Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (39 page)

The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: Under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?

This is a complicated issue. For instance, let’s say that the manufacturers of a chic new perfume called Slap (“When a woman wants to say: ‘Go ahead and hit me’ ”) produce a magazine advertisement
that looks pretty much like all magazine ads for perfume look these days; that is, it shows an attractive young woman with a torn blouse being knocked against the wall by an unshaven lout whose agent has been telling him for years that in a certain light he has a striking resemblance to Richard Gere. The manufacturers decide that infusing the ad with the actual smell of Slap would be preferable to attempting a description of it—particularly since the three most poetic phrases mentioned by randomly selected people asked to describe its aroma were “low-tide breeze,” “eagle in flight,” and “overcooked cabbage.”

Let’s say that the manufacturers have a constitutionally protected right to smell up the magazine page they have bought and paid for. Fine. But how about the author of the article on the facing page, which now smells strongly of Slap? He has worked for months on a piece extolling the caramelized pastries found in the remote Popolizio region of southern Italy. Now his pastry descriptions are going to be read by people who are at the same time getting a whiff of overcooked cabbage. What about
his
rights?

Let’s consider a subscriber to the magazine, a teenager who has always claimed that she is allergic to cabbage. Let’s consider the subscriber’s father, who, opening an envelope that has spent the day in the mailbox next to the aromatic magazine, discovers that a reminder from the Diners Club about last month’s unpaid bill is even more dispiriting if that reminder smells faintly like a large feathered beast. Do these people have rights that are involved here? They may, but those rights seem to be in conflict with Voltaire’s famous comment to Helvetius: “I may not like the way someone smells, but I’ll defend to my death his right to smell that way!”

Some people may be surprised that I see so many sides to the aromatic advertising issue. They expect me to dismiss aromatic advertising in two or three simple and exceedingly nasty sentences. Why? Because they think I’m a crank. I’m aware of the reputation I’ve been getting for crankiness. It’s all right. I don’t mind being thought of as a crank. In my heart of hearts, after all, I know that I am a sympathetic and genuinely sweet-tempered person. What I do mind are people who expect all cranks to rail against certain features of American life that have become designated crank targets—features of American
life like aromatic perfume advertisements and tear-out subscription cards in magazines and canned music that plays on the telephone when you’ve been put on hold.

“I guess I know how you feel about canned music that plays on the telephone when you’ve been put on hold,” one of these people will say to me, once he has been assured that my crank papers are in order.

No, he doesn’t. Here’s how I feel about it: It’s a complicated issue. Let’s consider the position of people who believe that a piece of music is something that has to be listened to rather than something that can be used as aural wallpaper. When they’re finally put through to the purchasing agent they’ve been trying to reach for weeks, they might have to say, “Could you please put me back on hold? There are another twelve or fourteen bars to go in the Montavani.” But let us also consider the person who spends every second that he’s on hold thinking that he might have been cut off—because of some slight congenital displacement of the eardrum, he has never been able to distinguish between the complete silence of hold and the complete silence of having been cut off—and is grateful for any sound that indicates otherwise. This is not a simple issue.

I suppose I’d be decertified as a crank if I admitted that I do not have a simple loathing for tear-out subscription cards. In fact, I use them sometimes. Not for subscriptions. I use them to send little messages to the people who work in what magazines call the circulation fulfillment department. I think it’s nice to buck people up now and then—that’s not an unusual thought for a sympathetic and genuinely sweet-tempered person—and in this case it doesn’t even cost me a postage stamp to do so. The subscription cards always have prepaid postage on them. Sometimes I just send along a simple word of encouragement (“Keep up the good work, fulfillment people”) or share an aphorism (“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, creep”). Sometimes I chat about what’s in the magazine. Occasionally, I even mention aromatic perfume advertisements—in which case I always say, right at the start, “It’s a complicated issue.”

1986

FROM HAROLD B. EVANS, SNOMESVILLE
—On page 38 of the document entitled
A Simple Guide to Residential Recycling
, it says that “wet newsprint” is organic waste that goes in the Green Cart, with such items as “untinted human hair.” However, on page 51 of the same document, there are instructions to place “newsprint” in the Blue Bag, along with recyclables like telephone books from which the binding glue has been removed. Does that mean that if wet newspapers that had been placed in the Green Cart just after a pickup day are likely to dry before the following pickup day, they must be recovered and transferred to the Blue Bag in order to avoid the penalties listed in the section entitled “Grounds for No Collection?” Also, where does the binding glue go?

FROM HELEN MCPHERSON, GATED MEADOWS
—We recently had a cross burned in our front yard. Since my husband and I are white Presbyterians who have never been involved in controversy, we think this was simply a mix-up in addresses. (I suspect the cross was meant for the Taylors down the street, since they are a mixed-race couple; he’s Canadian.) We’ve been in anguish, though, about how to dispose of the cross. We figured that the wood, being under the maximum dimensions listed on page 73 of
A Simple Guide to Residential Recycling
, would go into the Green Cart under the category of “small pieces of wood and bric-a-brac.” However, would it be necessary to remove the nails first? Also, do you think the Taylors should bear any responsibility at all for the disposal of this item?

FROM JASON TURNER, AGE 9, PARSONS
—What are you supposed to do with belly-button lint?

FROM NORTON W. SHACKLEFORD, SHADYVALE
—Two weeks ago, a neighbor of mine (to protect his privacy, I’ll refer to him as Blockhead) was expecting a visit from his grandchild. My wife and I lent him some toys. When he returned the toys, we weren’t at home, so he left them on our porch, in a large pasteboard box. No box had been used to deliver the toys to him; my wife carried the Tooty Train in its own case, while I took the Tiny Pieces Medieval Suburb in an easily recyclable shopping bag.

As you must know, the disposal of pasteboard boxes is one of the most complicated tasks under the new recycling regulations—and not simply because of the recent controversy over the meaning of the phrase “secure with organic twine.” Some newlyweds in our neighborhood now inspect every wedding present delivered by UPS and, hazarding a guess based on the name of the store and the weight of the box, refuse receipt of some on the grounds that the present inside is unlikely to be worth the trouble involved in disposing of the box.

When Blockhead stopped by a few days later (to return three of the tiny pieces from the Tiny Pieces Medieval Suburb that had rolled under a couch), I asked him to take back the pasteboard box. He refused. If I turn him in for “trash transference,” 1. Will I be given a new identity to prevent retaliation? and 2. Will someone come and pick up the box?

FROM HELENA BRIGHTSON, DONNER SPRINGS
—My husband had been an unenthusiastic participant in the county’s new recycling plan, but reading Volume Two of
A Simple Guide to Residential Recycling
seemed to spark his interest. At first, he simply became a more conscientious recycler, but gradually he turned into what I can only describe as a zealot. For instance, he was always accusing me of leaving on too much paper when I tore out those little plastic address windows from the envelopes that bills had come in before placing the envelopes in the Blue Bag. He referred to that as “wasting waste.” He’d spend a lot of time rummaging around the Black Garbage Bag for the plastic windows, and, as we sat in the parlor after dinner, he would carefully cut the extra paper off them with a scissors, then deposit the paper in the Blue Bag. I took that as a rebuke. When I said
that I was having difficulty with some of the changes listed in the “Adjustments and Further Regulations” section of Volume Two—for instance, the change under “Green Cart Items” from “fish intestines” to “fish intestines other than liver and spleen”—he accused me of being a despoiler of the earth.

Eventually, he embarked on what he called “a campaign for thorough separation” and what I called (behind his back) “the final solution.” He insisted that I strip the paint off any wood I put in the Green Cart under the category of “small pieces of wood and bric-a-brac.” One night, as I was slicing some tomatoes for dinner, he began to shout at me for tossing the end of a tomato in the organic waste destined for the Green Cart without removing that little round sticker that supermarkets sometimes put on vegetables. I still had the tomato-slicing knife in my hand, so I stabbed him in the heart. I put the body in a large freezer we have in the garage, but I know that eventually I’ll have to dispose of him elsewhere. Green Cart?

2005

First I heard on the radio about a new Happy to Be Me doll, which is thicker at the waist and hips than the idealized doll that we’ve been accustomed to and also has bigger feet. Then I came across a story I had clipped out of
The New York Times
a couple of months back about how plastic surgeons can now fill out the wrinkles on a patient’s face with fat taken from somewhere else on his body—a procedure that a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon called “the epitome of recycling.” Sometimes, I have to admit, I wonder about this country.

What I’m wondering this time is how in a single society so many people can make money on the proposition that you are truly fine just as you are (the self-esteem industry), while, at the same time, so many
other people are making money on the proposition that there are no limits to the ways you can improve the wreck you find yourself to be (the self-improvement industry).

Every year, two or three different pop psychologists haul in a bundle with self-help books whose titles amount to some version of
You Are the Very Best Person in the Whole Wide World
. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that a person who buys one of these books is not, in fact, the very best person in the whole wide world; the cashier at the book store doesn’t do any testing. It’s perfectly possible, in fact, that a person who buys one of these books is a crumb-bum. Or maybe he’s just a perfectly okay person who’s a little thick in the waist and has big feet.

But the book is so convincing that the person who buys it—let’s call him Harvey—sails along for months, absolutely stinky with self-esteem. He has even begun to feel a little sorry for people who have normal-sized feet and are therefore much more vulnerable to being toppled in a high wind.

At the same time, though, he is constantly being bombarded with suggestions that he is not only not the best person in the whole wide world but a walking disaster area. Every time he turns on the television he is reminded that he is overweight and afflicted with a flaking scalp and occasionally irregular and ignorant of the most rudimentary notions of personal investment strategy. When he goes to the bookstore to browse around for new books telling him how terrific he is, he notices books with titles like
Get That Waistline Down
and
How to Take Inches off Those Feet
. And his morale isn’t helped by the fact that any time columnists want to indicate that someone might have low self-esteem they name him Harvey.

So Harvey is on kind of a roller-coaster. One day, he’s feeling on top of the world, even though he’s having a little trouble getting his pants buttoned over that waist of his, and the next day he feels the self-esteem drain out of him like crankcase oil that needed changing a long time ago.

When he feels like that, he goes back down to the book store and finds something with a title like
There’s Absolutely Nobody Better than You
, and gets a little booster shot of self-confidence.

From reading these books, Harvey has learned just how to handle anything that threatens to undermine his belief that there is nobody in the world better than he is. He is quite aware of the possibility that at any time someone might say to him, “Have you ever noticed that you’re a little thicker in the waist than a lot of people?” or even, “You know, you’ve got a wrinkle or two near the mouth there that could be filled out by fat taken from some part of your body where, not to put too fine a point on this, you wouldn’t really miss it.”

If that happens, Harvey knows to say, “I’ve been given reason to believe that I’m the very best person in the whole wide world, although I don’t like to boast.”

If the same person goes on to say, “Are those your feet or is there a ski slope around here I didn’t notice?” Harvey knows to say, “I’m happy to be me.”

There may be a time, though, when a confrontation like that shakes Harvey’s confidence. So he goes over to the mall to look for another book with a title like
You’re It, Big Guy
. But the bookstore is closed. For a moment, Harvey is crushed. Then he notices that the toy store next-door is still open. He rushes in and says “Do you have a Happy to Be Me doll?” They do. Harvey is okay again.

1991