The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

“I’m sure the promotion will be stronger,” Michael Jackson said.

  A reporter asked Mr. Jackson how the move would affect the Jacksons’ relationship with Berry Gordy.

  Mr. Jackson smiled. “You take it as it comes,” he said.

  Tito and Jackie Jackson looked as self-confident as their father, although they didn’t manage to be quite as elusive. Michael looked very shy. Stacy, in her mother’s lap, put her face in a glass of ice water. Mr. Jackson said he was very happy to be at CBS, because “everything is possible” at CBS. Michael Jackson said he thought the family would be going after an older audience and might, in their Las Vegas show, do some nostalgia, “so the older people can remember their younger days.” Mr. Jackson said he was confident that Jermaine would rejoin the group. “Under his conditions, it’ll take a while,” Mr. Jackson said. No Jackson said anything sentimental. No Jackson said anything to indicate that there had been anything in the Motown ethic which couldn’t be reproduced at will at CBS. No Jackson really explained why their contract with CBS is being announced now, even though they remain under contract to Motown until March, 1976.

  A reporter did ask if the Jacksons had tried to renegotiate their contract with Motown.

  “Sure we tried to renegotiate with Motown,” Jackie said, “but the figures were just Mickey Mouse.”

  “Do you know that show ‘The Jeffersons’?” the young woman behind us said. “About the upperwardly mobile black man who owns some dry-cleaning stores? Well, Mr. Jackson is Mr. Jefferson, and the children are his dry-cleaning stores.”

  WE have a report from our correspondent Jamaica Kincaid about Michael Jackson:

  Here is my favorite fan letter to Michael Jackson, from the March, 1975, issue of Right On!:

  Dear Michael Jackson:

  You are my favorite star. You have all the right things going for yourself. You’re cute, beautiful, sweet, and also kind. You’ll always be my favorite star, Michael, until you get married, then I’ll have to put you down. But while you’re free, I want you always to remember me, because I’m in your corner! I love you!

  Jeanie Wilson

  Norfolk, Va.

  Michael Jackson is my favorite teenage idol, because he is so pretty. True, he is not the little ebony cutie he used to be, and his Afro hairdo often shows some split ends, but nevertheless he is just plain old pretty, and as far as I am concerned, if you’re pretty, you’re cool. Some people think Donny Osmond is cool, some people think David Cassidy is cool, some people think Foster Sylvers is cool, but I think Michael Jackson is coolest. Michael Jackson is so cool that he was discovered by Diana Ross. How many people are ever discovered by Diana Ross? Not many, I bet. Oh, I know, she really discovered The Jackson Five, but I say she discovered Michael. The Jackson Five is just his backup band. I read everything I can get my hands on about Michael Jackson, so I know a lot of things about him. I don’t mean that I know his mother’s name is Katherine; his father’s name is Joe; he comes from Gary, Indiana; or the song “Ben” was his biggest solo venture. I mean I know things like Michael Jackson is a Virgo; he had his first date on a TV show called “The Dating Game”; his favorite drink is Kool-Aid; he likes cameras and likes to take pictures of people when they are not looking; he keeps white mice for pets; Tito and Jackie call him Big Nose as a pet name; some of his favorite entertainers are Jim Nabors, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Diana Ross; he believes “you gotta give love to get love”; he likes being treated like the guy next door; his eyes are brown; he likes paintings and likes to paint in oils. I get most of this information from Right On!, a fan publication for black teen-agers. It’s just the greatest. In every issue, there are at least two articles on The Jackson Five and almost always an article on Michael. Recently, I came across a quiz in one issue that said, “Can You Pass Michael’s Love Test?” The quiz said that Michael doesn’t like a girl who keeps her thoughts to herself; that he delights in being around a lot of people, even when he is on a date; that he likes comics, and his favorite characters are Spider-Man, Green Arrow, and The Incredible Hulk; that he thinks personality is more important than looks; and that he doesn’t like jealous types. Do you know what? I failed the test pathetically.

  1975

  MINNESOTA FATS — Ian Fraizier

  IN the movie “The Hustler,” Jackie Gleason played Minnesota Fats as a silent pro of a pool player who was vaguely associated with the big-money barracudas and sold-out types hanging back in the pool-hall shadows while the hero, Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman), ran the table and spoke his plucky, beleaguered soliloquy against them all, and the only line of Fats’ that people remember—his interruption of Eddie with “Shoot pool, Fast Eddie”—is remembered mainly because it is a setup for one of Paul Newman’s more stylish lines in movies: “I’m shootin’ pool, Fats. When I miss, you can shoot.” We saw the real Minnesota Fats the other night, at a benefit performance for the Palisades General Hospital at the Palisadium, an entertainment complex connected with the Winston Towers, in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and he was not at all like Jackie Gleason in the movie. He is not particularly fat, and he is not from Minnesota. (He has worn that name since the movie, but before the movie he was most commonly known as New York Fats, because he grew up in Washington Heights, around 167th and Amsterdam. The movie producers liked the name Minnesota Fats better for the marquee.) Also, he would never let anyone else talk that long in his presence. He is one of the most skillful and financially successful of pool players, and the reason is that he really likes to play pool, and talks all the time with great self-assurance. A few years ago, he outtalked Muhammad Ali on Irv Kupcinet’s show. In a game like pool, in which all the top competitors are practically equal in skill, the things that Fats says are often distracting enough to make the difference in a close match. At the exhibition at the Palisadium, he played four matches, and he talked through them all, and here is some of what he said:

  “Pool. There’s never been a toy on earth to compare to a pool table. I been on one ever since I was two and I got nothin’ but money. Nothin’ but cash. I’m a millionaire, but I’m richer than a millionaire, because I’ve got cash. When I was twelve years old, I broke everybody from here to Zanzibar, and I bought me a Duesenberg a block long. I had a big, beautiful doll drivin’ it, in shorts. Tell ya funny story—I was playin’ in one of the largest shopping centers in the world, in California, and this kid asked me, ‘Do you ever scratch?’ I said, ‘I ain’t never scratched in my life.’ Just then, I took this shot and the cue ball went right in the pocket. He said, ‘Well, you’ve scratched now.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m a millionaire, so what difference does it make?’ Nothin’ disturbs me. I went down on two ships and fought in two revolutions and I ain’t scared of nothin’. When I was a kid, I used to swim the Hudson over here to Jersey, just for kicks. I’m a brilliant man. I’m like a top scientist. I can make shots no living creature can make. I’ve played for princes and princesses. I’ve had my own TV show, one of the best shows on television, ‘Celebrity Billiards,’ playin’ pool with the stars—Zsa Zsa Gabor, Buddy Hackett, Wilt Chamberlain, Paul Newman. I can play any card game you care to name. I beat the famous poker player Amarillo Slim at pool in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I played the North Pole twice this year. I played in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and I outdrew the Pope of Rome. On the square, I’m tellin’ it like it is. I just played twenty-two benefits in a row. I played pool for three days straight without never goin’ to bed. Ladies was dancin’ with me at a hundred dollars a dance. Nothin’ but cash, I got nothin’ but cash. See this pen? The mayor of St. Louis gave me this pen today. I just did a benefit near St. Louis for the criminal in-sane. I live in Dowell, Illinois, and I own the whole county. I own land everywhere. I own land in outer space. You don’t believe me—I do. I just don’t wanna go. Who wants to go to outer space, see some moon woman all wild-lookin’. Here we got Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charo. Let the Russians go to the moon. I’d rather go to Howard Johnson’s, eat an ice-cream cone.”

  One of his exhibition matches M
innesota Fats lost, to George Tarpenian, the champion of the Winston Towers. “Well, kid, you beat Minnesota Fats,” he said. “The only problem is, if you walk into a pool hall and say, ‘I beat Minnesota Fats,’ ain’t nobody gonna believe you.”

  In his youth, Minnesota Fats was also known as Double Smart Fats, and sometimes even Triple Smart Fats.

  1977

  TAXI JOKES — Mark Singer

  A FEW months ago, we thoughtlessly permitted our subscription to Taxi Drivers Voice, the organ of the New York City Taxi Drivers Union Local 3036, to lapse. Then, the other day, somebody left a copy next to us on the subway, and when we picked it up and began to read, we were reminded that to ignore the Taxi Drivers Voice is to live without one convenient method of monitoring the pulse of the megalopolis. Of particular interest was an editorial titled “Taxi Driver Humor.” Here is a memorable passage:

  Since Time began, or at least since the dawn of the Taxi Age, we have been the butt of comics’ jokes from coast to coast. Sometimes these jokes can be cruel and personal and they hurt very much, but most of the time they are the same jokes told by cab drivers themselves when they are together.

  Taxi drivers, the editorial seemed to be saying, are just another oppressed minority. The writer went on to suggest that instead of trying to “stall the career of a Johnny Carson, a Dick Cavett, or an Alan King”—a thought that has apparently occurred to some vengeful hackmen—they should learn to laugh along with the jokes. This is an intelligent and humane sentiment, hard to quarrel with even for those of us who have negligently strolled into the Taxi Age without a single taxi-driver joke in our arsenal of slurs. To be able in the future to laugh along with cabbies when they magnanimously laugh at themselves, we went to visit Ben Goldberg, the president of Local 3036 and the managing editor of Taxi Drivers Voice, at the union headquarters, on Park Avenue South, to ask if he would recite a few selections from his private canon of taxi-driver humor. We were received in Mr. Goldberg’s office—which, in addition to a desk, a couch, and filing cabinets, contained a large portrait of Harry Van Arsdale, Jr., the founder and president emeritus of Local 3036, and photographs of various union officials and mayors and governors—but before we were introduced to Mr. Goldberg, we spoke with his son Larry, a reporter for Taxi Drivers Voice and co-author of the editorial. Occasionally—when he isn’t busy reporting or driving a cab—Larry Goldberg, a heavyset young man, performs a stand-up comedy routine. As a rule, his repertoire includes a lot of jokes about dieting and television commercials, but it has nothing to do with taxis. His last public appearance, he told us, had taken place a couple of weeks before at the Pan American Motor Inn, on Queens Boulevard. Then Larry Goldberg explained the motive behind the editorial reflections upon taxi-driver humor. “In that column, we were telling the driver that the comedian doesn’t dislike him, as a driver, personally, so the driver shouldn’t attack him personally,” he said. “You’ll often find, especially among some of the independent taxi owners and the mini-fleet operators, that if someone on television says something derogatory about a taxi driver, they will react by saying negative things about that comic’s personality.”

  We asked Larry Goldberg to give us an example of the sort of joke that taxi drivers might tell among themselves.

  “Well, you might hear a guy around the garage tell the other drivers about a passenger getting in the cab and asking the driver if he would please refrain from smoking,” he said. “And the driver might say, ‘So I put out the cigarette, but I used the guy’s hand as an ashtray.’ ” He paused, and then said, “No, that’s not really a joke, that’s just a crack. Oh, yeah, I know one. Here. ‘What’s yellow and goes up Third Avenue sixty miles an hour at one o’clock in the morning?’ Now, most people will naturally say ‘A taxi,’ but the correct answer is ‘A tow truck.’ ”

  “That’s not really a taxi joke,” we said. “That’s a tow-truck riddle.”

  “O.K., then, I’ve got one,” said Ben Goldberg, who had come in and taken a seat on the couch. “I don’t know if you’d call this a joke, but it’s a true story that once happened to me in Brooklyn. I picked up a guy at the corner of Marcy Avenue and Broadway, and I heard him say, ‘Keep on Broadway.’ So I’m driving and driving, and all the way he’s saying what sounds like ‘Keep on Broadway. Keep on Broadway.’ Finally, we get to the end of Broadway, where it runs into Fulton Street, and I turn to him and say, ‘Now which way?’ And the passenger says he wants out at Keap on Broadway—so I realized that all along he really meant Keap Street at Broadway, but I thought he’d been telling me to keep going on Broadway. Get it?”

  As Mr. Goldberg finished recounting this incident, a retired driver named Howard Richman appeared in the office with a question about some union matter. “Hey, Howie,” said Mr. Goldberg, “you know any taxi-driver jokes?”

  Mr. Richman did not. However, he did summon up a story in the Keap-on-Broadway vein, about a young couple who wanted to be driven to a Manhattan night club but were taken instead to a garbage dump in Astoria, Queens. “What they wanted was some joint called The City Dump, but I gave ’em the city dump. See, I take everything literally. Ya got that?” Mr. Richman was literally convulsed with laughter.

  Next, the Goldbergs, junior and senior, gave us a guided tour of the union offices, and along the way we met another retired driver, a man named Harry Hoffman.

  “I got one,” said Mr. Hoffman. “A guy gets into a taxi on Park Avenue and says to the driver he wants to go to London. The driver says, ‘Are you kidding?’ The passenger says, ‘No. Just drive over to the pier. We’ll get on the Queen Mary. You keep the meter running the whole time. I’ll pay you.’ So they get on the boat and cross the Atlantic and they land in England and get off the boat and drive to London, and the driver lets the passenger off at Trafalgar Square, or wherever, and the passenger pays him and leaves a big tip. Now the driver realizes that he’s got to get back to New York the same way he came over. So he’s driving through London on his way to catch a boat, and a guy flags him down and asks for a lift. The driver says he’s going to the United States. The guy says, ‘Terrific, that’s where I wanna go. Do you happen to know where Flatbush Avenue is?’ And the cabby says, ‘Sorry, Mister, but I can’t take you. I don’t go to Brooklyn.’ ”

  We thanked Harry Hoffman and walked toward the elevator with Larry Goldberg. While we waited for the car to arrive, he introduced us to Mike Rosenthal, the recording secretary of the union, and Edward Zarr, a vice-president.

  “Taxi jokes,” Mr. Goldberg said. “Let’s hear some taxi jokes.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Mr. Zarr said, “Oh, yeah, I got one. You hear the one about the guy who wanted to go to London?”

  1977

  TWENTY-FIVE THOUSANDTHS OF A SECOND — Ian Fraizer

  NEW JERSEY could be called the carpet-sample state. From the window of a Transport of New Jersey bus, you see a lot of carpet samples in store windows and in the back seats of people’s cars. You also see a lot of stores like Rickel Home Center, Pergament, Syms, Pathmark, Frankart Furniture, Allen Carpet, and Two Guys. New Jersey is like late-night TV commercials, only there’s no movie. Actually, that’s not true. Something big happened in New Jersey earlier this month. For four days, the National Hot Rod Association’s Summernationals, the biggest drag-racing event on the East Coast, caused more than sixty thousand people—gas shortage or no gas shortage—to drive to Raceway Park, near Englishtown, from all over the country. Of those sixty thousand people, about forty thousand were overweight. (Drag-racing fans tend to be overweight.) Some of them were so fat that they made up for the twenty thousand who weren’t fat. Some of them were so fat that they were spread like a hand of cards; they walked around with their stomachs out and their elbows nearly touching behind their backs. Everything at Raceway Park seemed covered with trademarks—mostly of the companies that sponsored race cars and provided parts. Even some of the spectators had trademarks on them. We saw one guy with the lion that is the symbol of Löwenbr�
�u beer tattooed on his biceps. Other people had the traditional tattoos, only all over their bodies. They were so tattooed that it looked as if someone had doodled on them while on the phone.

  Acres and acres of campgrounds are part of the race-track grounds. The main thing about the campgrounds was the broken blue-and-white Styrofoam coolers. They were everywhere. People had made shelters with orange nylon wound up in the car windows and staked to the ground, lean-to style. The rescue orange stood out against the wads of dark-green trees, as did the light-gray smoke from firecrackers and the white billows from a burning-out dragster. The highest thing on the horizon was wires, probably for the public-address system, which ran the length of the track—a quarter mile. At one point, the announcer said, “Will the owner of a silver-flecked 1978 Corvette please come to the pit area and move your car, or we’ll dismantle it and hide the parts in the grass.”

  All the biggest names in drag racing—Don (The Snake) Prudhomme, Tom (The Mongoose) McEwen, Shirley (used to be Cha Cha but now she doesn’t want to be called that anymore) Muldowney, Big Daddy Don Garlits, and many more—were there. The cars were so loud you could hear them with your forehead. The nitromethane-burning dragsters, in particular, were so loud the sound went right down the center of your spinal column like a wire test-tube brush. Speeds were around two hundred and forty-seven miles an hour. Races were won by twenty-five thousandths of a second. Most of the spectators, once they were in the stands, did not feel like moving much, and anyway standing up was about the most they could do. But at one end of the stands maybe a hundred black guys were betting on every race, waving bills in the air and saying “This side!” or “Other side!” to indicate which lane they thought the winning car would be in. The cars took off, and every face followed them down the track, and at the end of each race the black guys assumed postures of joy or disappointment so extreme that it looked as if payroll safes were falling on them.