On the Wing (8 page)

“I've been checking you people in all day, and I've had all the gags I can take.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“I've heard that one, too.”

“I'm mystified,” I said. “Is this the standard greeting across the entire It'll Do chain? If I walk into an It'll Do in Sheboygan—”

“You know,” he said, holding up a hand, “just stop right there and let me ask you something—why is it always Sheboygan? What is it with you people that makes you choose Sheboygan when you're going to try to be funny?”

“I—”

“Is it supposed to be an announcement? ‘Attention! Attention! A joke is coming!'”

“I—”

“Or is Sheboygan just supposed to be innately funny?”

“I—”

“Or is it the entire state of Wisconsin?”

“Please,” I said, “stop. I don't know why you're asking me these questions, or what you mean about being funny—”

“You're here for the annual Humorists' Hoop-de-Doo, right?”

“No,” I said. “Certainly not.”

“Yes,” said Albertine. “We are.”

“We are?” I said, surprised again.

“By joining the Heartsick American Humorists' Association we got a tremendous discount,” she informed me.

“But who's the humorist?” I asked.

“You are, my darling,” she said, handing a membership card to the clerk. “You crack me up.”

The clerk began to snicker as he tapped us into the computer. “You guys are pretty good,” he said.

*   *   *

WE UNPACKED. We showered. We dressed for drinks and dinner. The cocktail lounge and bar were quite crowded, offering the possibility of an interesting conversation if we could pick the right people to sit next to, though the choice was likely to be forced because there were so few places available. Two stools were empty at the bar, but they were separated by two large men wearing black slacks and brightly colored shirts—one tangerine, one puce. Given the likelihood that the lounge was packed with humorists, the similarity of their outfits made it seem that they might be partners in an act.

“Let's sit at the bar,” I suggested. “We can ask those two guys to move over.”

We approached the bar and found the two bright shirts crying in their beer.

“It's over,” groused one. “Never again will the kind of humor we grew up on, the kind of thing we enjoyed as kids, achieve the ascendancy, the cultural dominance, that it once enjoyed. Not in our lifetime.”

“It was a golden age,” moaned the other, “and this is an age of crap, comparatively speaking.”

“Excuse me,” I said to the one in tangerine. “Would you be willing to move one stool to your right, so that we could have the two vacant stools?”

He looked at me for a moment. He seemed genuinely puzzled.

“I don't get it,” he said at last.

“Neither do I,” said the one in the puce shirt.

“I was hoping you wouldn't mind moving over—”

“One stool to my right,” said tangerine, with a puzzled look. “I got that part, but if I move one seat to my right, I'll be sitting in his lap. Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No,” I said. “I was hoping that your friend would also move one stool to the right. That would leave two stools for Albertine and me.”

They looked at each other, shrugged in the manner of two grumpy old men who are still willing to go along with a gag, and moved one stool to the right.

“Thanks,” I said. Al and I took the free stools and ordered martinis.

“Well?” said puce, leaning around tangerine to say it.

“Thanks again,” I said.

They looked at each other for a long moment.

“Impenetrable,” said tangerine.

“Unfathomable,” said puce.

“That's the whole problem today,” said tangerine. “On the one hand, you've got this ineffable high-concept bullshit—”

“—and on the other you've got your lowbrow bathroom humor bullshit,” said puce.

“—and the noble middle ground, where once we played—”

“—is vacant.”

“Let's take these to a table,” said Albertine.

*   *   *

AT THE ONLY TABLE with two seats empty, I stopped, indicated the empty seats with a nod of my head, and asked those seated around the table, “Are these available?”

“You see?” said a beefy man, bringing his hands together with a smart smack. “That's just what I've been talking about—a perfect example.” To me he said, “A classic setup, classic. Thank you. You couldn't have arrived at a more opportune moment.”

“By all means, join us,” said a woman with hair that might have been dyed to match the puce shirt of the man we had left at the bar.

“I want to see where you're going to take this,” said the beefy man.

“Take this?” I said. “Oh, I see what you mean. I don't really have any plans to take it anywhere. You see, I'm not a humorist.”

“You're not?”

Albertine kicked me.

“Well, technically I am. That is, I am a member of the Heartsick American Humorists' Association—”

“Ipso facto,” declared the beefy man.

“QED,” said a small man beside him, who might have been the beefy man's professional sidekick.

“So give,” said the woman with the hair.

I looked at Al. “How about helping me out a little here?” I asked.

“We're on the road,” she said to the group, “bound for Corosso, New Mexico.”

“Not bad, not bad,” said the beefy man, rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation. “Corosso is the new Sheboygan.”

“I think I see where this is going,” said the woman.

“To New Mexico?” I suggested.

“Eventually,” said Al, “but our immediate goal is to get back to the safety of our room and find out whether Bulky Burger delivers.”

“Hilarious!” declared the beefy man, though he only chuckled.

*   *   *

ON OUR WAY OUT of the lounge, we heard another of the humorists saying this: “Ours is not an age for subtlety. It doesn't want a Wilde or a Parker or even a Wodehouse. It doesn't want wit; it wants the whoopee cushion. It's an age that calls for a Rabelais or the Balzac of
Droll Stories
or that old sniggering schoolboy Alfred Jarry. In an age when people think a bomb is an appropriate answer to an insult, a fart is a clever riposte.”

“Well, I suppose he's right about that,” said Albertine.

“I wish he weren't,” I said.

“I know you do,” she said. “So do I.”

“I prefer the fart to the bomb, though.”

“I'll take silence, thanks.”

*   *   *

I STRODE THROUGH THE LOBBY with the purposeful look of a man who has left his toothbrush in the car. In the garage, I found an outlet, moved the Electro-Flyer to a spot one cord's length from it, and plugged it in for the night. Outside, I stood still for a moment, scanning the sky for the flashing lights of a helicopter. Nothing. I went back through the lobby. Passing the clerk, I patted my jacket pocket and said, “Toothbrush.”

“Ha-ha,” he said skeptically.

*   *   *

LYING IN BED that night, I had an insight, just before I fell asleep. It wasn't about humor; it was about Lem and his version of the Martian invasion story or, more accurately, my reaction to it. When I had objected to his altering the story, I wasn't taking offense on behalf of H. G. Wells or Howard Koch or Orson Welles. I was personally offended. The recorded version of the radio play that I had made with my friend Dan had been different from any of the sources we had used. It had been very similar to Howard Koch's radio play but not identical to it. We had made some changes out of necessity, others out of expediency, and others out of playfulness—changing some of the names of the characters to match the names of teachers in our school, for example—and the version that resulted was in a small way our own. That version had become in my storyteller's mind the version that I thought everyone ought to know and hew to, Lem included. It still is.

Chapter 7

A Banner Day

He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.

Colonel Atwit in Jonathan Swift's
Polite Conversation

IT WAS A DAY for rhapsodizing, one of those extraordinarily beautiful days when, under a sky pellucid and blue, you willingly fall victim to the illusion that life is good and nothing can go wrong.
Spirit
's engine hummed, the air felt buoyant, and a couple of times when we crested a rise in the road, I gunned the engine and the road fell away beneath us. Oh, that exhilarating feeling of flight, the breathtaking thrill of being airborne for a few feet.

Toward evening, when the light began to thin, I found myself riding through a marshy area, and because the lack of trees or other concealing vegetation afforded me a long view of what lay ahead of me, I could make out a small town or village in the distance. Soon I came upon a road sign welcoming me to Mallowdale, and farther on, when I reached the edge of the village, I saw a bright banner strung across the main street. Because I was still too far from the banner to read it, I allowed myself to think that it might be a message of welcome for me.

“Oh, please,” said
Spirit.

“Why not?” I asked. “Word of my journey could spread by phone—and why shouldn't it? Why shouldn't people in the towns we've passed through telephone their friends and relatives along our route and urge them not to miss the daring flyboy when he passes through their town?”

Whatever the banner announced—and I still thought it might be my arrival—had certainly caught people's fancy. The whole town seemed to be in the street. I wished that I had taken the opportunity at the last rest stop to straighten my clothes a bit, comb my hair, and give
Spirit
a dusting.

“Am I dirty?” she asked.

“Not dirty, exactly. But both of us could use a little spiffing up.”

“I know that I would look a lot better if you'd take that ratty banner off my tail.”

I said nothing, but I had to admit that she was right. The banner advertising Porky White's Kap'n Klam restaurant had suffered from being dragged along the road through New York and New Jersey. It was battered and dirty and twisted, and the part that had initially read
THE HOME OF HAPPY DINERS
had been reduced to
THE HOME OF HAPPY DIN
.

Perhaps
Spirit
and I both understood how contentious an issue Porky's banner was likely to become, because we both stepped aside from any discussion of it with the simultaneous declaration, “This is an occasion!” and when I was close enough to read the Mallowdale banner, it told me that the occasion was the 97th Annual Marshmallow Festival.

Festive it certainly was, and the marshmallow theme was inescapable. Many of the citizens of Mallowdale had dressed themselves as the plump white confections, either just as they come from the bag, or in various stages of toasting, from barely beige through golden brown to singed to the fragile wrinkled skin of black that follows ignition. I felt conspicuous in my flyboy garb. It seemed as wrong as could be in a crowd where marshmallows were à la mode.

“You need an outfit,” said a matronly woman at my side, taking me by the elbow. She wore a smile, but her brows were knit, giving her the air of someone taking pity on an unfortunate soul. In memory's eye, though, she seems not to be acting from spontaneous generosity but as part of a program. I see now that she was estimating in the back of her mind the benefit that would accrue from what she was about to do. “Here,” she said. “Try this.”

She offered me a crepe-paper hat that resembled a marshmallow somewhat. It was, I understand now, the Marshmallow Festival equivalent of the cheap jacket and tie that some restaurants keep in the checkroom for patrons who arrive dressed for dinner at a steel cart on the corner. The hat was enough of a marshmallow costume to make me feel that I could join the festivities. It was not nearly enough to allow me to fit in, but it was enough to make me stand out less. Still, as I walked around the center of the town, trying to mingle with the festive throng, I felt that the Mallowdalers considered me an outsider, someone suspect, possibly dangerous, a threat to their way of life, their beliefs, their young women. I liked it. I may have begun to swagger.

The flow of the crowd carried me to a parking lot behind the Marshmallow Museum where long tables and wooden folding chairs had been set up. From its resemblance to the Babbington Clam Fest's “Gorging Ground,” I recognized this as a feasting area, and discovered that I was hungry. I joined the line for tickets. The price was reasonable, and the sign at the entrance said
ALL YOU CAN EAT
, a wonderful offer for an adolescent who had spent the long day piloting an aerocycle.

I paid the price. Not until I sat down and read the little menu card on the table did I understand that there would be nothing to eat that did not include marshmallows.

Of course, that made me feel tremendously nostalgic.

“This is just like the Clam Fest back home!” I said to the person sitting next to me, a woman I guessed, carefully dressed as an evenly tanned marshmallow on a supple stick cut from a cherry tree. “Back home in Babbington, on Long Island, in New York. It's just like this!”

“Oh?” she said, with none of the fellow feeling I had hoped for. “How is it ‘just like this'?”

“Well,” I said, still hopeful, “you're celebrating marshmallows, and we celebrate clams.”

Across the table, a man in a charred head murmured to a neighbor, “Good lord, why?”

“We have a big feast like this,” I went on, trying to ignore the offense, “but instead of putting marshmallows in everything, we have clams in everything—clam chowder, clam fritters, clams casino—”