The Ferrari in the Bedroom (13 page)

On the very next page, item #9077, the
SPRING STEEL PATENT TELESCOPIC POLICE CLUB
is called
“the most reliable arm for self-defense.”
It was designed to be telescoped for concealment and could be carried in the hand without being noticed. When an “emergency” arose, this is what happened according to the caption writer:
“Your adversary is caught quite unprepared and is landed a stinging blow of a totally unexpected nature, rendering him completely helpless.”
Since this little beauty was made of spring steel, the writer was probably understating the case. The warning
“Do not mistake this club with weak imitations”
(sic) is well taken. Many items displayed in the Johnson Smith catalog carry the same advice. Apparently there were unscrupulous “imitators” everywhere dealing in spurious exploding cigars, sneezing powder, hand grenades and horse liniment. Since Johnson Smith always sold the real thing, there was a sense of security which went with a mailed order to Racine, Wisconsin.

And there was something to it. In the days of glory of the company, mail order flimflams were everywhere. Every magazine was filled with appeals to the unwary. Fifty cents
sent off to an important-sounding address in Chicago most often brought nothing in return. Johnson Smith stood like a rock of integrity in the midst of this sneaky landscape. When you ordered a Shimmy Inspector Badge (#2019) you got precisely that: shiny, 2½” by 6½”, it made
“a big hit”
with your friends. It was ten cents well spent.

Johnson Smith also recognized something that has only recently begun to appear in more sophisticated Advertising circles. They were well ahead of their time in many ways. They realized that advertising must be entertaining in itself, whether or not the customer buys. They knew knew that if he read the catalog for sheer enjoyment eventually something would grab him. Throughout the catalog, usually at the bottom of the page, little gratis knee-slappers are thrown in.

LAWYER:
You say your wife attacked you with a death-
dealing weapon. What was it?

LITTLE TOD:
A fly swatter.

As feeble as this joke was, it made no attempt to sell. It was just there. There are dozens sprinkled throughout the catalog like raisins in rice pudding.

There was one thing more than any other in the entire catalog that was identified with the company. They were sent everywhere and probably were as close to being a classic in the field of vulgarity as any other single practical joke ever created. Johnson Smith introduced this zinger to the waiting populace, who immediately embraced it wherever yahoos proliferated and low buffoonery flourished. In fact, it sets the tone of the entire Johnson Smith catalog which you are about to enjoy and no doubt cherish, as your immediate ancestors did.

I commend you to #2953, which sold for a trivial twenty-five cents. The first time it appeared in the catalog few
suspected that it would attain such timeless significance. Even today one hears references to its unfailing success at achieving hilarity and bringing cringing embarrassment to its victims. There are few alive who have not heard of it, yet most have never actually seen one. Johnson Smith & Co. of Racine, Wisconsin, still carries a full line and if you’d care to order one they would be delighted to comply.

THE WHOOPEE CUSHION
says it all. Here is what Johnson Smith has to say about their classic:
“The Whoopee Cushion or Poo-Poo Cushion as it is sometimes called is made of rubber. It is inflated in much the same manner as an ordinary rubber balloon and then placed on a chair. When the victim unsuspectingly sits upon the cushion, it gives forth noises that can be better imagined than described.”
The accompanying illustration leaves nothing to the imagination.

This catalog today is just a very funny coffee-table curiosity, because we are still too close to the life and times it describes. In two hundred years it will be a truly significant historical and social document. It could even be the Rosetta Stone of American culture. Students of the future, deciphering it, will know far more about us through its pages than through any other single document I know of. Read it, enjoy it, and honor it. It is about us.

Juneau is one of the most beautiful, exciting, curious places on earth. It lies at the base of a ring of the most perpendicular mountains I have ever seen. They rise straight up a couple of hundred yards from the main street, and just keep going on up and up, and way up there in the low clouds that hang over Juneau are mountain goat, roaring waterfalls, and very large, broad-shouldered bears.

The 13,000 or so Juneauians are unevenly divided between those who spend most of the night going in and out of the Red Dog Saloon and those few who denounce them. After the Red Dog, and Ty Tyson, the bartender, begin to taper off around 1:30
A.M.,
the Dreamland opens for business and roars until the last bear staggers home bleary-eyed.

From the minute my Alaskan Airlines 737 flipped over into a nearly perpendicular bank and whipped through the scudding clouds, whistling along the sheer face of a cliff for, of necessity, one of the hairiest air approaches anywhere, I knew that Juneau, and Alaska, was totally, completely and thoroughly real. A story, surely apocryphal, which Alaska
Airlines pilots love to tell over their intercom as you approach Juneau Airport, is that Pan Am flew in and out of there for years, and then one day the fog lifted, the pilots saw the mountains and immediately went on strike for hazard pay.

I’ve seen a lot of stuff about Alaska. I’ve seen films, and endless color slides, but all of it and none of it came anywhere near catching what it’s really like. After a few hours in Juneau I knew damn well that it would take dispatches from a lot more than one city to give you any idea of this fantastic state. For one thing, Juneau is very different from the other parts of Alaska that I visited. The Japanese current lies just offshore, giving Juneau a climate that in some ways resembles Seattle or Portland. But that is only statistically. There is rarely a day when it doesn’t rain in Juneau, and perpetually low, twisting clouds drift over and around the mountains, reaching down the gullies like some eerie grey smoke. This makes Juneau feel sort of enclosed, intimate and turned in on itself. The old cliche “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes; it’ll change” is absolutely true in Juneau. It is not a cliche but an accurate description of Juneauian weather. The inlet that splits Juneau lies deep in a valley and up and down, almost continually, float planes drone just under the cloud level a few hundred feet over the icy water. The float plane is to Alaska what the family car is to anywhere else. A large percentage of the population is licensed to fly, and everywhere are red and white, hairy-looking Stinsons and Cessnas scarred and tested by years of bush flying.

People in Alaska don’t own cars; they own vehicles. They are very unsentimental or romantic about automobiles. They are used purely as machinery, the only criterion
being, apparently, “does it work?” If it doesn’t, forget it. The cars are almost all battered, and have that hell-with-it-all look that everything else in Alaska, including the people, seems to have. Not many foreign cars seem to make it in Juneau, and I would guess mostly due to the parts problem as well as the insane grades and the gravel roads which are really tough on transmissions and differentials. You see a lot of International Harvester Scouts, some Rovers, a few Jeepsters, and a lot of plain, ordinary battered Fords and Chevys. The Volkswagen, of course, is on hand, and I’m beginning to suspect that when the world turns cold and Man departs, the only thing left will be VWs and cockroaches. Maybe they are the meek. Who knows. A few Volvos can be seen as well as a very occasional Saab, but for the most part any foreign cars around are usually driven by tourists who have come up the Alaskan Highway from the West Coast.

By the way, no Alaskan ever calls it the Alcan Highway. That went out with the Andrews Sisters and “Johnny Got A Zero.” It
is
the Alaskan Highway and don’t you forget it. No matter what you call it, though, it is a rough stretch of roadway and can be as treacherous in many ways as any stretch of highway in the world. It is also wildly exciting and beautiful. If you want to take a couple of weeks off and do something that you will never forget, that trip up the Alaskan Highway will do until they run excursion capsules to the Moon.

There is one thing about Juneau that completely floored me, something that in my wildest imagination I would never have guessed, and dammit, it pains me to report this, but here it is. Would you believe that one of the really big pains in the neck in Juneau is
parking!
And I mean it’s really a hassle. If you think you’ve got it bad wherever the
hell you are, you have seen nothing until you try to get a slot in Juneau. Good God Almighty! They have been known to fight it out on the street with .44 Magnums over a parking place. It’s hard to figure out why this is, until you look closely at the town and realize that in spite of all the wilderness that surrounds Juneau, the actual town itself is jammed into a little space among the towering cliffs and there is damn little room on those narrow, twisting streets for hulking Toronados and billowing Electras. Most of the streets are only two cars wide, so spaces are actually rented by the month and they don’t come cheap. The prices in Juneau for practically everything are staggering by Lower 48 standards. (By the way, Alaskans generally refer to us as living in the “Lower 48” or the “South,” or occasionally “The Lesser States.”) A guy stuffing junk mail into envelopes can earn $600 a month in Juneau, so naturally prices are incredible by conventional standards. Almost everything has to be flown in or trucked up the Alaskan highway, so a $3.00 hamburger is common. A breakfast of a couple of eggs, french fries, coffee and toast will go anywhere from $2.50 to three and a half, with everything else on the same scale. A fairly modest steak will go maybe $9.00, so when you head North be sure to bring plenty of cabbage unless you intend to live off what you can catch or shoot. Gas is about 70¢ a gallon. Oddly enough, you get used to the prices very quickly and after a while you don’t think anything of 40¢ Coke machines and 20¢ candy bars.

I checked into the Baranof Hotel, named after a Russian who ran the show in the Juneau area back in the days before Seward had committed his Folly and bought the whole state—mountains, glaciers, polar bears and all for 2¢ an acre. I stepped out on the street ten minutes later, turned left and headed for the Red Dog, which features an enigmatic Indian
sporting a haircut in the Napoleonic style singing show tunes, accompanied by an even more Buddha-like Indian lady on the piano. The Red Dog is the kind of place “colorful” bars in the Lower 48 try to imitate, but never quite pull off. Five minutes later I was aware that I was in the presence of Big League drinkers. As one Alaskan put it to me: “What the hell else can you do? There’s only two things to do in Alaska, and drinking is one of them.” They stagger in and out of the swinging doors with purpose and dedication. These are not casual grab-a-Martini-on-the-way-home-from-work types; they are
drinkers
and everywhere I went in Alaska it was the same. It is a state where women are women and men are after them, and if you have any doubts about your Sexual status they will be quickly resolved in the land where men toil for gold and the Northern lights play o’er the skies like the chariots of Hell.

I wanted to go fishing, and I ran into Steve Hildebrand, a 16-year-old Alaskan and the son of the Acting City Manager of Juneau. His sardonic wit drives his Old Man right up the wall, and is typical of Alaskans. A gentle cool rain, of course, was falling when I wheeled my rented, shuddering Ford Galaxie up the narrow gravel road to Steve’s house, which sits on a high bluff overlooking the whole city with a view of unparalleled magnificence. He came trotting out with a couple of beat-up spinning rods and a canvas fish bag, which he tossed into the back seat. He then threw on the front seat between us as evil-looking a US Army standard issue .45 calibre automatic as I had ever seen. Also two full clips of copper-nosed slugs. “Jesus Keerist,” I thought, “what kind of a cuckoo am I stuck with?”