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

TO THE POINT WHERE

Before he died Maxwell had completed translations of two works: Tobias Durchdenwald’s furiously political Where Has It Gone? (1978), a “rot in high places” novel, and  Berm (1982) by Roy X. Scheider (not to be confused with the American actor), a largely factual history of a land dispute between two families in Emsland. Both books offer, in their own ways, vivid portraits of contemporary German society, and we have only Maxwell to thank for their existence, as he was not paid a penny (or, as he liked to joke, “a pfennig”) for his labor, and in fact was consistently mocked by his American editor, Anne T. Harris, to the point where he sought counseling that failed to console him and led him to plan the desert sojourn that resulted in his untimely demise. Harris, also his ex-wife, did not cry at his funeral.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ENTERTAINING

The dinner table was set with expectations and disappointments. Elodie ladled from the tureen into each bowl, careful to divide equally among her guests. Service was not a time to show favoritism. It was a time to show competence, precision even. Ronald, her sister's boyfriend, began to eat without waiting for the others. He was aggressive with his spoon. He took too much too fast and began to choke on a provocation. Small-Time James, her other sister's boyfriend, started to chant something about brickbats and how they should call him Big-Time James if they called him anything at all. Elodie took the tureen back into the kitchen and began to weep. It was so hard to be a hostess, she thought. It was so hard to be anything at all.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

YOUNG CHILDREN RAN RECKLESS

She had been working since morning, and the night before that, if working was what it could be fairly called, sitting in the chair that had been her husband’s while he was alive, pulling up the top shell of the clam of the computer, and typing sentences, one first, then another one, counting them at first because it calmed her and then letting the counting fall away until they became numberless. That was when she forgot about the pains in her hips and back, forgot about the cracked back tooth that needed fixing, and when she remembered afternoons of sitting on a lounge chair while her young children ran reckless in the back yard, chattering happily, throwing balls and water balloons, screaming when a wasp’s nest was discovered, thinking about the night before or the night to come, when she would make dinner, serve said dinner, sit up late with her husband watching TV, wait until he dozed off, and then sneak across the street to find and be found by the neighbor, an older man with a mean aspect who the kids reacted to much the way they reacted to wasps. That man had died roughly a decade ago, and that was the death she truly mourned. Her husband, eh. He had been a good man, kind where it counted, and she had buried him with a curious lightness in her heart, a sense of a job well done.

@2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas