ONE
Sometimes, not often anymore but sometimes, Don Draper would stop in mid-stride and just gaze upward at the buildings around him. For someone from where he was from – even for someone from where he pretended to be from – Manhattan was a sight to inspire absolute awe. Of course there were the ancient showpiece buildings like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and the GE Building, but what truly thrilled him were the newer buildings, like the Seagram Building and the Time & Life Building which had just opened a few years ago, or ones so new they hadn't even opened yet, like the Union Carbide Building and One Chase Manhattan Plaza: they seemed composed of enormous columns of steel and glass reaching in a sleek, businesslike, unsentimental line straight to the nonexistent heavens, uninterrupted by the ornamental stone terraces and cornices of an earlier age; or, as he once heard a tourist say about a new building, "What happened to the gargoyles?" It made him laugh, this reaction of the hicks to the new bold new architecture of New York City, but then he too would stop and stare sometimes when he wasn't minding himself and he remembered that he was a hick, too, he just didn't dress like one anymore. He hated his awe, because he saw yokels from out west gawking up at the skyscrapers every day, standing there open-mouthed like baby birds waiting to be fed, as different from real New Yorkers as weeds were from roses, and he would remember once gazing open-mouthed up at the sun and his father barking at him, "What's 'a matter? Y'waiting for a goose to shit in your mouth?" That memory would cure him. He would lower his wide eyes and nudge his chin down to his chest and grip the handle of his briefcase tighter and barrel forward into the crowds like everyone else, and he was a New Yorker again, and no one could tell the difference.
Everyone from New York is from somewhere else, the saying goes, and you could say it about America, too, except for the Indians, and even they had to come from somewhere – Mexico maybe, or maybe it was the other way around – but the point was that America was a melting pot, and New York was the place you went if you couldn't melt. In New York you didn't blend in, you collided, or you went around. Don Draper knew this before he came here, or at least had some sense of it; he just knew that, at some point, there was nowhere else for him to go. He had tried everything else, from farming to hitchhiking to California, he'd even tried war, and nothing could ever cure him of the gravity he felt pulling him toward New York City; it was as if the whole western half of the continent was slowly upending and he had nothing to hold onto, nothing to keep him from slipping eastward anymore, so he let go and went. By that time he was already Don Draper, but he wasn't born that way.
He was born Dick Whitman in a whorehouse on 2nd Street in Beardstown, Illinois in January of 1926. His mother was a whore, his father a customer. She died giving birth to him. He was put into an old apple crate and delivered in the middle of the night to his father's farm, handed over to his father's wife Abigail and told that his name came from the thing that had created him and destroyed his mother. More than likely, if his father had been able to conceive a child with his own wife he'd have gotten rid of the thing instantly, smothered it or drowned it and buried it in a field somewhere; but his wife had had three miscarriages already and there was no reason to think she'd ever do anything else, so they kept the baby. His father was hateful to him, but then he was hateful to everyone, so the circumstances of his birth probably had nothing to do with it. In the cold reality of Depression-era farming country, his entry into the world was not significant; he was a field hand that didn't have to be paid. The first time he milked a cow he was five years old. The first time he harnessed a horse he was seven. Three years later, his father was killed trying to do the same thing. Stone drunk, he dropped the collar, and when he bent to pick it up the horse was spooked by a peal of thunder and kicked him in the face, cracking his skull. The boy was standing three feet away. Again, it was the middle of the night. Both his parents had died in the middle of the night. That seemed as if it should mean something, but it probably didn't.
He figured he would die at night, too. Maybe that was what it meant, that two people who died in the middle of the night would create a child who would die in the middle of the night . . . or die alone, basically alone, with people nearby but people who didn't love him or even care about him. And in darkness, too; not even the sun to shine on him. Maybe that's what it meant. But if you were looking for signs, there was more: his mother had sold her body for a living, and for a living Don Draper was an advertising man who made it easier for companies to sell things. A whore is a living, breathing advertisement, but an advertisement for only herself, not for anyone or anything else. There was something more pure in that than being an ad man, who, after all, never made the actual products, only found ways to convince people to buy other people's products. His mother had not needed slogans, or jingles, or endorsements, or any of that bullshit; what she sold was on display everywhere she went, and you either bought it or you didn't. She didn't have to talk anyone into anything. Everybody needs sex. His mother had sold the only commodity that everyone needed, needed even before they tried it for the first time. Even Lucky Strike Cigarettes couldn't make that claim.
And what of the father? What signs were there, he often wondered. He'd known nothing of his mother, therefore little or nothing of her could have rubbed off on her unwanted child, nothing but biology; but Dick Whitman had lived with his father, lived with him all day every day for ten years. Got up with him early in the morning, ate one hard biscuit with one spoonful of honey on it and drank (or tried to drink – he hated it) a cup of coffee in the silent cold dark kitchen with him, put on boots and gloves and a hat and a too-big but warm jacket with him, and followed him outside to help him feed the stock, clean the stables, milk the cows, tend the horses, look in the hen house for eggs and diseased chickens, then followed him out into the fields to weed, water, and work on the tractor, which broke down so often that his father would announce that somebody must be sneaking in and messing with it in the night, prob'ly the niggers working on the ranch down the road; when the boy asked why anyone would do that, his father would always say, "So we don't succeed, boy. They don't want us to make it. Nobody does. They'll do whatever they can to stop you so they can get ahead. They'll call it a 'co-operative' but it's every man for himself in this life. You remember that." He did.
Things happened in quick succession after he turned ten: his stepmother got pregnant at long last, his father got killed, they moved off the farm to live with Abigail's sister Ernestine, his stepbrother Adam was born, Ernestine died, and his stepmother took up with Ernestine's husband, a brothel-keeper named Mack. By the time he turned eleven, Dick Whitman was in fifth grade and living in the back of a whorehouse in Beardstown, where he was born.
More whores. Whores everywhere, smelling sweaty and rotten with their strong lemony perfumes, smiling and telling him he was cute, handing him a nickel to go and buy a chocolate bar. Finally, not long after he turned thirteen, a whore named Aimee took his cherry when he got sick and slept in her room for two days. And when his stepmother learned he'd slept with a whore, as his father had, as Mack did ("Just to make sure they're keeping their skills up to date," he explained helpfully), she began to hate him more than ever, and she'd never liked him in the first place because he was a whore's son. Whores. Whores everwhere. And what did that mean? Probably nothing. It meant he wanted to get the hell away from his childhood as fast as he could. And he did, before he even graduated high school. He ran away, disappeared into a world that was paying attention to the Nazis and the Japs and didn't have time to worry about some skinny punk kid from Illinois.
And now washed ashore on the island of Manhattan on Monday, the second of January, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-one, walking purposefully down the crowded sidewalk in a bespoke charcoal gray flannel suit with overcoat and quarter brogues, smoking a Lucky Strike, ignoring passersby as they ignored him, and not looking up at the buildings.
The same man? Not hardly, folks. He belonged here now, like the prehistoric ones belonged here. The real New Yorkers.
There were guys who had New York exactly the way they wanted it. Been living here forever, born turn of the century, lost their cherries in the war to end all wars, started losing their hair when Hitler and Tojo got their what-for . . . now getting old and fat, cozy, grumpy, standing by their windows scratching their big hairy bellies. Grew up with the place: rat-infested, torchlit swamps and rickety firetrap woodbrick apartments become garbage-strewn alleyways off of densely-packed streets, teeming millions of them boiling together on the sidewalks below, the Jews with their thick, smoky foreign smells of pickled herring pigs' feet and the screaming Italians with their brown sauces bubbling furiously and the Polacks with their sauerkraut sausage surprise and the Irish with their bland, bored, boiled potatoes and cabbage and briny corned beef and the Negroes with their whatever they eat . . . all of them safely tucked away for centuries in their dark, ancient, smelly little neighborhoods, ignoring the chromium new world as it spun around and around Columbus Circle all day and zipped all night through the crowds in Times Square, those rain-soaked streets cozily squalid and so loud you couldn't think and didn't want to, gigantic neon movie premiers and smoking whiskey billboards looming like cardboard gods over the insect millions on the sidewalks below, New York so familiar and ingrown like a toenail you won't clip because it's part of you now, turning in on itself, there's guys out there in all that smashed, roiling bustle do you realize have never been more than a mile from where they were born, their whole life they never step onto the road to see what's out there.
Sad, sad. But what is out there?
Just toenail fungus, apparently.
Don Draper came to rest in front of a bar on 48th Street, three blocks from his office building. He peered inside and saw a thin, silver-haired gentleman sitting at the bar drinking a martini and stubbing out a cigarette, and he knew he'd found the right place. He finished his own cigarette and then dropped it, crushed it under the tip of his wing, and went inside, unbuttoning his overcoat as the Negro boy posted by the entrance opened the door for him. He nodded his thanks.
"Roger," he said, slipping off the coat and hanging it up by the door.
The silver-haired gentleman gave a quarter-turn of his immaculate head and nodded a half-smile. "Well, you found me. I knew I should've avoided the familiar places, but I just can't stay away from here. Memory. Atmosphere. Dark windows so people can't see me from the street. Not dark enough, I guess." He took a sip of his drink.
The silver-haired gentleman was Roger Sterling: in a word, the boss. A partner in Sterling Cooper. Rich man. Rich man's son. Navy during the war. A glad-hander. Nice guy. Second heart attack two months ago, first heart attack three months ago. Now sitting in a God damn bar, smoking and drinking like nothing had happened.
Draper slid onto the barstool next to him and said "Whisky" to the man behind the bar. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack in his jacket pocket and lit it, regarding Roger Sterling with an amused eye. "So . . . what? You're going for three, is that it? A coronary trifecta?"
"Don't be my mother. You're too pretty to be my mother." He pointed at the pack in Draper's pocket. "Here. Gimme. I only brought one."
"Jesus Christ," Don said and handed him the pack.
"How'd you even know I was here?"
"One of the girls said she saw you walking down the street awhile ago, past the building without even looking at it. Right past her, like you didn't see her."
"I didn't." He lit the cigarette. "Honest. Who looks at faces in New York City?" For a minute he smoked, seeming to want to keep the smoke in his lungs as long as possible, his eyes closed as though he were in his own private nirvana. "God, I miss smoking. Tell me, what does smoke have to do with your heart, anyway? It goes to your lungs, I thought. Is it a proximity thing? If my heart was down in my ass, then could I smoke?"
Draper didn't say anything. The bartender set a glass in front of him on the bar and he picked it up delicately. First drink of the day. What was the significance of the first drink of the day, he wondered, and why was he lately trying to figure out the meaning of everything? It was just a drink, of course, but then too it set a man on a path – not a path, on tracks – that began to lead the day downhill, topping a rise and in a gradual slope that, by the time you headed home, was decidedly more steep, chugging and chugging down until by the time you sat down to dinner with your wife and children and she set that glass of Canadian Club in front of you and you automatically moved it closer to your plate than the silverware . . . well, it was a roaring freight train by that time, no telling where it would end, and then more drinks in front of the TV and you're just hoping, in that part of your mind that was only partly cloudy, that you would make it to bed and fall asleep before the train flew off the trestle and hurtled into the frigid waters below.
Roger was talking.
"Actually," he was saying, "I considered a third heart attack when Kennedy won, you know, as a sort of protest, but then I realized I didn't like Nixon enough to make that kind of gesture. I might've done it for Goldwater. Hard to say. Did I tell you – 'course I didn't, I haven't seen you – we got an invitation to the inauguration? Some organization Mona belongs to. Right there in the presidential box with the smug Irish bastard. Close enough to shoot him if I wanted to. But then what? President Gene Autry. We're trapped, Don. Do you have any idea how . . . shallow the next four years are going to be? I mean, that is if we even survive the next four years, with everything going on in the world and Johnny Kennedy in charge of handling it. Can you imagine that little brat going up against Khrushchev? He'll pee his pants. They'll have to put him in diapers before the meeting. I don't know, I didn't have any faith in Nixon, either, I just had this idea that Eisenhower would be sneaking in the back door, telling him what to do. He's a kid. The both of 'em are just kids."
"They're your age, Roger."
"Exactly my point. Would you put me in charge of the country? I sure as hell wouldn't." He raised his empty glass so the bartender could see it.
"Why don't you take it slow," Don said, hating the words coming out of his mouth. Roger Sterling was not just his boss, Roger Sterling was not just his friend, Roger Sterling was his mentor, his authority, his creator. The man who had found him and picked him up, all the way up to the 23rd floor. It was wrong to talk to your creator like that. But it was wrong not to, if you loved him.
Fortunately, Roger just ignored the admonition. He accepted his next martini and took a slow, delicate sip, savoring it as he savored the smoke from his cigarette. Coming near to death was supposed to make a man appreciate life more, but what if it also made him appreciate more the things that had nearly killed him in the first place?
"How're things in the office?" he asked.