Robert Bloch - Life in Our Time # SS.pdf - Robert Bloch - allforjesus2001

ROBERT BLOCH

Life in Our Time

Recently we read a definition of “Camp” (Susan Sontag’s?). Something is

“Campy” when it’s so “far out” that it’s “in,” so “bad” that it’s “good” — or to

put it another way, so lacking in culture that it is culture. (Norman Mailer has

defined Camp as “the art of the cannibal, the art which evolved out of the

bankruptcy of the novel of manners.”)

But is Camp, or even Campiness, truly the most represen-tative symbol of

our Twentieth Century civilization? We don’t believe it; perhaps more accurately,

we don’t want to believe it . . .

* * * *

When Harry’s time capsule arrived, Jill made him put it in the guest-house.

All it was, it turned out, was a big metal box with a cover that could be sealed

tight and soldered so that the air couldn’t get at what was inside. Jill was really quite

disappointed with it.

But then she was quite disappointed with Harry, too—Pro-fessor Harrison

Cramer, B.A., B.S., M.A., Ph.D. Half the al-phabet wasted on a big nothing. At

those flaky faculty cock-tail parties, people were always telling her, “It must be

won-derful to be married to a brilliant man like your husband.” Brother, if they only

knew!

It wasn’t just that Harry was 15 years older than she was. After all, look at

Rex Harrison and Richard Burton and Cary Grant and Laurence Olivier. But Harry

wasn’t the movie-star type—definitely not! Not even the mad-scientist type, like

Vincent Price in those crazy “campy” pictures. He was noth-ing—just a big nothing.

Of course, Jill got the message long before she married him. But he did have

that imposing house and all that loot he’d inherited from his mother. Jill figured on

making a few changes, and she actually did manage to redo the house so that it

looked halfway presentable, with the help of that fagilleh interior decorator. But she

couldn’t redo Harry. Maybe he needed an interior decorator to work on him, too;

she cer-tainly couldn’t change him.

And outside of what she managed to squeeze out of him for the redecorating,

Jill hadn’t been able to get her hands on any of the loot, either. Harry wasn’t

interested in entertaining or going out or taking cruises, and whenever she mentioned

a sable jacket he mumbled something under his breath about “conspicuous

consumption”—whatever that was! He didn’t like modern art or the theater, he

didn’t drink or smoke— why, he didn’t even watch TV. And he wore flannel

pajamas in bed. All the time.

After a couple of months Jill was ready to climb the walls. Then she began

thinking about Reno, and that’s where Rick came in. Rick was her attorney—at

least, that’s the way it started out to be, but Rick had other ideas. Particularly for

those long afternoons when Harry was lecturing at seminars or whatever he did over

there at the University.

Pretty soon Jill forgot about Reno; Rick was all for one of those quickie

divorces you can get down in Mexico. He was sure he could make it stick and still

see to it that she got her fifty-fifty share under the community property laws, and

without any waiting. It could all be done in 24 hours, with no hassle; they’d take off

together, just like eloping. Bang, you’re divorced; bang, you’re remarried; and then,

bang, bang, bang—

So all Jill had to worry about was finding the right time. And even that was no

problem, after Harry told her about the time capsule.

“I’m to be in full charge of the project,” he said. “Com-plete authority to

choose what will be representative of our present culture. Quite a responsibility, my

dear—but I wel-come the challenge.”

“So what’s a time capsule?” Jill wanted to know.

Harry went into a long routine and she didn’t really listen, just enough to get

the general idea. The thing was, Harry had to pick out all kinds of junk to be sealed

up in this gizmo so that sometime—10,000 years from now, maybe—somebody

would come along and dig it up and open it and be able to tell what kind of

civilization we had. Big deal! But from the way Harry went on, you’d think he’d just

won the Grand Prix or something.

“We’re going to put the capsule in the foundation of the new Humanities

Building,” he told her.

“What are humanities?” Jill asked, but Harry just gave her one of those

Good-lord-how-can-you-be-so-stupid? looks that always seemed to start their

quarrels; and they would have had a fight then and there, too, only he added

something about how the dedication ceremonies for the new building would take

place on May 1st, and he’d have to hurry to get everything arranged for the big day.

Including writing his de-dicatory address.

May 1st was all Jill needed to hear. That was on a Friday, and if Harry was

going to be tied up making a speech at the dedication, it would be an A-OK time to

make that little flight across the border. So she managed to call Rick and tell him and

he said yeah, sure, perfect.

“It’s only ten days from now,” Jill reminded Rick. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

She didn’t know it, but it turned out she wasn’t kidding. She had more to do

than she thought, because all at once Harry was interested in her. Really interested.

“You’ve got to help me,” he said that night at dinner. “I want to rely on your

taste. Of course, I’ve got some choices of my own in mind, but I want you to

suggest items to go into the capsule.”

At first Jill thought he was putting her on, but he really meant it. “This project

is going to be honest. The usual ploy is pure exhibitionism—samples of the ‘best’ of

everything, plus descriptive data which is really just a pat on the back for the status

quo ante. Well, that’s not for me. I’d like to include material that’s self-explanatory,

not self-congratulatory. Not art and facts—but artifacts.”

Harry lost her there, until he said, “Everything preserved will be a clue to our

contemporary social attitudes. Not what we pretend to admire, but what the majority

actually believes in and enjoys. And that’s where you come in, my dear. You

represent the majority.”

Jill began to dig it, then. “You mean like TV and pop re-cords?”

“Exactly. What’s that album you like so much? The one with the four

hermaphrodites on the liner?”

“Who?”

“Excuse me—it’s purportedly a singing group, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you’re talking about the Poodles!” Jill went and got the album, which

was called “The Poodles Bark Again.” The sound really turned her on, but she had

always thought Harry hated it. And now he was coming on all smiles.

“Great!” he said. “This definitely goes in.”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll buy you another.” He took the album and put it on his

desk. “Now you mentioned something about television. What’s your favorite

program?”

When she saw that he was really serious, she began telling him about

“Anywhere, U.S.A.” What it was, it was about life in a small town, just an ordinary

suburb like, but the peo-ple were great There was this couple with the two kids, one

boy and one girl, sort of an average family, you might say, only he was kind of

playing around with a divorcee who ran a discothetique or whatever they call them,

and she had a yen for her psychiatrist—he wasn’t really her psychiatrist, he was

analyzing one of the kids, the one who had set fire to the high school gymnasium,

not the girl—she was afraid her par-ents would find out about her affair with the

vice-principal who was really an enemy agent only she didn’t know it yet, and her

real boy friend, the one who had the brain operation, had a “thing” about his mother,

so—

It got kind of complicated, but Harry kept asking her to tell him more, and

pretty soon he was smiling and nodding. “Wonderful! We’ll have to see if we can

get films of a typical week’s episodes.”

“You mean you really want something like that?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you say this show faithfully captured the lives of

American citizens today?”

She had to agree he was right. Also about some of the things he was going to

put into the capsule to show the way people lived nowadays—like tranquilizers and

pep pills and income tax forms and a map of the freeway-expressway-turn-pike

system. He had a lot of numbers, too, for Zip Code and digit dialing, and Social

Security, and the ones the computers punched out on insurance and charge-account

and utility bills.

But what he really wanted was ideas for more stuff, and in the next couple of

days he kept leaning on her. He got hold of her souvenir from Shady Lawn

Cemetery—it was a plastic walnut that opened up, called “Shady Lawn in a

Nutshell.” Inside were twelve tiny color prints showing all the tourist at-tractions of

the place, and you could mail the whole thing to your friends back home. Harry put

this in the time capsule, wrapping it up in something he told her was an actuarial table

on the incidence of coronary occlusion among middle-aged, middle-class males.

Like heart attacks, that is.

“What’s that you’re reading?” he asked. And the next thing she knew, he had

her copy of the latest Steve Slash paperback—the one where Steve is sent on this

top-secret mission to keep peace in Port Said, and right after he kills these five guys

with the portable flame thrower concealed in his judo belt, he’s getting ready to play

beddy-bye with Yasmina, who’s really another secret agent with radioactive

finger-nails—

And that’s as far as she’d got when he grabbed the book. It was getting so

she couldn’t keep anything out of his eager lit-tle hands.

“What’s that you’re cooking?” he wanted to know. And there went the TV

dinner—frozen crepes suzettes and all. To say nothing of the Plain Jane Instant

Borscht.

“Where’s that photo you had of your brother?” It was a real nothing picture

of Stud, just him wearing that beatnik beard of his and standing by his motorcycle

on the day he passed his initiation into Hell’s Angels. But Harry put that in, too. Jill

didn’t think it was very nice of Harry, seeing as how he clipped it to another photo

of some guys taking the Ku Klux Klan oath.

But right now the main thing was to keep Harry happy. That’s what Rick said

when she clued him in on what was going on.

“Cooperate, baby,” he told her. “It’s a real kinky kick, but it keeps him out of

our hair. We got plans to make, tickets to buy, packing and like that there.”

The trouble was, Jill ran out of ideas. She explained this to Rick but he just

laughed.

“I’ll give you some,” he said, “and you can feed ‘em to him. He’s a real

way-out kid, that husband of yours—I know just what he wants.”

The funny part of it was that Rick did know. He was really kind of a brain

himself, but not in a kooky way like Harry. So she listened to what he suggested and

told Harry when she got home.

“How about a sample of the Theater of the Absurd?” she asked. Harry looked

at her over the top of his glasses, and for a minute she thought she’d really thrown

him, but then he grinned and got excited.

“Perfect!” he said. “Any suggestions?”

“Well, I was reading a review about this new play every-body’s talking

about—it’s about this guy who thinks he’s hav-ing a baby so he goes to an

abortionist, only I guess the abor-tionist is supposed to be somebody mystical or

something, and it all takes place in a greenhouse—”

“Delightful!” Harry was off and running. “I’ll pick up a copy of the book.

Anything else?”

Thank God that Rick had coached her. So she said what about a recording of

one of those concerts where they use a “prepared” piano that makes noises like

screeching brakes, or sometimes no sound at all. And Harry liked that. He also liked

the idea about a sample of Pop Art—maybe a big blowup of a newspaper ad about

“That Tired Feeling” or maybe “Psoriasis.”

The next day she suggested a tape of a “Happening” which was the real thing,

because it took place in some private san-atorium for disturbed patients, and Harry

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