Underworld by Don DeLillo
Rosie was dragged on her ass out into the street and spun around on her britches and left there. She spotted sawhorse barricades and police cruisers, people milling and scuffling and photographers popping flashcubes, and she thought she caught the first taste of gas.
People stagger-ran toward the church through ranks of guardsmen.
She saw the one-legged man on crutches, a familiar figure over weeks of bus rides and marches across state lines. And the man being beaten. She saw a slim man being struck by a cop with a billy club, hit three, four times, a pause, then hit again, white eyes showing.
The woman on the porch felt the air burning and went inside and the men went inside with her. Young men went running past, students and marchers, and one of them stopped long enough to fling a bottle the other way.
The gas, called CS, made people dizzy almost at once and caused a stinging on the body where the skin was moist.
Rosie smelled the gas, she tasted it before she saw it. A trooper had a man bent over the trunk of the cruiser, in an armlock, and another trooper stood nearby holding two shotguns, his own and his partner’s who had the armlock on the marcher.
The armored van moved slowly through the streets, searchlights swiveling on the roof.
The church was filling up with people trying to escape the gas, which rolled through the alleys off Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi on a muggy summer night with radios playing and children standing at the windows of shotgun shacks, watching men run through the dark.
Rosie started running. She saw the cop beating the man methodically, three, four blows and then a pause, and she started running toward them.
The gas had a radiance, a night glow, and the men in insect masks came walking out of the cloud, alive and bright.
The man who’d rolled up the windows of the car, a sixty-year-old in a white shirt and straw hat, proceeded to walk down the unpaved street toward his house, tasting the gas and putting his hat over his face and accidentally kicking a pop bottle someone had thrown, lying unbroken in the dust.
She watched the cop strike the man on the head and arms, three, four blows with his billy club and then a pause, and she pushed through a couple of sawhorses and ran directly toward them, feeling fast and light and unstoppable.
The gas rolled through the streets in tides and drifts, narrowing down alleys and fitting into confined spaces.
She had no idea what she planned to do when she got there, about four seconds from now.
DECEMBER 19, 1961
Charles Wainwright was on the phone to a client in Omaha, soothing, stroking, joking, making promises he could not keep. He felt a measure of detachment from the matters at hand, his eyes slightly aswim in the agreeable yield of a long liquid lunch.
He heard himself saying, “Off the top of my head I would estimate, Dwayne, we’ll be able to present this campaign, timewise, in four and a half weeks. Four weeks minimum. We just switched our best art director to the account. Three weeks with heavenly intervention. God keeps an apartment in New York, incidentally, because this is a swinging town. Seriously, the guy’s an award-winning art director and he’s in his office right now doing roughs.”
Just then Pasqualini, the art director, stuck his head in the door.
“What is death?” he said.
Wainwright smiled and shrugged.
“Nature’s way of telling you to slow down.”
Charlie tossed his head to indicate laughter and Pasqualini headed down the hall to tell the joke to some of the other senior account men, Charlie’s peers, the guys with the snap tab collars and chromium smiles—they drank gibsons straight up and said, Thanks much.
In fact Charlie thought the joke was beautifully suited to these surroundings. In the Times every morning, wasn’t it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?
Charles Wainwright was an account supervisor at Parmelee Lock-hart & Keown, a medium-sized agency located in the Fred F French Building on Fifth Avenue in New York.
The shop had suffered a few setbacks lately. And every time an account went walking out the door, a hush fell over the carpeted halls. People stood in line at the coffee wagons, holding their poignant mugs. The jokes they told had a bitter edge. Executives made phone calls behind closed doors. The pasteup boys sat in the bullpen with the radio off and the lights down low. Copywriters took three-hour lunches and came back stinko. They sat in their cubicles and stared at memos pinned to the corkboard, wondering why they’d sold out if this was how it felt to be a sellout.
Charlie had to fire people sometimes. Once he fired three people in one day, two before lunch and one after. He fired a tall man and a short man in the same week. These were the Mutt and Jeff firings. He fired a man recovering from a heart attack and a woman who’d just died. He didn’t know Maxine was dead and he was forced to fire the secretary who’d caused the mix-up.
Charlie said into the phone, “If you want us to do the presentation here, I’ll get you a table at the Four Seasons, Dwayne, and you can play footsie with my English secretary. Or I’ll schlep the layouts out to Omaha. What a thrill it is to spend time—no, seriously, what do you do on Sundays, Dwayne? Go to the park and look at the cannon?”
This was a line off a Lenny Bruce LP but Charlie didn’t think he had to credit the source. He liked Dwayne Sturmer, a decent guy for an ad manager. And the account was fairly sound, the lawn fertilizer division of a giant chemical company. The creative types here in the shop wanted to do a Bomb Your Lawn campaign. A little twist on the fact that these fertilizer ingredients, plus fuel oil, could produce a rather loud disturbance if ignited.
A young copywriter, Swayze, stuck his head in the door.
“Had a date with a Swedish model last night.”
Charlie smiled and waited. The kid paused for effect.
“When I touched her Volvo, she Saabed.”
It was Charlie who killed the Bomb Your Lawn campaign while it was still in-house. The creative types wanted to use George Metesky as a spokesman. An approach so suicidal Charlie found it somewhat lovable. George Metesky was the Mad Bomber of the 1940s and 1950s, famous for setting off a series of blasts at New York landmarks. They wanted to track him down at the state pen or the funny farm and build the whole campaign around his ancient and fabled deeds and his endorsement of the product.
Bomb your lawn with Nitrotex.
Mad Ave was getting younger all the time and Charlie was forty-six. Almost ready to be placed on an ice floe with his handcrafted English wingtips and his Patek Philippe timepiece. Still, he had solid accounts and a sunlit corner office with a crushed leather sofa. Prints of steeplechase races and frocked lordlings riding to hounds. A painted sea chest he’d spotted in a London shop. And the thing that gave him away as a regular guy—a sort of baseball shrine, three populist mementoes clustered at the far end of the room.
First, a tenth-anniversary limited-edition lithograph entitled The Shot Heard Round the World. The piece included photos of the Polo Grounds, Ralph Branca delivering the pitch, Bobby Thomson swinging the bat, Thomson’s teammates waiting in a conga line to greet him at home plate.
Second, a photo of Thomson and Branca standing on a golf course with Dwight D. Eisenhower, all holding drivers, a couple of Secret Service men shadowing the fringes of the picture—Charlie’s wife found the item in a junk shop in Vermont.
And, third, a smudged baseball balanced on the rim of a coffee mug that sat on the credenza—a ball he’d bought from a guy who claimed it was the very object Branca had hurled and Thomson had heroically struck.
His secretary walked in, Sandy, in a Mondrian dress and white shoes.
“Dwayne, my secretary just walked in. She’s wearing white shoes. She’s got a foot fetish and she’s dying to meet you.”
He liked to tease Dwayne, who was a bachelor, extremely shy, a large flesh-colored man in a pajama-striped wash-and-wear suit and shoes like Chinese gunboats.
Sandy dropped some status reports in his in-box
They’d wanted to give George Metesky a wig, a mustache and spectacles to make him look like Einstein.
These creative minds with their sublimated forms of destruction. Every third campaign featured some kind of play on weapons. The agency was still in shock over the Equinox Oil campaign. This was a very expensive effort that culminated in a sixty-second commercial shot in the Jornada del Muerto in remotest New Mexico. Site of the first atomic test shot ever made. A white space on the map. Totally closed to the public. Charlie thought the idea would fly, actually. Fill up two cars with premium gasoline. One with Equinox, the other with a leading competitive brand. Run the cars across the barren desert. Shoot the commercial with helicopters, crane shots, tracking shots, slow motion, stop action, all the latest know-how. White car versus black car. Clear implication. U.S. versus USSR. First car to get to the Trinity site wins—this is the monument that marks the spot where the bomb went off. We get permission from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, National Park Service. We shoot the thing. Takes many weeks. Costs, per second, more than a Hollywood epic. But it’ll fly, baby. The stark scrub. The heat undulations and cow skulls. The dust storms. The high-angle shots—one car pulling away, the other catching up. A voice-over done by a pompous announcer with a cold war tone. Which car will run out of gas first? Which one will get to the marker? Miles per gallon. A huge consumer issue. Of course the white car outlasted the black car and reached the site first. We air the commercial. Heavy schedule. We thought the Soviet embassy might lodge a complaint. We looked forward to it. Free publicity. What happens? We get complaints all right. But not from foreign governments. We hear from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. We hear from the Urban League. We hear from the Congress of Racial Equality. Because the white car beat the black car. An amazing firestorm of protest. Threatened boycotts of all Equinox products. We pull the commercial. We reshoot the entire thing and absorb the cost ourselves. Two cars. Both white. Car with letter A painted on roof. Car with letter B painted on roof. Lesson. Don’t mix your metaphors.
“Cost per thou, Dwayne, is an overrated device intended to blind us to the truth of our situation.” He waited for Dwayne to ask what the truth of our situation was. “There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.”
There were probably two dozen people walking the streets in the days after the game, shysters, heisters, fools and knaves, all claiming they had the one and only baseball. Which Charlie devoutly wanted to believe was the selfsame object on his credenza.
Yes, the baseball that marked him as a regular fellow with a soft streak despite his milled-steel veneer. He got fascist haircuts done by Spadavecchia of Milan—his school actually, since Gianni was frequently overbooked. He wore striped shirts with white collars, or white shirts with blue collars. He wore suits so compulsively custom-fit a fart would split a seam. He played squash and handball, did Canadian Air Force exercises, applied bronzing agents to his face and body and sat in front of a sunlamp all winter long. A regular guy with a station wagon heart despite the giddy MG he’d just treated himself to, perfect for tooling the foothills of the Berkshires around their weekend place.
A sentimental weepy white guy.
Yes, the baseball he dearly wanted to entrust to his son Chuckie. To Charles Jr. No longer the bubblegum boy of yore but a failed preppy now, slant-bodied and dissonant, with dumdum eyes and a way of hating you from a distance. Flunked out of Exeter, chased out of Choate, walked out of Andover. Chuckie didn’t care. But Charlie did and it was painful. How could he give such an emotional object, whatever ambiguity throbbed in the ball’s corked heart, to this aimless wayward aging kid, a displaced person in his own life?
Pasqualini stuck his head in the door on his way back to the art department.
“What do you call a six-foot five-inch two-hundred-and-sixty-pound Negro that you run into in a dark alley?”
Charlie smiled thinly, wary of the new wave of civil rights jokes, and raised his head to indicate, What?
“Mister.”
He fired a pregnant woman once. He fired a man related to the Dutch royal family. He fired a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew in fairly close succession. He fired a man for falling in the water on the company boat ride and another for carrying a gun to a client meeting.
“They’re doing research, Dwayne, on what they call retinal discharge. They secretly photograph women in supermarkets. They have sensitive cameras hidden on the shelves that record excitations of the inner eye, motions of the eye far more subtle and telling than a simple blink, and it seems that women go completely crazy eyeballwise when they see certain colors, packages and designs. These are orgasms, basically, of the eye, the brain and the nervous system. How do we use this research? Simple. We correlate high discharge events with the particular items that caused them and then we design our products and packaging accordingly. Once we get the consumer by the eyeballs, we have complete mastery of the marketing process.”
Sandy came back in and began to mouth some sort of complicated message.
But if Charlie truly believed the baseball was authentic, would he leave it in plain sight, unguarded, where a cleaning woman might decide to take it home to her kid because she doesn’t earn enough money to buy him a baseball, or a delivery boy from the coffee shop around the corner—he pictured a swarthy male drifting through the corridors on a slow afternoon, with creamless coffee and a toasted English in a white bag, looking for something to pinch.
“She wants to talk to us, Dwayne. Yes, my secretary. Did I ever tell you how she types? She likes to fold one leg up under her. Before she began sitting on her foot she did about twenty-five words a minute. Now she does two hundred.”
Charlie was fascinated by certain quirks and traits that Sandy brought to her job. She had that distinctive English quality of looking terrifically fresh and crisp even while conveying tawdry intimations of the state of her underwear and the fact that she bathes only under pressure from her roommates, Fiona and Georgina.
Charlie talked to Omaha and deciphered his secretary’s mouthed message at the same time.
“She’s telling us she needs to leave early, Dwayne. She’s been leaving early quite often lately. And taking conspicuously long lunches. We know what that means, don’t we? An affair with a married man.”
Sandy did a stand-up collapse, aghast at the man’s cheek. His temerity, his effrontery, his American facking New York nerve. Charlie gave her his Richard Widmark grin. He had no reason to keep her around the rest of the afternoon but asked her to order him an orange juice before she left.
Charlie wanted to pitch the Minute Maid account. He thought about orange juice all the time. He looked at it, drank it, had fantasies about it. He knew how to advertise orange juice. Forget Florida. Forget the piddling vitamins. You have to go for appetite appeal, for the visual hit, because this is a beautiful and enticing beverage and women’s eyeballs reach high levels of excitation when they see bright orange cans in the freezer, gleaming with rime ice. You have to show the pulp. You show the juice splashing in the glass. You show the froth on a perky housewife’s upper lip, like the hint of a blowjob before breakfast. Of course there is no pulp in concentrate. And there is only a microtrace of pulp in container juice. But you can suggest, you can make inferences, you can promise the consumer the experience of citrusy bits of real pulp—a glass of juice, a goblet brimming with particulate matter, like wondrous orange smog. You show it. You photograph it lovingly and microscopically. If the can or package can be orgasmically visual, so can the product inside. There was nothing Charlie liked better than a glass of orange juice on a lazy Sunday morning in the country, nicely spiked with vodka.
He wanted to pitch the Smirnoff account. There was an element of Russian chic in the culture these
“Dwayne, she’s gone, good buddy. We’ve lost her to some lech in the copy department. I’d bet anything on that. Sandy thinks writers are moody and glamorous because they’re always in danger of getting canned.”
The moans of spewing buses rose into the settling dusk. The office lights were on now and all up and down the halls the girls tapped on the squarish keys of their IBM Selectrics. The graved ball kissed the ribbon, the ribbon kissed the paper, a superior grade of bond that was rag-weaved like the oxford shirts worn by the bosses of the typing girls. Every sixteen seconds one of them hit the wrong key and muttered a middling curse.
The married copywriters met their secretaries, or the secretaries of other writers, or the tall and lissome secretaries of account executives, white-shod and well-spoken, and went about the tender regimen of their lunchtime love—the nooner, it was called, or the matinee—meeting in the secretaries’ snug apartments, striking in their dimensional similarity to the cubicles the writers worked in, only decorated more touchingly and vulnerably, with posters of Madrid on the off-white walls, or prints of Marino Marini horses or Bernard Buffet lobsters, or in the larger apartments of secretaries with roommates, which complicated the schedule and made the writers yearn for an intimate glimpse of one of the roommates, barefoot in a partially open robe, perhaps, coming from the shower after a late night with a failed date, the apartments situated nearly always in the sunless hindquarters of white-brick buildings in the East 80s, undoormanned, the small elevators inspected every two years by an individual called A. Bear, according to recent entries on the record of inspection that was fixed to the elevator walls.
And yes, it’s true, Charlie has practiced this kind of erotic disport himself, off and on, with one or another single young woman working in the production department or somesuch level of the mothership, belowdecks and lonesome and not always, actually, very young. But did he enjoy these interludes or were they sad entertainments he inflicted on himself in the stark space of a convertible sofa turned open to span the room so that he had to walk upon the bedding to go and pee? He had lovely sex with his wife in an antique bed with carved oak posts, so what are you doing here, Charlie, balling this morose media clerk. It was an odd form of mortification for some pattern of behavior, or grain of being, too transparent for this adman to fathom.