. He makes no distinction. To him a man is a man. I’m not kidding.”
“I’ll be darned,” Al said.
“That’s the mark of a real aristocrat,” Ross said.
“I guess so,” Al said.
“Even those who can’t stand him say that,” Ross said.
“Who can’t stand him?” Al said. “How can that be?”
“A lot of people can’t stand him,” Ross said. “You’d be surprised. He’s got a lot of enemies who wish him the worst luck in the world and don’t mind putting in a bad word for him, about him—not to his face, generally—any chance they get.”
“Why?” Al said.
“I’ve puzzled over it for a long time. It’s because of his luck. They could forgive him his breeding, his education, his talents along business lines and cultural lines. But not his luck. They could even forgive his wealth. But luck—” Ross gestured, spilling tobacco from his pipe. A burning fragment landed on the ground and he carefully wet his fingers and put it out.
“They think they ought to have luck, too,” Al said.
“Right,” Ross said. “It ought to be evenly distributed throughout the civilized world. Of course, if that was true, there wouldn’t be any such thing as luck anymore; nobody would even know what the word meant. I mean, let’s consider what luck is.”
Al said, “Luck is when things are breaking for you.”
“Luck is being able to make use of chance,” Ross said. “It means that when something goes wrong you can turn it to your own advantage. It doesn’t mean, say, always drawing a good hand. It doesn’t mean getting three aces and two kings every time.” Turning to face Al, he said, “It means that when you draw a nothing hand you can still win, because in some way that eludes the rest of us you can make that nothing hand a winning hand. Do you follow me?”
“Yes,” Al said. “And it’s a really fascinating new concept.”
“Then maybe you’ll explain it to me,” Ross said. “I’ve watched him for six years now, and frankly I can’t make it out. Say he buys into a watch-repair outfit. The next day an automatic watch-repairing machine is invented, and some guy sticks one out on the sidewalk directly across the street; all you have to do is drop your busted watch in, and in five seconds out it comes again, fixed. For, say, six bits. That would put any other man out of business.”
“Absolutely,” Al said.
“But not Chris.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe he has enough capital to write it off.”
“No. He turns it to his advantage somehow. He benefits. He profits, in the long run anyhow. That machine, that five-second watch-fixing machine across the street from him, actually causes him to make more in the long run than he would have if the operator hadn’t set up the machine there, or there had been no such machine.”
“It’s amazing,” Al said.
“I’ve seen him drop into somebody’s business office,” Ross said, “to give them a present, like a record sample or a bottle of whiskey, and because he happens to be there at that moment, some big golden opportunity falls his way. If he walked across the street to personally hand you a free hundred dollars, he’d happen to notice a ‘for lease’ sign on some place near you, and he’d immediately rent it and in six months he’d have made a killing in whatever he used the place for. It would turn out to be just what he needed, or what the public needed. Take this barbershop stuff. That was his idea, you know.”
“Yes,” Al said.
“He’s never wrong. If he goes into barbershop in a big way, you can bet it’ll be the next trend. Maybe it becomes a trend because he goes into it. I don’t know. And this relationship he has with reality spreads out to some extent through the whole organization. I swear my own luck has been substantially better since I met Chris Harman eight years ago. It’s good luck to meet him, even; you can date the process as starting there. Your good luck, Miller, has already begun. Don’t you feel that?”
“And how,” Al said.
“I mean, now you’re going somewhere. You’re not just standing still. You’ve been noticed.”
The French door opened and Chris Harman reappeared, in his blue and white robe, carrying a tray on which stood a silver Martini shaker and three frosty-looking Martini glasses, an olive in each.
“Here we are,” Chris said.
12
Jim Fergesson, on his first errand that morning, left his house and drove to the Bank of America. There, he transferred his money, except for ten dollars, from his savings account to his checking account. As he left the ban
Should he go back home? He wanted to be dressed right. I guess maybe I’ll stop and get a new tie, he told himself. One of those narrow ties. So he drove along San Pablo until he saw a clothing store; parking, he got out, taking care to move slowly and not to exert himself too much. Soon he was inside the store, examining the ties in the rack by the coats.
A plump young Chinese man in shirtsleeves came toward him, smiling. “Good day,” he said to Fergesson, He Lad on a good-looking tie: gray with bits of red. The old man, searching, found a tie exactly like it in the group. It cost four-fifty, which seemed to him a lot for a tie. “That’s a nice one,” the Chinese man said. “That’s handmade by a fellow over in Sausalito. He’s got a patent on it.”
Fergesson bought several ties and left the store, feeling pleased.
But he still did not want to go home. Lydia was there, and he felt nervous at the idea of running into her. Seated in his car he opened the paper bag of ties; by use of the rearview mirror he began to fasten one of the new ties around the collar of his shirt. While he worked at it—he wore ties so seldom that his fingers got in the way and he could not make out the length to let the small end fall—he realized that the Chinese man had come out of his store onto the sidewalk and was nodding to him sympathetically. So he got out of his car and let the Chinese man fix the tie. The man did a good job, and his fingers felt deft and friendly.
“Thanks,” Fergesson said, a little embarrassed but at the same time gratified. “I have this big business appointment I have to get to.” He looked at his pocket watch to show how much pressure there was on him.
The Chinese smiled at him, and watched him get back into the car and start up. He wishes me luck, Fergesson thought as he drove away into traffic. It’s a good sign.
Now he felt better than he had in months. This is really an occasion, he said to himself.
He had bought over twenty-five dollars’ worth of ties, he realized. Wow! That was something; that proved something.
That’s a service they do, he thought, those Chinese. That’s how they make those little businesses pay; they add something extra for nothing; that a white man won’t do. I wouldn’t mind going in there for all my clothes. I know I’d get real individual attention.
He made a note of the location. So I can find it again, he thought.
I’ll bet that Chinese guy has made a lot of money, he thought as he made a left turn at an intersection.
This is really a nice day, he said to himself as he noticed the sky and the sun; he rolled down the car window and sniffed the air. I hope that damn smog doesn’t show up, he thought. That really slays people; it causes lung cancer as much as cigarettes.
I can’t feel this good all day, he said to himself. Already he was beginning to feel tired; the driving was hard on him, the having to watch other cars, the stops and starts. That’s what makes the smog, he thought. The car exhausts, all these buses and trucks; too many people moving into Oakland—too overcrowded.
Now he felt the weight of an enormous flu come onto him. It was like the time he had been laid up with the Asiatic virus; he had had it a week before he had realized that he was sick, because the symptoms of the thing did not so much make him feel different as just worse. It had made his fatigue greater, his irritability greater, his gloom, his sense of defeat, more overwhelming. He had gone around snapping at everyone, and been unable to do his work; he had stayed on his feet, and then one morning he had been too tired to get up from the breakfast table. So Lydia had kept him home.
Like that again, he thought, slowing his car. Heavy all over, his arms in particular; his hands flopped like cement gloves on the wheel. His head wobbled. Even my eye muscles, he thought; his view of the traffic ahead became disfigured. Objects merged and then separated. My God damn left eye is swimming off on its own, he reasoned. Walleyed. Muscles must be pooped.
Well, he thought, what I need is vitamin B-one. That’s that nerve vitamin. Keeping his car in motion he continued on until he could turn back on San Pablo; he made a left turn against a red light and swung over to the far lane. That’s what took care of me before, he said to himself. That and a couple of good steam baths. But he could not go get into a steam bath this time, because of his being taped up. He had to stay out of the water; the doctor had warned him. The vitamin would have to do.
There was a yellow zone in front of the drive-in, and he parked there. Getting out, he carefully made his way up the sidewalk to the health food store. His feet, he discovered, seemed to sink down into the sidewalk, as if the pavement had become ooze. Sinking down a full six inches, he said to himself, lifting his right foot back up and out, setting it down again, lifting his left; left, right, left, and so on, to the screen door of the health food store. Stuck there, for a moment he rested, grinned to himself with anger, and then opened the door with the side of his hand.
“Morning, Jim,” Betty said.
He sat down, dropping abruptly and grunting, on the first stool. He folded his arms on the counter and rested his head for a moment; he had done that, years ago, in school; he felt his forehead pressing his wrist. Like in the third grade, he thought. Midday nap. He beckoned to Betty and she came over.
“Listen,” he said. “How about a bottle of those health vitamins again. Those therapy vitamins.”
“Oh, now what did you have?” Betty murmured. “Was it the theragrams?” She moved away to the shelf. “Big red pills?”
He saw the bottle he wanted, pointed to it; she got it down.
“I remember,” she said. “The B-complex. The niacinamide and panthenol group. This is very good, Jim. This has the liver fraction in it; they use it with anemic people. But it doesn’t have B-twelve in it; that’s the only drawback.” She reached for another bottle. “This has your B-twelve, but it’s a little more expensive. They’re both hematinic formulas.” She eyed him, holding up both bottles.
“I just want the nerve one,” he said. “B-one.” He reached out for the familiar bottle and she handed it to him. “Can I have some water?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, going to fill a glass.
He took two of the vitamin pills there at the counter, and then, carrying the bottle, started from the store.
“We’ll put it on your bill,” Betty said, following after him. “I hope that does what you want, Jim. You do look very tired today. You know, you could take it as an elixir; you might find that handier.” She came out on the sidewalk with him.
“Right,” he said, making his way to his car and getting into it. As soon as he had sat down again he felt better; some of the weight left him.
That God damn smog, he thought as he started up the car. It really is hard to breathe anymore. And the smog, he saw, had begun to blot out the colors of the buildings. San Pablo did not go on nearly as far now; it cut off in the haze and he could not see downtown Oakland as he had been able to just a few minutes before. But who cares? he asked himself as he drove out into traffic. I’ve seen downtown Oakland.
Up in the Oakland hills there would not be so much smog anyhow. That’s why they live up there, he told himself as he drove along a main street, in an eastwardly direction. He did not know the street, but it had a bus line running along it, so it had to go through to Broadway. I’ll turn left on Broadway, he decided, and that’ll take me clear out to Piedmont. Then I won’t have any trouble after that.
Sure enough, the street at last came out on Broadway. And now, as he drove toward the intersection with McArthur, he noticed that the smog had fallen behind. They wouldn’t let it get up here, he told himself with pleasure. There’s probably a zoning law against it. At that, he laughed to himself, feeling better once more. The vitamins had helped already. The clean air gave him back his ability to breathe, and the vitamins his strength. He patted his coat pocket, the bankbook and checkbook. Hot dog, he said to himself. This is going to be something.
At McArthur he turned right
He made out a street sign. Wrong street; not there yet. Picking up speed, he turned right.
Warm, he thought. Sun streamed down on him, on the sidewalk. The tie, too, made him hot; his neck had become slippery within the tight collar. With his left thumb he loosened it by stretching it still buttoned. And the car heater; it was on. He bent to switch it off…
A crash threw him forward and against the steering wheel. His head banged and his hands went out, hitting the windshield. He bounced back and lay hunched down, openmouthed. The car had stopped. The motor was dead.
Ahead of him a great heavy white Chrysler was stalled with its front fender locked into his. And out of the Chrysler the driver, stepping rapidly, was shaking his fist and yelling with no sound. A woman, the old man realized. A thin woman in a long brown coat, angry, scared, hurrying toward him.
“Do you see what you did?” Her face, shaking, broke into being at his window, an inch from his own. He rolled the window down. “Look what you did; my God, what’ll my husband say?” She dropped away, falling to see the fender. “Oh my God, look at it.”
Numbly he managed to get out onto the street. Other cars had stopped. The street, now, was blocked. His car and the woman’s car blocked it completely, because of the solid row of parked cars on each side.
“Look.” Her whole body was shaking. “And I have to pick him up at one-thirty. It’s your fault; you were driving in the middle of the street; you didn’t even see me. Did you hear me honk my horn? You didn’t look up; you were looking down—you weren’t looking at all, or paying any attention.”