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

by Finder, Henry

  This is a risk that I am prepared to take. Justice will in the end be done. Some Schliemann of the future, filled with burning faith, will unearth with his primitive spade the proof that my writings are as true as Homer’s. “I have gazed,” he will report in a dramatic smoke signal, “upon the veritable egg whisk of the Notebooks.” This will cause a proper stir. The knowledge that the Notebooks are not Myth but Manual is bound to change the course of history. The tribe or clan that owns them, with the secret of the spoked wheel safe in its grasp, must inevitably predominate. My book will become the Book of Power—closely guarded, eagerly sought, probably fought for. The thought that my patient labor may well become the cause of World War IV sometimes, though not invariably, sends me to sleep.

  1962

  THOMAS MEEHAN

  YMA DREAM

  IN this dream, which I have had on the night of the full moon for the past three months, I am giving a cocktail party in honor of Yma Sumac, the Peruvian singer. This is strange at once, for while I have unbounded admiration for four-octave voices, I have never met Miss Sumac, and, even in a dream, it seems unlikely that I should be giving her a party. No matter. She and I are in the small living room of my apartment, on Charles Street, in Greenwich Village, and we are getting along famously. I have told her several of my Swedish-dialect stories, and she has reciprocated by singing for me, in Quechua, a medley of Andean folk songs. Other guests are expected momentarily. I have no idea, however, who any of them will be. Miss Sumac is wearing a blue ball gown and I am in white tie and tails. Obviously, despite the somewhat unfashionable neighborhood and the cramped quarters of my apartment, it is to be a pretty swell affair. In any case, I have spread several dishes of Fritos about the room, and on what is normally my typing table there is a bowl of hot glügg.

  The doorbell rings. A guest! I go to the door, and there, to my astonished delight, is Ava Gardner. This is going to be a bit of all right, I think.

  “Tom, darling!” she says, embracing me warmly. “How wonderful of you to have asked me.”

  In my waking hours, unfortunately, I have never met Miss Gardner. In my dream, though, my guests seem to know me rather intimately, while, oddly, none of them seem to know each other. Apparently it is their strong common affection for me that has brought them to Charles Street. For my part, although I immediately recognize each guest as he or she arrives, I have no memory of having ever met any of them, or, for that matter, of having invited them to a party in my apartment. On with the dream, however. “Miss Ava Gardner,” I say, “I’d like you to meet Miss Yma Sumac.”

  “Charmed,” says Miss Sumac.

  “Delighted,” counters Miss Gardner.

  “Ah, but Tom,” says Miss Sumac, with an enchanting laugh (which runs up the scale from E above middle C to C above high C), “let us not, on this of all occasions, be formal. Por favor, introduce each guest only by the first name, so that we may all quickly become—how shall I say?—amigos.”

  Typical Peruvian friendliness, I think, and reintroduce the two. “Ava, Yma,” I say.

  We sit around for some time, sipping glügg and munching Fritos. Things seem to be going well. The doorbell rings again. The second guest is a man—Abba Eban, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations. Again I make the introductions, and, bowing to the wishes of the guest of honor, keep things on a first-name basis. “Abba, Yma; Abba, Ava,” I say.

  I stifle a grin, but neither Miss Sumac nor my two other guests see anything amusing in the exchange. We chat. The bell rings again, and I am pleased to find Oona O’Neill, Charlie Chaplin’s wife, at the door. She is alone. I bring her into the room. “Oona, Yma; Oona, Ava; Oona, Abba,” I say.

  We are standing in a circle now, smiling brightly but not talking much. I sense a slight strain, but the party is young and may yet come to life. The bell again. It is another man—Ugo Betti, the Italian playwright. A bit hurriedly, I introduce him to the circle. “Ugo, Yma; Ugo, Ava; Ugo, Oona; Ugo, Abba,” I say.

  Miss Sumac gives me an enigmatic glance that I try to interpret. Boredom? Thirst? No, she looks almost irritated. Hastily, I replenish everyone’s glass. For some reason, I begin to hope that no other guests have been invited. The doorbell rings once again, however, and I open the door on two lovely actresses, Ona Munson and Ida Lupino. This gives me a happy inspiration for my introductions. “Ona and Ida,” I say, “surely you know Yma and Ava? Ida, Ona—Oona, Abba.” Damn! It doesn’t come out even. “Ida, Ona—Ugo,” I finish lamely.

  I have scarcely given Miss Munson and Miss Lupino their first drinks when I am again summoned to the door. My guests stand stony-faced as I usher in the new arrival, the young Aga Khan. He is looking exceptionally well turned out in a dinner jacket with a plaid cummerbund. Smiling too cheerfully, I introduce him to the waiting group. “Folks,” I say, using a word I have always detested, “here’s the Aga Khan! You know.” But there is silence, so I must continue. “Aga—Yma, Ava, Oona, Ona ’n’ Ida, Abba ’n’ Ugo.”

  The Aga Khan and Mr. Eban, I notice, take an immediate dislike to each other, and I begin to feel an unmistakable pall descending over my party. I suggest a game of charades. This is met with glacial looks from everyone, including Miss Gardner, whose earlier affection for me has now totally vanished. When the doorbell rings this time, everybody turns and glares at the door. I open it and discover another pair—Ira Wolfert, the novelist, and Ilya Ehrenburg, the Russian novelist. The latter, I know, is quite a man-of-the-world, so I try a new approach. “Ilya,” I say, “why don’t you just introduce yourself and Ira? You know all these lovely people, don’t you?”

  “Nyet,” says Mr. Ehrenburg. “Can’t say that I do.”

  “Oh, all right,” I say. “Ilya, Ira, here’s Yma, Ava, Oona. Ilya, Ira—Ona, Ida, Abba, Ugo, Aga.”

  I ask Miss Sumac to sing for us. She refuses. We continue with the glügg and some hopelessly inane small talk. Mr. Eban and the Aga Khan stand at opposite sides of the room, eying each other. I begin to wish I’d never given the goddam party. Ona Munson jostles Ugo Betti’s elbow by accident, spilling his drink. I spring forward to put them at their ease, whipping a handkerchief from my pocket. “Never mind!” I cry. “No damage done! Ugo, you go get yourself another drink. I’ll just wipe this glügg off the, uh, rügg.” The guests fix me with narrowed eyes. At this moment, Eva Gabor, the Hungarian actress, sweeps through the door, which I have cleverly left open. Unaware of the way things are going, she embraces me and turns, beaming, to meet the others. Inevitably, I must make the introductions. I start rapidly. “Eva, meet Yma and Ava and Oona—” But then I find that Miss Gabor is pausing to hug each guest in turn, so I am forced to make the remaining introductions separately. “Eva, Ona; Eva, Ida; Eva, Ugo; Eva, Abba; Eva, Ilya; Eva, Ira; Eva, Aga.”

  This is a terrible party. All the men have bunched up. We stand in a circle, glowering at one another. I can think of nothing to say. I feel oddly hemmed in, like a man who is about to be stoned to death.

  “Am I late?” asks the actress Uta Hagen gaily as she comes tripping into the room.

  “No, no!” I say, gallantly taking her arm and steering her at once toward the punch bowl and away from the others.

  “Please have the common decency to introduce your guests to one another,” says Miss Sumac, in a cold monotone. “And in the proper manner.”

  In the dream, Yma Sumac seems to have some kind of hold over me, and I must do as she wishes. “O.K., O.K.,” I snap crossly. “Uta, Yma; Uta, Ava; Uta, Oona; Uta, Ona; Uta, Ida; Uta, Ugo; Uta, Abba; Uta, Ilya; Uta, Ira; Uta, Aga; Uta, Eva.” I turn to see if this has placated Miss Sumac, but she coldly ignores me. I have begun to hate her. Then I discover that the glügg has run out, and I am forced to offer my guests rye-and-7-Up. In the hope that no further company will arrive, I silently close the door. The bell rings instantly, however, and I feel a chill run down my spine. I pretend not to hear it.

  “Answer the door,” Miss Sumac says peremptorily. My circle of guests moves menacingly towar
d me. With a plummeting heart, I open the door. Standing before me, in immaculate evening dress, is a sturdy, distinguished-looking man. He is the Polish concert pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski.

  “Come in, Mieczyslaw!” I cry, with tears in my eyes. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life!”

  And here always, my dream ends.

  1962

  ROGER ANGELL

  AINMOSNI

  INSOMNIA is my baby. We have been going steady for a good twenty years now, and there is no hint that the dull baggage is ready to break off the affair. Three or four times a week, somewhere between three and six in the morning, this faulty thermostat inside my head clicks to “On,” raising my eyelids with an almost audible clang and releasing a fetid blast of night thoughts. Sighing, I resume my long study of the bedroom ceiling and the uninteresting shape (a penguin? an overshoe?) that the street light, slanting through the window, casts on the closet door, while I review various tedious stratagems for recapturing sleep. If I am resolute, I will arise and robe myself, stumble out of the bedroom (my wife sleeps like a Series E government bond), turn on the living-room lights, and take down a volume from my little shelf of classical pharmacopocia. George Eliot, James, and Montaigne are Nembutals, slow-acting but surefire. Thoreau, a dangerous Seconal-Demerol bomb, is reserved for emergencies; thirty minutes in the Walden beanfield sends me back to bed at a half run, fighting unconsciousness all the way down the hall. Too often, however, I stay in bed, under the delusion that sleep is only a minute or two away. This used to be the time for Night Games, which once worked for me. I would invent a No-Star baseball game, painstakingly selecting two nines made up of the least exciting ballplayers I could remember (mostly benchwarmers with the old Phillies and Senators) and playing them against each other in the deserted stadium of my mind. Three or four innings of walks, popups, foul balls, and messed-up double plays, with long pauses for rhubarbs and the introduction of relief pitchers, would bring on catalepsy. Other nights, I would begin a solo round of golf (I am a terrible golfer) on some recalled course. After a couple of pars and a brilliantly holed birdie putt, honesty required me to begin playing my real game, and a long search for my last golf ball, horribly hooked into the cattails to the left of the sixth green, would uncover, instead, a lovely Spalding Drowz-Rite. In time, however, some perverse sporting instinct began to infect me, and my Night Games became hopelessly interesting. As dawn brightened the bedroom, a pinch-hitter would bash a line drive that hit the pitcher’s rubber and rebounded crazily into a pail of water in the enemy dugout, scoring three runs and retying the game, 17–17, in the twenty-first inning; my drive off the fourteenth tee, slicing toward a patch of tamaracks, would be seized in midair by an osprey and miraculously dropped on the green, where I would begin lining up my putt just as the alarm went off. I had to close up the ballpark and throw away my clubs; I was bushed.

  It was an English friend of mine, a pink-cheeked poet clearly accustomed to knocking off ten hours’ sleep every night, who got me into real small-hours trouble. He observed me yawning over a lunchtime Martini one day and drew forth an account of my ridiculous affliction. “I can help you, old boy,” he announced. “Try palindromes.”

  “Palindromes?” I repeated.

  “You know—backward-forward writing,” he went on. “Reads the same both ways. You remember the famous ones: ‘Madam, I’m Adam.’ ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba.’ ‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.’ The Elba one is supposed to be about Napoleon. Here—I’ll write it for you. You see, ‘Able’ backward is ‘Elba,’ and—”

  “I know, I know,” I snapped. “But what’s that got to do with not sleeping? Am I supposed to repeat them over and over, or what?”

  “No, that’s no good. You must make up your own. Nothing to it. Begin with two-way words, and soon you’ll be up to sentences. I do it whenever I can’t sleep—‘sleep’ is ‘peels,’ of course—and in ten minutes I pop right off again. Never fails. Just now, I’m working on a lovely one about Eliot, the poet. ‘T. Eliot, top bard . . .’ it begins, and it ends, ‘drab pot toilet.’ Needs a bit of work in the middle, but I’ll get it one of these nights.”

  I was dubious, but that night, shortly after four, I began with the words. In a few minutes, I found “gulp plug” (something to do with bass fishing) and “live evil,” and sailed off into the best sleep I had enjoyed in several weeks. The next night brought “straw warts” and “repaid diaper,” and, in time, a long if faintly troubled snooze (“ezoons”). I was delighted. My palindromic skills improved rapidly, and soon I was no longer content with mere words. I failed to notice at first that, like all sedatives, this one had begun to weaken with protracted use; I was doubling and tripling the dose, and my intervals given over to two-way cogitation were stretching to an hour or more. One morning, after a mere twenty minutes of second shut-eye, I met my wife at the breakfast table and announced, “ ‘Editor rubs ward, draws burro tide.’ ”

  “Terrific,” she said unenthusiastically. “I don’t get it. I mean, what does it mean?”

  “Well, you see,” I began, “there’s this editor in Mexico who goes camping with his niece, and—”

  “Listen,” she said, “I think you should take a phenobarb tonight. You look terrible.”

  It was about six weeks later when, at five-fifteen one morning, I discovered the Japanese hiding in my pajamas. “Am a Jap,” he said, bowing politely, and then added in a whisper, “Pajama.” I slept no more. Two nights later, at precisely four-eleven, when “Repins pajama” suddenly yielded “Am a Jap sniper,” I sprang out of bed, brewed myself a pot of strong coffee, and set to work with pencil and paper on what had begun to look like a war novel. A month later, trembling, hollow-eyed, and badly strung out on coffee and Dexamyl, I finished the epic. It turned out that the thing wasn’t about a Japanese at all; it was a long telegram composed by a schizophrenic war veteran who had been wounded at Iwo Jima and was now incarcerated in some mental hospital. (This kind of surprise keeps happening when you are writing palindromes, a literary form in which the story line is controlled by the words rather than the author.) Experts have since told me that my barely intelligible pushmi-pullyu may be the longest palindrome in the English language:

  MARGE, LET DAM DOGS IN. AM ON SATIRE: VOW I AM CAIN. AM ON SPOT. AM A JAP SNIPER. RED, RAW MURDER ON G.I.! IGNORE DRUM. (WARDER REPINS PAJAMA TOPS.) NO MANIAC, MA! IWO VERITAS: NO MAN IS GOD.

  MAD TELEGRAM

  MY recovery was a protracted one, requiring a lengthy vacation at the seashore, daily exercise, warm milk on retiring, and eventually a visit to the family psychiatrist. The head-candler listened to my story (“Rot-cod . . .” I began), then wrote out a prescription for a mild sedative (I murmured, “slip pils”) and swore me to total palindromic abstinence. He told me to avoid Tums, Serutan, and men named Otto. “Only right thinking can save you,” he said severely. “Or rather, left-to-right thinking.”

  I tried, I really tried. For more than a year, I followed the doctor’s plan faithfully, instantly dropping my gaze whenever I began to see “POTS” and “KLAW” on traffic signs facing me across the street, and plugging away at my sleepy-time books when I was reafflicted with the Big Eye. I had begun to think that mine might be a total cure when, just two weeks ago, nodding over “Walden” again, I came upon this sentence: “We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled. . . .”

  “Ah-ha!” I muttered, struck by the remarkable pertinence of this thought to my own nocturnal condition. Thoreau himself had said it; I could never quite escape. To prove the point, I repeated my exclamation, saying it backward this time.

  I did not entirely give way to my reptile. Remembering my near-fatal bout with the telegram, I vowed to limit myself entirely to revising and amplifying existing palindromes—those famous chestnuts recited to me by my English friend. The very next night, during a 4 A.M. rainstorm, I put my mind to “A ma
n, a plan, a canal: Panama.” Replacing de Lesseps with a female M.I.T. graduate, I achieved “A woman, a plan, a canal: Panamowa,” which was clearly inadequate; she sounded more like a ballerina. Within a few minutes, however, a dog trotted out of the underbrush of my mind—it was a Pekinese—and suddenly redesigned the entire isthmus project: “A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda.” I went to sleep.

  Napoleon led me into deeper waters. Bedwise by night light, I envisioned him as a fellow-sufferer, a veteran palindromist who must have been transfixed with joy to find the island of his first exile so brilliantly responsive to his little perversion. But what if the allies had marooned him on a different island in 1814? Various possibilities suggested themselves: “A dum reb was I ere I saw Bermuda.” . . . “No lava was I ere I saw Avalon.” . . . “Lana C. LaDaug was I ere I saw Guadalcanal.” None would do; the Emperor’s aides, overhearing him, would conclude that the old boy had fallen victim to aphasia. A night or two later, I replaced Boney on Elba and retinued him with a useful and highly diversified staff of officers and loyal friends—a Rumanian, a female camp follower, a Levantine, and a German. These accompanied the Emperor by turns during his habitual evening walks along the cliffs, each feigning awe and delight as the impromptu musing of the day fell from his lips. “Uncomfortable was I ere I saw Elba, Trofmocnu,” he confessed to the first. To the female, smiling roguishly and chucking her under the chin, he murmured, “Amiable was I ere I saw Elba, Ima.” The next evening, made gloomy by the rabbinical sidekick, he changed to “Vegetable was I ere I saw Elba, Tegev.” He cheered up with the burly Prussian, declaiming, “Remarkable was I ere I saw Elba, Kramer!,” but, finding the same man on duty the following night (the list had run out, and new duty rosters were up), he reversed himself, whining, “Unremarkable was I ere I saw Elba, Kramer, nu?”