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

by Finder, Henry

  I’m a great believer in contingency planning, but none of this is realistic. Few adults, and even fewer children, are able to make up their minds beforehand what kind of ice-cream cone they’ll want. It would be nice if they could all be lined up in front of the man who is making up the cones and just snap smartly when their turn came, “Strawberry, please,” “Vanilla, please,” “Chocolate, please.” But of course it never happens like that. There is always a great discussion, a great jostling and craning of necks and leaning over the counter to see down into the tubs of ice cream, and much interpersonal consultation—“What kind are you having?”—back and forth, as if that should make any difference. Until finally the first child’s turn comes and he asks the man, “What kinds do you have?”

  Now, this is the stupidest question in the world, because there is always a sign posted saying what kinds of ice cream they have. As I tell the children, that’s what they put the sign up there for—so you won’t have to ask what kinds of ice cream they have. The man gets sick of telling everybody all the different kinds of ice cream they have, so they put a sign up there that says. You’re supposed to read it, not ask the man.

  “All right, but the sign doesn’t say strawberry.”

  “Well, that means they don’t have strawberry.”

  “But there is strawberry, right there.”

  “That must be raspberry or something.” (Look again at the sign. Raspberry isn’t there, either.)

  When the child’s turn actually comes, he says, “Do you have strawberry?”

  “Sure.”

  “What other kinds do you have?”

  The trouble is, of course, that they put up that sign saying what flavors they have, with little cardboard inserts to put in or take out flavors, way back when they first opened the store. But they never change the sign—or not often enough. They always have flavors that aren’t on the list, and often they don’t have flavors that are on the list. Children know this—whether innately or from earliest experience it would be hard to say. The ice-cream man knows it, too. Even grownups learn it eventually. There will always be chaos and confusion and mind-changing and general uproar when ice-cream cones are being ordered, and there has not been, is not, and will never be any way to avoid it.

  HUMAN beings are incorrigibly restless and dissatisfied, always in search of new experiences and sensations, seldom content with the familiar. It is this, I think, that accounts for people wanting to have a taste of your cone, and wanting you to have a taste of theirs. “Do have a taste of this fresh peach—it’s delicious,” my wife used to say to me, very much (I suppose) the way Eve wanted Adam to taste her delicious apple. An insinuating look of calculating curiosity would film my wife’s eyes—the same look those beautiful, scary women in those depraved Italian films give a man they’re interested in. “How’s yours?̶1; she would say. For this reason, I always order chocolate chip now. Down through the years, all those close enough to me to feel entitled to ask for a taste of my cone—namely, my wife and children—have learned what chocolate chip tastes like, so they have no legitimate reason to ask me for a taste. As for tasting other people’s cones, never do it. The reasoning here is that if it tastes good, you’ll wish you’d had it; if it tastes bad, you’ll have had a taste of something that tastes bad; if it doesn’t taste either good or bad, then you won’t have missed anything. Of course no person in his right mind ever would want to taste anyone else’s cone, but it is useful to have good, logical reasons for hating the thought of it.

  Another important thing. Never let the man hand you the ice-cream cones for the whole group. There is no sight more pathetic than some bumbling disorganized papa holding four ice-cream cones in two hands, with his money still in his pocket, when the man says, “Eighty cents.” What does he do then? He can’t hand the cones back to the man to hold while he fishes in his pocket for the money, for the man has just given them to him. He can start passing them out to the kids, but at least one of them will have gone back to the car to see how the dog is doing, or have been sent round in back by his mother to wash his hands or something. And even if papa does get them distributed, he’s still going to be left with his own cone in one hand while he tries to get his money with the other. Meanwhile, of course, the man is very impatient, and the next group is asking him, “What flavors do you have?”

  No, never let the man hand you the cones of others. Make him hand them out to each kid in turn. That way, too, you won’t get those disgusting blobs of butter pecan and black raspberry on your own chocolate chip. And insist that he tell you how much it all costs and settle with him before he hands you your own cone. Make sure everyone has got paper napkins and everything before he hands you your own cone. Get everything straight before he hands you your own cone. Then, as he hands you your own cone, reach out and take it from him. Strange, magical, dangerous moment! It shares something of the mysterious, sick thrill that soldiers are said to feel on the eve of a great battle.

  Now, consider for a moment just exactly what it is that you are about to be handed. It is a huge, irregular mass of ice cream, faintly domed at the top from the metal scoop, which has first produced it and then insecurely balanced it on the uneven top edge of a hollow inverted cone made out of the most brittle and fragile of materials. Clumps of ice cream hang over the side, very loosely attached to the main body. There is always much more ice cream than the cone could hold, even if the ice cream were tamped down into the cone, which of course it isn’t. And the essence of ice cream is that it melts. It doesn’t just stay there teetering in this irregular, top-heavy mass; it also melts. And it melts fast. And it doesn’t just melt—it melts into a sticky fluid that cannot be wiped off. The only thing one person could hand to another that might possibly be more dangerous is a live hand grenade from which the pin had been pulled five seconds earlier. And of course if anybody offered you that, you could say, “Oh. Uh, well—no, thanks.”

  Ice-cream men handle cones routinely, and are inured. They are like professionals who are used to handling sticks of TNT; their movements are quick and skillful. An ice-cream man will pass a cone to you casually, almost carelessly. Never accept a cone on this basis! Too many brittle sugar cones (the only good kind) are crushed or chipped, or their ice-cream tops knocked askew, by this casual sort of transfer from hand to hand. If the ice-cream man is attempting this kind of brusque transfer, keep your hands at your side, no matter what effort it may cost you to overcome the instinct by which everyone’s hand goes out, almost automatically, whenever he is proffered something delicious and expected. Keep your hands at your side, and the ice-cream man will look up at you, startled, questioning. Lock his eyes with your own, and then, slowly, calmly, and above all deliberately, take the cone from him.

  Grasp the cone with the right hand firmly but gently between thumb and at least one but not more than three fingers, two-thirds of the way up the cone. Then dart swiftly away to an open area, away from the jostling crowd at the stand. Now take up the classic ice-cream-cone-eating stance: feet from one to two feet apart, body bent forward from the waist at a twenty-five-degree angle, right elbow well up, right forearm horizontal, at a level with your collarbone and about twelve inches from it. But don’t start eating yet. Check first to see what emergency repairs may be necessary. Sometimes a sugar cone will be so crushed or broken or cracked that all one can do is gulp at the thing like a savage, getting what he can of it and letting the rest drop to the ground, and then evacuating the area of catastrophe as quickly as possible. Checking the cone for possible trouble can be done in a second or two, if one knows where to look and does it systematically. A trouble spot some people overlook is the bottom tip of the cone. This may have been broken off. Or the flap of the cone material at the bottom, usually wrapped over itself in that funny spiral construction, may be folded in a way that is imperfect and leaves an opening. No need to say that through this opening—in a matter of perhaps thirty or, at most, ninety seconds—will begin to pour hundreds of thousands of sticky mo
lecules of melted ice cream. You know in this case that you must instantly get the paper napkin in your left hand under and around the bottom of the cone to stem the forthcoming flow, or else be doomed to eat the cone far too rapidly. It is a grim moment. No one wants to eat a cone under that kind of pressure, but neither does anyone want to end up with the bottom of the cone stuck to a messy napkin. There’s one other alternative—one that takes both skill and courage: Forgoing any cradling action, grasp the cone more firmly between thumb and forefinger and extend the other fingers so that they are out of the way of the dripping from the bottom, then increase the waist-bend angle from twenty-five degrees to thirty-five degrees, and then eat the cone, allowing it to drip out of the bottom onto the ground in front of you! Experienced and thoughtful cone-eaters enjoy facing up to this kind of sudden challenge.

  SO far, we have been concentrating on cone problems, but of course there is the ice cream to worry about, too. In this area, immediate action is sometimes needed on three fronts at once. Frequently the ice cream will be mounted on the cone in a way that is perilously lopsided. This requires immediate corrective action to move it back into balance—a slight pressure downward with the teeth and lips to seat the ice cream more firmly in and on the cone, but not so hard, of course, as to break the cone. On other occasions, gobs of ice cream will be hanging loosely from the main body, about to fall to the ground (bad) or onto one’s hand (far, far worse). This requires instant action, too; one must snap at the gobs like a frog in a swarm of flies. Sometimes, trickles of ice cream will already (already!) be running down the cone toward one’s fingers, and one must quickly raise the cone, tilting one’s face skyward, and lick with an upward motion that pushes the trickles away from the fingers and (as much as possible) into one’s mouth. Every ice-cream cone is like every other ice-cream cone in that it potentially can present all of these problems, but each ice-cream cone is paradoxically unique in that it will present the problems in a different order of emergency and degree of severity. It is, thank God, a rare ice-cream cone that will present all three kinds of problems in exactly the same degree of emergency. With each cone, it is necessary to make an instantaneous judgment as to where the greatest danger is, and to act! A moment’s delay, and the whole thing will be a mess before you’ve even tasted it (Fig. 1). If it isn’t possible to decide between any two of the three basic emergency problems (i.e., lopsided mount, dangling gobs, running trickles), allow yourself to make an arbitrary adjudication; assign a “heads” value to one and a “tails” value to the other, then flip a coin to decide which is to be tended to first. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, actually flip a coin—you’d have to dig in your pockets for it, or else have it ready in your hand before you were handed the cone. There isn’t remotely enough time for anything like that. Just decide in your mind which came up, heads or tails, and then try to remember as fast as you can which of the problems you had assigned to the winning side of the coin. Probably, though, there isn’t time for any of this. Just do something, however arbitrary. Act! Eat!

  In trying to make wise and correct decisions about the ice-cream cone in your hand, you should always keep the objectives in mind. The main objective, of course, is to get the cone under control. Secondarily, one will want to eat the cone calmly and with pleasure. Real pleasure lies not simply in eating the cone but in eating it right. Let us assume that you have darted to your open space and made your necessary emergency repairs. The cone is still dangerous—still, so to speak, “live.” But you can now proceed with it in an orderly fashion. First, revolve the cone through the full three hundred and sixty degrees, snapping at the loose gobs of ice cream; turn the cone by moving the thumb away from you and the forefinger toward you, so the cone moves counterclockwise. Then, with the cone still “wound,” which will require the wrist to be bent at the full right angle toward you, apply pressure with the mouth and tongue to accomplish overall realignment, straightening and settling the whole mess. Then, unwinding the cone back through the full three hundred and sixty degrees, remove any trickles of ice cream. From here on, some supplementary repairs may be necessary, but, the cone is now defused.

  At this point, you can risk a glance around you. How badly the others are doing with their cones! Now you can settle down to eating yours. This is done by eating the ice cream off the top. At each bite, you must press down cautiously, so that the ice cream settles farther and farther into the cone. Be very careful not to break the cone. Of course, you never take so much ice cream into your mouth at once that it hurts your teeth; for the same reason, you never let unmelted ice cream into the back of your mouth. If all these procedures are followed correctly, you should shortly arrive at the ideal—the way an ice-cream cone is always pictured but never actually is when it is handed to you (Fig. 2). The ice cream should now form a small dome whose circumference exactly coincides with the large circumference of the cone itself—a small skullcap that fits exactly on top of a larger, inverted dunce cap. You have made order out of chaos; you are an artist. You have taken an unnatural, abhorrent, irregular, chaotic form, and from it you have sculpted an ordered, ideal shape that might be envied by Praxiteles or even Euclid.

  Now at last you can begin to take little nibbles of the cone itself, being very careful not to crack it. Revolve the cone so that its rim remains smooth and level as you eat both ice cream and cone in the same ratio. Because of the geometrical nature of things, a constantly reduced inverted cone still remains a perfect inverted cone no matter how small it grows, just as a constantly reduced dome held within a cone retains its shape. Because you are constantly reshaping the dome of ice cream with your tongue and nibbling at the cone, it follows in logic—and in actual practice, if you are skillful and careful—that the cone will continue to look exactly the same, except for its size, as you eat it down, so that at the very end you will hold between your thumb and forefinger a tiny, idealized replica of an ice-cream cone, a thing perhaps one inch high. Then, while the others are licking their sticky fingers, preparatory to wiping them on their clothes, or going back to the ice-cream stand for more paper napkins to try to clean themselves up—then you can hold the miniature cone up for everyone to see, and pop it gently into your mouth.

  1968

  VERONICA GENG

  TEACHING POETRY WRITING TO SINGLES

  I HAD the idea to teach more kinds of people to write poetry as a result of two previous books of mine: “I Taught Republicans to Write Poetry” and “How to Teach the Writing of Poetry to Fashion Coördinators.” I thought of singles because of an interesting hour I had spent reading my own poems at a singles bar called Ozymandias II, and because of many other hours, much less happy ones, I had spent before my marriage as a visitor to another singles bar, Nick’s Roost, where there were no activities of that kind going on.

  I asked the owners of Ozymandias II, my friends Ozzie and Mandy Dias, to arrange for the class. I had four students, and we met once, on a Friday at midnight, at the big table in front. Like the others in the crowded room, most of the four were in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. Some of them wore glasses. One worked for an escort agency, one was a hayride organizer, another a fashion coördinator, another a Republican. The singles bar gave these people a feeling of meetability, but none had ever written poetry there, and none, I think, would have done so without me.

  I started the class by saying what I was going to do was get them to write words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper (I didn’t want to scare them with the formal term “poem”) and then I would write a book about how much I had helped them. The students were not in the habit of sitting and hearing something like this explained. Some were so distracted that they could only talk in incomplete sentences, such as “What the—?!” Others stared nervously at the TV screen above the bar, where the final minutes of some kind of sports event seemed to be going on. I said that writing words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper was not the hard thing that many people think. I said how could it be hard if
I was going to teach it to them? I was sure I could give them the mastery of literary form and metaphor so lacking in singles-bar life. I said I knew they had all been single since childhood and I could see how this might make them feel “unmarried” and “on their own,” but I said John Milton and Vachel Lindsay and James Dickey had all been single at one time or another and that writing words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper had helped them to stop running.

  I said the first thing we would do would be a collaboration. I knew the students had all gone on a singles bicycling tour of the Wye River in England five years before, so I said I want everyone to remember that trip and think of a sentence about it. Something you saw. Or an outfit you wore. Or a feeling you had about time passing and your not being married yet and having to go on bicycle tours to meet somebody. I’ll write down everyone’s sentence and put them together, I said, and we’ll have words in lines of uneven length on a piece of paper.

  At first the students were puzzled. “We went there, that’s all.” “I remember we did different stuff.” “And bicycling.” Then William said, “O.K. A double vodka, please. Five years have passed; five summers, with the length of five long winters!” This was a good start, I said, especially the dramatic “frame” made by “O.K. A double vodka, please,” as if the lines were being said casually to someone by someone sitting in a bar or tavern.

  Then Ezra spoke up: “And again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland brodod´aktuloV.” This was better than I had expected, but the poem was getting a false-sounding jig-jigging rhythm, and I said for the students not to worry about academic gimmicks such as metre. I also said try to get in more of your own personal feelings and hangups. I said for instance I remember when I was in high school I worried a lot about my bike getting rusty.