Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

JENKINS : Have a seat. Fritter biscuit?

JONATHAN : No thank you.

JENKINS : Crunkle cake, fresh from the vat?

JONATHAN : Thanks, but I’m not all that hungry.

JENKINS : Deep fried crackle crisp?

JONATHAN : I’m not sure I know what that is.

JENKINS : Shall we get down to business?

JONATHAN : Yes.

JENKINS : I don’t beat around the proverbial bush. When I want to know something, I simply ask it.

JONATHAN : Go right ahead.

JENKINS : Are you a hairy man?

JONATHAN : Am I what?

JENKINS : A hairy man.

JONATHAN : Well, I—

JENKINS : I note a minimum of carpeting on your forearms. Does this indicate a lack of same upon other regions of your epidermis?

JONATHAN : I would suppose so.

JENKINS : That is unfortunate.

JONATHAN : I beg your pardon?

JENKINS : The fact that you are effeminately hairless.

JONATHAN : Perhaps I will grow more hair as I age. I am, after all, only twenty-one.

JENKINS : Yes. Hmm. There is that possibility. Though I must tell you, Mr. Blashette, that my preference is for the men who join this operation to have sufficient, well-established body hair.

JONATHAN : My father is somewhat hairy. Perhaps in time—

JENKINS : I’m afraid I need this position filled next week. ( A pause .) There are, of course, ways for one to stimulate the growth of hair.

JONATHAN : Yes?

JENKINS : One proven method comes to mind. But there is a downside. On occasion, the hair growth is limited to the palms of the hands. And in some exceptional cases, one goes blind.

JONATHAN : I wouldn’t want that, no.

JENKINS : Tripping and bumping into things. I’d have to keep you far away from the rendering room.

JONATHAN : I do think I would make a good employee, Mr. Jenkins, if only you could see your way to dismissing the fact that I am not an overly hairy man.

JENKINS : I’m sorry, Mr. Blashette, but that would be difficult. This is a factory of hirsute men and one Mrs. Beebe who joined us following a failed Rutgers pituitary experiment. You would not be happy among these people. You would inevitably be teased, taunted, perhaps even roughed up. And here I’m speaking only of Mrs. Beebe. It simply wouldn’t be safe for you here.

JONATHAN : Could you not simply forbid your employees to go after me?

JENKINS : Lard men, Mr. Blashette, are hard men.

JONATHAN : Then, I assume this interview is over.

JENKINS : You assume correctly. By the way, would you know of someone with the requisite qualifications who might wish to apply for the position?

Jonathan’s friend Toby “the Monkey Boy” Brancato was hired the very next day.

6. Halley’s hysteria was widespread.Jonathan’s exasperation over the paranoia that gripped Wilkinson County residents in the weeks leading up to the May, 1910, fly-over by Halley’s Comet is evident in this letter which Jonathan wrote to Great Jane on “the eve of the Great Apocalypse, May 17.” (JBP.) I include it here in its entirety. It reflects Jonathan’s growing impatience with “those trammeled by their own timidity” but also indicates Jonathan’s growing bitterness and dissatisfaction with his own life.

May 17, 1910

Hawthorne Way

Pettiville

Dear Great Jane,

The citizens of this jerkwater Mongolian hamlet have decided that the world is about to end. It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. In the face of all reason, they gather to make all right with God, to tearfully kiss their babies and hug their grannies good-bye, to sing their favorite hymns and eat up the best preserves from the fruit cellar, and I can’t get anyone to wait on me at the five and dime because selling a tin of shoe polish means nothing compared to the destruction of this planet by poisonous cometic gases — sufficient reason, it would seem, to try to drink as many ice cream sodas as the human digestive tract can hold while customers in need of shoe polish who don’t happen to believe that God is arriving tomorrow morning on the 6:07 must fend totally for themselves like I don’t have better things to do with my time than walk through a store and claim items for myself without clerical assistance! I would be fired for treating my customers at Izzie and Moe’s the way these apocalypse-obsessed imbecilic sales clerks treated me.

My parents are, thankfully, keeping their wits, although I can detect the occasional anxious thought percolating now and then, understandable when you consider that they are surrounded by men and women totally deficient in intelligence and possessed of not even the notochord of an embryonic mouse.

Yesterday I had the displeasure of talking seven men and women out of nailing themselves to crosses in a cotton field just north of town to wait Christ-like for what they believed would be the Second Coming, due to arrive in a cloud of comet dust. My exchange with these people went something like this:

ME : Hello there! What’s with the crosses?

A LARGE, FURRY AGRICULTURAL SORT WHOM THEY CALL TUB : Where you been, son? The end is near!

ME : Right. But what’s the reason for the crosses?

A TOOTHLESS AGRICULTURAL SORT WHOM THEY CALL LESTER : We will await our Lord and Savior in the manner in which He Himself was spirited to the arms of His Father.

ME : You’re going to nail yourselves to these things?

AN EARNEST APRON-BEDECKED WOMAN WHOM THEY CALL EITHER BESS OR BETH (SEVERAL HAD CONFUSING LISPS) : Yes. That is the plan.

ME : What about these little crosses?

TUB : They are for the children.

ME : Where are the children?

TUB : They require a bit more coaxing.

ME : And the tiny cross there?

BESS : I have a cat named Mr. Pink.

ME : So who goes first?

A GRIZZLED OLD MAN WITH A HUMP WHO I LATER LEARN IS NAMED PAPPY : We’ve drawn straws to decide.

TUB : Unfortunately, we can’t tell which is the shortest of these two.

ME : Let me see. That was easy. Here’s your winner.

TUB : Lester, this three-legged gentleman says you got the shortest straw. Pappy, we best get the hammer and commence to crucifyin’.

ME : What happens if the comet comes and goes and Jesus doesn’t show up?

LESTER : If we’re still alive and kickin’, then I reckon we’d need someone to come get us all down. I also reckon the doctor would have to do himself some patchin’ about our hands and feet.

DOC : Yup, I reckon I would.

ME : Here’s a thought: maybe Jesus would prefer to find you all sitting quietly and without physical anguish in your parlors when He arrives.

BESS (nodding her head eagerly): That is a thought. Why, you know what? I could make Him lemonade. I couldn’t make Jesus lemonade if I’m hangin’ on that there cross, Lester.

LESTER : That’s a right good point. Maybe we could study on it a spell.

In the end, even the cat was spared.

Your friend,

Jonathan

7. Lucile Moritz entered Jonathan’s life through the peeled-back tarpaulin flap of a Chautauqua lecture tent.The lecture which brought Jonathan and Lucile together was delivered by a Professor Wilbert Wollensagen on the topic “Agronomy and Animal Husbandry in the Age of Industrial Encroachment” and included “a magic lantern slide show for illustration, and musical interludes provided by Judith Crevecoeur and her dwarf-harp.” So instantly enamored of each other were Lucile and Jonathan that neither recalled much of the event beyond projected images of fruit flies and botflies and a gagging farm child who had apparently put one of the insects into his mouth. Jonathan’s Diary, 4 June 1914.