Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“His parents stopped going in the summer, or went for only a couple of weeks every third or fourth year. The building had stopped entirely. Now, in its hodgepodge of composition roofs and variously synthetic fronts — imitation brick, tile, aluminum siding — it looked like a tub of mixed fonts waiting to be melted down. It was finished. It was awful. High, dangerous grasses grew in the infield, the outfield was a no man’s land, the river too low to swim in, the once presentable Ramapo Mountains behind them gone bald from too much blasting in the quarry. The bungalows, now houses of a sort, were locked into a permanent shabbiness which no paint or extravagance of metal awning could disguise.”

“Meanwhile,” he would write later in his preliminary notes, “in the early Sixties, a word went out: CONDOMINIUM.

“At first one thought it was a metal alloy, or perhaps a new element. Maybe it was used to fashion industrial diamonds. There were those who thought it had to do with big business, international stuff — combines, cartels. Others thought it was a sort of prophylactic. It was strange that the very people who would later become most intimate with the term should at first have had so vague a notion of what it meant. Only after doctors tell him does the patient know the name of his disease. Condominium. (Kon´-d -min´-ē- m.)

“Perhaps it strikes you as strange that these should suddenly have become so popular. After all, the concept is not entirely new; there had been cooperatives for years. But a closer investigation reveals it’s not that mysterious. Myth is more persistent than staph. Accuse others of what you’re guilty of yourself and go scot-free. The Jews, say the gentiles, are too clannish; they stick together. Yet the cooperative was a gentile device, an arrangement whereby individuals owned their own apartments but could not sell them unless they had permission from the other owners. There were few Jews in cooperatives. He did not know any. Participation in a co-op was often restricted and the constituency of a building monolithic. The condominium, on the other hand, simply grants each owner a recordable deed, enabling him to sell, mortgage or otherwise dispose of his property in any way he sees fit, independent of the will and advices of the other owners in the building. It is this last fact which makes all the difference, driving home the last implication of ownership, giving dominion ( con -domini- um) over possession, reserving to the possessor the ultimate rights of belonging, extravagantly excluding all other men’s say-so, finessing all putative ownership’s tithe and obligation and easements, both Platonic and legal, making it unique, total, proprietorship in depth and in fact.

“So Klein and Charney — who weren’t Jewish — lived again. (The two old men, their last bungalows sold, died in the same summer within a month and a half of each other in 1953.) It was an age of developers, fast talkers who had the ear of bankers, insurance companies, financiers, boards of directors — all those mysterious resources where the money was, all those who sat in judgment of the feasible, who, like odds-makers, actuaries of the probable, made the determinations and fine distinctions, running up the flagpoles of the possible this probability and that likelihood, weighing needs and tastes and trends and fixing priority like hoods a horse race. Solomons of the daily life who, surer than legislators or artists, give its look to whatever age they live in wherever they happen to live it. This was the ear the developers had, this the power they had managed to tap.

“There were trial runs, pilot projects. Condominiums went up in Florida and Arizona, existing side by side with the retirement communities, the Sun Cities like reservations for a dying species in nature, the high-rises rising high in the yeasty sun, cities of the plain, sketching skylines where none existed before, the face of nature instantly changed by fiat and ukase — not like Oakland, New Jersey, where it had taken years — here a lake put in and stocked as you’d lay a golf course, there a series of canals and inlets like the interesting underedge of a key. Marinas constructed for people who got seasick and golf courses for duffers who didn’t know doglegs from birdies (and the courses actually fixed, shaving a dozen strokes off the game of even the lousiest player, gravity improving the lie, the water holes and sand traps more optical illusion than obstacle, the customer is always right), ‘country clubs,’ airstrips for the charter flights on converted bombers that bussed potential investors down from Chicago, Cleveland, New York and St. Louis, shopping centers, medical centers, swimming pools and even, in those deserts, gardens.

“It was Oakland, N.J., all over again, but an Oakland blessed by money this time, an Oakland of surfeit, manifesting an unseen but individual will, an individual yet collective style so that the final result approached, in appearance at least, American fiefs and kingdoms, an impression underscored by the pennants on staffs which outlined the approaches to these places and which, along with the flags of the states (one for each state represented in the ownership), waved a sort of visible fanfare, a cracking clothy panoply, suggested actual nationhood, a city-state perhaps, like ancient Florence or old Siena. And the private police too, the security guards in sentry boxes and shelters like little tollbooths along the perimeters and outposts who if they did not actually salute at least smiled a sort of obeisance to every potential buyer and waved him through as if he carried the privileges and immunities of a funeral procession or official cortege.” (“Yes,” he would write excitedly, “ Federal! National ! Isle this, Cape that, Lake the other, topography built into identity even if topography, a product of blast and bulldozing, was collateral with the development itself. Ha!”)

Then a few days later he would write: “But the developers were wrong; they’d missed their marks, people who had even less interest in the spurious trappings of nationhood than they had in fishing the stocked man-made lakes or kidding themselves on the tampered greens which bore as much relation to real golf as the ringing bells and falling tin soldiers of a shooting gallery to real warfare. The dream house stood vacant, the planned community went unattended. Even the sun went unattended, the customers seeking shade, air conditioning, the great indoors. You rejected nationhood for neighborhood!

“So it was no surprise to him — who had seen the river wither, the skating rink turn in upon itself, the handball courts crumble and the base paths choke with weeds; who had watched the dissolution of all the communal apparatus, the Junglegym given back to the jungle and even the sidewalks sink — that the attractive nuisances of play were ignored, used only by the occasional grandchild or prospective customer a salesman took fishing. They weren’t wanted. What was wanted was the basic living space: the bath and a half, two-bedroom, Pullman kitchen, living-dining room area where you could put forty years of furniture. Oh, yes, oh yes, indeedy, and perhaps a California or Florida room where the color TV could go, and certainly an outside balcony for the potted plants. But primarily the space, the apartment itself.

“A place to live, to be!”

He was thirty-seven. Single. A famous heart patient. A schoolboy.

And he could answer certain hypothetical questions one often hears about but are rarely put. He could tell you without hesitation — and give reasons — which ten books he would take with him to a desert island. And which ten people could come with him. He could tell you, breaking it down to the penny, how he would dispose of $1,000,000,000 in twenty-four hours. He knew precisely the dozen persons, living or dead, he would most like to meet, and could discourse on what historical era he would prefer to have lived in. Not only that; he could cite the great dead man he would be willing to change places with and the living man or woman he would be if he could be one person other than himself. He knew what age he would be if he had the power to alter his real age. Also he could tell you creditably whether or not he would do it all over again if he could. (He wouldn’t.) He could name his favorite American city and his favorite foreign country. He was a whiz on all the desert isle stuff: not only which ten books or companions but which three films, what single food, which five inventions. If everything in the world had to be just one color, he knew which he’d choose. Finally, he could tell you what his three wishes would be if a powerful magician granted them to him.