This Footstool Earth. John Zeugner
line” in town. It was Walter Jelliffe himself who reiterated, after sufficient sherry, what he called John Keats’ finest declaration: “A gentleman is one who is not wholly preoccupied with getting on.” So Waldo, following Walter’s lead, left actual actions, decisions, rewrites–in short, “getting-on” to others. He enjoyed being the final voice, never invoked, the absolute ruler whose only task was to meet the public and every now and then come up with a “brilliant feature proposal.” The job left him gobs of time for slow luncheons at the club, side trips to Bermuda, early dinners with Suzan, month-long stays with her at various installations of sound mind and body. Waldo immensely enjoyed the latitude he had with The Spy’s staff. He was at once the daffy uncle on the premises and the Zeus of certain death if you didn’t play along. He was at The Spy, as in life itself, to be indulged. Indulgence came certainly with the Jelliffe name enforced with Corcoran monetary muscle.
Now in his fiftieth year Waldo Jelliffe had not given up the khakis of his swell collegiate life, nor the thin sweaters or cashmere blazers. He wore, as if in anticipation of his retirement years, and in recollection of his golden youth, New Balance running shoes or Timberland high tops in reverence for his New England roots even if, he noted at the club bar one night, the labor was not exactly Brahmin on Batam Island (where the shoes were made) perhaps a little swarthy even, and certainly dirt cheap. He was proud of his trip to Batam Island off the Malaysian coast, prouder still of his one single byline feature: “The Worcester/Batam Connection” in which he lovingly recorded the barracks lives of those exploited Southeast Asian laborers who sent everything they earned back home to China, India, the Philippines or wherever. Waldo had liked the spicy food and hammering Malaysian sun; he admired the way things ran so promptly and cleanly in Singapore. Worcester could learn a lot from ASEAN his one article maintained. And Kuala Lumpur was the one city on the planet he could emigrate to, he told the younger staffers and interns at The Spy, if circumstances should ever require him to leave Worcester. It interested him sometimes to wonder what those circumstances might be. Could he be a secret serial killer, filleting young women with one of Chef Tony’s lifetime knives? He saw the knives advertised often enough on T.V., and once he had called the 800 number to inquire which of the knives would be best for gutting girls. “Be serious,” the operator replied. “You want one set or two?” Most of all he liked the strange liberation he felt on Batam. It was almost as if he had lost weight or was wearing weirdly bouncing sneakers launching him farther up into the soft, mucid air. Every step seemed to radiate “Yes!” in his confident striding. There was always a troubling collapse in the return flight, as if the seat, the cramped air, the sour food was pressing down on his buoyancy, returning him to a heritage of empty strangulation. “I swear to God I’m taking you back with me, LP, (his nickname for the Vietnamese in charge of the workers barracks) just to feel alive again.”
Lately he spent more and more time with the younger staffers and interns since they only imperfectly understood his irrelevance. He was for them, the owner, the publisher, the ultimate authority, who merely husbanded his power by never displaying it. They did not understand what lineage could and could not do. And they responded enthusiastically to his rare proposals. And a few of them grasped that it was through Waldo that their own ideas could percolate in The Spy’s system.
Thus it was not exactly clear who thought the feature up but Waldo certainly embraced the great pub crawl search for “The Toughest Bar in Worcester.” And he began the deliberations with what he knew was the central point: “Look, you have to have a standard, a comparison point on toughness. You’ve got to have a clear idea of what you mean by ‘toughest’. What is the essence of ‘toughness’ and where do you find it? If you can point to one bar as ‘tough’, then you can say X or Y exceeds that standard by such and such a factor and therefore it is not yet, ‘The toughest Bar in Worcester.’ And surprise of surprises, I can give us the standard: the old Valhalla Bar on Summer Street.”
“It’s gone–they built the new police station on the site,” someone answered.
“I know that, but its perishing makes it the perfect standard. No one can really say what it was on the scale of toughness. We can establish one ourselves. Besides, when I taught at the old jail, inmates told me it was the toughest bar in town. You could always be guaranteed a fight if you went in. That’s toughness. Maybe we should put a time factor into the equation. Whadya think?”
“Art’s Diner on West Boylston street. The Huns hang out there.”
“The Brass Helmut on Main Street–--Hispanic gangs.”
“Any place on Green street. Vietnamese gangs all over the place there.”
Waldo objected, “We need more work on the standard. On criteria. Give me criteria.
Something to sink our teeth into. Something the lunchpails will understand.”
Waldo tended to regard those who worked for a living as “lunchpails,” although the term disappointed and discouraged Walter Jelliffe.
“I still think we need a time constraint,” Waldo said. “You have to engage in actual fisticuffs within, say, nine minutes of entry. How does that sound?”
“You’ll need a time keeper,” Lewis Walling said, the most senior of the interns. There was a trace of whining sarcasm in his tone.
Waldo looked carefully at him, then finally said, “And a nifty stop watch, I suppose.”
“And a hostility quotient,” Walling continued, “maybe made up of equal parts rage, envy, insecurity, belief God is on your side.”
“Lunch pail,” Waldo answered.
“And we’d need bodyguards, people to do the actual fighting–either that or a year of combat training before we start the crawl.”
Waldo and Suzan had no children, and Waldo had the habit of adopting one of the interns as the son he was convinced he didn’t want. Lewis Walling was the latest in his adoptions–three previous adoptions had migrated to graduate school or Rhode Island papers. One became an editor in New Haven.
“Look, Walling, you like to throw log jams on the fire. I know that, but we can easily find a few thugs to back us up in testing the hostility. You probably know some yourself–-football players or Rugby freaks.”
“I do.”
“Good, then let’s not lock down over trivia. We need criteria–perfect criteria. A fight in nine minutes is a good start, but just a start.”
“The first thirty seconds is crucial. True toughness signals itself right out of the gate. If you can’t find a hostile phrase, look, gesture in 30 seconds, the place fails. We need a play book of gestures and phrases–that can be part of the article.” Walling said, warming to the task.
“What about ethnicity?” Waldo asked.
“Meaning what?” Walling answered.
“Meaning should we stipulate a certain homogeneity as key to hostility. It’s a Latino bar and we walk in and there’s looks and so on. Does that qualify? Does the toughness have to go beyond resentment of outsiders? Isn’t that natural? And therefore discountable?”
“So it has to be a WASP bar?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Waldo said. “We’re looking for an add-on factor – something that can begin in ethnic resentment but quickly boils over into generalized hatred, a pure viciousness aimed out of the soul of bile.”
“The soul of bile,” Walling repeated. “The soul of bile. Something that comes out of generations of repression? The end product of remembering that this town once was the center of New England, a palace of wire manufacturing –the barbed wire kingdom of the world and then, and then, the ugly descent as Swedes gave way to Italians and Irish and then to southeast Asians–wire to plastic, to gutted factories, abandoned mills, thence to boutiques and finally to plywood–so that everybody carries around a longing for some imagined time of prosperity. What begins as resentment for skin color ends as boiling rage and blame for loss of autonomy–all over some local IPA or Miller lites? Is that it?”
“You