Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

Brian arrived on the nose at eight-thirty, and it was a good thing, too, since by that time I had been standing motionlessly by the door for twenty-two minutes, mostly as an anti-wrinkle maneuver. He and I were dressed almost identically except he wore a tie. Blue up top, brown down below, the only difference in our clothes being in designer eccentricities. My white shirt had stitching around the collar; his didn’t. My coat was polyester, his was wool, though they both had the same sheen.

“No tie?” he asked.

“Should I?” I answered.

“I think so,” he said.

I went to my closet and retrieved my one tie. A tie that was so hideous, so old, so wide, so unmatchable, so thick, so stained, that Brian made me wear his. “Come on, buddy,” he said, and we started off. “Got your essay?” he asked. “Yes, and an extra set from Kinko’s, just in case.” I had folded my speech lengthwise and put it in my breast pocket. This caused a tiny corner of the white paper to peek out from my lapel, which I nervously tucked back in every three minutes for the rest of the day.

Brian had idled the car in the driveway, making it easy for me to enter as I didn’t have to step over a curb. I hung my coat on a hanger and put it on a hook in the backseat. He made me co-pilot, handing me the directions and saying, “We’ll take the 10 to the 5 to the Disneyland turnoff then left on Orangewood. We’ll save some time because then we’ll be headed away from Disneyland and out of traffic.” He backed out of the driveway, telling me to put on my seat belt, but I really couldn’t. It would have cut across my chest and left a wide imprint across my starched white shirt. We turned the corner onto Seventh and I stiffened my legs and pressed them against the floorboard, raising my rear end into the air. This kept me in a prone position with my shoulders being the only part of me touching the car seat. I wasn’t sure whether I did this to prevent wrinkles or to prevent myself from slipping into a coma. The answer came later when my legs fatigued and I slowly lowered myself down to a sitting position and nothing happened: I did not blow up, faint, or die. But I remained intensely aware that my khaki pants were soon going to be streaked with hard creases across my fly front.

We were now on the freeway and I had focused the air conditioning vent on my pants, thinking it might serve as a steamer. Finally I said to Brian, “would you mind if I lowered my pants a little?”

“Huh?” he said. “If I could lower my pants a little, I don’t think they’ll get so wrinkled.”

“Sure,” he said, leaving me wondering if nothing disturbed Brian, ever.

I unbuckled my belt and lowered my trousers to my thighs. I skooched down in my seat so my pant legs ballooned out to keep them from wrinkling, too. I aimed the air vent at my shirt, which bellowed like a sail, preventing even more wrinkling. Satisfied, I then turned to Brian and said, “I really appreciate you taking me.”

Considering he was driving, Brian looked at me a dangerously long time, but absolutely nothing registered on his face. Even when he was pummeling Mussolini, his face had never changed from its Mount Rushmore glare.

We did have a few laughs as we wheeled down the Santa Ana Freeway. Small industrial neighborhoods lined the access roads and Brian pointed out a factory sign that innocently read, A SCREW FOR EVERY PURPOSE. He found this hilarious, and because he did, I did. As we neared Disneyland, traffic thickened and Brian said don’t worry, because right up here we go the other way. Every other car on the road was an SUV, and Brian’s green Lincoln rode so low that we were like the Merrimac in a sea of ocean liners.

Brian was right. Everyone was turning west toward Disneyland when we were turning east, which meant we avoided a horrendous wait at the freeway exit. We ended up on a wide-open four-lane street that headed toward a few low hills, while behind us soared the Matterhorn. I consulted the directions and soon we were entering what I would describe as a wealthy parking lot. There were wide lanes for access and every third space was separated from the next by grass-filled islands. Trees lined the rows making it all look like an automotive allée . In the distance on a hill, stood-or sat- Freedom College, announced by a gilt sign tastefully engraved in a large plank of oak. The bottom line of the sign read, “PRIVATELY FUNDED.”

At one end of the parking lot was an open tent with a banner promoting Tepperton’s Pies and something about Freedom Day. There were twenty or so people milling around; there were tables where students were signing people in, and also several official-looking ladies and gentlemen in blazers, including my contact with Tepperton, Gunther Frisk. Gunther was decked out in a tartan suit, the plaid just subtle enough to keep him from looking absurd. His body was so incongruous with itself that it looked like he had been made by three separate gods, each with a different blueprint for humanity. “That must be where we’re supposed to go,” said Brian, and he turned off the engine. I laid my shirt over my underwear as flatly as possible, and then gingerly pulled up my pants and closed them over my shirttail. I raised to my prone position, opened the car door, and angled my legs onto the asphalt with as little bend as possible. I took my coat off the hanger and slipped it over my shoulders, tucking my protruding notes back in my coat pocket. I surveyed myself and was deeply pleased that very little wrinkle damage had been done to my fly front. In fact, I looked nearly as crisp as I had when I exited my front door in Santa Monica.

Gunther Frisk spotted us and shot out of the crowd as though he were launched. “Yoo-hoo… here, here!” he shouted, as he flailed and waved. We made our way toward the tent, but the parking lot had an uphill trend that made me worry about sweating into my cotton shirt, so I slowed to a rhino pace, which forced Brian, who was walking at a normal speed, to retard his tempo so I could catch up. After Brian introduced himself as my manager, Gunther directed us into the tent, where we were handed a packet of welcoming materials. We had our pictures snapped and two minutes later were given laminated photo IDs threaded through cords that were to hang from our necks like a referee’s whistle. In one corner of the tent stood a clump of misfits, the other winners. Sue Dowd, with a body like the Capitol dome-a small head with a rotunda underneath; Kevin Chen, an Asian with an Afro; and Danny Pepelow, a kind of goon. And me. The only one missing was the recently evaporated Lenny Burns.

We were introduced all around, and honestly, it was clear I was the normal one. But as motley as we were, I suspected there was a unifying thread that ran through us all. It was a by-product of the instinct that made each one of us pick up the Tepperton’s entry form and sit home alone in our rooms writing our essays. The quality was decency. But it had not really been earned. It was a trait that nebbishes acquire by default because of our inability to act upon the world with a force greater than a nudge. I stood there that day as a winner but feeling like a loser because of the company I kept. We weren’t the elite of anything, we weren’t the handsome ones with self-portraits hanging over their fireplaces or the swish moderns who were out speaking slang at a posh hotel bar. We were all lonely hearts who deemed that writing our essays might help us get a little attention. We were the winners of the Tepperton’s Pies essay contest, and I, at least for today, was their king.

This sinking feeling did not last. I reminded myself that my entry into the contest had been a lark and that it had really been done to extend my Rite Aid visit by a few extra Zandy-filled minutes, though I guessed that my competitors had taken their efforts seriously. I thought of them slunk over their writing pads with their pencils gripped like javelins and their blue tongues sticking out in brain-squeezing concentration. The spell was also broken by Gunther Frisk’s triple handclap and cry of “All right, people.” It was time, he said, to start the Freedom Walk. He tried to gather us into a little regiment, but there were enough docents and officials trailing us to make the group seem a bit ragtag. We trudged up a concrete pathway. I needed to walk slowly enough as to not break a sweat, so I cleverly started at the front of the group, hoping that by the end of the march I wouldn’t be too far behind. The sun beat down on me and I worried about a sunburn singeing one cheek, or the heat causing a layer of oily skin that would make my forehead shine under the spotlight like a lard-smeared cookie pan.