There’s a small celebrity associated
with writing words that find public display; for instance, a few
folks have asked me for writing advice. Of course, what they mean
but are too kind to say is, “I have a wicker chair that can
write better than you. I’m 50 times the writer you are, and I
can’t get published. How do I get published?”
My advice: Have
a conversation with Kurt Vonnegut in 1964. The details are a bit vague because I was, at the time,
on a road trip to see a basketball game in Champaign, Ill. Because
we were young, and it was 1964, we ended up in a shadowy
neighborhood bar in Indianapolis. After four hours we decided to
stay put so that the basketball teams might find us.
My three fellow travelers were in the back,
inventing a pool game having something to do with the 7-ball,
pool-cue limbos, shots of tequila, and 15 bucks. The game was to
prove, once and for all, who was the better man. A completely
unnecessary contest of course, because they’d asked me to
hold the $15, which I was now spending at the bar — proving
once and for all that I was the better man. I figured maybe an hour
before the winner asked for the cash — plenty of time to
resolve the “question at the bar.”
The debate at hand was a debate that can only take place in a neighbor bar, in the
blistering cold of winter, midafternoon. My position was that
“sensible shoes are to woman as hair comb-over is to man,”
whereas my new best friend — the guy I’d just met 15
minutes ago on the stool to my right — contended that it was
“Sensible shoes are to woman as baldness is to man.” When my new best friend signaled that he
didn’t care to continue the debate (by passing out and
letting his one-strand, 3-foot-long comb-over hang to the warped
barroom floor), I turned to my new, new best friend — the guy I’d just
met on the stool to my left — a rumpled, mop-haired man,
drinking vodka, doodling, and chain-smoking Chesterfields: “I
believe it would be a better world if newspapers described people
by weight rather than by age, as in ‘John Semifargel, 218
pounds, was ticketed for speeding,’ rather than ‘John
Semifargel, 36 years old, was ticketed for speeding.’ Your
position on the theory?”
“A matter of considerable
weight,” answered the mop-haired man, “a weighty
question indeed. And I question you back, my friend — must we
save the Third World forests?”
“We must,” I contended,
“lest we run out of monkey-paw ashtrays!”
“And elephant-foot footstools,”
added my new, new best friend. The conversation continued for a while, some
of it abiding the well-established convention of afternoon
neighborhood bar talk, wherein the parties to the discussion are
welcome to precede one party completely independent of the other
party. The mop-haired man asked whether he could use
the word “pedantic” without being pedantic by using it.
Having not a clue what “pedantic” meant, I answered
that perhaps we should wait until the basketball teams arrived and
ask them. He agreed with the plan. A few minutes later, our enlightened exchange
was interrupted by Bugs Eisenberg, the winner of the best-man
contest. Bugs was laboring under the illusion that I owed him 15
bucks for some reason. So I poked my previous best friend, still
sleeping at the bar, and asked him what he did with the $15 I’d stuffed in
his shirt pocket for safekeeping. The comb-over man raised his head a full
wobbly inch, surveyed the room through flickering question-mark
eyeballs, turned to Bugs, muttered, “As bald is to
man,” and then re-signaled that he intended to speak no more
on the issue by re-passing out. Bugs wanted more information: “You gave
the money to a drunk with a single 3-foot-long hair danglin’
off his head?”
“Because,” I explained, “it
was the longest hair I could find.”
Although Bugs dismissed the answer as
incomplete, he did agree that he’d likely recoup the $15 once
the basketball players arrived and started shootin’ pool,
because they were too tall to line up a shot straight on. When I turned from Bugs, Kurt Vonnegut was
bundling up to leave. As he left the bar, he handed me a note, with
this message scribbled inside a doodled monkey paw: “Your
previous best friend was logically correct. Sensible shoes are to
woman as baldness is to man, but if you are ever to write the
story, ‘Comb-Overs and Sensible Shoes’ is by far the better
title.
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2005.
