We find this radical process of reduction occurring too with regard to the nature of historical reality. The life and life-style of slave-trading America on the Mississippi River in the 19th century is compressed into a technologically faithful steamboat ride of five or ten minutes on an HO-scale river. The intermediary between us and this actual historical experience, the writer Mark Twain, author of Life on the Mississippi, is now no more than the name of the boat. Piracy on the high seas, a hundred and fifty years of harassment of European mercantile exploration and trade, becomes a moving diorama of all the scenes and situations of the pirate movies made by Hollywood in the thirties and forties. When the customer is invited then to buy, say, a pirate hat in one of the many junk shops on the premises, the Pavlovian process of symbolic transference to the final consumer moment may be said to be complete.
The ideal Disneyland patron may be said to be one who responds to a process of symbolic manipulation that offers him his culminating and quintessential sentiment at the moment of a purchase.
The following corporations offer shows and exhibits at Disneyland: Monsanto Chemical Co., Bell Telephone, General Electric, and Coca-Cola. Other visible corporate representation includes McDonnell Aircraft, Goodyear, Carnation Milk, Sunkist, Eastman Kodak, Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, Insurance Company of North America, United Air Lines, and Bank of America.
Obviously there are political implications. What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient’s rich psychic relation to his country’s history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience. One cannot tour Disneyland today without noticing its real achievement, which is the handling of crowds. Coupled open vans, pulled by tractors, collect customers at various points of the parking areas and pour them out at the entrance to the park. The park seems built to absorb infinite numbers of customers in its finite space by virtue of the simultaneous appeal of numbers of attractions at the same time, including not only the fixed rides and exhibits and restaurants and shops but special parades and flag raising and lowering ceremonies, band concerts, and the like. (At Christmas time Main Street residents in period dress sing Christmas carols at the foot of a large odorless evergreen whose rubberized needles spring to the touch.) In front of the larger attractions are mazes of pens, designed to hold great numbers of people waiting to board, or to mount or to enter. Guards, attendants, guides, and other personnel, including macrocephalic Disney costume characters, are present in abundance. Plainclothes security personnel appear in any large gathering with walkie-talkies. The problems of mass ingress and egress seem to have been solved here to a degree that would light admiration in the eyes of an SS transport officer.
One is struck by the number of adult customers at Disneyland unaccompanied by small children. One notices too the disproportionately small numbers of black people, of Mexicans, possibly because a day at Disneyland is expensive. There is an absence altogether of long-haired youth, heads, hippies, girls in miniskirts, gypsies, motorcyclists, to the point that one gives credence to the view that Disneyland turns away people it doesn’t like the looks of. This particular intelligence occurred to Linda Mindish as Dale rolled into the parking acreage. The day was hazy and smog indicated the outlines of the sun. When we parked and boarded one of the tractor trains, the clean-cut girl conductor looked at me in what I thought was a regretful manner, her knowledge of my fate conflicting with the natural attraction she felt for my shoulder locks and fuck-everyone persona. Linda obviously did not know whether she was happy or distressed that I might not get in. I don’t think she thought I would quietly go away.
I decided that if I was hassled I would break the line and jump over the turnstile. Dale bought the tickets and I noticed significant looks between a guard and a ticket-taker. A man approached me. Dale headed him off and talked to him for a moment. The thing was I was a freak, yes, but he would take the responsibility. Our tickets were presented and like a foreigner going through customs I was accepted into Disneyland.
Linda and I and Dale walked briskly down Main Street USA. We passed a horse-drawn trolley, an old-time double-decker bus. We passed a penny arcade with Charlie Chaplin flipcard Movie-olas. Giant music boxes that make the sound of the whole band. We passed an apothecary. A red and white striped ice cream parlor. People sat smiling in beerless beer gardens. People filled the sidewalks and the street. People strolled past the bay-windowed shops. People stared at me.
“How do we find him?” I asked Linda.
“They’ll be in Tomorrowland,” she said. “That’s what he likes best.” In the Plaza at the end of Main Street we go through the gates of Tomorrowland. The whole world turns colorfully modern. Linda leads us to the Richfield Autopia.
People wait to board the little gas cars of the Richfield Autopia, a tracked ride that offers the illusion of steering to the person behind the wheel. Little snarling Autopia convertibles pile up at the freeway stop, drivers jump out, and drivers waiting their turns at assigned and numbered places jump in. Cars stream by, the air is filled with the droning of kicky toy engines. Linda points over the fence. There he is. With Sadie next to him, sitting straight and proud. In the toy car. She has a whole book of tickets. She hands another ticket up to the attendant and they don’t get out. Selig grips the wheel waiting for the new run to begin. His arms are bare, he wears an Hawaiian shirt. He is incredibly old. His chin moves up and down, his lips flap against each other, his mouth opens and closes and there flashes across his face a moment of astonishment, a moment of pugnacity, astonishment, pugnacity, in alternating palsies of the nerve. He is white-haired. His hands shake as they grip the wheel. A car bumps them from the back, a child laughs, their grey heads look up to heaven, and they lurch forward on the journey into Autopia.
My heart was beating wildly. I found myself needing more air than I had. I was aware that Dale and Linda were on either side of me and were watching me closely.
“I want to talk to him, Linda.”
“You still do?”
“Yes.”
She was very grim. In a few minutes Selig and Sadie came into view and pulled up again. Sadie prepared another ticket for the attendant and for a moment did not hear her daughter calling to her.
“Mama! Mama!”
But the car shot off again, Sadie looking back over her shoulder to see who had called her.
It was decided that Dale and I would retire to the shade of the Coca-Cola Tomorrowland Terrace while Linda waited for her parents and prepared them for meeting me. I felt as if we were making arrangements for a burial. At the Coca-Cola Terrace a rock band was just finishing a set. The rock musicians had short hair. They waved and their stage sank out of sight to the applause of the matrons.
“He’s senile,” Dale said to me as we sat waiting. “She tried to tell you that. There’s nothing left up here,” he said tapping his temple.
People stood on line for hamburgers and Coca-Cola. Embossed on the edges of my vision were all the errant tracks of the overhead rides and rocket spins, the sinking submarines and the swiveling cars; the starting and stopping of strollers, the ruthless paths of careening infants. I sat with my arms folded at the formica café table. In the middle of my eye, out in the sun the Mindish family was about to deploy itself. Linda beckoned and Dale went out to join them.
Sadie Mindish was being stubborn. She believed if she came any closer some terrible contamination, or sudden death, would befall her. She kept peering in my direction and then giving Linda hell. Linda spoke to Dale and Dale held the old lady’s hand and talked to her. Sadie pulled her hand away and waved her arm in my direction. The lawyer stood in front of her to block me from her vision.
Linda came toward the terrace leading her father by the elbow.
I sat
across the orange formica café table from Dr. Selig Mindish. His daughter kneeled beside him asking him if he’d like a chocolate milk shake. Her knees were blanched in her sheer stockings.
“Chocolate milk shakes are his favorite,” she explained to me. Then in a louder voice she asked her father again if he wanted a milk shake.
I leaned forward with my hands on my knees so that he had to see me. The whites of his eyes were discolored. He needed a shave. Brown spots and moles had attacked his skin. His white hair was thinned out. His eyes were sunken in age sockets of fat and skin. His jaw moved up and down, his lips made the sound of a faucet dripping as they met and fell apart. But there was still in him the remnant of rude strength I remembered.
I said, “Hello, Mr. Mindish. I’m Daniel Isaacson. I’m Paul and Rochelle’s son. Danny?”
Linda was kneeling beside him holding his hand. He struggled to understand me. His head stirred like a turtle’s head coming out of its shell. He smiled and nodded. Then as he looked in my eyes he became gradually still, and even his facial palsy ceased, and he no longer smiled. I was sickened to see water well from the congested yellow corners of his eyes. Tears tracked down his face.
“Denny?”
“It’s all right, Papa,” Linda was saying. She patted his hand. She had begun to cry. “It’s all right, Papa.”
“It’s Denny?”
For one moment of recognition he was restored to life. In wonder he raised his large, clumsy hand and touched the side of my face. He found the back of my neck and pulled me forward and leaned toward me and touched the top of my head with his palsied lips.
Recently in Houston, Texas, surgeons implanted a new heart in the body of a fifty-four-year-old car salesman whose own heart was killing him. Two weeks after the surgery the salesman rejected his new heart. In Brooklyn a seventy-year-old grandmother divorcee with acute heart disease received the heart of a seventeen-year-old girl killed just hours before in an auto accident. The grandmother lived only three days before her body rejected the new heart. Heart rejection is a problem. The body attacks its own new heart as it would any foreign object. The heart is attacked by the body’s antibodies. It is destroyed. In Los Angeles a young woman who had been bedridden for years and whose natural color was blue received the heart of an eighteen-year-old basketball player just minutes after his death by cerebral hemorrhage. Two days later, pink and lovely among her pillows, she was smiling to photographers. In a week she was walking around. In six months she was married to a young doctor who had interned on her floor. Within the year she was dead of her heart’s rejection. Doctors still have a lot to learn about why we reject our hearts. Yes, doctors have a lot to learn. An old peddler from Delancey Street received a new heart at Mt. Sinai and spit it out minutes after regaining consciousness. That’s what we call heart ejection. A black postman in Pittsburgh, Ohio, received the heart of a white steelworker killed in a bar brawl. The black man died immediately. That’s what we call heart dejection. Medical Science has a lot to learn.
In Atlantic City, New Jersey, doctors put a new valve in a blood-pumping machine. The machine rejected its new valve and the man attached to the machine died.
There was some question about the signs. People were confused. Everyone was milling around and we were sitting on somebody’s old desk waiting to be told what to do. Mr. Fischer had dropped us off and said he’d be back. People were on their knees on the floor drawing signs with paintbrushes. It was an empty store. A man was sawing lengths of lumber and stacking them against the wall. Then there was a flurry of excitement at the door, someone cheered, and two people came in laughing and dropped stacks of big cardboard signs with pictures of my mother and father in the middle of the floor. Susan and I sat on the desk with our legs crossed, facing each other, trying to keep some sort of fortress against the scene. Every once in a while someone would come in and we’d know without looking that we were being appraised. In all that noise you could hear some things very clearly. Is that them? Those poor kids.
We knew whoever said that was not one of the inner circle. The people who knew us thought of us as weird and demanding, Just before an appearance we’d suddenly decide we wanted malted milks or hamburgers. Once Susan insisted on chicken chow mein. We blackmailed anyone who made the mistake of befriending us. We were always a threat. By not cooperating we could ruin the best plans. Our public appearances were heartstoppers, The image was of two good, fine children. Those who were close to us knew better.
The Fischers disliked us intensely. They were always rushing us to rallies and meetings and hurrying our supper. We hated them. They lived in a big house and we had two rooms on the third floor. Mrs. Fischer left an old vacuum cleaner up there so we could keep the floors clean. There was a laundry bag for our dirty clothes; when it was full we brought it to the basement. Sometimes we’d find new clothes from Alexander’s laid out on our beds. Our schedule was on the bulletin board in the kitchen. The house, a dark Tudor-style mansion, was well back from the street; and the entire property was surrounded by tall hedges. We often looked through the hedges but saw nothing but another Tudor house. We went to a private school in a station wagon, and a station wagon brought us home. We had no friends.
One day we hid in the basement behind the oil burner. We stayed there all day and missed a rally. I was growing hair around my penis and I showed Susan. We talked about that for a while. Susan read The Enchanted Garden. I took a nap. We could hear the phone upstairs ringing every few minutes. Finally we got hungry and went upstairs. It was ten o’clock in the evening. Mr. Fischer’s tie was pulled down, his collar was open, and the points of the collar were turned up. He yelled at us. Mrs. Fischer looked pale and kept lighting cigarettes and almost immediately mashing them out in the ashtray. She was a thin blond woman with bulgy eyes. “Do you think we’re doing this for our health!” Mr. Fischer screamed. “You rotten kids! They’re your parents! You miserable brats!” Yet one week when it was time to make our visit to prison there was no one to take us.
Then Jacob Ascher came to the house. We hadn’t seen him in a long time. He drove us back to Judge Greenblatt’s Children’s Court and the Judge removed us from the custody of the Fischers. “No more of this,” he said pointing a finger at Ascher. The old lawyer laughed bitterly and shook his head.
What more is there to say? YOUR CAREER IN ELECTRICITY. Electricity is a form of energy. It is generated by various power sources driven by water, steam, or atomic fission. The leading electric-power producing countries are the United States (987,432,000 kilowatt-hours per year), and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (379,096,000 kwh per year). The theory of electricity is that atoms lose or gain electrons and thus become positively or negatively charged. A charged atom is called an ion.
I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution. I know there is a you. There has always been a you. YOU: I will show you that I can do the electrocution.
First they led in my father. They had rightly conceived that my mother was the stronger. All factors had to be considered. They wanted the thing done with as little fuss as possible. They wanted it to go smoothly. It is not a pleasant job, executing people, and they wanted to do it with dispatch. His legs were weak. He had to be held up. His eyes were red from crying, but he was drained, and now they were dry. He wore slippers, grey slacks and a loose shirt with the sleeves rolled. A round area on the top of his head had been shaved. His right pant leg had been slit with a scissor.
There were a number of people in the room with him. The warden, the executioner, three guards, the rabbi, two doctors and three reporters chosen by lot to represent the press corps. One reporter was from the Herald Tribune, one was with Associated Press, and one was from the News. My father’s hands were shaking and his breathing was rapid and shallow. He had been advised that a phone with a direct line to Washington would be in the execution chamber. He did not look for it when he entered the room. He made no sign that acknowledged the presence of any of the onlookers. He had to be helpe
d into the chair, gently lowered, like an invalid. When he was seated his breathing became more rapid. He closed his eyes and clenched his hands in his lap.
Nothing had gone right. No cause had rallied. The world had not flamed to revolution. The issue of the commutation of the sentence, their chance for life, seemed to have turned on the quality, the gentility, the manners, of the people fighting for them. The cause seemed to have been discredited as a political maneuver. As if there was some grand fusion of associative guilt—the Isaacsons confirmed in guilt because of who campaigned for their freedom, and their supporters discredited because they campaigned for the Isaacsons. The truth was beyond reclamation. The President of the United States had called in the Attorney General of the United States just before he announced his decision on the Isaacsons’ petition for clemency. It is believed that the Attorney General said to the President, “Mr. President, these folks have got to fry.”
My father’s hands were raised, and separated, and his arms strapped at the wrists to the arms of the chair. The arms of the electric chair are wood. The frame is wood, although a metal brace rises from the back of the chair and the chair is bolted to the concrete floor with metal braces. His ankles were strapped to the chair. The chair straps are leather. A strap was tied across his lap, another across his chest, and another, like a phylactery, around his head. A guard gently removed his eyeglasses, folded them, and put them aside. A guard came over, dipped his fingers into a jar, and with a circular motion rubbed an adhesive and conduction paste on the shaved place on my father’s head, and then kneeled down and did the same for the place on his calf that had been shaved. Then the electrodes were fixed in place.