JACK AND HIS FRIEND HARRY

    There is a reason Jack keeps saying “The Devil’s just a point of view.”
    He has done things that require him to subscribe to this notion.
    He scavenges out in the warehouse district all morning.
    By noon, when he comes in to take his spot at the counter, he has already made more money than most of us will ever see.
    By two, when he gets to his office and his desk, the most has disappeared.
    It’s all of us by then.
    The money’s not in what he finds out there.
    The items he brings with him to the diner and then to the office are spurs for conversation: discarded gadgets, pristine pieces of lumber cut to the wrong size, the occasional sketched self-portrait.
    He has all those conversations.
    “I could probably rewire this to be a really fantastic car alarm.”
    “This is a really fine cedar.”
    “Whoever drew this is probably more talented than he knows. Do you see how the eyes are looking down slightly in a way that suggests shame but then, when you look at it, reveals itself as arrogance?”
    He has them at the diner and he has them at the office.
    It’s possible they are intentional distractions from the money.
    The money comes from the silent distant operation of all his businesses.
    These businesses are the things that he has done.
    One develops airborne toxins for use in wartime.
    Another plainly makes armaments.
    A third deposits radioactive waste and industrial runoff in poor nations, burying it underneath fields that are then used to grow crops or as playgrounds.
    His friends, and there are many, are quick to point out the other types of companies he has started, run, profited from, the medical devices firm, the one that protects personal information from invasive technologies.
    “He’s a saint,” says Harry.
    But these are just offsets and Harry knows it, just as Jack himself knows it, though Jack also knows that it would be inappropriate for he himself to articulate it so clearly, and that is why he is grateful that Harry does.
    Harry, weekly if not daily, advances the point of view that enables Jack to move forward, safe in the belief that he is a man like any other, possessed of flaws, certainly, but also moral in other regards, a “balanced being,” in the parlance of the writer Louis R. Lancaster, who penned How to Forgive (Yourself), the slim 1994 volume that is Harry’s North Star and consequently Jack’s.
    Harry is there at the diner most days at noon when Jack drops by.
    If he is not there, he appears soon after Jack, entering quietly.
    He listens, mostly, smiles often, says nice things about Jack when Jack leaves the diner for the office.
    Harry is the Devil.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

 

ANDY DANDY

I remember that he wrote his shopping list backwards, in Hebrew, in tiny, birdlike marks before driving out to Tagus Hills, the new shopping center with the new supermarket, and then he stood in the area beyond the cashiers, the tight carpet striped green and yellow with starbursts of white splashed across it, and squinted at his list as if he needed assistance. Women stopped, asked him if he was lost, drawn in by his wispy beard, and he pointed to the list and said that his elderly mother had jotted it down, poor thing, old country, you know, mind going fast. Most would cluck their tongues and move on, mimicking his nervous motions when they gained safe distance, but every fifth or tenth (he didn’t care) would reach out and touch his wrist with their fingers. Later, when he woke in their bed, when he looked across the room and saw a brassiere hanging over a chair or remembered the whoosh of breath that had escaped from the woman’s mouth as he had taken up position, he thought of the list still tucked into his pocket. Hebrew. Who would have guessed? Porter, of course, was a name that had been designed by his great-grandfather, an American sleight. Tagus.“Take that, goyim,” he thought, and stroked his wispy beard, and stroked the bare hip of the woman who had fallen for it.  

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE TWO JENNIFERS

It's impossible to talk about Jennifer any further without noting that there are actually two distinct Jennifers, both born the same day in the same place to the same parents, entirely co-extensive, but one married to a wealthy banker with a penchant for sleazy parties and a trio of conspicuously lavish residences and the the other single for a while, nursing wounds and doubts and then married to a galumphing Irish poet whose hangdog expression concealed a wry sense of humor and a warm heart. The second husband called her “love” and meant it. The first wanted her always out of her clothes and meant it too. The first Jennifer was the tawdrier option (complete with extra flourishes like a drug problem and a short-lived affair with her husband’s female secretary, carried out right under his nose and never suspected), while the second was more measured and accomplished, even beginning to play the piano again for the first time since her teens. Both versions certainly have a right to exist and are preserved in shockingly pristine condition in the memory of the seventy-six-year old Jennifer, who has just been to the doctor and been given bad news.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

Undergirded by a theory of interpretation, dependent upon a common set of terms, informed equally by circularity and repetition, rattling off rules and exceptions, insistent upon specific if not universal applicability, the thoughts that lay behind the words on the chalkboard possessed the students in the classroom, possessed them from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, grabbed them and would not let go, began to squeeze the life out of them so that new life could be squeezed into them. Eyes and ears were prime points of entry.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas