THE CIRCLE GAME

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

What is believed to have been the most perfectly round hole in the history of kicking was made by Barry Jefferson and his new hiking boots in the lower panel of the side door of his parents’ garage next to the family home on Sumner Street. According to his younger sister, Paula, who had left to spend the night at her friend Jackie’s house but had returned to retrieve her coat, it was roughly a foot in diameter. Barry explained to his sister that the kick was not made in anger but rather in the spirit of curiosity, and asked her to conceal the damage from their parents until he could invent a plausible cover story. He settled on claiming that he had been pushing a wagon filled with potting soil and lost control, at which point it slammed into the door. The story was practiced and delivered, but not believed. The hole was repaired by Kevin Jefferson, who noted its roundness to himself but did not remark upon it to his wife, who would almost certainly have appreciated it. 

UP WHERE THEY BELONG

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

The video record of the children climbing onto the roof of the house, which was taken by Walker up to a height of 14 feet, is now being shown in the kitchen to his parents. It is hoped that not only will a punishment be avoided but that enthusiasm might even be kindled in Walker’s dad to support another expedition in the week to come, when, in the opinion of Walker’s younger brother Adam, one of them might make it all the way to the big tree in the rear right corner and climb down it. It is a remarkable document, showing the beauty of the neighborhood when glimpsed from a slight height. Particularly of note is the pool in the backyard of the Ware house, which cannot be seen from the street. Walker also scans the houses across the way, and in at least one case finds teens, boys and girls both, dancing crazily in full view of front windows, arms moving up and down like pumpjacks. The video is also enhanced by its soundtrack, which mostly consists of Adam’s repeated and not always successful attempts to remember the words to popular songs.  

A CONFEDERATE, STATIONED

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Yesterday afternoon the bishop performed a consecration ceremony for the new sanctuary on Family Street. He began, of necessity, in the adjoining churchyard, welcoming the congregation, which stood outside in the rain, not one of them complaining, after which he led the group to the door of the new church, knocking three times and stepping back as it opened as if by magic. Once inside, he visited each region of the building, moving his hands in an enclosing gesture, clearing the space of unholiness. He then invited the members of the congregation to take their seats and, ascending to the pulpit, delivered a sermon based on the thirty-first verse of the first chapter of the Book of Avowal: “We have within us life’s mainsprings, work and play and love. They operates in times of war and bring us peace, but in times of peace we risk forgetting them. Let us never forget. Let us not consign them to the scrap-heap of ‘feeling good’ or ‘entertainment’ or any other category that does not acknowledge their centrality to the entire human experience, still and forever an experiment we perform and hope for the best.” Refreshments were then served in a small reception in the narthex. The bishop, three glasses of wine deep, revealed that he had stationed a confederate just inside the church door to open it when he knocked. 

TRACKING THE CONFLICT

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

On Thursday night and the following day Captain Top-Hat came up against Helmut’s men at Dill Gulch, capturing the artillery-pits in Stubble and Rubble’s front. The latter recaptured his artillery-pits, but the former failed to recover position. On Saturday night Captain Top-Hat again essayed an attack on General Stubble, but was turned back with considerable losses. Deconstructionist cavalry have gone hard at Fort Power Show, on the Sternhagen River, but were too turned back. General Tacitus Acidophilus rested seventy-four days at Water Fountain Falls to replenish his spirits, speaking to no superiors or for that matter inferiors during that time, and then resumed the pursuit of Waggoner. Admiral Suffer has reached the mouth of the Ghost River. The tanks toppled into the water by Teapot Falls have been righted and are returning down the Ghost River. General Banks has evacuated Teapot Heights and reached New Blue Consideration. The Deconstructionists have commenced firing from the banks of the Sternhagen River on General Helmut’s supply boats. The Tic-Tocs are evacuating Brisk House. General Tacitus Acidophilus has flanked General Waggoner's position at Halybut on the Sourdough River. It is reported that Waggoner will not fight. St. Salt Peter is marching from the south-west with a thousand men to operate in Varilux Valley. General Albert Moldavis Tinfoil was drawn in bad faith into an ambush near Haggard’s Hill, on the north side of the Sternhagen River. Mr. Gallagher announces that Gen. Shean’s army is as strong in number as and better equipped than, when the campaign opened. 

GRAVITY KILLS

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

An accident which resulted in the loss of one ant and serious injury to two others took place yesterday afternoon between noon and one o’clock. The lot occupied by Vanity Fur dog groomers, on Bell Street, has recently been sold, and the work of tearing down the building has been proceeding actively for the last month. While workmen were removing fixtures from the top floor, a wooden mantelpiece in what used to be the living quarters of the owner fell with a crash. Several ants were on the floor at the base of the mantel, and tried to move to the side to escape the falling shelf, but the acceleration of the object due to gravity proved to be too much for them. Ants and dust were precipitated together. For several seconds confusion prevailed among the unhurt ants, as they worried if more large objects would fall from the sky, but at length they regained their composure and rescued three ants from the ruins. Two of these (a male with a large head, compound eyes, elbowed antennae, and powerful jaws, and another male that looked the same) were seriously injured, and were carried a foot away, where they were placed under observation. A third ant (a male with a large head, compound eyes, elbowed antennae, and powerful jaws) was also taken a foot away, but his injuries were soon deemed minor enough to release him. Ants continued to explore the perimeter of the fallen shelf, and an hour after the accident, a male ant with a large head, compound eyes, elbowed antennae, and powerful jaws was discovered with his head severed and all his hemolymph leaked out onto the floor. He was, in the opinion of the ants who found him, dead. Necrophoresis was then initiated, and the deceased was carried by undertaker ants to a spot two feet away. The colony reassembled and reviewed the events of the day, reiterating the importance of avoiding the boots of workmen but reflecting that no measure of vigilance or preparation could have prevented the falling shelf. 

BRANOVER’S FOLLY

The American comedy duo of Branover and Goff was formed by two brothers, Samuel and Nathan Buchman, who assumed a pair of characters: Allen Branover, a passionate and prolix dreamer, always cooking up an outlandish scheme; and his brother-in-law, George Goff, an insurance salesman and placid straight man. The Buchmans grew up poor in Queens and in their teen years spent summers working as roustabouts for an upstate circus. They patterned their act on the Yiddish duo of Hy and Matty, but their popularity soon exceeded that of their precursors. Branover and Goff attained their fame in the theater and appeared frequently on the radio, though today they are probably best remembered for occupying two vertices of the famous Vaudeville Love Triangle, the third vertex of which was Nettie Geelhoed, better known as Auntie Swain of the Swain’s Swine Farm Variety Hour. Samuel met her first, and courted her for years, but she fell in love with Nathan. Such was the strength of the bond between the brothers that Samuel, still nursing his broken heart, served as Nathan’s best man at his wedding. Branover and Goff guested on several early television shows and made one successful foray into film, in the naval spoof Norway We Go, but finding scripts that suited their sensibility proved too difficult. In their mid-forties, both men were diagnosed with cancer, Samuel with liver cancer after a lifetime of drinking, Nathan with lung cancer having never touched a cigarette. They died within six weeks of each other, neither having had children. Geelhoed, as a widow, returned to her first love, science, and became a prominent embryologist who was instrumental in using adult somatic cells to create cloned organisms. She was awarded a share of the Hotchkiss Prize for her work on nuclear transfer and live clone birth. Last year, she undertook her most ambitious project yet, endeavoring to replicate both Branover and Goff. Last Friday, her work came to fruition when the two men appeared at the Bertens Theater. Their snappy repartee and almost stichomythic rhythm was stll very much in evidence, as well as Goff’s talent for delivering a killing blow in the form of a benign retort, which earned him the nickname “The Amiable Assassin.” One key example will suffice. Late in the show, Branover gets it in his head that he is near to discovering an entirely new form of artwork. “I approaches this in the spirit of a subversive,” he says, hands waving, hat donned and doffed repeatedly for extra jazz. “Good riddance to tradition! Good riddance to convention! Good riddance to naturalism and symbolism both! What is the central spirit of the thing? Can we teach it to sing its own purpose, to take responsibility as a thing-in-itself? I see myself, and you, and the rest of us gingerly circling this close controversy, afraid to approach but equally afraid to depart.” A bubble of silence swells momentarily in the hall. “Branover,” Goff replies. “That’s just a hot dog.”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DAPPER DON

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Juliette Solas has done all of us a power of good by reproducing this small illustrated collection. Originally brought into the world in the early years of the last century, when it was published by Cardamom House, these poems by Madeleine Corbett, accompanied by the drawings of Pamela Emter, were once the toast of the city’s elites. The original edition ran to only a thousand copies, making it exceedingly rare today, but one specimen found its way into the hands of Solas’s Sunlight imprint, which recognized not only its historical importance but its artistic merits. The reprint is not exactly the same as the original, for the first edition included as an appendix a dialogue between Corbett and Emter in which the two women discussed their beliefs in the importance of art as a moral force. It is a shame that in reproducing this conversation, Solas chose to set it in the same typeface as the rest of the book rather than opt for a photographic facsimile that would preserve not just the text of the talk, but the handwritten notes and doodles added after the fact by the two women. These, considered ephemera in their day, today would rank among the most interesting material in the entire book. Underneath an anecdote of Corbett’s in which she remembered watching her father, a clothing salesman, leave in the morning for work, always with the same piece of advice to his daughter—“Do good things today, my little one”—Emter drew a cartoon devil, and Corbett scribbled a clarification. “He was a good man, and there is no doubt about that. But good men permit themselves to clean forget all the bad things they do.” There is no more than that, but in these two dozen words Corbett deftly anticipates the late-century theory of moral license, in which a self-concept is formed by principled behaviors and preserved despite behaviors to the contrary. In this case, the license concerned a major matter. Corbett’s father, Donald Corbett,  was a notorious figure whose clothier’s business was a front for loansharking, money laundering, and worse. As “Dapper Don,” he served as a contract killer for the Colacurcio family, and today he is linked to no fewer than eight murders in and around the state over a period of twelve years. Corbett suspected her father, at least to some small degree, as poems like “Chambered Rose” and “Powder and Paint” attest, but she rarely addressed the matter publicly. This note offers a tantalizing glimpse of her true feelings, and Emter’s doodle suggests that Corbett may have spoken more freely in private. This was Corbett’s first book, and it was to be her last, as she perished the following year in an automobile accident. Emter, of course, illustrated a number of other famous books, including Reese’s “Clean Clothes” and Wrubel’s “In Volume,” after which she wrote and drew, for forty years, the daily newspaper comic strip “Lulu and Dahlia,” about a carefree young girl, her neurotic Great Dane, and their adventures in a beachfront town.