Chips Off the Old Benchley

by Robert Benchley

  This, unfortunately, is impossible in personal conversations. If you slip off into a quick coma late some evening when your vis-a-vis is telling you about South America or a new solvent process, it is usually pretty difficult to pick up the thread where you dropped it. You may remember that the last words he was saying were “ – which is situated at the mouth of the Amazon,” but that isn’t going to help you much if you come to just as he is asking you: “What would you say are?” As in the personal-conversation doze the eyes very seldom completely close (it is more of a turning back of the eyeballs than a closing of the lids) you may escape detection if you have a ready answer for the emergency. I find that “Well, I don’t know,” said very slowly and deliberately, will fit almost any question that has been asked you. “Yes” and “No” should never be offered, as they might make you sound even sillier than you look. If you say: “Well, I – don’t – know,” it will give you a chance to collect your wits (what few there are left) and may lead your questioner into answering the thing himself.

  At any rate, it will serve as a stall. If there are other people present, some one of them is quite likely to come to your rescue and say something which will tip you off as to the general subject under discussion. From then on, you will have to fight your own battle. I can’t help you.

  The whole problem is one which calls for a great deal of thought. If we can develop some way in which a man can doze and still keep from making a monkey of himself, we have removed one of the big obstacles to human happiness in modern civilization. It goes without saying that we don’t get enough sleep while we are in bed; so we have got to get a little now and then while we are at work or at play. If we can find some way to keep the head up straight, the mouth closed, and just enough of the brain working to answer questions, we have got the thing solved right there.

  I am working on it right now, as a matter of fact, but I find it a little difficult to keep awake.

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  Sporting Life in America:

  TURKISH BATHING

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  One of the more violent forms of exercise indulged in by Americans today is Turkish-bath sitting. This invigorating activity has almost entirely replaced the old-fashioned tree chopping and hay pitching which used to work our fathers up into such a rosy glow and sometimes land them in an early grave. Turkish-bath sitting has the advantage of not only making you perspire freely, but of giving you a chance to get your newspaper read while perspiring. And you can catch cold just as easily after a Turkish bath as you ever could after pitching hay. Easier.

  A man seldom thinks of taking Turkish baths until it is too late. It is usually at that time of life when little diamonds of white shirt have begun peeping out between the buttons of his vest, or when those advertisements showing men with a large sector of abdomen disappearing under the influence of a rubber belt have begun to exert a strange fascination for him. Then he remembers about Turkish baths. Or when he wakes up some morning with his head at the foot of the bed and the lights all going and the windows shut. Then, somewhere in the recesses of what used to be his mind, there struggles a puny thought vaguely connected with steam rooms and massage.

  “That might do me some good,” he thinks, and promptly faints. In both of these cases he is anywhere from one day to one year too late.

  However, he takes a chance. He totters to the nearest emporium which features pore-opening devices, checks his watch and what is left of his money, and allows a man to pull off his shoes. Just in time he remembers that he has on the lavender running drawers which someone once sent him as a joke, and quickly dismisses the attendant, finishing disrobing by himself and hiding the lavender running drawers under his coat as he hangs them up. Not that he cares what the attendant thinks, but you know how those guys talk.

  Then, coyly wrapping a towel about himself, he patters out into the hot room. A hot room in a Turkish bath is one of the places where American civilization appears at its worst. One wonders, on glancing about at the specimens of manhood reclining on divans or breathing moistly under sheets, if perhaps it wouldn’t be better for Nature to send down a cataclysmic earthquake and begin all over again with a new race. It is slightly comforting in a way, however, because no matter how far along you have allowed your figure to get, there are always at least half a dozen figures on view which make yours look like that of a discobolus.

  I can imagine no lower point of self-esteem than to find yourself one day the worst-looking exhibit in a Turkish bath. They should keep a pistol handy for just such cases. And you might shoot a couple of others while you are at it. It would save them all that bother of lacing up their shoes again.

  In the hot room there isn’t much to do. You can read a newspaper, but in a couple of minutes it gets a little soggy and flops over on your face, besides becoming so hot that turning over a page is something of an adventure. If, by any chance, you allow an edge of it to rest on an exposed bit of your anatomy, it isn’t a quarter of a second before you have tossed it to the floor and given up reading. Then comes the period of cogitation.

  As you sit waiting for your heart to stop beating entirely, you wonder if, after all, this was the thing to do. It occurs to you that a good brisk walk in the open air would have done almost the same thing for you, with the added advantage of respiration. People must die in hot rooms, and you wonder how they would identify you if you were quietly to smother.

  The towel around your waist would do no good, as they are all alike. You regret that you were never tattooed with a ship flying your name and address from the masthead. The only way for them to tell who you were would be for them to wait until everybody else had gone home and find the locker with your clothes in it. Then they would find those lavender drawers. So you decide to brave it out and not to die.

  Conversation with your oven mates is no fun either. If you open your mouth you get it full of hot air and you are having trouble enough as it is keeping body and soul together. In the second place, you know that you look too silly to have your ideas carry any weight.

  I remember once sitting on a sheet-covered steamer chair with my head swathed in a cold towel to keep my hair from catching on fire and thinking that there was something vaguely familiar about the small patch of face which was peering at me from under a similar turban across the room. As the owner of the face got up to go into the next torture chamber I recognized him as an English captain whom I had last seen in the impressive uniform of those Guards who sport a red coat, black trousers, and an enormous fur busby with a gold strap under the chin. I at once hopped to my feet, and, clutching my towel about me with one hand, extended my other to him.

  “Well, fancy seeing you here!” was about all that seemed suitable to say. So we both said it. Then we stood, perspiring freely from under our head cloths, while he told me that he was in New York on some military mission, that the King and Queen were both well, and that England was counting a great deal on the coming Naval Conference to establish an entente with America.

  In my turn, I told him that I was sure that America hoped for the same thing and that, to my way of thinking, the only impediments to the success of the conference would be the attitude of France and Italy. He agreed in impeccable English, and said that he had some inside information which he wished that he might divulge, but that, all things considered –

  And then, as my mind began to stray ever so slightly, the idea of this gentleman in a sheet and a head towel having any secrets from anyone struck me as a little humorous. To make things worse, a picture came to my mind’s eye of how he would look if he had that busby on right now, with the gold strap under his chin, and I gave up my end of the conversation.

  He must have, at the same time, caught a picture of me standing behind a none-too-generous towel, giving it as my opinion that France and Italy were the chief obstacles to international accord in naval matters, for he stood slightly at attention and, bowing formally, said: “Well, I’ll be toddling along. See you again
, I hope.” There was an embarrassed shaking of hands and more formal bowing and he went his way, while I went out and flung myself into the pool.

  There is one feature of Turkish bathing which I have not had much experience in, and that is the massage. Being by nature very ticklish, I usually succeed in evading the masseur who follows me about suggesting salt rubs, alcohol slaps, and the other forms of violence. I tell him that I am in a hurry and that I really shouldn’t have come at all. He chases me from one room to another, assuring me that it won’t take long. Then I plead with him that I have got a bad knee and am afraid of its flying out again. This just spurs him on, because bad knees are his dish.

  Once in a while I slip on the wet tiles and he gets me, but I prove to be such a bad patient, once he has me down on the slab, that he passes the whole thing up and gives that irritating slap which means, in the language of the masseur: “All right! Get up – if you can.”

  Once, while I had my back turned, he played a powerful stream from two high-powered hydraulic hoses on me from clear across the room, which threw me against the wall and dazed me so that I went back into the hot room again instead of getting dressed. I would rather that the masseurs let me alone when I am in a Turkish bath. I know what I want better than they do.

  As a matter of fact, I don’t know why I go to a Turkish bath at all. I emerge into the fresh air outside looking as if I had been boiled with cabbage for five hours, with puffy, bloodshot eyes, waving hair, and the beginnings of a head cold. It is all I can do to get back to my room and go to bed, where I sleep heavily for eleven hours.

  And invariably, on weighing myself, I find that I have gained slightly under a pound.

  However, it is a part of the American sporting code and we red-blooded one hundred percenters must carry on the tradition.

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  Sporting Life in America:

  FOLLOWING THE PORTER

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  Having someone carry your bag for you is a form of sport which has only comparatively recently found favor in America. It has come with the effemination of our race and the vogue of cuffs attached to the shirt.

  When I was a boy (and I remember President Franklin Pierce saying, “What a Boy!” too) to let a porter carry your bag was practically the same as saying: “My next imitation will be of Miss Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale.” No man who could whistle or chin himself would think of it. In the old days before these newfangled steam cars started raising Old Ned with our apple orchards with their shower of sparks, I have seen men knock a porter down for even reaching for their valises. The only people who would consider such a thing were veterans of the Mexican War who had lost both arms above the elbow or traveling salesmen for pipe-organ concerns. The traveling salesmen could let a porter take one end of the pipe organ without incurring the sneers of their fellow travelers.

  But nowadays it is a pretty unattractive porter who can’t wheedle a great hulking man out of his briefcase, even if he is just crossing a platform to take another train. And I am secretly glad of this change in the standards of virility; for, frankly, my arms used to get awfully tired in the old days. This was due, in part, to the fact that any suitcase I ever buy always weighs a minimum of sixty pounds without anything in it. It is something about belonging to me that makes a suitcase put on weight. I lift other people’s suitcases and they are like thistledown. But mine, with perhaps two collars and a tube of shaving cream in it, immediately swells up and behaves like the cornerstone of a twenty-story building. I know that this is not just my imagination, because several people have tried to steal my suitcase and have complained to me about its being so heavy.

  But even now I still have a slightly guilty feeling as I walk up the runway with a porter going on ahead with my bags. I try to look as if I were not with him, or as if he had snatched up my luggage by mistake and I were trying to catch him to take it myself. If it is very obvious that he is with me, I carry my right arm as if I had just hurt it badly. You can’t blame a cripple for not carrying his own bag.

  It is not only the impression that I must be making on other people that worries me. I feel a little guilty about the porter. If the bag is very heavy (as it always is, and not from what you think, either) I start out with a slightly incoherent apology to him, like: “You’ll find that pretty heavy, I’m afraid,” or “Don’t do this if you don’t really feel like it.” Sometimes I tell him what I have in the bag, so that he will understand. “Books,” I say, timidly. (He never believes this.) I have even been so specific, if the thing was very heavy, as to tell him that I was carrying home a law digest and a copy of the Home Book of Verse for a friend. If this doesn’t seem to be making him feel any better, I add, “—and shoetrees. They make a bag heavy.” Several times I have worked myself up into such a state of sympathy for the man that I have taken one handle of the bag myself. There is one bag in particular that worries me. It is what the French refer to as a grand valise and I don’t know what I was thinking of when I bought it. Standing on a station platform it looks like a small rhinoceros crouching for a spring, and I have seen porters run ten feet to one side of it rather than be called upon to lift it.

  It holds a great deal more than I have got to put into it, including two small boys, but even with my modest equipment it has to be lifted on and off boats with a crane. There is a story about Louis XVI having hidden his horse in it during the early days of the Revolution, but I rather doubt that, as there would have been no place for the horse to breathe through. However, the fact remains that 1 don’t know what I was thinking of.

  Now, this bag is all right when I am abroad, for the porters over there are accustomed to carrying anything up to and including a medium-sized garage. They hitch it to a strap with another load the same size on the other end, fling it over their shoulders, perspire freely, and trot off. I would be very glad to feel sorry for them, but they don’t seem to mind it at all. It is an older civilization, I guess.

  But in the United States I am very uneasy about this bag. I apologize to the porter who puts it on the train and feel that I have to give him enough extra to endow a Negro college in his home town. I start worrying about getting it into a taxi long before the train has pulled into the station, and I run over in my mind a few pleasantries with which I can assuage the porter on the other end. “Pretty heavy, eh? And I don’t drink, either! Aha-ha-ha-ha!” or “Maybe I’d better get a trunk, eh?” None of these ever go very big, I may add.

  It usually ends up by my being so self-conscious about the thing that I carry it myself. There are two ways of doing this: one is to carry it by the handles, but that way it crashes heavily against the side of the leg and eventually throws me; the other method is to hoist it up on the shoulder and stagger along under it. This is not much better, for then it not only cocks my hat over my eye but completely shuts off my vision from the other eye, so that many times I have walked head on into another train or collided with passengers. I have even caught up with passengers going in the same direction and smashed into them from behind. And the combined weight of my body and the bag, going at a fair clip, is sufficient to capsize and badly bruise a woman or a small man.

  Taxi drivers are not very nice about my bag, either. When confronted with the problem of where to put it in the cab, they often make remarks such as: “Why don’t we put the cab on top of the bag and drag it through the streets?” or “Where are the elephants?” With my bag tucked on the front seat beside him, a taxi driver had to lean out over the other side and drive with one knee. And nobody feels sadder about it than I do. Of all people to have a bag like that, I am the worst, because I am so sensitive.

  It is not only with railway porters that I am ill at ease. I feel very guilty about asking moving men to carry bureaus and bookcases downstairs. I have a bookcase which I sold to a man three years ago which is still standing in my room because I could not get up the courage to ask anyone to move it for me. I know that there are men who make it their busin
ess to lift heavy articles of furniture, but this is a terribly heavy bookcase. The first six weeks after I sold it I used to sit and look at it and say to myself: “I really ought to get that over to Thurston right away.” But I couldn’t seem to feel right about getting anyone to do it.

  I tried hitching it along the floor myself, but I couldn’t even get it away from the spot where it had always been. So then I tried forgetting about it, and would look quickly away every time my eyes rested on it. Thurston asked me about it once, and I said that I had been trying to get a moving man to take it but that there was a strike on. I tried draping it with a sheet, so that I wouldn’t have to look at it, but that did not good. The sheet just made it worse.

  About a year ago I gave Thurston his money back and said that I had decided to keep the bookcase, but I really don’t want it. Perhaps some moving man will see this confession and will come up some day and ask me if I don’t want some especially heavy furniture moved. If he asked me, I couldn’t feel guilty about it, could I? But I can tell him right now that it is heavier than he thinks, and I won’t blame him if he drops it on the stairs, and I would rather not watch, if he doesn’t mind.

  It makes it very difficult to be afraid to impose on porters and yet not be able to carry things yourself. Perhaps the best thing to do would be just not to own any heavy things, and to buy whatever clothes and shoes I need in the town I happen to be in. Or perhaps it would be better yet not to go anywhere, and just sit in my room.