Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

by Finder, Henry

  Gandhi jumped on home plate with both sandalled feet, and the crowd exploded as Joe McCarthy, the entire Yankee squad, and even a beaming Connie Mack surged onto the field.

  “I ran home,” giggled Gandhi. “Does that mean that I hit a run home?”

  “A home run, Gandy,” said Ruth. “Ya sure did.”

  “Well, technically,” said Umpire Dinneen, “it was a single and an overthrow and then—”

  “Shaddup,” growled a dozen voices at once.

  “Looked like a homer to me, too,” the ump corrected, but few heard him, for by that time the crowd was on the field, lifting to their shoulders a joyous Gandhi, whose tin whistle provided a thrilling trilling over the mob’s acclaim.

  Inside the locker room, Manager McCarthy offered Gandhi a permanent position on the team, but the Mahatma graciously refused, stating that he could only consider a diamond career with a different junior-circuit club.

  “Which club would that be, kid?” said the puzzled Bambino.

  “The Cleveland Indians, of course,” twinkled the Mahatma.

  An offer from the Cleveland front office arrived the next day, but India’s top pinch-hitter was already on a train headed for points west—and the history books.

  1983

  IAN FRAZIER

  IGOR STRAVINSKY: THE SELECTED PHONE CALLS

  COMPOSER, conductor, critic, teacher, iconoclast, and grand old man, Igor Stravinsky bestrode this century like a colossus, with feet on two different continents. Already respected and popular in Europe for writing pieces like “Le Sacre du Printemps,” he became equally if not more famous in his adopted country of America. The many friends he made here remember him as a man of breathtaking talent, whether he was composing an epochal symphony or playing shadow puppets in the candlelight after a small dinner party. Like many other geniuses, he was generous, almost profligate, with his gifts. He would write beautiful phrases of music on restaurant napkins and give them to friends, acquaintances, even passersby. Thoughts bubbled forth from him in such a torrent that often when he was sitting in his den writing a letter to a friend he would impulsively grab for the telephone, look up his friend’s number in his address book while holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder, and dial. In a matter of seconds, he would be pouring out ideas that might have required days, even weeks, to travel through the mails. At the other end of the line, the friend would listen with delight as the great man went on, humming or singing at times, until finally he was “all talked out.” Then Stravinsky would bid his grateful hearer goodbye, and, in the pleasant afterglow of inspiration, he would crumple up the unfinished letter, throw it in the wastebasket, and mix himself a cocktail.

  Fortunately for us, his heirs, Stravinsky was a man aware of his place in history. With careful consideration for the students and biographers he knew would follow, he saved his telephone bills from year to year, and before his death he donated the entire corpus to the K-Tel Museum of the Best Composers Ever. What a fascinating picture these phone bills paint! With their itemized lists of long-distance calls and charges, they are like paper airplanes thrown to us from the past, providing a detailed record of the seasons of Stravinsky’s mind in the multihued pageant of life as he lived it on a daily basis. And what better time for a close examination of the treasures his phone bills contain than this, the year after the centennial of Stravinsky’s birth? (Actually, the centennial year itself would probably have been better, but even though this year might not be as good a time as last year, still, it is almost as good.) Now let us turn to the documents:

  This call, made not long after Stravinsky moved to America and had his phone hooked up, shows him adjusting quickly to the ways of his new country. With scenes of Old World poverty fresh in his memory, he has prudently waited to place the call until 11:01 P.M., the very moment when the lowest off-peak rates go into effect. Such patience and calculation indicate a call that was professional rather than social in nature. Almost certainly, the recipient was Stravinsky’s fellow-composer Arnold Schoenberg. It was common knowledge that Schoenberg often vacationed in New Orleans, where he enjoyed the food, the atmosphere, and the people. Stravinsky may have found out from a mutual friend where Schoenberg was staying and then surprised him with this call. Always one to speak his mind, Stravinsky probably began by telling Schoenberg that his dodecaphonic methods of musical composition were a lot of hooey. Very likely, Schoenberg would have bristled at this, and may well have reminded Stravinsky that great art, like the Master’s own “Sacre,” need not be immediately accessible. Stravinsky then probably made a smart remark comparing Schoenberg’s methods to the methods of a troop of monkeys with a xylophone and some hammers. This probably made Schoenberg pretty mad, and it is a testament to the great (albeit hidden) regard each man had for the other that the call lasted as long as it did. Possibly, Schoenberg just held his temper and said something flip to defuse the situation, and then Stravinsky moved on to another subject. Inasmuch as they never spoke again, this intense thirty-eight-minute phone conversation may represent a seminal point in the history of twentieth-century music theory.

  This call is of particular interest to the student because of its oddity. One is compelled to ask, “Who did Stravinsky know in Custer, South Dakota?” He never went there; none of his friends or relatives ever went there; the town has no symphony orchestra. So why did he call there? It is hard to believe that on a June morning the sudden urge for a twenty-five-minute chat with a person in Custer, South Dakota, dropped onto Stravinsky out of the blue. No, we must look elsewhere for an explanation. Two possibilities suggest themselves: (1) an acquaintance of the composer, perhaps an occasional racquetball partner, a fan, even a delivery boy from the supermarket, comes by the Stravinskys’, sees no one is in, and takes the opportunity to make a long-distance call and stick someone else with the tab; or (2) the telephone company made an error. In either event, Stravinsky should not have paid the ten dollars and sixty-nine cents, and I believe it was taken from him unfairly, just as much as if a mugger had stolen it from him on the street.

  Here we have a side of the composer’s personality which we must face unflinchingly if we are to be honest. Every man has a dark side; this is his. On an evening in late September, just after dinner, Stravinsky placed a call to New York and talked for a hundred and four minutes. A hundred and four minutes! That’s almost two hours! As one ear got tired and he switched the phone to the other, he obviously did not realize how inconsiderate he was being. It was as if he were the only person in the whole world who needed to use the phone. What if his wife wanted to make a call? What if somebody was trying to call him from a pay phone, dialling every five minutes, only to hear the busy signal’s maddening refrain? Surely, after an hour or so he could have found a polite way to hang up. Surely, he could have at least made an effort to think of someone other than himself. But he didn’t—he just kept yakking along, without a worry or a care, for over one hundred selfish minutes.

  We should always remember that the perfection we demand of our heroes they cannot in reality ever attain.

  Calling Stravinsky collect would seem to be the act of either a madman or a genius—or both. Yet here before us is the evidence that not only did someone pull such a stunt but Stravinsky actually went along with it and accepted the charges. In all likelihood, the caller was a young admirer, possibly a music student (Boston is known for its many music schools), who found himself in the middle of a creative crisis with nowhere else to turn. It shows how nice Stravinsky could be when he wanted to be that he gave the young man a shoulder to cry on, as well as some helpful encouragement. The disconsolate youth probably said that he despaired of ever finding an entry-level position as a composer, and that even if he did he was sure he would never make very much per week. Stravinsky may have gently reminded the lad that music is not a job but a vocation—which its true disciples cannot deny—and he may have added that a really good composer can earn a weekly salary of from eight hundred to one thousand dollars. Comfort
ed, the student probably hung up and returned to his work with renewed dedication, and later went on to become Philip Glass or Hugo Winterhalter or André Previn. As success followed success, the young student (now adult) would always remember the time a great man cared enough to listen.

  This delightful series of calls reveals the Master at his most puckish. The time is a drab afternoon in mid-winter; Stravinsky is knocking around the house at loose ends, possibly with a case of the post-holiday blahs. Maybe he starts idly leafing through a San Francisco telephone directory. Then, perhaps, a sudden grin crosses his face. He picks a number at random and dials. One ring. Two rings. A woman’s voice answers. Stravinsky assumes a high, squeaky voice. “Is Igor there?” he asks. Informed that he has the wrong number, he hangs up.

  Fourteen minutes pass. Then he calls back. In a low voice this time, he repeats his question: “Hi. Is Igor there?” Sounding a bit surprised, the woman again replies in the negative.

  Nineteen minutes later, again Stravinsky dials the San Francisco number. Now his voice takes on a rich Southern accent: “Hello, Ma’am, is Igor there?”

  “No, there’s nobody by that name here,” the woman says, by this time truly perplexed.

  Stravinsky lets fifteen minutes go by. Then he is ready to deliver the classic punch line, which he has orchestrated as carefully as the crescendo in one of his most beautiful symphonies. He redials the number. The woman answers, a trace of annoyance coloring her tone. The great composer waits one beat; then, in his regular voice, he says, “Hello, this is Igor. Have there been any calls for me?”

  An artist such as this comes along only once in a great while. Had he done nothing else but accumulate his remarkable portfolio of phone bills, he would merit our consideration. But, of course, he did much more than that, in music as well as in other areas. We who are his contemporaries cannot presume to judge him in his totality; that task we must leave for future ages blessed with a vision far greater than today’s.

  1983

  GARRISON KEILLOR

  WE ARE STILL MARRIED

  ONE day last August after the vet said that Biddy had only months to live, Willa and I took her for a cruise around Lake Larson on our pontoon boat. She was listless and depressed from the medication, and we thought the ride might cheer her up, but she sat with her head in Willa’s lap, her eyes closed, and when a flock of geese flew down and landed alongside the boat she paid no attention. I felt desolate to see her that way, and angry at other boats zipping around without a care in the world, and so when we got home and I found a message on the answering machine that said, “Hi, this is Blair Hague at People magazine, and I’d like to come to Minnesota and do a piece about your poor dog,” I was relieved to know that someone cared.

  Willa and I discussed it that night, and although she felt that a pet’s death is a private matter, eventually I convinced her that we should agree to the story as a tribute to Biddy and also because, as Blair said on the tape, our experience might help others who were going through the same thing.

  Blair arrived on Thursday with Jan, a photographer, and he explained that they wanted to live with us, so they could do a better job. “You get more nuance that way,” he said. He had lived with a number of people in order to write about them, including Joe Cocker, Jean Shepherd, Merv Griffin, and the Pointer Sisters, he said. I could see his point, so they moved in, and Jan set up a darkroom in the laundry, which was fine with us—one thing we realized, with Biddy dying, was that we didn’t have many pictures of her—and Blair got to work gathering background. Willa and I opened up our scrapbooks to him and Willa even let him read her diary. I wondered about that, but she said, “Honesty is the only policy. There’s a lot about Biddy in there.”

  We lived in a two-bedroom condominium overlooking Lake Larson, and although Blair and Jan were extremely pleasant and helped with the dishes and made their beds and kept the stereo turned down after ten o’clock, I started to feel crowded after a few days. I’d be shaving and Blair would stick his head in the bathroom door and ask, “How much do you earn a year, Earl? Do you consider yourself a religious person? Do you normally wear boxer shorts? Is that your real hair?” After work, when I like to sit down with a beer and watch television, he sat next to me. How would I describe myself? Had I ever wanted to be something other than a bus driver? How much beer did I consume per day, on the average? Was it always Bub’s Beer? What were my favorite books? What was on my mind? What did I think of the future? What sorts of people made me angry?

  I wanted to say, “People who ask too many questions,” but I held my tongue. I did mention to Willa that I thought Blair was pushy. “The article is about Biddy, not us,” I said. She thought Blair was doing an excellent job. She said, “I feel like he is helping me to understand a lot of things about us that I never thought about before.”

  Soon after they arrived, we noticed that Biddy was getting better. Her appetite improved, and she got so she liked to go for walks again. I told Willa I thought we should tell Blair that there was no story. She said, “There’s a lot more story here than you know, Earl. Biddy is just the tip of the iceberg.”

  Two weeks passed, then three, and Blair wasn’t running out of questions to ask. He kept coming back to the subject of our marriage. “Do you feel you have an excellent, good, average, or poor marriage? Do you regret not having had children? How many times per week do you have sexual relations? On the average—just a ballpark figure. Do you think Willa is happy?”

  I said, “You ought to ask her.”

  “I have,” he said.

  Right up to the day they left, I had no idea he was going to write the story he did. Once, he said, “As so often happens, the story changes as a reporter works on it. You start out to do one thing and you wind up doing something entirely different.” I thought he was referring to Biddy’s improvement.

  THE story was entitled “Earl: My Life with a Louse, by Willa Goodrich as told to Blair Hague, photographs by Jan Osceola,” and the day it came out Willa took Biddy and moved to her mother’s. I wasn’t home so I didn’t know she left. I was driving a charter to New Orleans. Some passengers picked up People in Des Moines, and as I drove South I could hear them whispering about me. In southern Missouri, a man came to the front and crouched down in the aisle beside me. “I thought you had a right to know this,” he said, and he read me some parts. I couldn’t believe the stuff Willa said about me! My personal grooming, my food preferences, my favorite TV shows, our arguments. And her referring to me as “stubborn and unreasonable”—why would she say that? In print!

  In New Orleans, I discovered that the man had skipped some of the worst parts. Willa said she had often wanted to leave me. She said that I was uncaring and cold, that Biddy’s illness didn’t mean “beans” to me, and that I had talked about getting another dog soon. She said that I had “Victorian ideas about women and sex.” She said I was often personally repulsive. To back her up, People printed three pictures with the story: me in my shorts, bending over to adjust the TV picture; me with my mouth open, full of baked potato; and me asleep on the La-Z-Boy recliner, in my shorts, with my mouth open.

  I tried to reach Willa at her mother’s, but she was in New York, and I saw her the next morning on “America, How Are You?” Essentially, she told Monica Montaine the same stuff, plus she said that I was “compulsive.” She said, “He walks around humming the same tune over and over, usually ‘Moon River.’ He taps his fingers continuously, and he taps his foot in his sleep. He compulsively rips the labels off beer bottles. And at dinner he always eats all his meat first, then the potato, then the vegetable.” Monica Montaine got a big kick out of that. “Sounds like he’s missing the Up button,” she said.

  Two days later, someone from “Today” called and wanted me to get on a plane to New York and join Willa on the show for a dialogue. He said, “I think the country would like to hear your side, Earl.” I told him I had no desire to engage in a public debate with my wife over matters I considered personal. Willa
did the show herself, then a number of other daytime shows, and though I made a point of not watching, my friends were starting to ask questions. “Is it true about the almost total lack of any attempt at communication?” a guy at work wanted to know. “And you wearing socks in bed—any truth to that?” He said the story had given him a lot to think about.

  In October, Willa testified before a House subcommittee, revealing new details about our marriage under oath. Several congressmen expressed shock at what she said about my lack of affection, my “utter insensitivity” to her needs. “What was he doing all this time while you were suffering?” one asked. She said, “He watched football on television. He played seven different types of solitaire. He carved a new stock for his shotgun. He acted like I didn’t exist.” That was the quote they used on “ABC World News Tonight.”

  I WAS lonely as winter approached. I’m not a man who can live by himself. Some men are cut out for the single life, but not me. So I told my boss I was available for all the charters I could get. I spent November and December mostly on the road, going to Orlando six times, Disneyland four, making two runs to San Francisco. Meanwhile, I read in People that Willa had sold her story to Universal Pictures and was in California ironing out some wrinkles in the deal. The next week, she got a call from the Pope, who expressed hope that efforts would be made to reach a reconciliation. “I’m ready any time Earl is,” she told the Holy Father. She told him that although she was not a Catholic she respected the Church’s view on marriage. “It’s a two-way street, though,” she said.

  Finally, we met in New York, where I had driven a four-day “New Year’s Eve on the Great White Way” tour and was laying low at the Jaylor Hotel, and where she had rented a great apartment on the upper West Side and was on her way to a cocktail party. We met at her place. It was in a new building on Broadway, with a beautiful view from the twenty-fifth floor. Biddy was living with her, of course. Biddy looked wonderful, though she was a little hostile toward me. So were Willa’s three friends, who worked in publishing. “What do you do?” one man asked, though I was sure he knew. The other man mentioned something about socks. The woman didn’t talk to me at all. She kept telling Willa, “We’ve got to get going—the invitation said five o’clock.” Willa kissed me goodbye. “Let’s be friends,” she said. “Call me sometime.”