MY STOCK DECLINES AT MUI. I bring in tapes, I play one, Fox fidgets, Wally puts on another, Fox goes to the John, Wally gives me a lecture, as follows. I don’t hear you talking, kid, I don’t hear the slogans, HE WHO LEARNS EARNS, A CHILD TAUGHT IS A FUTURE BOUGHT, HE WHO KNOWS GOES. There’s a fucking lot of wisdom in those thoughts, kid. I can’t hear nothing, have you got the folder out? I don’t hear the pages rattle. You’re not doing a social bit here, kid. You can’t sit on your can, you got to push. You know what I mean? Push. What’s the matter, kid, these guys don’t know nothing. If they weren’t dopes they’d be selling and you’d be buying. And the dumber they are, the softer they are, that’s a basic of salesmanship. I’ll tell you something, kid, to a dope I can sell shit in a fancy wrapper. Is that what you’re selling me, I said. That’s it, kid, be snotty. What do you want, you want to smell them or sell them? I go into a guy’s home, if the guy’s nice I’m nice, if the guy’s snotty I’m snotty. I say to them, Mr. Jerk, I hope you will pardon my expression, but you are a stupid person. Maybe no one ever called you a stupid person before, but I am calling you a stupid person, and I’ll tell you why, Mr. Jerk, because I came here in your home to talk about your kid’s future, and you’re not listening. You listen to the doctor when he comes, don’t you? You’re shaking your head, Mr. Jerk, does that mean you do or you don’t, because I don’t know from the way you’re acting whether you listen to the doctor. I wouldn’t be surprised if you put cotton in your ears and it goes in one ear and out the other, because I came here to tell you something just as important as the doctor. I came here to tell you that if your kid isn’t educated he’s through. I don’t know what your line is, you didn’t have the courtesy to acknowledge what your line is, maybe you collect garbage, but I’ll tell you something, if your kid doesn’t have an education today he won’t even collect garbage. You know what he’ll do, and I choose my words with full appreciation, he’ll be a bum. You feed your kid, don’t you, Mr. Jerk? You see to it that he gets nourished right up to the teeth. But what do you do about the mind, because if you don’t fill up the mind you might as well throw away all the good nourishment and send him out on the street with the rest of the bums, because that’s where he’ll end up, standing around on the street with his hands in his pocket. You see these kids with their hands in their pockets, what’s on their minds, Mr. Jerk? Who knows, you know what I mean, Mr. Jerk. You see what I’m doing, kid, I get my hooks in and they listen. You’re just wasting everybody’s time, most of all your own, with this banana-cake shit. Get with it, kid. The banana-cake shit referred to one of the tapes Fox walked out on. Sweet people, the guy about thirty, two children, one eight and the other preschool. And he was no dope either, he was a color-reproduction expert for an advertising agency. Anyway when we came to FAMILY IS FUTURE he told me that his worst day since he got married was better than the best day before he got married, which sounds wild, but not if you saw his little round wife with her black hair parted in the middle and pulled back in a bun behind her head, and the two kids, quiet without being stiff. Then he told me about the banana cake. It seems that when he was a child in North Carolina banana cake was his favorite food, but he hadn’t had any in so long he had forgotten about it. Then one night—after he and his wife had been married five years—he came home and she had baked a banana cake. Five years, she never knew he liked banana cake, he didn’t know she could bake it, which I gather not everybody can do. Well, Fox walked out at this part, and Wally turned the tape off, but the guy had gone on to explain that the banana cake had made him so happy he couldn’t get to sleep that night. He was afraid it would all be taken away from him, wife, kids, home, job. It wasn’t, however, and they invited me back the next evening, when the wife would have a banana cake prepared. I didn’t go, but I’m sure it was great banana cake. I knew Fox wouldn’t learn anything about selling books from the tape, I just thought it would be good to listen to. So what are we going to do? There are eaters of banana cake, there are Foxes and Wallys, and right in the middle there is me, which is the worst position of all, I suspect. Not that everybody I do for MUI eats banana cake. For instance, there is the carnivorous Mrs. Frank, more about whom in a minute. Or there is the newsstand dealer who twenty years ago, when he was on furlough from the army, met a famous American philosopher. The philosopher saw in the young soldier a Natural Philosopher. He even wrote an article about the soldier to prove it. Well, this naturally philosophic soldier never got over it. For twenty years he’s been going around believing that he is the repository of special wisdom. He writes letters to magazines and world leaders and even claims to be amused that a man of his qualities is running a newsstand. I don’t think his wife is, however. Then there was another guy who works in a commercial darkroom, where the chemical fumes are so intense he can’t smell or taste food any more. Leaning over a table lamp he showed me the scar tissue instead of mucous membrane inside his nose, and also took out a pair of his work pants from which the chemicals had eaten away the cuffs. He did all this with a smile. Before I left we went into his bedroom so that I could see how the fire escape was rusted away. Anyone trying to use it would fall to the street. All smiling. Then there was a big meaty housewife, who in every sentence used the word frig, pronouncing it mincingly to let me know she knew it stood for fuck, which she refrained from saying out of delicacy. This woman’s husband told me that when he first saw her she was working in a candy store, the owner’s daughter. Before he had spoken to her, just having seen her over the counter and through the store window, he told his buddies that she was the girl he was going to marry. None of them believed me, he said, not one of them thought I could. But I did. Fox had absolutely no comment when I ran this one, and I felt as if I had told a dirty joke to a bunch of nuns. Then there was a woman whose midget uncle one night had brought Tallulah Bankhead home, where she sat with the family till two A.M. I didn’t know what this meant or was intended to mean, except that the woman spoke of it in a way that made me think it was the first autobiographical revelation she made to strangers. Also there was a kid who spat on one of my foldouts. The father, a psychologist, asked me if I didn’t think the boy was wonderfully aggressive. I said if he was my kid I’d bash his skull in, so that before I left, the father called me a Nazi brute. Well, if these encounters amuse you they’re not a complete loss, that’s what I say. But after twenty or thirty interviews you begin to realize something, that you’re using up people’s time, stealing it in fact. Most of them work hard all day, come home and want to watch television or hop into bed and screw or sit around and drink, and here I arrive, fake my way into their living rooms with my big black presentation folder and my little invisible tape recorder, and I steal their precious time. Then I turn their foolishness over to my master, who will make from it a poison formula to lay them out on the order pad some day. That isn’t nice, is it? So if I goof, if I just let them talk about themselves and if what they say is useless to Fox and Wally, well then, bravo for me. Let them get another boy-spy, which I suppose they’ll be doing soon enough. Mrs. Frank, mentioned above, is a special case, like the psychologist, not in our test block of five-story tenements. She and her plump silent son live around the corner from me, one of the families Mr. Goldhammer recommended. No doorbell ringing here, all was accomplished in genteel and professional fashion. I phoned for the appointment. Yes, Mr. Goldhammer had spoken to her about me, said I was a very interesting young man doing important work for the country. Come over whenever you like, just call beforehand, she said. No fun at all, I thought, no danger, no resistance. Well, there was fun. The moment, the second, the millisecond I saw her I knew that Mrs. Frank was more organ than person. Wet. Her lips shone, the lower rims of her eyes glistened, her tiny hand was warmly damp. For a while—until she made up her mind about me, I guess—she was all eyes. I thought she would lick me. Well, we raced that interview, Mrs. Frank nodding, nodding, Junior saying nothing, only looking, looking with the mother’s same wet eyes. Then—so Mommie and the man could talk—Junior was put to bed. Every five minutes for half an hour she checked him, and when she finally announced that he was asleep we ourselves were in bed before five minutes more had passed. It was a strange seduction, no seduction at all. She had so shown the wetness, or whatever the quality was, that nothing had to be said. As she came out of Junior’s room for the last time, I stood up, kissed her, and she led me away. I won’t tell you how many times the dirty deed was done that night. You’d think I was bragging, and although I’ve heard of similar exploits by others, I never thought I’d be the hero of one myself. Let me here repeat a familiar sentiment: a man is only so good as the woman he’s with. Mrs. Frank is very good. The night was like a week to me. I napped between, deep dreamless naps, waking in surprise, then we’d sit at different ends of her great bed, talking and kidding around, tickling one another’s feet, and a funny thing struck me, how much this was like children in a sandbox. Bed is the adult’s playground. It seems sort of regressive when you think of it, but it really is the only place you can giggle easily when you’re grown up. In a way, though, it was too much. Not that it wasn’t fun, because she’s a small and charming creature, a little worn about the tit and tummy, but pretty and golden, and it was fun. She had to tell me, however, the gory story of her marriage, some years dissolved, to what she claims was an unconscious fag. Every time he came near me for sex, she said, it looked like there was someone behind pushing him. Well, I guess she ought to know. But I think she still loves the guy. In the midst of the tossing and turning she called me by his name. And then I couldn’t get out of my mind a picture of the plump silent boy in the other room. He was the adult and we were the children. It didn’t seem fair. Well, whether on his account, Mrs. Frank’s account, Mr. Frank’s account, or my own, after I left, which was about five A.M., I was overcome by a depression. If all animals are sad after intercourse, I was five times sad, and on my way home, no one around, I walked into a traffic light. Later I realized that I had seen the light and walked into it anyway. I like Mrs. Frank all right, but I guess I don’t approve of her. I might if the boy hadn’t been there, but as it was, the night made me feel like an accomplice, or one of many accomplices, in the bad thing she was doing to him. Don’t ask me what bad thing, I don’t know, but when I got home I couldn’t sleep, so I wrote about my pal Austin, which writing I will send you under separate cover, in a plain wrapper.