I Saw Mommy Kissing CitiCorp: A Cautionary Tale of the 1980s
by Richard
Grayson
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The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is getting a $200 Visa
cash advance at a Chase Manhattan ATM on Broadway. He is waiting patiently to hear the sound
of money being counted in the teller machine.
Already he has put in his card, identified his PIN number 1933, the
year the Glass-Steagall Act was passed and given
the necessary commands. Looking down, the Chairman notices empty crack vials at his
feet. The tops of them are mostly
yellow, with some blue and a few black.
The Chairman wonders who manufactures these vials, what kind of profit
they make, whether they pay federal taxes, and if any Federal Reserve member
banks have lent them money. Still nothing is happening at the ATM. The woman at the ATM next to the Chairman's, an actress whose
character on a soap opera hasn't had a story line in a year and who is now
used only in crowd scenes like funerals and weddings, has already gotten her
$100 from her Chase checking account.
And she punched in her PIN number 6606, assigned to her by the bank
two minutes after the Chairman punched in his. The actress takes back her ATM card and the receipt, which shows
that she has $456.34 in checking, and glancing at the Chairman, leaves the
lobby. To do this, she must press a
button that makes a high-pitched sound.
The door opens, and she is on Broadway. Her place is taken at the lefthand ATM
by a man who has tested positive for the HTLV-3 antibody but has no symptoms
of AIDS. He wants to deposit a check
from his aunt. The Chairman is still waiting for the money-counting sound to
begin. In her apartment in She has been disconsolate since her husband, the Chairman's
stepfather, died of lung cancer last year.
Her late husband had smoked two packs of Pall Malls every day since he
was fourteen. He died at seventy-nine, which the Chairman thought was pretty
good for someone who had been that familiar with nicotine for so long. The Chairman smokes only cigars. Naturally he does not inhale.
Oh Nigel, the Chairman's mother thinks, I miss
you so. Thinking that her son must be delayed by important Federal
Reserve Board business, she decides to take from her videocassette library a
certain tape. She places the tape at the
mouth of her VCR, which swallows it obligingly. Turning on the TV monitor to channel 3, the Chairman's mother
simultaneously presses the "record" and "play" knobs of
the VCR and then realizes in horror that she is erasing the tape she wants to
play. Pressing the "stop" button, she rewinds the tape to its
beginning and then presses only the "play" button. Chuck Woolery is asking the audience
whether they think Roger, a black Army captain, should go out with date
number one, number two, or number three.
The Chairman's mother has inadvertantly
taped a minute of "The Love Connection." Then there is a moment of grey fuzziness and belching noise
before she sees the video image of her late husband. Nigel's daughter had interviewed him two months before he
died. She wanted to know all about her
father's life. "The games we kids played in those days were fun," says
the dead Nigel. "Stoop ball,
punch ball, johnny-on-the-pony, ringalevio..."
Stepping back, holding the remote control unit, his widow presses
the freeze-frame button. Nigel is frozen in mid-reminiscence. His mouth is open. A The Chairman's mother reverses the action, watches her late
husband backwards. On "The Love Connection," the audience has selected
date number two for Roger. Roger seems
very happy about it. At LaGuardia Airport, in view of the Fed Chairman's mother should
she turn her glance away from the TV and out her western window, the
Comptroller of the Currency is on the Eastern shuttle. He has to get back to He has gotten his ticket by using his Diners Club card, given to
him by the federal government. The
Comptroller of the Currency has pushed his charge card through a scanner
which has read the magnetic stripe on its back side and has spit out his
ticket. The ticket costs $60. The Comptroller of the Currency is uncomfortable in his
seat. These shuttles are like cattle cars, he thinks. No wonder Eastern Air Lines is in such bad financial
shape that it has to be taken over by another airline, the parent company of
its LaGuardia shuttle rival. On the
other airline they give passengers bagels, even on evening flights. The Comptroller of the Currency doesn't mind not getting a bagel,
for in his carry-on luggage is a shopping bag filled with a dozen bagels from
H & H Bagels on Broadway. They are
the best bagels in the world. H &
H's slogan is "There is no substitute for excellence." If H & H has not been written up in the new edition of
"In Search of Excellence," the Comptroller of the Currency thinks,
it is only because the company is too small or because the authors have not
sunk their teeth into one of H & H's warm, soft sourdough bagels. In Excuse me," says the fourteen-year-old girl sitting in the
seat next to the Comptroller of the Currency.
"Yes?" he says. "Aren't you somebody famous?" the girl asks. "I think I've seen your photo in The
Wall Street Journal." "Young lady," says the Comptroller of the Currency,
"The Wall Street Journal does not print photographs." "Then maybe it was in Vanity Fair," she says. Reaching into his carry-on bag, the Comptroller of the Currency
offers her a sesame bagel. Three blocks from H & H Bagels and their excellent slogan,
the Fed Chairman is still waiting for his Visa cash advance. "Uh, sir, maybe you should call for assistance," says a
man on line, the deputy press secretary for the Controller of the City of "What do you know?" says the Chairman
sarcastically. "Your boss can't
even spell his job title right." Nevertheless, he picks up the phone next to the ATM. A woman's voice comes on the line. "Thank you for calling AT & T," she says. "You're welcome," says the Chairman. "I'm trying to get money from my Visa
and it's not working." "Have you tried selling it to Haitians?" she asks. "Or those refugees from Those people would pay a pretty penny for a valid visa." "My Visa is valid," the Chairman explains. "The ATM seems to be stuck." "That's why you should choose AT & T for your long
distance service," says the woman on the phone. "Companies like ATM may promise lower
fees but their service is horrible.
Does ATM give you automatic credit for wrong numbers?" "I'm sure I entered the right number," the Chairman
tells her. "I'm the Chairman of
the Federal Reserve Board. I ought to
know my own PIN. Can't you give me any
information?" "Try NYNEX for directory assistance," the phone woman
offers. Some of the people on the line at Chase Manhattan get
impatient. Two of them are carrying
handguns. The Comptroller of the Currency hates takeoffs. At LaGuardia there's one runway that goes
out into Long Island Sound and he hates the idea of ending up in the water if
the takeoff doesn't go right. But it does go right, and the Comptroller of the Currency is on
his way to the nation's capital. Below, an air traffic controller at LaGuardia files a report of a
"near miss." It is her third
this week. Her superior, who's been around since 1967 and who didn't go out
on strike and get fired in 1981, takes the report and shrugs. "Are the Mets playing at Shea
tonight?" he asks the air traffic controller who filed the report. "I can't keep up with everything!" the air traffic
controller shouts. In a minute her
tears will be smudging her mascara. Twelve thousand feet up, the Comptroller of the Currency feels
relieved when the seat belt light goes off.
The girl next to him is on her second raisin bagel. The Ambassador from The Ambassador thinks not, glad he has bought a Perry Ellis
matching sweater and skirt ensemble.
In the middle of the night he will go into his bathroom in the embassy
and try it on. " "Ah yes," says the Ambassador. "I remember you well. And how is your pragmatic son?" "I'm afraid he's stood me up for dinner. I was about to walk down "Delighted, dear lady," he responds. "But I am Ambassador An, not The mother of the Chairman smiles. She is too old to be embarrassed. "Well, I knew you were Korean, so I
figured I had a good shot with Park.
Most of the fruit stands in Passing St. Patrick's Cathedral, Ambassador An
is about to give his companion a faint rebuke, but he notices that she
looks faint. Then she passes out. "Dear lady!" he says.
"Help me, someone, this elderly racist has collapsed!" A police officer comes to the rescue. She bends down close and puts her hand on
the old woman's neck. "Does she have a pulse?" asks the Ambassador. A crowd is beginning to gather around a
mime around the corner. The mime is
making fun of the way people walk and gesture. Since the mother of the Chairman is
unconscious, she is of no use to the mime or to the crowd. The police officer, also Korean, touches her hand to her nose and
sniffs. "The lady has a pulse,
all right," she tells the Ambassador.
"What I was doing was smelling the
perfume on her neck. Unfortunately, I
think your companion is the latest victim of the newest wave of product
tampering." "My goodness," says the Ambassador. "What is it?" "We got word from Bloomingdale's that some joker has been
taking bottles of Poison perfume and filling them with liquid Tylenol. Apparently this lady was wearing the
tainted scent..." An ambulance pulls up to the curb, and paramedics take away the
Chairman's mother while the Ambassador is questioned by young Meanwhile, back at the ATM on the In the meantime the thirty-fourth floor has gone up on the new
co-op across the street and one of the homeless people who was displaced by the
new construction has died of old age on one of the benches on the islands on
Broadway. Passing the Chase Manhattan branch where the Chairman is awaiting
contact with Visa or the Plus nationwide teller system, a man walking a
purebred Jack Russell terrier points to a "NO RADIO" sign on a
parked car's windshield and tells his wife, "See, I told you people are
getting less materialistic." She sighs. "I know, I
know, if we wait long enough, the Sixties will come back again." Getting off the Eastern shuttle at He takes the call at a ticket counter where a perplexed customer
service representative is looking at the latest automated reservations system
work station and thinking, I remember when printers were people like my Uncle
Joe and not just peripherals. "Comptroller of the Currency here," says the
Comptroller, ignoring the woman's thoughts. "This is the Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation." "Yes?" "We've got trouble." You're telling me, the Comptroller thinks. Wait till my wife finds out there are only
eight bagels left. On the twenty-first floor of the Someone could make a fortune if they knew this news, thinks Quynchi. Too bad
for me I'm too poor to indulge in insider trading. You really need a million-dollar-a-year
salary to do that right, setting up phony bank accounts in the "Well, enough multitasking for one night," says Quynchi's nominal boss's boss, an investment banker who
wants to get back to his family in "Did you leave the Wysiwyg report
for me to proofread?" asks hard-working Quynchi.
"No, unfortunately not.
I took the floppy that contained it home with me last night and was
working on it on my PC when my wife called me into dinner. When I came back to our media room, my
little boy was playing some adventure game on the computer." "So?" "So my son says that the Wysiwyg
document is now in a cave guarded by a sleeping dragon. Extreme caution is called for." Quynchi nods. As she looks out the river to In their In a La-Z-Boy recliner in the back of the room, their father
wonders why he had children. They are
no longer an asset, he thinks, but a discretionary acquisition that requires
tremendous upkeep for twenty years. The Comptroller's female discretionary acquisition is watching
the broad shoulders and boyish smile of Xerox Sankabrand,
lead singer of the Vomit Seekers in the group's top ten video,
"Information in Motion." Clutching dollar bills and plastic money, Xerox is surrounded by
scantily-dressed girls as he sings: I pay my Visa bill with my MasterCard So what's the commotion? Money's just information in motion, Information in motion, Information in motion... In his La-Z-Boy, the Comptroller of the Currency eats the last of
the H & H Bagels, more convinced than ever that there is no substitute
for excellence and that children are not cost-effective. In the newsroom of the New York Post, reporters are watching the
CBS Evening News with Frankly Unctuous substituting for the vacationing Dan
Rather. "...And in Manhattan tonight, an ironic drama is going on at
one of those automatic teller machines we all love to hate," says Frankly. "It seems that early this afternoon,
the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board the man who is chiefly
responsible for this nation's monetary policy was attempting to get a cash
advance from his credit card when the machine apparently got stuck. Now, some four hours later, the Fed
Chairman is still at the teller machine, waiting for his money. Susan Spencer is on the scene. Susan?" "Yes, Frankly, this is quite an eventful event here. Hundreds of people have come to this Chase Manhattan
twenty-four-hour bank at Broadway and The Post reporters continue to watch the news as they work on
their stories. One reporter writes
about The Cereal Killer, a fiend who bludgeons people to death people while
they eat their breakfast. Another works on an article about a Tofutti vendor who went
berserk on Wall Street and put ringing AT & T Nomad cordless phones next
to the ears of passing stockbrokers as he said, "It's for
you." The subsequent noise permanently deafened these
men. Another reporter is about to take off for Coney Island, where a
splinter group of terrorists is making life miserable for barefoot beachgoers
on the boardwalk. "Somebody, go uptown and cover that teller machine
story!" shouts the city editor.
He is an Australian. The Fed chairman's mother is out of the hospital, where they gave
her the universal antidote to liquid Tylenol. She has seen the headlines and the TV broadcasts, and she is
worried about her son. It is after 11 p.m. and Eyewitness News is on. The sportscaster is just finishing up. "...and in extra innings, it was Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere 7, Secular Humanists 5.
That's all the scores I have for tonight, Dweezil,"
he says to the anchorman. "Well, speaking of scores," the anchorman says,
"scores of people were injured tonight in The Chairman's mother switches back to her VCR tape, looks at the
image of her late husband, and says aloud, "Nigel, what can I do to help
my son?" " "This is the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency in "Yes, sir, what can I do with you?" "You know about this trouble with the Fed chairman in "Excuse me, sir, I think you want
the Japanese ambassador. I'm from "Oh, really? Sorry to
have troubled you for nothing, "An." And what?" "Never mind." It's midnight. On the
Disney channel, they're showing a film called "The Horrorville
Amity," wherein monsters of all different races and nationalities live
together in harmony in a town in I love fantasy, thinks Quynchi Cao as she watches TV. Then she thinks about her nights with Xerox Sankabrand. The Fed Chairman is still at the ATM, still waiting for his Visa
cash advance. The police, reporters,
the mayor, the Comptroller of the Currency, and even the President have
implored him to just go home. But the
Fed Chairman will not be deterred. He is staying till he gets his money, his Visa card, and yes, even a record of his transaction. He has faith in the banking system, even in
states like The Chairman is becoming delirious. At 3 a.m., Quynchi Cao
has fallen asleep in front of her TV, which is playing the video of
"Information in Motion."
Ambassador An has fallen asleep in the Perry
Ellis sweater and skirt ensemble he bought earlier at Benetton. The Comptroller of the Currency has fallen
asleep in his wife's arms. Even midtown Suddenly the elderly mother of the Chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board can be seen at her window on the forty-second floor of To people on the ground she looks like a balloon. The Fed Chairman has finally given up his quest for his $200 cash
advance. Walking wearily through She must be hundreds of feet up. The Chairman's mother floats over Central Park to the east, past
Fifth and At the The Citicorp logo looks a lot like the logo for NATO. The Fed Chairman, for the first time in many long hours, feels
something akin to relief. It's the float, he thinks.
It's the float. Two weeks later, the President of the At the news conference the broad-shouldered, boyish punk rocker
says, "The business of On upper Broadway, maintenance men replace a broken automatic
teller machine with a newer model that has a computer-generated voice. ______________ |
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Richard Grayson grew up in |
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