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

by Finder, Henry

  THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES . . . If only it could all be such good news. But unfortunately, OPERATION: TERRIBLE MISTAKE has not been the success I anticipated, and I’m afraid a new strategy may be required.

  As you may recall (LWL #57), the operation’s objectives were to: (1) apply societal pressure; (2) foster emotional uncertainty; (3) precipitate reevaluation; and ideally (4) achieve reconciliation.

  The following conversation starter was suggested:

  LEANN, I WAS SO SORRY TO HEAR ABOUT YOU AND LARRY. YOU MAKE SUCH A WONDERFUL COUPLE. SO I DON’T MIND TELLING YOU, I THINK YOU ARE MAKING A TERRIBLE MISTAKE. THIS IS MY OWN PERSONAL OPINION ON THE MATTER.

  Unfortunately, a number of well-meaning individuals took this suggestion rather more literally than intended, and repeated it verbatim to Leann, creating a cumulative effect other than the one desired.

  I have now received word through an intermediary that Leann requests I “call off the zombies.” I will honor her wishes, as always, though I must emphasize that I cannot be held responsible for the behavior of individuals acting on their own initiative.

  LEANN ANONYMOUS . . . In our first meeting at Gatsby’s, the bartender, Mark, graciously accommodated us by closing off the back room and supplying extra folding chairs. All in attendance praised the wisdom of moving these mutual support sessions from my apartment, which some had complained was not neutral territory, and which had become quite cramped in any case. (On a related matter, Mark told me privately that, while he appreciates our patronage, he’d prefer that in the future we try not to monopolize the jukebox, or at least play a variety of songs. He says that if he doesn’t see some improvement the Hank Williams selections will have to go.)

  We ordered a round, and at Tom’s suggestion dispensed with the reading of the minutes. We proceeded immediately to old business, resuming debate on Leann’s eyes and whether they are a turbulent sea green or a sand-flecked moon blue. It appeared there could be no middle ground on the issue, until Dick stood up and declared, “To paraphrase Elton John, ‘Who cares if they’re blue or if they’re green, those are the sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen.’ ”

  The motion to adopt Dick’s language carried unanimously, and we collected more change for the jukebox.

  We ordered another round, and the conversation turned naturally to the rest of Leann: her quirky perky nose, her funny sunny smile, the perfect curve of her neck, her soft shoulders, and so on, until petty jealousies precluded further discussion.

  Soon thereafter, we took a break to order more refreshments, and then it was time to welcome new members. A stubby and not particularly attractive man, who had been spotted with Leann as recently as mid-November, stood up in the back of the room.

  “My name is Harry,” he said, “and I love Leann.”

  Harry then related his long, sad tale, the details of which were all too familiar, ending with that same old refrain.

  “She met this guy,” he said. “She says she’s deliriously happy.”

  “Deliriously happy, eh?” Gunther said slowly, staring into his beer. “He’s doomed.”

  Those of us who could still laugh did so.

  “Really?” Harry said, cheering considerably. “So you think there’s a chance I can win her back?”

  This question prompted extensive debate, leading to the inevitable threats of violence and ceasing only when Quentin moved that we change the name of our group from Lovers of Leann to Victims of Leann. The motion was soundly defeated, and we voted to adjourn.

  Elmo closed the meeting by singing “Oh, Leann,” including a new verse that had recently come to him in a dream:

  Oh, Leann,

  I love you,

  Love you still,

  I love you,

  I love you,

  I love you still,

  I always will.

  LEANN ALERT . . . My special friend Jane, who has been so supportive during this difficult time, has suggested there is a need for a group addressing the concerns of the lovers of the Lovers of Leann. Anybody who knows somebody who might be interested in such a group should have them write to Leann Anon at this address.

  THIS WEEK’S LEANN CHALLENGE . . . Leann is what she eats, but how well do you know what she eats? Everybody knows Leann likes horseradish on her hamburgers, but how many of you know what kind of horseradish? (Here’s a hint: She received a case of it for Christmas.)

  The answer to last week’s challenge: From left to right.

  LEANN’S MAILBAG . . . The mail ran heavy this week with entries to the “Candid Leann” photo contest, and it’s obvious I need to remind everyone that the rules clearly stipulate that Leann must be the only person shown in the photograph.

  In consideration of those who may wish to resubmit, I’ve decided to extend the deadline two weeks, until Jan. 29. And remember, entries cannot be returned.

  One of our foreign correspondents, Miles, writes from Windsor, Ontario, “I’m going to be in the States in the near future, and I was hoping to finally meet this Leann I’ve heard so much about. Do you have her phone number or an address where I can write her directly?”

  No need for that, Miles. Just send your correspondence to Leann in care of this newsletter, and I’ll make sure she gets it.

  And finally, Reggie, of Buffalo Grove, Ill., writes in and asks:

  “Larry, isn’t it time you got on with your life? It’s been nearly two years [sic] since Leann broke up with you [sic], and I hate to be the one to tell you, pal, but it’s over. O-V-E-R [sic].

  “But listen,” Reggie continues, “there are a lot of other chicks in the sea, my friend, and they’re yours for the picking. Go for it!”

  Well, Reggie, I don’t quite know how to answer that. It’s difficult to determine exactly what it is you’re driving at, since I’m afraid I do not share your bitter perspective or your particular gift for playground aphorisms. So please understand when I suggest this: You know nothing about love.

  But thanks for the letter, Reg. Your “Larry Loves Leann” T-shirt is in the mail.

  1990

  GARRISON KEILLOR

  ZEUS THE LUTHERAN

  WHEN Hera’s lawyer, Alan, had lunch with Zeus that Wednesday at the Acropol, it certainly crossed his mind that the ageless gentleman in the blue T-shirt and white shorts sitting across the table from him and smelling of juniper was the Father of Heaven (and of the Seasons, the Fates, and the Muses) and the father of Athena and Apollo and Artemis and Dionysus, plus the father of Hephaestus by Hera, his wife, and of Eros by his daughter Aphrodite—a guy who didn’t take no for an answer. So Alan felt silly saying, “Hello. How are you?” He knew the answer: Great, all-powerful. For aeons, Zeus had done exactly as he wished, following the amorous impulses of his heart, changing himself into a swan or a horse or Lord knows what for the purpose of making love with whomever he wanted. Now Alan had been hired to talk some sense into him.

  “I realize you’re omniscient, but let me say what’s on my mind,” he said. “Enough with the mounting and coupling. Keep it in your pants. What are you trying to prove? You’re a god, for Pete’s sake. Be a little divine for a change. Knock it off with the fornication, O.K.?”

  “You want to see a magic trick?” said Zeus. And right there at the table he turned the young lawyer into a pitcher of vinaigrette dressing and poured him over the spinach salad and told the waiter, “Take this garbage away, Dimitri, and feed it to the pigs. And bring me a beautiful young woman, passionate but compliant, with small, ripe breasts.” It was his usual way of dealing with opposition: senseless violence followed by easy sex.

  Hera was swimming laps in the pool at her summer house when she got the tragic news from Victor, Alan’s partner. She was hardly surprised; Alan was her six-hundredth lawyer in fourteen centuries. She climbed out of the water, her great alabaster rump rising like Antarctica, and wrapped herself in a vast white towel. “Some god!” she said. “Omniscient except when it comes to himself.” She had thought she understood Zeus’ fascination with mo
rtal women until the day he tried to explain it to her. “The spirit of love is the cosmic teacher who brings gods and mortals together, lighting the path of beauty, which is both mortal and godly, from one generation to the next,” he offered. “One makes love so that people in years to come can feel passion at the sight of flowers.”

  She said, “You’re not that drunk—don’t be that stupid.”

  When Victor told her that Alan was gone, eaten by pigs, she vowed to avenge him, but the next day she was in Thebes, being adored, when Diane sailed into the harbor at Rhodes aboard the S.S. Bethel with her husband, Pastor Wes. Zeus, who was drinking coffee in a dockside café with the passionate, compliant woman and was a little bored with her breasts, which now seemed slightly too small and perhaps a touch overripe, saw Diane overhead as the Bethel tied up, and he felt the old, familiar itch in the groin—except sharper. He arose. Her strawberry-blond hair and great tan made his heart come over the top of the Ferris wheel. She stood at the rail, in a bright-red windbreaker, furious at the chubby man in the yellow pants who was laying his big arm on her shoulder—her hubby of sixteen years. She turned, and the arm fell off her. Zeus paid the check and headed for the gangplank.

  Wes and Diane were on the final leg of a two-week cruise that the grateful congregation of Zion Lutheran Church in Odense, Pennsylvania, had given them in tribute to Wes’s ten years of ministry, and last night, over a rack of lamb and a 1949 Bordeaux that cost enough to feed fifty Ugandan children for a week, they had talked about their good life back in Odense, their three wonderful children, their good health and good luck, their kind fellow-Lutherans, and had somehow got onto the subject of divine grace, and that led into a discussion of pretentious clergy Diane had known, and that led to a twelve-foot dropoff into the wild rapids of a bitter argument about their marriage. They leaned across the baklava, quietly yelling things like “How can you say that?” and “I always knew you felt that way!” until the diners nearby were studying the ceiling for hairline cracks. In the morning, Diane announced that she wanted a separation. Now Wes gestured at the blue sea, the white houses, the fishing boats. “This is the dream trip of a lifetime,” he said. “We can’t come all this way to Greece just to break up. We could have done that at home. Why are you so angry?” And then the god entered his body.

  It took three convulsive seconds for Zeus to become Wes; it felt to the fifty-year-old minister like a fatal heart attack. Oh, shit! he thought. Death. And he had quit smoking three years before! All that self-denial and hard work—and for what? For zip. He was going to fall down dead anyway. Tears filled his eyes. Then Zeus took over, and the soul of Wes dropped into an old dog named Spiros, who lived on the docks and suffered from a bad hernia.

  The transformation shook Zeus up, too. He grabbed at the rail and nearly fainted; in the last hour, Wes had consumed a shovelful of bacon and fried eggs and many cups of dreadful coffee. The god was nauseated, but he touched the woman’s porcelain wrist.

  “What?” she said.

  The god coughed. He tried to focus Wes’s watery blue eyes. “O Lady whose beauty lights the darkening western skies, your white face flashes when I close my eyes.”

  She sighed and looked down at the concrete dock. The god swallowed. He wanted to talk beautifully, but English sounded raspy, dull; it tasted like a cheap cigar.

  “A face of such reflection as if carved in stone, and such beauty as only in great paintings shone. O Lady of light, fly no higher, but come into my bed and know eternal fire.”

  “Where’d you get that? Off a calendar? Be real,” she said.

  The dumb mustache, the poofy hair, the brass medallion, the collapsed chest, the wobbly gut, the big lunkers of blubber on his hips, the balloon butt. The arms were weak, the legs shaky. The brain seemed corroded, stuffed with useless, sad, remorseful thoughts. He wished he could change to somebody trim and taut, an athlete, but he could feel the cold, wiggly flesh glued on him and he knew that Hera had caught him in the naked moment of metamorphosis and with a well-aimed curse had locked him tight inside the flabby body, this clown sack. A god of grandeur and gallantry living in a dump, wearing a mask of pork.

  Just below, the dog sat on his haunches—a professional theologian covered with filthy, matted fur, and with his breakfast, the rancid hindquarters of a rat, dangling from his mouth.

  “Look. That poor old dog on the dock,” said Diane.

  “When you open your thighs, the soft clanging of bells is heard across the valley, O daughter of Harrisburg. Come, glorious woman, and let us waken the day with the music of your clamorous thighs.”

  “Grow up,” she advised.

  His innards rumbled, and a bubble of gas shifted in his belly—a fart as big as a child. He clamped his bowels around it and faced her and spoke: “Dear, dear Lady, O Sweetness—the cheerful face of amiable passion in a cold, dry place. To you I offer a thousand tears and lies, an earnest heart longing for the paradise that awaits us in a bed not far away, I trust. Look at me, Lady, or else I turn to dust.” His best effort. But the language was so flat, and the pastoral voice so clunky and ponderous.

  “I could swear that dog is human,” she cried.

  “Thank you, Diane,” said the dog. “I don’t know how I became schizophrenic, but I do know I’ve never loved you more.” This came from his mouth as a whine, and then he felt the rubber boot of a vicious dockhand kick him in the middle of the hernia. The woman rushed down the gangplank and knelt and picked him up and cradled him in her arms. She crooned, “Oh, honey, precious, baby, sweetness, Mama gonna be so good to you, little darling.” She had never said this to him before. He felt small and cozy in her arms.

  THE dog, the woman, and the god rode a bus three miles over the mountain to the Sheraton Rhodes, the woman holding the dog’s head on her lap. She’d leave Wes and go back to school for her degree in women’s studies—the simple life of the student, a tonic after all these years of ordinary lying. The god vowed to fast until she surrendered to him. The dog felt no pain. He planned to find a pack of Luckies and learn how to smoke again.

  The hotel room had twin beds and looked out on a village of stucco houses with small gardens of tomato plants and beans, where chickens strolled among the vines. Brown goats roamed across the brown hills, their bells clanging softly. Diane undressed in the bathroom, and slid into bed sideways, and lay facing the wall. Zeus sat on the edge of her bed and lightly traced with his finger the neckline of her white negligee. She shrugged. The dog lay at her feet, listening. Zeus was confused, trying to steer his passion through the narrow, twisting mind of Wes. All he wanted was to make love enthusiastically for hours, but dismal Lutheran thoughts sprang up: Go to sleep. Stop making a fool of yourself. You’re a grown man. Settle down. Don’t be ridiculous. Who do you think you are?

  Zeus pulled in his gut and spoke. “Lady, your quiet demeanor mocks the turmoil in my chest, the rage, the foam, the wind blasting love’s light ships aground. Surely you see this, Lady, unless you are the cruellest of your race. Surely you hear my heart pound with mounting waves upon your long, passive shore. Miles from your coast, you sit in a placid town, feeling faint reverberations from beneath the floor. It is your lover the sea, who can never rest until you come down to him.”

  “I don’t know who you’re trying to impress, me or yourself,” she said. Soon she was snoring.

  “This is not such a bad deal,” said the dog. “For me, this is turning out to be a very positive experience on the whole. Becoming a dog was never my first choice, but now that I am one I see that, as a man, my sense of self was tied up with being an oppressor. I got separated from my beingness, my creaturehood. It is so liberating to see things from down here at floor level. You learn a lot about man’s relentlessness.”

  They spent two sunny days at the Sheraton, during which Zeus worked to seduce Diane and she treated him like a husband. She laughed at him. The lines that had worked for him in the past (“Sex is a token of a deeper friendship, an affirmation of mutual humanity, an e
xtension of conversation”) made her roll her eyes and snort. She lay on a wicker lounge beside the pool—her taffy-colored skin in the two red bands of bikini, her perfect breasts, her long, tan legs with a pale golden fuzz. Her slender hands held a book called “The Concrete Shoes of Motherhood.”

  “Let’s take a shower. They have a sauna. Let me give you a backrub. Let’s lie down and take a nap,” he said.

  “Cheese it,” she said. “Amscray. Make tracks. Get smaller.”

  Zeus could hear his fellow-gods hooting and cackling up on Olympus. (The Father of Heaven! Shot Down! Given the Heave-Ho! By a Housewife!) He lost eighteen pounds. He ran twenty-one miles every morning. He shaved off the mustache. She refused to look at him, but, being a god, he could read her thoughts. She was interested. She hiked over the dry brown hills and he walked behind and sang songs to her:

  Lady, your shining skin will slide on mine,

  Your breasts tremble with gladness.

  Your body, naked, be clad in sweet oils,

  And rise to the temple of Aphrodite,

  Where you will live forever, no more

  Lutheran but venerated by mortals.

  This I pledge.

  She pretended not to hear, sweeping the horizon with her binoculars, looking for rare seabirds. Zeus thought, I should have been a swan. The dog trotted along, his hernia cured by love. She had named him Sweetness. “You go ahead and use my body as long as you like,” he said to Zeus. “You’re doing wonders for it. I never looked so good until you became me. No kidding.”

  They didn’t make love until they got on the plane and were almost to America. They hit turbulence over Newfoundland. The plane bucked in the boiling black clouds, the seat-belt light flashed on, they tipped and plunged and rattled, people shrieked. “We’re going to die,” Diane said. “I love you. Let’s take our laps around the track, big boy.” So they undressed under the thin blankets, unfastened their seat belts, and made steady and joyous love, two travellers across life’s tumultuous sky joined in life’s great mutual gift, until, just as the plane hit the concrete at Kennedy and bounced and touched down and rolled to a stop, Diane shuddered and moaned and raked his back with her nails. She said nothing. She was clearly moved. Not until they were in the terminal and had got their bags and passed customs and come through the crowd did she whisper to him, “That was so nice I could do it again, I bet.”