Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

You are absolutely the berries!”

(A couple of days later Jasmine phoned to say she was engaged to Reginald. Jonathan was never to see her again.)

5. “You got your pung cows and you got your chow cows.”Ellery Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, the Little Company That Could…and Then Did , 101-03. Edders, the company’s new senior vice president for investor relations, had earned so much money shipping calf shin bones from his Chicago slaughterhouse to China to be made into Mah-Jongg tiles, that he was able to retire at age forty-one in 1928. When Jonathan snatched him up, he was happy to be going back to work again. Having invested heavily in the stock market (including sizeable holdings of Dandy-de-odor-o), Edders was hard hit by the Crash of ’29. He suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the remainder of his life in modest circumstances in a small Forest Hills, Queens, saltbox, picking up the occasional royalty check from verse he wrote for the Holiday Hearts greeting card company. When his mind began to fail, Holiday Hearts began to reject his work out of hand. One really can’t blame them if the following versification, unearthed from the company’s archives, is representative of the obtuseness and offensive nature of his later efforts.

On one’s birthday :

One year closer.

The grave draws nearer.

But that doesn’t make you any the less dearer.

Hugs and kisses and voices a’ trill.

But if you don’t mind my asking:

Where is the will?

On one’s anniversary (husband to wife) :

Many years ago

In days of yore,

I gave my troth to an erstwhile whore.

I cleansed your womb of its former employ,

And gave you some measure of marital joy.

I forgot and forgave

And all was near bliss

Notwithstanding the blindness (from the syphilis).

On graduation from high school (from parents) :

Graduation day.

Hip hip hooray!

Now go away.

And stay.

6. “I’m Famine. This here’s Pestilence.”Jonathan would have liked to have met all four of Notre Dame’s famed “horsemen,” immortalized by sportswriter Grantland Rice, but only Stuhldreher and Miller were dining at the hotel that night. Describing the chance encounter in a letter to his friend Toby (the Monkey Boy) Brancato (family papers), Jonathan noted that he might have lingered at the table all night, but, true to his name, Stuhldreyer really was “quite famished” and couldn’t digest with someone hovering about.

7. There followed a long series of mismatches and romantic misfires.Furman, The Story of Jonathan Blash — [ette].

8. “ I have a prolapsed womb. Would you still like to date me?”Author’s interview with Charmian Campbell, granddaughter of Lavinia Hudd.

9. “ Can we postpone our first date until I get out of traction?”Author’s interview with Bridey Burmeister, granddaughter of Astrid Csizmadia. Incidentally, Astrid broke her hip when the leather belt of her Vibro-Slim snapped and she fell backwards onto the living room floor.

10. “ Please don’t touch me there. It’s only our first date.”Author’s interview with Eustacia Hodgdon, granddaughter of Ona Hodgdon. The body part in question was Ona’s arm.

11. “First name’s Delicia; last name’s Everest. Would you like to mount me?”JBP, “Hooker Encounters” Notebook.

12. She never emerged from her coma.Author’s interview with Lotta Patois, great niece of Marie Ward. This fact was disputed by one of the attending nurses who entered the room late one night to find Marie sitting straight up in bed and playing solitaire. The nurse was about to go to the phone to share the good news with Marie’s family (one evening with Marie at the newly opened Stork Club didn’t qualify Jonathan to be contacted) when she noticed a move that Marie had missed. The nurse quickly became engrossed in the game, and Marie, happy to be conscious and to have liberated all of her aces, invited the nurse to sit next to her in quiet, nocturnal communion. Only once did either speak to the other. Marie allegedly turned to her companion and remarked, “It’s so nice to have conscious brain function, isn’t it?” After a few more minutes of thoughtful card play, Marie’s eyes suddenly rolled back in her head and she returned to her previous comatose state. The nurse plumped her pillow a bit, wiped a tiny thread of saliva from her chin, and then finished the card game for her. Many years passed before she mentioned the incident to anyone. She finally decided to share the story with her pastor, the Reverend Boxer Seale, who, not being Catholic, was under no ecclesiastical directive to keep it to himself, and so included it in his When We From Sleep Awake (Henderson, Kentucky: Joey Gee Books, 1975), a collection of anecdotes about resurrection, coma emergence, and rudely broken reveries.

13. Jonathan resigned himself to lifelong bachelorhood.Jonathan’s Diary, JBP, 9 August 1927.

14. These were dark months for Jonathan and Dandy-de-odor-o.The slump in sales may have also been attributed to a statement made by actor Wallace Beery in Behind the Screen , a popular Hollywood fan magazine. Tough guy Beery bragged, “I don’t need no sissy perfume-counter dabby-doo under my arms. A man’s supposed to smell like a man, not like some guzzied dame in a flower shop.” At the same time Jonathan and the Dandy-D board of directors were hearing the first of a string of charges leveled by the investigative press that the company’s assembly line equipment was unsafe. Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o , 156-57.

15. The company was in the red due, in part, to blackened business practicesPerry Jennings’s exposé on defective assembly-line equipment at Dandy-de-odor-o’s Queens, New York factory represents only a small fraction of this investigative journalist’s prodigious reportorial and literary output. Never achieving the stature of such muckrakers as Tarbell, Stannard Baker and Sinclair, Jennings in his hard-hitting pieces did reach a wide readership, most notably through his monthly contributions to Jest Kids , a periodical for boys and girls (although his wrenching accounts of child labor practices in the textile industry resulted in a severe drop in subscriptions to the magazine). A monthly cartoon to which he several years earlier contributed text and ongoing story lines, “The Continuing Adventures of Li’l Lame Nell, Six-year-old Loom Operator,” was a catalyst for the passage of legislation by the Georgia General Assembly…to ban sales of the periodical within the state.

Late in his career, Jennings’ credibility was undermined by a series of articles for Guv’ner’s Magazine in which he fabricated the existence of feline sweatshops in Lynn, Massachusetts, wherein sweaters and other knit garments were manufactured through energy generated by cat treadmills — the heavily catnip-drugged grimalkins trotting until collapse toward tantalizing mechanical mice-on-sticks.

In his lifetime Jennings also wrote fourteen novels, thirteen continuing the saga of the toothless Gum family which settled in central Nebraska and sold consommé. His fourteenth novel Things My Wife Did to Me was a very loosely veiled account of Jennings’s rocky marriage to silent screen actress Velma DeGraaf, apologist for and possible paramour of doomed comedic actor Fatty Arbuckle and coiner of the tag line “Take your grimy eyes off my sheen.”

Jennings’ last two books, both memoirs published posthumously and heavily revised by widow DeGraaf, sold fewer than two hundred copies in their only printings. In fact, existing copies of Things I Did to Myself and My Life as a Wife-slugging Bastard, with Afterword by Roscoe “Fatty”Arbuckle each now commands a high price in the rare book market. A copy of Things I Did to Myself was exhibit “A” in a lawsuit filed in 2001 by Mauvourneen Heyer, who, when told of the value of her mint condition copy by a book dealer on the television program Video Flea Market , lost consciousness and cracked her skull on a rare Queen Anne highboy being caressed at the time by both of the Keno twins.