NAVIGATING THE DISPUTE

She’s let the dog out, has forgotten once that he’s still in the yard, it’s a faint pressure on her mind, he’s fine out there, no real danger, but of course he could twist a leg in a gopher hole or eat something that poisons him or slip out through a gap in the gate and be hit by a car, no, this is just distraction for her, a way of keeping herself from thinking about Emma, and the way she left, head down, shoulders deflated too, slow into the car, slow backing the car out of the drive, she had the upper hand in the argument though it didn’t seem like it, and there would be the call later tonight from her ex-husband, always helpless when she turned up on his doorstep, always filled with a little too much hope, and then the next day Emma would thank Leo for his hospitality, peck on the cheek, poor stunned man, and she would drive back home and tell Alana that they were wrong to have fought and that love demanded more effort, and Alana would nod, and they would eat breakfast or lunch, depending on what time she drove back home, and look into each others’ eyes, performing love, protecting stockpiles, preparing for the next argument while still playing through this one, a contest of voids.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HIS PROUDEST MOMENT

Morning, cold, people in cars in the coffee shop parking lot, one older man singing to himself as Eric went by. He paused, hopefully imperceptibly, read the man’s lips. You're breaking my heart, the man mouthed. Seemed to be “Cecilia,” but the man was going too slow. Eric got his coffee, headed back to his car, passed the man’s car again. Down on my knees, the man was saying. So he had been right the first time, but why so slow? It came to him in a flash: it wasn’t the Simon & Garfunkel original, but the Smokey Robinson cover version. The pacing was perfect. He waited for the next song, got it: I don’t blame you at all, not Gee but it’s great to be back home. He went home convinced that he had unlocked the universe and woke unconvinced that he hadn’t.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SPECTATORSHIP

Lights on screen. Letters on screen. Darkness behind the letters and in fact all around them. Letters add up to names. What are the names doing? They are accumulating. What are the names ever doing? They are always accumulating. What does the profusion of names do in time to the darkness? “We answer,” says the text, “by describing other things.” A honeycomb is hollowed out with no thought to the benefit of the bees. A piece of furniture with flowers on it. A wall with climbing ivy. A point of view without a single implication does not in any world exist. We come around the porch.  Are we maintaining a narrative? We are back in the house with the others.  We go through the kitchen, through the dining room, through the small sitting-room where recently was the piece of furniture with flowers on it.  A door shuts at the top of the stairs. A door opens at the bottom of the stairs. But we’re on the stairs and what can be done about that?

©2022 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PAINTERS

Eight painters prattled, not working as much as they should. They had a system. Each specialized in a different color. Frank was great with black. Lou made poetry with white. Paul liked yellow, Lucy red, Ken violet. Jack had always felt allied with greens. Corinna was a wizard with orange. And no one could touch Hubert when it came to blue. The problem was that the house they were in was destined for none of these colors. The owner, an older tweedy sort whose young wife stayed in the car, was clear. “Gray,” he said. “Gray, gray, gray.” He pointed at a painting in a book for reinforcement. He went off in his car, which was green. The painters stood around for a while, shooting the breeze. Everyone was in a chatty mood despite the fact that they had reached an impasse in their day. The conversation surged, died down. A cricket mocked them in the yard. Corinna broke the silence. “He may have been a jerk,” she said, “but I liked his car.” This got Jack’s ears up. He and Corinna went off to the master bedroom, where the California King had been dragged into the middle of the room. “I’ll bet they’re taking off the plastic wrap, if you know what I mean,” said Ken. Lucy knew what he meant. The two of them went down to the den in the basement. It wasn’t being painted. It was paneled. But it had a couch that Lucy could brace herself against. Hubert and Paul looked longingly at each other until Hubert sighed. “Enough with the goo-goo eyes,” he said. “Upstairs office, now.” Frank and Lou stood in the middle of the room, Frank in front of his can of black paint, Lou in front of his can of white paint. They were the least talkative of any of the painters. For a while there was nothing. Even the cricket had given up. Finally, Frank cleared his throat. “You know,” he said. “I was thinking.” Lou angled his head. “Thinking?” Lou said. “Yeah,” Frank said. “About?” Lou said. “About the house,” Frank said. “This house,” Lou said. “Well, sure,” Frank said. “What about it?” Lou said. “The owner,” Frank said. “Boss Tweed?” Lou said. “Yep,” Frank said. “The Cradle Pirate,” Lou said. “The one and only,” Frank said. “Mr. Gray,” Lou said. “That’s the thing,” Frank said. “What’s the thing?” Lou said. Frank cleared his throat again. “The others,” he said, “were demoralized by him. It was his manner, for starters. Did you see the way his finger stabbed the air when he was pointing at the book? Humiliating? But it was also the substance of his demand, don’t you think? Each of them felt excluded by his plan for the house. Off they went, one by one—or two by two, as the case may be. But as Hubert and Paul were going upstairs, I had a thought. I didn’t say anything right away, because I was working it out.” Lou half-turned toward him. “Oh,” Lou said. “Do tell.” Frank half-turned toward Lou. The room was now a picture of perfect symmetry, two men, two paint cans,. “Do tell,” Lou said again. “What do you say we go get a bite to eat?” Frank said. “Fuck this guy and the gray house he rode in on.” They laughed and laughed and laughed all through lunch.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WOOLF'S EMU PROBLEM

...and then from the square box on the floor there emerged an emu, and then another emu, until there were more than a dozen of them in the room, their plumage matted down and their eyes dulled as a result of the long trip which had brought them from their Australian home to this Surrey estate. The emus varied in size, with the smallest one being roughly as small as a thimble and the largest being roughly as large as an automobile, and yet they all seemed to get along with one another perfectly well, with the smallest specimens cleaning the largest ones in the manner of dentist-fish, and the largest ones protecting the smallest in return. The light in the room travelled across the floor, and travelled across the emus as well, illuminating the colors in the feathers, which had seemed to be a drab mix of grey and brown but were in fact a more promising assortment of other hues, tending toward red in the roots and toward a kind of lemon-yellow in the further fingers of the plumage. It would be natural to assume that in such a group of emus, the largest emu would lead the rest, but in this case the largest seemed slow-witted: the dullness in his eyes, it soon became apparent, was not a result of his long trip but rather the limits of his intellect. The mid-size emus were dominant, and in particular one whose legs were somewhat stouter than the others. When he gave a bray, the others leaned in as if they were receiving marching orders. Even the smallest emus stopped cleaning their titanic compatriots and listened.

 

Most of her work, of course, was emu-centric when drafted. Jacob’s Room was originally titled Jacob's Emu. To the Lighthouse had an early draft that Woolf referred to in correspondence as Away From Or Maybe Toward the Emu. Her friends were alternately alarmed and amused by this preoccupation. Leonard, in particular, despised dromaius novae-hollandiae, and insisted that her books focus more on humans. In a letter of 1928, he could not contain his frustrations any longer: "Damn you and your emus," he wrote. "Do you see Joyce writing Emulysses? Did Eliot labor for months on The Waste Land of Emus? Of course not. But you, my dear, fritter away your time attempting to limn the social machinations and intellectual reticulations of these preposterous creatures. In the end, sadly, the birds that are flightless are not the emu – or the ostrich, or the rhea – but the birds of your sentences, sodden, heavy, grave with avian pretention." Virginia apparently took this advice to heart and never wrote about emus again. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

IN THE OVAL

A man with his shoe in his hand is called into the office of the president, where he expects to have to explain himself. He is not asked to do so, despite the fact that he opens the door with a disclaimer and the beginning of a story. “Jim,” he says. “I was at this store, Eyes Ajar, up on Fairfield….” He has known the president since they were boys. The president Marcus off, confounded. He doesn’t want to know about the shoe and is more interested in the fact that Marcus is wearing a mask. The mask is nothing obvious, not a Richard Nixon mask or a werewolf or The Shape, but rather a thin transparent film that changes Marcus’s face both not very much and entirely.  “Your pleasantness, Marcus,” the president says. “I love that.” What he doesn’t say is that the mask disrupts that. The meeting is short, two-pronged, half about an upcoming diplomatic event that Marcus has petitioned to attend and that Jim regrets to inform him he cannot, the other half two old friends shooting, as it were, the shit. “What?” the President says. “No. I can’t be seen as having used that kind of language. Everyone knows I use it but no one must know. Does that make sense to you? I need for it to make sense to you. I need for you to have a clear sense of what I’m saying. I don’t want to disown you, Marcus. I don’t want to have to disown you. We are brothers, stitched together under the skin. We are two but we are one. I have never loved anyone as much as…” The man with one shoe outbursts. “Shut up, Jim,” he says. “Just shut the fuck up. You weren’t elected to be anything other than this.” He waves his hands around. “This is what now you are. What now you are? What you are now.” The two men, telepathically, stand at the same time and walk out together. Marcus leaves his shoe on the desk. He’s not going back for it. Both of them know this as well as they know each other.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FRAGMENTS FROM IVANKA! THE MUSICAL

©Ben Greenman

Originally Composed November 1999

 

[PETE, a poor boy from Georgia, is preparing for the local dance contest, in which he hopes to impress the judges with his Peach Picker’s Shuffle, a lively folk dance of his own invention.]

 

PETE:

I’m not good at making speeches.

That’s not my cup of tea.

And I blush when I buckle up my breeches;

I need my privacy.

But when it comes to picking peaches

You just wait and see.

 

I’m a peach picker, peach picker, peach picker, peach picker

Yeah!

Peach picker!

That’s me.

 

[PETE goes to the barbershop to get a haircut. While there, he sees a picture of IVANKA TRUMP in a magazine. He is instantly smitten.]

 

PETE:

I’ve never heard of Thierry Mugler.

Dolce and Gabbana are all Greek to me.

Even though they sound Italian,

Those fashion names just don’t speak to me.

 

But I saw her face

In a magazine;

It’s the prettiest face

That I’ve ever seen.

 

Ee-vahn-ka? Ee-vain-kah?

I wonder. I hanker

For her touch.

It’s all too much. 

 

[PETE leaves the barbershop with his hair only half-cut and boards a bus to New York City.]

 

PETE:

Does this bus go east?

Sir, I need to know.

Take me north, at least.

Toward the ice and snow. 

 

Does this bus go fast?

Sir, I hope it can.

I’ll meet her at last.

She’ll make me a man. 

 

[PETE gets off the bus in New York City. He is immediately approached by LILY, a young policewoman working undercover as a prostitute. She advises PETE to go to the Trump residence and wait outside for Ivanka. He should be reading the newspaper, she says: it’s a good conversation piece.]

 

LILY:

While I faked turning tricks

I invented that tactic.

This little song

Is anticlimactic

 

[While PETE waits outside the Trump residence, he strikes up a conversation with an old doorman named WALLY. PETE tells Wally of his plans to win Ivanka’s heart.]

 

PETE:

She’s from the set that jet

I haven’t met her yet 

 

But I have a strong suspicion

That she’ll understand my mission. 

 

The rich, you see, are not like you and me.

They have everything but still they feel lonely.

When she finally meets my gaze it will put her in a daze.

I swear that I will be her one and only. 

 

[PETE waits for hours but Ivanka doesn’t appear. He waits the next day, and the next. Each day, he entertains Wally with stories about Georgia. The fourth day, Wally is not there, and Pete learns that the old man has died of a heart attack. He also discovers that Wally’s real name was really Peter Edmond Fredricks, and that when he was a young man he had an obsessive love for Abby Rockefeller, the eldest daughter of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. At the time, Peter Fredricks was a promising young businessman, but after six months of dogged pursuit, including a sleepless week spent outside the Rockefeller residence at No. 10 W. 54th Street, he was fired from his job and was forced to become a beggar. This news fills PETE with horror. He becomes convinced that he is doomed to repeat the older Pete’s fate. He takes to drink, has a brief fling with Lily, and begins talking to SPORT, a mutt he meets outside of Macy’s.]

 

PETE:

Those shoes wouldn’t fit you, old Sport.

Neither would that jacket

Or that black cotton shirt

Why won’t you speak to me, Sport?

My legs feel shaky

My heart is hurt 

 

[By blind luck, PETE meets IVANKA, who is coming out of her modeling agency. He falls to his knees in front of her.]

 

PETE:

In Georgia we were taught to do our duty

To country and to family and to God

But no one ever taught me about beauty

When I look at you I feel kind of odd 

 

[Desperate to win Ivanka’s love, PETE hurls himself between her and her limousine and does the Peach Picker’s Shuffle. In his haste to impress her, he falls and hurts himself. From the ground, he makes one last appeal.]

 

PETE:

I feel like a moron

I am sore from head to rump

Give me your hand

So I can stand

And show you what I’m made of, good Miss Trump 

 

I feel like a donkey

Or a monkey on a stump.

I want one more chance.

May I have this dance

And show you what I’m made of, good Miss Trump? 

 

[IVANKA drives away. PETE lowers his head to the ground slowly and weeps. The ghost of WALLY/PETER FREDRICKS emerges from the clouds above, opens his mouth, but then realizes he has nothing to say.]

THE NEW REVENGE

No day is quite as pleasing as the day that gives you the opportunity to create discomfort for the people you despise.  Pound them on the back like friends but don’t let up until they feel a flicker of fear that the thumps are coming too fast and too hard. Buy a present for them and put it in matte black wrapping paper. Call them and then, when they answer, immediately say “Hold on a second” and then scream bloody murder at someone in the background, not a real person, but an idea real enough to deserve the cruelest words at the highest volume. If capable of that, what else? These are the obvious options, the utensils within reach. But sometimes that discomfort can take the form of thoughts. Eventually those thoughts will infiltrate and infect those who are despised, but the joy comes in their creation, when those thoughts power up in the mind, batteries throwing off electrons, hot rocks, propelling the moment through the otherwise unremarkable sea of time.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE DENTIST WAITED, INCREASINGLY ANNOYED

Carl was running out of time to make his appointment but he couldn’t leave the coffee shop because that’s where Lucy was. He had just met her an hour ago. He wanted an extension. “Did you read the interview with this guy?” she said, tapping a picture of a newspaper on her phone. “I would love to make the world a better place, sure, like all billionaires. Malibu must be nice this time of year. World’s biggest helipad.” Carl was still amazed by the things that were common knowledge to others. “I mean, take off the broadcloth,” Lucy said. “We’re all just stones thrown into the water.” Carl tried to get in on it. “The thing is,” he said, “back in college I thought only about what I would do when I was out. Now it doesn’t seem like any of this is real.” Lucy was suddenly sober. She took his hand thrillingly. “My mother used to tell me that as soon as I got to know someone I found a distinction for them. That was my flaw, she said. But I see it in you now: it’s the willingness to be trapped in the past, in those dear dead days of recall.” She had a look in her eyes like she might kiss him and he wasn’t sure she was faking.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AN OTHERWISE UNEVENTFUL MORNING

The man on the street was struggling with the sleeve of his jacket and talking to himself. Janice, hands tightly on her coffee cup for warmth, was not trying to overhear, but the man's voice had a music to it. “The world would be different if tombstones were taller than buildings,” he said. “The world would be different if metal detectors could detect ill will. The world would be different if I could understand how my money made a difference. The world would be different if I could both leave work for the afternoon and also be there. The world would be different if when people made speeches and other people listened, those other people joined the revolution.” He winked at Janice. Was this her future husband?

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

TEAMMATES

A voice came to Jerry. It called out beguilingly. It said, “Jim.” Jerry didn’t think it was talking to him at first but after a while he realized that this was just an affectation, like calling everyone “Boss” or “Chief.” He tuned in to the voice. It said, “Come to me, leave behind what you have known, leave your family, your loved ones, leave behind any idea you believe, and in return I will put a dagger in your hand and lift the shame from your heart.” Jerry was arrested later that afternoon in the parking lot of the grocery store, brandishing a knife, ranting about dark nights and dark blood. He told the police that his name was Jim. The arresting officer, who knew Jerry a little bit from when he had played baseball with Jerry’s son, handled the older man gingerly. “Come on, Mr. Forte,” he said. “Watch your head.” 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PRESS/DEPRESS

Steve woke up. He remembered most of the night before. He had been talking about the newspaper, how it was once a godsend but now felt like a burden. “I still read it,” he said. “I still walk down my porch and bend down and pick it up. I mean, it’s where I work. Shouldn’t I be loyal? But it’s getting harder to do, and not just the bending down part.” He was talking to a young women he hoped to talk to more through the course of the evening, though he was not certain, even as the words left his mouth, that emphasizing his infirmity was the best strategy. But she had let him buy her a drink and she had gone with him to a banquette and pressed up against him, her insights surging. Steve knew that things had accelerated further—the woman had woken up in his bed—but his memory had blurry patches and dropouts. “Of course,” his ex-wife would have said. “That’s how it is with your irredeemable drunks.” He did remember the young woman asking him what felt like to work for a business that was systematically destroying the hopes of young people like her, and he had confessed that he was usually too tired to care. Maybe that’s what had sealed the deal: his helplessness.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE RIGHT TIME AT THE WRONG TIME

What happened was happening to others, but that did not mean that it was not also happening to him. The tall boy in middle distance on the lawn was connected to him. The tall man who had chiseled the name was connected to him. The child spinning happily in the playground four blocks away. His first wife, long gone, buried near here. His second wife, gone too, not into the earth but to Tokyo. The elderly couple calling his name. The young girl thinking of going out tonight. The woman driving away toward the lychgate, fumbling with fast food papers. He read the marble message, “What is not understood is sometimes a source of strength,” and stood there sobbing. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PLEASE WELCOME DR. FIGUEROA

The former governor of the state, now a professor, cleared her throat nervously, aware that she was about to change things. “Thank you,” she said. “These days, we react to journalism and criticism, not to mention poetry and prose, differently because we react to writing differently. We react to writing differently because we react to language differently. We react to language differently because the constant onslaught of symbols has addicted us to the presence of symbols in general while devaluating each individual symbol. The compulsive mind that results, desperate for the novelty that new symbols represent, unable to determine the truth-value or moral content of those symbols, in fact uninterested in determining either, is a mind that is not lit up from within but rather from nearby, even as it sinks deeper into darkness.” A man in the crowd jumped up,  holding a pistol. “This is devilry,” he said. “And now I will end it, not with a symbol, but with a true and irreversible action.” He pulled the trigger but all that came out was a BANG flag.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MURDER GRAF

He poisoned her drink. He tampered with her brakes. He hit her with a car. He hit her with a candlestick. He loaded her up with pills and pushed her off a boat. He loaded her up with pills and left her in the bed. He lashed her to a chair, set a house fire, and let the smoke thicken. He electrocuted her with a toaster he had rewired. He hired a hit man. He delivered a sharp punch to the chest, calling out “commotio cordis” as he did so. He steeled himself for the long game, lamenting the meaningless of life in a series of texts and leaving hints around the house about how the end might come. He strangled, shot, suffocated, stabbed. Each time—every time—his heart went out to her, in devotion, in sorrow, in love.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

BAD BLOOD

The defeat of Lou Co-Sight, the lead singer of the punk band Danger Management, consisted of his exclusion from the social fabric of his beloved Kansas City and the loss of his frank and open relationship with his bandmate Neuro Phil. In spite of all his strategic thinking, he had failed to take into account the most important thing, the band’s funds. And it liquidated Lou. Decades later, Hulk Frenetic, the band’s drummer, summed up the entire situation in a piece entitled “That’ll Do It”: “It is impossible to say who was right, but also impossible to avoid saying that Lou was wrong—that he was clumsy, careless, reckless, bitter, and even barbarous. Full disclosure: I have, for many years now, worked for Mr. Phil.” 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE MINOR MILLIONAIRE

Break Street, in the northeast edge of Seattle, is a typical exercise in urban rot: a plumb-straight thoroughfare that, over the course of two miles, hosts a grim parade of adult bookstores, pawnshops, gun dealers, and abandoned warehouses. Neither pretty nor safe, Break Street isn’t particularly well-traveled; and the absence of any drug dealers or prostitutes means that even those looking for illicit pleasures don’t come around. On a typical evening night, Break Street is as empty as the moon. It would be easy to understand why a large corporation might buy up the land: perhaps for a tax dodge, perhaps as a result of some powerful foresight that imagines the day when this corner of Seattle will be bustling with hip boutiques and small, overpriced restaurants. But why would an independently wealthy businessman – a tile-and-flooring wholesaler who, in this city of high-tech magnates is known as a “minor millionaire” – spend his entire life’s savings to purchase a three-block-square area in the worst part of the worst street in town?

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SITTING HERE IN REDDISH

First off let me warn you that Big Mel is a goon. He went to Goon School, goofed off, went to Goon Summer School, flunked out, went to Goon Night School, threw a rock through the trophy case, went to Goon Juvie, bungled a Grand Goon Larceny, got sent to Goon Prison. At Goon Prison his cellmate was a guy named Lawrence Killian. This Killian character, a super-Goon, stabbed a guard in the thoar, which is a small typographical error near the throat. In the chaos that followed, whoosh he was gone. No one knows where he is now. No one includes me. What am I thinking about whilst I cannot locate him? Well, the fact that last night I narrowly escaped being hit in the head by a dog. I was sitting here in Kulpsville, or Hammonton, or Reddish, or wherever the hell I live, humming "You Take the Dark Out of the Night." You know that song? It's an unreleased ballad, one of those rushing-on-my-run type things that comes into you through your stomach and ribs, releases the good kind of poison, and stays where it is until you are happily dead to the rest of life. Anyway, there I was, listening, humming, getting prepped for the step, and all of a sudden a dog jumped out of nowhere. He was airborne, ears akimbo, aimed like an arrow at my head. At the last minute I ducked. The dog kept sailing. He is probably out over the ocean by now. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

I PUSHED MY WAY

I pushed my way into the house despite the ache in my arm and shoulder. I didn't like what I saw, not at first, and it didn't bode well for the rest of it. There were stacks of books and papers everywhere—on the floor, on the chair, on the table—and though the place was cluttered with them, it was also strangely empty, as if any human inhabitants had left the place in a hurry. "Professor, I called out, not bothering to make my voice very loud, because I knew that no answer would come back at me. I went directly to the bedroom where I had stayed as a child. It was cleaner than the rest of the house, by a wide margin. It had a small bed and desk along one wall, which was also the wall that contained the door that led me into the room. Two of the other three walls were outfitted with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. In my youth, they had been filled with my things, schoolbooks and storybooks, trophies, toys. Those had all been replaced by books whose spines were red leather and gold filigree. There was an unusually great number of them, and they all were titled in a language that I did not understand. Whatever light there was in the room came from a small but powerful lamp on the desk, and it reflected off the lettering on the books. The books called to me. I do not know how to describe their effect except in those terms. They had been calling to me since the day before, when I was in New York City, walking from my law office to my townhouse, carrying a cup of coffee from a new café that had opened up on my route, walking within earshot of a pair of attractive young women, one brown-haired, the other raven, who were in the midst of a heated discussion about the moral, financial, and even carnal fitness of a young man that one of them was dating. Through the thicket of street noise, I got the impression that the other one had dated him as well, because she had no shortage of opinions on everything from his family to his fashion sense. I picked up only snatches of their words for a few blocks, though they were immensely entertaining in that form: "the kind of guy who thinks a hundred is a million," "the president of the thrift store, "bed for him is like rehab." At an intersection, they stopped, and I stopped a few feet behind them, which gave me more direct access to their conversation. "It's not that I have a problem with him for you," said the raven. "It's that I have a problem with him period. Talking to him is like climbing down a ladder into a well and then hearing someone at the top of the ladder say 'Nope, no one down there," and slide a cover over the entrance." I laughed to myself. The light changed. I made to follow. Just then, I was hit as if by a bolt of lightning. I could not move. I stayed still on the corner and the women, who were no longer amusing to me, passed out of earshot. They were not amusing because I no longer truly noticed them. I did not notice the passing traffic, either, or the smell of food carts, or the warmth of the coffee cup in my hand. I had been occupied, fully, by a vision of a thick red stripe. At first it filled my entire field of thought, but I managed to pull myself back a bit to gain its edges, at which time I saw it clearly for what it was: the spine of a book. I adjusted my mental picture outward even more and saw that it was one book among many, a member of a full shelf that had similar shelves both above and below. The vantage kept retreating slightly until I recognized that it was a picture of my childhood room. It was then that I heard the professor's voice, as clearly as if he had been standing beside me. "You need to come home," he said. Then a book was in my hand, in my mind. "Start with this one," he said. "The answer is not here, but the questions may be." On the cover of the book was a triangle followed by a star followed by a circle. When I came to, there on the street, the coffee had spilled slightly and was burning the knuckle of my right index finger. I transferred the cup to my other hand and wiped my hand on my hip, after which I called the airline and bought a ticket for home. I knew before I called the professor that he would not answer. This was before I boarded the flight and met the man who claimed to know me. This was before he followed me out of the airport and tried to kill me. This was before I was hit by a car, before I saw the dead deer, before I opened the book and saw the painting of the girl who had lived with us the summer I turned eighteen: lived and then, in circumstances so mysterious I had not, in fifteen years, been able to untangle them to my satisfaction, died. The book was, by all appearances, at least a hundred years old. And yet, the image was unmistakably that of the girl--that beautiful, kind, adventurous girl. I looked in the eyes of the painting as I had done in life, and then I read on.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

COASTING ACROSS FLIGHT STREET

Frank coasted across Flight Street and capsized his bike in front of the movie theater. Inside Linda Chung was waiting for him, already watching the movie, a story of three imprisoned men who wrote a play to perform at an inmate talent show and were surprised when it attracted the attention of a Hollywood producer and became a huge hit. The movie was already being talked about as the top drama of the year. Or was it a comedy? It starred George Sedano, Louis Thur, Oliver Watchung, Billie Tempo, John Jarndice, Susan Greene, and Alison Griffith. Or was it Griffin? Linda could never tell the difference between "Griffith" and "Griffin" and didn't care who knew it, and Frank, who knew exactly what the actress's name was, was not about to get on Janey's bad side, not when she they were in a movie theater, not when she was angling toward him slightly, not when she was laughing at his jokes and letting him share her popcorn. A tendency was in her eyes.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE WISDOM OF THE WIND

He moved beyond the boundaries of the room, and as he went through the door, a column of air passed across him, sharply cold, reminding him his body was a body, moving his hair, the loose fabric on his misshapen frame, and when he went to take his leave from the column, to free himself from it, it followed him, each step of his matched by the column's motion on down the hallway, and he began to cry, softly at first, then a little louder, but never less than constantly, and yet since he was not thinking about the sounds he was making but only making them, he did not accept them as his own but as something other, a sea that ran out to the horizon, where it was far enough away to let him deride someone else for the crying and confidently renter the room.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE PROTECTOR

Every child, if she has her wits, will cling to those who protect her, and if one of those protectors goes a little over the top, says something to the effect that without the presence nearby of him or her (the protector) she (the child) would surely perish, she (the child) will allow her eyes to gravitate down to the ground at her feet, and will not venture further into the confidences of that protector, instead considering with all her finer faculties the earth, the plants that grow upon it or are waiting inside it to grow, the snow on the tops of the hills that will, come spring, rush down as a freshet, the bushes with brightly colored lights that can be plucked and eaten. "Those lights are called berries," the child will say. The protector will laugh, but angrily, as he or she has not been afforded access to the child's thoughts, and thus is hearing what sounds only like nonsense. You say you want what is best for me but in fact you just want all of me, the child thinks, and as the protector does not hear this thought either, the angry laugh softens to a smile and the two part, each believing that the other is not, for the moment, a danger.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NO USE

He walked up the hill behind the house toward the tree, his feet pulsing with a pain he hadn't experienced before, a pain that began there and carried up his entire body to his mind, where it met the pain that was already in his mind, the feeling that he was hurrying pulled apart by the expression on his daughter's face, which told him that he was not. He adjusted his own expression to appear deliberate and purposeful. "No use wasting the afternoon when there's so much good in it, he said. This same trip, the day before, had been easy. Now it was nearly impossible. Is this what life was like toward the end? He was taking all the time available to him, or maybe he was out of time entirely. Maybe whatever he was approaching was receding. He thought about the previous day's trip, and the night before that, when he had lain awake in bed, looking at the ceiling, casting forward to the sense of achievement he knew would fill him when he reached the tree. It had not filled him. He had been empty. Now he was filled with achievement, the achievement of a lifetime, and the certain knowledge that he would not make it to the tree, but would instead drop flat against the ground of the hill, call his wife's name, not the name his daughter knew her by, but the name that he had used in their youth, and pass into the soil in search of her.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

JANUARY ERRAND

He was not thinking about the new year at all. He was not thinking about the old year either. He was not thinking about any year at all, not even any day, only the moment, about the coins heating up in his hand, clenched in two tight fists, silver dollar in the right, gold five dollar Liberty in the left, both of which he knew meant nothing until he made the trip from the middle of the park where he was standing to the corner store, at which point they would mean everything. Until then, his time of greatest wealth had come when his sister had died and his grandparents had visited and announced that they were going to indulge him, because "that's what is done," and then made good on their pledge, his grandfather giving him a dime, his grandmother a quarter, both with great ceremony, his grandmother curtsying even, and that time he had gone straightaways to the store and bought a loaf of bread, an orange, and a chocolate bar, the lot of which he thought would provide an afternoon's worth of pleasure at most but which lasted much longer, the chocolate bar especially, which stuck around until after Easter. His grandparents had joined his sister and were no longer on the earth. This money had come from them as well, from instructions they had written on a piece of paper they had left behind. So what would happen with six dollars? What would not happen? He could eat like a king. He could drink like his grandfather. He might even pick up a magazine or two as gifts for his parents, and if his arms were too full, he could take the streetcar home. But first he had to get to the store.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

JUST BEFORE DEATH KNOCKS

A lady I know is a sight to behold. That is her place, the small house, marigold, red trim on windows, a front door to match. (If I ask sweetly she’ll leave it unlatched.) A perfectly kept lawn, bright emerald green, and right by her front door, a girl figurine. She thinks it looks like her. I see why she does.  And yet this belief is a madness, because  The girl cannot move. She’s a statue, no more. The lady who lives there behind the red door is always in motion, a dervish, a swirl. She’s nothing at all like this motionless girl. The lady’s not old but she’s plenty old, really. She comes to my house and drinks and smokes freely. It’s her house or my house, and most of the time, we put ourselves through that same old pantomime: in which we are sources of comfort, not fear; in which our motives are patently clear; in which her nature both fills and eludes her; in which my nature exhausts and renews her; in which we entangle; in which we converse; in which we assemble and then we disperse. And so we are partners, at least for the day, instruments of beauty, not disarray. The statue is stock-still outside her front door. “Tomorrow,” I say, “I may come back for more.” She says we’re a caution. I say it right back. “Well,” she says. “Yep. There it is. Fade to black.”

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

READ THE ROOM

The room is no more than twenty feet square, with dull gray walls, the northern one with a wrong clock, the southern with a calendar hung to the wrong month, the east and west bare save for the two thin midline doors, neither with knobs, painted the same color as the walls. In each corner stands a man, dressed in a black coat and white shirt, and next to each man there is a table laden with notecards on which are written the secret memories of the other three men in the room. The clock strikes. A fierce wind blows open one door. The calendar turns to the right month and the cards go everywhere in the room. Secrets are suddenly in the air. Three of the men rush into the center of the room to claim the cards that belong on their table. They are screaming. Foam flecks their black coats. Each of the three men grabs at any card that contains a secret that he does not recognize. The fourth man, unconcerned, is dead.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SCARE TACTICS

Holding that a definite conception of fear could not be formulated, Reginald Rance opined that it failed even as a description of pragmatic conduct. “The notion of terror is so indefinite,” he said, jutting out his jaw, “that although many artists—filmmakers, authors, composers—wish to produce it, very few can predict with any certainty how to do so.” He coughed. “My fifth cousin,” he said, and trailed off. “My fifth cousin,” he said again. He was speaking, of course, of the renowned director Anson Rance, the “Sultan of Slash.” Now his eyes were wet with tears. “For a man to determine with certainty what would make another man afraid, he would have to be omniscient.” He fled the stage and called his mother, who had met the great man once. “If this is true of the individual,” he said, “think of how various must be the notions of dread which prevail among the species in general.” His mother did not answer. What no one knew was that she had just closed her medicine cabinet and seen a face reflected in the mirror. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ART IN AMERICA

From 1973 to 1987, in order of appearance: Melvin Herrera, Chris Newman, Paul Russell, Richard Bonita, Dan Suth, Donald Giller, Antonio Suarez, Allan Howe, Peter Sternschwager, Kelly Sollo, among others—unmarried men, uniformly unpleasant in character, hard to employ, estranged from their families, who were located, transported, slain, prepared, stuffed, and mounted by the predatory billionaire D.R. “Flip” Perkins. Perkins did not attempt to conceal the figures. Rather, he claimed that they were sculptures fashioned by Konstantinos Malokinis, a Greek artist who had started as a Color Field painter but had been consumed by envy in 1961, the year that Morris Louis showed at the Guggenheim, and was consequently impelled to shift over to fabricating realistic full-body effigies at roughly the same time as Duane Hanson  and John De Andrea. Malokinis, a drug addict who was never clear of the stuff, a bad gambler who was often in debt, took a considerable amount of cash from Perkins in exchange for letting the rich man pretend that these ghoulish tableaus were artworks. “In a sense, they were,” he was fond of saying. Both men disappeared in June of 1987, days before they were to be arrested. A car parked at the airport contained a note that authorities believe was penned by Perkins but that consisted entirely of a quote attributed to Lincoln Steffens: “Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.”

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

A SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST

She’d been on the road since she was twenty and knew all the types, which guys were too high on themselves, which guys simmered with underdog rage, which guys cleaned their glasses over and over again like that would help them see the world more clearly. She laughed whenever she heard someone at a party said that men were the same the world over. “Come with me to a little place called Fetch Me a Memory,” she said. Maybe it was the one when the high school principal stood outside her hotel room and lowed like a cow. Maybe it was the one when she got out of the car and saw the mayor coming toward her with a bouquet of spray-painted roses. Maybe it was the one where she tied a father and son down on a hotel bed and read to them from the Bible. Decades of fieldwork firehosed out of her, and usually she was so charged up that she couldn’t get to sleep without two or three drinks and another hot night she could turn to story.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

RUNNING INTO DARREN

“Some mornings,” Gary said, putting both hands around the cup of coffee he had no intention of drinking. That was the thing about Gary. He proselytized endlessly about “the market” and “passthrough purchasing” and “active customerhood,” but in fact enjoyed nothing, so when you were out with him you had to endure the pageantry of ordering food or drink, all the while suffering from the knowledge that most of it would go to waste. “Some mornings,” Gary said, “I run into Darren in here. You know him? We used to work together, me and him, over at Arktronix. The other day he said to me, ‘Hey, man, they have some prime new baristas working here. I’d like to put a straw right through the middle of her latte art, if you know what I mean.’ I didn’t know what to say so I just stared at him. And after a few minutes a tear appeared in the corner of his eye. ‘I didn’t mean to say that,’ he said. ‘There’s one woman they hired recently who I just love to look at, especially her posture, and the way her hair goes down over her shoulders. It’s like a waterfall of black vinyl.’ He sniffled, this guy, and then caught himself. ‘What I mean, I guess,’ he said, ‘is that I wouldn’t mind putting an extra shot in her espresso.’” Gary clutched the cup tighter for warmth. “That fucking scumbag,” he said. “Afraid of his own poetry.” He stood up and tossed the coffee in the garbage. “Let’s go,” he said above its loud thump.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MONEY WELL SPENT

I had the idea to arrange a dinner between Christophina and Blau with myself as the host in a medieval cavern that I had purchased with monies I made from the sale of my yacht. There were also other guests: a convicted murderer, a self-proclaimed “invert” (it was a mental category of his own invention, having to do with belief in the opposite of what he believed), some barrel boys, a septum specialist, and Morris Guberstein, who is always a wit. The cavern walls sweated coolly. One round table was placed beneath a censorious stalactite. Duck was served, l'orange and otherwise. Neither Christophina nor Blau spoke much. They eyed each other admiringly, each conceding to one of the other guests that they felt as though they were in the presence of a true master. Christophina reportedly gave Blau the ultimate compliment—the murderer asked what was so special about Blau, and Christophina, with a very serious expression, said, “It’s his pulse.” Most of the focus, then, fell to Morris Guberstein, who did voices, told jokes, juggled. He had kept his weight down and looked quite youthful, which led the invert to proclaim that he was a “total bore, really not the life of the party at all.” 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NEW RELEASES

Emerton’s psychological acuity as a lyricist extends to her singing and, specifically, to an overuse of the pause, especially before and after pronouns. The effect of this technique is, again, that the players in the story, the “I,” the “you,” the “she,” are assigned additional weight, and that the cast of characters acquire a powerful reality that far exceeds that which would normally be granted by a personal fiction such as a song. If, as happens in such rare cases as “We Can’t Find It” or “I Doubt,” the pronoun is not framed in such a way, the very existence of that character is thrown into doubt, a distrust that in turn in intensifies the trust that powers the rest of the work. Emerton’s most recent album, Bottle Jack, applies new technology to her trademark technique, adding, in the millisecond before a pronoun, an “underwhoosh,” which can best be described as a susurrus of engrossment. The cover photograph of a fish trapped in a net is a nice touch.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas