Bite Point

Shrubbery, Episode Ten: The Wine

Massimo Volpedo, as we saw in the last episode, loves life and people on a breathtaking scale.

Let us see what he has to say about wine.

The setup: It's a bitter cold Boston evening in January, 1930. Pinky DeVroom, his best pal Unctual Natchez, Elfred Norcross and Massimo Volpedo meet in Stuyvesant's, a swank Beantown restraurant.

Prohibition is in full swing, and the Great Depression is deepening. Still, it was almost always possible to obtain alcohol during Prohibition, even outside of speakeasies. One just had to know how to ask the right way, and each establishment had its own unwritten rules. Just before this excerpt, Massimo has managed to order wine for his party. Not quite by following those rules, but close enough.

Here's what he says at the moment he's successful in spite of the Volstead Act:

“Ah. Yes, I see how it truly is with you all. You feel imposto—yes, yes, put upon. But the wine! Wine, my friends, is not just for the drink.”

Pinky looked about. The man had everyone’s attention; Stuyvesant’s had gone silent.

“No, no, no. The wine—the wine is poetry, it is fantasy, it is love!”

http://www.swirledshrub.com/

Shrubbery, Episode Nine: The Volpedo

The only Episode thus far with a coda to its title. And why?

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Signore Massimo Volpedo:

*

Pinky entered, hat in hand, and nodded to Mrs. Dalton. He was vaguely conscious that he was throttling the windpipe of his hat again, and willed himself to relax his hands. “Ahh, Mrs. Dalton, ever so good. I wonder—is El—er, is Miss Norcross in? I won’t take up too much of her time.”

Mrs. Dalton gave him such a peculiar look, one that seemed to mix peril with intrigue, that he actually looked behind himself to see if an organ grinder’s monkey or something similar might be taking up her attention in the rear of the room. “Mr. DeVroom. This is a surprise.”

She took the pencil she was holding and set it on the papers in front of her. “She is in conference at the moment, but I will buzz her and announce your arrival.” She picked up her phone’s receiver and was about to punch a button on its console when Elfred emerged from her office, laughing. Laughing with a man, who was escorting her out by the arm. A tall, tall, not dark, handsome man.

Pinky’s hat was not likely to survive. Elfred stopped, as did her companion; both stared. Elfred reddened, and then frowned. “Pinky, we had no appointment.” She turned to Mrs. Dalton and said, “Inverness, that’s correct, is it not? Pinky and I weren’t scheduled?”

Mrs. Dalton (Inverness?) closed her open mouth, but pried it open again before she spoke. “No, Miss Norcross. No appointment.”

Elfred turned back to Pinky, but before he spoke, the tall man stepped forward, showing a Vesuvius eruption of large, perfect teeth. He held his hand outstretched, and bounded over to Pinky. “Pinky? Pinky DeVroom, the author? You I know. Stolen Keys, si? You are the maestro!”

Pinky drew back slightly, and started to stretch out his hand, but the fellow grabbed him in a tight pas de deux, hugging him close and whirling him around the room. Pinky’s hat sighed and gave up the ghost, falling lifeless to the floor. The fellow released Pinky, allowing him a desperate intake of breath.

“Massimo! I am Massimo Volpedo, of the Shakespeare and Company connection. I know your work, this sly Malacong Dall, stupendo!” He clapped Pinky on the shoulder, and it was all Pinky could do to remain standing. Pinky, speechless, was gazing at Massimo as though he was a ten-story flaming asteroid, a second away from engulfing him.

Elfred stepped in. “Pinky, it seems that we needn’t go through any formalities, now that Massimo has vaulted over them. He is here to discuss the potential contract between Eckleburg’s and Shakespeare & Company, as I mentioned. We were just on our way to lunch.”

Pinky’s reptile brain had kept him upright, and now his cortex took command. He smiled as best he could to Elfred and then at the Italian asteroid. The asteroid was perhaps six-and-a-half-feet tall, perhaps taller, at least a full eight inches taller than Pinky. His hair a burnished gold. His moustache the same. His shoulders broader than a cliché can bear. His suit, a lustrous, almost glowing grey with—could it be?—the thinnest of pink pinstripes—eschewed the pretense of shoulder pads. The narrow but gigantic gleaming shoes something a count would wear.

A thought that the day would have been better spent at the museum winged through Pinky’s head. But his driverless car plunged on.

“But, but, you can’t be the Italian. You’re blond!”

Volpedo cocked his head to the side and glanced at Elfred, golden eyebrows raised. Then he laughed, a free, open laugh like a flock of birds released to the sky. “Pinky, the blond? Yes, yes, we Italians are blond. We are everything!”

He laughed again, and Pinky reflexively stepped on his hat. “Pinky, my family is Bolognese, many blondes. But we have many pelle scura, the darker skin, in my family too. We are the rainbow!” He loosely waved his hands in the air and smiled the smile of a thousand torches.

*

Who is our character Massimo Volpedo? How to conceive of our "ten-story flaming asteroid" of a man?

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath, clear your mind, banish all stray and stressful thoughts from your awareness. Center yourself and relax your body.

Now, think back to a day. One of those rare, special days that stands out in your life as one of the very finest you've ever experienced. A day when you felt in excellent physical shape and also, enjoyed experiences and shared human connection and love in its most meaningful forms.

Put another way, if we live to be 90 years old, we experience 33,000 days. That one you're thinking of is one of the ten best of them all.

Got the memory in your mind? Channeling the joyous emotions from that point in your life? Well, now you understand how Massimo feels on a bad day. A day when much goes wrong.

For Massimo Volpedo loves life, and the people he encounters, with such an outrageous intensity that his reactions to life's setbacks are not like those of the rest of us. This is for two specific reasons:

(1)   When Massimo encounters flaws in his fellow humans, he seamlessly embraces the fact that we all have flaws. Of course we do, he reasons; it's the most obvious thing in the world, because human flaws are all around us, all the time. We never live a moment without them. But rather than focus on those flaws, Massimo elevates his fellows. Not by lecturing or scolding us. He works his magic simply by being joyous, and leading us to solve life's problems with delight, not in misery.

(2)   When Massimo encounters those problems that come up all the time in our lives--little ones, big ones, their scale doesn't matter to him--he views the problem at hand primarily as a way to engage people in solving that problem together. It's the togetherness, the delight of human connection, that Massimo sees as primary. The problem itself? To him, it's a secondary thing.

What about tragedies, you might ask? What about the ultimate tragedy, when someone dies? We don't get to see that in Shrub, not yet anyway, but rest assured that even then, Massimo's main concern would be providing comfort to the mourning and, as always, in bringing people together in order to work through their grief with human connection; never alone.

When you're having a bad day, remember Massimo's two principles:

Respond to human flaws by elevating all involved, and

Respond to life's problems by engaging human connection. By bringing people together.

 

http://www.swirledshrub.com/

Shrubbery, Episode Eight

Somewhere in all his writings Seth Godin asserted that businesses--and I assume he meant local, bespoke, non-corporate ones--have only two pathways to success:

(1) Delight people, and

(2) Solve their problems. The more interesting the problem, the better.

In our novel, Swirled All the Way to the Shrub, The Shrub is "a splintered bar in Boston," and McNeal is its bartender.

http://www.swirledshrub.com/

In subtle ways, McNeal solves problems for his customers. Everyone who has been a bartender will understand. His main path forward though is in delighting his customers. Here's a bit of banter between McNeal and our hero Pinky. The setup is that Pinky has been drinking too much, even in the mornings. Even at breakfast in The Shrub. On this day, he realizes that he needs focus, and to be energized, not dulled.

(At this early stage of their relationship, Pinky often absent-mindedly mispronounces McNeal's name.)

Here's the bit:

 

Pinky loped into The Shrub at the astonishing hour of eight o’clock in the morning, took up his favorite stool at the bar and waved to McNeal. “Coffee, McArdle. And two eggs over easy. And bacon. There must be bacon.”

McNeal’s brain had stopped at the first word. “Coffee, Mr. DeVroom?”

“Yes. You heard right. Coffee. Fresh. Hot. Black.”

McNeal couldn’t come to grips with it. “But … it’s morning, sir.”

Pinky had to laugh. “Alright, alright. I suppose I owe you an explanation. After all, my usual is brandy and rye. Toast, that is. Today, McSweeney, I need to be in fine fettle. I often do, when it comes right down to it. And I’ve decided that when fettling is called for, so is caffeine. Not alcohol. So coffee and eggs and bacon it is today. Do not fear, though—I’ll have my brandy before five.”

McNeal poured the coffee first, then went off to the kitchen to prepare the food. He came back to find Pinky smelling the remnants of his coffee, a twitching smile on his face. Pinky drained his cup with a final gulp and rattled it on the bar, signifying more.

“You must really like coffee, sir.”

“I do. That’s why I’m willing to drink so much of your water just to get a little of it.”

McNeal swatted the bar with his towel and laughed in turn. But when he went off to make a fresh pot, he added half again as much ground coffee to the urn.

Shrubbery, Episode Seven

Time now to turn from the realm of industrialists and corporate capitalism to the free market's other branch, which doesn't seem to have a name but which I shall call the bespoke branch of capitalism.

This is an interesting question. Is capitalism one big complex entity, or does it, in fact, have two distinct phases, the corporate and the bespoke?

As a dentist and local business owner, the main division line I see is how we behave to our customers and community. What I mean is, if I engaged in unethical behavior similar to the recent Volkswagen emissions scandal, or the recent college entrance cheating scandal, or the recent Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal, or ... well, you get the idea. If I attempted any such selfish skullduggery, my patients, my neighbors, my friends would all run away from my dental practice at Mach 2.

I'm unsure if this hypothesis has ever been tested by economists, but here it is anyway:

Bespoke, localite businesses face greater and more direct pressure from their customers to behave ethically than do large-scale, corporate businesses, and as a result actually do behave more ethically than their corporate counterparts.

And this brings us to McNeal.

In our novel, Swirled All the Way to the Shrub, what The Shrub actually is is a bar. "A splintered bar in Boston," as Tom describes her. Old, venerable and also venerated, a little creaky but a lot comforting to those who know her well. And McNeal is the bartender.

Now, as our novel takes place from 1929 to 1931, which was during Prohibition, you might naturally ask, "Wait--there can't be a bar during Prohibition. A speakeasy, maybe, with a secret knock and a secret handshake and a secret password and ... But a bar? They couldn't run one of those right out in the open!"

But that's not quite the case. During Prohibition the Federal government had at the maximum around 5,000 agents with which they could enforce the Volstead Act. This enforcement included dealing with Canadian whiskey smugglers, rum runners from the Caribbean, countless bootleggers and hidden micro-brewers, wine diversions from "religious use" to other uses, and many more. Plus there were all the restaurants that even then dotted the nation. Layer in the fact that it was the height of the Great Depression and most of these Federal enforcement agents--"prohis"--just wanted a little cash from the restaurant owners and the chance to drink their beer in peace. Thus, a joint such as our Shrub could put up a nice dry facade as the place to enjoy tea and coffee, and grab a sandwich or perhaps a bite of smoked jowl. But that was only a facade, acknowledged and then just winked at. Hidden away behind the bar were all kinds of sour spirits, to be had for ready cash and asking the right way.

So long as The Shrub kept its head down and didn't raise a ruckus, it would probably never face a prohi's fine or the G-man's cask-splitting axe.

So back to McNeal. He does not, in this first book, own The Shrub, though such a role for him feels likely in the sequel. And yet even without the intense pressures of business ownership, McNeal still strives for excellence at all times. We might even view his approach to the work as hyper-excellence, a level of attention to the work rarely achieved by most human beings.

Here he is getting ready for an important event. And there's even more he does in this scene--I've abridged it.

McNeal made one more round—perhaps his eighth—of The Shrub. Under the street-side windows, two long tables of cold cuts, pickles, hearty sliced breads, some delicate little canapés and dainties from a French bistro downtown, small plates, tableware, folded cloth napkins, an immense water jar, cool drops condensing down its sides. All in place.
Criss-crossing through the tables, set for eight, water goblets and wine glasses for all. Rented tablecloths and napkins—not all-get-out silks or satins, but all first-rate. McNeal adjusted the small centerpiece of flowers on two of the tables, and pushed in chairs an inch or two at several. An easy eye wouldn’t have made any adjustments, and none were manifestly needed, but McNeal had never settled for an easy eye.
The ceiling fans, freshly oiled, purred on their lowest setting above. McNeal scanned the ceiling, the walls, the floors, the counters. He nodded to Rochester, who moved to open the door. It was time.

McNeal also quotes to us from his great counselor to a life in bartending, Harry Johnson's Bartender's Guide. Here's an example:

“It is proper, when a person steps up to the bar, for a bartender to set before him a glass of ice-water, and then, in a courteous manner, to find out what he may desire. If mixed drinks should be called for, it is the bartender’s duty to mix and prepare them above the counter, and allow the customers to see the operation; they should be prepared in such a neat, quick, and scientific way as to draw attention. It is also the bartender’s duty to see that everything used with the drinks is perfectly clean, and the glasses are bright and polished.”

“The first rule to be observed by any man acting as bartender is to treat all customers with the utmost respect. No one should make distinctions between patrons on account of their appearance. As long as they behave like gentlemen, they should be treated as such. Therefore, all customers, whether rich or poor, should be served alike, not only in the same respectful manner, but with the same quality of goods; not keeping a special bottle for rich people, and an inferior grade for poorer persons, unless you have one before you who prefers quantity to quality.”

In my first novel, The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks, Pilot Officer (later Wing Commander) Roger Finlayson makes this assertion from time to time:

“The music's played by a madman. But we have to dance anyway.”

In the Shrub universe, it is McNeal who most understands this striking assertion. And lives it, too.

In fact, he takes it even further than Finlayson did. For McNeal, it's not enough to "dance anyway."

Faced, as we all are, with an absurd and at times seemingly actively malevolent universe, McNeal's straightforward response is to always dance his best.

Shrubbery, Episode Six

One more post on industrialism and then we shall leave this oft-times dark subject and move into the light. And the lighter side of Swirled All the Way to the Shrub, this engaging and thought-provoking novel that Tom Bentley and I co-authored.

What is an Externality, and why should we care to learn about them?

From this concise and excellent website:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/externality.asp

"What Is an Externality?

An externality is an economic term referring to a cost or benefit incurred or received by a third party who has no control over how that cost or benefit was created.

An externality can be both positive or negative, and can stem from either the production or consumption of a good or service. The costs and benefits can be both private—to an individual or an organization—or social, meaning it can affect society as a whole.

[Important: An externality may not have an effect on the entity that causes it.]

Pollution emitted by a factory that muddies the surrounding environment and affects the health of nearby residents is a negative externality. The effect of a well-educated labor force on the productivity of a company is an example of a positive externality."

Two principal industrial externalities impact our characters in Shrub. The first is the rise of leaded gasoline, a profound and totally unnecessary poisoning of our biosphere on a massive scale by General Motors, Standard Oil and Dupont.

Bill Kovarik PhD explains best:

http://www.ethyl.environmentalhistory.org/?page_id=60

The second is the utterly fascinating machinations of United Fruit Company, the giant importer of bananas which operated largely outside the reach of U.S. regulatory bodies, in Central and South America.

Peter Chapman's Bananas delves into how UFCo was a law unto itself in many lands:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Kurtz-Phelan-t.html

We employ a light touch in our novel with these powerful forces, though. They drive and impact and motivate our principals, but ours is a novel about a human story, not a business tome.

Our lively character Unctual Natchez is actually a banana messenger for United Fruit. 

Banana Messengers were agents who rode the rails on the unit trains of refrigerated banana cars (“reefers,” in railroad parlance). Banana messengers took care of every aspect of the transport of this perishable fruit. They saw to it that the reefers were iced correctly. Temperature was a classic Goldilocks Problem: not so warm that the fruit ripened early, but not so cold that it froze. They protected their bananas from theft. And they worked with the sales agents to ensure that each reefer arrived at its proper point of sale on time.

Here are two banana messenger passes from those days:

The itinerant, unfettered lifestyle of a banana messenger suited our character Unctual Natchez perfectly.

If you're interested in a deep exploration through fiction of negative externalities, then my first novel is for you.

In some ways, The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks is a 240,000-word depiction of an existential battle between one business that is concerned with minimizing its negative externalities, and another business that strives to maximize theirs in the interest of minimizing expenses and maximizing profits, regardless of the societal costs incurred.

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Wore-Mismatched-Socks/dp/0991301757/ref=sr_1_1?crid=27HKNKY853LYK&keywords=the+man+who+wore+mismatched+socks&qid=1554844368&s=gateway&sprefix=the+man+who+wore+mis%2Caps%2C126&sr=8-1

Next up: lighter fare, as we turn from the corporate wing of capitalism to the localite, bespoke one.

 

Shrubbery, Episode Five

In recent posts, we have been exploring the nature of industrialists. Our novel, Swirled All the Way to the Shrub, wrestles with the complex interplay between industrialism and the human beings who live in the world it shapes.

Industrialist: "A person who owns or is involved in the management of an industrial enterprise," which essentially means designing, producing, selling and delivering products and services at scale.

Most industrialists share a common set of characteristics. Let us consider three of them.

 

(1) Industrialists are often willing to expend or use up human beings in the process of making products and services at scale.

Specific examples include:

*The tremendous death rate of slaves of African origin in the production of sugar in the Caribbean from the 1600s though the 1800s.

*The 146 dead in the 1911 New York City Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in which textile workers were locked into their factory during their shifts.

*The 1,134 dead and 2,500+ injured in the 2013 Savar Building Collapse in Bangladesh. (It is worth noting that this incident was essentially the same crime against humanity as Triangle Shirtwaist, but 102 years on into what should be our human culture progressing, and with an order of magnitude more dead.)

*The Radium Girls, who were hundreds of female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning and cancer from painting watch dials with self-luminous radium paint. The industrialists who ran the U.S. Radium Corporation tried, and ultimately failed, to duck responsibility by claiming that the poisoned young women had contracted syphilis--pretty much the worst insult that could be hurled at a single young woman in an age of more rigid social mores than ours--and in an age before the invention of antibiotics. A hundred years ago, syphilis was always fatal as well as socially mortifying.

*In the days before the Westinghouse air brake linked all the cars on a train into one coordinated braking system, each car had a mechanical brake wheel at one end at roof level. The role of a railroad brakeman was to run from car to car and set these hand-cranked brakes, as fast as possible when the engineer called for a stop. Hard data on brakeman injuries and fatalities for the 1800s are hard to come by, but a notion of the danger involved in this job will be gained by this fact:
Between 1890 and 1917, there were 230,000 on-the-job deaths of railroad employees of all types in the United States.

And then we have the lead industry workers and the miners and the steelworkers and so many more ... the list of industries that did not strive to care for and protect their human workers goes on seemingly without end.

We thus come to understand from the hard historical data that industrialists are often willing to expend or use up human resources--human beings--in the process of making products and services at scale.

 

(2) Industrialists see the world in terms of hierarchies.

A United Fruit manager serving in Honduras in, say, 1923 ranked higher in the hierarchy of the company than did an indigenous Honduran who labored in the fields. In the 1960s, a middle manager at Westinghouse or GM ranked higher than a worker on the factory floor, but lower than the senior level management, who themselves ranked lower than the Board members or the President of the company. In my profession of dentistry, the current corporate sector of dentistry in the U.S. views a dentist as a cog in a large-scale profit making enterprise, and a hygienist as a somewhat lesser cog, and a dental assistant as a yet lesser cog, and so on.

Further, and of critical importance, industrialists generally view the human beings who do the work as existing in rigidly fixed categories. In other words, it never occurs to an industrialist that a dental assistant might become a dentist, or that a frame welder at General Motors might rise to become Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations, General Motors Company.

If such a transformation within a hierarchy happens, an industrialist is usually not particularly surprised, but they never anticipate or encourage such transformations.

Hierarchies are actually necessary to the worldview of industrialists. If they viewed human potential through the lens of "all men are created equal," it would upend their entire structure of how to create products and services at scale.

If everyone mattered the same, industrialists couldn't use people up and discard them.

 

(3) Industrialists treat human beings as interchangeable, temporary and disposable.

What this means is, first, that anyone is as good as anyone else for the job, so long as they can meet the minimum requirements. So long as they can read the manual, keep their head down and follow the rules.

And second, that if human beings fail to perform to spec, or get damaged and used up in the work, they can readily be replaced with someone else.

Dr. Alice Hamilton writes about a lead worker:

"It sometimes seemed to me that industry was exploiting the finest and best in these men—their love of their children, their sense of family responsibility. I think of an enameler of bathtubs whom I traced to his squalid little cottage. He was a young Slav who used to be so strong he could run up the hill on which his cottage stood and spend all the evening digging in his garden. Now, he told me, he climbed up like an old man and sank exhausted in a chair, he was so weary, and if he tried to hoe or rake he had to give it up. His digestion had failed, he had a foul mouth, he couldn’t eat, he had lost much weight. He had had many attacks of colic and the doctor told him if he did not quit he would soon be a wreck. “Why did you keep on,” I asked, “when you knew the lead was getting you?” “Well, there were the payments on the house,” he said, “and the two kids.” The house was a bare, ugly, frame shack, the children were little, underfed things, badly in need of a handkerchief, but for them a man had sacrificed his health and his joy in life. When employers tell me they prefer married men, and encourage their men to have homes of their own, because it makes them so much steadier, I wonder if they have any idea of all that that implies."

No good anymore? Dispose of them, and go get new ones.

 

There is nuance here, though, and complex trade-offs to be made. I don't know about you, but I would not want to live in the world of a century ago. No antibiotics, no medical diagnostic tests, no automatic washing machines, no consumer electric refrigerators, no mass media. Iron hair straighteners that women heated over an open fire. Primitive toilet paper, barbaric dental care and no proper shampoo ... Industrialists have, in fact, helped shape our modern world and it is a lot safer and more comfortable than the world of the past.

Industrialists have, if we are honest with ourselves, given us great gifts.

The essential question is: At what human and environmental cost? And could many of those costs have been mitigated or prevented entirely?

In our next episode we will examine the economic concept of Externalities. Meantime, if interested in further reading on some of the worst negative effects of the activities of industrialists in history, please have a look at our Historical References on the industrialists at General Motors and United Fruit. These are the two forces of industrialism that we chose to apply pressure on our characters in Shrub. And let us tell you ... the rise of leaded gasoline and the offshore machinations of United Fruit were superb examples to choose.

http://www.swirledshrub.com/dr-alice-hamilton-a-remarkable-american-life/

http://www.swirledshrub.com/united-fruit/

 

 

Shrubbery, Episode Four

The story arc and the lives of our characters in Swirled All the Way to the Shrub are forcefully impacted by industrialists. Indirectly--we don't (yet) actually meet any bona fide robber barons in the work. Their circle of influence effects everyone, though.

Industrialists often accumulate great wealth in the course of creating products and services at scale. In most cases, once wealth accumulation becomes significant for an individual or family, a curious thing happens.

They can't stop.

Not only do industrialists generally want More, capital 'M;' once they have it, they want more More and so on in an upwards spiral that knows no ceiling.

Probably this has to do with our evolutionary past, in which our ancestors never knew if they'd eat tomorrow or not. In a world of scarcity, it makes sense to grab hold of as much food, water, resources or money as possible once the opportunity presents itself.

With every great accumulation of wealth is a funnel-shaped flow of resources in one direction, and inevitably as a consequence, resources are diverted away from somewhere, and someone, else. Or: the many tend to pay a price when the few accumulate great wealth. One of the classic Gilded Age cartoons offers insight:

Here are two brief examples of the effects the activities of industrialists can have on regular people. The first is a quote from Dr. Alice Hamilton's memoir, Exploring the Dangerous Trades:

"April, 1911. Today I went over to the West Penn Hospital to look through the records. It is an indescribably dingy place, smoke-begrimed and ugly. One of the great Carnegie Steel Mills is just below it and as I sat by the window I could watch the ambulances crawl up the hill to the accident entrance with a new victim inside. Three came while I was there. So many cases are sent from the mills that evidently the clerk got tired writing the name of the Company and had a rubber stamp made which, appropriately enough, he uses with red ink. All down the page came these red blotches, just like drops of blood. Andrew Carnegie himself is here today, making a speech out at the Institute. I went there Saturday afternoon and I saw the John Alexander murals of the steel mills, lovely pictures of clean, athletic youths, engaged in healthy sport against a background of Spotless Town. I suppose he was never allowed to look at the real thing. Did you know that the steel men still work twelve hours a day and seven days in the week? And that one of the fiercest defenders of the system is the minister of the most important Presbyterian church? It makes me ashamed to be a Presbyterian. There are queer contrasts in life, aren’t there? Sunday evening I was invited to the H——’s for supper. They are in steel and very wealthy, and I was all hot inside over the luxury of the house and the complacence of Mrs. H. And then their daughter came in. She has just returned from a year at school in Italy and she is the most exquisite young thing I have ever seen, beautiful, gentle, cultivated, modest. She is the product of this ill-gotten wealth; I suppose she couldn’t be so exquisite had she not had it."

This second excerpt is from our story. While it's fiction, we do capture accurately the medical effects of lead poisoning on a human being. Lead toxicity was Dr. Hamilton's particular specialty in the field of Industrial Hygiene.

The scene is in The Shrub. Our man Pinky is interviewing Horacek, a bathtub enameler who suffers from severe lead poisoning at this point.

Horacek was emaciated—no fat, no muscle. The cloth of his shirt, pants and coat was marred with soot and the occasional fleck of dried mud, yet oddly, his shoes were freshly shined. Those shoes had deep scuffs, but old Horacek had taken great pains to mask them.

“Hungry?”

The man brushed back wisps of hair from his face. His hair—what remained of it—was so gossamer thin that it didn’t seem able to land anywhere. The absurd phrase dirigible hair rose unbidden into Pinky’s consciousness; he found it unnecessarily funny. Horacek looked down at his concave stomach, then back up at Pinky. As he rotated his head up and down Pinky watched the gray skin wrinkle and un-wrinkle. It was ugly, but it was compelling too.

“I could try to eat.”

What an odd way to put it. Very well then. “McNeal!”

Pinky had skipped breakfast and its cost; he hadn’t eaten since the night before. He ordered a Reuben and had to make do when half the ingredients of his second favorite sandwich weren’t available. Heaps of blessings on McNeal, though—the man always did his best. If corned beef wasn’t in the house, some other species of beef would be. If there was no Russian dressing to be found, well then dang it, McNeal would scrounge up French or some other European dressing-nationality. Like his idol Harry Johnson, the man believed “It is of the utmost importance to see that everything you furnish is properly served, and is clean and fit to eat.” 

“Mr. Horacek?”

“Yes?”

“What do you want to eat?”

McNeal stood there, silent and still, waiting. Horacek stared into the middle distance. Strands of dirigible-hair sailed aloft.

“I’m not very hungry.”

Not very hungry? Mercy. The man was practically a skeleton.

“Perhaps a banana. Yes, I’ll have a banana. No corn! Corn is hard on the digestion, you know. Corn is a tough one, she is.”

Pinky leaned back, let out a long breath. McNeal made no outward sign of reaction to the man’s odd menu choice.

“Very well, sir. A banana, hold the corn. And to drink, sir?”

“Yes, Horacek, old fella. Would you like something to drink? It’s no problem here, you’re among friends, if you know what I mean. Beer? Whisky? Gin, perhaps, or maybe you’ll go for brandy, like I do? On the rare occasions when I have a nip, that is.”

McNeal’s eyebrows flew up at that. Horacek’s hunkered down. “Oh, no, sirs, no spirits for me. The digestion, you see. It’s all bad for the digestion.”

“Perhaps some tea then, sir? Or water?” Laws! How was McNeal so damned unflappable!

“Water. Just water.”

“Very well, sir.”

When McNeal headed for the bar, Pinky tried to make conversation. “Funny about you ordering that banana! You know, my friend Unctual …”

But then he stopped. This line of thought looked likely to go nowhere. Down to business, then. Pinky drew his pencil, squared his small sheaf of paper and got ready to take notes.
“So. Let’s start our interview. Age?”

Eyes gradually traversed back to questioner. “Thirty-one.”

“Thirty … what?”

For the first time, the man’s eyes opened fully. “I know. I look a lot older, don’t I?”

I thought you were sixty-five, thought Pinky. No point in disclosing a precise number to the poor guy, though.

“Well, I thought you were a little older, that’s all.”

“It’s the lead. They say it ain’t, but we all know it is.”

“Oh? How?”

The man smiled—a ghastly affair for several reasons. For one, it looked forced, artificial—painful, even. But for another, this was the first time Pinky had ever seen a “lead line.” Dr. Hamilton had told him to look out for these. She had informed him that a lead line was a deposit of black lead sulfide in the cells of the mouth, usually most obvious on the gums along the margin of the front teeth.

Gawd, it was awful to gaze upon. Black, instead of pink! Dog gums, is what it looked like.

 

Horacek was not an isolated case. The industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the fields of mining, steel, lead industries, radium, textiles and all the other "Dangerous Trades" were quite ok with using up human material in the work, tossing spent workers aside and then hiring new ones.Untold millions of human beings were harmed by largely preventable side effects of industrial processes. We will examine some specific examples in a later post.

Oh, and we haven't even gotten to United Fruit yet. Rather than duplicate my efforts, I'll link to the Shrub website here:

http://http://www.swirledshrub.com/united-fruit//united-fruit/

Next Episode: a few characteristics of the industrialist, examined.

 

Shrubbery, Episode Three

Here, our enigmatic character the Gantseh Macher opens up old wounds in Unctual Natchez, our internally troubled but externally chipper friend of Pinky DeVroom's:

***

But the Gantseh Macher was unperturbed. “You, as your surname suggests, sir, are of Natchez Indian ancestry, along with your French background.”

It was Unctual’s turn to flush red in the face. That was an accurate description of his ancestry, and it was a tortured one. The French had almost wiped the Natchez out of existence, after an initial period of trade and good relations. So much for half his ancestors enjoying “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

***

Unctual is half French Hugenot and half Natchez. His own personal ancestry is like a bloody civil war confined to the realm of a family. And so are the ancestries of countless other American families.

Your family, if your ancestors have been here for awhile.

http://www.swirledshrub.com/

Shrubbery, Episode Two

In our previous post, we discovered an extraordinary and meaningful quote on equality from Dr. Alice Hamilton. Her words form an integral part of the fabric of our novel, Swirled All the Way to the Shrub.

Now, let's have a look at another quote from a great American; a quote that gets to the heart of fairness in our culture. This one, too, serves a role in our story arc.

Here, our character the Gantseh Macher reads a letter that President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1908. Gantseh Macher is a Yiddish phrase that translates not so much as "the boss" or "the big cheese" but moreso "the oiler of wheels," "the one who makes things happen." Let's let this always-dapper gentleman bring the mighty TR's words back into the light:

***

The Gantseh Macher broke into his one-lipped smile. He then reached into his coat pocket with the most graceful and fluid of motions and drew out a piece of crisp, clean paper. Unfolding it, he said, “This is a copy of a letter that President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1908.”

He cleared his throat. “It reads like this:
‘You must keep reasonably good-natured; but above all things you must not lose heart; and you must battle on valiantly, no matter what the biggest business men may say, no matter what the mob may say, no matter what may be said by that element which chooses to regard itself as socially the highest element. You are in a fight for plain decency, for the plain democracy of the plain people who believe in honesty and in fair dealing between man and man. Do not get disheartened; and keep up the fight.’

***

President Roosevelt gave a name to his philosophy of fair play in American life: the Square Deal.

And his Square Deal circles right back around to that key phrase from our Declaration of Independence, to which we need to pay heed if we are to move forward and improve this culture we all must live in.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

http://www.swirledshrub.com/

Shrubbery, Episode One

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Thus begins the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence.

Has our great nation upheld this ideal, though? The answer, we must admit to ourselves if we are honest, is no. As a culture, we have violated this most sacred principle time and time again. How?Women prohibited from voting. The enslavement of Africans. Blocking the right of many classes of people to vote, in all periods of our history. Discrimination based on race, religion, ethnic background, sexual orientation, and a thousand other useless artificial labels by which we arbitrarily categorize each other. Perhaps worst of all--the genocide waged against the indigenous peoples who were here first, but did not match the technology of the early settlers.

Well.

My friend Tom Bentley and I have co-authored a novel, Swirled All the Way to the Shrub. Here is the website we created in support of the work:

http://www.swirledshrub.com/

Shrub is available on Amazon in eBook and print versions, and it's off Amazon as well.

Ah, but what's it about, you ask? Here you go:

The Roaring Twenties were bellowing along—until they weren’t. In a splintered bar in Boston, Pinky deVroom, newspaperman, amateur cynic and would-be-novelist, clutches his sour Prohibition brandy and watches his world get sucked down into the vortex. Hope comes in the form of an astute, comely literary agent named Elfred. But hope can be its own form of hell. Watch game Pinky twist, squirm and waffle while the world wobbles.

Shrub is about Pinky, and yet also about very much more. As Shrub unfolds, it grapples with these issues of equality and inequality, of how the word "inalienable" came to be applied to only a select few.

We didn't actually set out to wrestle with these themes; it just happened as we created our world and began to wend our way through it.

In this first blog post on Shrub, let's have a look at Dr. Alice Hamilton's insights on equality.

In these troubled times, when the industrialists and politicians who run things are striving harder than ever to bleed the common man dry, we found breathtaking inspiration in making (with the utmost respect) Dr. Alice Hamilton one of our characters.

Dr. Hamilton was a physician and one of the finest toxicologists and industrial medicine experts of her time. She was also a social reformer--a lifelong part of the Settlement House movement and an associate of Jane Addams.

Dr. Hamilton had this to say about equality in America:

“We know that ability and character are not a matter of class, and that the difference comes from the unfair handicaps to which the children of the poor are subject, and we would remedy matters by working for equality of opportunity for all children, instead of trying to encourage the propagation of one class and not of the other.”