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Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

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In a recent interview with Steve Martin on NPRs Fresh Air, host Terri Gross asked her guest: Do you remember the point in your career, when people started to realize that you are smart? The host was referring, of course, to Martins zany comedic roles that qualify him as a loveable nut. After all, it is tough to equate King Tut from Saturday Night Live, as an author of fairly serious repute. Martin, in reality, is an immensely talented writer; his Shouts and Murmurs and other brief pieces in the New Yorker were enjoyable and set his writing reputation even before his first novella, Shopgirl was released. His latest, another slim volume, The Pleasure of my Company, emphasizes Martins status as a promising and talented writer. Martins protagonist is a thirty-something single guy, Daniel Pecan Cambridge, whose life is constrained by his obsessive-compulsive behavior. Daniel informs us that his middle name originates from the pecan plantation his granny owns in Southern Texas, but we realize it is a fitting name for a nut. Daniel is a cute one though, even despite his many quirks. His biggest obstacle, one that prevents him from venturing out on long walks anywhere, is his fear of curbs. To avoid them, he searches for opposing scooped out driveways in his California town, and draws mental maps that will take him successfully to his favorite hideout-the local Rite Aid. The Rite Aid with its clean lines and atmosphere is like heaven to Daniel and he never tires of walking the aisles, checking out supplies and the cute pharmacist, Zandy. The Rite Aid is splendidly antiseptic, explains Daniel, Ill bet the floors are hosed down every night with isopropyl alcohol. The Rite Aid is the axle around which my squeaky world turns, and I find myself there two or three days a week seeking out the rare household item such as cheesecloth. Among Daniels other obsessions are ensuring that the total wattage of all the bulbs in a house equal 1125 and periodically having to touch all four corners of copiers at the local Kinkos. No wonder then that Daniel finds his love life a bit constrained. He keeps himself happy by eyeing Elizabeth, the real-estate agent who often works across the street, by mixing drinks for his upstairs neighbor, Phillipa, and with his weekly visits by his caseworker, Clarissa. Of course, there is Zandy at Rite Aid. All along, Daniel supports himself on generous gift checks sent him by his grandmother in Texas. Daniel is anything but an average guy but amazingly he wins the Average American contest sponsored by a frozen pie company. Daniel is such pleasant company, because for the most part, his outlook on life is always sunny and bright. For a brief moment, when he meets the other finalists of the essay competition, he is sad. We werent the elite of anything, he notes, we werent 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. However, this sinking feeling is only temporary and Daniel reminds himself that he only wrote the essay at the Rite Aid to have a few extra Zandy-filled minutes. It is hard not to make comparisons between Daniel and the autistic protagonist Christopher of Mark Haddons The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Like Christopher, Daniel has some curious insights about the world around him and these casual observations woven into the text make for delightful reading. Referring to his caseworker, Clarissa, Daniel observes: Shes probably reporting on me to a professor or writing about me in a journal. I like to think of her scrawling my name in pencil at the end of our sessions-I mean visits-but really, Im probably a keyboard macro by now. She types D and hits control/spacebar and Daniel Pecan Cambridge appears. When she looks at me in the face on Tuesdays and Fridays she probably thinks of me not as Daniel Pecan Cambridge but as D-control/spacebar. Towards the end of The Pleasure of my Company, the story moves along quickly. Daniel becomes involved with Clarissa in a way and they travel to Texas, both for their individual private reasons. By novels end, Daniel has conquered his fear of curbs and Clarissa has accommodated his obsession with bulb wattage. The Pleasure of My Company is a delightful novel as warm as the California sun. Martin has managed to capture in Daniel, the essence of a likeable zany man. Daniels eventual success at having a happy life despite his many handicaps, is uplifting because it reminds us that life is not all bad all the time. It is always fun to root for the underdog and have him win. It might take some doing but Martin shows us that there are indeed takers for the quiet heart.

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Steve Martin The Pleasure of My Company To my mother and father If I can - photo 1

Steve Martin

The Pleasure of My Company

Tomy mother and father

If I can get from here to the pillar box

If I can get from here to the lamp-post

If I can get from here to the front gate

before a car comes round the corner

Carolyn Murray will come to tea

Carolyn Murray will love me too

Carolyn Murray will marry me

But only if I get from here to there

before a car comes round the corner

MICK GOWAR, FROM OXFORDS ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF POETRY FOR CHILDREN

This all started because of a clerical error.

Without the clerical error, I wouldnt have been thinking this way at all; I wouldnt have had time. I would have been too preoccupied with the new friends I was planning to make at Mensa, the international society of geniuses. Id taken their IQ test, but my score came back missing a digit. Where was the 1 that should have been in front of the 90? I fell short of genius category by a full fifty points, barely enough to qualify me to sharpen their pencils. Thus I was rejected from membership and facing a hopeless pile of red tape to correct the mistake.

This clerical error changed my plans for a while and left me with a few idle hours I hadnt counted on. My window to the street consumed a lot of them. Nice view: I can see the Pacific Ocean, though I have to lean out pretty far, almost to my heels. Across the street is a row of exotically named apartment buildings, which provide me with an unending parade of human vignettes. My building, the Chrysanthemum, houses mostly young people, who dont appear to be out of work but are. People in their forties seem to prefer the Rose Crest. Couples whose children are grown gravitate toward the Tudor Gardens, and the elderly flock to the Ocean Point. In other words, a person can live his entire life here and never move from the block.

I saw Elizabeth the other day. What a pleasure! She didnt see me, though; she doesnt know me. But there was a time when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had never met, yet it doesnt mean they werent, in some metaphysical place, already in love. Elizabeth was pounding a FOR LEASE sign into the flower bed of the Rose Crest. Her phone number was written right below her name, Elizabeth Warner. I copied it down and went to the gas station to call her, but the recorded voice told me to push so many buttons I just gave up. Not that I couldnt have done it, it was just a complication I didnt need. I waved to Elizabeth once from my window, but maybe there was a reflection or something, because she didnt respond. I went out the next day at the same hour and looked at my apartment, and sure enough, I couldnt see a thing inside, even though I had dressed a standing lamp in one of my shirts and posed it in front of the window.

I was able to cross the street because just a few yards down from my apartment, two scooped-out driveways sit opposite each other. I find it difficult-okay, impossible-to cross the street at the corners. The symmetry of two scooped-out driveways facing each other makes a lot of sense to me. I see other people crossing the street at the curb and I dont know how they can do it. Isnt a curb forbidding? An illogical elevation imposing itself between the street and the sidewalk? Crosswalks make so much sense, but laid between two ominous curbs they might as well be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Who designed this? Daffy Duck?

You are now thinking Im either brilliant or a murder suspect. Why not both? Im teasing you. I am a murder suspect, but in a very relaxed way and definitely not guilty. I was cleared way early, but Im still a suspect. Head spinning? Let me explain. Eight months ago a neighbor downstairs, Bob the appliance repairman, was knifed dead. Police came to interview me-it was just routine-and Officer Ken saw a bloodstained parka on my coatrack. Subsequently the lab found fibers from my parka on the corpse. Can you figure out my alibi? Take a minute.

Here it is: One night a naked woman burst out of Bob the appliance repairmans apartment, hysterical. I grabbed my parka and threw it around her. Bob came and got her, but he was so polite he made me suspicious. Too bad I didnt get fully suspicious until a week later, just after naked woman had penetrated his liver with a kitchen knife. One day, the naked woman, now dressed, returned my parka, unaware that blood and other damning evidence stained the backside. I was unaware too until savvy cop spotted the bloodstain when the parka was hanging on a coat hook near the kitchen. The cops checked out my story and it made sense; Amanda, hysterical woman, was arrested. End of story.

Almost. Im still a suspect, though not in the conventional sense. My few moments of infamy are currently being reenacted because the producers of Crime Show, a TV documentary program that recreates actual murders, love the bloodstained parka angle, so Im being thrown in as a red herring. They told me to just act like myself. When I said, How do I do that? they said to just have fun with it, but Im not sure what they meant.

Im hoping that my status as a murder suspect will enhance my first meeting with Elizabeth. It could jazz things up a bit. Of course, in the same breath I will tell her that I was cleared long ago, but Ill wait just that extra second before I do in order to make sure Ive enchanted her.

The larger issue, the one that sends me to the dictionary of philosophy, if I had one, is the idea of acting like myself. Where do my hands go when Im myself? Are they in my pockets? I frankly cant remember. I have a tough time just being myself, you know, at parties and such. I start talking to someone and suddenly I know I am no longer myself, that some other self has taken over.

The less active the body, the more active the mind. I had been sitting for days, and my mind made this curious excursion into a tangential problem: Lets say my shopping list consists of two items: Soy sauce and talcum powder. Soy sauce and talcum powder could not be more dissimilar. Soy: tart and salty. Talc: smooth and silky. Yet soy sauce and talcum powder are both available at the same store, the grocery store. Airplanes and automobiles, however, are similar. Yet if you went to a car lot and said, These are nice, but do you have any airplanes? they would look at you like youre crazy.

So heres my point. This question Im flipping around-what it means to act like myself-is related to the soy sauce issue. Soy and talc are mutually exclusive. Soy is not talc and vice versa. I am not someone else, someone else is not me. Yet were available in the same store. The store of Existence. This is how I think, which vividly illustrates Mensas loss.

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events. Like the morning the toaster popped up just as a car drove by with Arizona plates. Connection? Or coincidence? Must the toaster be engaged in order for a car with Arizona plates to come by? The problem, of course, is that I tend to behave as if these connections were real, and if a car drives by with plates from, say, Nebraska, I immediately eyeball the refrigerator to see if its door has swung open.

I stay home a lot because Im flush with cash right now ($600 in the bank, next months rent already paid), so theres no real need to seek work. Anyway, seeking work is a tad difficult given the poor design of the streets with their prohibitive curbs and driveways that dont quite line up. To get to the Rite Aid, the impressively well-stocked drugstore that is an arsenal of everything from candies to camping tents, I must walk a circuitous maze discovered one summer after several weeks of trial and error. More about the Rite Aid later (Oh God, Zandy-so cute! And what a pharmacist!).

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