Tanner On Ice

Chapter 4

It took me six months.

I don’t know if you’d call that a long or a short time for the task at hand. All I know is that’s how long it took, and it was an intensive six months. I was at it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with time out for meals and not much else. Even the exercise I got, which consisted of walks around the city, was a sort of busman’s holiday; I tried to take a different route each time and acquaint myself with changes in the neighborhoods.

Mostly I read. Every week I went through a solid year of newsmagazines – Time or Newsweek, I alternated between them, plus the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday Times. I maintained that approximate ration – one week to one year – and supplemented the news with the books and magazine articles my reading led me to.

For example, the news coverage could give me a sense of the increasing role of computers, but I had to read books to find out what they really amounted to. The newsmagazines provided a good idea of the way the AIDS plague had impacted on America and the rest of the world, but I had to read And the Band Played On for a fuller report and an overview. And so on.

I just read all the time. And, while I was taking the years one by one in the same order Time had dealt them out, there was no way to avoid skipping around some. The daily paper kept throwing things at me that I hadn’t yet encountered in my reading, and I couldn’t really pretend I didn’t notice.

Like, for example, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of world communism. How, when you come face to face with a fact of such magnitude, could you put off paying attention to it? A system that had looked for all the world like the inescapable future for all the world had overnight wound up on the dust heap of history, along with Prohibition and feudalism and the Stanley Steamer. The Red Chinese (except no one called them that) had a stock market now, and the Brits had given Hong Kong back to them. The only place communism survived at all, as far as I could make out, was in Cuba, which in turn was the only place where the United States had strenuously opposed it. (There was a lesson there of a sort which probably wouldn’t be lost on a master of the Asian martial arts, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was.)

For my part, I went right on reading. Years ago (obviously!) I’d taken a course in speed-reading. I hadn’t used it all that often – sometimes you want to take your time with a book – but I hadn’t forgotten the technique, and I made good use of it now.

Meanwhile, Minna taught me how to use the computer. At first we spent an hour a day at it, and early on I was convinced that I was hopeless, that I would never catch on, that merely learning what to call things was hard enough but actually using the thing was impossible. I reminded myself that some languages were like that – I’d had a perfect hell of a time learning Chinese – and that all I had to do was stay with it. And then I began to get the hang of it.

Once that clicked in, Minna had me using the thing to study the past quarter-century. It was amazing the access it gave a person. I could sift through the world’s libraries without leaving my apartment. I could also go off on tangents without realizing it, too, and could waste whole hours playing Tetris and computer solitaire, but eventually they lost their curious charm and I managed to get back to work.

So much to find out! So much to catch up on!

A lot of it was exciting. It had been evident even back in the early seventies that Europe was in the process of becoming one nation, and that process had continued, but so had its opposite. Yugoslavia was a prime example, having during those same years become five nations, but it was by no means an isolated example. The bad old USSR had become more than a dozen nations, and even Czechoslovakia had somehow found it incumbent upon itself to bifurcate into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Four short years before my personal Ice Age began, Russian tanks had rolled through the streets of Prague. Now Vaclav Havel, whom I’d met once in a garret in Montparnasse, was president of the country. I remembered him as a chain-smoking young playwright, a gentle idealistic dreamer, and now the son of a gun was a head of state.

Quebec, where I’d spiked a plot against the life of the queen of England, had moved far closer to secession from the rest of Canada. Basque separatism flourished, and so, it now appeared, did separatist movements in Galicia and Cantalonia. There were strong pushes for autonomy for the Flemings in Belgium, and both Scottish and Welsh nationalism had heated up some, although the Cornish separatists seemed disappointingly docile.

On the other hand, some things hadn’t changed a bit. The United States, doing no end of business with such traditional allies as Hanoi and Bejing, continued its blockade of Castro’s Cuba. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants kept up their reprise of the Thirty Years’ War, their version of which was outrunning the original.

And so on.

And then there were the deaths.

Well, hell. Twenty-five years. You have to expect a certain amount of mortality over that great a span of time. The bulk of the world’s leaders had been well along in years, and it wasn’t all that much of a surprise that they were no longer with us. Nixon was dead, and Agnew, and well, dozens of others. Jack Benny, that perennial thirty-nine-year-old, had left us not long after my body temperature plunged; George Burns, on the other hand, had lived to be a hundred. Francisco Franco was dead – evidently that had been taken up as a running gag on a television program. Evelyn Wood, inventor of speed-reading, was dead, too, and I wondered how long her funeral had taken. Two or three minutes, I thought, was how she would have wanted it.

The deaths of prominent persons struck me in a variety of ways. Many seemed both inevitable and appropriate. Some came as a shock, either because the person seemed far too young to die or because – like Franco, say – I’d somehow assumed he would live forever. But the sheer number of deaths was overwhelming. Over twenty-five years, one might have taken them in stride. When they came all at once, in a flood, they were enough to drown you.

Then there were the deaths I took personally. Friends, acquaintances. Fellow tenants and other people in the neighborhood. The owner of the deli at Broadway and 106th – I didn’t know his name, but one day he’d made me a sandwich (corned beef and Russian dressing on rye) and the next thing I knew he was ten years dead.

So many of my gay friends, dead of a disease that hadn’t even existed. Women I’d known, women I’d slept with, dead of breast cancer. The Grim Reaper, never less than up to date, had traded in his scythe for a power mower. He was cropping whole fields and cutting a wide swath through my world.

People I hadn’t even heard of, people who’d barely been around, performers and politicians who hadn’t yet stepped upon the stage twenty-five years ago, had left it forever. One day I’d learn their names in my relentless pilgrimage through Time and Newsweek, and a few days or weeks later I’d read that they had died. Sic transit gloria mundi. Sic transit everything.

It was, as Minna remarked, a real mind fuck. And those words, pronounced so trippingly on her tongue, were a mind fuck all by themselves. The eleven-year-old Minna I remembered would not have said them, but then again neither would a Minna grown to maturity in 1972. These days the nicest sort of woman said words formerly reserved for male company. They even said them in magazines and newspapers, and on television.

On the other hand, there were words you couldn’t say anymore, like Oriental and girl. I could sort of understand why women didn’t want to be called girls, although I didn’t see why they wanted to make such a fuss about it. (And they seemed to be making less of a fuss now than they had ten years ago.) But how did Oriental get to be a bad word?

“It’s a matter of political correctness,” Minna explained. “I thought about doing a thesis on it, but I was afraid it wouldn’t be politically correct itself. It’s fascistic, a sort of fascism of the academic left, and it’s all based on the idea that we need euphemisms to hide the fact that we know we’re superior.”

“ Superior to whom?”

“To the people we use euphemisms for,” she said. “Look how we keep changing what we call black people. First the polite thing to call them was colored people. Then it was Negro. Then that was an insult, and you had to call them Black.”

“Right.”

“And then that was wrong, or at least it wasn’t right enough, and the proper term was people of color.”

“What’s the difference between that and colored people?”

“I don’t know, Evan. I think people of color means anybody who isn’t white.”

“There’s a word for that,” I said, “assuming you absolutely require one.”

“Non-white.”

“That’s the one.”

“But then you’re defining people by what they’re not, and that’s supposed to be demeaning. Anyway, the current name for black people is African-American.”

“Not Afro-American?”

“No.”

“Because that had its turn a while back, although it never did catch on in a big way. African-American? That’s seven syllables.”

“I know.”

“Black is only one syllable. I have a hunch I know which one I’ll be using.”

“African-American might last,” she said. “Because it’s so cumbersome most people won’t use it. As long as most people don’t use it, it can remain politically correct.”

“How’s that?”

“The whole point,” she said, “is to show that you’re not like other European-Americans, and that you don’t-”

“European-Americans? White folks?”

“Right, people of non-color. You’re not like them, and you don’t call black people by the same insulting term they do.”

“Insulting because they use it.”

“Exactly. Once all the rednecks start calling blacks African-Americans, the P.C. people will have to come up with something else. But that may not happen for a while, because African-American is such an awkward phrase to say.”

“Especially for a redneck,” I said. “Speaking of which, how do they feel about being called rednecks?”

“I don’t think they give a fuck,” Minna said, “but I don’t think it’s because they’re more enlightened than everybody else. I don’t think they’re paying attention.”

“Well, good for them,” I said.

It’s a damn good thing I didn’t have to sleep. Twenty-four hours a day was little enough time for all I had to do. I don’t know how the rest of the world makes do with sixteen.

It was all I could do to get through my cram course in the final quarter of the twentieth century, but that wasn’t the only thing on my plate. I also had to play catch-up with my own life. That meant finding out what remained of the various political movements in which I had participated, and renewing my ties with whatever fellow members I could track down. (And, while I was at it, renewing the memberships themselves, after all those years during which I’d gone without paying a forint or a zloty or a dinar in dues.)

Here again, death had taken its toll. Some old comrades had gone gently, while others had been untimely ripped from this world and flung into the next. Many more had simply disappeared, nudged by time or fortune out of the political orbit in which I’d encountered them.

But some remained, and some were glad to hear from me, and responded by letter or fax (fax!) or E-mail (EvnTanr@aol.com). And they referred me to other kindred spirits, and, bit by bit and person by person, I began to reconnect myself to the world.

At the same time, I had a living to make.

I’ve never really held a job, so I didn’t lose one when I went into cold storage. Ever since my army days, I’d supported myself in the shadow world of ex-officio academia. A high school dropout myself, I had never been to college. But over the years, I’d got a lot of other people through.

I’d written term papers and theses. Early on I’d even take exams for students – finals at Columbia and NYU, LSAT’s for people who inexplicably longed to be lawyers.

I gave that up when the march of time left me looking a bit advanced in years to be in an undergraduate exam room. The proctors were starting to look closely at me, and I decided I didn’t need the pressure.

But I had a good business turning out term papers in virtually any area of the humanities. If your field was science I couldn’t help you at all, but in literature or history or philosophy I was your man, and I’d deliver on schedule and guarantee a B. (No extra charge if the professor gave us an A, and your money cheerfully refunded if we got a C or less.)

It was a nice way to make a living. Sometimes I got to recycle my efforts – it was safe and ethically sound, say, to adapt for NYU a paper I’d done for Columbia – but most of what I did was one-time-only, so I was forever learning and writing about something new. The research was a pleasure and the writing came easy, so it was the ideal situation for me.

But now it was 1997, and I felt like the messenger services must have felt after everybody in New York got a fax machine. Because my line of work was outmoded.

It wasn’t that students had suddenly turned honest, and it wasn’t that educators had finally figured out how to keep students from presenting others’ work as their own. But what had once been a cottage industry for a handful of enterprising freelancers had become Big Business. A couple of outfits operated nationally, purporting to offer “term paper assistance,” and in fact offering term papers, impure and simple, on an entire catalog of subjects. They would even give it to you on disk, so you could personalize it with a few awkward sentences of your own, reformat it in the style preferred by your particular institution of learning, and print it out and turn it in.

Since they could sell the same paper over and over, dozens upon dozens of times, they could offer their wares at attractively reasonable prices. It was, in fact, a wonder that any college student went to the trouble of doing his own work. It wasn’t cost-effective, if you stopped to think about it. With what you had to pay to go to a decent college, why not pay a few dollars more to be sure of a good grade? And look at the time you’d save, and think what you could do with it.

I suppose I could have knocked out term papers for the catalog outfits. They needed new work all the time. But my gorge rose at the very thought. It was like putting a man who did custom coachwork on the assembly line at the Ford plant. Thanks, but I don’t think so.

But you couldn’t ring an 800-number and order up a master’s or doctoral thesis, and that was the sort of work I preferred, anyway. With a thesis you could dig in and buckle down and really produce something. I might fabricate some of the footnotes – one doesn’t want to approach scholarship with too much in the way of reverence – but I did good work all the same. And, without any real effort on my part, I found myself back in business. I got a phone call one afternoon from a young man named David Van Sumner. The name rang a bell, and I soon found out why.

“My father suggested I give you a ring,” he said. “Bruce Van Sumner? You did some work for him in 1968 or 9. That was a while ago, I wouldn’t expect you to remember, but-”

It wasn’t that long ago, not to me. “Bruce Van Sumner,” I said, “‘Blake’s Lamb and Tiger and Their Influence on Charles Dickens.’”

“You remember.”

“It would be hard to forget,” I said, “because he chose the topic, of course, and I’ve never been convinced that Blake’s lamb and tiger had any influence on Dickens. But I guess I was persuasive enough. How’s your father doing?”

“He’s at Iowa State. He’s tenured, and first in line to head the department when the top man retires.”

“That’s great.”

“And I’m following in his footsteps. I’ve done all my course work for my doctorate at Columbia. And I’ve done plenty of research for my thesis, but I can’t get the thing written.”

“Like father,” I said.

“You said it. And my dad told me how you’d helped him out, and said he didn’t know if you were even alive, let alone still, uh, in the business. But he said you might know somebody, and-”

Young Van Sumner’s thesis topic was ethnocentrism in the novels of Tobias Smollett. That meant I was going to have to read Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker again, and thank God for Evelyn Wood. As he’d said, he’d done a good deal of reading and research himself, and taken abundant notes. That would make my job easier, and would be a big help to him when he had to defend his thesis at his orals. I met him at an Ethiopian restaurant on 125th Street – all sorts of ethnic groups, scarcely discernible in New York twenty-five years ago, have moved in and opened restaurants – and I looked over his notes and quoted him a price and a delivery date. He shook my hand and wrote out a check for half my fee.

“You’re younger than I expected,” he offered. “My dad looks good for his age, but you’re amazing. What’s your secret?”

“Good genes and plenty of sleep.”

So I was back in business. I knocked off his thesis, putting in a few hours a day as a break from my own studies, and I beat the deadline I’d set myself by a full week. I’d written the thing on Minna’s computer, and I printed it out and admired the typeface I’d selected. It looked good, and the content was good, too. I could be proud of it, I told myself, and so could David Van Sumner.

I was in a mood to celebrate. If Minna had been around I’d have taken her out somewhere, but she’d gone out earlier with some friends her own age. (I still found myself thinking that way, although they were my age as well.)

So I went out for a walk, and a couple of blocks down Broadway I felt myself drawn to a tavern called the Pit Stop. There was nothing special about the place, but it was halfway between my apartment and the 103rd Street subway stop, and so I’d gotten in the habit of stopping in once or twice a week for a beer.

I hadn’t been in since the Great Defrosting, but I went in now, and the place looked exactly the same. A little dimmer and dingier, maybe, but otherwise unchanged. Amazingly enough, the same bartender was behind the stick. His name was Charlie, and from the looks of things he was still drinking the same drink. It consisted of Drambuie, vodka, and prune juice, and he’d invented it for a contest sponsored by the cordial’s U.S. importer. He called it a Rusty Can Opener, and never could understand why it hadn’t won, and how come nobody in the place ever ordered one.

“Charlie,” I said.

He looked at me. “Tanner,” he said, and drew me a beer without asking. “You been out of town or something? Seems to me I ain’t seen you in a while.”

“I was away.”

“Yeah, I figured,” he said, and took a swig of his Rusty Can Opener. “Must be a few weeks since I seen you, maybe as much as a month.”

“A long time,” I agreed.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I’ll tell you, you ain’t missed a thing.”

A couple of nights later Minna and I were having dinner. I’d worked up a new version of beef stroganoff using Portobello mushrooms. I generally cook kasha as an accompaniment, and at Minna’s suggestion I’d combined the buckwheat groats with an equal amount of quinoa, an Andean grain only recently introduced to the U.S. market.

The results were a success. “You’re right,” I told her. “They complement one another. And the cooking times are the same, which simplifies things. I’ve combined kasha and bulgur, and that works, but I think I like this even better.”

The phone rang. She went to answer it – it was generally for her these days – and came back a minute later wearing a frown.

“It was a wrong number,” she said.

“I hate when that happens.”

“It was the third time today, Evan. And it was the same wrong number each time, and I even think it was the same person calling.”

“We used to do that when I was a kid,” I remembered. “Call the same person five times running. ‘Is Joe there?’ Then your friend calls. ‘Hi, this is Joe. Were there any calls for me?’”

“How amusing.”

“Not if you’re more than ten years old,” I said. “Did it sound like a kid?”

“It sounded like an adult,” she said. “Except…”

“Yes?”

“Well, whoever it was sounded Chinese.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” I said. “There are loads of Chinese adults.”

“I know, but-”

“Or adult Chinese,” I said. “Whatever you want to call them. Whatever’s politically correct.”

“I think it was a fake Chinese accent.”

“Oh? What did they say?”

“They wanted to know if this was the Blue Star Hand Laundry.”

“The Blue Star Hand Laundry.”

“Except it came out sounding like ‘Brue Stah Hand Raundly.’ You know, with the l’s and r’s all switched around in a very unconvincing way.”

“Brue Stah Hand Raundly,” I said.

“Yes, like that, in a sort of all-purpose fake Oriental accent.”

“Asian, you mean.”

“Whatever.”

“Do you remember,” I said, “how I used to go away now and then?”

“Of course. I would stay with someone, usually Kitty Bazerian. And you would be gone for a long time, and you would bring me a present when you came back. One time you brought me the little jade cat. I still have it.”

“I know, I saw it the other day. The point is, those trips usually started with a phone call. And more often than not it was from someone trying to reach the Blue Star Hand Laundry, or pretending to be the Blue Star Hand Laundry.”

“Hey, mistah, when you come pick up you shirts?”

“That’s the idea. When they call back-”

“I’ll give you the phone.”

“Good idea.”

At which point it rang.

She was reaching for it when she stopped herself, drew back, and nodded for me to take it. I picked it up and said, “Blue Star Hand Laundry,” but didn’t bother with the Charlie Chan accent.

There was the slightest of pauses. Then a man’s voice, uninflected, said, “You should look in the mailbox.”

He rang off.

“I should look in the mailbox,” I told Minna, and went down four flights of stairs only to climb back up again. I came back carrying a three-by-five index card. I suppose they must be obsolete now that people have databases.

I said, “Look what I found,” and handed it to Minna.

There was an address and suite number on lower Fifth Avenue, along with “9:15.”

“It’s after nine already,” she said. “Are you supposed to go there tonight?”

“It doesn’t say a.m. or p.m.,” I said.

“Maybe they’re thinking in terms of a twenty-four-hour clock.”

“He’d think that was European,” I said, “and hopelessly effete. If a.m. and p.m. was good enough for Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt, it’s damn well good enough for him.”

“Him?”

“The Chief,” I said. “Whatever this is, it can wait until tomorrow. I’ll show up at nine-fifteen in the morning, and if that doesn’t work I’ll try again twelve hours later.”

She thought about it. “Evan,” she said, “are you sure this is from the same people who called the first time? The man who told you to look in the mailbox never said anything about the Blue Star Hand Laundry. You were the one who mentioned it.”

“Turn it over,” I said.

“Turn it over?”

“The index card. Look on the back.”

And there it was, hand-stamped, the blue ink slightly smeared. A five-pointed star.