Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (4 page)

“Let’s go to Schrafft’s,” said the girl, low. “But first I must phone Mummy.” She stepped into a public booth and dialled true and well, using her finger. Then she telephoned.

As they walked on, she smelled good. She smells good, thought Pirnie. But that’s all right, I add good. And when we get to Schrafft’s, I’ll order from the menu, which I like very much indeed.

THEY entered the restaurant. The wind was still west, ruffling the edges of the cookies. In the elevator, Pirnie took the controls. “I’ll run it,” he said to the operator. “I checked out long ago.” He stopped true at the third floor, and they stepped off into the men’s grill.

“Good morning, my Assistant Treasurer,” said Botticelli, coming forward with a fiasco in each hand. He nodded at the girl, who he knew was from the West Seventies and whom he desired.

“Can you drink the water here?” asked Pirnie. He had the fur trapper’s eye and took in the room at a glance, noting that there was one empty table and three pretty waitresses.

Botticelli led the way to the table in the corner, where Pirnie’s flanks would be covered.

“Alexanders,” said Pirnie. “Eighty-six to one. The way Chris mixes them. Is this table all right, Daughter?”

Botticelli disappeared and returned soon, carrying the old Indian blanket.

“That’s the same blanket, isn’t it?” asked Pirnie.

“Yes. To keep the wind off,” said the Captain, smiling from the backs of his eyes. “It’s still west. It should bring the ducks in tomorrow, the chef thinks.”

Mr. Pirnie and the girl from the reception desk crawled down under the table and pulled the Indian blanket over them so it was solid and good and covered them right. The girl put her hand on his wallet. It was cracked and old and held his commutation book. “We are having fun, aren’t we?” she asked.

“Yes, Sister,” he said.

“I have here the soft-shelled crabs, my Assistant Treasurer,” said Botticelli. “And another fiasco of the 1926. This one is cold.”

“Dee the soft-shelled crabs,” said Pirnie from under the blanket. He put his arm around the receptionist good.

“Do you think we should have a green pokeweed salad?” she asked. “Or shall we not think of anything for a while?”

“We shall not think of anything for a while, and Botticelli would bring the pokeweed if there was any,” said Pirnie. “It isn’t the season.” Then he spoke to the Captain. “Botticelli, do you remember when we took all the mailing envelopes from the stockroom, spit on the flaps, and then drank rubber cement till the foot soldiers arrived?”

“I remember, my Assistant Treasurer,” said the Captain. It was a little joke they had.

“He used to mimeograph pretty good,” said Pirnie to the girl. “But that was another war. Do I bore you, Mother?”

“Please keep telling me about your business experiences, but not the rough parts.” She touched his hand where the knuckles were scarred and stained by so many old mimeographings. “Are both your flanks covered, my dearest?” she asked, plucking at the blanket. They felt the Alexanders in their eyeballs. Eighty-six to one.

“Schrafft’s is a good place and we’re having fun and I love you,” Pirnie said. He took another swallow of the 1926, and it was a good and careful swallow. “The stockroom men were very brave,” he said, “but it is a position where it is extremely difficult to stay alive. Just outside that room there is a little bare-faced highboy and it is in the way of the stuff that is being brought up. The hell with it. When you make a breakthrough, Daughter, first you clean out the baskets and the half-wits, and all the time they have the fire escapes taped. They also shell you with old production orders, many of them approved by the general manager in charge of sales. I am boring you and I will not at this time discuss the general manager in charge of sales as we are unquestionably being listened to by that waitress over there who is setting out the decoys.”

“I am going to give you my piano,” the girl said, “so that when you look at it you can think of me. It will be something between us.”

“Call up and have them bring the piano to the restaurant,” said Pirnie. “Another fiasco, Botticelli!”

They drank the sauce. When the piano came, it wouldn’t play. The keys were stuck good. “Never mind, we’ll leave it here, Cousin,” said Pirnie.

THEY came out from under the blanket and Pirnie tipped their waitress exactly fifteen per cent minus withholding. They left the piano in the restaurant, and when they went down the elevator and out and turned in to the old, hard, beat-up pavement of Fifth Avenue and headed south toward Forty-fifth Street where the pigeons were, the air was as clean as your grandfather’s howitzer. The wind was still west.

I commute good, thought Pirnie, looking at his watch. And he felt the old pain of going back to Scarsdale again.

1950

JOHN UPDIKE

ON THE SIDEWALK

(AFTER READING, AT LONG LAST, “ON THE ROAD,” BY JACK KEROUAC)

I
WAS
just thinking around in my sad backyard, looking at those little drab careless starshaped clumps of crabgrass and beautiful chunks of some old bicycle crying out without words of the American Noon and half a newspaper with an ad about a lotion for people with dry skins and dry souls, when my mother opened our frantic banging screendoor and shouted, “Gogi Himmelman’s here.” She might have shouted the Archangel Gabriel was here, or Captain Easy or Baron Charlus in Proust’s great book: Gogi Himmelman of the tattered old greenasgrass knickers and wild teeth and the vastiest, most vortical, most insatiable wonder-filled eyes I have ever known. “Let’s go, Lee,” he sang out, and I could see he looked sadder than ever, his nose all rubbed raw by a cheap handkerchief and a dreary Bandaid unravelling off his thumb. “I know the
WAY
!
” That was Gogi’s inimitable unintellectual method of putting it that he was on fire with the esoteric paradoxical Tao and there was no holding him when he was in that mood. I said, “I’m going, Mom,” and she said, “O.K.,” and when I looked back at her hesitant in the pearly mystical UnitedStateshome light I felt absolutely sad, thinking of all the times she had vacuumed the same carpets.

His scooter was out front, the selfsame, the nonpareil, with its paint scabbing off intricately and its scratchedon dirty words and its nuts and bolts chattering with fear, and I got my tricycle out of the garage, and he was off, his left foot kicking with that same insuperable energy or even better. I said, “Hey wait,” and wondered if I could keep up and probably couldn’t have if my beltbuckle hadn’t got involved with his rear fender. This was
IT.
We scuttered down our drive and right over Mrs. Cacciatore’s rock garden with the tiny castles made out of plaster that always made me sad when I looked at them alone. With Gogi it was different; he just kept right on going, his foot kicking with that delirious thirtyrevolutionsasecond frenzy, right over the top of the biggest, a Blenheim six feet tall at the turrets; and suddenly I saw it the way he saw it, embracing everything with his unfluctuating generosity, imbecile saint of our fudging age, a mad desperado in our Twentieth Century Northern Hemisphere Nirvana deserts.

We rattled on down through her iris bed and broke into the wide shimmering pavement. “Contemplate those holy hydrants,” he shouted back at me through the wind. “Get a load of those petulant operable latches; catch the magic of those pickets standing up proud and sequential like the arguments in Immanuel Kant; boom, boom, bitty-boom
BOOM!
” and it was true.

“What happens when we’re dead?” I asked.

“The infinite never-to-be-defiled subtlety of the late Big Sid Catlett on the hushed trap drums,” he continued, mad with his own dreams, imitating the whisks, “Swish, swish, swishy-swish
SWOOSH!
”

The sun was breaking over the tops of Mr. Linderman’s privet hedge, little rows of leaves set in there delicate and justso like mints in a Howard Johnson’s roadside eatery. Mitzi Leggett came out of the house, and Gogi stopped the scooter, and put his hands on her. “The virginal starchblue fabric; printed with stylized kittens and puppies,” Gogi explained in his curiously beseechingly transcendent accents. “The searing incredible
innocence!
Oh! Oh! Oh!” His eyes poured water down his face like broken blisters.

“Take me along,” Mitzi said openly to me, right with Gogi there and hearing every word, alive to every meaning, his nervous essence making his freckles tremble like a field of Iowa windblown nochaff barley.

“I want to,” I told her, and tried to, but I couldn’t, not there. I didn’t have the stomach for it. She pretended to care. She was a lovely beauty. I felt my spokes snap under me; Gogi was going again, his eyes tightshut in ecstasy, his foot kicking so the hole in his shoesole showed every time, a tiny chronic rent in the iridescent miasmal veil that Intrinsic Mind tries to hide behind.

Wow! Dr. Fairweather’s house came up on the left, delicious stucco like piecrust in the type of joints that attract truckers, and then the place of the beautiful Mrs. Mertz, with her
canny
deeprooted husband bringing up glorious heartbreaking tabourets and knickknacks from his workshop in the basement, a betooled woodshavingsmelling fantasy worthy of Bruegel or Hegel or a seagull. Vistas! Old Miss Hooper raced into her yard and made a grab for us, and Gogi Himmelman, the excruciating superbo, shifted to the other foot and laughed at her careworn face. Then the breathless agape green space of the Princeling mansion, with its rich calm and potted Tropic of Cancer plants. Then it was over.

Gogi and I went limp at the corner under a sign saying
ELM STREET
with irony because all the elms had been cut down so they wouldn’t get the blight, sad stumps diminishing down the American perspective whisperingly.

“My spokes are gone,” I told him.

“Friend—ahem
—zip, zip—
parting a relative concept—Bergson’s invaluable marvelchocked work—tch, tch.” He stood there, desperately wanting to do the right thing, yet always lacking with an indistinguishable grandeur that petty ability.

“Go,” I told him. He was already halfway back, a flurrying spark, to where Mitzi waited with irrepressible womanwarmth.

Well. In landsend despair I stood there stranded. Across the asphalt that was sufficiently semifluid to receive and embalm millions of starsharp stones and bravely gay candywrappers a drugstore twinkled artificial enticement. But I was not allowed to cross the street. I stood on the gray curb thinking, They said I could cross it when I grew up, but what do they mean grown up? I’m thirty-nine now, and felt sad.

1959

MIKE NICHOLS

SAVE MY SEAT

T
HERE
is a still newer wave of films on its way from Italy. Here are some synopses, so that you can plan your weekends.

“THE OCCURRENCE”

Giovanna has lost her thimble. For the first two and three-quarters hours of the film, she and her friends look for it. In the final ten minutes, she is raped, and we are left with a sense of loss.

“The Occurrence” is the first film made by the cruel and talented Dominic Fabiani, and stars his good friend and constant companion Fabiana Dominici.

“CARLO AND HIS BROTHERS”

“Carlo and His Brothers” is the odyssey of Carlo and his brothers, Niccolo, Giacomo, Ottorino, Gioacchino, Giuseppe, Vittorio, Gaetano, Ruggiero, Cesare, and Pietro, who emigrate from the suburbs of Rome to midtown Rome. In the course of the conflicts brought about by the crude uprooting forced on them by the Industrial Revolution, Niccolo becomes deeply obsessed with Giulietta, who loves Ruggiero and Pietro. Gaetano marries Francesca, whose affair with Giuseppe has caused him heartlessly to leave Gina, who, in her bitterness, impulsively tells Cesare that Floria has been carrying on a liaison with Goldfine.

At the big family reunion, Antonietta, unable to contain her unhappiness, reveals her pregnancy. In their grief, the brothers visit the childlike Sylvana, who for all of them has been their only contact with the soil from which they have been uprooted. They rape her, and we are left with a sense of loss.

“Carlo and His Brothers” is the first film from the perverse and talented Penuche Marchesi, and stars his good friend and constant companion Gérard Durain.

“
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
”

Gia and Maria, mother and daughter, walk the length of wartime Italy to present their last pair of stockings to the Pope. The stockings are lost in Torino, where they settle to look for them. After Torino is devastated by American bombs, Gia and Maria are raped by the Army, and we are left with a sense of loss.

This is the twenty-seventh film about war-torn Italy by the bitter and successful Carissimo De Vita; it stars his good friends and constant companions Lucia Vengerini and Patsy Harkness.

1961

WOODY ALLEN

HASSIDIC TALES, WITH A GUIDE TO THEIR INTERPRETATION BY THE NOTED SCHOLAR

A
MAN
journeyed to Chelm in order to seek the advice of Rabbi Ben Kaddish, the holiest of all ninth-century rabbis and perhaps the greatest
noodge
of the medieval era.

“Rabbi,” the man asked, “where can I find peace?”

The Hassid surveyed him and said, “Quick, look behind you!”

The man turned around, and Rabbi Ben Kaddish smashed him in the back of the head with a candlestick. “Is that peaceful enough for you?” he chuckled, adjusting his
yarmulke.

In this tale, a meaningless question is asked. Not only is the question meaningless but so is the man who journeys to Chelm to ask it. Not that he was so far away from Chelm to begin with, but why shouldn’t he stay where he is? Why is he bothering Rabbi Ben Kaddish—the Rabbi doesn’t have enough trouble? The truth is, the Rabbi’s in over his head with gamblers, and he has also been named in a paternity case by a Mrs. Hecht. No, the point of this tale is that this man has nothing better to do with his time than journey around and get on people’s nerves. For this, the Rabbi bashes his head in, which, according to the Torah, is one of the most subtle methods of showing concern. In a similar version of this tale, the Rabbi leaps on top of the man in a frenzy and carves the story of Ruth on his nose with a stylus.