Something Happened by Joseph Heller Page A

them instead of worrying about them all the time and taking chances? Settle down, will you? Control Brown and cooperate with Green, and why don’t you hire a Negro and a Jew?”
    Kagle scowls grimly and broods in heavy silence for several seconds. I wait, wondering how much is sinking in.
    “What would I do with a coon?” he asks finally, as though thinking aloud, his mind wandering.
    “I don’t know.”
    “I could use a Jew.”
    “Don’t be too sure.”
    “We sell to Jews.”
    “They might not like it.”
    “But what would I do with a coon?”
    “You would begin,” I advise, “by finding something else to call him.”
    “Like what?”
    “A Black. Call him a Black.”
    “That’s funny.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ve always called them coons,” Kagle says. “I was brought up to call niggers coons.”
    “I was brought up to call Negroes coons.”
    “What should I do?” he asks. “Tell me what to do.”
    “Grow up, Andy,” I tell him earnestly, trying with all my heart now to help him. “You’re a middle-aged man with two kids and a big job in a pretty big company. There’s a lot that’s expected of you. It’s time to mature. It’s time to take it seriously and start doing all the things you should be doing. You know what they are. You keep telling me what they are.”
    Kagle nods pensively. His brow furrows as he ponders my advice without any hint of levity. I am getting through to him. I watch him tensely as I wait for his reply. Kagle, you bastard, I want to screamat him desperately as he meditates solemnly, I am trying to help you. Say something wise. For once in your mixed-up life, come to an intelligent conclusion. It’s almost as though he hears me, for he makes up his mind finally and his face brightens. He stares up at me with a slight smile and then, while I hang on his words hopefully, says:
    “Let’s go get laid.”
    The company has a policy about getting laid. It’s okay.
    And everybody seems to know that (although it’s not spelled out in any of the personnel manuals). Talking about getting laid is even more okay than doing it, but doing it is okay too, although talking about getting laid with your own wife is never okay. (Imagine: “Boy, what a crazy bang I got from my wife last night!” That wouldn’t be nice, not with gentlemen you associate with in business who might know her.) But getting laid with somebody else’s wife is very okay, and so is talking about it, provided the husband is not with the company or somebody anybody knows and likes. The company is in favor of getting laid if it is done with a dash of élan, humor, vulgarity, and skill, without emotion, with girls who are young and pretty or women who are older and foreign or glamorous in some other way, without too much noise and with at least some token gesture toward discretion, and without scandal, notoriety, or any of the other serious complications of romance. Falling in love, for example, is
not
usually okay, although marrying someone else right after a divorce is, and neither is “having an affair,” at least not for a man.
    Getting laid (or talking about getting laid) is an important component of each of the company conventions and a decisive consideration in the selection of a convention site; and the salesmen who succeed in getting laid there soonest are likely to turn out to be the social heroes of the convention, though not necessarily the envy. (That will depend on the quality of whom they find to get laid with.) Gettinglaid at conventions is usually done in groups of three or four (two decide to go out and try and take along one or two others). Just about everybody in the company gets laid (or seems to), or at least talks as though he does (or did). In fact, it has become virtually
comme il faut
at company conventions for even the very top and very old, impotent men in the company—in fact,
especially
those—to allude slyly and boastfully to their own and each other’s sexual misconduct in their