Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (53 page)

Hang it all, Mark Cross,

there can be but the one little black book. . . .

Under black leather dress, lithe daughter of telephone directory . . .

I said noises could be in a poem. I threw a beer stein on the floor and asked what word the noise sounded like. “Bunk.” “Drunk.” “Black.” “Bash.” Right away Emily wrote something down and gave it to me:

I dreamt I was a Key Club,

Select Fraternity.

At night the eligible Men

All had a Bash at me.

I said that in a poem you can compare things in goofy ways. Compare something small to something yellow, something big to something you don’t know the name for, something married to something legally separated. William later told me that this idea made him write his nice poem that starts:

Shall I compare thee to your place or mine?

I WAS surprised when it was 4
A.M.,
closing time at Ozymandias II. The students were still quite excited and said could they stay for a few minutes after hours because they wanted to collaborate on one final poem, a poem for me. They made me go into the john while they wrote, and when I came back they were laughing. The poem was this:

Thank you, this has been as much fun as a free trip

To Aspen—only I can’t ski and anyhow I’d probably break something

In several places, crack! crack! crack!

Gosh, thanks, I simply feel as if you gave me a raunchy souvenir T-shirt from the

Annual Bachelor Rally—quite an icebreaker, but I already have one.

By the way, thank you for this night like a bag of yellow Doritos, the name reminds me of a dog I once heard of named Doris

But I’m on a diet of blue and of purple.

Thank you for an experience similar to drinking tee Martoonis,

Which I could compare to those other clear drinks that I can hardly be expected to remember the name of. Oh—water!

Listen, really, we all thank you for teaching us that looks aren’t everything, even in a poem.

I said they had learned a whole lot and it was a really nice poem, one that gave a strong feeling of niceness.

1978

IAN FRAZIER

DATING YOUR MOM

I
N
today’s fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore. Here is a grown, experienced, loving woman—one you do not have to go to a party or a singles bar to meet, one you do not have to go to great lengths to get to know. There are hundreds of times when you and your mother are thrown together naturally, without the tension that usually accompanies courtship—just the two of you, alone. All you need is a little presence of mind to take advantage of these situations. Say your mom is driving you downtown in the car to buy you a new pair of slacks. First, find a nice station on the car radio, one that she likes. Get into the pleasant lull of freeway driving—tires humming along the pavement, air-conditioner on max. Then turn to look at her across the front seat and say something like, “You know, you’ve really kept your shape, Mom, and don’t think I haven’t noticed.” Or suppose she comes into your room to bring you some clean socks. Take her by the wrist, pull her close, and say, “Mom, you’re the most fascinating woman I’ve ever met.” Probably she’ll tell you to cut out the foolishness, but, I can guarantee you one thing: she will never tell your dad. Possibly she would find it hard to say, “Dear, Piper just made a pass at me,” or possibly she is secretly flattered, but, whatever the reason, she will keep it to herself until the day comes when she is no longer ashamed to tell the world of your love.

Dating your mother seriously might seem difficult at first, but once you try it I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at how easy it is. Facing up to your intention is the main thing: you have to want it bad enough. One problem is that lots of people get hung up on feelings of guilt about their dad. They think, Oh, here’s this kindly old guy who taught me how to hunt and whittle and dynamite fish—I can’t let him go on into his twilight years alone. Well, there are two reasons you can dismiss those thoughts from your mind. First,
every
woman, I don’t care who she is, prefers her son to her husband. That is a simple fact; ask any woman who has a son, and she’ll admit it. And why shouldn’t she prefer someone who is so much like herself, who represents nine months of special concern and love and intense physical closeness—someone whom she actually created? As more women begin to express the need to have something all their own in the world, more women are going to start being honest about this preference. When you and your mom begin going together, you will simply become part of a natural and inevitable historical trend.

Second, you must remember this about your dad: you have your mother, he has his! Let him go put the moves on his own mother and stop messing with yours. If his mother is dead or too old to be much fun anymore, that’s not your fault, is it? It’s not your fault that he didn’t realize his mom for the woman she was, before it was too late. Probably he’s going to try a lot of emotional blackmail on you just because you had a good idea and he never did. Don’t buy it. Comfort yourself with the thought that your dad belongs to the last generation of guys who will let their moms slip away from them like that.

Once your dad is out of the picture—once he has taken up fly-tying, joined the Single Again Club, moved to Russia, whatever—and your mom has been wooed and won, if you’re anything like me you’re going to start having so much fun that the good times you had with your mother when you were little will seem tame by comparison. For a while, Mom and I went along living a contented, quiet life, just happy to be with each other. But after several months we started getting into some different things, like the big motorized stroller. The thrill I felt the first time Mom steered me down the street! On the tray, in addition to my Big Jim doll and the wire with the colored wooden beads, I have my desk blotter, my typewriter, an in-out basket, and my name plate. I get a lot of work done, plus I get a great chance to people-watch. Then there’s my big, adult-sized highchair, where I sit in the evening as Mom and I watch the news and discuss current events, while I paddle in my food and throw my dishes on the floor. When Mom reaches to wipe off my chin and I take her hand, and we fall to the floor in a heap—me, Mom, highchair, and all—well, those are the best times, those are the very best times.

It is true that occasionally I find myself longing for even more—for things I know I cannot have, like the feel of a firm, strong, gentle hand at the small of my back lifting me out of bed into the air, or someone who could walk me around and burp me after I’ve watched all the bowl games and had about nine beers. Ideally, I would like a mom about nineteen or twenty feet tall, and although I considered for a while asking my mom to start working out with weights and drinking Nutrament, I finally figured, Why put her through it? After all, she is not only my woman, she is my best friend. I have to take her as she is, and the way she is is plenty good enough for me.

1978

IAN FRAZIER

A READING LIST FOR YOUNG WRITERS

W
HEN
aspiring young authors come to me and ask what books I think it essential for a modern writer to have read, I am hard pressed for an answer. I dislike talking about writing, because I believe that the job of a writer is to write rather than talk, and that real writing is something so deep within one that any discussion profanes it. In addition, I have a profound distrust of lists—the ten-best this, the twenty-worst that. Such lists strike me as a characteristically American oversimplification of life’s diversity. Like most writers of any experience, I fear making lists simply because I fear leaving something out. Young writers, however, can be very insistent (I have found), and, as no less an authority than Flaubert once said, “what a scholar one might be if one knew well merely some half a dozen books.” So I have decided to tackle this difficult task despite my misgivings. The following six works are ones that I believe every writer—in fact, every educated person—should know as well as he knows his own name and telephone number:

“Remembrance of Things Past.” Marcel Proust’s lyric, luminous evocation of lost time is arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Moving from private to public scope, from the narrator’s boyhood in the small provincial town of Combray, through the glittering salons of the Faubourg-Saint-Germain in Paris, to the sun-blinding hotels and beaches of Hawaii’s Diamond Head, this monumental work has as its intent the precise description of Time itself. Time is as much a character in the book as the narrator, Marcel, or his ex-wife, Valérie. When Marcel meets Valérie on a flight to Honolulu, she is much changed since he saw her last; now she is an international diamond smuggler, and the mob has put a hundred-thousand-dollar price on her head. Again, Time is the genie who reveals to Marcel unguessed secrets about a woman with whom he was once deeply in love. Many writers have imitated Proust’s generous, untrammelled, multi-hued prose; none has ever equalled it.

“Madame Bovary.” In Emma Bovary, Flaubert created a character who will live as long as there are books and readers. Flaubert, we are told, wrote slowly and carefully; I try to take the same care when I read him. In the marvellous scene when Emma first discovers that the petit-bourgeois pharmacist, Homais, is operating a baby-stealing ring, the intricate chiastic imagery switches from the look of horror on Emma’s face to the happy, gurgling laughter of the innocent babies in their makeshift cribs in the garage behind the drugstore. Flaubert’s genius for the accumulation of observed detail in delineating character showed the way for many later writers—particularly James Joyce.

“War and Peace.” Tolstoy’s epic novel of Russia during the Napoleonic era is, in essence, a parable about the power of the media. Pierre Bezuhov is the ambitious young reporter who will go to any length to get a story—including murder. What he doesn’t know is that Natasha Rostov, Moscow’s feared “Dragon Lady,” wants Pierre iced, and the hit man is Prince Andrei, Pierre’s old college roommate! No writer who ever lived possessed a surer sense of plot than Tolstoy.

“Buddenbrooks.” Meet Antonie. She’s beautiful. She’s talented. She’s sexy. She’s the daughter of rich German businessman Jean Buddenbrook. And she’s a walking time bomb. Somebody wants her dead, and she has been infected with a deadly virus that takes twenty-four hours to work. Half the city of Frankfurt goes underground looking for the antidote, and the police, in desperation, join forces with the mob. Author Thomas Mann interweaves these many strands so effortlessly that it is easy to see why he, along with Proust and Joyce, was considered one of the three main architects of twentieth-century literature.

“Bleak House.” This is the one with the car chase, right? And the exploding helicopter at the end? Excellent! A neglected book but one of Dickens’ best.

“Ulysses.” Stephen Dedalus, star of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” teams up with twelve beautiful lady truckers to find the madman responsible for a series of brutal murders. When Stephen himself becomes a suspect, he turns to his old buddy from ’Nam, Jim Rockford. Jim comes up with a great plan, which is to pretend that Stephen is dead and to plant a fake obituary in his brother-in-law’s newspaper. Then Jim, Angel, Molly Bloom, Buck Mulligan, Rocky, Stephen, and the twelve beautiful lady truckers fly over to Dublin, Stephen’s home town. It is St. Patrick’s Day, and in the mass of people the killer escapes. Then the scene shifts to New Orleans, where Mardi Gras is in full swing. Then it’s down to Rio, for Carnaval. All this time, Joyce keeps the reader informed about what is going on inside each character’s head.

MY list is, of course, only a beginning. View it as the foundation of a literary mind; do not mistake it for the edifice itself. If you approach these books with passion, with an eye to their symmetries and harmonies and violent dissonances, you will not necessarily learn how to write. But you will certainly come nearer an understanding of what it is, gloriously, to read.

1982

DONALD BARTHELME

HOW I WRITE MY SONGS

BY BILL B. WHITE

S
OME
of the methods I use to write my songs will be found in the following examples. Everyone has a song in him or her. Writing songs is a basic human trait. I am not saying that it is easy; like everything else worthwhile in this world it requires concentration and hard work. The methods I will outline are a good way to begin and have worked for me but they are by no means the only methods that can be used. There is no one set way of writing your songs, every way is just as good as the other as Kipling said. (I am talking now about the lyrics; we will talk about the melodies in a little bit.) The important thing is to put true life into your songs, things that people know and can recognize and truly feel. You have to be open to experience in what is going on around you, the things of daily life. Often little things that you don’t even think about at the time can be the basis of a song.

A knowledge of all the different types of songs that are commonly accepted is helpful. To give you an idea of the various types of songs there are I am going to tell you how I wrote various of my own, including “Rudelle,” “Last Night,” “Sad Dog Blues,” and others, how I came to write these songs and where I got the idea and what the circumstances were, more or less, so that you will be able to do the same thing. Just remember,
there is no substitute for sticking to it
and listening to the work of others who have been down this road before you and have mastered their craft over many years.

In the case of “Rudelle” I was sitting at my desk one day with my pencil and yellow legal pad and I had two things that were irritating me. One was a letter from the electric company that said “The check for $75.60 sent us in payment of your bill has been returned to us by the bank unhonored etc. etc.” Most of you who have received this type of letter from time to time know how irritating this kind of communication can be as well as embarrassing. The other thing that was irritating me was that I had a piece of white thread tied tight around my middle at navel height as a reminder to keep my stomach pulled in to strengthen the abdominals while sitting—this is the price you pay for slopping down too much beer when your occupation is essentially a sit-down one! Anyhow I had these two things itching me, so I decided to write a lost-my-mind song.