SHAMED

Jack found another man, as high as a tree, to write dialogue for his film. But that man abused truth, even as he displayed a mastery of his craft, and Jack wanted truth to be free to make its impression—upon him, upon the other man, and upon whoever would be sitting in the theater, rapt, during the run of the film. This would please God, he knew, and he told the other man so, and the other man stiffened and told him (Jack) that he (the other man) believed in God but that he (the other man) knew that he (Jack) did not, and could tell because of the way he (Jack) spoke His (God’s) name. “He guides our mind which guides our pens so that even the basest things can usher in aspects of the divine,” said the other man, and Jack was shamed.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DETOUR

The 1200 and 1300 blocks of Arrow Place are lined with exceedingly handsome houses, similar in style and grace to those of Mount Zipporah Avenue. This ten-block-square area was, in the middle of the century, home to many artists and authors, to the point where it became known as “Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Hardtack.” Gerritt Porter, born and raised at 1244 by a sculptor father and a dancer mother, bought two homes across the street, 1255 ad 1257, and built a covered passageway between them so that they formed what he called “Arrow Castle.” He paid for the construction with the profits from his first and best-known novel, Green-Light Depot, and then wrote his next four novels there: Breathing Music, Timpanis and Temblors, Inversion Hit Parade, and As A People We Don’t Have Much Time. Each was the equal of the one before it, and though his sales tapered off, he would have had sufficient funds to maintain his lifestyle were he not ruined by bad investments (among the worst was a Green-Light-Depot-themed restaurant, which cost him nearly half his fortune and never opened) and a musical adaptation of Breathing Music (which did open, ran for one night, and cost him nearly as much as the restaurant). Dispirited but also inspired, he set his fiction to the side and turned to what he called “typed jazz,” not verse precisely, but a poetic form that the Marcia Malinka characterized as “improvisatory language deployed on the page for pyrotechnic delight.” As depicted on the previous page, through traffic entering from the north will now proceed around the neighborhood by way of the Sinck Bypass. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ALL HE HAD

He had a character he liked to dress up as, Nubla Con—The Weather Thief, but he couldn’t find a theater and he couldn’t find a play. He had a list of things that he needed to tell people, mostly about what was underrated (“Swept For You, Baby”) and what was not (They Call Me Bruce). He had a check made out to the roofer as a deposit for a repair that would remedy the damage done by the woodpeckers. He had a dog that ran around the yard, looking for his other dog. He had a recording of that other dog from years before, when he was a puppy, when he was alive, a pretend job interview where he would ask set-up questions (“What do you call a tuned radio amplifier?”) and the dog would answer (“RF!”). He had a book he tried to read but found impenetrable. He had a chair he tried to throw away but found tenacious. He had a suspicion that something was bothering him. He had a memory of one evening with one woman, a dark room, a big room, too many pillows, laughter, too, though after that she had hardened to him and the laughs, while the continued, were brittle. He had a hope that time would soften her to him. He had a fork poised above a bowl of beans. He had a pain in his side that he did not yet know was cancer. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NICE GUYS FINISH LAUGHING

He was always there, the fresh-faced guy, always talking to the barista, and while at first this seemed disreputable because the barista was always one of two attractive young women, over time it became clear that his motives were not quite this, and that he was just as jovial when the counter was manned by one of several bearded young men or Dave, who was approaching sixty and couldn’t stop talking about how the Motown songs people didn’t know were far superior to the ones they did know. The fresh-faced guy didn’t get involved in that debate or any other one. He had an unlimited supply of benign observations and self-deprecating remarks, which is why it was all the more surprising when he was named a person of interest in a string of violent bank robberies, then the prime suspect, after which he fled town in someone else’s Mustang, the original license plates of which were found in a dumpster behind the coffee shop with a note that read “I’ll miss you all.” Seventeen days later he was shot to death while sitting in a bright yellow Alfa Romeo Disco Volante near Venice Beach. He had spent the rest of the money on jewelry, clothing, and a book called Nice Guys Finish Laughing. The woman next to him, the spitting image of one of the baristas, was unharmed. Dave somehow took pity on her coffeehouse twin and brought her a rare 45, LaBrenda Ben & the Beljeans singing “The Chaperone.” She loved it. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

REGISTRY

“I had a dream that kept starting over. A woman I didn’t know was leaving a building—a bank?—and the revolving doors spun her back into the building. She tried again. They spun her back inside again. It was like a comedy at first, a silent comedy, but then, in my dream, I could hear the people in the building worrying about her. One man had alarm in his voice. A woman was crying. It got tragic fast. She couldn’t get out of the door. Then I started to try to wake up, from within my dream, and I couldn’t, and then one of the voices I heard worrying about the woman addressed me. What do I mean by that? I guess I mean that it got clearer, shifted in orientation so that it faced me directly. It was a woman’s voice. ‘You can’t get out either,’ the voice said, in a tone that wasn’t quite a question, wasn’t quite a statement. The voice addressing me was clear, then muffled, clear then muffled, I phase, and I came to understand that it was the voice of the woman trapped in the door. Was she sympathizing with me? Was she fusing with me?” But he wasn’t listening. He was thinking that he liked everything about her except that she was okay with putting a milk carton back in the refrigerator crooked. Their wedding, still set for early August, loomed on the horizon like a ship whose hull had just been pierced and which was about to go down.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HOUSE, CHAIR, ROOM

He sat in his house thinking about her house. He sat in his chair thinking of her chair, and how it was different from the chair he owned. He sat by his window thinking about her window, and how it was near enough to a tree that in a brisk breeze the branches moved into it in Morse code, and in higher winds the noise was like that of a fiend trying to enter the house. He sat under his portrait thinking of her portrait, which captured the wide gray insistence of her eyes, the serious mouth that did not take itself seriously (it looked ready to smile or as if it had just slid out of a smile), the way her hair bounced back light like vinyl did. He had painted it when he was younger. He had given it to her as a gift. She had taken it with hands that were so steady that he knew that she was making an effort to conceal her excitement, and that filled him with terror at what might be next for them. But she was, above all, loyal, and would not change her life for him. She was happy being miserable with her husband, who unironically wore a glasses chain and said “The Cream” instead of just Cream when rhapsodizing about his favorite song ever, “White Room.” 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

STRATEGIES FOR GROWTH

I am buying a majority stake in a cup of coffee. That kid over there is buying a majority stake in a red velvet cupcake. The woman on the street is buying a majority stake in a bottle of pills that she has been promised by her doctor will control the pain from her recent procedure. The doctor is buying a majority stake in a boat that he plans to share with his son-in-law. The son-in-law is buying a majority stake in a week’s worth of services from a contract killer who he is enlisting to prematurely end the life of his father-in-law, largely as a result of monies that will then come to him and his wife but partly, too, because of the boat, and the way that his father-in-law condescendingly calls it a “fifty-fifty partnership,” even though everybody knows it’s more like ninety-ten in his favor, and the son-in-law knows there’s no shame in that, he’s only starting to get his nutriceuticals business underway, it’s going to take a while, everyone knows that, how can he compete with a thoracic surgeon who has had a thriving practice for decades, whose success comes off him like a cologne, who advertises even with the name of the boat, A Cut Above, but the lie of the even split irritates him because it is so transparent that is is always exposed immediately in a way that results in the son-in-law’s diminishment. The son-in-law’s wife, the doctor’s daughter, has no knowledge of the plot at all. She’s buying a majority stake in having no knowledge of the plot at all.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas