Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (20 page)

4. When you are cool like this and don’t fawn and don’t grab and just go about your business as a fan and get that autograph and the photo and are businesslike about it, probably you are going to make such a big impression on the famous person that he or she will make a grab for
you
in that offhand way these people have (
Care to join Sammy and me for dinner, Roy?
or
Somebody find this guy a backstage pass, wouldja?
). Remember, these people are surrounded by glittering insincerity and false friendship and utter degradation of all personal values to such a degree that three cool words from you (
Like your work!
) will knock them for a loop. Suddenly the star recalls the easy camaraderie of a Southern small-town childhood and the old verities of love and loyalty in the circle of family, church, and community. Desperately he reaches out for contact with you (
Please. You remind me of a friend I once had. Many years ago and far away from here. Please
), wants your phone number, tries to schedule lunch with you on Thursday (
Anywhere, anytime. Early lunch, late lunch. You name it. I can send a car to pick you up. Thursday or Friday or Saturday or any day next week. Or Sunday if you’d rather. Or it doesn’t have to be lunch. It could be breakfast or dinner. Or a late supper. Brunch
), tries to draw you into conversation (
You got a book you want published? Songs? Anyone in your family interested in performing? Got a favorite charity you need anyone to do a benefit for? Need a credit or job reference?
). Don’t bite. Just smile and nod and say, “Nice to meet you,” and walk away. He’ll follow you (
What’s your name? Please. I need you
). Walk faster. You don’t want to get involved with these people. Thirty seconds can be interesting, but beyond two minutes you start to get entangled. They’re going to want you to come to the Coast with them
that night
and involve you in such weird sadness as you can’t believe. (
Please come with us. I mean it. There’s something real about you that’s been missing from my life for too long. Please. Just come and talk to me for three minutes.
) Sorry. (
Please.
) No. (
Then let me come with you.
) No. (
Tell me why not.
) I’m sorry. I wish that it was possible, but it isn’t, not at this time. I hope we can meet again very soon. Bye.

1988

FRANK GANNON

YO, POE

Consider [Sylvester Stallone’s] pet project: a film biography of Edgar Allan Poe. “I am a student of his,” says Stallone. “But people have this image of Poe as a crazy alcoholic and drug addict, and that’s wrong. I’d like to set the record straight.”

—Newsweek.

I
T
is with a lot of humility that I pen the first sentence of this work. It is almost accompanied by a sense of trembling awe that I approach the reader with this, the most dreamlike, the most solemn, the most difficult, the most buried-in-my-gut.

Hey, Ulalume, if I could sing and dance I wouldn’t have to do this.

O strangely sent one, how your words touch my spirit! How well have we both learned the propensity of man to define the indefinable! How the strange happiness of our innermost souls has thus been magnified!

You really got lucky tonight, you know?

IT’S a quiet and still afternoon here. The leaves are all sere, whatever that means. But here inside the Spectrum it’s a different story. Men are screaming, women are fainting, and the children—well, they’re just being kids.

Right you are, Al. There’s tumult everywhere, and with good reason. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

No, Dick, I haven’t either. You can almost feel the electricity in this arena. It’s almost palpable.

I can’t keep up with you, Al.

I’ve been going back to school, Dick. Heh, heh.

Excuse me for interrupting, but here he comes.

Making his way down the aisle with his entourage—Mister Edgar Allan Poe.

Some say his last name is Allan, some say it’s Poe. There’s quite a bit of controversy about that, Al.

All I know is he looks serious tonight, Dick.

Look at those eyes. Look at that expression.

He means business.

Yes, he does, Al. And there’s that tie.

That trademark Edgar Allan Poe tie. He’s still wearing it, and I guess he always will, Dick.

You can bet on that, Al.

But no raven tonight, Dick.

You’re not going to get me to say “Nevermore,” Al.

Heh, heh. You know, a lot of people don’t know that Edgar Allan Poe was actually a very good broad jumper.

That’s right, Al. A lot of critics feel that he may have symbolically put himself in his famous story “Hop-Frog.”

You’re a regular encyclopedia, Dick.

HELLO again, literature fans. Tonight we have a special treat on our post-fight show. Tonight’s guest is Baudelaire, the unofficial manager of Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Poe. I always call him Edgar Poe. Please don’t say “Edgar Allan Poe.” I hate that. It makes me—how you say?—sick.

O.K., Beau, have it your way. Edgar Poe.

Gracias, amigo.

Let’s get right to the big question. Why do you, the acknowledged champion of the symbolists, want to manage a guy like Poe, an alcoholic drug addict who marries little girls because he’s a pervert. And on top of all that, he can’t tie a tie.

Let me get this straight right away. And not just for you, Marv. For everybody. Edgar Poe is not a pervert. He is not an alcoholic. To my knowledge, the man has never taken a drink. He does not use drugs. He is not a “party” person.

How about the tie allegation?

I can’t say anything about that. He’s an individual, and like all individuals he has a right to his own tastes in neckwear.

You don’t think he looks funny?

No. But let me say one thing.

Go right ahead.

My man was actually an excellent athlete.

You mean you’re going to get into the broad-jumping thing and “Hop-Frog” and all of that?

Absolutely.

Good for you. And while we have you, you’ll forgive another question, I’m sure. How is Rimbaud?

Loved it. I was on my feet cheering.

There you have it. Baudelaire, the self-styled king of the symbolist poets. Nothing if not controversial. Thank you for coming.

Gracias.

VIRGINIA. Yo, Virginia—wake up. I have something I want to tell you. I was just over to look at the poster they got of me. And you know what? They got the wrong tie. That’s right. They got me wearing a club tie instead of this little one that I always tie funny.

I just want to say a couple of things. One, a lotta people probably think it was kinda weird for me to get married to you, on account of you being my cousin and only fourteen years old and like that. What they don’t know is that for a guy like me beauty is incarnate only as an intellectual principle. Man is but a part of the great will that pervades the cosmos. In other words, when I hear somebody say something about my wife I tell him to get out of the car.

I got one more thing I want to say. Some of my early biographers, they got the idea that I was an alcoholic drug addict or something. That’s just a bunch of you know what. I’m not a drug addict, I’m a poet. Keats, Shelley—they were poets and they died young. But it wasn’t because they were drug addicts. It was because they didn’t train.

Tonight I’ll know one thing. If I hear that rapping, that rapping on my chamber door, and I’m sitting there. Still sitting there, pondering over a big pile of quaint and curious volumes. If I’m still sitting there, I’ll know one thing: The record is now straight.

1985

SUSAN ORLEAN

MY LIFE: A SERIES OF PRIVATELY FUNDED PERFORMANCE-ART PIECES

1. BIRTH

As the piece opens, another performance artist, “Mom” (an affiliate of my private funding source) waits onstage, consuming tuna-noodle casseroles. Eventually, she leaves the initial performance site—a single-family Cape Cod decorated with amoeboid sofas, Herman Miller coconut chairs, boomerang-print linoleum, and semi-shag carpeting—for a second site, a hospital. There she is joined by a sterile-clad self-realized figure of authority (“Sidney Jaffe, M.D.”) who commands her to “push,” and then externalizes through language and gesture his desire to return to the back nine. This tableau makes allusion to the deadening, depersonalizing, postwar “good life.” “Mom” continues “pushing,” and at last I enter—nude. I do this in a manner that confronts yet at the same time steers clear of all obscenity statutes.

2. COMING HOME EXTREMELY LATE BECAUSE I WAS MAKING SNOW ANGELS AND FORGOT TO STOP

Again, an ensemble piece. But unlike “Birth,” which explores the universal codes of pleasure and vulnerability, “Coming Home Extremely Late” is a manifesto about rage—not mine but that of the protonuclear family. The cast includes “Mom,” “David,” “Debra,” “Fluffy,” and my private funding source. In “Coming Home,” I become Object, rather than Subject.

The piece is also a metaperformance; the more sophisticated members of the audience will realize that I am “coming home extremely late” because of
another
performance: “Snow Angels,” an earlier, gestural work in which, clothed in a cherry-red Michelin Man–style snowsuit, I lower myself into a snowbank and wave my arms up and down, leaving a winged-creature-like impression upon the frozen palimpsest. Owing to my methodology, I am better at it than anyone on the block. Note the megatextual references to Heaven, Superior Being–as-girl-child, snow-as-inviolable-purity, and time-as-irrelevancy. “Coming Home Extremely Late” concludes with a choral declaration from the entire cast (except for my private funding source, who has returned to reading the sports section), titled “You Are Grounded for a Month, Young Lady.”

3. I GO THROUGH A GANGLY PERIOD

A sustained dramatic piece, lasting three to five years, depending on how extensively the performer pursues the orthodontia theme. Besides me, the cast includes the entire student population of Byron Junior High School, Shaker Heights, Ohio—especially the boys. In the course of “Gangly Period,” I grow large in some ways, small in others, and, ironically, they are all the wrong ways. I receive weird haircuts. Through “crabby” behavior (mostly directed at my private funding source), my noncontextual stage image projects the unspeakable fear that I am not “popular.” In a surreal trope midway through the performance, I vocalize to a small section of the cast (“Ellen Fisher,” “Sally Webb,” and “Heather Siegel”) my lack of knowledge about simple sexual practices.

Throughout the piece, much commentary about time: how long it is, why certain things seem to take forever, why I have to be the absolutely last girl in the entire seventh grade to get Courrèges boots.

4. FINDING MYSELF

This piece is a burlesque—a comic four-year-long high art/low art exploration. As “Finding Myself” opens, I am on-site—a paradigmatic bourgeois college campus. After performing the symbiotic ritual of “meeting my roommates” and dialoguing about whether boyfriends can stay overnight in our room, I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of majoring in English, and instead dare to enroll in a class called “Low Energy Living,” in which I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of reading the class material and instead build a miniature solar-powered seawater-desalinization plant. I then confront Amerika’s greedy soullessness by enrolling in a class called “Future Worlds,” walking around in a space suit of my own design, doing a discursive/nonlinear monologue on Buckminster Fuller and futurism.

Toward the end of “Finding Myself,” I skip all my “classes”—spatially as well as temporally—and move into an alternative environment to examine my “issues.” At this point, my private funding source actually appears in the piece and, in a witty cameo, threatens to withdraw my grant. Much implosive controversy. To close the performance, I sit on an avocado-green beanbag chair and simulate “applying to graduate school.”

5. I GET MARRIED AND SHORTLY THEREAFTER TAKE A POUNDING IN THE REAL-ESTATE MARKET

A bifurcated work. First, another performance artist, “Peter,” dialogues with me about the explicit, symbolic, and functional presentations of human synchronism. We then plan and execute a suburban country-club wedding (again, with assistance from my private funding source). Making a conceptual critique of materialism, I “register” for Royal Copenhagen china, Baccarat crystal, and Kirk Stieff sterling. Syllabic chants, fragments of unintelligible words like the screeches of caged wild birds gone mad—this megatonality erupts when I confront my private funding source about seating certain little-liked relatives. At the work’s interactive climax, “Peter” and I explode the audience/performer dialectic and invite the audience to join as we “perform the ceremony.”

The second part of the piece—a six-month-long open-ended manifesto on the specificity of place—culminates with “Peter” and me purchasing a four-and-a-half-room coöperative apartment with a good address in Manhattan. Conran’s furniture, Krups appliances, task-specific gadgets (apple corers, pasta makers, shrimp deveiners), and other symbol-laden icons are arranged on-site. Curtain goes down on the performers facing each other on a sofa, holding a
Times
real-estate section between them, doing a performative discourse lamenting that they have “purchased the apartment at the peak of the market.”

The series will continue pending refinancing.

1990

DAVID BROOKS

THE A-LIST E-LIST

I
SPEND
my days trying to contribute to a more just, caring, and environmentally sensitive society, but, like most Americans, I’m always on the lookout for subtle ways to make myself seem socially superior. So I was thrilled recently to learn about E-name dropping, a new and extremely petty form of one-upmanship made possible by recent strides in information technology.

I first became aware of this new status ploy when a colleague sent out a mass message. “Dear friends,” his E-mail began. But before I could go on to the text my eye was drawn up to the list of other people it had been sent to. My friend had apparently sent this message—it was a request for help on an article—to his entire E-mail address book. There were three hundred and four names, listed alphabetically, along with their E-mail addresses. It was like a roster of young media meritocrats. There were newsweek.coms, wsj.coms, nytimes.coms, as well as your assorted berkeley.edus, stanford.edus, microsoft.coms, and even a UN.org.