Obviously, none of us endorses the placement of that burning cross in your front yard last weekend. But perhaps we can understand the anger that motivated it.
What is wrong with grass, Miss Klempt? And what is wrong with trying for once in your long rebellious life to fit in?
3. “I want you to meet a young friend of mine: Jasmine.” Much too young, it turned out. Jonathan came to realize that Davison’s first inning “Winny” home run had been a total fluke. A long series of matchmaking strike-outs followed. Eventually Jonathan had to ask his friend to stop fixing him up. Lanham, “Harlan Davison,” Entrepreneurial History, 13 (1990), 25–42.
4. Jonathan dated Jasmine for five weeks. The relationship was doomed from the start, and not only because Jonathan was rebounding badly from the death of Winny. Jasmine, a dead ringer for Clara Bow, was a typical young, indefatigable, devil-may-care flapper. She exhausted thirty-eight-year-old Jonathan, even as she divided her attention among all the other men whose names crowded her dance card. Here is an excerpt from the only existing letter from Jasmine to her soon-to-be-ex-beau (written on a sorority-sponsored road trip). Jasmine had only a few days earlier met one Reginald Grayson III, a Varsity-dragging John Held caricature, even down to the raccoon coat and Stutz Bearcat roadster. JBP, 2 May 1926.
“He’s a cakeater, Jonny, a real jazzbo but I’m no dumb Dora. I say,’You might be the big cheese in these parts but I’m stuck on my Jonny, see? My Jonny, he’s the bee’s knees, the real McCoy.’ That’s what I tell him. I make nice with Reggie, you understand, but if he gets the least bit fresh, I go all hardboiled, I’m not bunking you. I can hold my own with jellybeans like him, you better believe it.
He does have IT, though. Positively, gotta admit it. But so do you, my little snugglepup. Just a little more crags ‘round the edges, dat’s all. And I’d have it no other way. You are my sheik of Araby, and don’t you worry your turbaned head, my dear. Tres copacetic, things is. Sheba — yours for 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.