This
piece first appeared in STYLE Weekly as a Back Page in 2002. The Dorothy Parker illustration was done in 2013.
The prototype was assembled during a lull in seventh grade shop
class. After tying some 15 rubber bands together to make a chain, a
collaborator held one end of the contraption as I stepped back to
stretch it out for a test. Squinting to sight along the taut line to
take proper aim, finally, I let go.
The whole thing gathered itself and shot past the holder. The
released tip struck a target smartly, several feet beyond the holder.
While the satisfaction I felt was a rush, the encouragement from the
boys who witnessed that launching felt transforming.
Through a pleasant sequence of trial-and-error experiments, it was
soon determined how to best maximize distance and accuracy. Once guys
across the room were getting popped with the bitter end of my
brainchild -- dubbed The Stretch -- the spitballs that routinely flew
around classrooms in 1961 at Albert H. Hill Junior High -- were
strictly old news.
A couple of days later, uncharacteristically, I appeared on the
schoolyard an hour before the first bell. Inside a brown paper bag I
had was an updated version of my invention. This
one was some 60 links long -- the Big Stretch. No one at school had seen it and I was only too happy to change that.
Once the Big Stretch was tested on the schoolyard, demonstrating its amazing new
range, boys were soon shoving one another aside just to act as
holders. Most of the time I did the shooting. Occasionally, one of
the guys from my inner circle was permitted to be the shooter. As the
wonder whizzed by it made such a splendid noise that just standing
close by the holder was a thrill, too. On the asphalt playground behind
the yellow brick school building an enthusiastic throng cheered each
flight.
The Big Stretch went on to make an appearance at an afternoon
football game, where its operators established to the delight of the
audience that cheerleaders on the sideline at a football game could
be zapped on their bouncing butts with impunity from more than 25
yards away. After a couple of days of demonstrations around the
neighborhood and at Willow Lawn shopping center, again, I significantly
lengthened the chain of rubber bands.
But the new version -- about 100 rubber bands long -- proved too
heavy for its own good. It was not as accurate or powerful as the
previous model. Then came the morning a couple of beefy ninth-grade
football players weren’t content with taking a single turn with the
new Big Stretch. Although there was a line behind them they demanded
another go.
Surrounded by seventh-grade devotees of the Big Stretch, I stood my
ground and refused. But my fair-weather entourage was useless
in a pinch. Faced with no good options, I fled with my claim-to-fame
in hand. In short order I was cornered and pounded until the
determined thieves got the loot they wanted. They fooled around for a
while trying to hit their buddies with it. Eventually, several
rubber bands broke and the Big Stretch was literally pulled to pieces
and scattered.
By then my nose had stopped bleeding, so I gathered my dignity and
shrugged off the whole affair, as best I could. I chose not to make
another version of the Big Stretch. A couple of other kids copied it,
but nobody seemed to care. Just as abruptly as it had gotten underway,
the connected-rubber-band craze ran out of gas at Hill School.
It was over.
At that time the slang meaning of “cool” had an underground cachet
which has been stretched out of shape since. We’re told the concept
of cool, and the term itself, seeped out of the early bebop scene in
Manhattan in the ‘40s. That may be, but to me the same delightful
sense of spontaneity and understated defiance seems abundantly evident
in forms of expression that predate the Dizzy Gillespie/Thelonious
Monk era at Minton’s, on 118th Street.
Wasn’t that Round Table scene at the Algonquin Hotel, back in the
‘20s, something akin to cool? If Dorothy Parker wasn’t cool, who the
hell was? (Of course, I mean on paper, not necessarily in her day-to-day
deportment.) And, in the decades that preceded the advent of bebop
jazz,
surely modern art -- with its cubism, surrealism, constructivism,
and so forth -- was laying down some of the rules for what became
known as cool.
Cool’s zenith had probably been passed by the time I became enamored
with the Beats, via national magazines. Widespread exposure and cool
were more or less incompatible. Significantly, cool -- with its
ability to be flippant and profound in the same gesture -- rose and
fell without the encouragement of the ruling class. Underdogs
invented cool out of thin air. It was a style that was beyond what
money could buy.
The artful grasping of a moment’s unique truth was cool. However,
just as the one-time-only perfect notes blown in a jam session can’t
be duplicated, authentic cool was difficult to harness; even more
difficult to mass-produce.
By the ‘70s, the mobs of hippies attuned to stadium rock ‘n’ roll
shrugged nothing off. Cool was probably too subtle for them to
appreciate. The Disco craze ignored cool. Punk Rockers searched for it
in all the wrong places, then caught a buzz and gave up.
Eventually, in targeting self-absorbed Baby Boomers as a market,
Madison Avenue promoted everything under the sun -- including
schmaltz, and worse -- as cool. The expression subsequently lost its
moorings and dissolved into the soup of mainstream vernacular.
Time
tends to stretch slang expressions thin as they are assimilated;
pronunciations and definitions come and go. Since then, when people
say, “ku-ul,” usually it's to express their ordinary approval of routine
things.
The process of becoming cool, then popular, pulled The Big Stretch to
pieces. Once the experimental aspect of it was over it got old, like
any worn out joke. Then it began to play as just another showoff
gimmick, which was something less-than-cool, even to seventh-graders a
long time ago.
Cool has always been
elusive, never easy to corral. In the early-1960s, it was essential to grasp that a copycat could never be but so cool.
Words and art by F.T. Rea.
This is part of a series of stories (a work in progress)
at Biograph Times. All rights are reserved.
