Jan. 7, 1989: Afternoon’s slow except for the wedding cake
Gets kind of quiet in the middle of the afternoon around here. O’Strowsky goes out and runs around at lunch to burn off energy and comes back mellow, and when someone who’s as hyper in the mornings as O’Strowsky turns mellow in the afternoon, he can’t help but drag down the place. Afternoon’s when guys do most of their layouts, since staring at a black-and-green screen for a couple hours doesn’t get you anything but a stiff neck and more fixit work to do later on. Paragraphs turn into nonsense, all stretched out and shrunk. Sometimes you’ll make it to the end of a story that you’ve edited in the middle of the afternoon half-asleep, go back to the top and start reading, and find words with a hundred T’s all strung together or paragraphs that end in the middle of a sentence or start two inches down from the last paragraph. Sometimes you have to dig out the original manuscript to figure out what they were saying to start with, and when the manuscripts are handwritten on the back of a light bill the way McManus likes to do, you might as well make up something likely, because nothing’s going to give you a definite answer.
Don and Maggie sit next to Whitey and they fight sometimes, knocking at each other with words, in the middle of the afternoon, just so they’re not falling asleep. This afternoon, though, it’s Whitey lets out a yell about two o’clock, two-fifteen. “Cripes sakes!” he yells. “Wedding cake! What the hell they expect me to do with wedding cake?”
You have to remember that Whitey does prices, which means he has to figure out as best he can what baseball cards and things like old bats and balls are selling for and whether prices are legit, then he has to take all this information and make price guides out of it. He probably has the most important job on this end of the building, since all the collectors want to know is, “How much is it worth?”. Problem is he never has any problem telling Baumer how things are and who ranks where, and that doesn’t sit well with Baumer. At least Whitey doesn’t go around pissing off advertisers like O’Strowsky, but if there were advertisers in Whitey’s way he’d piss them off without thinking twice just by shooting straight and not holding back. That’s the kind of guy he is.
Whitey’s yell wakes up anyone thinking about sleeping through the afternoon, but Donnie B’s closest so he’s the one sticks his head over the cubicle wall.
“What’s the yelling about wedding cake?” Donnie B asks. “You don’t need a wedding cake, do you?”
“Aw, it’s this auction,” Whitey says back. A lot of what he does involves going through auction catalogs after auctions and matching up selling prices with items. You gotta know when the prices are there just to hold up the market for something the auction house might have been stuck with a gross of, like press pins or Woodstock tickets. Woodstock tickets are the worst. Must be a couple million Woodstock tickets floating around, and 80 percent of ‘em look like the day they were printed. You need a good eye for scams to plow through auction catalogs without getting hurt, and Whitey’s cynical enough to make it without a scratch.
“Wedding cake? Whose wedding?” Donnie B asks.
“Guess.”
“Geez, I don’t know. Bo Belinsky and Jayne Mansfield?”
“Bo Belinsky never married Jayne Mansfield. Mamie van Doren either.”
“I give up – Steve Garvey?”
“Try Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.”
Donnie B’s not as much of a cynic as Whitey, but since he edits Whitey’s price guides he’s cynical enough. “Wedding cake from Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s wedding? How you know it’s authentic?”
“Got me,” Whitey says. “But you gotta believe there’s a better way to make seventy-five bucks than faking a piece of wedding cake. In cellophane, yet.”
“They put a grade on it?” A grade isn’t like a grade you get in school – A’s and B-plusses and all that. Grades in sports memorabilia describe condition, whether something is Mint – that’s perfect – or Near Mint or something worse. A lot of Whitey does is figure out whether someone’s faking a grade to get more money for whatever they’re selling.
“Say it’s in excellent condition,” Whitey says. “Here – let me read you what the book says: ‘Own a piece of history’ –“
“God, it’s always ‘own a piece of history,’” Don says. “How many pieces does history have, anyhow?”
“Got me,” Whitey says, before going back to reading. “’Own a piece of history: wedding cake from the legendary lovers, the 20th century’s most spectacular cultural icons, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. This spectacularly preserved artifact is in remarkable condition for its age and comes packaged in its original cellophane wrapper. An invitation to the wedding reception is included as provenance. Hold this priceless artifact in your hands an’ immediately be transported to a place and time of legends. Price estimate: seventy-five to one hundred dollars.’”
Don does a half-laugh, a hard little breath, after Whitey finishes reading. “’Hold this priceless artifact in your hands and immediately get cold hands,’ what they meant to say. I mean, it’s gotta be frozen. How else could it have kept all these years?”
“I dunno. It’s in cellophane.”
“You want to eat anything’s been in cellophane for forty years?”
“No one said anything about eating it.”
“What else you gonna do with it?”
Whitey’s a cynic, but now he’s playing straight man to the cynic on the wall of his cubicle, he knows it, and he can’t help it. “Display it, I guess.”
“Display it? Okay, this is a piece of wedding cake that’s been in cellophane for forty years. You ever take some of your wedding cake and throw it in the freezer, thinking you’re going to eat some every year on your anniversary?”
“Uh, no.”
“That’s right; I forgot. Okay, you throw some of your wedding cake in the freezer and first year you take it out it’s not so bad. Wash it down with champagne, it’s okay. You’re still at least half in love anyway, so it don’t matter. Next year it takes a little worse, you’re a little less in love, takes more champagne to wash it down. Third year you take one look at the cake, throw it away and drink the champagne out of the bottle. Fourth year you dispense with the champagne entirely. Fifth year you clean out the freezer, open up the aluminum foil, go, ‘Yuck!’, throw the cake away. Now that’s five-year-old wedding cake wrapped in aluminum foil and stored in a freezer. You think forty-year-old wedding cake’s wrapped in cellophane’s gonna do better than that? And you’re gonna display it? How?”
Whitey’s trying to regain his footing, but it’s tough. “Well first of all, I’m not gonna display it. Idiot who bought it’s gonna display it, is what I’m sayin’. I don’t know; I’m guessin’ that he gets a picture of the two of them, DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, maybe puts the picture on a wood plaque with the invitation to the reception, then the wood plaque has a little piece on the bottom stickin’ out where he can put the piece of wedding cake – assumin’ it doesn’t have to stay in the freezer. If it has to stay in the freezer I’m haven’t got a friggin’ clue what the hell he’ll do with it.”
“Okay, assuming it doesn’t have to stay in the freezer and you can put it on your little stand like you say,” Donnie B says. He’s sort of half-mad now, like you can tell he’s figured out it doesn’t really matter, like he knows it’s doing a fine job keeping him awake on a winter afternoon. “What’s it gonna look like, this nice little stand with this cellophane lump sitting on it? What’re people gonna say – ‘Oh, that’s nice but someone left their old Hostess Cupcake on this platform’? ‘Here, let me throw it away for you’ – and then where are you?”
“Cut it out,” Whitey says. He’s had enough, whether it’s helped him stay awake or not.
“Okay, okay, so forget displayin’ it. How do you grade it?”
“Don’t know. Unopened? Unique?”
This gets a bunch of the other sports guys going, guys who’d been listening as things went along, more or less as a way to stay awake.
“What about the double-autographed piece of cake, with the signatures in the frosting?” says E-boe from around the corner.
“Yeah, and the rare double-rose error,” chimes in Bulk.
“I had three of those pieces of cake, but my mom threw them out,” O’Strowsky says, and that clinches it. Once you pull out the my-mother-threw-them-out line the game’s over. No one else is gonna say anything to top that.
“Aw go back to sleep, wouldcha?” Whitey says, but no one does.
Gets kind of quiet in the middle of the afternoon around here. O’Strowsky goes out and runs around at lunch to burn off energy and comes back mellow, and when someone who’s as hyper in the mornings as O’Strowsky turns mellow in the afternoon, he can’t help but drag down the place. Afternoon’s when guys do most of their layouts, since staring at a black-and-green screen for a couple hours doesn’t get you anything but a stiff neck and more fixit work to do later on. Paragraphs turn into nonsense, all stretched out and shrunk. Sometimes you’ll make it to the end of a story that you’ve edited in the middle of the afternoon half-asleep, go back to the top and start reading, and find words with a hundred T’s all strung together or paragraphs that end in the middle of a sentence or start two inches down from the last paragraph. Sometimes you have to dig out the original manuscript to figure out what they were saying to start with, and when the manuscripts are handwritten on the back of a light bill the way McManus likes to do, you might as well make up something likely, because nothing’s going to give you a definite answer.
Don and Maggie sit next to Whitey and they fight sometimes, knocking at each other with words, in the middle of the afternoon, just so they’re not falling asleep. This afternoon, though, it’s Whitey lets out a yell about two o’clock, two-fifteen. “Cripes sakes!” he yells. “Wedding cake! What the hell they expect me to do with wedding cake?”
You have to remember that Whitey does prices, which means he has to figure out as best he can what baseball cards and things like old bats and balls are selling for and whether prices are legit, then he has to take all this information and make price guides out of it. He probably has the most important job on this end of the building, since all the collectors want to know is, “How much is it worth?”. Problem is he never has any problem telling Baumer how things are and who ranks where, and that doesn’t sit well with Baumer. At least Whitey doesn’t go around pissing off advertisers like O’Strowsky, but if there were advertisers in Whitey’s way he’d piss them off without thinking twice just by shooting straight and not holding back. That’s the kind of guy he is.
Whitey’s yell wakes up anyone thinking about sleeping through the afternoon, but Donnie B’s closest so he’s the one sticks his head over the cubicle wall.
“What’s the yelling about wedding cake?” Donnie B asks. “You don’t need a wedding cake, do you?”
“Aw, it’s this auction,” Whitey says back. A lot of what he does involves going through auction catalogs after auctions and matching up selling prices with items. You gotta know when the prices are there just to hold up the market for something the auction house might have been stuck with a gross of, like press pins or Woodstock tickets. Woodstock tickets are the worst. Must be a couple million Woodstock tickets floating around, and 80 percent of ‘em look like the day they were printed. You need a good eye for scams to plow through auction catalogs without getting hurt, and Whitey’s cynical enough to make it without a scratch.
“Wedding cake? Whose wedding?” Donnie B asks.
“Guess.”
“Geez, I don’t know. Bo Belinsky and Jayne Mansfield?”
“Bo Belinsky never married Jayne Mansfield. Mamie van Doren either.”
“I give up – Steve Garvey?”
“Try Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.”
Donnie B’s not as much of a cynic as Whitey, but since he edits Whitey’s price guides he’s cynical enough. “Wedding cake from Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s wedding? How you know it’s authentic?”
“Got me,” Whitey says. “But you gotta believe there’s a better way to make seventy-five bucks than faking a piece of wedding cake. In cellophane, yet.”
“They put a grade on it?” A grade isn’t like a grade you get in school – A’s and B-plusses and all that. Grades in sports memorabilia describe condition, whether something is Mint – that’s perfect – or Near Mint or something worse. A lot of Whitey does is figure out whether someone’s faking a grade to get more money for whatever they’re selling.
“Say it’s in excellent condition,” Whitey says. “Here – let me read you what the book says: ‘Own a piece of history’ –“
“God, it’s always ‘own a piece of history,’” Don says. “How many pieces does history have, anyhow?”
“Got me,” Whitey says, before going back to reading. “’Own a piece of history: wedding cake from the legendary lovers, the 20th century’s most spectacular cultural icons, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. This spectacularly preserved artifact is in remarkable condition for its age and comes packaged in its original cellophane wrapper. An invitation to the wedding reception is included as provenance. Hold this priceless artifact in your hands an’ immediately be transported to a place and time of legends. Price estimate: seventy-five to one hundred dollars.’”
Don does a half-laugh, a hard little breath, after Whitey finishes reading. “’Hold this priceless artifact in your hands and immediately get cold hands,’ what they meant to say. I mean, it’s gotta be frozen. How else could it have kept all these years?”
“I dunno. It’s in cellophane.”
“You want to eat anything’s been in cellophane for forty years?”
“No one said anything about eating it.”
“What else you gonna do with it?”
Whitey’s a cynic, but now he’s playing straight man to the cynic on the wall of his cubicle, he knows it, and he can’t help it. “Display it, I guess.”
“Display it? Okay, this is a piece of wedding cake that’s been in cellophane for forty years. You ever take some of your wedding cake and throw it in the freezer, thinking you’re going to eat some every year on your anniversary?”
“Uh, no.”
“That’s right; I forgot. Okay, you throw some of your wedding cake in the freezer and first year you take it out it’s not so bad. Wash it down with champagne, it’s okay. You’re still at least half in love anyway, so it don’t matter. Next year it takes a little worse, you’re a little less in love, takes more champagne to wash it down. Third year you take one look at the cake, throw it away and drink the champagne out of the bottle. Fourth year you dispense with the champagne entirely. Fifth year you clean out the freezer, open up the aluminum foil, go, ‘Yuck!’, throw the cake away. Now that’s five-year-old wedding cake wrapped in aluminum foil and stored in a freezer. You think forty-year-old wedding cake’s wrapped in cellophane’s gonna do better than that? And you’re gonna display it? How?”
Whitey’s trying to regain his footing, but it’s tough. “Well first of all, I’m not gonna display it. Idiot who bought it’s gonna display it, is what I’m sayin’. I don’t know; I’m guessin’ that he gets a picture of the two of them, DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, maybe puts the picture on a wood plaque with the invitation to the reception, then the wood plaque has a little piece on the bottom stickin’ out where he can put the piece of wedding cake – assumin’ it doesn’t have to stay in the freezer. If it has to stay in the freezer I’m haven’t got a friggin’ clue what the hell he’ll do with it.”
“Okay, assuming it doesn’t have to stay in the freezer and you can put it on your little stand like you say,” Donnie B says. He’s sort of half-mad now, like you can tell he’s figured out it doesn’t really matter, like he knows it’s doing a fine job keeping him awake on a winter afternoon. “What’s it gonna look like, this nice little stand with this cellophane lump sitting on it? What’re people gonna say – ‘Oh, that’s nice but someone left their old Hostess Cupcake on this platform’? ‘Here, let me throw it away for you’ – and then where are you?”
“Cut it out,” Whitey says. He’s had enough, whether it’s helped him stay awake or not.
“Okay, okay, so forget displayin’ it. How do you grade it?”
“Don’t know. Unopened? Unique?”
This gets a bunch of the other sports guys going, guys who’d been listening as things went along, more or less as a way to stay awake.
“What about the double-autographed piece of cake, with the signatures in the frosting?” says E-boe from around the corner.
“Yeah, and the rare double-rose error,” chimes in Bulk.
“I had three of those pieces of cake, but my mom threw them out,” O’Strowsky says, and that clinches it. Once you pull out the my-mother-threw-them-out line the game’s over. No one else is gonna say anything to top that.
“Aw go back to sleep, wouldcha?” Whitey says, but no one does.
posted by Kit Kiefer | 7:54 PM
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