Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (52 page)

SO far, we have been concentrating on cone problems, but of course there is the ice cream to worry about, too. In this area, immediate action is sometimes needed on three fronts at once. Frequently the ice cream will be mounted on the cone in a way that is perilously lopsided. This requires immediate corrective action to move it back into balance—a slight pressure downward with the teeth and lips to seat the ice cream more firmly in and on the cone, but not so hard, of course, as to break the cone. On other occasions, gobs of ice cream will be hanging loosely from the main body, about to fall to the ground (bad) or onto one’s hand (far, far worse). This requires instant action, too; one must snap at the gobs like a frog in a swarm of flies. Sometimes, trickles of ice cream will already (already!) be running down the cone toward one’s fingers, and one must quickly raise the cone, tilting one’s face skyward, and lick with an upward motion that pushes the trickles away from the fingers and (as much as possible) into one’s mouth. Every ice-cream cone is like every other ice-cream cone in that it potentially can present all of these problems, but each ice-cream cone is paradoxically unique in that it will present the problems in a different order of emergency and degree of severity. It is, thank God, a rare ice-cream cone that will present all three kinds of problems in exactly the same degree of emergency. With each cone, it is necessary to make an instantaneous judgment as to where the greatest danger is, and to
act!
A moment’s delay, and the whole thing will be a mess before you’ve even tasted it (
Fig. 1
). If it isn’t possible to decide between any two of the three basic emergency problems (i.e., lopsided mount, dangling gobs, running trickles), allow yourself to make an arbitrary adjudication; assign a “heads” value to one and a “tails” value to the other, then flip a coin to decide which is to be tended to first. Don’t, for heaven’s sake,
actually
flip a coin—you’d have to dig in your pockets for it, or else have it ready in your hand before you were handed the cone. There isn’t remotely enough time for anything like that. Just decide
in your mind
which came up, heads or tails, and then try to remember as fast as you can which of the problems you had assigned to the winning side of the coin. Probably, though, there isn’t time for any of this. Just do something, however arbitrary. Act!
Eat!

In trying to make wise and correct decisions about the ice-cream cone in your hand, you should always keep the objectives in mind. The main objective, of course, is to get the cone under control. Secondarily, one will want to eat the cone calmly and with pleasure. Real pleasure lies not simply in eating the cone but in eating it
right.
Let us assume that you have darted to your open space and made your necessary emergency repairs. The cone is still dangerous—still, so to speak, “live.” But you can now proceed with it in an orderly fashion. First, revolve the cone through the full three hundred and sixty degrees, snapping at the loose gobs of ice cream; turn the cone by moving the thumb away from you and the forefinger toward you, so the cone moves counterclockwise. Then, with the cone still “wound,” which will require the wrist to be bent at the full right angle toward you, apply pressure with the mouth and tongue to accomplish overall realignment, straightening and settling the whole mess. Then, unwinding the cone back through the full three hundred and sixty degrees, remove any trickles of ice cream. From here on, some supplementary repairs may be necessary, but, the cone is now defused.

At this point, you can risk a glance around you. How badly the others are doing with their cones! Now you can settle down to eating yours. This is done by eating the ice cream off the top. At each bite, you must press down cautiously, so that the ice cream settles farther and farther into the cone. Be very careful not to break the cone. Of course, you never take so much ice cream into your mouth at once that it hurts your teeth; for the same reason, you never let unmelted ice cream into the back of your mouth. If all these procedures are followed correctly, you should shortly arrive at the ideal—the way an ice-cream cone is always pictured but never actually is when it is handed to you (
Fig. 2
). The ice cream should now form a small dome whose circumference exactly coincides with the large circumference of the cone itself—a small skullcap that fits exactly on top of a larger, inverted dunce cap. You have made order out of chaos; you are an artist. You have taken an unnatural, abhorrent, irregular, chaotic form, and from it you have sculpted an ordered, ideal shape that might be envied by Praxiteles or even Euclid.

Now at last you can begin to take little nibbles of the cone itself, being very careful not to crack it. Revolve the cone so that its rim remains smooth and level as you eat both ice cream and cone in the same ratio. Because of the geometrical nature of things, a constantly reduced inverted cone still remains a perfect inverted cone no matter how small it grows, just as a constantly reduced dome held within a cone retains
its
shape. Because you are constantly reshaping the dome of ice cream with your tongue and nibbling at the cone, it follows in logic—and in actual practice, if you are skillful and careful—that the cone will continue to look exactly the same, except for its size, as you eat it down, so that at the very end you will hold between your thumb and forefinger a tiny, idealized replica of an ice-cream cone, a thing perhaps one inch high. Then, while the others are licking their sticky fingers, preparatory to wiping them on their clothes, or going back to the ice-cream stand for more paper napkins to try to clean themselves up
—then
you can hold the miniature cone up for everyone to see, and pop it gently into your mouth.

1968

VERONICA GENG

TEACHING POETRY WRITING TO SINGLES

I
HAD
the idea to teach more kinds of people to write poetry as a result of two previous books of mine: “I Taught Republicans to Write Poetry” and “How to Teach the Writing of Poetry to Fashion Coördinators.” I thought of singles because of an interesting hour I had spent reading my own poems at a singles bar called Ozymandias II, and because of many other hours, much less happy ones, I had spent before my marriage as a visitor to another singles bar, Nick’s Roost, where there were no activities of that kind going on.

I asked the owners of Ozymandias II, my friends Ozzie and Mandy Dias, to arrange for the class. I had four students, and we met once, on a Friday at midnight, at the big table in front. Like the others in the crowded room, most of the four were in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. Some of them wore glasses. One worked for an escort agency, one was a hayride organizer, another a fashion coördinator, another a Republican. The singles bar gave these people a feeling of meetability, but none had ever written poetry there, and none, I think, would have done so without me.

I started the class by saying what I was going to do was get them to write words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper (I didn’t want to scare them with the formal term “poem”) and then I would write a book about how much I had helped them. The students were not in the habit of sitting and hearing something like this explained. Some were so distracted that they could only talk in incomplete sentences, such as “What the—?!” Others stared nervously at the TV screen above the bar, where the final minutes of some kind of sports event seemed to be going on. I said that writing words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper was not the hard thing that many people think. I said how could it be hard if I was going to teach it to them? I was sure I could give them the mastery of literary form and metaphor so lacking in singles-bar life. I said I knew they had all been single since childhood and I could see how this might make them feel “unmarried” and “on their own,” but I said John Milton and Vachel Lindsay and James Dickey had all been single at one time or another and that writing words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper had helped them to stop running.

I said the first thing we would do would be a collaboration. I knew the students had all gone on a singles bicycling tour of the Wye River in England five years before, so I said I want everyone to remember that trip and think of a sentence about it. Something you saw. Or an outfit you wore. Or a feeling you had about time passing and your not being married yet and having to go on bicycle tours to meet somebody. I’ll write down everyone’s sentence and put them together, I said, and we’ll have words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper.

At first the students were puzzled. “We went there, that’s all.” “I remember we did different stuff.” “And bicycling.” Then William said, “O.K. A double vodka, please. Five years have passed; five summers, with the length of five long winters!” This was a good start, I said, especially the dramatic “frame” made by “O.K. A double vodka, please,” as if the lines were being said casually to someone by someone sitting in a bar or tavern.

Then Ezra spoke up: “And again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland brodod´aktuloV.” This was better than I had expected, but the poem was getting a false-sounding jig-jigging rhythm, and I said for the students not to worry about academic gimmicks such as metre. I also said try to get in more of your own personal feelings and hangups. I said for instance I remember when I was in high school I worried a lot about my bike getting rusty.

It was Emily’s turn: “Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts: the soul selects her own scene, but you meet more eligible guys by going out and partying rather than staying at home.” I said the repetition of “scene” was nice, it gave a nice feeling of repetition.

At this point William got very agitated and said we were ruining “his” idea. I said all right, you do the next part, but I pressed him to put in more details from his own experience as a single—the very details that he seemed most reluctant to put in, maybe because he thought they were “stupid.” He continued: “The day is come when I again socialize, taking a nice girl to dinner and a show, and view the floor show and the salad bar, which at this season, with its unripe fruits, is clad in one green hue, and lose myself ’mid men and women, who have different attitudes toward sex.”

Quite soon the students felt they had enough words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper. I read the results back to them and said what they had written was a poem. I asked them to think of a title. They decided the poem was really about working out the problems of writing a poem, so they called it “Working Out at the Wye.”

I THEN said to do individual poems. Writing a poem all by yourself is something that nobody can do with you, and this is a special problem for people who are already panicked about being alone, such as so-called singles. I say “so-called” because the words “single,” “bachelorette,” etc., may be thought to apply to people’s
imaginations,
and they do not. The power to see the world as a configuration of couples linked inextricably in Holy Matrimony is the possession of everyone.

I told the students that one of the main problems poets have is what to write about. I said this was a really hard problem if you were lonely and in a studio apartment and had to go out to a bar to seek some grotesque mockery of human contact. But I said that in a poem you can be somebody else, you can even be
two
people. I said for everyone to start their poem with “Let us . . .” The “us” in the poem could do anything: get married, have a huge church wedding with a flower girl and a page boy, sit down and talk over family finances—anything.

The most popular “Let us . . .” poem was Tom’s:

Let us go then, you and me,

When the weekend is spread out for us to see

Like a roommate bombed out of his gourd under the table. . . .

Oh, do not ask, “You said you were who?”

Let us go to the free luau.

In the room the women come and go

 Talking of someone who might be tall and share their enthusiasm for theatre.

I praised Tom’s poem, saying it might seem silly to a lot of people but to me it gave a nice sociable feeling, the sounds of nice people talking to each other. I said there were many more things having to do with the five senses that could be in a poem, like colors. I said for instance when I was a boy I had a dog named Rusty. I said close your eyes and take a swallow of beer and say what color it reminds you of. They answered. “Black.” “Beer color.” “Black.” “Blackish.” After this exercise, Ezra wrote his “Little Black Book” poem: