Part 5

The Lemures Stone now traveled with me everywhere. I must admit that I was quite reckless in the way I treated it, for I kept it right in my pocket, loose, with whatever change that might be rattling around inside. I liked the idea of being able to reach in my pocket and hold the stone in my hand. Sometimes it felt warm, sometimes cold. But as long as it was with me, I felt a kind of invulnerability, a feeling of hope like seeing a light at the end of a tunnel.

The wish I had made remained my secret, as did Betty's. Both of us felt that revealing our wishes might invalidate them; a sort of betrayal of trust toward the Lemures. Besides, if we told people of the events that had transpired, we would not have been believed; and I was not interested in further sarcasm from Bull Robot. (At least not until I had a chance to use one of my later wishes, which I won't reveal in its entirety, though I will go so far as to say that it involved a small wart on the end of somebody's nose that would grow big enough to be featured in Ripley's Believe It Or Not.)

And so the winter of 1973 came and went, and hundreds of thousands, nay, millions, of American men, spent their dark wintry mornings huddled over cups of pale listless electric percolator coffee; and an equal number of American women sat down at three o'clock in the afternoon to suffer over a cup of coffee that was just ever so slightly less awful than the old non-electric-percolator coffee that they had been drinking for years. Yet all of them believed that they were getting something better just because Mr. ED-vertizzing had told them so. Not to mention Mr. Fried Egg. Me.

I was vindicated some years later when the Federal Trade Commission challenged our advertising claim that our coffee tasted better than ordinary non-electric percolator coffee. Specifically, they found out that the research for the claim was based on interviewing total of only 29 women. And these women didn't actually say the coffee tasted better; they merely said that after it had been heating in the percolator all day, "maybe it didn't taste quite as bad".

So the words in our advertising were changed from "coffee that tastes better in an electric percolator" to "coffee made especially for an electric percolator." (This is a pretty good example of a "legal weasel": the implication being that, because the coffee was especially made for an electric percolator, therefore it would taste better than coffee that wasn't.) What the advertising really should have said was, "Doesn't taste as good in the morning! Doesn't taste as bad in the afternoon". This was one time that I thought the venerable Maxwell House slogan "Good to the last drop ®" should have been changed to "Not as bad as the last drop."

And today, thank goodness, I can't find a single grocery store (and believe me, I have looked), that still sells any of the so-called "electric percolator" coffees. (If you find one, don't tell me about it; I don't want to know.) And while I may spend eons in purgatory for my crime, at least, I can take some consolation in the words of the old Hank Williams song that I play on the guitar when I'm feeling sorry from myself (the last line is mine):

Early in the spring of 1974 I was walking down Canal Street in New York when the Spell of the Lemures began to work, though I really didn't connect the incident with my wish.

Canal Street is a street in the lower part of Manhattan lined with an eclectic collection of shops selling almost everything imaginable. It is like a gigantic flea market, but instead of stalls, it has stores. There are stores that sell nothing but fans, from gigantic ceiling fans with 12 foot paddles to fans with blades the size of clover leaves; fans made to cool hamster cages; fans made to cool other fans; fans that played tunes; fans that blew heated perfume vapors; and, for people who liked to fix fans, fans that didn't work at all . The only kind of fans they didn't have were the kinds country folk wave in their hands on the front porch in the summertime.

The store I happened upon sold rocks. There were big hunks of meteorites and things that were supposed to have come from the moon. Something oblong that was gathering dust in the corner of the window was labeled a dinosaur egg, but I have a feeling that if you cracked it open, it wouldn't have a curled up fossil inside but a bunch of quartz crystals, or more likely, a pool of dust.

The object in the window that struck my eye was a rock polishing machine; a black rubber barrel about the size of a coffee can that rotated on a spindle, driven by an electric motor with a pulley. Next to the rock polisher was a pile of small, dull-looking pebbles with a "before" sign on it, and next to that, a pile of shiny pebbles with an "after" sign. On an adjacent book stand was a thin paper-back book entitled "How to Make Jewelry"; and on the front of the book was a picture of a polished rock hanging on a black neck cord. I remember the moment distinctly, because the picture wasn't of just any old rock. It was a white rock. A smooth river pebble with a mottled grey surface. I was mesmerized. The resemblance was uncanny. I reached into my pocket and took out the Lemures Stone and looked at it. Then I walked into the store with the blank determination of a zombie.

"How much is that rock polishing machine," I asked.

"Rock tumbler," corrected the store owner sourly. He had the face of a cow. I could imagine his ears twitching.

"Tumbler," I said.

"You need to buy grit and polish," he said, taking five flour-sized bags from the shelf behind him. There seemed to be enough stuff to polish the output of a rock quarry. "Two months with the coarse, one month with the medium, one month with the fine, one month with the extra fine, one month with the polish."

I calculated the time: six months. My Lemures Stone would be ground down the size of a pea. I showed him the stone.

"Boring," said the man, pushing forward a box of colored pebbles. "Ten dollars for the lot," he said.

"I just want to polish this rock."

"It works better with a lot of rocks."

"What size will they end up?"

"Same size. Just grinds off the bad part."

I hoped it wouldn't grind off the magic.

I bought the polishing machine, the grit and polish, the bag of colored rocks, the book, and a kit of jewelry-making stuff with cords and little metal caps with loops on top for chains and a tube of jeweler's glue. I walked out of the store and headed home with what would turn out to be a miniature version of the proverbial Trojan Horse.

I put the Lemures stone in the tumbler along with the colored pebbles, added a half cup of extra coarse grit, a cup of water, and started the motor. The tumbler sounded like a little concrete mixer. You could hear the rocks and grit sloshing around. Every once in a while the rocks seemed to gather themselves in one mass and crash over like a wave made of stones. The sound wasn't loud, but it always seemed to be following me around. I put the tumbler in the closet to shut it up. But, when I got in bed and put my head on the pillow I could still hear waves of rocks crashing on a beach somewhere off in the sands of time.

Even when I was at the office, the sound of the the rock tumbler seemed to ebb and flow in my mind. When Bull Robot would begin one of his droning diatribes, I would think of a gravelly surf eating at the floor where he was standing and the floor opening up like a fissure in an earthquake. Robot would be dropping down the hole in slow motion, his hands grabbing the edge of the floor. I would be hopping up and down on his fingers like a drunken kangaroo.

I was running this satisfying scenario through my mind one morning just before a new television commercial I had written was about to be shown to the advertising agency's chairman, the famous advertising genius, David Ogilvy. The conference room was filled with writers, art directors, production people, lawyers, and various levels of executives. There were at least thirty people there.

The commercial was for a product called Shake 'n Bake ®, which as you may know is a bag of seasonings and crumbs (at that time said to be Grape Nuts Flakes ® "findings: -- the stuff that blew off the conveyor belt while the cereal was being made) into which you drop some raw chicken parts, shake it all up, then bake the chicken. For the privilege of not having to fry the chicken in a heart-attack's-worth of grease, you get the privilege of buying a bag of ingredients for a price that could buy a chicken farm. My boss, Josephine Smith, who was one of the most brilliant advertising women I ever knew, thought up the idea of the little girl in all of the Shake 'n Bake commercials who, when her mother serves up the baked chicken, says in a voice right out of the Exorcist, "And I helped". (She actually says, "And I hepped.")

Some people think the little girl is cute. I think she should be put in the bag with the chicken. At any rate, the idea sold, and still sells, zillions of bags of the the product and made a lot of General Foods stockholders (and nowadays, Kraft stockholders) even richer, but not Jo Smith. All she got was a congratulatory pat on the back from Bull Robot, which was about as satisfying as being kicked between the shoulder blades by a mule. Whether or not I join Jo in purgatory for having foisted that little blonde-headed monster on the world, I can assure you that mamma's little hepper is going to be right there at Jo's grave site, dumping in the last spadefull of dirt and squeaking, "And I hepped."

The beginning of the commercial I had written had been shot with a camera mounted on the ceiling of a filming studio. Prior to the shoot, a couple of dozen chickens had been gently kept from eating for a day. (I must add, before the Chicken Rescue League storms my door, that the chickens had plenty of water, and that wild chickens often have virtually nothing to eat for days, and that the chickens did not end up in a bag of bread crumbs).

Beneath the camera in the center of the floor was placed a bowl of chicken feed. Just beyond the range of the lens, evenly spaced around the bowl, four "grips" held four chickens at bay from the food (grips are the people in film studios who carry or grip things; wires, chairs, ropes, clipboards, and in this case, chickens). The chickens had been allowed one peck of the food to know where it was and were barely grippable as they tried to scratch their way to freedom and get at the bowl. Every time a feather would come loose and get into camera range the director would yell, "Cut', and another grip would come in whisk the feather out of sight. By the time the shoot was over, and the time and salaries and film wasted chasing feathers was added up, each feather was worth the price of a quill from the Golden Goose.

Over and over the chickens were released and filmed entering the scene from four different sides and pecking at the food. As soon as one set of chickens had their hunger even slightly appeased and were no longer enthusiastic, another set of starving chickens got the part. We had hundreds of feet of film of the same thing. The only difference was in the color of the different chickens; and in how close they came to reaching the bowl all at once; and whether or not one chicken had tried to peck another's eyeballs out.

During the screening of these early takes (which occurred long before the upcoming meeting to present the final assembled version), Bull Robot had expounded endlessly on his theories of appropriate chicken behavior in the context of Swanson Food's corporate image. Looking at one take, he announced:

"The white chicken on the left gave the black chicken a dirty look. We're going to have a race problem."

"We have footage of four white chickens, Mr. Robot" said Amanda Pandayear hopefully.

"Are you out of your mind?" he snapped. "Do you want the N.A.A.C.P. on our doorsteps?"

Amanda looked crushed.

"What about three white chickens and one brown chicken?"

"Too phony. Obvious tokenism."

"One white chicken and three brown chickens?"

"What about the American Indians," asked Saul Glockstein, sarcastically. "We need a red chicken in there."

I wondered what Glockstein would look like scalped.

"You pick 'em," said Robot, glaring at me. "You thought this whole idiotic thing up. You're probably going to get fried alive for it."

Fried? Not baked? Had he no respect for our client's product?

"Baking's better than frying," I said.

"What?" asked Robot.

"I'm trying," I answered. I imagined a big glob of chicken doo popping up on top of his head. Then another. It looked like blue cheese dressing.

"I'll pick the chickens myself," interrupted Robot impatiently.

"Be sure to get the pin feathers," I said under my breath.

Robot settled on a chicken shot with two white chickens, one dark brown chicken, and one reddish brown chicken. Sam Wong, the cameraman looked at me and said, "What about a yellow chick...." I put my hands over my ears. "Don't even think about it."

The idea of the commercial was to take the shot of the chickens rushing to the bowl and make multiple copies of it. Then the footage would be reversed back and forth so that the chickens looked like they were running up to the bowl then backing up, then running to the bowl again. Sometimes they would appear to back up almost off the screen, then run toward the bowl. Sometimes they would take only a few steps back and a few steps forward, and so forth. While this was happening, square dance music was being played so the chickens looked like they were dancing at a country hoedown.

When the commercial was shown to Mr. Ogilvy in the corporate meeting, and the chicken square dance began, gasps of delight came from the room. The chickens were adorable. The effect was charming. The commercial was a smashing success.Until the next scene.

The next scene was a close-up view of a featherless, venous, blue-white chicken leg, seemingly from one of the cute square-dancing chickens, now gutted and dismembered, being dangled over a bag of Shake 'n Bake. The sound track of the square-dance music had been abruptly replaced by the sound of a skillet full of sizzling grease. The announcer was wagging his finger shamefully at the skillet and saying brightly, "It's a whole lot better than frying!" The effect was right out of a slasher movie. It was like showing somebody's child at a birthday party, then showing it on a plate with an apple in its mouth.

"My God in heaven," said Mr. Ogilvy in his aristocratic Scottish accent. "We are going to have every man, woman, and child in this country retching in their living rooms. We will have the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals boycotting our client. I want the person who wrote this thing fired. And everybody who had anything to do with it." He popped his suspenders like a pair of slingshots and left the room with a ruddy flush rising up the back of his neck.

There wasn't an innocent face in the room. Even though I had conceived the ill-fated opening of the commercial, everybody else there had at one point or another had something to do with the advertisement. They had either seen it and tacitly approved it, or worked on it one way or the other, or checked it for legality. It was Robot himself who had signed the final authorization and adopted the commercial as his own idea since he had personally selected the chickens. But now the idea was suddenly all mine again. Robot was staring at me like the Father Confessor about to excommunicate me for my sins. I wasn't confessing to anything.

"If the captain goes down with this ship, so do all the rats," I said, looking around the room at a panorama of distraught faces.

"I'll write a memo for you to sign, Mr. Robot," said Betty. Robot started to say something. Betty sewed up his lips with a look that could have cauterized cracked concrete.

"Dear Mr. Ogilvy," the memo read. "I take full responsibility for the commercial that was shown in the conference room this morning. It was an error in judgment, and I assure you that all future commercials will be screened for such unfortunate juxtapositions. I will remove my belongings from my office at the close of work today. Sincerely, Bull Robot."

"Wasn't that brave of Bull to take the blame for you?" asked Amanda Pandayear as she passed me in the hall late that day. She had Bull Robot' afternoon coffee and doughnut on a paper plate in her hand.

"Robot's last meal?" I asked.

She stuffed her upper lip down under her lower one and sniffled. "And it's all your fault," she whined.

I whispered in her ear: "I'm going to tell Mr. Ogilvy that you starved the chickens."

"You wouldn't."

"And personally wrung their necks."

"No!"

"And Shaked 'n Baked them while they were still kicking."

Amanda ran down the hall blubbering and sloshing coffee all over the carpet.

Brave Bull Robot wasn't going to get fired. He knew it. I knew it. Everybody knew it. He was married to the client's sister.

That night when I opened the tumbler to inspect the Lemures Stone, it looked no shinier than it did a month before. I consulted the book that I had bought on how to make jewelry and saw a picture of a bigger tumbler, one that worked faster and cost a lot more. I ordered it and set it up. The noise level doubled. I lined the closet with towels and bought the tumbler a foam rubber couch cushion to sit on. One night I could have sworn I heard the distant sound of a big cricket somewhere in the walls of the building. A cricket...or the clicking of someone in apartment 11-F loading a revolver.

Go to Part 5 The Leumur Stone leads me down a rocky road toward financial disaster and another run-in with chickens and Bull Robot)