Mark Dunn - American Decameron

His remaining years clouded by depression, “Silent Cal” Coolidge suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of sixty on January 5, 1933, in his Northampton, Massachusetts, home. His surviving son, John, died on May 31, 2000, at the age of ninety-three, having outlived his younger brother by almost seventy-six years .

It is not known if John ever picked up another racket .

Tillman Hopper, the oldest of the three, was regarded as the “almost normal brother.” He left home at eighteen, lying about his age to get into the Great War, and enlisting, as luck would have it, literally one month before the signing of the Armistice. Mustered out with swift military expedience, he moved to Scranton and took a job with the Scranton Button Company, first stamping out shellac buttons, and then coating Braille sheets with shellac to protect the pips from recklessly indifferent speed-readers. During this period, Tillman taught himself to read Braille and sat up late at night in the darkness of his boardinghouse lodgings laughing at jokes from a Braille humor magazine similar to Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang . It was called, with journalistic brilliance, Captain Billy’s Biz Whang .

In late July of this year, with the sudden emergence of the latest craze of this half-cocked decade, flagpole sitting, Tillman spent a delightful Sunday afternoon in neighboring Wilkes-Barre standing next to its downtown flagpole and conversing with “Shipwreck” Gail Hoyt, a young woman of about Tillman’s age from Galveston, Texas, who was perched upon the top of the pole. The two had a long and lively conversation that ended with a jesting proposal of marriage by Tillman and an equally fatuous riposte of feigned interest on the part of the impetuous daredevil flapper, Miss Hoyt.

When ordered to come down from the flagpole later that evening by the city fathers due to the fact that William Jennings Bryan had just passed away and an American flag would have to be flown at half-mast upon it to respect his passing — this coupled with the fact that Shipwreck Gail was wearing an ape suit to commemorate with devil-may-care frivolity the recent verdict rendered in the Scopes “Monkey” trial (which had been Bryan’s unintentionally harlequin courtroom valediction) — Gail shimmied monkey-style down the pole and joined Tillman for a late dinner in Scranton.

Gail was famished; there hadn’t been any food up on that flagpole.

Over hamburgers and Coca-Colas, the two discussed other stunts for which Gail had become semi-famous, including dancing the Charleston on the wing of an airborne Curtiss Jenny biplane and playing tennis with famed wing walker Lillian Boyer, also while buzzing the clouds.

“Are you a barnstormer, as well?” asked Tillman.

“No, but someday I’d very much like to learn to fly. But that’s enough about me, Tillman. Tell me something about yourself. What is it in a man that makes him want to stand for three hours in the hot summer sun just to gaze up at a crazy woman in a gorilla costume?”

“It’s not such a strange occupation, I should think. I was almost certain that there was a pretty girl under all that pithecoid pilosity and I’m happy to see, now, that my assumption was correct. What brings you to central Pennsylvania all the way from Texas, Miss Hoyt?”

“I can never quite say just how it is that I wind up in the places I do. My life, you see, has no purpose other than shrugging off these earthbound traces whenever possible, and taking wing.”

Tillman smiled. “I like a girl who soars — one who plays by her own rules. You must know, though, how hard it is to set yourself apart from the crowd these days. Everybody’s trying to gain attention for themselves. Ten years ago there was no such thing as an exhibitionist and now the country’s teeming with them.”

“Is that what I am? An exhibitionist? Is that a bad thing to be, Tillman?”

“Not when you do what you do with such skill and panache. Now what is it that I can say about myself ? I’m in shellac. I hail from Williamsport, where I grew up with two slightly younger brothers, both very odd. Even though they don’t play tennis on the fly or hang from the wings of inverted Jennys, I’m sure you’d find them strange beyond facile description.”

“Intriguing. And your parents?”

“Our father died of influenza and our mother presently resides in a sanitarium in Arizona.”

“Tubercular?”

“ And insane.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m an orphan.”

“For how long?”

“Since the Galveston hurricane swept my parents out to sea. I’d like to meet your brothers. I never had siblings.”

“I must warn you, Gail, they’re a panic. And not necessarily in a fun way.”

“I’ll gird myself for the occasion.”

A moment of silence passed. Gail savored her last bite of hamburger. Tillman watched with affectionate eyes as she licked the residual mustard from her fingers. “Are we falling hopelessly in love, Tillman Hopper?” she asked simply.

“What do you think, my dear cloud-ape?”

Gail tossed her napkin at Tillman teasingly, and then asked if the two of them might leave. The still-intact trousers portion of her ape suit was really starting to itch.

Tillman’s youngest brother Palmer was tenting.

The other brother, Hezzie (short for Hezekiah), noticed upon entering his brother’s bedroom that Palmer had gotten himself into a state that, given the size of his member, could not be so easily ignored. “You’re flagpoling, brother,” said Hezzie. He was wearing the prototype of his latest invention: a life preserver with attached propellers (“When simply floating and waiting for rescue isn’t a viable option”).

“Of course I know this. You don’t think I know this?”

“The question then becomes why ? Or perhaps, what ? What has happened to put you in such a state of arousal, dear brother?”

“ That !” said Palmer, pointing to the film projector set upon a nearby table. “Here I am, brother — the diligent, innocent correspondence-course student — a fully committed matriculant of the National School of Visual Education. Here I am studiously — and did I happen to say, quite innocently — viewing one of the instructional films being projected by my leased De Vry motion picture machine, learning everything I need to know about how to run a radio switchboard and/or electrical substation and/or fully operational, maximum-output power plant, when suddenly without warning, the quite engaging animated step-by-step process for repairing a cracked Alexanderson 200 kilowatt motor alternator is suddenly replaced by the image of a French woman taking off the top of her Chinese pajamas and rubbing lotion on her bare breasts.”

“How do you know she’s French?”

“I just assumed she was French. Do American women embrocate their bare supple breasts with skittering, lambent fingertips?”

“Our mother rubbed motor oil all over herself and then admitted that trying to join that minstrel show was only a convenient afterthought.”

Palmer released a wistful sigh. He missed his mother.

“What caused it, brother? The tenting, I mean. Was it the application of the lotion? Was that what did it?”

Palmer groaned. “It was everything , brother. It was the lotion. It was the glistening nipples. It was the naughty come-hither look on her ooh-la-la face. The way her bee-stung lips contracted themselves into that little dime-sized ‘O’ that you know always seems to get my gonads dancing. And now I’m flagpoling and nothing I can think of is furling me back to flaccidity. What time did you say Tillman was coming by with that new girl of his?”