Will Hines Dot Net

I subscribe to the New Yorker but never read it. That’s not a comment on the magazine as much as it shows that I value re-listening to my favorite songs on my .mp3 player on the subway over exerting mini-carlories of effort to Learn Actual Things. Nonetheless, I picked up the November 21st issue recently to happily discover that Woody Allen had written a piece.

I think I love Woody Allen’s writing more than any of his other work. I discovered it in 1986, when my Dad brought home a paperback copy of Without Feathers from Heathrow Airport book shop. I had been on a Woody Allen movie-watching binge and he apparently had noticed. I devoured that book, and it’s one of the few I refused to give away in my recent book purge. It’s a textbook example of concise, silly smart writing.

So it’s a big deal to me when Woody writes another short fiction piece — even something which is essentially a trifle. The old man Allen doesn’t seem funny in his movies, and essentially never makes any public appearances — but still is able to write a really funny piece. His written voice has always been very distinctive from his movie persona, or his stand-up persona. I mean, they overlap of course. But whereas his movie persona seems very “i’m a neurtoic cowardly Bob Hope-ish dude that reads books” his written voice is hilariously NONSENSICAL and SURREAL. It’s sillier than his other stuff. He has a terriffic sense of rhythm in that his word choice just SOUNDS funny to me, regardless of what joke is being made. Like this:

The driver, Beau Stubbs, had recently escaped from San Quentin, where he had been incarcerated for littering.

Well, maybe that doesn’t sound so funny all by itself. It made me laugh out loud when I got to that sentence in the midst of this article. “Littering” — the right number of syllables, and the right “size” of small crime to make the joke work.

Anyway, I love his written stuff. I can’t find it on line so I’m going to type it here. Well, half of it anyway. I might type the rest later.

Above The Law, Below The Box Springs
by Woody Allen
The New Yorker. November 21, 2006.

Wilton’s Creek lies at the center of the Great Plains, north of Shepherd’s Grove, to the left of Dobb’s Point, and just about the bluffs that form PLanck’s constant. The land is arable and is found primarily on the ground. Once a year, the swirling winds from the Kinna Hurrah rip through the open fields, lifting farmers from their work and depositing them hundreds of miles to the south, where they often resettle and open boutiques. On a gray Tuesday morning in June, Comfort Tobias, the Washburns’ housekeeper, entered the Washburn home, as she had done each day for the past seventeen years. The fact that she was fired nine years ago has not stopped her coming to clean, and the Washburns value her more than ever since terminating her wages. Before working for the Washburns, Tobias was a horse whisperer at a ranch in Texas, but she suffered a nervous breakdown when a horse whispered back.

“What stunned me most,” she recalls, “was the he knew my Social Security number.”

When Comfort Tobias entered the Washburn house that Tuesday, the family was off on vacation. (They had stowed away on a cruise ship to the Greek islands, and although they’d hidden in barrels and done without food or water for three weeks, the Washburns did manage to sneak out on deck at 3 A.M. each night to play shuffleboard.) Tobias went upstairs to change a light bulb.

“Mrs. Washburn liked her light bulbs changed every Tuesday and Friday, whether they needed it or not,” she explained. “She loved fresh light bulbs. The linens we did once a year.”

The minute the housekeeper entered the master bedroom, she knew something was amiss. Then she saw it — she couldn’t believe her eyes! Someone had been at the mattress and had cut off the tag that reads, “It is a violation of law to remove this tag, except by the consumer.” Tobias shuddered. Her legs buckled and she felt sick. Something told her to look in the children’s room and, sure enough, there, too, the tags had been removed from the mattresses. Now her blood froze as she saw a large shadow loom ominously across the wall. Her heart pounded and she wanted to scream. Then she recognized the shadow as her own, and, resolving to diet, phoned the police,

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Chief Homer Pugh said. “Things like this just don’t go on in Wilton’s Creek. Sure, one time somebody broke into the local bakery and sucked the jelly out of the doughnuts but the third time it happened we had marksmen up on the roof and we shot him in the act.”

“Why? Why? sobbed Bonnie Beale, a neighbor of the Washburns. “So senseless, so cruel. What kind of world are we living in when someone other than the consumer cuts off the mattress tags?”

“Before this, ” Maude Figgins, the local schoolteacher, said “when I’d go out I could always leave my mattresses home. now whenever I leave my house, whether it’s to go shopping or out to dinner, I’m’ taking all my mattresses along.”

At midnight that evening, along the road to Amarillo, Texas, two people drove at high speed in a red Ford with fake license plates that looked real from a distance but on close inspection were clearly made of marzipan. The driver had a tattoo on marzipan. The driver had a tattoo on his right forearm that read, “Peace, Love, Decency.” When he rolled up his left sleeve another tattoo appeared: “Printing Error – Disregard My Right Forearm.”

Next to him was a young blond woman who might have been considered beautiful if she had not been a dead ringer for Abe Vigoda. The driver, Beau Stubbs, had recently escaped from San Quentin, where he had been incarcerated for littering. Stubbs was convicted of dropping a Snickers wrapper on the street, and the judge, claiming that he had showed no remorse, sentenced him to two consecutive life terms.

The woman, Doxy Nash, had been married to an undertaker and worked beside him. Stubbs had entered their funeral parlor one day, just to browse. Smitten, he tried to make flirtatious conversation with her, but she was too busy cremating someone. It wasn’t long before Stubbs and Doxy Nash began having a secret affair, although soon she found out about it. Her undertaker husband, Wilbur, liked Stubbs and offered to bury him gratis if he would agree to have it done that day. Stubbs knocked him unconscious and ran away with his wife but not before substituting a rubber blow-up doll in her place. One evening, after there of the happiest years of Wilbur Nash’s life, he became suspicious when he asked his wife for more chicken and she suddenly popped and flew around the room in ever-diminishing circles, coming to rest on the carpet.