Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (11 page)

J
EERY
:
You sod-damned cowbird!

A
LAS
:
Stomp it! Stomp it this minute!

J
ANE
:
Why are we having such trouble trying to communicate?

D
INK
(taking the lead)
: Look. Alas … I heave nothing but harpy memories of our time together. I depreciate
your good winces, but Jane and I are to be marred, and that’s that.
(He looks to
J
ANE
to match his definitive renunciation.)

J
ANE
(
taking
J
EERY
’s hand briefly
): And … Jeery … I leave you very much. You know that. But that’s all winter under the fridge. (
She turns to
A
LAS
.
) Alas, I’m sorry I lost my torpor.

A
LAS
(with dignity)
: I understand. And I axe-up your apology. Anyway, for your inflammation, I’m getting marred myself. To Henry Silverstone.

J
ANE
(impressed)
: The banker! But he’s rather old for you, isn’t he?

A
LAS
:
Luckily, he’s in very good wealth.
(A car horn honks from offstage.)
There’s my chauffeured limbo now. I’d better get gilding. Conglomerations, and gall the best!… Goad bye!

D
INK
(feeling bested)
: Bile!

J
ANE
(feeling outdone)
: Bile!

J
EERY
:
Her own limbo!… Well, I guess I should leave you two lifeboats alone!

J
ANE
:
Thanks for the foul airs, Jeery! Enjoy the trance!

J
EERY
:
Maybe I’ll meet
my
future broad!

D
INK
(as if to a buddy)
: That’s the right platitude!

J
EERY
:
So long! Have a lot of skids!

D
INK
:
Bile!

J
ANE
:
Bile! (
J
EERY
goes.
) He’s a good spore, isn’t he?

D
INK
(reluctantly)
: I gas so.

J
ANE
(hugging him consolingly)
: But you’re the uphill of my eye!

D
INK
:
Oh, hiney!
(He holds and tries to kiss her, but she resists him.)
Oh, come on! Ploys? Pretty ploys?

J
ANE
:
Oh, look! A vintage battle of damn pain! Let’s celibate!
(She pops it open and pours some of it into two empty lemonade glasses on the porch table. She raises her glass.)
Here, let’s test each other!
(They toast.)
To
ice
!

D
INK
:
To
ass
!

J
ANE
:
Oh, galling! Our life together is going to be
blitz
!

A TALL TALE

America’s privately owned, fertilizer-enriched soil has nurtured some mighty big men—legends like Slipp’ry Joe Hartford, who actually sold Mother Nature unemployment insurance, or Lightnin’ Lefkowitz, the Wall Street Flash, who traded bonds so fast that no one could tell if they were really there or not. And every boy in B school has heard the story of Loophole Sam, who got out of both death
and
taxes. Yes, the doings and boastings of these tall-in-the-portfolio characters have filled many an annual report, but none of them has ever been bigger or more diversified than a horizon-blocking butte of a booster they call Johnny Business, and if the busboys have
finished clearing the tables, lend an ear to the story I’ve been so well paid to tell. Lights, please?

Johnny was only the biggest man that ever gripped a boardroom table, and that includes your ex-football players in public relations. Why, when he was born, he was fifteen stories high, with a view of the park on two sides! His pa was a profiteering man with an automobile so long, it started pulling into the hospital driveway the morning Johnny was born, and to this day it hasn’t completely arrived. Johnny’s mother was the infamous Ma Bell, a broad-shouldered woman who could hear a million conversations at once, and still not change her mind.

One day when he was three, she took him out to lunch and said to him. “Son—you gonna be a deal-drivin’ man, like yo’ daddy?” And Johnny—through a representative—answered, “I have no problem with that.”

Well, it wasn’t long before Johnny’s pa was reduced to nothing by revenooers, and his poor old Ma got divested, so Johnny quit Junior Achievement and headed out on his own. Next slide, please. He made himself an attaché case out of an old airplane hangar,
and along with his trusty secretary, Babe the Blue Blood, headed south.

“South, Babe!” he told her, and held on high a billfold the size of a billboard. “South—to the Sunbelt!”

Johnny was such a fast talker, he could sell feathers to a fish, retail, and in no time he cast a long shadow from Dallas to Atlanta. Old Babe had to do a mountain of Xeroxing as high as the Wrigley Building every morning before breakfast, and what they didn’t want kept they used for landfill to build high rises on. He had more credit cards than there are things to buy, and he worked it so he could charge the new ones on the old ones, and the old ones on the new ones, and not even your auditor could have figured out who was due what. And when Johnny took a client out to lunch, he drank his martinis out of old water towers from bankrupt railroads. “Here’s how!” he’d laugh. “Happy hour is here to stay!”

Of course, people always get jealous when you’re big and jolly. Some sunken-eyed baloney-for-lunch types tried to get Johnny tied down, though of course they were too cash-scrawny to take him on in any leveraged way. No, they had to tattle, like a runt to
a playground monitor. What happened was, one day Johnny was visiting a mining operation he was thinking of selling, and when he lay on his belly and squinted down that shaft, he didn’t like what he wasn’t seeing.

“It’s Monday, Frank,” he told his foreman. “Where are all the miners?”

Frank took to trembling so his clipboard started to splinter. “They ain’t workin’, Johnny!” he stammered. “Some kind of itty bitty scraggly ol’ foreign birdy told ’em to go out on strike for safer conditions!”

Johnny’s scorn fell like acid rain on alkaline earth. “Nothin’ in life is safe!” he roared. “America didn’t get built on safety! Gimme that shovel, Frank, I’ll do the mining myself!”

Johnny took hold of a gigantic shovel and was about to be labor and capital both at once, when suddenly, three little tiny woman lawyers you could barely see came up behind him and hit him with a Cease and Desist whammy. The first one had once got Christmas tabled till Easter, and the second one had taken over Hell until the Devil could refinance. The tiniest of the three was also the meanest. She was from the IRS, and was so good at tax collecting she could find pockets on a shadow. The three of them together carried a roll of red tape so thick a man couldn’t even think of home without a dozen feasibility studies first.

Of course, Johnny’s back was broader than those little woman lawyers were motivated to wrestle, since they worked on salary only, and he threw them faster than rodeo clowns off a bronco. Then he went ahead and dug into that mine until it plumb collapsed from
happiness, and to this day they call the hole he left the Grand Canyon, in honor of the thousand dollars he paid himself to do it. Then for dessert he cut down all the forest in those parts, slicker than a ballplayer shaving on a TV commercial. And without those pesky regulators, Johnny started growing and growing and
growing
—right in front of the media, so ask them if you don’t believe me—and pretty soon it took three strong men just to
conceive
of how rich he was!

Finally, right when Johnny was so big he was actually twice as large as himself, there was a market-rattling explosion that made analysts bark as far away as Tacoma, and when the hype had cleared, there wasn’t anything left in Johnny Business’s shoes but the air rights.

Where did he get to? Oh, some say he went and jumped out a window, but you and I both know there’s not enough distance on this earth for a man that big to fall far enough to hurt himself. Others say he died from a heart attack after all that hard work he should have been delegating, and still others have the gold-plated brass to say they’ve seen his carcass on display at Neiman Marcus—but after all the bespectacled Sunday morning commentary floats off into what no one watched yesterday, the real question is, Do dreams like Johnny’s ever really die? Sometimes,
on an autumn evening, when trading has been particularly heavy, give a listen to the wind. Maybe you’ll hear a distant voice saying,
“… I’ll get back to you!”

That’ll be Johnny.

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