Bits and Pieces

by Robert Benchley

  Aside from the initial fright at the sudden shower, there is the subsequent irritation at the humiliation (it is quite apparent that the dog picked you out deliberately to do it to) which ends in your leaping up and going home to lie down on a couch. It usually ends up that way even without the dog.

  I am perhaps working myself up into a phobia for sand which I did not originally feel. Simply by putting all this down on paper I have got myself wiping my lips to get off imaginary particles of sand. And there is no sense in my getting myself into this state of nervous susceptibility, for in fifteen minutes I have got to go down to the beach and romp with the children. Perhaps I can persuade them to go to the movies. Perhaps I shall even make them go to the movies.

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  The Tourist Rush

  to America

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  According to statistics or whatever you call those long tables of figures with “1929” and “1930” at the tops of the columns, there weren’t so many Americans vacationing in Europe last summer as there were the summer before. Of course, it was impossible to get accommodations back to New York on any boat leaving after the middle of August, but that may have been because a lot of Americans adopted Frenchmen and Germans and brought them home. The boats were filled up somehow. But figures will show that, full boats or not, Americans stayed away from Europe this year in great droves. (I know why, but I am not going to tell. You must guess. It begins with a W and is the name of a street in New York.)

  Now, if it is true that American tourist trade to Europe is falling off, then European tourist trade to America will have to begin. There has simply got to be a tourist trade somewhere, otherwise the world will be flooded with picture post cards which nobody will buy and there will be a plague of them.

  So far, the only Europeans who have come over here have come to sell something or to lecture. They land in New York, rush right to an import house or lecture platform, do their stuff, and take the next boat back. They very seldom stop to look around, probably because there isn’t much to stop to look around at. We have never gone in much for the tourist trade, but, if the future is going to bring great hordes of Europeans to this country to behave as we have been behaving in Europe all these years, we had better begin to look picturesque. We can also begin to jack up prices a bit, having one set of prices for us natives and one for the foreign visitors. Maybe it won’t be a pleasure to get one of those French hotel-keepers with a long black mustache into a corner of a real old New England inn with spinning wheels in the lobby and just nick him good and plenty for a sheaf of those little lavender francs he has in his sock!

  But we shall have to give them something for their money. Not much, perhaps, but a little more than we have to offer now in the way of local color. They will want to see the quaint old streets of Lawrence, Massachusetts, or Portage, Wisconsin. We shall have to make them quaint. They will want to see the natives in native costume. We shall have to rig up something for the residents of Massillon, Ohio, and Denver, Colorado, to wear which will bring forth gasps of delight from our foreign friends – at twenty dollars a gasp.

  Of course, some of our citizenry may object to being stared at while they are at their supper, but Americans have been staring at French and German natives for years and it is only fair that they have their chance now. There may be a little trouble if, some warm summer evening, when the Perkinses are sitting out on their front porch getting what breeze there is, a group of French tourists from the local hotel stop and make remarks about Mr. Perkins’ suspenders and offer to buy the straw mat out from under Mrs. Perkins as she sits on the steps.

  The boys who hang around the corner drug store and make wise cracks at passers-by are going to resent just a bit being pointed out from an automobile-full of Italian visitors as the “the lower element of the village, wearing the native headgear,” and having their pictures taken by elderly Tyrolese couples who happen to be spending the night in town on their way to Chicago. Mrs. Durkins, on Sycamore Street, isn’t going to fancy being interrupted in her housework by having a German artist poke his head in her kitchen window and ask if she will pose for a sketch.

  But these things will have to be done if we are going in for getting foreign business. We have made no bones about peering into Dutch windows. We can’t object to the Dutch peering into ours. Of course, we shall object, but we shouldn’t.

  In fact, sooner or later we shall probably get used to it and make a little effort to be picturesque. You will find different sections of the country brushing up on the distinctive local dishes and serving them in costume. Our own tea rooms have given us a start on the thing, and in many places the serving of a simple lettuce-and-tomato sandwich involves the dressing up of the waitress like Betsy Ross and the execution of a short minuet by the customer and the cashier.

  The step from this sort of thing to catering to foreign visitors is not so drastic. Up around Boston they can put the regular Sunday morning baked beans and fish balls up in little earthenware pots and serve them at a dollar and a half a throw. Everybody in Boston will, I am afraid, have to dress up like Puritans during the summer months, because that is the way that the Europeans will have read about them in their guidebooks. In Philadelphia, scrapple can be elevated to the status of a rare old vin du pays and served by Quakeresses or little Ben Franklins. Of course, the South will just drive the foreigners crazy with its famous dishes and local color. It would not be surprising to see corn pone, if dished out by a dear old mammy with a bandanna on, reach an importance where it could draw down three dollars a portion in the open market.

  The present batch of guidebooks to points of interest in the United States will have to be revised to make them more like books we get abroad explaining the intricacies of France and Germany, with phrases for use by the foreign traveler. They can be divided up into sections like this:

  PHRASES FOR THE STEAMSHIP PIER

  What country is this? . . . That is too bad, I wanted Brazil. . . . In which direction is the night-club life? . . . Get the hell out of that trunk! . . . No, that bottle of cognac is not mine. . . . I do not know how it got in there. . . . I am surprised to see that you have discovered yet another bottle of cognac. . . . They must have been in the trunk when I bought it. . . . Here, porter, take these bags and my arm. . . . I want to go first to the corner of Michigan Avenue and Goethe Street, Chicago.

  AT THE HOTEL

  Please assign me to a room overlooking the Mayor and the City Council. . . . It need not have a bath so long as the bureau drawers are wide enough to accommodate my dress shirts. . . . What shall I write here? . . . How do I know that you will not use my signature to further some nefarious financial coup of your own? Boy, take those three bags of mine and the nice-looking one next to them to Room 1473.

  IN THE RESTAURANT

  What are your most typical native dishes? . . . Then give me a couple of eggs. . . . I do not care how they are cooked so long as they do not contain sentimental mottoes or confetti. . . . Won’t you sit down yourself and have a bit to eat? . . . You seem tired. . . . Perhaps you would like to have me serve you? . . . What would you like? . . . The chicken pie is very nice today. . . . No, I am not nice. I am simply being polite. . . . I would much rather not dance, if you don’t mind.

  IN THE AVIARY

  What type of bird is that? . . . Ugh! . . . Are all three of those one bird, or do they come separately? . . . I am not very crazy about birds. . . . Let us go.

  IN THE REPAIR SHOP FOR CIGARETTE LIGHTERS

  I would like a new flint for my briquet. . . . I’m sorry, I thought that this was a repair shop for cigarette lighters. . . . Good day.

  ON THE WAY BACK TO EUROPE

  That is the last time I shall make a voyage to America. . . . Such robbers! . . . I did not see a pretty woman all the time I was there. . . . It will certainly seem good to get back home and have some bad coffee. . . . Well, I suppose everyone ought to see America once, but, for me, give me little old B
ucharest every time!

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  The Eel-Snooper

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  [COMPILER’S NOTE: The last two pages are missing from this piece.]

  Come, come! What’s all this we hear about eels? Some Danish ichthyologist (look it up yourself – I had to) named Schmidt comes back from a scientific cruise and says that every single one of the eels on the eastern cost of the United States and the western coast of Europe came originally from the Sargasso Sea (the Sargasso Sea behind that small area of the Atlantic Ocean down around the Antilles which is always full of tea leaves and old bits of grass). He says that whenever our eels get to feeling sappy and foolish and want to become parents, they pack up and leave the fresh waters of New England or Virginia or wherever they happen to be living at the time, and glide all the way south to the Sargasso Sea. Here the eggs are deposited and (pardon me) fertilized, and here the happy event takes place. Or perhaps it should be happy events, since they hatch out in litters of ten million per mother.

  At this point, according to the Danish Dr. Schmidt, the parents die, evidently disgusted at the prospect of cutting up food and picking up toys for ten million babies. The offspring, finding themselves orphans, immediately turn tail and wriggle north, where they, too, stay until Joe feels that he is earning enough to have kiddies. Then the whole rather silly procedure takes place all over again.

  At least, this is what the Danish Dr. Schmidt says. Just what anyone named Schmidt is doing in Denmark (unless his parents, like the eels, went somewhere else for the time being) is beside the point. What I want to know is how does he know that our eels come from, and go back to, the Sargasso Sea? How do you keep track of an eel?

  According to the story told by the ichthyologist (don’t tell me you haven’t look that up yet!), he “banded” thousands of eels and then followed them all over the various seas. I take this to mean that he tied little markers on each eel, labeled “Georgie” and “Fred” or perhaps just “No. 113,539.” While he was at it, it would have been just as easy to have the plate engraved “This is Rover, and belongs to Dr. Johannes Schmidt, 1 14 Nvjeltidg Boulevard, Copenhagen,” or “Please put me off at Jacksonville, Fla.” He might even have gone so far as to put little false mustaches on those eels which he particularly wanted to keep track of and to give them each seventy-five cents to spend for candy on the trip south. The whole thing sounds just a little bit fishy to me.

  An eel must be an awful sap to let himself be caught just for the sake of being tagged and thrown back into the water again. My experience with eels is rather limited, having got hold of one for only a few seconds once and then decided that it wasn’t worth the struggle. But I should think that any self-respecting eel would resent being caught and “banded” and then tossed back, making him a figure of fun among the other eels, and perhaps laying himself open to the charge of being a sissy. For a breed of fish (or are they fish?) which has gone proudly through the centuries without ornamentation of any kind, it must be very humiliating for one particular member to find himself wearing a shiny new band around his tail reading “Prince.”

  No wonder those eels who have been subjected to this indignity rush off to the Sargasso Sea. They probably can’t bear to stay around the home town with all the kidding they must get. I shouldn’t be surprised to find that it was only those eels who wore bands that fled to the south. The rest are probably still in the northern fresh waters, laughing their heads off and saying: “Whatever became of that pansy who used to wear a tin ring on his tail?”

  And from then on, just what is Dr. Schmidt’s course of action? Does he follow the eels down the coast, fishing them out every few days to see if their bands are on tight? Or does he rush right off by airplane to the Sargasso Sea in order to be there when his pets arrive? It must be rather confusing for a bunch, or covey, or flock of eels to leave New England after their distressing experience with Dr. Schmidt, and swim all the way down to Central America only to be fished out by the same Dr. Schmidt at the other end and made mock of all over again. If eels figure out anything at all, they must

  [[[ SCAN MISSING PAGE 116, 117 ]]]

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  What Are Little Boys

  Made Of?

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  Did you know that you have enough resin in your system to rub up a hundred violin A strings? Or enough linoleum to carpet two medium-sized rooms (without bath)? You were probably not aware of these valuable properties lying dormant in your physical make-up, and yet scientists tell us that they are there.

  As you all were taught in school, our body is made up of millions and millions of tiny particles called the Solar System. These tiny particles are called “aeons,” and it would take one of them fifteen billion years to reach the sun if it ever broke loose and wanted to get to the sun.

  Well, anyway, these millions and millions of tiny particles are composed of hydrogen, oxygen, iodine, phosphorus, Rhode Island, Connecticut. There is also a blueplate dinner for those who don’t like iodine. The action of all these elements sets up a ferment (C2HN4, or common table pepper) which sometimes ends in digestion but more often does not. If any of these agents is lacking in our make-up, due to our having dressed in a hurry, we say we are “deficient,” or perhaps we “feel awful.” Even with everything working I don’t feel so hot.

  It is only recently that doctors have discovered that we have many more elements in our systems than was originally thought. Whether we have always had them and just didn’t know it, or whether they were brought there and left by some people who wanted to get rid of them has not been decided. They tell us that the average 150-pound body (and a very pretty way to phrase it, too) contains enough carbon alone to make 9,000 lead pencils (not one of them ever sharpened, probably).

  Another item which the doctors tell us we have in abundance is hydrogen – “enough in excess,” they put it, “to fill about a hundred child’s balloons.” There’s a pretty picture for you! As if we didn’t have troubles enough as it is, we must go about with the consciousness that we have the makings of one hundred child’s balloons inside us, and that under the right conditions we might float right off our chairs and bounce against the ceiling until pulled down by friends!

  Thinking of ourselves in terms of balloons, lead pencils, whitewash (we have enough lime in us to whitewash a chicken coop, says one expert), and matches (we are fools to bother with those paper books of matches, for we are carrying around enough phosphorus to make 2,200 match heads), all this rather makes a mockery of dressing up in evening clothes or brushing our hair. We might just as well get a good big truck and pile ourselves into it in the raw whenever we want to go anywhere, with perhaps some good burlap bags to keep the rain off. There is no sense trying to look nice when all that is needed is a sandwich-board sign reading: “Anything on this counter – 15 cents.”

  And that is the ultimate insult that these inventory hounds have offered us: they tell us just how much all this truck of which we are made is worth in dollars and cents. They didn’t have to do that. Put all our bones, brains, muscles, nerves, and everything that goes into the composition of our bodies on to scales and, at the current market prices, the whole lot would bring just a little over a dollar. This is on the hoof, mind you. If we wanted to tie each element up in little packages with Japanese paper and ribbon, or if we went to the trouble to weather them up a bit and call them antiques, we might be able to ask a little more.

  For example, the average body, such as might meet another body comin’ through the rye, contains only about one tenth of a drop of tincture of iodine at any one time, and one tenth of a drop would hardly be worth the dropper to pick it up for the retail trade. And yet, if we don’t have that tenth of a drop something happens to our thyroid gland and we sit around the village grocery store all day saying “Nya-ya!” Or to our pituitary gland and we end up wearing a red coat in a circus, billed as Walter, the Cardiff Behemoth: Twice the Size of an Ordinary
Man and Only Half as Bright.

  I don’t see why scientists couldn’t have let us alone and not told us about this. There was a day when I could bounce out of bed with the lark (I sometimes let the lark get out first, just to shut the window and turn on the heat, but I wasn’t far behind), plunge into a cold tub (with just a dash of warm to take off the chill), eat a hearty breakfast, and be off to work with a light heart.

  But now I get out of bed very carefully, if at all, thinking of those 9,000 lead pencils which are inside me. Too much water seems to be a risk, with all that iron lying around loose. Exercise is out of the question when you consider 2,200 match heads which might jolt up against each other and start a very pretty blaze before you were halfway to work.

  Suppose that we are as full of knickknacks as the doctors say. Why not let the whole matter drop and just forget about it? Now that they have put the thing into our heads, the only way to get it out is for some expert to issue a statement saying that everyone has been mistaken and that what we are really made of is a solid mechanism of unrustable cast iron and if anything goes wrong, just have a man come up from the garage and look it over.

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  The Big Coal Problem