This time out, I'm going to tell the story of two of the best laughs I ever got in my life, one at age ten and one at twelve. They were both with the same joke and the person who laughed at it twice was my Uncle Aaron. He was a nice man — my father's sister's husband — who looked enough like Art Carney to be occasionally mistaken for him.
One time when we went to a crowded restaurant with him and Aunt Dot, we were surprised to be seated immediately, ahead of many other parties. As he passed out the menus to us, the host told Uncle Aaron how much he loved him on The Honeymooners. Uncle Aaron, who was afraid they'd rescind our preferential seating, said, "Thank you. I love working with Jackie Gleason."
As I've mentioned here, he sold window displays. If you had a small business, you could peruse his catalog and order little, relatively-inexpensive creations of wood, styrofoam and cloth to jazz up your store or front window. He offered low cost displays for all holidays and occasions. As Halloween approached, he sold a lot of witches and ghosts. As Thanksgiving neared, he sold turkeys and pilgrims. Christmas accounted for around 50% of his annual sales.
The displays were manufactured by a company in Japan and much of Uncle Aaron's life revolved around "The Japanese." He never spoke of his suppliers by name unless, I suppose, he was meeting with them, here or there. When he wasn't, it was "The Japanese are giving me trouble again" or "The Japanese overcharged me on that last shipment" or "The Japanese will be in town next week."
Even as a child, it struck me as bizarre to refer to his associates that way. He'd say, "The Japanese will be visiting my apartment on Saturday" and I'd say, "Really, Uncle Aaron? All of them?" And he never got it. He'd say, "Of course. The Japanese will be in town all next week. I'm taking them all to lunch on Monday." There was nothing racist about it. It was just shorthand. In the same way, he'd turn to his secretary and say, "Get Chicago on the phone!" and I'd think to myself, "Really? You're going to talk to the entire city?"
The displays were also designed in Japan, often from little sketches Uncle Aaron would doodle out and mail to them. He wasn't much of an artist but he'd draw a crude, almost-stick-figure snowman sunning himself under a cruder palm tree and then "The Japanese" would figure out what he had in mind and build it. A few times, he let me do the sketches and even at age 10, I was better than he was.
He had an office/warehouse down on Beverly Boulevard in what was then largely a Hispanic neighborhood but is now trending Korean. Once every few months, I'd spend the afternoon there. He'd assign me my own desk and I'd sit and draw or sit and read. Sometimes, Uncle Aaron would let me stuff catalogs into envelopes. Then he'd ridiculously overpay me for about an hour of work and I'd spend it all on comic books.
One day, "The Japanese" presented Uncle Aaron with a proposition. His supplier over there had acquired interest in a firm that could make full-sized mannequins for an absurdly low price. I do not remember the exact numbers but they went something like this. The top department stores were paying $100 and up for the kind of mannequin you dress in the clothes you're selling and place in your store window or on the floor. Via this new connection, Uncle Aaron could sell mannequins of the same size for $29.95 and still make a nice profit on each one.
"The Japanese" proposed a partnership arrangement whereby he would advertise and sell them in America. He made the deal which meant expanding his business considerably. Fortunately, the store next door to his office was for rent so it became the warehouse and shipping center for the mannequin side of his business. There was a considerable expenditure in setting up that store, staffing it and especially in advertising and mailings but he saw it as a great investment. And indeed, orders were soon rolling in and mannequins were arriving from Japan for him to repackage and ship to buyers.
You have probably seen a horror movie or suspense drama where someone is trapped in a warehouse full of mannequins. They walk nervously through it with eerie lighting and eerier music setting the mood. They glance from face to face, from silhouette to silhouette with the mounting terror that one or more of those mannequins might just be…alive?
Well, I got to play in just such a warehouse.
I have this odd memory of being alone in the warehouse at least once. I don't recall the circumstances that led to me being alone in there and probably it was for a matter of minutes as opposed to the hour or two I recall. But in the memory, I am ten and I'm wandering around amidst hundreds of nude, genital-less mannequins, females outnumbering males by about two to one. At that age, I was still trying to get clear on what women actually had under their clothing and nothing I saw there was any help. The whole thing was, like I said, odd.
It was not scary like in the movies because it lacked the ominous music and lighting…but it was odd. At one point, I turned to them and said aloud, "Okay, you can knock it off, guys. Move!" When they didn't move, I felt safer.
Mannequins today are, like everything else except tattoos and Joan Rivers, sexier. Female mannequins now look very much like the women in Playboy, which is partly a function of more realistic eyes and hair and makeup and a greater suggestion of reproductive organs on the mannequins. It's also partly a function of the women in Playboy looking more and more like they were sculpted out of papier-mâché. The mannequins in Uncle Aaron's warehouse were designed to be as non-offensive (i.e., non-sexy) as possible.
That was true of the ones on the north side of the warehouse, which were the ones that were all assembled, mostly for display purposes for when potential buyers came around. Less sexy were the ones on the west side of the warehouse. These were the ones in pieces, newly-arrived from Japan, which were to be shipped to buyers for assembly. Each of them was in nine parts — head, a two-part torso plus pairs of arms, hands and legs. Being low-cost mannequins, they had limited posing possibilities…but what did you want for $29.95?
Well, you might have wanted something sturdier. On the south side of the warehouse were the broken ones. What turned out to be an unacceptable percentage of them arrived from Japan in unsellable condition. The secret of the $29.95 price tag was that they were made with cheap material from cheap molds by poorly-paid employees and then were shipped over with inadequate packaging.
When a shipment of mannequins arrived from their maker, one would be missing a hand, one would have a leg that was busted, one would have a defective arm that wouldn't lock into place, etc. Uncle Aaron found he had to have his staff inspect and try assembling each one. Then they'd cannibalize, taking the head from this one and the arm from that one to turn three busted ones into one whole one. He would soon get into a lawsuit with "The Japanese" over this. They'd bill him, say, for one hundred mannequins. He'd pay for the seventy-one out of a hundred he considered complete. They finally sued him and in a counter suit, he charged that the product they were delivering to him was inferior to the samples he'd been shown when he agreed to the joint venture.
There were also many returns from buyers of mannequins that didn't live through their 90-day guarantee. The flesh-coloring would flake off or fingers would break or the torso would implode from the slightest bump. The metal fittings whereby one part locked to another would snap off and be unrepairable.
The mannequins may have had a 90-day guarantee but Uncle Aaron's new business didn't. In less than three months, he realized he was in trouble and for a simple reason: He was being delivered, and was therefore delivering to his customers, an inferior, shoddy product. That doesn't always put you out of business in this world but it did in Uncle Aaron's case.
Before long, it was all in the hands of lawyers. Eventually, there was a settlement and I never heard the terms but Uncle Aaron did refer to it as — and I quote: "A very expensive lesson." I wish some companies today would learn it.
My almost-final memory of Uncle Aaron's mannequin venture was the last day I spent in his office, watching and helping a bit as he and his few remaining employees packed to vacate the premises. He was leaving the mannequin biz behind and moving what was left of the window display operation to new quarters a few miles away. As he packed, he quoted to me what he said was an Old Jewish Curse. It went as follows: "May you have partners."
Uncle Aaron, by the way, was an Old Jew and he knew how to curse.
As he put the lid on one box, he asked me to give him a hand. My comedy impulses were starting to kick in at that age so I ran into the adjoining warehouse, came back with the hand (only) of one of the mannequins and gave it to him. He looked at it for a second, puzzled. Then he "got it" and began laughing uproariously.
It was one of those laughs that just went on and on. Tears — the good kind — came to his eyes and then he hugged me and said, "This whole business venture has been such a nightmare. But this almost makes it worth it." I didn't believe that but I was real happy I could do anything good for my Uncle Aaron. Real happy. A little later, he let me pack up a box of pads and pencils and other office supplies he wouldn't be needing so I could take them home. When he wasn't looking, I put a few of those stray mannequin hands into the box. Just in case.
This all happened in 1962. A few months later, and I'm not suggesting a connection, Uncle Aaron got sick and he underwent a series of operations. The first was certain to solve the problem but it didn't so he had the second one which was certain to solve the problem. It didn't so he had the third one which was certain to solve the problem, which led to the fourth one which was certain to solve the problem. By that point, even I knew how the problem would end and that it would not be long.
One day in 1964, my parents told me we were going to see Uncle Aaron in the hospital. They didn't say "This may be to say goodbye" but from their manner, I figured that part out. Since a visit to the hospital usually involved sitting around a waiting room for long periods, I packed a little bag of comic books and a pad of paper and my favorite doodling pen…and I took along something else. Just in case.
Uncle Aaron looked terrible there in the bed. The sheet didn't completely cover his chest and I could see terrible, ugly scars and stitching all over him. I tried to look at his face without looking at the scars but his face wasn't much more pleasant. You could see he was in pain — the physical kind and the emotional kind. The latter kind seemed to be worse.
We all talked for a little while and then I was sent out of the room so he could talk to my mother and father in private. I later learned he was asking them to take good care of the woman who would soon be his widow. And of course, they said yes.
Then he asked to have a moment alone with me. My mother and father went out and I went in. Uncle Aaron told me how proud he was of me and how he regretted he wouldn't be around to see what I would become but he was sure it would be impressive. He asked me to never forget about my Aunt Dot, the woman he loved so, and to do what I could to be of help to her, especially right after he was gone. The way he said it, I wondered if he expected this to happen within the hour.
It was all a lot for a child of twelve to hear and I remember thinking two things during it. One was to wonder if I should say something like, "You're not going anywhere. You'll be up and around in no time." I didn't believe that. I also knew he would never believe that. And I really knew that he would never believe I believed that. Still, I was thinking: Isn't that the kind of thing you're supposed to say in these situations?
I wasn't sure why but I decided not to say anything of the sort. Looking back, I suppose my instinct was that what he was telling me was very serious. This was perhaps the most serious moment of his life and if I'd said "Oh, you'll be fine," that would have been me not taking his seriousness seriously.
So I was thinking that and I was also thinking, "How can I get this man to ask me to give him a hand?" Because you know darn well what was in my bag with the comic books and the drawing pad.
As he finished his emotional plea to me to grow up right and to prosper and to care for Aunt Dot, he got a tad hoarse. On the table next to the bed, there was a little cup of club soda with a straw in it. He started to reach for it and I asked, "Do you need help?" and he said, "Yes, please, give me a hand!" I couldn't believe my luck.
I grabbed for my bag of stuff and out came the mannequin hand I'd brought. Uncle Aaron stared at it and began howling with laughter. Howling! I have never made anyone laugh like that in my life since then and I doubt I ever will again. My parents and a nurse came in to see what was happening. For a moment there, I thought maybe I'd harmed him somehow…perhaps hastened his demise. Then I thought, "No, he's not going to survive anyway. Maybe I've given him the chance to literally die laughing."
I thought he would have liked that. I know when I go, I'd like that.
He survived my joke, snickering and savoring it, and insisted on putting the mannequin hand on his bedside tray. That was the last time I ever saw him but Aunt Dot and one of his nurses both told me he couldn't look at it without laughing and feeling a little better. He died about two weeks after my visit.
Yeah, the hand thing was a silly joke but it wasn't bad for a kid that age…and it made 100% of its audience laugh, which is more than most jokes do.
When you're a kid, you can't do much to make your family happy. You can not get into trouble, and I almost never got into trouble, but you can't actually do anything. I was glad I could do something good for my Uncle Aaron. He did something good for me and I'll tell you about it the next time I write one of these.