IBID (14 page)
Authors: Mark Dunn
An even more bizarre (and uncorroborated) attempt to address Jonathan’s grief over the death of Winny comes to us from Davison. According to his diary both he and Jonathan spent the fifth anniversary of Winny’s departure in the home of a spiritualist who made a good faith effort to communicate with the deceased through the “thick curtain of mortality.” She did not succeed. Although a connection was made, it was Harry Houdini who allegedly took the celestial call that night and who asked Jonathan to get a message to his wife, who he understood had been trying to reach him since his passage (per their pre-mortem agreement). The message was this: “Yes, there is an afterlife. Yes, I love you still. The secret of the Water Torture Cell: false rivets.”
2.
Jonathan lost touch with Klempt after Winny’s death.
Winny’s best friend Cordelia Klempt (charter member of
the Bowery Hotel Round Table) gained some notoriety in her sunset years for defying the community of Desert Hills, Arizona, to which she retired in 1965, by xeroscaping her front lawn, much to the distress of her bermuda grass-loving sixty- and seventy-something neighbors. Cordelia’s response to the harassment and fines from the community board that followed was that she “lived in a &*%# desert and intended for her &#%#!* lawn to reflect that fact.” Despite being denounced and ostracized for wanting to ban water-greedy turf and deciduous plantings from her yard, she stayed put for another twenty years, and in the drought of 1970 had the pleasure of watching all her neighbor’s lawns go ugly-brown and brittle from stringent water restrictions. Still, she faced the likes of the following for much of her stay in the community.
Desert Hills News,
27 September 1967.
“Do You See What I.C.?”
by
Community Columnist I.C. Lavington
Cordelia Klempt continues to thumb her nose at us all as she shoves yet another unsightly cactus into that abortion she calls her front yard. She persists in forcing all of us to stomach that unsightly abomination of an eyesore every time we drive down Yucca Crest or turn onto Dry Mesa Parkway. It is noticeable, I might add, from as far away as Saguaro Circle and Sagebrush Lane.
One is inclined to say to the aesthetically-retarded Miss Klempt—this is America, my dear stupid woman, not the Soviet Union. Here we uphold beauty in all its plush, dewy greenery, in its riot of floral color. Your yard of rocks and sand and thirsty, gnarled desert succulents mocks your neighbors, mocks your community, mocks this very nation for which blood was spilled (and is currently being spilled as we do battle with the vicious V.C. in that land of rice paddies and coolie hats) so that we might live in peace
and prosperity among beauty and ample verdancy. Who are you to move to the desert and infect your property and our community with that selfsame desert? You are the most insidious form of Anti-American subversive.
Obviously, none of us endorses the placement of that burning cross in your front yard last weekend. But perhaps we can understand the anger that motivated it.
What is wrong with grass, Miss Klempt? And what is wrong with trying for once in your long rebellious life to
fit in
?
3.
“I want you to meet a young friend of mine: Jasmine.”
Much too young, it turned out. Jonathan came to realize that Davison’s first inning “Winny” home run had been a total fluke. A long series of matchmaking strike-outs followed. Eventually Jonathan had to ask his friend to stop fixing him up. Lanham, “Harlan Davison,”
Entrepreneurial History
, 13 (1990), 25-42.
4.
Jonathan dated Jasmine for five weeks.
The relationship was doomed from the start, and not only because Jonathan was rebounding badly from the death of Winny. Jasmine, a dead ringer for Clara Bow, was a typical young, indefatigable, devil-may-care flapper. She exhausted thirty-eight-year-old Jonathan, even as she divided her attention among all the other men whose names crowded her dance card. Here is an excerpt from the only existing letter from Jasmine to her soon-to-be-ex-beau (written on a sorority-sponsored road trip). Jasmine had only a few days earlier met one Reginald Grayson III, a Varsity-dragging John Held caricature, even down to the raccoon coat and Stutz Bearcat roadster. JBP, 2 May 1926.
“He’s a cakeater, Jonny, a real jazzbo but I’m no dumb Dora. I say,’You might be the big cheese in these parts but
I’m stuck on my Jonny, see? My Jonny, he’s the bee’s knees, the real McCoy.’ That’s what I tell him. I make nice with Reggie, you understand, but if he gets the least bit fresh, I go all hardboiled, I’m not bunking you. I can hold my own with jellybeans like him, you better believe it.
He does have IT, though. Positively, gotta admit it. But so do
you
, my little snugglepup. Just a little more crags ‘round the edges, dat’s all. And I’d have it no other way. You are my sheik of Araby, and don’t you worry your turbaned head, my dear. Tres copacetic, things is. Sheba — yours for life.
You are absolutely the berries!”
(A couple of days later Jasmine phoned to say she was engaged to Reginald. Jonathan was never to see her again.)
5.
“You got your pung cows and you got your chow cows.”
Ellery Reinhold,
The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, the Little Company That Could…and Then Did
, 101-03. Edders, the company’s new senior vice president for investor relations, had earned so much money shipping calf shin bones from his Chicago slaughterhouse to China to be made into Mah-Jongg tiles, that he was able to retire at age forty-one in 1928. When Jonathan snatched him up, he was happy to be going back to work again. Having invested heavily in the stock market (including sizeable holdings of Dandy-de-odor-o), Edders was hard hit by the Crash of ’29. He suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the remainder of his life in modest circumstances in a small Forest Hills, Queens, saltbox, picking up the occasional royalty check from verse he wrote for the Holiday Hearts greeting card company. When his mind began to fail, Holiday Hearts began to reject his work out of hand. One really can’t blame them if the following versification, unearthed from the company’s archives, is representative of the obtuseness and
offensive nature of his later efforts.
On one’s birthday
:
One year closer.
The grave draws nearer.
But that doesn’t make you any the less dearer.
Hugs and kisses and voices a’ trill.
But if you don’t mind my asking:
Where is the will?
On one’s anniversary (husband to wife)
:
Many years ago
In days of yore,
I gave my troth to an erstwhile whore.
I cleansed your womb of its former employ,
And gave you some measure of marital joy.
I forgot and forgave
And all was near bliss
Notwithstanding the blindness (from the syphilis).
On graduation from high school (from parents)
:
Graduation day.
Hip hip hooray!
Now go away.
And stay.
6.
“I’m Famine. This here’s Pestilence.”
Jonathan would have liked to have met all four of Notre Dame’s famed “horsemen,” immortalized by sportswriter Grantland Rice, but only Stuhldreher and Miller were dining at the hotel that night. Describing the chance encounter in a letter to his friend Toby (the Monkey Boy) Brancato (family papers), Jonathan noted that he might have lingered at the table all night, but, true to his name, Stuhldreyer really was “quite
famished” and couldn’t digest with someone hovering about.
7.
There followed a long series of mismatches and romantic misfires.
Furman,
The Story of Jonathan Blash—[ette].
8. “
I have a prolapsed womb. Would you still like to date me?”
Author’s interview with Charmian Campbell, granddaughter of Lavinia Hudd.
9. “
Can we postpone our first date until I get out of traction?”
Author’s interview with Bridey Burmeister, granddaughter of Astrid Csizmadia. Incidentally, Astrid broke her hip when the leather belt of her Vibro-Slim snapped and she fell backwards onto the living room floor.
10. “
Please don’t touch me there. It’s only our first date.”
Author’s interview with Eustacia Hodgdon, granddaughter of Ona Hodgdon. The body part in question was Ona’s arm.
11.
“First name’s Delicia; last name’s Everest. Would you like to mount me?”
JBP, “Hooker Encounters” Notebook.
12.
She never emerged from her coma.
Author’s interview with Lotta Patois, great niece of Marie Ward. This fact was disputed by one of the attending nurses who entered the room late one night to find Marie sitting straight up in bed and playing solitaire. The nurse was about to go to the phone to share the good news with Marie’s family (one evening with Marie at the newly opened Stork Club didn’t qualify Jonathan to be contacted) when she noticed a move that Marie had missed. The nurse quickly became engrossed in the game, and Marie, happy to be conscious and to have liberated all of her aces, invited the nurse to sit next to her in quiet, nocturnal communion. Only once did either speak to the other. Marie allegedly turned to her companion and
remarked, “It’s so nice to have conscious brain function, isn’t it?” After a few more minutes of thoughtful card play, Marie’s eyes suddenly rolled back in her head and she returned to her previous comatose state. The nurse plumped her pillow a bit, wiped a tiny thread of saliva from her chin, and then finished the card game for her. Many years passed before she mentioned the incident to anyone. She finally decided to share the story with her pastor, the Reverend Boxer Seale, who, not being Catholic, was under no ecclesiastical directive to keep it to himself, and so included it in his
When We From Sleep Awake
(Henderson, Kentucky: Joey Gee Books, 1975), a collection of anecdotes about resurrection, coma emergence, and rudely broken reveries.
13.
Jonathan resigned himself to lifelong bachelorhood.
Jonathan’s Diary, JBP, 9 August 1927.
14.
These were dark months for Jonathan and Dandy-de-odor-o.
The slump in sales may have also been attributed to a statement made by actor Wallace Beery in
Behind the Screen
, a popular Hollywood fan magazine. Tough guy Beery bragged, “I don’t need no sissy perfume-counter dabby-doo under my arms. A man’s supposed to smell like a man, not like some guzzied dame in a flower shop.” At the same time Jonathan and the Dandy-D board of directors were hearing the first of a string of charges leveled by the investigative press that the company’s assembly line equipment was unsafe. Reinhold,
The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o
, 156-57.
15.
The company was in the red due, in part, to blackened business practices
Perry Jennings’s exposé on defective assembly-line equipment at Dandy-de-odor-o’s Queens, New York factory represents only a small fraction of this investigative journalist’s prodigious reportorial and literary output. Never achieving the stature of such muckrakers as
Tarbell, Stannard Baker and Sinclair, Jennings in his hard-hitting pieces did reach a wide readership, most notably through his monthly contributions to
Jest Kids
, a periodical for boys and girls (although his wrenching accounts of child labor practices in the textile industry resulted in a severe drop in subscriptions to the magazine). A monthly cartoon to which he several years earlier contributed text and ongoing story lines, “The Continuing Adventures of Li’l Lame Nell, Six-year-old Loom Operator,” was a catalyst for the passage of legislation by the Georgia General Assembly…to ban sales of the periodical within the state.
Late in his career, Jennings’ credibility was undermined by a series of articles for
Guv’ner’s Magazine
in which he fabricated the existence of feline sweatshops in Lynn, Massachusetts, wherein sweaters and other knit garments were manufactured through energy generated by cat treadmills—the heavily catnip-drugged grimalkins trotting until collapse toward tantalizing mechanical mice-on-sticks.
In his lifetime Jennings also wrote fourteen novels, thirteen continuing the saga of the toothless Gum family which settled in central Nebraska and sold consommé. His fourteenth novel
Things My Wife Did to Me
was a very loosely veiled account of Jennings’s rocky marriage to silent screen actress Velma DeGraaf, apologist for and possible paramour of doomed comedic actor Fatty Arbuckle and coiner of the tag line “Take your grimy eyes off my sheen.”
Jennings’ last two books, both memoirs published posthumously and heavily revised by widow DeGraaf, sold fewer than two hundred copies in their only printings. In fact, existing copies of
Things I Did to Myself
and
My Life as a Wife-slugging Bastard, with Afterword by Roscoe “Fatty”Arbuckle
each now commands a high price in the rare book market. A copy of
Things I Did to Myself
was exhibit “A” in a lawsuit filed in 2001 by Mauvourneen Heyer,
who, when told of the value of her mint condition copy by a book dealer on the television program
Video Flea Market
, lost consciousness and cracked her skull on a rare Queen Anne highboy being caressed at the time by both of the Keno twins.
16.
Accidents and other odd happenings plagued the plant
. No one has any idea how Elwin Lyster got inside the box. One moment he was observed by co-workers at his usual station in Section 17B on the assembly line. The next moment he was gone. Elwin was later found curled sleepily among packing material and deodorant sticks. A co-worker recalled that Lyster’s face was beatific, “as if he had been to a wonderful secret place mortals don’t generally get to visit.” For years thereafter Lyster would eagerly relate to those he’d meet all the details of his fifteen minutes in “a place difficult to describe without assistance from the clergy.” Unhappy with the adverse publicity generated by those who found such individuals socially menacing, Blashette would eventually be forced to fire the former game warden and butter-and-egg man without severance or apology, although Lyster was allowed to keep the box, which he nicknamed “My Portal to Paradise” and more informally “Roy.” Reinhold,
The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o
, 162-66.