Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (70 page)

How
can
I even see those tiny things? I can spot an errant sprig of clover from halfway across the yard but can’t make out the face of a good friend five rows down in an auditorium. I can see my gray hairs as if they were outlined in neon but can’t read a football scoreboard on TV. The college co-ed who didn’t notice trash and graffiti has become a woman who scours every scene, vigilant in her pursuit of jarring notes, infelicitous detail. She has learned to look and to pay attention. But she still can’t see the picture itself, or the happy accidents it might contain.

Bad eyes pick out the bad — it makes sense. Put like that, the condition sounds dire, requiring corrective lenses for the brain or soul. But my myopia is physical before anything else; I’m truly unable make out the face of my friend in that auditorium, however much I might want to see her. A hinge exists between the literal and the metaphorical reality of my crummy vision. I can bear in mind that my vision is untrustworthy, but I can’t change it.

All of which brings me back to my high-school biology teacher, God bless her, who diagnosed me more accurately than anyone else. I am a person who has trouble seeing enough, or correctly. Knowing this, I must go forth with useful caution, avoiding quick turns and snap decisions.

And, truly, I do all right. I haven’t yet stepped off a cliff or driven into a pedestrian, and my judgments in recent years seem little worse than anyone else’s. I just have to look, then look again. I have to remember that I’m seeing only part of the picture. I remind myself to allow for my margin of error and then bear in mind that the world is, always, more populous and bright and bountifully landscaped than it appears.

John McPhee

 

JOHN MCPHEE
, born in Princeton, New Jersey, was educated at Princeton and Cambridge. His writing career began at
Time
magazine and led to his long association with
The New Yorker
, where he has been a staffwriter since 1965. His books include
A Sense of Where You Are
,
The Headmaster
,
Oranges, The Pine Barrens
,
A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles
,
The Crofter and the Laird
,
Levels of the Game
,
Encounters with the Archdruid
,
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
,
The Curve of Binding Energy
,
Pieces of the Frame
,
The Survival of the Bark Canoe
,
Coming into the Country
,
Giving Good Weight
,
Basin and Range
,
In Suspect Terrain
,
La Place de la Concorde Suisse
,
Table of Contents
,
Rising from the Plains
,
Heirs of General Practice
,
The Control of Nature
,
Looking for a Ship
,
Assembling California
,
The Ransom of Russian Art
,
Irons in the Fire
, and two
John McPhee Readers.
Both
Encounters with the Archdruid
and
The Curve of Binding Energy
were nominated for National Book Awards in science. McPhee has received numerous awards, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he teaches writing at Princeton University.

 

Go. I roll the dice — a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flat-iron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.

The dogs are moving (some are limping) through ruins, rubble, fire damage, open garbage. Doorways are gone. Lath is visible in the crumbling walls of the buildings. The street sparkles with shattered glass. I have never seen, anywhere, so many broken windows. A sign — “Slow, Children at Play” — has been bent backward by an automobile. At the lighthouse, the dogs turn up Pacific and disappear. George Meade, Army engineer, built the lighthouse — brick upon brick, six hundred thousand bricks, to reach up high enough to throw a beam twenty miles over the sea. Meade, seven years later, saved the Union at Gettysburg.

I buy Vermont Avenue for $100. My opponent is a tall, shadowy figure, across from me, but I know him well, and I know his game like a favorite tune. If he can, he will always go for the quick kill. And when it is foolish to go for the quick kill he will be foolish. On the whole, though, he is a master assessor of percentages. It is a mistake to underestimate him. His eleven carries his top hat to St. Charles Place, which he buys for $140.

The sidewalks of St. Charles Place have been cracked to shards by through-growing weeds. There are no buildings. Mansions, hotels once stood here. A few street lamps now drop cones of light on broken glass and vacant space behind a chain-link fence that some great machine has in places bent to the ground. Five plane trees — in full summer leaf, flecking the light — are all that live on St. Charles Place.

Block upon block, gradually, we are cancelling each other out — in the blues, the lavenders, the oranges, the greens. My opponent follows a plan of his own devising. I use the Hornblower & Weeks opening and the Zuricher defense. The first game draws tight, will soon finish. In 1971, a group of people in Racine, Wisconsin, played for seven hundred and sixty-eight hours. A game begun a month later in Danville, California, lasted eight hundred and twenty hours. These are official records, and they stun us. We have been playing for eight minutes. It amazes us that Monopoly is thought of as a long game. It is possible to play to a complete, absolute, and final conclusion in less than fifteen minutes, all with in the rules as written. My opponent and I have done so thousands of times. No wonder we are sitting across from each other now in this best-of-seven series for the international singles championship of the world.

On Illinois Avenue, three men lean out from second-story windows. A girl is coming down the street. She wears dungarees and a bright-red shirt, has ample breasts and a Hadendoan Afro, a black halo, two feet in diameter. Ice rattles in the glasses in the hands of the men.

“Hey, sister!”

“Come on up!”

She looks up, looks from one to another to the other, looks them flat in the eye.

“What for?” she says, and she walks on.

I buy Illinois for $240. It solidifies my chances, for I already own Kentucky and Indiana. My opponent pales. If he had landed first on Illinois, the game would have been over then and there, for he has houses built on Boardwalk and Park Place, we share the railroads equally, and we have cancelled each other everywhere else. We never trade.

In 1852, R. B. Osborne, an immigrant Englishman, civil engineer, surveyed the route of a railroad line that would run from Camden to Absecon Island, in New Jersey, traversing the state from the Delaware River to the barrier beaches of the sea. He then sketched in the plan of a “bathing village” that would surround the eastern terminus of the line. His pen flew glibly, framing and naming spacious avenues parallel to the shore — Mediterranean, Baltic, Oriental, Ventnor — and narrower transsecting avenues: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Connecticut, States, Virginia, Tennessee, New York, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois. The place as a whole had no name, so when he had completed the plan Osborne wrote in large letters over the ocean, “Atlantic City.” No one ever challenged the name, or the names of Osborne’s streets. Monopoly was invented in the early nineteen-thirties by Charles B. Darrow, but Darrow was only transliterating what Osborne had created. The railroads, crucial to any player, were the making of Atlantic City. After the rails were down, houses and hotels burgeoned from Mediterranean and Baltic to New York and Kentucky. Properties — building lots — sold for as little as six dollars apiece and as much as a thousand dollars. The original investors in the railroads and the real estate called themselves the Camden & Atlantic Land Company. Reverently, I repeat their names: Dwight Bell, William Coffin, John DaCosta, Daniel Deal, William Fleming, Andrew Hay, Joseph Porter, Jonathan Pitney, Samuel Richards — founders, fathers, forerunners, archetypical masters of the quick kill.

My opponent and I are now in a deep situation of classical Monopoly. The torsion is almost perfect — Boardwalk and Park Place versus the brilliant reds. His cash position is weak, though, and if I escape him now he may fade. I land on Luxury Tax, contiguous to but in sanctuary from his power. I have four houses on Indiana. He lands there. He concedes.

Indiana Avenue was the address of the Brighton Hotel, gone now. The Brighton was exclusive — a word that no longer has retail value in the city. If you arrived by automobile and tried to register at the Brighton, you were sent away. Brighton-class people came in private railroad cars. Brighton-class people had other private railroad cars for their horses — dawn rides on the firm sand at water’s edge, skirts flying. Colonel Anthony J. Drexel Biddle — the sort of name that would constrict throats in Philadelphia — lived, much of the year, in the Brighton.

Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken is on Kentucky Avenue. So is Clifton’s Club Harlem, with the Sepia Revue and the Sepia Follies, featuring the Honey Bees, the Fashions, and the Lords.

My opponent and I, many years ago, played 2,428 games of Monopoly in a single season. He was then a recent graduate of the Harvard Law School, and he was working for a downtown firm, looking up law. Two people we knew — one from Chase Manhattan, the other from Morgan, Stanley — tried to get into the game, but after a few rounds we found that they were not in the conversation and we sent them home. Monopoly should always be
mano a mano
anyway. My opponent won 1,199 games, and so did I. Thirty were ties. He was called into the Army, and we stopped just there. Now, in Game 2 of the series, I go immediately to jail, and again to jail while my opponent seines property. He is dumbfoundingly lucky. He wins in twelve minutes.

Visiting hours are daily, eleven to two; Sunday, eleven to one; evenings, six to nine. “no minors, no food, Immediate Family Only Allowed in Jail.” All this above a blue steel door in a blue cement wall in the windowless interior of the basement of the city hall. The desk sergeant sits opposite the door to the jail. In a cigar box in front of him are pills in every color, a banquet of fruit salad an inch and a half deep — leapers, copilots, footballs, truck drivers, peanuts, blue angels, yellow jackets, redbirds, rainbows. Near the desk are two soldiers, waiting to go through the blue door. They are about eighteen years old. One of them is trying hard to light a cigarette. His wrists are in steel cuffs. A military policeman waits, too. He is a year or so older than the soldiers, taller, studious in appearance, gentle, fat. On a bench against a wall sits a good-looking girl in slacks. The blue door rattles, swings heavily open. A turnkey stands in the doorway. “Don’t you guys kill yourselves back there now,” says the sergeant to the soldiers.

“One kid, he overdosed himself about ten and a half hours ago,” says the M.P.

The M.P., the soldiers, the turnkey, and the girl on the bench are white. The sergeant is black. “If you take off the handcuffs, take off the belts,” says the sergeant to the M.P. “I don’t want them hanging themselves back there.” The door shuts and its tumblers move. When it opens again, five minutes later, a young white man in sandals and dungarees and a blue polo shirt emerges. His hair is in a ponytail. He has no beard. He grins at the good-looking girl. She rises, joins him. The sergeant hands him a manila envelope. From it he removes his belt and a small notebook. He borrows a pencil, makes an entry in the notebook. He is out of jail, free. What did he do? He offended Atlantic City in some way. He spent a night in the jail. In the nineteen-thirties, men visiting Atlantic City went to jail, directly to jail, did not pass Go, for appearing in topless bathing suits on the beach. A city statute requiring all men to wear full-length bathing suits was not seriously challenged until 1937, and the first year in which a man could legally go barechested on the beach was 1940.

Game 3. After seventeen minutes, I am ready to begin construction on overpriced and sluggish Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Nothing else being open, opponent concedes.

The physical profile of streets perpendicular to the shore is something like a playground slide. It begins in the high skyline of Boardwalk hotels, plummets into warrens of “side-avenue” motels, crosses Pacific, slopes through church missions, convalescent homes, burlesque houses, rooming houses, and liquor stores, crosses Atlantic, and runs level through the bombed-out ghetto as far — Baltic, Mediterranean — as the eye can see. North Carolina Avenue, for example, is flanked at its beach end by the Chalfonte and the Haddon Hall (908 rooms, air-conditioned), where, according to one biographer, John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) first played when he was twenty-two, insisting, even then, that everyone call him by his entire name. Behind these big hotels, motels — Barbizon, Catalina — crouch. Between Pacific and Atlantic is an occasional house from 1910 — wooden porch, wooden mullions, old yellow paint — and two churches, a package store, a strip show, a dealer in fruits and vegetables. Then, beyond Atlantic Avenue, North Carolina moves on into the vast ghetto, the bulk of the city, and it looks like Metz in 1919, Cologne in 1944. Nothing has actually exploded. It is not bomb damage. It is deep and complex decay. Roofs are off. Bricks are scattered in the street. People sit on porches, six deep, at nine on a Monday morning. When they go off to wait in unemployment lines, they wait sometimes two hours. Between Mediterranean and Baltic runs a chain-link fence, enclosing rubble. A patrol car sits idling by the curb. In the back seat is a German shepherd. A sign on the fence says, “Beware of Bad Dogs.”