Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

I thank you for your letter. I am happy to report that things are going well. Things, in fact, are going exceedingly well. Dandy-de-odor-o, Inc. has become more successful than I ever imagined. We cannot keep up with the orders that are flooding in; we are already making plans for expanding our plant and are taking on new employees on almost a weekly basis.

It has not been a difficult task. There, apparently, has always been a need for deodorizers for the male underarm. I suppose it was simply a matter of time before someone like me came along to find a way to fill that need. But is it, simultaneously, filling the need within me to make something of my life — something lasting? Something with which I can make a difference in this world? Perhaps not. Yet, I know that the money I make from this business can be put to good use in myriad ways. I would like to found an organization with some humanitarian aspect. I haven’t yet decided what that will be. I am still trying to figure out why I am here. You have told me that I have a life mission. I know that selling deodorants is not it. Dandy-de-odor-o, Inc. constitutes merely a rest stop along the highway of my life. To freshen up. To help others freshen up. I will be back on that highway soon — speeding toward my destiny, to be sure.

I have rented a very comfortable little apartment for my father on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When I first moved him here he had a terrible aversion to the city. Almost daily he would remind me how much he wanted to get back to Arkansas. But now he seems to have settled in nicely. He has made several friends — older men like himself, living alone — with whom he sits in Riverside Park and discusses current events. They debate the merits of various local delicatessens. Last night he told me that he is considering becoming a Jew. He doesn’t wear his overalls any more. He is evolving into a true New Yorker.

Doctor Bloor, I am in love. I will speak frankly. Her name is Winny Wieseler and she is smart and funny and beautiful. I cannot wait to see her each day. And when I am not with her, I am thinking about her — constantly. I do not think I dishonor the memory of Lucile by having such strong feelings for Winny. I have simply been blessed by God with the chance to meet and cultivate affection for two most extraordinary women. I cannot wait for you to meet my Winny. Will you be in New York some time soon?

Sincerely,

Jonathan Blashette

19. She was dedicated to public service.Among the other causes to which Winny devoted herself was working to replace the name of the Dakota School for Crippled and Stumbling Children. Leggio, Winsome Winny , 123.

20. It was no Algonquin.Of decidedly less collective magnitude than the luminaries who congregated uptown at the Algonquin Hotel, was the literary demimonde that gathered twice each week at the Bowery Hotel “Round Table.” (Robert Benchley did wander in on one occasion to use the telephone and was corralled into sharing a drink with the group for a quarter of an hour. The experience included little conversation and much gawking.) And yet the conclave’s existence through the twenties and into the early thirties made enough of a ripple in the New York literary and theatrical pond to merit a book by Justin Dunigan, grandson of charter member New York Clarion columnist A. Deveer Dunigan. In his book, Justin assembles a number of the quasi-witticisms delivered by participants of the Bowery klatch, among them the effervescent and slightly cheeky Winny Wieseler. A sampling follows. Justin Dunigan, Wednesdays at Noon, Fridays at One: An Anecdotal History of the “Other” Round Table (New York: Tabitha Press, 1983).

A. Deveer Dunigan : My paper reports that Nellie Bly has just died. I am more inclined to believe that the woman is feigning death as a means to investigating the undertaking profession.

Thomas Marchese (columnist for the New York Shoppers Weekly ) She certainly has the coloration down.

Cordelia Klempt (columnist for the Ladies’ Reader ): Nellie Bly — Nellie Blech! Gentlemen, may we please suspend such morbid talk until after the à la mode?

Arden Philpot (drama critic with the Yonkers Crier, regarding an actress whose name is now lost to us): Watching her perform is like observing the purchase of stamps.

Winny Wieseler (on the former President): You can lead a horse to Warren Harding, but you can’t castrate the two of them simultaneously.

Enos D. Ryerbach (bon vivant): The biggest difference between men and women lies in the tits, unless, of course, you’re speaking of Mr. Philpot here, when one is advised to travel farther south to draw a conclusion!

Arden Philpot (his retort): Enos, you are bile in human form!

Cordelia Klempt : Shut up, the both of you! You’re wilting my surprise salad.

Victor Sonderskov (freelance poet, on the recently opened tomb of King Tutankhamen): Tut, tut, tut. I am not moved.

Winny Wieseler (on the launch of Chanel Number Five): I haven’t tried the new fragrance. I have, however, worn Chanel Number One and Chanel Number Four simultaneously and would imagine the end result to be the same.

Enos D. Ryerbach (On Coco Chanel): I do not generally endorse women whose names are eponymous with beverages.

Arden Philpot (reviewing Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author ): I would have preferred to see perhaps two more characters.

Thomas Marchese : What an age in which to live — Fascists to the right, Communists to the left! And Mr. Kahlil Gibran telling us to love them all! Give me Texas Guinan and a night of liquor-facilitated self-absorption. Give me a plush seat in the Epicurean, hedonistic middle! Give me the bottle of ketchup, Arden, before the grease on my meatloaf sandwich congeals!

21. “Tomorrow I will ask Winny if she will consent to be my wife.”Jonathan’s Diary.

22. Then, suddenly, Winny was gone.Lana Leggio, Winsome Winny .

23. Jonathan received the tragic news late that night.Patrick Oldeman, Tears for the Shawmut , 256-66. Fate had indeed played another cruel trick on Jonathan. Once again the setting for tragedy was (amazingly) Boston. Whereas six years earlier Lucile Moritz’s young life had been snuffed out by a tsunami of molasses, Winny was now meeting her end in a different, yet equally freakish Beantown accident. Like Lucile, Winny was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jonathan knew that she liked to dance, but was unaware that the Charleston had become such an obsession with her that her frequent travels would inevitably draw her inexorably and often foolhardily to the hottest night spots in town. 1925 was the peak year for the popular dance, and Winny (as Leggio notes in her biography) made a special effort to get to the Pickwick Dance Club— the hot spot in Boston for “doin’ it, doin’ it.”

The official post mortem was unequivocal: the roof collapse was attributed to “unnatural stresses” placed upon the building’s structural members by the feverish, swiveling, swaying, flailing and knee-knocking of hundreds of monkey-limbed dancers, among them one Winny Wieseler from New York City by way of Heppleville, Illinois. Poor Winny — artist, writer, progressive activist, lover and friend to Jonathan Blashette — had literally danced herself into an early grave.

A postscript: Jonathan vowed never to return to the city that had claimed his two fiancées. He refused even to sell his deodorants there, in retribution. “I hate this town more than any man on this planet, save probably Babe Ruth,” he told a reporter 1927. “It killed two women who meant the world to me, and murdered my hope for any future happiness. The men of Boston can stink with b.o. till the cows come home!”