THE AIR AROUND

Waylon wrote so many letters to Lucy that at last he was neutral. He told her what he felt, what he knew she didn’t feel, what he hoped to one day feel again between them, and in the last letter, which he didn’t know would be the last but which he still felt was somehow special, he told her that when he was away from her, he appeared normal but was always having strokes of brilliance, and that other people around him sensed them and moved, some toward him, some away, but they moved one way or another, and that the air around him was never the same afterwards. Why couldn’t she see that? Or why wouldn’t she? After the last letter her considered writing an additional one. He would remind her of a moment. On their first date he had bought her a hat she had liked, a wide red hat meant to be raked at a severe angle, designed by someone famous, a lady with a French name, or maybe a knockoff of that famous lady’s hat, and he had given the girl at the shop a hundred-dollar bill and said “keep the change” with a tone as round and full as he could muster. He assumed Lucy still had that hat. He wanted her to feel good about herself when she wore it, or did he want her to feel good about him, or bad about her distance from him? He couldn’t solve that problem, which he filed under Philosophy, which meant that he couldn’t write about it before he had thought some more. Neutrality descended. He let the pen fall to the floor. 

 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DEATH OF A REDHEADED MAN

from Celebrity Chekhov, by Ben Greenman

Adapted from "The Death of a Government Clerk"

**

One fine evening, Conan O’Brien was sitting in the second row at the Staples Center, watching the Lakers run away from the Sacramento Kings. He was thrilled to see the game, excited and gratified. But suddenly..In stories one so often meets with this “But suddenly.” The authors are right: life is so full of surprises! But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his breathing was arrested, he put his head down, then drew it up suddenly, and “Achoo!” It is not reprehensible for anyone to sneeze anywhere. Petty thieves sneeze and so do captains of industry, and sometimes even television stars. All men sneeze. Conan O’Brien wiped his face with a napkin, and like a polite man, looked round to see whether he had disturbed any one by his sneezing. But then he was overcome with confusion. He saw that an old gentleman sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and his neck and muttering something to himself. In the old gentleman, Conan O’Brien recognized Larry King.

“I have sprayed him,” thought Conan O’Brien. “I am not planning to be on his show any time soon, but still it is awkward. I must apologize.” Conan O’Brien gave a cough, bent his whole person forward, and whispered in the man’s ear. 

“Pardon me, Mr. King, I sprayed you accidentally “

“Never mind, never mind.”

“Excuse me, I did not mean to.”

“Please, sit down! Let me watch the game. I’m here with Chance and Cannon!”

Conan O’Brien was embarrassed, he smiled stupidly and fell to gazing at the court. He gazed at it but was no longer feeling bliss. He began to be troubled by uneasiness. At halftime, he went up to Larry King, walked beside him, and overcoming his shyness, muttered: “I sprayed you, Mr. King. Forgive me. You see, I didn’t do it to”

“Oh, that’s enough about it. I’d forgotten it, but you keep reminding me. It’s like Liz Taylor,” said Larry King, moving his lower lip impatiently.

“I don’t know what he means, but there is something fierce in his eyes,” thought Conan O’Brien, looking suspiciously at Larry King. “And he doesn’t want to talk. I ought to explain to him that I really didn’t mean anything by it, that it is how nature works. I don’t want him to think I spit on him. He doesn’t think so now, but he will think so later!”

On getting home, Conan O’Brien told his wife about his sneezing. It struck him that she took too frivolous a view of the incident; she was a little frightened at first, but when she learned that Larry King had said that it was nothing to him, she was reassured. “Still, you had better go and apologize,” she said, “or he will think you don’t know how to behave in public.”

“That’s just it! I did say that I was sorry, but he didn’t take it right. He just said something strange about Elizabeth Taylor. There wasn’t time to talk properly.”

The next day, Conan O’Brien went to apologize. He found out that Larry King was taping a series of brief interviews with sitcom stars. He put on a shirt and tie, drove to the studio, and waited while Larry King spoke to Kaley Cuoco, Jon Cryer, and Joel McHale. Finally, Larry King stood and walked toward the bathroom. Conan O’Brien intercepted him.

“Yesterday at the game, Mr. King,” Conan O’Brien began, “I sneezed and accidentally sprayed you.”

“I have nothing to say about it,” Larry King said. He went to the bathroom and when he came out, he went straight over to Julie Bowen to speak to her.

“He won’t talk to me,” thought Conan O’Brien, turning pale. “That means that he is angry. It can’t be left like this. I have to explain myself to him.”

When Larry King had finished his conversation with Julie Bowen and was heading out to the parking lot, 

Conan O’Brien intercepted him again.

“Mr. King! If I am bothering you, it is only because I feel such regret. It was not intentional. Please believe me.”

Larry King made a mournful face, and waved
his hand.

“You’re just making fun of me,” he said as he closed the car door and drove away.

“Making fun of him?” thought Conan O’Brien. “That’s not true at all. He has interviewed thousands of people, but he won’t stop to listen to me. If that is how it is, I am not going to apologize to that guy anymore. He can go to hell. I’ll write a letter to him, but I won’t make any more
attempts in person.”

So thought Conan O’Brien as he drove home. But he did not write a letter to the Larry King; he thought and thought but could not write a sentence. He had to go the next day to explain in person.

The following day, Larry King was interviewing sports figures: Lamar Odom, Phil Mickelson, Rafael Nadal. When Conan O’Brien saw that he was done with Danica Patrick, he hurried toward him. “I tried to talk to you yesterday,” he muttered. Larry King fixed him with an owlish stare.

“But it was not to make fun of you. I was apologizing for having sprayed you when I sneezed. I did not dream of making fun of you. If I made fun of you, if people started making fun of people without any concern for the truth, then there would be no respect for persons, there would be…”

“Get out!” yelled Larry King, turning suddenly purple, and shaking all over.

“What?” asked Conan O’Brien, in a whisper turning numb with horror.

“Get out!” repeated Larry King, now stamping
his foot.

Something seemed to give way in Conan O’Brien’s stomach. Seeing nothing and hearing nothing he reeled to the door, went out into the street, and staggered to his car. Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his tie, he lay down on the sofa and died.

SINGING PARTY LIGHTS

My sister Alice and I love to talk about the past because our ideas of it are so far apart from one another, and so every conversation is like two people struggling through a language barrier. For example, in the matter of 1974, Alice had completely forgotten what a state I was in after my first divorce. I wore only one sweater all year, a mustard-yellow one with holes at the elbows. Janey was calling off and on to see if I was getting better and I would either refuse to take the call or grab the phone and fill up the line with questions she couldn’t really afford. I was obsessed with a song from the summer we met, and one lyric that went Glorious days, glamorous nights / And Claudine Clark singing “Party Lights.” I wanted to know who sang it and what station played it. I had a sharp memory of sitting in a car with my hand in her shirt and hearing it come on the radio. Janey had nothing to say and usually just hung up. Naturally, Alice had a completely different account of the year, and remembered mostly the big fire that took half of the warehouses west of town, killing six.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE PROBLEM WITH A RICH MAN

 “The problem with a rich man,” said Bob, and laughed, because Bob was the rich man, and everyone in town knew it. He had gone most of the way off the rocker since April, when his wife had been seen stepping into a light blue ’68 Coronet, “preserved perfect,” said Gerald Howard, who had been the one who had seen her stepping, and with a wink made it known that he meant both the car and Jeannette. For weeks after Bob spent more time than anyone thought advisable in places everyone went, the diner, the park, the stone porch of the ice cream shop. Too many people saw him for him to maintain his dignity, which had always been the source of his appeal, even more than his wealth. The time of excessive appearance was followed quick on by the time of sharp words hurled, in which Bob activated his membership in the dinner-party circuit, made sure that he was seated as an eligible single, and proceeded to berate the host and hostess. He called Fred Perlemutter a “day-trading fop” and Andie Perlemutter “someone’s memory of a good woman,” and it only got worse from there—French Wolf was “a jail sentence that hasn’t happened yet,” Louis Snodgrass had “so many ways of trying to distract you from the fact that he’s basically dead inside,” and Jocelyn Masters “never shut up, not for one god-loving second”— until one night at the Braysons he stood up with additional flourish, rattling china and silver both. Everyone held their breath for Phyllis Brayson, who was vulnerable in many respects, but Bob turned and wheeled and pointed at Gordon Howard, who he condemned as a “syphilitic traitor wrapped in rancid bacon.” “Harsh, but fair,” said Mrs. Howard, who escaped unscathed. Three days later was when Bob was found nude in the forest, babbling about the problem with a rich man, and also when he fought off the cop who found him, kicking the man harder than anyone thought he could. The cop, young, drowning in deference, held his fire until he knew that everyone would agree he had no choice, and the hit Bob with a new high-tech sonic stun weapon that a man even richer than Bob had paid to make part of the force’s base arsenal. Bob ended up on his back, staring eye-to eye with a burl on an oak that had fallen crossways into the lespedeza. 

 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

STIRRINGS OF RESPONSIBILITY

That moment where the dog tenses and leaps off the couch, howling as it runs for the door, is the most horrifying aberration in his otherwise placid day. It is not nice, and puts a knot in his lower back that makes it impossible for him to sit still or stand up. He is not careless with his dogs. He latches the fence. He leaves out water. He hangs signs to tell the mailmen to slip the bills and circulars into the shallow metal box that hangs on the fence and drop the packages in the wooden box below. So what is it that upsets the dogs this much? It is a tornado of noise and fur and he is trapped in it, sick to think that there is something he has done wrong to worry them.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A MISUNDERSTANDING

About a week ago it was reported here that Ezra Boyce, formerly of this city, had been killed, at Chugwater, Alabama, though the cause of death was variously reported in different papers. This morning Thomas Fabrizio received a letter from Mr. Boyce in which there was no mention of his being dead, or of having been shot (as one report had it), or stabbed (as it went in another report), or strangled, or bludgeoned, or poisoned, or hit by a falling tree, or pushed off a waterfall, or mauled by a bear, or drowned in a tub, or seized by a faulty heart, or electrocuted by a torn wire flapping wildly in a sudden wind. It is not known how the story of his death originated. He says that he is in his usual good health.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MARTIN RESTON'S SINGLE-PARAGRAPH STORY "A KEYBOARD SITUATION"

To those who spend half their life in near proximity to a keyboard, each key has a voice as well as a symbol. As a finger passes over the keyboard, each key attracts with its symbol, and as a fingertip presses down upon it, it releases that voice. A consonant clicks as it watches the vowel beside it, which whistles or rustles. Up above numbers and special characters sit in silence, hearing their own heartbeats. When deployed, they will stop the noise for a moment, a second or a split- : they are rests in the measure, so to speak. The result is a song of the alphabet, a collection of symbols that sound together without shedding any individuality. Every word has so much music already knit into it.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas