UNITED STATES—There was Sam Delaney, he was in a tan guayabera shirt and khaki pants, waiting in a hallway of a palace, beautiful and in gilded ruins. It was an Ankor Wat imbued by a tawny nimbus. There was Sam Delaney, his shoulders unstooped, the enfeebled tissue made strong muscle again, a defiant stance, a firefly glow, both soft and intense, played around his solid features. There were many doors in the hallway, which seemed to gently curve. He had moved on. The memories turned beige, of the days he was a vegetarian, when he eschewed meat to prove to himself that he did not need it.
The masses were slaves to it.
“Here’s a little bit for you,” said the Master. “Jump. Sit. Roll ever. Atta boy! Those were the masses who sold the time of their lives to the Master.”
This seemed to be the unpublicized thing about the metamorphosis from middle age to way past the middle; you were really quite alone, with thoughts and an all-enfolding emptiness as so many of the friends from the days of the banana frontier. Of course you made new friends, that’s what you did He had outlived so many, and when he went to pay his respects to the old rabbi on Yom Kippur, at first the fellow squinted and didn’t know who he was.
“Look yourself in the mirror, Sam. You’re not 28 anymore.” When he got home Rega put a spring with a boxing glove on it.
On earth, after Sam Delaney’s departure, not so much death as the slow, slow closing of an aperture, Allied Fruit was a man without a mission, meandering from here to there. It had suffered a blow to the brain; it didn’t have a brain. The problem that caused so many other problems (Panama disease) which took the bull by the horns in AF’s wandering years of overthrow and consent decree, a settlement approved by the court. The disease was not cured; however it was made moot by the introduction of a banana called the Cavendish, which was one of the breeds be growing wild in Southeast Asia, that began to be cultivated.
The Big Mike was tastier and hardier than Cavendish, and bigger, but the Cavendish was impervious to Panama Disease, and it has a higher yield. A Cavendish rhizome produces twice as many fingers as a Gros Michel, which meant that the banana companies could operate on half as much land.
Union Fruit began to experiment with the Cavendish. The first Cavendish bananas were shipped in 1953. They were a more delicate breed than the Gros Michel, that could be laid on the decks of a ship. The Cavendish had to be shipped in a box. This was a new addition to a trade which customarily stuck to a few bare essentials. The banana label was an innovation, likewise the banana box, with holes, so the bananas could “breathe.” The way bananas were sorted, stacked, shipped and stocked
Allied Fruit still had enough momentum from its glory years to move forward. By another name you could call that inertia. The company had become imitative. You had a board of directors in Boston, who got their dividends and stock options, they were in auto-pilot. Instead of groping for the constant innovations and breakthroughs that marked the company in its first years, it repeated earlier moves and techniques. Bernard Lukasey was semi-retired in Boston, and went to the offices near Beacon Hill and he had this great idea to make an animated series about Banana Bob. It would appeal to the sweetness kids liked, and tie-in with a new product his client General Mills was dreaming up. Nobody cared. Also, although Sam Delaney had long ago passed from this veil of laughter and tears, he persevered in pushing his people to find the elusive chemical; formula for perfect artificial banana flavor drops. As anyone who has ever tasted banana flavor drops from a plastic squeeze bottle knows, banana flavor is something else altogether, a flavor of its own.
As Sam’s world became smaller, and his body shrank, his creative concerns shrank as well. It was the grandkids, the children of Sam II who came back from trick-or-treating, and they discarded the banana-candies. Sam took one nibble and said, “This tastes like shit.”
The company had had lost its edge, it had lost every speck of inventiveness it had, in the area of production, sales and transportation, as in the matter of politics. Allied Fruit was doing business in the same old stand, even their ‘new’ executive office built in the 1950s, had a staleness. The world had changed. Allied fruit struggled under the weight of its own tenebrous history, a heavy one, and its image, forever ambered in 1912, a tinny Victrola playing a record of Irish tenor, John McComack, somewhere in the nether regions of an empty mansion undergoing ludicrous disintegration, the walls freckling, the windows broken, infested by snakes and poisonous spiders. Once Allied Fruit counted among the nation’s most enlightened corporations. It was now seen as archaic, lethargic and racist, not to mention a male enclave of privilege. In 1969 the Allied offices at Pier 3 on the Hudson River were bombed by Neo-Anarchist radicals. They used Allied at the object of their hatred to make a stand on the Vietnam War. Unrest and disgust were reaching a crescendo that summer of 1969. A New York intellectual, Norman Mailer, commented:
“You can attack property rather than people,” Mailer said on a talk show. “I mean you have to snipe at a human object whereas this is a way of symbolically attacking the Establishment without attacking human beings. There is something symbolically satisfying about a pure explosion, the emotional satisfaction and drama attached to it, calling everybody’s attention to the fact that something has been done.” Allied Fruit had been reduced to a symbol of the system. It was one last hurrah for the tarnished brand to be targeted that same summer alongside General Motors and Standard Oil.
In the 1970s Pier 3 was destroyed. Clawed into pieces by giant machinery and dumped into the river to make the landfill the world’s tallest building, was to be built on.
To be continued…
