Soap Opera

by Alan Nelson

You may note that there is a slight family resemblance between this story of a tomorrow in outdoor advertising and Arthur C. Clarke’s Silence, Please! earlier in this book. Read this one and then compare British (Clarke’s) and American (Nelson’s) methods of satirizing our business civilization… By the way, weren’t there some items in the newspapers not so long ago about the indestructibility of suds made by certain types of non-soap detergents? Some people’s septic tanks being clogged, and certain sewer line outlets appearing as if they were foaming at the mouth? Maybe truth can be stranger than, or at least as strange as, fiction!

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.

Notes

NO history of that dizzy decade, the 1970’s, would be complete without mention of the celebrated “Schizoid Skywriter” episode which threw the city of San Francisco into such a turmoil for three absurd days in September 1973 and provided more confusion and garbled news copy than any other event in the whole period. Briefly the facts are these.

On August 27, 1973, a fuming little man with a shock of white hair and tan shoes strutted down a long corridor, pushed open a door marked “Advertising” and buzzing like an angry wasp, made for the window, slammed it open, leaned out and frowned skyward.

This was H. J. Spurgle, owner and founder of the H. J. Spurgle Soap Company (manufacturers of the all-purpose household cleanser known as GIT!) and his scowl was directed at three freshly skywritten slogans hovering smokily above the San Francisco skyline:

GIT GETS GRIME

GRIME DOESN’T PAY—GET GIT!

GIT’S GOT GUTS

Close behind him was his private secretary Nita Kribbert, a luscious brunette with a careful hairdo, who was uttering soothing noises.

“Who’s responsible for that!” Spurgle snarled as he withdrew his head from the window and pointed a gnarled finger upward. His face was unnaturally red, as though scrubbed too vigorously.

Eleven advertising staff members blinked anxiously and peered out.

“I am.”

Spurgle whirled and glowered at the gaunt, uneasy young man in a leather jacket who had just entered the room.

“Well, that’s just about the worst skywriting I’ve ever seen,” Spurgle growled, walking slowly toward him with a watch in his hand. “Your letters started falling apart in less than 30 seconds.”

“But the breeze, sir…” Everett Mordecai interposed, glancing miserably at Nita.

“Breeze or no breeze,” Spurgle thundered. “I’m not paying you to trail a lot of smoke across the sky that nobody can read. Why I could do better with a 30 cent cigar. Tune the smoke mixture up a bit, man! I want more permanence in those letters! Understand? Permanence!”

Wretchedly, Mordecai glanced first at the angry little man, then at the lovely Nita and wondered if this was the end of everything. Hired five months ago as a research chemist, everything had gone wrong. The very first week he’d blown up a small laboratory in an unauthorized experiment designed to produce a “quick action” hand soap. Transferred into accounting, his experimental ink eradicator had almost completely dissolved an entire ledger before the horrified section chief. Brief hitches in sales and traffic proved equally disastrous.

And now this miserable assignment as skywriter was about to blow up too. And right in front of Nita. The prospect was unendurable. For months he’d been following the gorgeous and elusive creature around like a stunned and abject slave—now she’d marry him, now she wouldn’t. I can’t stand a failure, she’d told him early in the game. Give me a man on his way up. But the harder he tried, the worse things got. Already he’d lost ten pounds. Already the pit of his stomach frizzled from morning to night like a perpetually erupting test tube.

“Permanence!” Spurgle was shouting. “Is that clear?” Wretchedly, Mordecai watched the angry little man bounce out of the office. Nita remained a moment. “Keep trying,” she smiled encouragingly.

After Mordecai wrote his usual message, GOT GRIT?—GET GIT!, at 2000 feet, he fluttered the helicopter in, crawled out of the cockpit, and walked over to Nita and Mr. Spurgle who were waiting for him by the side of the hangar.

“Everett!” Nita cried, moving forward to meet him. “For two weeks I’ve been trying to reach you! Where on earth have you been?”

“Leave of absence,” Mordecai answered tensely. He was thinner, haggard; dark pouches quivered beneath both eyes.

“I have something to tell you,” she began.

“Perhaps, young man,” Spurgle interrupted impatiently, you’ll tell me what this is all about.” He glanced at an interoffice memo fluttering in his hand. “Just why is it so urgent that I be on the landing field this morning at 11?”

Mordecai hauled out a stop watch, turned his eyes upward to the slogan he’d just written.

“Possibly you’d like to time these letters…”

Automatically Spurgle gazed up too. The letters, still firm, still strong and perfectly formed, seemed to be settling earthward, undisturbed by the brisk breeze that scudded across the field.

“They’re coming down,” Nita gasped.

Spurgle frowned and stared, waiting for them inevitably to dissolve and disappear.

But they didn’t.

Like great soggy balloons, the letters gradually descended, becoming larger and clearer as they drifted closer, and finally when they landed on the field, bounced gently several times and lay quiet.

Silently the three walked over to the slogan. Spurgle kicked at the letter G in git! It was a monstrous white thing, ten feet thick, half a city block long, composed of a flexible, elastic substance that resembled something between jello and foam rubber, yet which was opaque and so light that despite its size, Mordecai could pick the entire letter up with one hand. He balanced the G on his palm a moment.

“You asked for permanence…”

Then Mordecai tilted his hand; the giant letter slid off, bounced crazily on the ground, shuddered like some monstrous coiled snake and lay gently quivering. Nita found the dot to the I—a tremendous white sphere the size of a two car garage—and was bouncing it off the side of the hangar.

Spurgle frowned and rubbed his jowls.

“What’s this stuff made of?” he finally asked, grabbing a corner of the G and compressing an entire cross bar into his hand. When he released the pressure it sprang back to its original shape.

“Oh, it’s just a little synthetic rubber derivative with a dash of neoprene and a couple of jiggers of koroseal…”

“Never mind,” Spurgle cried, growing more and more irritable. He withdrew a knife, opened it, started sawing away at an edge of the T. “I’ll send it to the lab, have it analyzed.”

But the stuff just wouldn’t cut. Twice Spurgle plunged the knife into the rubbery substance up to his armpits, but it was like trying to puncture a sponge with a potato masher.

“Well, I must admit, it’s a neat trick,” he growled uncertainly. “But unfortunately I decided only last week to ditch the whole skywriting campaign. After all, this is 1973 and skywriting is pretty much a thing of the past. Clever twist, this—I must admit. But I’m afraid it just doesn’t have any impact. No one skywrites anymore.”

He glanced at his watch, then turned to Nita.

“Good lord, Nita. You’d better pick up the tickets. We’ve got exactly 25 minutes.”

Nita lingered just long enough to touch Mordecai gently on the sleeve.

“Keep trying,” she said smiling, then hurried off across the field.

“As I say, Mordecai,” Spurgle continued. “It’s a nice try but I’m afraid you have another stinker here. When I get back from my honeymoon I’ll try to find another spot for you—the shipping department perhaps…”

“Honeymoon?” Mordecai echoed with a premonition of disaster.

“Why, yes,” Spurgle said, allowing his face to relax a moment as he gazed after the disappearing figure of Nita. “Nita and I are on our way to Palm Springs right now. But I shouldn’t say anything about it. It’s a secret…”

Dazedly, Mordecai watched Spurgle stride off toward the administration building; then with a low moan that seemed to rack his whole body, he hauled off and booted the exclamation point clear off the landing field.

Those are the events that lead up to the three wildest and most bizarre days in San Francisco history. Whether Mordecai’s subsequent actions were the result of a frustrated personality gone berserk or merely a last-ditch attempt to “keep trying” has been debated for nearly twenty years.

The San Francisco Chronicle dated September 14, 1973, carried this dispatch on page one:

Residents in scattered portions of the city were surprised early this morning by the appearance of huge rubbery letters leaning against the eaves of houses, clogging backyards and blocking street car tracks. In the downtown area, a huge elastic “O” ringed the Shell building like a quoit on a peg and was wedged at the sixteenth floor by an extended flag pole. The Atlas Foundry reported one of its huge brick smoke stacks obstructed by a large white sphere.

Meteorologist Fred Ballard could not immediately identify the source of the phenomenon but thought the objects might be by-products of a new atomic development project located somewhere in the vicinity.

Toward morning the drizzle seemed to be increasing and had already created a nuisance in several sections due to difficulty in disposing of them. Impossible to cut, burn or deflate, the letters could only be moved; and the big question was—where? Vacant lots in certain districts were loaded and police reported squabbles breaking out between neighbors over tossing the things over back fences…

It was not until the second morning that San Franciscans discovered to their ire that the phenomenon—still falling steadily—was not an atomic by-product, but an old advertising stunt with a new twist. For while previously Mordecai had dropped individual letters, now he was connecting them up in a flourishing Pelman script; slogans fell as a unit, and all too clearly people could read the GET GIT!’s as they drifted downward and covered the city like a blanket of snow.

Moreover, the size was increasing. A single GIT’S GOT GUTS, for instance, fitted perfectly into Van Ness avenue from Golden Gate to Post street, and SCOUR WITH POWER—GIT’S GOT IT! which landed upend in Kezar stadium stuck out like a spoon in a bowl of soup.

The angry, protesting howl that welled up that second morning—the morning of “Frantic Friday”—was a demonstration of civic indignation that will probably never be equalled. Inevitably, the Spurgle Soap Company was on the receiving end of the point-blank blast.

Forty thousand irate housewives dialled Spurgle’s almost simultaneously, and the four benumbed operators on duty at the plant, overwhelmed by the avalanche, simply laid down their headpieces, watched the flashing switchboard in awe a few moments longer, then quietly slunk out.

Outside, an ugly crowd estimated at between 10 and 20,000 milled beyond the wire fence, shouting and occasionally heaving bricks into the yard.

It was not until almost 11 a.m. that the citizen’s committee of seven headed by Mayor Randolph Rockwell, a rotund man with vertical lines in his face, shouldered its way through this crowd, and at length strode into the panelled office of H. J. Spurgle. They found Spurgle in a cold rage, rocking himself gently in his swivel chair, face nearly purple, trying desperately to control a fit of the shakes.

“Who’s responsible for that?” Rockwell snarled, going immediately to the window and pointing a finger skyward. “I demand you put a stop to this outrageous publicity stunt at once!”

It was a moment before Spurgle could find his voice.

“Put a stop to it!” he screamed. “Don’t you think I’d like to? First it ruined my wedding. Now, my business. Put a stop to it? HOW?”

“Call your man down, that’s how.”

Spurgle cackled mirthlessly.

“You call him down. The man’s gone completely mad! The only way you’re going to get him down is shoot him down.”

A man with a briefcase stepped forward.

“Nevertheless, Spurgle,” he stated in cold, judicial tones, “as city attorney I must warn you the man is on your pay roll and therefore we’re holding you legally responsible.”

“What do you mean—legally responsible!” Spurgle shouted. “Spurgle company has a perfectly valid 1973 city skywriting license. It’s not legal responsibility I’m worried about. I’m in the clear there.” He rummaged a moment in the desk, came up with a document, tossed it across to the city attorney who examined it carefully. Presently he began to shake his head and frown.

“This seems to be in perfect order,” he said. “Frankly, gentlemen, I’m at a loss to know just what ordinance is being violated, except possibly the anti-smog regulation. This whole thing, unfortunately, appears perfectly legal.”

There was an embarrassing silence.

“How long can he stay up there?” someone asked.

“Months,” Spurgle answered sadly. “Both our helicopters are atomic powered.”

“But the supply of… of rubber or whatever it is he uses,” Mayor Rockwell cried plaintively. “Surely that isn’t inexhaustible. What about that, Cliff—you’re City Engineer.”

“Haven’t had time yet to analyze the stuff,” a stolid man in a blue serge answered. “But I can tell you this. There’s more solid rubber in an ordinary golf ball than there is in an entire slogan. It’s like the sugar in those sugar fluff candy cones they sell at the beach—a little goes a long way. If the man happened to take along three or four hundred pounds of old rubber tires, for instance, there’s no telling how long he could spin them out.”

“Maybe we’d better shoot him down then,” Chief of Police Guire said.

“No! No!” the city attorney replied testily. “Didn’t you hear me say he’s committing no crime? Writing obscene literature in public places—yes. But shoot him down for that and the city would have a suit on its hands for half a million dollars.”

Mayor Rockwell, who had been looking flustered, stopped chewing on the earpiece of his spectacles, cleared his throat and turned to a thin, frowning man.

“Well, Ed, it looks as if this is your baby.”

“Very definitely it is not a matter of Civilian Defense,” the man answered irritably. “We’re not being attacked. Personally I think it’s up to the Civil Aeronautics Commission.”

“Absolutely not!” a short man answered from the background. “This is a local matter, pure and simple. Perhaps the gentleman from the Better Business Bureau has a suggestion…”

“Just get that madman down!” Spurgle shrilled.

Meanwhile, outside, the city wallowed deeper and deeper in the torrent of slogans. Toward afternoon, Mordecai, obviously tiring of the shopworn phrases, began making up some of his own:

GIT CONTAINS TRI-SODIUM PHENO-BARBITO-HYPER-CLOROSOL AND IS MADE BY REACTING POLY-HYDRIC ALCOHOLS WITH POLYBASIC ACIDS,

for instance, extended from the east slope of Twin Peaks all the way down Market street to the Embarcadero.

And for a brief spell, possibly under the influence of the bottle, there rained a strangely garbled series of messages like:

NITA KRIBBERT IS FAST, EASY, SAFE AND DOESN’T REDDEN THE HANDS.

H. J. SPURGLE REQUIRES ABSOLUTELY NO RINSING. HAPPY WEDDING DAY TO GIT!

By dusk of the second day, the downtown area was completely paralyzed. All traffic had stopped. Rubber letters completely smothered every street, lay crazily across roof tops, stacked up on one another like a gigantic, disordered wood pile. Only the peaks of the highest buildings were visible.

The following eye-witness account by Edgar Fogleman, Wells Fargo bank clerk, is quoted from the November, 1973, issue of Glimpse:

“… I wasn’t sure whether the bank was going to open or not but I started walking to work anyway. It got worse as I approached the financial district.

“I don’t know how to describe it except it was like walking through a bubble bath. There was plenty of light and air down there but it was very easy to get lost because you’d go to turn a corner, then find it wasn’t a corner, but just the end of a letter.

“No one was scared or panicky because the things were easy to move if they got in your way—but everybody was confused and very mad.

“When I got to Montgomery and California some guy in an arm band told me every able-bodied man in the district was being drafted to haul the things out of there. I was assigned to a crew with three others and we started dragging one of the big things through a narrow lane they’d cleared toward the water front. They weren’t too hard to carry but very awkward and hard to get a hold of.

“After about four hours the Embarcadero got so jammed we couldn’t even get close to the bay any more. We hung around a while longer, then the man in charge told us to go home, that they were going to try to haul the things down the peninsula by auto caravan…”

Two hours previously, the mayor of Oakland just across the bay, in a gaudy display of civic friendship, dispatched to the scene over 500 boy scouts who were having their annual jamboree on the shores of Lake Merritt. The following excerpt is quoted from a letter later written by Scoutmaster Jerrold Danielsen to the National Chairman of Boy Scouts of America and printed with the permission of Mr. Danielsen:

“… wish to take exception to your letter reprimanding the Hedgehog Patrol for ‘conduct unbecoming to Scouts,’ as you put it. It is true our boys became lost and wandered about for over three hours, but I think it is to their credit they didn’t lose their heads completely. After all, being lost in a forest and being lost in a maze of rubber letters are two different things—I might remind you it was impossible to cut notches in the trunks of these slogans.

“As to your statement about ‘building campfires on every street corner and adding to the general confusion,’ I will point out these campfires were used to make hunter’s stew and boosted the morale of over fifteen hungry San Franciscans (by actual count) with whom it was shared.

“So far as your claims that…”

The city police had, of course, long since been given orders to “find and bring down that madman.” There was little difficulty in finding him. Sergeant Mulrooney reported back within the hour that Mordecai was barrelling around at 5000 feet, trailing a funny-looking liquid rubber that solidified almost immediately.

“But how we going to get him down if we can’t shoot him down?” he asked. “We can’t get close enough to force him down—all he has to do is duck behind one of his own sentences.”

And by nightfall of “Frantic Friday” Mordecai not only was still roaming the skies, but had added a new ingredient—fluorescence.

BRIGHTEN YOUR SINKS AND WASH BASINS WITH H. J. SPURGLE.

The slogan glowed with a purple brilliance and finally nestled obscenely against the Museum of Modern Art. From then on the night sky was brilliant with great glowing gobs of green, orange and vermillion which settled and infested everything with a weird and garish phosphorescence.

And then at 5:17 a.m. on the third day, when all San Francisco lay under a quivering blanket of technicolor, there was an abrupt cessation of descending slogans. A pregnant lull ensued for a full five minutes. Suddenly a different type of message flashed across the sky.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT TO FOLLOW

Several hundred thousand anxious eyes scanned the blackness above, waiting hopefully. Finally it came.

GET SCRAMMO—THE NEW SOAP POWDER

It was closely followed by another.

SCRAMMO MAKES GIT! SCRAM

The several hundred thousand watchers, not understanding, not caring much more, their eyes strained and bloodshot, turned away in weary disgust and took once more to the task of digging out.

That was the last message ever to be skywritten across San Francisco’s skyline.

Perhaps the denouement can best be described by reprinting an excerpt of an interview with Millie Speicher, housewife, residing at 2390 Washington street, as published in the September 23, 1973, issue of the San Francisco News:

… I was at 14th and Market about 9 A.M. Saturday when I noticed this vacant warehouse with a big sign reading: “GET YOUR SCRAMMO HERE.”

I remembered the slogan earlier this morning about SCRAMMO and went in. The place was crammed with stacks of five pound packages in plain paper sacks. The clerk told me to buy one and try the contents on one of the GIT! slogans.

Outside, I opened the package and sprinkled a little of it on the nearest GIT! slogan. Instantly, the whole thing disintegrated with a little pop. I told some other people about it and in less than fifteen minutes there was a line in front of that store clear to the ferry building.

By noon that day I didn’t see a single GIT! sign. All that was left was a thin layer of gray powder that covered almost everything but which the firemen washed down the street drains with fire hoses. It really is wonderful stuff…

Thus ended the “Schizoid Skywriter” incident, an episode San Francisco has tried vainly to live down for twenty years.

There are those who insist that Mordecai really did go off his rocker, that his were the actions of a madman, and that he came to a merciful end when his helicopter was damaged and plunged somewhere into the Pacific.

But others are not quite so sure.

They point to some rather significant facts:

First, that the manufacturers of GIT! really were forced out of business by popular demand.

Second, that SCRAMMO, which skyrocketed to popularity after its dramatic performance on GIT! signs that third day, appeared at a suspiciously apropos time.

Third, that the newly formed SCRAMMO company was operated for years thereafter by a dummy board of directors, the real power, rarely, if ever, making a public appearance.

As for Nita Kribbert, the following two excerpts may be of interest, the first of which appeared in the San Francisco Examiner classified section under Personals, on November 14,1973:

>

EV! WHERE ARE YOU? HOW COULD YOU BELIEVE I EVER INTENDED MARRYING H. J.? ALL A HORRIBLE MIX-UP. CAN EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. PLEASE CALL!——KRIBBIE

The second appeared in San Francisco Night Life (February, 1973):

“… yes, I’m on my way to be married. But I can’t tell you where or to whom or anything! It’s a big secret! All I can say is that he’s young and handsome and on his way up.

“Is it true that I once started to elope with H. J. Spurgle? Absolutely NOT! We did start out for a wedding but not to mine. H. J. was on his way to marry someone he met in Arizona and he asked me to accompany him in the capacity of private secretary and later to fill in as bridesmaid. Then the bombardment of GIT! slogans broke loose and everything was off. How do these stupid rumors get started anyway?

“Right now I’m very happy…”

One other footnote to the whole bizarre sequence: Only two years ago, Consumers’ Research had this to say about SCRAMMO:

… Hysteria buying of SCRAMMO by housewives zoomed this product into one of the fastest selling household soap products on the market, a position it has maintained for over fifteen years. This, despite our own laboratory tests which have repeatedly shown that SCRAMMO is entirely worthless on sinks, tubs, enamel, porcelains, linoleum or apparently anything else save for the purpose it was originally intended: destroying GIT! slogans.

The End.

Notes and proofing history

Scanned with preliminary proofing by A\NN/A

January 16th, 2008—v1.0

from: Thirteen Great Science Fiction Stories, Cronklin, ed., 1960

Originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, April, 1953