Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (47 page)

In recent months, the Communists have been entertaining more—having more people over at Plenteous Rice Harvest Brunches and Revere Progressive Elders At-Homes, and guests have remarked that they notice a new atmosphere of hope in my former residence. After all, it’s in a nice neighborhood, and it’s convenient—right on the I.R.T.—and there are lots of things to do in the area, and the Communists have my list of sitters. They have a two-year lease on the place, so unless rent control is repealed the rent won’t go up right away, and they also have a sublet clause, just in case they ever want to move on. It’s a fairly safe part of town, and just a couple of blocks away there’s a delicatessen that’s open until two, where they sell Pepperidge Farm cookies, and there are some terrific new courses they can take at The New School, and things just might turn out to be not all that bad.

1976

GEORGE W. S. TROW

SPILL

A
VICIOUS
oil spill at Bergdorf’s has ruined hundreds of pretty items. Swirling up at a rate of one thousand gallons a minute, the oil has ruined several slit-to-the-waist dresses in a silk crêpe de Chine that shimmers like a wicked smile in peach, auburn, dusky blue, and lemp. Attempts to cap the spill—the standby crew in painters’ pants (tied at the ankle), Pure-As-Suède tool holders, construction caps, and red-red goggles—failed utterly, sending streams of thick crude into eyes, ears, mouths,
everywhere,
soiling
everything,
leaving a thick-thick residue on lips and fingertips.

The secondary effects are just beginning to be felt. Horrid oil balls, clumping together in several large masses, have moved up stairwells, emergency chutes, and steamways, to upper floors heretofore judged impervious to spills and mishaps, frustrating all attempts to preserve from damage hundreds of the prettiest possible snakeskin bags—clutch, over-the-shoulder on a whisper of a
string,
attached by
thongs
to wrist or belt, or tied about the neck. Refreshing!

Many things have been tried, naturally. Real oil riggers have set about to drill a relief hole, but they can’t seem to get the hang of it. In fact, inside sources who nearly always know the
scoop
claim that the relief well is now gushing tens of thousands of gallons more of the rich, expensive crude over the new Laudanum Collection of antibacterial facial formulas, including Stripped Mask, Under-Glaze Country Bronzing Creme, and Laudanum Laurel, Laudanum Landscape, and Laudanum Lavalier unscented pure-as-pure moisturizing facilitators for regular, oily, and dry complexions. Some of the oil riggers have gone back to the Southwest, naturally, but others have come up with a new-cut overall,
full through the waist
but pegging, pegging down the leg. Flattering!

SOME of New York’s top-top party people have tried to be helpful—organizing little teas, sending in relief crews, planning out mop-up operations, etc. Most just peek in, but one or two real friends won’t leave the scene. Mrs. Freddy Boots, for instance, hasn’t had a bath for days, won’t change her slicker-smock, plunges in time after time in a reckless attempt to save some of the fabulous gabardine, which has really been completely ruined by the oil. Mrs. Boots takes each retrieved oily item and conducts an elaborate ritual, using enthusiastic young volunteers. First, each item is soaked in a harsh—almost unbearably harsh—acid bath to remove the oil from within the fine-weave gabardine. Then Mrs. Boots
very quickly
transfers the cloth—before it has a chance to utterly disintegrate in the harsh-harsh bath—into a soothing moisture-full solution of
entirely natural
ingredients: cool-as-silk mixtures of precious cress, dill, avocado, and arugula, for instance, undercut with just a tang of lemon to keep the vegetable matter from actually penetrating into the cloth fibre and rotting there. Despite her best efforts, this regimen hasn’t worked out yet—the gabardine, horribly weakened by the acid bath, tends to blotch and then clump in the vegetable moistures—but Mrs. Boots won’t give up, and she plunges in again and again, actually diving under the oil, where you can’t get a breath and where the terrible, powerful currents set in motion by the flow of oil can suck you deep under in a minute or,
worse still,
send you spinning up into one of the powerful jets of salt water that completely inept temporary workers (many of them would-be buyers, assistant buyers, and stylists) direct here and there almost at random in an attempt to reduce the viscosity.

Only the top-top party people understand.

“It’s fabulous fabric,” a child said—a child who is even now much more popular and social than many mature people. “We may never see gabardine like this again.”

1980

BILL FRANZEN

HEARING FROM WAYNE

W
HILE
I was flipping through the day’s mail after a real yawn fest of a workday at the Stereo Shack, I came across something that knocked me over like a good brushback pitch. It was a postcard from Wayne, and I’ve really got to hand it to him, but before I get going on Wayne’s postcard and on Wayne and on how Wayne was my best friend and just the whole incredible Wayne Story, I’d like to say right up front that my
real
fear of any kind of hereafter is that instead of being sort of reunited with my family and friends and everyone I’ve ever felt close to, I’ll get there and find myself in the middle of just casual acquaintances—people I recognize, people I always said hi-how-you-doing to, but
nobody
I ever felt close to. Like the guy from the luncheonette, kitty-corner from the Stereo Shack, who makes the great two-story ham sandwiches, plenty of mustard, but who I can’t exactly say I’m attached to. He’s a nice guy and all, and I even gave him ten per cent on some speakers once, but if he’s the first person I see in the afterlife it’ll be some letdown. And if I reach life’s nineteenth hole
before
him, and I’m the first one
he
sees, I can understand how it’ll sour the whole experience for him, too. I’d probably try to duck before he saw me, but if he saw me ducking, that would be pretty awful. I mean, imagine yourself popping through into extra innings, only to see one of your regular sandwich customers, who suddenly ducks, pretends he doesn’t know you, pretends you never made maybe two hundred and ninety-seven ham sandwiches for him during his lifetime, plenty of mustard. Now, I can’t tell from Wayne’s postcard if the afterlife ever starts out that creepy for anyone, but if it does, it’s just like Wayne not to go into it. That’s the way Wayne was, and one reason why he was my best friend and one reason why he’ll stay my best friend, especially if he can keep up this great second effort through the mail. He did slip in a few comments about the afterlife on his card, but nothing that would scare any of us still playing life’s back nine.

On a snowy night one year ago, Wayne and I were sitting and watering our faces in that Wild West bar called the Sitting Bull. Above the bar, there’s this giant painting of four Sioux Indians in big, flowing headdresses riding in a gondola in Venice that Wayne was so crazy about, and right in front of us those upside-down cowboy hats with the barbecue-flavored party mix that we both liked. Wayne and I were swapping stories about Harold, the Stereo Shack’s only TV salesman and a buddy from the Stereo Shack’s softball team. Harold had recently left the team and every other earthly organization after plowing smack into an oak tree. He wasn’t even supposed to be driving. This guy was a narcoleptic, which means permission denied as far as getting your hands on a wheel in this state goes. So anyway, old Wayne and I get to wondering what Harold’s .450 batting average is doing for him wherever he is now, and soon we’re speculating as to what that wherever actually is and if it would be possible for a guy exiting to that place to smuggle in a room equalizer. I explain to Wayne my fear of seeing just people I kind of recognize there, but take-it-as-it-comes Wayne, of course, says he’s not worried, and laughs through a mouthful of party mix. He says he’s expecting something more like the best room they have at the Ramada Inn in Fort Lauderdale, with telepathic models bringing you and your best deceased pals frothy turquoise drinks just as soon as you’ve all drained your clear orange ones.

Eventually, I get around to telling Wayne about Houdini and his wife. I took this book out from the bookmobile once that was all about the Houdinis conducting their own afterlife experiment. They went and promised each other that the first one of them to die would do everything possible to reach the one still alive. Well, Harry Houdini died in 1926. And, according to the book, before Beatrice Houdini died, in 1943, she admitted that she’d never heard from Harry and called their experiment a failure. But Wayne, who I guess was feeling his boilermakers pretty well by then, says he loves the idea anyway, and he gets me to say “What the heck” and shake hands and then sign and date a Sitting Bull Bar cocktail napkin with him to cement our own pact, and a man next to us who’s been muttering something about his sister making a thousand dollars a second seems glad to sign it, too.

WELL, that was a year ago. Then, a half year later, Wayne and I are locking up the Stereo Shack after a real gutterball of a business day when Wayne turns to me and says, “Let’s call ’em.” So we take turns calling our wives from a phone booth in the parking lot, and twenty cents later we’re loose. There’s some all-you-can-stand fish fry at the Sitting Bull, but it sounds a little too bush league to us. Instead, we drive out to Long Lake and smack two large buckets of balls each at Denny’s Driving Range. Wayne uses a 3-wood, and after every swipe says—loud enough for everybody there including Denny to hear—“
That’s
on the green.” Then we go nearby for some Italian and a couple of pitchers of draught beer. Later, when we’re cruising back in my Toronado with all the windows down, Wayne finds the head of a green toy soldier in my glove compartment. It’s just this tiny little rubbery soldier head without a body that my kid, Timmy, probably left around, and it made us sort of laugh. Then Wayne puts it in his left nostril—just a little ways—so that the little army man could sort of look out, and then turns so they’re both looking at me. And that really cracks me up. Next, Wayne says something like “Eyes on the road!” and snaps his head straight ahead, so that the soldier watches the road, and it’s stupid, but we’re giggling like high schoolers and tears are coming down. But then Wayne—gasping for air—sort of snorts inwards and the little head vanished and we had to drive right to Long Lake Hospital and it wasn’t funny anymore. And the way it turned out, the inside of that hospital was the last thing on earth poor Wayne ever saw—at least in this life.

ANYWAY, Wayne’s postcard is a miniature version of the big painting above the bar at the Sitting Bull—the one with the four Sioux Indians in headdresses riding in a gondola in Venice. Except that on Wayne’s postcard there’s a fifth passenger squeezed in between two of the Indians, and it’s Wayne in his Stereo Shack softball uniform, smiling and with his cap on backwards. There wasn’t a stamp or a postage mark anywhere on the card, but there was a decent-sized message in Wayne’s usual slanty brand of printing. Wayne began by saying hi and saying he bet I was surprised he’d got ahold of me like we’d talked about and that he missed hanging out together, but that at least this was some kind of way to reach me. Then he asked if my Timmy was still playing Battle of the Bulge in the car, and wrote “ha ha” afterwards. He said that his notion of the hereafter being something like a room at the Ramada Inn in Fort Lauderdale was way off, except for the turquoise drinks. He said that the stereo systems there aren’t nearly as impressive as you might expect, but added, “The acoustics in our modules are choice.” He plays a lot of what he calls Cluster Ball there—“a potent blend of golf, bowling, and softball for large numbers,” in his words. Then he advised me to get out in life and shake my tail feathers all I can, and said if I wanted to perform one especially decent act, I should tell the police that seventy-nine cats and eleven dogs are being kept inside a home at 281 South Brook Lane, about half a mile from Denny’s Driving Range.

Finally, Wayne said it’s really not so bad after your third strike and not to worry about it but just to stay loose and go with it and that everything will make a lot more sense to me when we meet up again—“more than you could ever imagine right now,” Wayne wrote. Which was nice of Wayne to say, and another reason why he was my best friend and why he’ll stay my best friend—regardless of whether or not he can keep up this great second effort through the mail.

1983

JACK HANDEY

STUNNED

A
S
I looked through the telescope, I could hardly believe my eyes: There before me, in the constellation of Virgo, circling a medium-sized star, was a planet. And not just any planet. It had oceans and landmasses and polar ice caps, just like Earth.

And then it hit me: Not only was this planet a lot like Earth—it was
exactly
like Earth! It was an exact twin of our very own planet!

I was stunned. I had to walk away from the telescope. An exact copy of Earth! Were there people there? Were they like us? Did they have the same problems, the same hopes? When I finally summoned the courage to look again, I realized that I had been wrong. It wasn’t exactly like Earth. The continents didn’t have anywhere near the same shapes as ours, the oceans were different, and many other features were dissimilar. Still, it was a planet, and the first conclusive evidence of such outside our own solar system.

Then it hit me: According to my calculations, the entire planet—oceans, continents, and all—was only a mile in diameter, and rotating at more than twenty times per second. It was a world in miniature, spinning at a phenomenal rate of speed!

I was stunned. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my face in bewildered disbelief. After rechecking my calculations, I realized that I had been off on the size of the planet. It wasn’t a miniature planet but was instead about the size of our own Earth. And it wasn’t spinning as fast as I had originally calculated. In fact, it was spinning much slower—a little bit slower than our own planet. But that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.