Nothing Works and Nobody Cares

in which the renowned big-game hunter and author, fearless in the face of lions both wild and literary, concedes total frustration with the misnamed conveniences of modern life

A Nice Polish Lady I know once said: "Don't pick up that log, you'll get raptured." Another time she said: "The trouble is the girl has got a crash on you." It seems to me that everything I lift raptures me, and the whole world has a crash on me. For instance:

There is a soft-drink machine that still owes me ten cents for a truant Seven-Up. In airports, five-cent Life Savers cost six cents. My knife sharpener completely chewed up a knife. My ice-crushing machine hurled some crushed ice at me and then quit cold, sobbing from exhaustion. Three phonographs are all raptured simultaneously. One refrigerator, kaput. There are no taxi-cabs until 10 A.M., and none at all at 4:30 P.M.

I got mildly rich once and bought a hand-wrought English auto. The tin ashtrays fall out of a car so special that you allegedly can only hear the dashboard clock tick. You can't hear my clock tick. It doesn't work, and neither does the cigarette lighter.

During the same period of affluence, I acquired a castle in Spain. The rain in Spain falls mainly on my brain, because the roof is porous. I caused to be built a garage, large enough to kennel a whelp of the old Graf Zeppelin. They constructed the roof of some sort of acid-bearing concrete, and so I was confronted with the following unusual dialog to a slave:

"Alan, hurry! Take the car out of the garage! It's raining again!"

Cost of paint job from acid burns: £400 and a long trip from Spain to London. Duration of inactivity on part of car: six weeks. But everybody said I looked real cute on the cook's bicycle.

Nothing works in my Spanish house, but then nothing works in my London digs, just as nothing ever worked in my New York apartment. The cesspool used to overflow in my boyhood home in North Carolina. It still overflows in Spain. In London the plumbing merely jams. And overflows. Gravity, old boy. The hot-water system, at this writing, has just drowned the cookstove, and the kitchen is full of strangers with pickaxes. The cook just had a hysterectomy, and she can't work anymore, even if the stove did work. This includes this typewriter, which is punching holes with the "o" key again.

I bear scars on wrist and soul from being chewed by a leopard who would have been dead if my gun's ammunition had fulfilled its basic purpose. But we picked the buckshot out of the cat's hide like currants from a bun. I choked the leopard to death with the shotgun, which doesn't work anymore, and then went off to hospital for six weeks. The hospital didn't work, either. The night nurse, whose name was either Jessie Juke or Katie Kallikak, stabbed me in the sciatic nerve with an injection of purest arsenic. I went into the hospital with my arm in a sling, and just you guess what was in a sling when I came out ... But nobody cares.

Nobody ever successfully operated an airline ashtray, although the plane might cost a hundred million dollars. All airline stewardesses run out of ice and whiskey and service when you need a final belt to cushion the last plunge into a mountain range. They are making mountains higher than they used to ... But nobody cares.

They ripped the guts out of Fifth Avenue at the peak of the influx of yuks to the World's Fair. I suppose it is because Fifth Avenue doesn't work anymore. The only thing I know of that really works anymore is Consolidated Edison, which is always busy digging craters seeking Judge Crater in the city streets because the new cancer complex of hideous buildings isn't getting enough electricity.

Let us assault the telephone system before we peruse the broader aspect of that commodity Ben Franklin trapped in a precursor to the Coca-Cola bottle.

Bell Telephone has a double-truck slick-magazine advertisement in favor of the Data-Phone. It headlines: "What Can Data-Phone Do For You?" as the grabber. Then it answers its own question: "It can transmit your business data over telephone lines at 100 to 2700 words per minute, at regular phone-call rates. Combine it with your present telephone service and you have fully integrated information handling that will help you improve customer relations, reduce paperwork, keep costs in line, and make decisions on what is today, not what was yesterday."

This, of course, is provided you get the right number, and not some recording which says: "The number you have just dialed is----" Or, mayhap, on Long Distance, after you have offered up an area code, you get Philadelphia instead of Phoenix, and a surly operator finally comes on to say: "What city are you dialing?"

One of the most successful film producers in the world lives in the flat above me in London. We have the same telephone exchange, Grosvenor, and this flat is in Park Lane. I cannot get Mr. Cubby Broccoli on the telephone, not even with the aid of his secret agent, James Bond, although I can hear his children killing each other through the air vent in my bath. And just the other day Cubby's automatic washing machine went raving mad and produced a waterfall which, guess what, roared through my best antique chandelier. Good old 007 couldn't fix that either. In my London dwelling, the concierge's name is Doctor No.

We have changed from operators to the dial system in my part of Spain. So for three months now I have had no phone service, even though I had to sign a notarized contract for the switchover. Of course, in the old human-operator days, the phone didn't work very well either. When you wanted a number you sent somebody to Palamós to wake up the operator. Now I send the cook to relay a message to my secretary. He lives a block away.

The Bell ad says, in part: "A savings institution uses Data-Phone service to connect all teller windows with a Central Computer. Tellers can check and update accounts immediately from any location--and can handle two customers in the time it used to take to handle one."

Hoo, boy. I don't know what my Shylocks use in the computing department, but I have recently had six banking errors and one near miss in a row since the machines took over.

Twice, on consecutive months, a publishing house sent me $50,000 which I did not own, and it had to be fetched back by messenger. (On the third mistake, I was going to keep the $50,000 and take off for Tahiti with it.)

Once, a monstrous Swiss bank debited my Zurich account but the machine forgot to send the money. (Correspondence to prove it.) But I dropped a grand shooting craps in London and the man was on hand with the blank check.

Next, the same bank sent the money to my New York bank, but in New York the machine gave it to the wrong person, whose name was nothing like Ruark. (I have been doing business with that bank since the end of World War Two.)

Then, for God's sake, the Swiss computer forgot the name of the town in Spain in which I dwell. (Letter to prove it.) And I have been doing business with that particular Swiss bank for 12 years, and have lived in the same Spanish town--5000 pop.--for the same number of years. It is not a difficult town to live in. I once received a letter addressed simply to Roberto, Palamós, and I also run a stamp credit tab with the post office. It still sorts the mail by hand.

Recently, I wrote a check for the last installment on a business deal, and unfortunately used an old checkbook that wasn't geared to the card punch. The money was there, all right, but they were about to kick back the check and call for the police when some square genius took it to the bank manager, who OKed it on his own reputation. Otherwise, some other machine would have shot me off to the pokey for forgery, or mopery, or something disgustingly similar.

Bell says: "A large insurance company uses a Data-Phone network to transmit records of premium payments, claims, new policies, and accounting information from 34 branch locations to a central data center ..."

Well, a large insurance company that used to handle my taxes as well as my premiums somehow forgot to tell the machine that alimony is deductible, and a little item of $35,000 makes a power of difference in the income-tax returns.

And speaking of income taxes, the machines in Washington were about to set the FBI on me for refusal to file until I sent them back the canceled check the machine forgot to mention.

Finally, Bell's ad mentions that "an appliance manufacturer has used Data-Phone service to the more than 40 independent supply centers in an automated network for ordering and supplying replacement parts."

I sure hope old Data-Phone gets cracking in this case, because you really do need a Data-Phone to supply replacement parts for the busted-flush merchandise that either doesn't work at all, quits in mid-function, or just manages to fall apart in your hands after a tiny spate of operation.

I have seen lightning strike, so old Ben Franklin must have had something when he caught that bolt in the bottle. But apart from what history preaches, I don't believe there is such a thing as electricity, no matter what Consolidated Edison says. I can feel it, when the shaver shorts out or the record player electrocutes me, but I have this uneasy suspicion that it's a crafty diversion to sway attention toward the butler, not the toaster, who was the actual guilty party in the murder.

Allegedly, electricity runs a variety of things, like vacuum cleaners that bust, television sets that explode, and lights that burn out. I admit its existence, but I don't really believe in it. Like what really keeps an airplane up?

It seems bloody silly to say that a tenant in a building can't have an air conditioner because the wiring is inadequate. The experts say that the wire is too small to handle the necessary number of amps or volts or whatever it is that wires hustle. This is why they keep digging up Park and Fifth and Madison. They are really looking for amps, not for oil or Judge Crater.

Electricity always seems to want to travel first cabin, and flings a tantrum if the stewards aren't in steady attendance. Miss Inez Robb, a testy lady, was writing the other day about calamities in the kitchen.

Said Miss Robb:

"Instead of discussing the care and coddling of the housekeeper-cook or the nursemaid, who has gone where the woodbine twineth, the conversation, still in the kitchen, turns on the care and feeding of push buttons--especially the cost of care to keep them in prime condition.

"For the push button, which is the substitute--and an unsatisfactory one at that--for Nora or Annie or Dinah, demands far more tender, loving care, far more pampering than the gone-but-not-forgotten houseworker ever did.

"The push button and the daily helper of fond memory have one outstanding characteristic in common: Both are prone to quit without notice. But there is also a major difference: When Annie quit, it was an inconvenience. When the push button quits, it's a major financial disaster.

"At least that's the way the conversation wags after dinner in these parlous times. The big conversation gambit in the kitchen today is not the horror of Bertha quitting just as the dinner guests arrive, but of the electric barbecue and grill laying down and dying--for no good reason at all--as the crowd gathers for steaks.

"Or, if it isn't the grill, the Gothic tale relates the treacherous demise of the electric dishwasher, the washing machine, the dryer, the electric carving knife that quits in mid-slice, the defunct air conditioner, or the deceased vacuum or floor waxer.

"And now I draw a merciful curtain over the rest of the talkathon: The scarcity of competent mechanics to repair said machines and the astronomical prices they charge for any kind of surgery. The slaughter is killing everything but conversation."

Another dissatisfied mortal writes:

"I am reminded of a TV set that a company wanted me to try, free of charge, for a couple of months; the case was made of extruded white plastic, ugly as a Tasmanian devil, with a plastic white clock stuck on it like a second eye; (continued overleaf) the clock was supposed to turn the damn thing on and off at your preset bidding. While trying to set the clock the first time, one of the handles broke off in my hand. I said to hell with it, turned the set on by hand; it played OK the first few times (except for loud crackles of electricity every now and then--that always bodes ill for plug-in gadgets). A couple of days later, the picture tube just quit trying and I had to get rid of it. A new Japanese importer (not Sony) rushed in with one of those new teeny-weeny jobs for me; that lasted three days before going on the blink. And, mind you, I don't even have to pay for these sets; if I did, I'd really blow up."

• • •

I have visited friends--reasonably affluent, and of dissimilar sexes--in what the real-estate racket calls "luxury housing," and have fled in horrified relief to a goathide tent in Timbuktu.

These joints are all shiny new, or reconverted, and the monthly rental stab would subsidize a yacht on the Riviera. The ceilings are as thin as a drum membrane, even if they are made out of alleged reinforced concrete, and they perform exactly the same function as a drum membrane. Structurally most of these new pads have obviously been hung together by one of the less talented of The Three Little Pigs.

Some of the conversations from next door, upstairs and downstairs would make an interesting addendum for the memoirs of Christine Keeler. You can hear beds squeak all round; you can hear toilets flush. On a clear day, you can hear a cockroach belch. In actual fact, I was sitting with a young lady one night, with the television turned up to drown out the screams of the rape victims, when a chap who was hanging a picture next door broke completely through the wall! And this, friends, in the high-rent district.

An alternative to the new construction is a converted brownstone, which has been carved into cubicles. The tenants, more in self-defense than honesty, brag about their 14-foot ceiling and their noble fireplaces, which generally don't draw. This fault really makes no difference since nobody but the late Bernard Baruch could afford logs at current prices. In New York, five boy-sized logs cost $3.75 plus a half-buck tip. Kindling, believe it or not, is sold by the quart. Competition to real wood has sprung up. One company sells something called "Rologs," which are composed of old newspapers, tightly rolled, with built-in air passages to make the paper burn well. But the fireplaces still don't draw, even if you're feeding them a steady diet of Louella Parsons.

The plumbing in the reconverts was installed by Henry Hudson himself, and has a mind entirely of its own. There is that little business of electricity again, and that also is evilly whimsical. Not so whimsical is the fact that there are no real facilities for garbage and trash removal. You leave the gunk in paper bags in the hallways, and trust that some potential sex killer lurking nearby will steal it.

Only choice between the brand-spankers and the reconverts is to live in the suburbs, and that means trains. Oy vay.

Trains. The trouble with train people is that they think they are still living in an early Harriman era. They think they are still in the railroad business.

Once, in a moment of madness, I took a train out of Grand Central, and was noticeably grayer at the finish of the safari. Fortunately all I was carrying was a briefcase, for there were no available porters, and I had to walk what seemed half a mile but was probably just over 500 yards. I wondered, momentarily, how a Whistler's Mother with a heavy suitcase would make it.

The train's john seeped only cold water. No towels. No soap. The odor was one retch ahead of a subway restroom. On the return trip, the train was an hour late, although the dispatcher had marked it "On Time." Just once, try killing an hour in a rural railway station with no bar and those lovely, rock-ribbed benches.

Dinnertime, and the living is greasy. Since the train was late, the dining-car staff also was late. The helpless feeder was therefore treated to a mild Dante's inferno of tables being dismantled and spare linen being stashed away, which is, to say the least, disquieting to the diner.

The waiter had not yet been corrupted. He was polite. But like so many old waiters, he couldn't read the order you scrawl on the check. He and the chef evidently had some sort of vendetta going, because the cold consommé was hot and half-melted, the liver came straight out of a synthetic-testing lab, and the whipped cream on the strawberry short-cake was purest Rise. The strawberries were made of genuine artificial coloring.

They are not building railroad tracks the same way since Averell's ancestor passed away. Or else the feather-bedded engineer was drunk, for the train kept lurching until the customer was half-drowned in his own coffee.

We progress now by easy hysteria to plastics. I recently encountered a plastic fire shovel. As I attempted to remove some hot ashes from a fireplace which did draw--it was on a pre--Civil War Texas ranch--the fire shovel melted in my hands. The ranch had been newly refurnished, and the ashtrays were plastic, as well. I left a cigarette in an ashtray--where else do you stick it, in your ear?--and the ashtray melted and the cigarette set fire to the tablecloth. We will now dismiss plastics, because I'm beginning to quiver again.

When I am in New York I stay in an East Side hotel, small, chic and expensive--a homey little hutch. Small suite, $35 a day. Gish sisters in the lobby. Ava Gardner in the Presidential suite. The piano in the Presidential suite ($50 a day) is out of tune and the keys stick.

One summer the owner was in Europe, acquiring culture. The manager was in the Hamptons, acquiring a glorious tan. And I was in the hotel, acquiring a glorious burn.

There was no room service after Sunday lunch, even in winter, but now there is no room service on Saturday or Sunday in August. The one doorman was running the elevator, and the one surviving bell-boy was riding the desk, because all the clerks were off on their hols. And the relief telephone operators? Mama mia.

But the bills remain constant. It is a matter of actual record that I once called Long Distance to get the house operator to ring the accountant--hotel accountants never take any time off, they're right in there with that weekly reminder--to attack room service personally, so that I might not starve in my costly garret.

• • •

I am basically a kind man, and heed warnings not to bend, staple, fold or mutilate. Wistfully I always hope that the hotdogs at football games will be hot. If there's a No Smoking sign present, nicotine will not smirch my lungs. I believe everything I read in the papers, and step lively when the subway guard snarls: "Move along now."

But I boggle at guarantees. Guarantees used to mean that what you bought was warranted to do what it was supposed to do for a reasonable length of time. If it failed, you dragged it back and some nice man gave you your money back. But today the actual salesman doesn't accept responsibility. He hangs the guilt on the manufacturer, and who do you know personally at General Motors, DuPont or General Electric?

What gets me right here is that guarantee that says: "Guaranteed for 100 years" or "five years." I don't want to hang in for 100 years to buy my money back, and it is difficult to remember where and when you bought some gadget that is good for that same five years.

The other day I went into Woolworth's to collect a canary for a friend's kid. This child has been quite sick and I felt the canary was easier to put up with than TV. You think I could just buy a canary and let it go at that? No. Not that easy.

I was given a guarantee that states: "This certifies that Ralph Rackstraw has today purchased a guaranteed male singing bird. Should this guaranteed healthy bird (with identification mark under the wing) fail to sing, or fail to please within twenty-one (21) days from the above date, this bird may be exchanged without charge for another singing bird of (concluded on page 255)Nothing Works(continued from page 178) the same value, provided he is returned in good health. Since we guarantee this bird to be a young singer, his song will grow stronger and more varied as he gets older. You will note his song develop as he swells his throat more and more from month to month."

Neat, just dandy--until you analyze it. "Fails to please"--how do they know what I expect from this bird? Grand opera? They talk about "growing stronger as he gets older." Is he going to rathcally change his vocal cords during the length of the 21-day guarantee? You expect Caruso and wind up with Eddie Fisher?

Now I have a guarantee that doesn't guarantee anything beyond the fact that the bird is a comer. Just give him time. This is just like my fire insurance which doesn't cover smoke damage, my Social Security, and my theft insurance which is ruled invalid because the camera wasn't in my safe at the time it was stolen.

It would be real sweet if somebody would manufacture something and issue a guarantee that said, in effect: "Look, we made this damned thing as best we could to show a reasonable profit on it and at the same time peddle you something worth your $2.79. It ought to last, with luck and no undue abuse by children and dogs, a couple of months. What do you want out of us--blood?"

At that point I'll buy the damn thing and recommend it to all the other kids on the block. But I will not recommend anything that's guaranteed for five years, much less a hundred.

Friend of mine smokes a special pipe tobacco--Old Sweatshirt, or something similar. He's been smoking it for 25 years. He puffs that pipe constantly, so he buys his tobacco in one-pound batches. Suddenly, he says, he had an uneasy feeling that the one-pound tin had shrunk. Weighed the tin: 14 ounces. And he swears that in grammar school they taught him that a pound ought to weigh 16 ounces, so somebody's clipping the baccy barn for the two ounces on each package.

This boy was really cheesed off. He knows about rising costs and is willing to pay rising prices, but he wants his full 16 ounces. He also is sore at a candy company that sells three quarters of a pound of chocolates. Who the hell ever bought three quarters of a pound of anything that was packaged?

I stand foursquare for only one modern commodity which really works: the Zippo lighter. The Zippo boys still keep my cockles cockling. No matter how old or in what condition your lighter is, Zippo will repair its product without charge. Hinges do wear out or break, naturally, but you know damn well that your old Zippo comes back from repair as good as new. They not only fix what's wrong but they install new cotton, a new wheel to strike the flint, clean the lighter, polish it and return it. All for free. They even send you a little envelope containing some fresh flints.

In the food department, practically nothing remains constant except catsup. Bread is aerated sawdust, painted ghostly white. It owns all the nutriment of a breath of its principal ingredient, air. Nobody makes bread anymore; they can't find the right dials on the stove, which has just shorted out.

Apple pie? Nunh-uh. In my time it was a delight, and I went to war for it and motherhood. But motherhood is obsolete, too, in the old-fashioned sense, and now apple pie is a slag heap of green apples jammed between two layers of Bakelite. What, oh what, ever happened to the slim slices that came cinnamon-drenched from the crusted deep-dish?

Nobody makes sauerkraut anymore. It used to be cabbage shredded thin, speckled with caraway and actually dilled. The closest thing to dilling these days is named Phyllis, a night-club comedienne.

You used to make three or four stops at good delicatessens to pick up a Sunday-night buffet--sauerkraut here, potato salad there, kosher franks yonder. Now you make the one stop and they put it all in a paper bag and it all tastes just like the paper bag, which is made of pure imitation cellulose. Momma, who took pride in preparing the specialties of the house, is no longer in the kitchen. She is shoving her mink around in Miami Beach. The mink is real, but real ranch.

Restaurants? You stumble by accident, in search of a beer and a sammidge, into some dive and run onto the damnedest cuisine since the first cannibal discovered a recipe for braised missionary. The food is marvelous, because Momma makes it herself. Then you open your big fat mouth and tell a couple of martini companions about this little gem where the flavor is and the ptomaine ain't.

Bam! In six weeks you've got a Louie Chez Lui. Next time you check in, the menu is engraved on paper so thick you have to pick the words out with tweezers. Some son-in-law, out on parole, sneers down his nose, and says: "Did you have a reservation, sore?" They never say "sir." It's always "sore." So you don't have a reservation, because the last time you were in the phone company had cut off the credit. But the maître de--his most recent rap was for breaking and entering--permits you to stand at a bar and drink nine dollars' worth of refilled Scotch until the table is ready, if ever.

A surly sister of the parolee slugs you a buck for a pack of cigarettes and your hat, and then loses the matching check. Everything on the menu, which used to consist of Poorboy sandwiches, beans and bread (all you can eat for half a buck) is now à la carte. But man, it's chic, and why bother to spend all that money in "21" or The Pump when you can poison yourself at twice the price in the name of chic?

The tipping business needs no further development. There is nothing you can say about a man being paid union wages who will insult you and imply your female companion is a slut if you don't double the price of a hot martini, served in a cloudy glass full of detergent suds. I will never understand hatcheck concessions, either. Does a restaurant expect you to eat with your hat and coat on, unless you bribe the chick who doesn't get the money anyhow?

The doorman says he can't find you a cab. The airport people say sorry, your luggage must have gone on the other plane. The airport taxi won't take you back from the canceled flight unless he can fill his heap with three other suckers. If it rains, there aren't any cabs. At the theater hour, there aren't any cabs. You can't get out of town on Friday, and you can't get back on Sunday.

The wishful domestic you are lucky enough to kidnap, at two bucks an hour, says her doctor told her she can't do any heavy work, like lifting or sweeping. The cook has to be home to check the Dow-Jones averages by seven sharp. You make all manner of appointments with doctors--no doctors make house calls anymore--and then you wait an hour and a half with an old copy of Country Gentleman or Bluebook. And if you break the appointment he bills you anyhow.

Philip Wylie once wrote a small poem that went this way, if memory serves:

The waiters all are rude.The bellboys scream and yell.The swill is better than the food.Goddamn the Mills Hotel.

As the sum total sinks over the plumbers and doctors and electricians and TV feelers, the supermarkets, the discount stores, the trains and the airlines, the taxis and the room servicers and switchboard operators and shoddy shoemakers and booksellers who say, brightly: "We had one, but we sold it last week," I feel that Mr. Wylie was speaking for us all.

Except I don't know why the poor old Mills Hotel has to take the rap for modern sucker civilization, in which, basically, most things that are not worth doing are done badly. Things don't work, is all. You just can't get there from here. And nobody--but nobody--cares. And the typewriter is busted again.