So This is Depravity Read online

  “As long as you’re here,” I said, “maybe you could tell me who you have to see in this town to get a parking ticket fixed.”

  “Aren’t you ashamed of being a party to the corruption of public officials?” he asked.

  “I am, indeed,” I said, “but I’d be twice as ashamed if I contributed to a situation in which it was impossible to get a parking ticket fixed in America. That’s one of the things democracy is about.”

  He rallied the other guests to combat. “Look,” he said, “at this symbol of American folly. Busily engaged in destroying himself with his vices, he would pollute the system by trading his vote for a parking-ticket fix. He probably drives three blocks when he wants to go to the drugstore instead of walking.”

  “And in a gas guzzler,” I said. “I used to walk, but joggers kept jeering at me for not jogging, and doctors kept stopping me to warn me off eggs and marbled beef, and excessively decent young people scolded me for flirting casually with divorcees. They said I should establish healthy permanent sexual relationships. The only way I could get any privacy was to drive.”

  The group moaned unhappily. “Hear that moan?” asked the agent of the uplift police. “That is the cry of an outraged America demanding that a law be passed to take care of people like you.”

  “No,” I said. “That is the moan of people who have been drinking white wine too long in hopes of attaining physical and social uplift. They are moaning for martinis.”

  The agent turned upon the moaning crowd. “Anybody who would drink a martini would eat eggs,” he said. The crowd recoiled in terror. “Anybody who would drink a martini,” he said, “would take saccharin.”

  The crowd retreated rapidly. Several persons dashed to their doctors for emergency injections of fear to help them resist vice and achieve senility intact.

  “Anybody who would drink two martinis,” I said, finishing my second, “would break up the furniture.”

  “How juvenile,” said the uplift agent as I broke up a lamp and an oak table in very respectable time. It was excellent exercise and far more fun than jogging. It also created a thirst for another martini, which I resisted, as I did not want to give this man the satisfaction of seeing me break up my gas guzzler. I knew there was no hope of bribing Congress into letting Detroit make me a new one. Uplift had cast such a blight over Washington that you could scarcely find a dishonest Congressman anymore.

  The commotion had drawn a large crowd outside. They were threatening to pass a law that would require me to be sold over the counter as a prescription drug, but the martinis’ fleeting gift of genius enabled me to get rid of them. “Disperse at once,” I shouted, “or I shall do something dreadful.”

  “He’s going to smoke,” shrieked a voice.

  “Worse than that,” I said, “I’m going to say a good word for Richard Nixon.” They scattered. Of course it was perverse, but at times uplift has to be beaten across the snout to keep it in its place. It made me feel so good I had the third martini after all. Now I need a new car.

  Richly Deserved

  New York’s financial trouble apparently left most Americans rather pleased. Many seemed downright delighted, and salesmen trying to find buyers for Municipal Assistance Corporation bonds reported a positive emotional hostility, suggesting a desire to see the place plowed with salt like conquered Carthage.

  The reason for this antipathy is easily explained and easily removed. It is the rich and the poor. The rich of New York are mostly people who left Main Street for Gomorrah-by-the-Bronx and ended up on top of the world.

  Few people who have stayed home and watched an old school pal go on to tailored suits, hip flasks and long-stemmed beauties on distant boulevards are spiritually elevated by the spectacle of the hero’s success. Many experience twinges of pleasure upon hearing that he is mired in a fen.

  New York is filled with these human successes we all went to school with before they began lunching on expense accounts and dictating memoranda in limousines. Only a person with a heart of mush could weep upon hearing that their milieu has gone sour.

  To compound the problem, New York is also filled with the poor, the incompetent and the wretched. It is the national convention center for life’s losers, and while everybody may not love a winner, this is a country where most people believe nobody can really lose unless he tries to. The high concentration of these misfits in New York is accountable partly to the intelligence spread across the land that New York treats them less abominably than most places.

  Thus, Americans have a distorted impression of New York. It is perceived as a city of arrogant successes and coddled failures.

  If it is a pleasure to despise such an urban perversion of the American code, it is also a cruel injustice to the great majority of New York’s population who will never lunch at Lutèce or cash a welfare check.

  A solution becomes obvious. If the successes and the failures were both removed, Americans would again see New York as a place much like Kansas City or Des Moines, full of earnest white-collar toilers and purposeful yeomanry. New York’s problems would then be seen to be the same problems everyplace else faces, and a creative spirit of brotherhood untainted by ugly regional and economic envy would prevail.

  Disposing of the troublesome element in New York would, moreover, vastly increase the city’s per capita wealth and possibly dissolve its financial problem. If all the successes and all the failures were moved elsewhere the population decline would be about 1.5 million persons, the great majority of whom would be people who merely drain the city’s wealth.

  Relocating a million poor people is relatively easy. One month very soon, they could be mailed, instead of welfare checks, bus tickets to Chicago, or perhaps to Washington. It is a difficult choice. Chicagoans boast that Chicago knows how to cope with poor people but, on the other hand, constant suggestions from Washington that the Federal Government could teach New York a thing or two about handling money argue in favor of letting the Federal city give these wretched losers the benefit of Washington’s superior fiscal know-how.

  Alternatively, they might be shipped to a suburb. The future of America lies in the suburbs, everyone says. That’s where the old virtues abide and people still understand about work, dedication and commitment to American values. Surely, a million losers from New York would profit from the salubrious ethical atmosphere of, say, Armonk, New York, or Chevy Chase, Maryland, which would doubtless be proud to give New Yorkers a lesson in how to deal with such people.

  Disposing of the rich will not be so easy. No other city will wish to take them all, lest the new host city incur the same kind of enmity these successes brought upon New York. They must be spread around. Television people might be assigned to Buffalo and the theater crowd to East St. Louis, which could use brighter lights.

  The gangster community could be relocated in Roanoke, Virginia, which needs excitement. The beautiful-people set, which flies to the Alps, could go to Salt Lake City, which has a good airport, and the bankers and market kings could be moved to Baltimore, where East Pratt Street would doubtless soon make the world forget Wall Street had ever existed.

  Afterwards, no American would dislike New York again, and anyone from anywhere visiting New York would feel so perfectly at home standing on a street corner on a Saturday night eating a piece of cheese that nobody probably would think it worth a visit.

  So This Is Depravity

  1976

  With the Democrats coming to New York for their convention, everyone is suddenly worried about sheltering them from the depravity of Times Square, 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue.

  Sheltering a Democrat from depravity has always seemed to me to be an offense against nature, like sheltering a fish from water, but a friend in the city government insists that what goes on in the midtown depravity zone makes Friday night at the typical Democratic Club seem, by comparison, like a Girl Scout picnic.

  To persuade me of the degradation which will imperil De
mocrats unless the area is cleaned up, he took me to a pornographic film parlor off Seventh Avenue, which will lie right in the Democrats’ line of vision.

  Admission was $5. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” I told my friend. “You’ll never catch a Democrat laying out five bucks for a movie when he can hang out in the convention bars and cadge free drinks from the candidates’ ‘bag men.’”

  “They could be forced to take sanctuary in places like this to escape the prostitutes on Eighth Avenue,” he said.

  We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth-floor walk-up.

  “Should Democrats be forced to look at stuff like that?” my friend demanded.

  “As friends of the laboring man, they should not only look at it, they should stand up and cheer,” I told him.

  After a while, the movie dramatized the thankless lot to which woman has been reduced in the sexual labor force. A wan, dispirited woman, obviously defeated by years of sweatshop labor, trudged about naked in a kitchen cooking a chicken dinner.

  “Disgusting,” murmured my friend.

  “But politically powerful,” I whispered. “If every Democrat in Congress could see this there’d soon be legislation guaranteeing that poor creature enough pay for her labor to buy a housecoat and put some sirloin on the table.”

  We fell quiet then, for the woman—small thanks for her toil over a hot stove—had been hung by ropes from the ceiling and was being severely whipped.

  From the start of the picture I had realized that sex was a harsh and thankless business, but I hadn’t guessed it treated its work force like this.

  “Every Democrat in the country ought to see this,” I said. “Then maybe there’d be legislation forcing sex to treat its workers at least as well as chain-gang prisoners.”

  “Shut up,” said my friend.

  We watched in dismay while a giggling, deformed man, who appeared to be an idiot, struggled to move several hundred pounds of listless female furniture that had been placed in awkward positions.

  “Exploitation of the mentally defective for the vicious purpose of perpetuating a system of human labor that should have been automated years ago,” I said. “If the Democrats see this, you can bet there’ll be new fair-labor legislation to bring sex into the twentieth century.”

  “You’re spoiling the movie for me,” said my friend.

  I subsided, for the movie had switched themes. Having dramatized the odious toil and punishment of sex, the movie now began illustrating various machine operations. It had become essentially an industrial training film designed to instruct sex workers in industrial processes.

  For this purpose, seven or eight human bodies were employed. By example, the film demonstrated various functions of machinery. In sex, I gathered, the human body is not regarded as a human body, but as plant equipment.

  Now the laborers, who had toiled so dispiritedly in the earlier sequences, took turns demonstrating sundry mechanical processes their machines could perform, and we had a lengthy, didactic illustration of generator upkeep, valve timing, lubrication maintenance, clutch disengagement and other such engineering matters.

  I was disgusted and hauled my friend out of the theater. “That cuts it,” I told him. “When the Democrats see that sex is turning people into machines, I think we can count on fast action.”

  “They’ll outlaw it,” said my friend, somewhat sadly.

  “And why not?” I demanded. “Who wants their life afflicted with something like that?”

  Caesar’s Puerile Wars

  Among treasures recently uncovered by Italian workmen excavating for a new discothèque in Rome is an essay entitled “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” written by Julius Caesar at the start of his junior year in Cato the Elder High School. At the request of the Italian Government and the classics faculty of Oxford University, I have translated it from the Latin into English. The text reads as follows:

  These things thus being so which also, from the nones to the ides, the impediments having been abandoned, Caesar constituted on the rostrum to exhort his comrades to joy. “No more lessons, no more parchment scrolls, no more teacher’s dirty looks,” Caesar hortated.

  Ten days having subsided, of which the maximum was the first Sunday, Caesar, of whom the parents having to a villa in Capri passed from the injurious sun of Rome to that lambent insular quiescence. Which, therefore, Caesar, being abandoned solely to the urbans of the Rome, he gave himself illicit custody of his father’s chariot and hied it through the Roman routes and streets in quest of frumentum.

  Between those all which conjoined with Caesar in the paternal chariot, thus to harass the maximally beautiful feminine youth of the city and to make the ejection of empty wine jugs onto the lawns of quaestors, censors, tribunes and matrons, were Cassius and Marc Antony.

  Brutus noble was superior to the omnibus, however, of others between Caesar’s cohorts. That one opposed his stance to the puerile search for frumentum, stating which things thusly: primary, that harassings of femininity from a moving chariot and ejectings of empty wine jugs had not been predicted by the Cumae Sibyl. Fourthly, that Caesar was a reckless driver which would wreak ire, not only of the gods, but also of Caesar’s father, by the arrogance of which he burnt the iron from the paternal chariot wheels.

  The which made much risibility itself between Cassius, Marc Antony and Caesar. “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” said Brutus, “evince respect to the public thing unless you will have forgotten to obviate too long our patience, O Catiline.”

  These things having been exhorted, Marc Antony asked Caesar to lend him his ear and declared into it, “Brutus is a sissy. For two denariuses I’d whip his gluteus maximus.”

  Caesar’s ear whence, by forced march, having been manumitted to Cassius, this one, his lips having been juxtaposed to the lobe, uttered, “Brutus thinks too much about the public thing. Such schoolboys are stuffy.”

  Twelve nights having marched, Caesar and his amiables having collected a six-pack of Falernian wine and three frumentums from South Tiber Girls’ Latin School, these made strategems to effectuate nocturnal sport on Capitoline Hill.

  To which speeding full of equitation, the chariot encountered an opposing chariot adjoined in much agitation, having debauched from the superior route without attention to the whiffle-tree connection.

  After brusque externalization from Caesar’s chariot in a shower of frumentum, Caesar, Cassius and Marc Antony, their wounds being inferior, hurled themselves furioso with epithet upon the two passengers of the intersecting chariot shattered in regard to the right wheel.

  “Tacit your puerile abuse,” said the younger of those there two. “You are speaking to Cato the Younger and this one here of us two is Pliny the Elder.”

  Thus which then Caesar being aware, without days of wrath and being recognized by Cassius and Marc Antony as the without whom none, Caesar sent pleas to Cato the Younger and Pliny the Elder lest they make him under arrest for driving a chariot without a license.

  Of which indeed it would have been made, the more thus also by which that inspection of Caesar’s chariot would have unopened the essence of a can of paint, revealing his juvenilian strategy to paint a graffito on the statue of Romulus and Remus. By high fortune joined the dispute Cicero, having been awakened from his oration by the crash.

  “How long, O Julius, will you continue to abut our patience?” asked Cicero. Then was Caesar full of dolor, by which he made the oath to work hard all summer and respect the public thing, whomever would Cicero lend him the money to repair the two ruinous chariots before his father got back from Capri.

  “I shall make it thus to be so which,” said Cicero, “because of the respect I support for your old genitor.”

  Thus came Caesar to toil hi
s summer vacation in labored makings and to ponder the glory of the public thing, of which the which is such that there is no posse to improve it, although Caesar is determined to study hard this year so he can grow up and improve it anyhow, whichever is of what.

  Pr-s-d-nt--l Sex

  ​Revelations about the sex lives of Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt have prompted many questions about sex and the Presidency. Because of the new public demand for lubricious political disclosure, it is now vital to answer them with full candor. Here are the answers to the questions Americans most commonly ask:

  Q: Is it true that President Zachary Taylor liked to be spanked by older women?

  A: This is a base canard, which arises from the fact that President Taylor was known as “Old Rough and Ready.” Actually, Taylor abhorred spanking, as well as French postcards.

  Q: Wasn’t George Washington once treated for an Oedipus complex?

  A: Yes, but it was accidental. Washington had gone to have his dental plate adjusted and was inadvertently shown into a psychiatrist’s office and told to lie on the couch. The doctor began by asking, “How long have you had these feelings about your mother?” Washington was so embarrassed by the hour which followed that he never went to the dentist again. This is why George Washington’s false teeth still didn’t fit when Gilbert Stuart painted him.

  Q: I have always heard that Rutherford B. Hayes wore shiny black leather underwear throughout his Presidency. Is this true?

  A: Anyone who knows how hot it gets in Washington in July will realize that this is nonsense. President Hayes, in fact, was an exceedingly prudish President, who blushed when he had to go into a haberdashery and ask to see some long woolen union suits.