Bich didn’t invent the ballpoint pen—Laszlo Biro, a Hungarian newspaper editor, fathered the modern ballpoint in 1938—but Bich went a long way toward perfecting it when he introduced the Cristal in 1959. Through its clear polystyrene barrel, you could watch the ink drop like the mercury in a thermometer. This transparency would remain a distinct advantage over the Cristal’s own loudmouthed brother, the BIC Banana, whose opaque yellow barrel achieved a devoted following in the ’70s, when bananas were enjoying a brief vogue in pop culture: The Banana Splits TV show of the late ’60s gave way to banana seats on bicycles and, by the middle ’70s, the banana section on the TV game show Tattletales.
In 1972, BIC would enter the disposable lighter market and create a second icon of the era, one that illuminated the encores of every concert in the decade and beyond. But even the toughest among us in fifth grade were not yet lighting up real Lucky Strikes or flicking our BICs at Led Zeppelin concerts, despite Led Zep’s regular visits to Bloomington to play the Met Center arena. And so the BIC Cristal remained the greater influence in our daily lives.
This perfect object was practically free, a price that appealed to all our parents. In 1970, the tuition at three-quarters of Catholic schools in America was less than a hundred dollars. Likewise, the price of a BIC Cristal in 1979 was the same as it had been in 1959: twenty-nine cents. Purchased in a multipack, the pens could be had for as little as seven cents apiece.
All these pennies made Marcel Bich a very rich man by the time the fifth-graders at Nativity had weaponized his pens in our assault on Sister Mariella’s nut cup. Bich drove a Bentley, became a baron, fathered ten children, contested the America’s Cup yacht race, and generally lived as large as he deserved to on the proceeds of his world-conquering pen-slash-spitball bazooka.
To this day I cannot see a BIC Cristal without wanting to field-strip it and load it with a spitball made from spiral-bound Mead notebook paper steeped in my saliva. And I’m hardly alone in that compulsion, given the ubiquity of BIC’s invention. The one billionth BIC Cristal was sold in 2006, and it has joined the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, alongside Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Dalí’s melting clocks, as a timeless (if not quite priceless) work of art.
Likewise, Schwinn StingRays of the ’60s and ’70s now sell, fully restored, for five thousand dollars or more. In 2016, when I showed one to my brother Tom, with whom I shared a bedroom for much of the 1970s, he squinted at the Flamboyant Lime model and said, “Five thousand dollars? For that piece of shit?”
In truth, it looked humbler than either of us remembered, deprived of its ’70s sunshine and harshly lit on eBay. But then Tom gazed a little closer, lost himself in a long reverie, and finally said, more softly this time, “That sissy bar needs to be higher.”
True, they’re only objects, and you can’t take them with you. But are they really? And why can’t you? A retired Procter & Gamble engineer named Fredric Baur, when he died in Cincinnati in 2008, was cremated, per his wishes, and had his ashes interred in his greatest creation, another coveted totem of my childhood. His children had purchased this vessel at Walgreens expressly for that purpose, on their way to his memorial service in Springfield Township, Ohio, where Fred Baur is now riding out eternity in the Pringles can he invented. After a brief debate over which flavor to choose, his children went with Original, because Fred Baur was sui generis, much as his contemporaries Al Fritz and Marcel Bich had been.
It’s a paradox. One man’s entire life can be interred in an emblematic object of his age. But it takes a hundred more of these objects to capture the lightning flash of a single childhood.
1.
Eight-Track Mind
Dad holds a finger to the sky. “Look,” he says. The moon is a waxing crescent, a children’s book moon. It looks to my father like Bob Hope in profile.
On a summer night in 1969, in the moon glow of the motor court of the Shady Lawn Motel, five and a half of us spill out of a Chevy Impala station wagon; Dad cradles me in a forearm, the way he used to hold a football. Jim and Tom, my big brothers, race ahead of us to the checkin desk. Mom, five months pregnant, presses a palm to her lumbar. She doesn’t know it yet, but she will get the daughter she has instructed us to pray for every night—my little sister, Amy.
Jim, Tom, and Amy. Our parents named us as if we were telegrams, as if they were being charged by the letter.
And so the Shady Lawn is cheap, the kind of motel Mom and Dad are partial to, with an air conditioner rattling in the window. In its man-made breeze, the single-ply toilet paper dances like a little lace curtain.
A thrumming soda machine stands guard outside the lobby, lit from within and stocked with exotic pops, the kind of soft drinks we can only have—and can only find—on vacation. Tahitian Treat. Cactus Cooler. Bubble Up.
Dad squeezes the coins in his pocket to stop them from jangling. He doesn’t want Jim or Tom asking for change for a Shasta cola or an Orange Crush. Vending machines, my father knows, are untrustworthy, prone to rob a man of his hard-earned nickels while leaving the desired treat agonizingly out of reach.
He has already been betrayed by countless inanimate objects, and many animate ones. The superlemon that is our wood-paneled Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon is still a few years and a few dozen repairs in our future. So are a succession of unsatisfactory armchairs. The spring-loaded suspension of one such chair—his “Archie Bunker chair,” as we will come to call all of them—seems to give out the moment he drives it off the lot at Levitz. From that day forward, whenever he hears the Levitz commercial jingle—“You’ll love it at Levvv-itz”—Dad sings softly to himself, “It’s lousy at Levvv-itz.”
And yet the mechanical failure of any man-made good—be it toaster or transmission—confirms his hard-won knowledge of the universe and seems to put him at peace. It proves him right, that relying on other people, to say nothing of their mechanical offspring, is foolhardy. The larger the failure, the greater the gratification, so that when the furnace finally blows, he can sigh and say what he always does: “The joys of homeownership.” Or when he is feeling especially philosophical: “C’est la Guy.” None of us knows it is “C’est la vie,” least of all Dad, who prior to flying to Paris for work will buy a book called French Made Simple. He’ll never even open it, leaving it on our basement bookshelf for two decades while he wings it en fran?ais, developing his own versions of that and other languages. French Made Even Simpler. When he tells us to eat in Italian—mangia—it comes out as a kind of Chinese: “Mon-jai! Mon-jai!”
In January of 1970, a forty-year-old man named Robert Goines inserts a few coins into the soda machine at his own filling station in Indianapolis. Then he presses a button and watches, with growing fury, as nothing at all happens. In previous years, by Goines’s own estimate, that machine had taken twenty-five dollars in nickels and dimes from him and his customers, and now—God dammit—he has had enough.