As John Steinbeck pointed out, there is no name for a “green thumb” in mechanics, but that is precisely what Smokey had, and Mr. Schlesinger showed his appreciation of his genius by paying him $16 a week. Aside from the two production camera cranes, there was nothing in the entire Schlesinger studio that had any value at all except Schlesinger’s richly caparisoned front office. Leon did not believe in spending money, and Smokey’s work area was clear evidence of that reluctance. Mr. Garner was in charge of shooting pencil tests, splicing them into loops to be studied, and then running them in the projection test room (or sweatbox); manning the ancient Cooper-Hewitt projector in the big projection room, keeping that monster and every other decrepit thing in the studio running. Maybe he was paid $18 a week. I know he once asked Mr. Katz, our business manager, for a “crease in his celery.” Mr. Katz professed not to understand what he was talking about, but Mr. Katz never understood what anybody was talking about when the delicate subject of salary increases was on the docket.
Smokey’s camera stand was made of two-by-fours mounting a 1912 Bell & Howell camera made of brass and cherrywood, looking very much like the case that microscope slides would have been carried in by Oliver Wendell Holmes the Elder. Smokey built the stand himself, and it worked better and more efficiently than did the $40,000 production stands. He built his film dryer out of three bicycle wheels and some slats from a purloined rabbit hutch. The test projector was so old and odd-looking that no one had known it was a projector—and maybe it wasn’t, but Smokey Garner used it as one; so if the name of an object is determined by its function, then this gear-cluttered telegraphic-looking object was a motion-picture projector.
But with all his other skills, Henry Garner’s greatest joy for us was his wondrous disregard of the precision of the English tongue. In his short life, had he passed through academia, he would have left linguists swooning in phonemic horror in his wake. The difficulty of our language was his playground. If a word or a name was too intricate for easy phrasing, he simply adjusted it to a pleasanter and more convenient one: “Schlesinger” became the much smoother “Slesser.” “Tiger” became “tagah.” “Accidental collage” naturally follows—whoever heard of “Occidental”? Sounds more like an orthodontist’s mistake. The “tagah,” or “tiger,” is indeed “Accidental’s” symbol; “simple” is much smoother, but just in case you have doubts about “simple,” Smokey would add an etymological simplifier. One of the loveliest of all his contributions to an often sterile language: “Accidental’s enema.”
It took weeks for us to make the quantum leap from “enema” to “emblem.” We treasured Smokey far too much to ever think of correcting him; one would as soon scratch in a cathedral. All languages have music, and Smokey’s was no exception. We respected his adjusting English to his own melodic principles, and if we did not always understand him immediately, the translation was worth the wait.
His lexicographic adjustments were so subtle at times that often we missed them altogether or subconsciously adopted them into our own vocabulary without knowing we were doing so. I used the term “flat-rock rifle” for years before realizing that “flint-lock” was what I had in mind. Curiously, I translated “raffle” to “rifle” without disturbing “flat rock.” Friz Freleng got “wireless terrier” from Smokey. Bob McKimson used “fireman red” and “cold water heater,” the latter I suppose because of its accuracy—“hot water heater” is redundant and silly; “cold water heater” makes sense.
Just before alcoholism killed Smokey Garner, he committed himself to a state institution at Oxnard, California. Upon his return we naturally asked what it was like up there. “Too hot,” he said. “They had me in the spaggers.”
This seemed to me very cruel punishment to inflict on a man who, after all, was suffering a terrible disease. Where were the spaggers, and why was it hot in the spaggers? Were the spaggers small concrete-and-iron punishment boxes broiling in the sun? Were the spaggers some sort of esoteric red-hot pliers? There was no point in looking in the dictionary for clues; we had exhausted that possibility years ago and we were honor-bound not to disturb the fragility of the matter by asking Smokey for precise elucidation; so it was only an overheard conversation just before Smokey went to his appointment in Samarra with a broken stair-riser and a cement sidewalk that I understood. “It was awful hot out in the sun under the tocas-blue sky, working in the spagger-patch,” said Smokey Garner.
Which leads me to another remarkable man I once misunderstood and now understand too well.
I have kept many things for their sentimental value—often things from people toward whom I have no sentimental attachments—but for the objects themselves that seem to me to be sentimental in nature and therefore treasurable. Russell Jones gave me what he could—and I valued his gift for many years without knowing exactly why, subconsciously moved by it, I suppose, and finally misplacing it, to my sorrow. The gift was a large clean mayonnaise jar containing three rubber-banded bunches of Good Humor ice-cream sticks, stained with marks of ancient and synthetic cherry and chocolate and Neapolitan dyes and sugars. These, too, had been scrubbed and washed of their syrup and grit, their dust and lipstick, for Russell had carefully gathered them from their curbside windrows where my co-workers had sucked and slurped and licked the impaled Eskimo Pies during their three-o’clock break.
Background from ONE FROGGY EVENING (1955)
Bureaucracy is stranger than fiction
Russell had found me one night at work stirring a small pot of poster paint with a tongue depressor rescued from my infant daughter’s collection of medical gear. It seemed an ideal paint paddle, as I pointed out to Russell when he entered
