DREAMING IN 1979

Gary Numan did “Are ‘Friends' Electric?” and then went to sleep, confident that he had done his best communicating the chilly but arousing notion of robotic intimacy via a chilly but arousing pop soundscape, synthesizers standing where guitars once stood. He knew that Tubeway Army was going down the tubes, pun intended. The name had outlasted its usefulness. He would shutter it and reemerge into his solo career as a new man, pun intended. He needed sleep, but he was too wired. He could still feel the Minimoog glowing in the center of his mind. He attempted to dispatch the song by declaring its title repeatedly in a quick murmur. “Are ‘Friends” Electric?…Are ‘Friends” Electric?…Are ‘Friends” Electric?” But from the moment he drifted off he was thronged by the syntagm, set upon by questions structured similarly. Are “Songs” Noetic? Are “Thoughts” Monastic? Are “Faces” Emetic? Are “Eyes” Idyllic? Are “Brains” Erotic? Are “Inches” Metric? Are “Limes” Acidic? Are “Feet” Podiatric? Are “Dreams” Bathetic? The questions bounced like sounds off the tile of the room where he suddenly found himself standing, a massive gleaming white bathroom with an ornate full-length mirror, and blinking away the white he effortfully reached his dream arm up and pinched his dream neck, hard, intending to wake himself up, doing so. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

TWO SISTERS

When she died, Betsy was surprised. She was only sixty-three and as far as she knew healthy, still a practical nurse, still a decent squash player. She had been on a mile-long jog the day before though toward the end it had been more of a rueful walk. Her phone had whistled and she had answered it: an excuse. “Hi, Jan,” she said. Jan was her sister, four years older, immodestly proud when people said they looked like twins. Jan was a poet or had become one after she had stopped being a tech executive. “It’s one of the things I like most about poetry,” Jan said. “All the money in the world can’t make me better at it.” No: but it could make people say you were. Betsy kept that to herself for a while but when she finally told Jan she was rewarded with a gale of laughter. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?” Jan said. “It’s truer than true. An editor took a poem of mine recently and then hinted un-hintingly that maybe the journal could use a sizable donation to continue discovering new talents such as myself.” “What did you do?” said Betsy. “I paid,” Jan said. “It was only a hundred thousand dollars.” She laughed again. But when Betsy answered the phone call that downshifted her jog, Jan was crying. Martin had left her. “Again?” Betsy said. Martin had been a loyal husband for thirty years, to the point where even his storm-outs were predictable. They happened every two years or so, always with aggrieved hand-wringing about how they were not complete without children. “I think this time it’s for real,” Jan said. “And I thought you were smart,” Betsy said. Now Jan laughed, a little. “I just need to do something to take my mind off of him,” Jan said, and Betsy agreed. “You should write a poem or sleep with a shopkeeper or something. What you shouldn’t do is feel bad on the phone with me.” “Talk to you tomorrow,” Jan said. Hanging up, Betsy had felt a twinge in her chest that she assumed was a mix of pity and fury toward her sister. She had gone home to take a nap but felt agitated and instead had a glass of wine and went to bed. Now her side ached a bit. If she had still been married she would have complained more but solitude suited her. “I’ll just nod off now and wake up in the morning feeling fine,” she said. She was wrong. Dead wrong, she thought, laughing at the joke because no one else was around to do so. Her body was not gone but attached to her consciousness more in the manner of a suggestion. She felt light in the limbs, with an almost erotic charge that ran up the center of her like a thin hot cylinder. She was in a white expanse, dotted with yellow, which was her favorite color. She wondered if other people saw other colors. Was death a state of mind that fed back to the subject a personalized and thus comprehensible version of an ineffable experience? She heard a voice singing, and made out that it was singing “Waters of March,” and that clinched it. It wasn’t possible that everyone got her favorite song. This was not the Jobim version or Susannah McCorkle’s, her favorite. It was even better, which was impossible. So was her environment an articulation of her inner state, her preferences, her comforts? Is that what death was, for everyone? Was she being rewarded for a life well-lived by being given more of herself? Frankly, it seemed like a punishment. She became aware that she was in not in a boundless expanse but rather in a room decorated, if that’s what you could call it, in pure flat white. She was sitting in a chair. A dresser was off to the right, maybe against a wall, but she couldn’t fully sense a wall. On top of the dresser there was a mirror, reflecting back only flat white. She knew she had to go look in the mirror. Her legs were starting to extend. She tried to stop herself. What would she see in the reflection? It was times like this when she wished that she was the poet and the billionaire.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SUGGESTIBLE

Returning home from the bar, she noticed that the man who had been behind her in line that morning at the convenience store (she had paid special notice to his haircut, buzzed short and blonde but with a conspicuous forelock, as if he was a soldier from a futuristic army) and who she had noticed again in the parking lot of the day-care center (he was sitting in his car, talking on his telephone, and she had wondered if he was a single dad to one of  the other kids, speculation that quickly led to the fantasy that they would meet, feel an instant attraction, and fall in love), was now driving behind her, and that’s when it came to her that the man was neither a futuristic soldier nor a single dad but rather a detective, and that he had been hired by her estranged husband to track her movements and build a case against her, and she tried to track her own movements, but for the moment could only go back as far as the bar, and she didn’t recall seeing the detective there but there had been another man, an older man, who she had flirted with, let him buy her drinks, done a line with him in the bathroom, made out with him a bit in the dark seam neglected by the streetlights in the parking lot, so if the detective had been there, he could have seen some or all of it, and if he had seen some or all of it, Brian would get the photos, the audio, the video, and she would get a call from her lawyer, Ken, that she had messed up again, and Ken's voice would be rising with anger not only because he wanted her to win custody but because the two of them had slid from a purely professional relationship into “something more hybrid,” as he liked to say, and he had been spending Wednesday and Fridays over at her place, an arrangement that she knew made him happy, she could hear him singing in the shower, she could see the way he had suddenly started to share his most closely held ideas (he believed that dreams were a portal to either heaven or hell, that the spirit was briefly taken one way or the other during sleep), but what would he make of the bar, or the coke, or the older guy in the parking lot, and what could she do to make sure he never made anything of it, and that was when she remembered a scene from a movie where a car had managed to speed up and slow down in such a way that it ran the car behind it right off the road, after which there was an explosion down in the canyon and a fireball that spun in the air, and she feathered the gas pedal, trying to remember exactly what had happened in the movie. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HOPEFUL FOR SUN

He’s old, this kid. Just ask him. To his right is a chalkboard where someone who works at the hotel has neatly printed the day’s weather. Rain is a possibility but the hotel is “hopeful for sun.” To his right is a man in a suit who is, with extended arm, shaking a can of spray paint at the woman behind the front desk. All morning the kid has been trading glances with this woman. She has smiled at him. She has asked him if he is interviewing for a job. She is small with hair that swirls up from her head like a soft-serve ice cream, and he says so. “It’s a beehive,” she says. “Don’t get stung.” He has entertained impure thoughts more than once—she is older than him, but he’s old, this kid—but now he can only watch as she is berated by the man in the suit. “This is the color he said he wanted,” the man says. “Not green or yellow or orange. This is the color I told you to order.” The woman begins to speak but the man jabs at her with the can. “I’m tired of your mistakes,” he said. “I want you to write me a note explaining why you can’t get anything right.” The man storms off. The kid expects the woman to say something to him, or to say something under her breath, or to burst into tears, or to laugh, but she doesn’t do any of these things. She sits still, like the man’s anger has drained her of any motive will, and then robotically slides a sheet of paper into her line of vision with her left hand while her right hand construction-cranes a pen. She begins to write. He stands and talks to the desk. His first thought is that he’ll stop her from writing. The pen would be better used taking the man’s eye. That’s what he plans to say. But he sees that she has already started. “Dear Mr. Samuels,” she has written. “I am very sorry to have made so may mistakes and also to have slept with you all summer.” The boy stares at the words. The handwriting is the same as on the weather board. He looks back and forth and back and forth. He laughs. He bursts into tears.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AS IF IN A CARTOON

Albert Terrason, known as Albee, released Finishing School in 1980, with a cover photo that confused fans, who had never seen him wearing glasses, who would have been forgiven for wondering if the man pictured, not just bespectacled but older, thinner, and grayer, was even the same man, but the ten songs on the album drove back any doubts, so meticulous were they in their adherence to soul conventions, so magnificent were they in their ability to convey his hopes, fears, and dreams, all of which had poured out of him in a seemingly unending stream and were captured by the reel-to-reel tape recorder in the guest house of the palatial estate of his former bandmate and duet partner, Edward Foreman, known as Eddie. Albee and Eddie had started singing together in Baltimore in 1962. They had been joined then by an ampersand. “Firing Fast” was their first hit, regional, after which they reeled off a half-dozen that climbed higher and higher on the chart: “The Girl For Me,” “Never Without (Your Love)” “Home-Field Advantage.” Eddie had a word for the fame they suddenly felt: “Limousines,” he said, as if that explained it all, and maybe it did. Albee was more expansive in his thoughts but kept them to himself. Eddie jumped ship in 1971, when he discovered that he had a talent for trading stocks. An initial investment of ten thousand dollars doubled and then doubled again, often with him acting against the advice of his business manager. His small house had been traded in for a larger one, and then for his estate. His wife drove one of six cars. He announced the news with a shrug. “This is the direction I think I have to go,” he said. Without Eddie, Albee was not so lucky. Or rather, drugs were luckier: they forged a partnership with him that replaced and surpassed the one that and Eddie had enjoyed. Albee kept releasing records without Eddie, scored one massive hit with “The Love I Need To See (What’s Real),” filled halls on the strength of its success, but then started to falter, usually because his partner waylaid him, fogged his mind, made the case that he didn’t need to show up at the the theater if he wasn’t paid in advance or that the younger singer who was expressing admiration was really a snake who needed to be punched in the mouth. Albee sang sad songs and lived one, too—he lost his girl, his home, slept in a motel and then in his car in the motel’s parking lot. Driven to the edge, exhausted more days than not, incensed by the sight of his own face in the rearview mirror, he called Eddie and was offered use of the guest house, no questions asked. At first, he considered the arrangement a con in progress, or at the very least payback for the way Eddie had left the act, but within a day of moving into the guest house he felt its tonic powers coming through the wood panels, the leatherbound volumes, the oddly understated chandelier. He never opened the liquor cabinet. He wrote a song called “What Can’t Be Filled,” and another called “Burning Up and Burning Down.” He was the subject of both. He wrote other songs about people he had wronged, mostly women: “I Asked Too Much,” “You Gave Me Everything,” “Sitting Next To Me (So Far Away).” He kept a notebook next to the book of lyrics in which he documented his arrival at a kind of calm he had not previously felt. Eddie’s wife, coming out one day to bring him a sandwich, remarked upon it. “You seem different,” she said. “You haven’t hit on me or yelled at me once.” That became a song title, “You Haven’t Called My Name Once.” The album was recorded in a nearby studio on Eddie’s dime and released to wide acclaim. Albee was found dead in the guest house a week later. Eddie’s wife, who made the discovery, let the sandwich slip slowly off the plate as if in a cartoon. A commitment letter for a national tour sat signed on the desk. Next to it were lyrics for an eleventh song left unrecorded, “Limousines,” and atop the lyrics were his glasses. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

OWNER'S MANUAL

 Your camera is an instrument of memory. Perhaps this is why you have purchased this camera rather than opting for a digital or instant model. You are the discerning type of photographer who prefers the traditional instrument, in which light enters through an aperture and creates an inverted image on the back wall of the housing, which is covered by unexposed negative film. That film can be removed and developed. Prints can be created. You will no doubt treasure them over the years. Do you know, though, that the images remain behind within the camera as memories? Every picture makes an indelible impression on the camera, and over time, the character of a camera is formed in response to what is seen: a camera can become ebullient if it sees mostly celebrations, victories, or moments of inspiration. It can become despondent if it seems mostly death and defeat. It can be cynical if it sees only celebrations without a sense of context or context. It can become arrogant or defensive or unwilling to remain within the guardrails of reality. All are personalities, and thus all are possibilities. What is your camera’s disposition? Here we encounter an insurmountable and intractable problem, which is that cameras cannot speak, gesture, or communicate in any other manner. Their recollections are imprisoned within them, and they are prisoners of those recollections. As you do not have the ability to free your device from this state, you need not to worry about it. Pity is not welcome and even concern will be wasted. Enjoy your new film camera. Happy snapping! 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

SITCOM THEME

She grabs her violin, plays E major, kicks the wooden floor blocks with her feet, one, two, three, four, moves quickly to the keyboard, plays a layered E major 9, now the feet are working the sub-bass panels she has mounted on the wall, hangs on a suspended 9th note, pauses to call her mother, to make breakfast, to jog a mile and wlk the mile back, to write a hit piece about her ex, to take a nap, to wake, to make a snack, to take a shower, to soften the hit piece before publishing it (he was terrible, but he was trying his best, and she wants the piece to reflect that), reads a book, watches a movie, takes a trip to Isle of Palms, is enjoying a margarita when suddenly it hits her, the music!, and so she returns to the microphone, sings a first inversion of E while using both her hands to shake cabasas. Her feet, finally, are still. The show begins with a brightly lit shot of the living room. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas