by Woody Allen
In the morning I was found curled up on the floor sobbing rhythmically. My spouse had been led away by a stocky woman in a severe suit, wearing a brimmed man’s hat, to whom she kept intoning something about always having been dependent on the kindness of strangers. In the end, we sold the house for a song. I can’t recall if it was “Am I Blue” or “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” I do remember the faces of the building inspectors, however, and the admixture of zeal and dismay with which they enumerated my sundry violations, which they said could be rectified by either further contracting work or accepting a lethal injection. I also have some dim recall of being before a judge who sat glowering like an El Greco cardinal as he mulcted me to the tune of many zeroes, causing my net worth to disappear like the lox at a bris. As for Arbogast, legend has it that, while attempting to hijack an expensive Georgian mantel from someone’s fireplace and replace it with a ceramic copy, he managed to get stuck in the flue. Whether he was ultimately consumed by flames I don’t know. I tried finding him in Dante’s Inferno, but I guess they don’t update those classics.
ATTENTION GENIUSES: CASH ONLY
JOGGING ALONG FIFTH Avenue last summer as part of a fitness program designed to reduce my life expectancy to that of a nineteenth-century coal miner, I paused at the outdoor café of the Stanhope Hotel to renovate my flagging respiratory system with a chilled screwdriver. Orange juice being well up on my prescribed regimen, I quaffed several rounds and upon rising managed to execute a series of corybantic figures, not unlike the infant Bambi taking his first steps.
Recalling dimly through a cortex richly marinated by the Smirnoff people that I had committed to picking up a ration of goat-cheese buttons and some Holland rusk en route home, I stumbled numbly into the Metropolitan Museum, mistaking it for Zabar’s. As I lurched down the halls, my head spinning like a zoetrope, I gradually regained sufficient lucidity to realize that I was bearing witness to an exhibition, Cézanne to van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet.
Gachet, I garnered from the wall spiel, was a physician who treated the likes of Pissarro and van Gogh when these lads were under the weather after ingesting an unripe frog’s leg or belting back too much absinthe. As yet unrecognized and unable to pay a sou, they offered to balance Gachet’s books with an oil or pastel in exchange for a house call or a dose of mercury. Gachet’s willingness to accept proved clairvoyant, and as I luxuriated in the agglomeration of Renoirs and Cézannes, presumably direct from the walls of his waiting room, I couldn’t help imagining myself in a similar situation.
Nov. 1st: Quelle good fortune! That I, Dr. Skeezix Feebleman, have received a referral today from none other than Noah Untermensch, a genius among psychoanalysts who specializes in the problems of the creative mind. Untermensch has amassed a prestigious show-business clientele rivaled only by the “Available List” at the William Morris Agency.
“This kid Pepkin’s a songwriter,” Dr. Untermensch told me over the phone as he greased the skids for a meeting with the prospective patient. “He’s Jerry Kern or Cole Porter, but modern-day. Problem is, the kid’s awash in debilitating guilt. My best guess? It’s a mother thing. Candle his sconce for a while and sluice off some angst. You won’t be sorry. I see Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, maybe even a Medal of Freedom.”
I asked Untermensch why he wasn’t going to treat Pepkin himself. “Plate’s full,” he snapped, “and all analytic emergencies. Actress whose co-op won’t let dogs in, TV weatherman into paddling, plus a producer who can’t get a call back from Mike Eisner. Him I placed on suicide watch. Anyway, do your best, and no need to keep me informed about your progress. You get final cut. Ha ha.”
Nov. 3rd: Met Murray Pepkin today, and there’s no question about it, the man has artist written all over him. Bushy-haired and with eyes like hypnodisks, he is the rarefied man obsessed with his work yet lumbered on all sides by the pygmy demands of food, rent, and two alimonies. As a songwriter, Pepkin appears to be a visionary who chooses to hone his lyrics in a spare room in Queens above Fleisher Brothers Quality Embalming, where he sometimes serves as a makeup consultant. I asked him why he believes he needs analysis, and he confessed that, while the reality is that each note and syllable he pens vibrates with genuine greatness, he feels he’s too self-critical. He recognizes his relentless self-destructive choices in women and was recently married to an actress in a relationship based not so much on traditional Western ethics as on Hammurabi’s Code. Shortly after, he discovered her in bed with their nutritionist. They quarreled, and she struck Pepkin in the head with his rhyming dictionary, causing him to forget the bridge to “Dry Bones.”
When I brought up my fee, Pepkin allowed sheepishly that at the moment he was a bit strapped, having squandered the last of his savings on a duck press. He wondered if we might not arrange some form of installment plan. When I explained that financial obligation was crucial to the treatment itself, he came up with the idea that he might pay me off in songs, pointing out how remunerative it would have been over the years if I alone held the copyright to “Begin the Beguine” or “Send In the Clowns.” Not only would the royalties from his sheet music in time swell my personal coffers, but I would be lauded the world over as having nurtured a fledgling tunesmith equal to Gershwin, the Beatles, or Marvin Hamlisch. Having always prided myself on a keen eye for budding talent, and recalling how amply rewarded some old French homeopath named Cachet or Kashay had been writing prescriptions for van Gogh in exchange for an occasional still life to cover the cost of his tongue depressors, I warmed to Pepkin’s offer. I also reviewed my own financial obligations, which have puffed recently like a hammered thumb. There was the apartment on Park Avenue, the beach house in Quogue, the two Ferraris, and Foxy Breitbart, an expensive little habit I picked up one night trolling the singles bars, whose skin tones in a thong put a smile on my face that could only be chipped off with a chisel. Add to this a too heavy position in Lebanese guavas and my cash flow seemed a shade coagulated. And yet a voice somewhere within asserted that a flier with this tightly wound mainspring sprawled before me not only might prove an annuity but, should Hollywood one day make his life story, the role of Skeezix Feebleman could just cop Best Supporting Actor.
May 2nd: It has been six months today that I have been treating Murray Pepkin, and though my faith in his genius abides undiminished, I must say I did not realize the amount of work involved. Last week he rang me at 3 A.M. to tell me a long dream in which Rodgers and Hart appeared at his window as parrots and simonized his car. Some days later he paged me at the opera and threatened to take his life if I did not immediately drive to meet him at Umberto’s Clam House and hear his idea for a musical based on the Dewey decimal system. I put up with it out of deference to his gifts, which I alone seem to recognize. He has given me, over the last half year, a kilo of songs, some composed hastily on napkins, and although none have as yet found succor at a publishing house, he insists each will in time be a classic. One is a sophisticated bauble called “If You’ll Be My Puma in Yuma I’ll Be Your Stork in New York.” It’s best crooned, and is replete with clever double entendres. “Molting Time,” by contrast, is a mournful air not unlike the Irish masterpiece “Danny Boy.” I agree with Pepkin that only a tenor of genius could do it justice. A beautiful love song Pepkin also guarantees me will eventually top the charts is “My Lips Will Be a Little Late This Year,” which boasts the bittersweet lyric “Embrace me, disgrace me, just don’t erase me from your Rolodex.” For lagniappe in this delightful salmagundi, Pepkin included “Stout-Hearted Mice,” which, he assures me, is the kind of patriotic morale builder that, in the event of all-out nuclear war, will glean for me beaucoup jack. Still, a little of the ready for my Herculean efforts would come in handy, what with Foxy, to whom I am engaged, dropping mail-fisted hints regarding a floor-length winter garment in the marten family.
June 10th: I am experiencing some professional problems, which I realize for the “hands on” type of shrink I am is par for the course, and yet to sustain a subdural h
ematoma the size of a Brunkhorst knockwurst I feel is over the top. The other night, while fast asleep after an arduous day of psychoanalysis, I got a frantic call from Pepkin’s wife. At the moment we were speaking she was holding Pepkin at bay with Mace. Apparently she had been critical of his new torch song, “A Side Order of Heartache, Please,” suggesting it could be used as a good way to break in their new paper shredder. Realizing what tabloid banner lines top-billing Feebleman could do to a discreet practice should I alert the fuzz, I bolted from my apartment in my underwear and sped possessed over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Arriving at Pepkin’s, I found husband and wife feinting around the kitchen table, each trying to gain purchase for a strike. Magda Pepkin gripped a spray can, Pepkin a souvenir he had gotten free on Bat Day at Shea Stadium.
Convinced that a firm tone was needed, I stepped between the two and cleared my throat dramatically just as Pepkin swung the bat at his wife, cracking my head with the sound of a bases-clearing triple. I staggered forward, smiling unmotivatedly at what I imagined to be Alpha Centauri, and recall being taken to the local hospital emergency ward, where I was instantly rushed to the Intensive Apathy Unit.
As for recompense for what one colleague calls “Hippocratic dedication barely discernible from cretinism,” I remain on shaky ground. I have accumulated over a hundred songs in lieu of any suggestion of the green and crinkly, and have not had much luck selling them. That not a single music maven I visited could find a molecule of promise in a hot cabaret number like “Make with the Hormones” or the sublime ballad “Early Alzheimer’s” has given me fleeting intimations that Pepkin may not be the next Irving Berlin. Still, in his lilting “Everything’s Up to Date at Yonah Schimmel’s,” which I own and also can’t milk a brass farthing from, the line “Knishes and wishes are only for the young” makes me smile with a rueful irony.
Nov. 4th: I have come to the conclusion that Pepkin is a no-talent zombie momser. The center began to spring a leak when I discovered that a series of tax shelters structured to maximize my earnings had begun to strike the IRS as curiously similar to those of Al Capone. Disallowing each one with hand-rubbing glee, the Treasury Department elected to suction my holdings to the tune of eight times my net worth. Unable to inhale when this news descended upon me in the form of a subpoena, I explained to Pepkin that I could no longer afford to treat him on the arm, my furniture being moved out by federal marshals even as we spoke. Touched by this request for some measure of genuine coin of the realm, Pepkin terminated his treatment, and on the advice of some shyster he plays eight ball with sued me for malpractice.
Unable to handle the sudden downsizing and the hardship that accrued when Bergdorf’s amputated her charge account, Foxy Breitbart exchanged me even up for an anorexic four-eyed pipsqueak whose computer-chip patent catapulted him, at twenty-five, seven notches above the Sultan of Brunei on a certain list in Forbes. Meanwhile, I was left with a trunkful of sheet music with titles like “The Earthworms of Tuscany” and “At the Speleologists’ Ball.” I tried marketing these tiny white elephants, to no avail, and even checked to see what price they might bring if sold in bulk to a paper-recycling factory. But Pepkin’s coup de grâce was yet to come, and come it did, in the person of Wolf Silverglide. Silverglide, a ferret in gabardine, had experienced visions advising him to do a musical reworking of Lysistrata called Not Now, I Have a Headache. Enlivened by clever modern songs, this Attic chestnut, which happened to be in the public domain, would, in Silverglide’s view, turn us all into maharajas. The grapevine clued him in to the fact that I owned a carload of unpublished songs that could be garnered for short money. Dusting off my copyrights at last, I optioned an exaltation of hummable ditties to Silverglide in return for some shares in the enterprise and a vintage black-and-white TV set, and his brainchild lurched into production sporting a complete Murray Pepkin score. The best number was a torch song called “Italics Mine,” which boasted the magnificent lyric “You’re fine, like rare wine, I love you (italics mine).”
The show opened to mixed notices. The Poultryman’s Journal enjoyed it, as did Cigar Magazine. The dailies, along with Time and Newsweek, were more reserved, forming a consensus best summed up by the critic who called it “a black hole of imbecility.” Unable to parse the reviews and come up with any kind of quote ad that didn’t appear life-threatening, Silverglide folded his extravaganza like a deck chair and blew town photon-fast, leaving me to deal with the avalanche of plagiary suits that poured in.
It seems that Maestro Pepkin’s best music proved upon expert testimony to be a scintilla too proximate to certain trifles like “Body and Soul,” “Stardust,” and even that old military rouser that begins “From the halls of Montezuma.” Meanwhile, I’m in court every day, and although it appears I’m staring off into the middle distance, what I’m really thinking is that if I ever run into the undiscovered van Gogh of ASCAP, I will take one of my last remaining possessions, a straight razor, and cut both his ears off (italics mine).
STRUNG OUT
I AM GREATLY relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me. As it turns out, physics, like a grating relative, has all the answers. The big bang, black holes, and the primordial soup turn up every Tuesday in the Science section of the Times, and as a result my grasp of general relativity and quantum mechanics now equals Einstein’s—Einstein Moomjy, that is, the rug seller. How could I not have known that there are little things the size of “Planck length” in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find. And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket? What I do know about physics is that to a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat—especially if the man on the boat is with his wife. The latest miracle of physics is string theory, which has been heralded as a TOE, or “Theory of Everything.” This may even include the incident of last week herewith described.
I awoke on Friday, and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe. This made me late leaving for work, and because the concept of up and down is relative, the elevator I got into went to the roof, where it was very difficult to hail a taxi. Please keep in mind that a man on a rocket ship approaching the speed of light would have seemed on time for work—or perhaps even a little early, and certainly better dressed. When I finally got to the office and approached my employer, Mr. Muchnick, to explain the delay, my mass increased the closer I came to him, which he took as a sign of insubordination. There was some rather bitter talk of docking my pay, which, when measured against the speed of light, is very small anyhow. The truth is that compared with the amount of atoms in the Andromeda galaxy I actually earn quite little. I tried to tell this to Mr. Muchnick, who said I was not taking into account that time and space were the same thing. He swore that if that situation should change he would give me a raise. I pointed out that since time and space are the same thing, and it takes three hours to do something that turns out to be less than six inches long, it can’t sell for more than five dollars. The one good thing about space being the same as time is that if you travel to the outer reaches of the universe and the voyage takes three thousand earth years, your friends will be dead when you come back, but you will not need Botox.
Back in my office, with the sunlight streaming through the window, I thought to myself that if our great golden star suddenly exploded, this planet would fly out of orbit and hurtle through infinity forever—another good reason to always carry a cell phone. On the other hand, if I could someday go faster than 186,000 miles per second and recapture the light born centuries ago, could I then go back in time to ancient Egypt or imperial Rome? But what would I do there? I hardly knew anybody. It was at this moment that our new secretary, Miss Lola Kelly, walked in. Now, in the debate over whether everything is made up of particles or waves, Miss Kelly is definitely waves.
You can tell she’s waves every time she walks to the watercooler. Not that she doesn’t have good particles, but it’s the waves that get her the trinkets from Tiffany’s. My wife is more waves than particles, too, it’s just that her waves have begun to sag a little. Or maybe the problem is that my wife has too many quarks. The truth is, lately she looks as if she had passed too close to the event horizon of a black hole and some of her—not all of her by any means—was sucked in. It gives her a kind of funny shape, which I’m hoping will be correctable by cold fusion. My advice to anyone has always been to avoid black holes because, once inside, it’s extremely hard to climb out and still retain one’s ear for music. If, by chance, you do fall all the way through a black hole and emerge from the other side, you’ll probably live your entire life over and over but will be too compressed to go out and meet girls.
And so I approached Miss Kelly’s gravitational field and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunneling. It was at this point that I was rendered impotent by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. How could I act if I couldn’t determine her exact position and velocity? And what if I should suddenly cause a singularity—that is, a devastating rupture in space-time? They’re so noisy. Everyone would look up and I’d be embarrassed in front of Miss Kelly. Ah, but the woman has such good dark energy. Dark energy, though hypothetical, has always been a turn-on for me, especially in a female who has an overbite. I fantasized that if I could only get her into a particle accelerator for five minutes with a bottle of Château Lafite, I’d be standing next to her with our quanta approximating the speed of light and her nucleus colliding with mine. Of course, exactly at this moment I got a piece of antimatter in my eye and had to find a Q-tip to remove it. I had all but lost hope when she turned toward me and spoke.