by Paul Merton
AUGER. One becomes surprisingly clairvoyant in this line of work.
ZEUGMA. Fancy that. Well, suppose you put me down for about five hundred pounds. Needn’t use my name, necessarily. Call it “Compliments of a Friend.”
AUGER. Very magnanimous of you, I’m sure.
ZEUGMA. Nonsense—live and let live’s my motto. Let sleeping dogs lie, I always say.
AUGER. Yes, and whilst you’re raking up proverbs, don’t forget there’s no fool like an old fool. [He replaces the dossier in the desk, extends a packaged handkerchief to his illustrious caller.] Would you care for one of these? Your own seems to be wringing wet.
ZEUGMA [Undone]. Ah, yes, many tax—that is, you’re most welcome. Pip-pip. Cheerio. [He exits, tripping over his stick and ricocheting off the filing cabinet. Auger’s eyes crinkle up at the corners and he hums two or three bars of a tuneless little melody. Then, reopening Burke’s Peerage, he begins nibbling a carrot reflectively as the curtain falls.]
WHY BOYS LEAVE HOME
S.J. Perelman
Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was born into a Russian Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn. He attended Brown University in 1922 where he became the cartoonist of the college magazine and finally its editor. After publishing his first two books he was invited to Hollywood by Groucho Marx to script two films: Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. A contributor to The New Yorker from 1935, he soon became the magazine’s most successful humourist.
Every woman worth her salt, and even the few unsalted ones I have known, cherishes somewhere in her heart midway between the auricle and the ventricle a lovely, pastel-tinted dream. Maid or matron, she longs to dress up her man in a velvet smoking jacket and red morocco slippers, plant him in his favourite easy chair with a pipe and a rattling good detective story, and then, the moment his eyes freeze over, launch into a catalogue of bargains available at the stores. My own chocolate drop is no exception. One evening a while ago, I tottered in from a gruelling afternoon at the bookmaker’s and collapsed heavily in my Morris chair. I barely had time to sluice my larynx with a healing emollient of honey, orange bitters and a drop of cognac to allay the insupportable sweetness before the nightly overture struck up.
“Well, I vum,” began my helpmate, unfolding her newspaper. “Do you remember those cunning little doilies Sandra Vermifuge bought two years ago at Neimann & Marcus, in Dallas? She paid a dollar forty-nine for them, and here they are at McCreery’s for only a dollar forty-three. I can’t wait to see her face!”
“Neither can I,” I giggled. “Let’s call her up and tease her! Where does she live now?”
“In Spokane, I think,” said my wife doubtfully. “But you don’t really intend—”
“Why not?” I urged. “Oh, come on, it’s only a twenty-three-dollar toll call!” My proposal was received with an icy silence that melted forty-five seconds later, just as I had relaxed my neck muscles and begun a realistic imitation of a transcontinental truck puffing up a grade.
“Macy’s is holding its annual clearance of barbecue aprons,” the Voice resumed. “We’ve got four, but I don’t think you can have too many barbecue aprons, do you?… And look at this: there’s a sacrifice of poplin-covered steamer chairs at Altman’s, eighty-nine dollars and ninety-eight cents, only twenty-two to a customer… Genuine quilted-rayon cheese strainers, marked down to four fifty-four… Now here’s something we really need!… Are you awake?”
“Urg,” I replied, to indicate I was drinking in every word.
“GIMBEL’S JACKS UP YOUR CAR!” she read breathlessly. “GIMBEL’S COVERS UP YOUR CAR. If you’re going into the service or to Florida, leave your car protected, so it will stay spick-and-span until you return. Jack it up on our plywood jacks—they’ll hold an eight-ton truck for the duration. Then cover it from stem to stern with our paper coverall to keep out dust, soot, grit and grime; it’s sturdy kraft paper—”
“Listen!” I roared. “I like the car the way it is! I like it down there in the country with mushrooms in the clutch and chickens roosting in the glove compartment! And if you think I’m going to travel sixty-four miles in the dead of winter to dress up a ’37 Plymouth in a paper tent, you can jolly well—”
“Of course not, gingerbread boy,” agreed Circe soothingly, “but it can’t hurt if I stop in tomorrow and look at it, can it?”
Which may explain how I came to reel into the railroad station at Frogtown, New Jersey, yesterday morning in a sub-arctic dawn, my spectacles opaque with steam and my pigmy frame bent double under a massive carton. The freight agent squirted tobacco juice over my shoes in welcome.
“Back for the summer, eh?” he inquired. “Say, you certainly look awful. What are those big circles under your eyes?”
“Glasses,” I said evenly. “What the hell do you think they are?”
“You never got ’em drinkin’ milk,” he guffawed, slapping his thigh. “Say, what’s in that there box?”
“A body,” I snapped. “The body of a freight agent with a long nose that he kept sticking into other people’s business.” There was a short, pregnant silence during which our eyes stood toe-to-toe and slugged it out. Then, humming a nonchalant air, I sauntered into a snowdrift outside and dawdled a scant hour and a half wondering how to cover the seven miles to my duchy without a car. At last a friendly chicken farmer drew up, attracted by my humorous carrot nose, stovepipe hat and lumps of coal simulating buttons.
“Ain’t no room up front here,” he said hospitably, leaning out of the warm, cosy cab of his truck, “but you can ride back there with them pullets.”
For the first couple of miles, it was a novel experience to travel with a boutonnière of Rhode Island Reds pecking at my cravat, but eventually their silly feminine chatter bored me, and averting my face, I drank in great healing lungfuls of the exhaust. With the perfect sense of timing that characterises everything I do, I arranged matters so that my chariot was exactly abreast of the post office as a group of neighbourhood louts emerged.
“Pretty good-sized capon you raised there, Zeb,” they complimented my ferryman. “Figger on butcherin’ him now or feedin’ him through the winter?”
Their good-natured derision was infectious, and averting my face, I drank in great healing lungfuls of the pullets. Soon, however, the spires of my château came into sight and I vaulted nimbly into a puddle, slashing a jagged rent in my overcoat, and trudged up the glare ice to Lacklustre Farm. Time had wrought few changes in the old place; one or two chimneys had fallen down and passing sportsmen had blown out every pane of glass in the windows, but there was nothing amiss that fifty thousand dollars would not cure.
Divesting myself of my coat to insure a spanking case of pneumonia, I gamely caught up the carton and staggered to the barn where the car was housed. Fortunately, there was no need to waste time opening doors, as the wind had obligingly torn them from their tracks. The trip along the dark threshing floor was uneventful, except that I adroitly involved myself in a rope hanging from the beams and conceived the ridiculous notion that someone was trying to garrote me. I emitted a few piercing cries, however, and it shook itself loose. The car itself seemed more streamlined than I remembered it, until I realised that parties unknown had removed the tyres, along with the wheels. I rarely give way to my feelings, but in the irritation of the moment, I gave those axles a kick they will remember for many a day to come. As soon as my foot stopped throbbing, I routed out an old broom and transferred the dust and wheat chaff which had settled down over the body to my own. Then, arms akimbo, I shrewdly laid out my plan of campaign.
The first thing to do, I said to myself, was to get the car up on the wooden jacks. To accomplish this, I would need a stout tyre jack, which must be in the luggage compartment. The key to the luggage compartment, though, was on my bureau sixty-four miles away, where I had prudently left it. Ergo, I must force the lock— child’s play to one whose knowledge of mechanics was a household word for ten feet around. I procured a pinch bar from the toolroom, inse
rted it under the door of the luggage compartment, and heaved my weight downward as outlined in first-year physics.
After picking myself up from the floor, I twisted my handkerchief into a makeshift tourniquet and decided that the wooden jacks would be superfluous anyhow, as the car already stood staunchly on its transmission. The next step hence was to envelop it in the paper coverall. I clawed up the carton and eventually succeeded in setting up the coverall, though several times the wind sweeping through the barn bore me off into the fields like a box kite.
“Now, easy does it,” I said cunningly—I had reached the stage where I was addressing myself aloud—and holding the coverall above my head like Paul and Virginia fleeing before the storm, I crept up over the top of the car and dropped it neatly into place. Unluckily, this left me pinned on my stomach in the dark, slowly throttling under sturdy kraft paper; and acting on a sudden obscure impulse, I decided not to linger. I went through the side of the coverall biting, gouging and scratching, and when I hit the lane, I kept on going. The natives are still talking about the meteor covered with chicken feathers that flashed across the Delaware River yesterday afternoon. And the minute he gets his breath back, the meteor’s going to do a little talking himself— to Mrs. Meteor.
From far away, I could hear my wife’s voice bravely trying to control her anxiety.
“What if he becomes restless, Doctor?”
“Get him a detective story,” returned the leech. “Or better still, a nice, soothing picture puzzle—something he can do with his hands.”
WHOSE LADY NICOTINE?
S.J. Perelman
Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was born into a Russian Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn. He attended Brown University in 1922 where he became the cartoonist of the college magazine and finally its editor. After publishing his first two books he was invited to Hollywood by Groucho Marx to script two films: Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. A contributor to The New Yorker from 1935, he soon became the magazine’s most successful humourist.
At approximately four o’clock yesterday afternoon, the present troubadour, a one-story taxpayer in a wrinkled alpaca jacket and a repossessed Panama, was gaping into the window of Alfred Buntwell Inc., the celebrated tobacconist in Radio City. Above his balding, gargoyle head floated a feathery cloud containing a Mazda bulb labelled “Idea!” Buntwell is a name revered by pipe smokers everywhere; his briars have probably penetrated farther into the earth’s far places than the Union Jack. From the steaming jungles of the Gran Chaco to the snows of Kanchanjanga, from the Hook of Holland to the Great Barrier Reef, the white dot on the Buntwell pipe stem is the sign of the sahib. Deep in equatorial Africa, surrounded by head-hunters, Mungo Park clenched a Buntwell pipe between his teeth to maintain his fortitude; it was a battered Buntwell mouthpiece that yielded up the fate of the Franklin polar expedition.
Peering into the shop, jostled by crisp, well-fed executives hurrying toward million-dollar deals, it suddenly struck me that a Buntwell pipe was the key to my future. Here at last was a magic talisman that would transform me from a wormy, chopfallen cipher into a forceful, grim-lipped tycoon. A wave of exultation swept over me; I saw myself in the club car of the Twentieth Century Limited puffing a silver-mounted Buntwell and merging directorates with a careless nod. I too could become one of those enviable types who lounged against knotty-pine interiors in four-colour advertisements, smoking their Buntwells and fiercely demanding Old Peg-leg Whisky. “Give me Old Peg-leg’s satin smoothness every time,” I would growl. “I like a blended rye.”
I squared my tiny shoulders and, baring my teeth in the half-snarl befitting a major industrialist, entered the shrine. To my chagrin, no obsequious lackey sprang forward to measure my features for the correct model. A cathedral hush enveloped the shop, which had the restrained elegance of a Park Avenue jeweller’s. At a chaste showcase displaying a box of panatelas marked down to a thousand dollars, a glacial salesman was attending a fierce old party with white cavalry mustaches redolent of Napoleon brandy. In the background, another was languidly demonstrating a cigarette lighter to a dowager weighed down under several pounds of diamonds. I coughed apologetically and gave the salesman a winning smile to indicate that I knew my place. The old grenadier scowled at me from under beetling brows. “Confound it, sir,” he roared, “you’re not at a cock fight! Blasted place is gettin’ noisier than the durbar!” I cleared my throat, in which a fish bone had mysteriously lodged, and made myself as inconspicuous as possible. The salesman hastily explained that the war had brought an influx of foreigners, but his client refused to be mollified.
“Should have caned the bounder,” he sputtered. “Country’s goin’ to the demnition bow-wows, dash it all! Now then, Harkrider, what’s this infernal nonsense about my Burma cheroots?” He waved aside the salesman’s excuse that a convoy had been sunk, commanded that Buntwell himself be summoned.
“But Mr. Buntwell’s been dead sixty years, major,” Harkrider protested.
“None of your poppycock!” barked the major. “You tell Buntwell to bring ’em around personally by noon tomorrow or I close my account!” He stamped out, his wattles crimson with rage, and I sidled forward timidly. In a few badly chosen words, I indicated that I required a pipe.
“H’m-m-m-,” murmured Harkrider grudgingly, surveying my clothes. “Just a moment.” He disappeared through a curtain and engaged in a whispered consultation with the manager. I dimly overheard a phrase that sounded like “butter-snipe”; the two were obviously discussing their lunch. At length the salesman re-entered and conducted me sullenly to a showcase. After some deliberation, he extracted what appeared to be an old sycamore root fitted with a steel flange that covered the bowl.
“Know anything about pipes?” he inquired patronisingly.
“Well, not exactly,” I hesitated. “I had a corncob when I was a little boy—”
“I’m not interested in reminiscences of your youth,” he snapped. “Hold still.” With a quick gesture, he jammed the root into my mouth and backed off, studying my face critically.
“Wh-what is it for?” I stammered.
“Big-game hunting,” he returned loftily. I was screwing up my courage to inquire out of which end the bullet came when he suddenly plucked it from my teeth. “No, I don’t care for you in that. Let’s see now—what’s your club?”
“Why—er—uh—the Williams After-Shave Club,” I replied politely. “You know, for men whose skins welcome that zestful, bracing tang—
“No, no,” he broke in irritably. “Where do you keep your yacht?” His face darkened and he took a threatening step forward. “You have a yacht, haven’t you?” “Oh-why—er—bub—certainly,” I lied skilfully. “He’s—I mean, she’s laid up right now, the man’s scraping her chimney. It got full of seaweeds.”
Harkrider glared at me suspiciously, clearly unconvinced.
“Yo heave ho, blow the man down,” I hummed nonchalantly, executing a few steps of the sailor’s hornpipe. “Thar she blows and sparm at that! A double ration of plum duff for all hands, matey!” The stratagem was successful; with a baffled grunt, Harkrider produced a green velvet jewel case and exhibited a small, charred stub encrusted with salt.
“That’s been used before, hasn’t it?” I faltered.
“Of course it’s been used,” he grated. “You don’t think you’re going to get a new pipe for sixty-seven dollars, do you?”
“Oh, no, naturally,” I agreed. “Tell you the truth, I had in mind something a bit smaller.”
“Smaller?” snorted Harkrider. “You ought to have a calabash to go with that jaw of yours!”
“That’s what I was telling the wife only this morning,” I chuckled. “Gee, did you ever see anything like it? It’s worse than an English bulldog’s.”
“Well, do you want a calabash or not?” he interrupted. “They’re twenty dollars—though I guess you don’t see that much money in a year, do you?” Blushing like a lovely long-stemmed American Beauty rose, I explaine
d that I merely wanted something to knock around in, a homely old jimmy pipe I could suck on while dispensing salty aphorisms like Velvet Joe. After a heartrending plea, he finally consented to part with a factory second for thirteen dollars, equipped with an ingenious aluminum coil which conveyed the nicotine juice directly into the throat before it lost its potency. To prove my gratitude, I immediately bought a tobacco jar in the shape of a human skull, two pounds of Buntwell’s Special Blend of chopped amethysts and attar of roses, and a cunning all-purpose reamer equally useful for removing carbon from a pipe or barnacles from a boat. Peeling eighty-three rugs from my skinny little roll, I caught up my purchases and coursed homeward whistling gems from The Bartered Bride. Right after dinner, I disposed myself in my favourite easy chair, lit a cheery blaze in the pipe and picked up the evening paper.
When I regained consciousness, there was a smell in the apartment like a Hindu suttee, and an angel in starched denim was taking my pulse and what remained of my roll. If I go on improving at this rate, she’s promised I can get up tomorrow. That means I can go out Wednesday and go to jail on Thursday, because in the meantime I’ve got a date to heave a brick through a plate-glass window in Radio City. See you in Alcatraz, bud.
YOU’RE LAUGHING
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer, who was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. Pirandello broke decisively with the conventions of realist theatre with his two major plays, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922). His relationship with Mussolini has been the subject of much debate, and his last play, The Mountain Goats, reflects his growing anxiety about artistic integrity under a fascist regime.
Shaken by his wife with an angry tug on the arm, jolted out of his sleep again that night, was poor Mister Anselmo.
“You’re laughing!”
