Bits and Pieces

by Robert Benchley

  You take a quick look at what he is eating. It is usually steak and French-fried potatoes, with sliced tomatoes on the side. Has the guy no imagination in eating? You feel sure that he is going to top off with a piece of apple pie and a large cup of coffee. In the meantime, it has come your time to order. Now it is his turn to be critical.

  As a matter of fact, that steak of his looks pretty good, but you wouldn’t order that for a million dollars. He would know that you got the idea from him and you won’t give him that satisfaction. So you order the deviled beef bones – and realize that he is laughing nastily to himself at your naïveté. The hell with him!

  While your order is being prepared, you try looking out the window, but it is too dark to see anything. Here is the chance to break down the ill feeling slightly and make some remark, such as, “Dark out, isn’t it?” But, unless you do it right away, the chance is lost and it is war to the death.

  When your dinner comes, the advantage is all his. He can watch you serve yourself, make mental notes on your handling of your knife and fork, laugh inwardly at your attempts to get meat from a bone which has no meat on it. The result is that you spill large pieces of beef on the cloth, suddenly become self-conscious about holding your implements until you aren’t sure just how you have been holding them all your life and, with the nervousness of a beginner, let your knife fly out of your hand on to the window sill. You are tempted to throw it at him, but you notice that he has divined your purpose and is grasping his. Well, let us have no bloodshed here. You can get him out in the vestibule.

  Here are two citizens of the United States who should be brothers in the bond, whipped up to a state of mutual dislike and animosity without a word being spoken. He delays over his dessert much longer than he has to, and although you yourself would like some preserved figs with cream, you decide that one hog at a table is enough. You both pay your checks at the same time and sneer at each other’s tip. Fortunately his car is in one direction from the diner and yours is in the other, so actual physical combat is avoided.

  In elevators also we find a spirit which, without any justification whatsoever, threatens to destroy all the good work which evangelists and philanthropists have been struggling at all these years. Two people alone in an elevator, and strangers to each other, are instinctive enemies. If one says: “Ten out” and the other can beat him by two and say “Eight out,” it is a victory which can hardly be measured by ordinary standards. Sidelong glances of hatred are shot across the car. If one catches the other looking in the mirror, a scornful leer passes over his face and the word “Siss” is spoken just as clearly as if the sound were actually made. If a woman gets into the car, and No. 1 takes off his hat while No. 2 keeps his on, the first man boils with a desire to snatch the other’s hat from his head and dash it to the floor, while the second does everything but sneer out loud at the affectation which prompts the other to assume a gentility which is both spurious and unnecessary.

  The only thing which can possibly bring these two together is the entrance into the car of two other people who carry on their conversation over the heads of the other passengers. Our two original antagonists could almost become friends under the irritation of having to listen to the new occupants’ badinage.

  But probably the most common of all antagonisms arises from one man’s taking a seat beside you on a train, a seat to which he is completely entitled. You get in at Bog Shore and find a seat by yourself. At any rate, you get the window, and although you know that by the time the train reaches Flithurst the car will be taxed to its capacity, you put your hat down in the seat beside you.

  At Flithurst a long line of commuters files past. One of them, an especially unpleasant-looking man, spies your hat and hesitates. You are thinking: “The great hulk! Why doesn’t he go into the next car?” He is thinking: “I guess I’ll teach this seat hog a lesson. . . .” “ Is this seat taken?” Without deigning a reply, you grab your hat sulkily and cram it on your head. He sits down and the contest begins.

  He unfolds his paper and opens it so wide that it knocks your hat askew. He is regarding the Post-Examiner. He would. Obviously an illiterate, to add to everything else. You crouch against the window sill, in exaggerated courtesy and fold your paper up into the smallest possible compass. Go ahead, take all the room if you want it! Don’t mind me – oh, no! He doesn’t. Nevertheless, he is boiling with antagonism, while you are on the point of pulling the bell rope and getting off the train to walk the rest of the way to town. And for what?

  You are enraged because a man took a seat to which he was quite entitled, and he is enraged because he knows that you are enraged and, besides, you have the seat by the window. Thus we see that Old Stepmother Nature has her own ways and means of perpetuating warfare and hatreds. Every one of us may have a daily calendar with a motto on it about loving our fellow men, but when Nature puts two people within a radius of three feet of each other and turns on the current, there is no sense in trying to be nice about the thing. It is dog eat dog.

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  Little

  Noise Abatement

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  So now we are to have no more noise. Scientific research has disclosed the fact that the effect of harsh noises on the brain is more deleterious than that of drugs, and nowhere near so pleasant while it is happening. The bursting of a paper bag, according to the Noise Abatement Commission, increases the brain pressure more than does morphine, but you don’t read of anyone smuggling paper bags into the country just to bang them in some addict’s ear at so much per bang. Noise is bad for you and isn’t even any fun. It’s a wonder that they care about prohibiting it.

  Doing away with banging paper bags is a good beginning, along with sidewalk loud-speakers and other public disturbers, but why not first do away with the people who think it is funny to bang paper bags? You would find that you were killing 500 birds with one stone, for they are the ones who make almost all other kinds of obnoxious noises. Anyone who thinks it is funny to sneak up behind you and whack an inflated paper bag (and is there anything more satisfactory than to see the chagrin on his face when the bag turns out to be a dud and refuses to bang?) will also sneak up behind you and push you off rafts into the water, will dive down and grab your legs while you are swimming, will snap rubber bands at you, and will cover his lower teeth with his lip and emit piercing whistles. Get rid of one and you will have got rid of them all.

  This shrill whistling through the teeth is a sure indication in a boy that he will grow up to be an obnoxious citizen. They usually practice it in public gatherings where it will attract attention to themselves. It is offered in place of any mental attainment or physical prowess and is almost always the mark of retarded development along lines other than whistling through the teeth. In a crowd, if you will watch carefully, you will see the boy who has just whistled himself into prominence sooner or later will begin to push. This is also considered funny, especially if a good flying wedge can be started which will knock over a couple of old ladies. It is all a part of the banging-paper-bags and whistling-through-the-teeth psychology and is, mental experts will tell you, the sign of an inferiority complex. Inferiority is a mild word for it.

  What the scientists do not seem to have taken into consideration in their researches is that it is not so much the noise itself that irritates as the knowledge that someone is making the noise deliberately.

  That is entirely a question of whether the noise is necessary or not is shown by the fact that I am not upset by the sound of celery or nuts being eaten. There is no way that I know of, unless they are ground up into a paste and dissolved in the mouth, by which celery and nuts can be eaten noiselessly. So my nerves get a rest during this course, and I have nothing but the kindliest feelings toward the eater. In fact, I don’t hear it at all. But ice-crunching and loud gum-chewing, together with drumming on tables and whistling the same tune seventy times in succession, because they indicate an indifference on the party of the pe
rpetrator to the rest of the world in general, are not only registered on the delicate surface of the brain but eat little holes in it until it finally collapses or blows up. I didn’t see this mentioned anywhere in the Commission’s report.

  The Commission, in fact, just concentrates on the big noises, like those which go to make up what poets call “the symphony of a big city.” Some of these are also the result of the activities of grownups who used to whistle through their teeth when they were boys and who now don’t care how much they disturb other people so long as they call attention to themselves. In this class are those owners of radio supply shops who stick big horns out over their doors to give the “Maine Stein Song” an airing from nine to six every day; chauffeurs who sound their horns in a traffic jam when they know that it will do no good; and, I am sorry to say, mendicants who walk up and down the street playing shrill little instruments featuring “The Blue Danube Waltz” and “Happy Days” in rotation.

  I hate to be nasty about blind men (if they really are blind) but there is one who takes up a stand right under my window on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and plays a clarinet most of the afternoon. He is accompanied by a helper with a banjo.

  Now, a clarinet is an instrument with considerable volume and powerful reach. It sounds out above the noise of the elevator (which I don’t mind) and the riveting (which I can make allowances for) and the worst of it is he plays it pretty well. When it first begins I rather enjoy it. I stop my lathe and hum softly to myself. I sometimes even get up and execute a short pas seul if nobody is looking. But his repertory is limited, and, after a while, “I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes Because the Girl in My Arms Isn’t You” loses its sentimental value and begins its work on my nerve fibers. I try to say to myself: “Come, come, the man is blind and very poor,” but then I remember reading about street beggars who not only are really not blind but who make more in a day than I do in some weeks (this week, for instance) and I become convinced that this man is one of those. And why can’t he move on? Doesn’t he ever stop to think that there are probably 5,000 people who are being driven mad by his music within a radius of one block? Aren’t there any instruments that he can play which aren’t so loud? By this time I am in a rage which is cumulative every time he stops and I hear him begin again. (The stopping and beginning again is really the peak of irritation.) The whole thing ends in my shutting all the windows and getting under the bed to sulk.

  I hope that the Noise Abatement Commission will take cognizance of these things. If they don’t, I have my own resources. I have a small rifle with which I am practicing every day at a shooting gallery, and I am going to try it out on that newsboy (aged thirty-five, with a voice to match) who picks out the noon hour about once a week to walk through my street announcing that “Nya-a-ya-nyaded! Onoy-naded!” in tones which would indicate that he has three other men inside him. I may not wait for the Noise Abatement Commission to get him.

  As a matter of fact, I have every confidence that some of the louder and more general noises will be abated. It is the little noises that I am after, or rather the people who make the little noises. My brain cells are pretty far gone as it is, but it may not be too late. Of course, the question might arise as to what I shall use my brain for, once I have saved it. There will be time enough to figure that out when the noises have stopped.

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  The Truth about

  Thunderstorms

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  One of the advantages of growing older and putting on weight is that a man can admit to being afraid of certain things which, as a stripling, he had to face without blanching. I will come right out and say that I mean thunderstorms.

  For years I have been concealing my nervousness during thunderstorms, or, at least, I have flattered myself that I was concealing it. I have scoffed at women who gave signs of being petrified, saying, “Come, come!” What is there to be afraid of?” And all the time I knew what there was to be afraid of, and that it was a good, crashing sock on the head with a bolt of lightning. People do get it, and I have no particular reason for believing that I am immune. On the contrary.

  Just where any of us in the human race get off to adopt the Big-Man attitude of “What is there to be afraid of?” toward lightning is more than I can figure out. You would think that we knew what lightning is. You would think that we knew how to stop it. You would think that no one but women and yellow dogs were ever hit by it and that no man in a turtle-neck sweater and a three days’ beard on his chin would give it a second thought. I am sick of all this bravado about lightning and am definitely abandoning it herewith.

  Ever since I was a child old enough to have any pride in the matter I have been wincing inwardly whenever 100,000 volts of Simon-pure electricity cut loose in the air. My nervous system has about six hundred ingrowing winces stored up inside it, and that is bad for any nervous system. From now on I am going to humor mine and give a shrill scream whenever I feel like it, and that will be whenever there is a good sharp flash of lightning. I will say this for myself: I will scream when the lightning flashes and not when the thunder sounds. I may be timid but I am no fool.

  My nervousness begins when I see the black clouds in the distance. At the sound of the first rumble my digestive system lays off work, leaving whatever odds and ends of assimilation there may be until later in the day.

  Of course, up until now I have never allowed myself to show trepidation. If I happened to be out on the water or playing tennis when it was evident that a storm was coming, I have looked casually at my watch and said, “Ho-hum! What about going in and making a nice, cool drink?” Sometimes I even come right out an say, “It looks like a storm – we’d better get in”; but there is always some phlegmatic guy who says, “Oh, we aren’t going to get that – it’s going around the mountain,” and, by the time it is evident that we are going to get that and it isn’t going around the mountain, it is too late.

  It is remarkable how slow some people can be in taking down a tennis net or bringing a boat inshore when there is a thunderstorm on the way. They must not only take the net down but they must fold it up, very carefully and neatly, or they must put things away all shipshape in the cabin and coil ropes. Anything to waste time.

  My attempts to saunter toward the house on such occasions must have, at times, given away the dread I have of being the recipient of a bolt of lightning. I guess that I have done some of the fastest sauntering ever pulled off on a dry track. Especially if my arms are loaded down with cushions and beach umbrellas I make a rather ungainly job of trying to walk as if I didn’t care and yet make good time.

  If possible, I usually suggest that someone run ahead and shut the windows in the house, and then immediately delegate myself to this job. I am not so crazy about shutting windows during a thunderstorm, but it is better than hanging around outside.

  I once got caught up in an airplane during an electrical storm. In fact, there were two storms, one on the right and one on the left, and we were heading right for the spot where they were coming together. We could see them quite a long time before they hit us, and I was full of good suggestions which the pilot didn’t take. I wanted to put down right where we were. It was a rocky country, covered with scrub pines, but it seemed to be preferable to hanging around up in the air.

  I was considerably reassured, however, by being told (or shouted to) that you are safer up in the air during a thunderstorm than you are on the earth, as lightning cannot strike unless the object is “grounded.” It sounded logical to me, or as logical as anything connected with lightning ever could sound, and I sat back to enjoy my first electrical display in comfort. It really was great, although I hate to admit it. You couldn’t hear the thunder because of the motors and there were some very pretty flashes.

  It was only several months after, on reading of a plane being struck by lightning three thousand feet up, that I began to get nervous. Perhaps you can’t get hit unless you are “grounded,” according
to all the laws of nature, but it is always the exception that proves the rule, and it would be just my luck to be one of the exceptions.

  Perhaps the worst part that a nervous man has to play during a crisis like this is reassuring the ladies. If I am alone, I can give in and go down cellar, but when there are women around I have to be brave and joke and yell “Bang!” every time there is a crash. To make matters worse, I find that there are a great many women who are not frightened, and who want to sit out on the porch and play bridge through the whole thing.

  This is a pretty tough spot for a man of my temperament. At best, I am an indifferent bridge player, even with the sun shining or a balmy summer night’s breeze wafting around outside. I have to go very carefully with my bidding and listen to everything that is being said or I am in danger of getting a knife in my back from my partner when the game is over. But with a thunderstorm raging around my ears and trees crashing down in the yard by my elbow, I might just as well be playing “slapjack” for all the sense I make.

  A good flash of lightning has been known to jolt a “Five spades” out of me, with an eight and queen of spades in my hand. Sometimes it would almost have been better if the bolt had hit me. (Only fooling. Lord! Just kidding!)

  I would feel more ashamed of confessing all this if I weren’t sure that I am in the right about it. I am afraid of snakes or burglars or ghosts of even Mussolini, but when it comes to lightning – boy, there’s something to be afraid of! And anyone who says that he isn’t is either lying or an awful sap.

  Of course, being nervous isn’t going to keep you from getting hit, but when you are nervous you don’t he around with water dripping on you and holding a copper plate in your mouth, and avoiding all this sort of thing certainly helps.