Itinerantdaughter's Blog

The Whores of Mensa

A Short Story by Woody Allen

From his book “Without Feathers”, Random House, 1975 (tr.it.: Citarsi Addosso, Bompiani, 1976)
Estimated Online Reading Time: About 10 Minutes

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THE CLIENT

One thing about being a private investigator, you’ve got to learn to go with your hunches. That’s why when a quivering pat of butter named Word Babcock walked into my office and laid his cards on the table, I should have trusted the cold chill that shot up my spine.

“Kaiser?” he said. “Kaiser Lupowitz?”

“That’s what it says on my license,” I owned up.

“You’ve got to help me. I’m being blackmailed. Please!” He was shaking like the lead singer in a rumba band. I pushed a glass across the desk top and a bottle of rye I keep handy for nonmedicinal purposes.

“Suppose you relax and tell me all about it.”

“You … you won’t tell my wife?”

“Level with me, Word. I can’t make any promises.” He tried pouring a drink, but you could hear the clicking sound across the street, and most of the stuff wound up in his shoes.

“I’m a working guy,” he said. “Mechanical maintenance. I build and service joy buzzers. You know – those little fun gimmicks that give people a shock when they shake hands?”

“So?”

“A lot of your executives like ’em. Particularly down on Wall Street.”

“Get to the point.”

“I’m on the road a lot. You know how it is – lonely. Oh, not what you’re thinking. See, Kaiser, I’m basically an intellectual. Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women – they’re not so easy to find on short notice.”

“Keep talking.”

“Well, I heard of this young girl. Eighteen years old. A Yassar student. For a price, she’ll come over and discuss any subject – Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas. You see what I’m driving at?”

“Not exactly.”

“I mean my wife is great, don’t get me wrong. But she won’t discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn’t know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who’s mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t want an involvement – I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave. Christ, Kaiser, I’m a happily married man.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Six months. Whenever I have that craving, I call Flossie. She’s a madam, with a Master’s in Comparative Lit. She sends me over an intellectual, see?”

So he was one of those guys whose weakness was really bright women. I felt sorry for the poor sap. I figured there must be a lot of jokers in his position, who were starved for a little intellectual communication with the opposite sex and would pay through the nose for it.

“Now she’s threatening to tell my wife,” he said.

“Who is?”

“Flossie. They bugged the motel room. They got tapes of me discussing The Waste Land and Styles of Radical Will, and, well, really getting into some issues. They want ten grand or they go to Carla. Kaiser, you’ve got to help me! Carla would die if she knew she didn’t turn me on up here.” The old call-girl racket. I had heard rumors that the boys at headquarters were on to something involving a group of educated women, but so far they were stymied.

“Get Flossie on the phone for me.”

“What?”

“I’ll take your case, Word. But I get fifty dollars a day, plus expenses. You’ll have to repair a lot of joy buzzers.” “It won’t be ten G’s worth, I’m sure of that,” he said with a grin, and picked up the phone and dialed a number. I took it from him and winked. I was beginning to like him.

THE SETUP

Seconds later, a silky voice answered, and I told her what was on my mind. “I understand you can help me set up an hour of good chat,” I said.

“Sure, honey. What do you have in mind?”

“I’d like to discuss Melville.”

“Moby Dick or shorter novels?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The price. That’s all. Symbolism’s extra.”

“What’ll it run me?”

“Fifty, maybe a hundred for Moby Dick. You want a comparative discussion – Melville and Hawthorne? That could be arranged for a hundred.”

“The dough’s fine,” I told her and gave her the number of a room at the Plaza.

“You want a blonde or a brunette?”

“Surprise me,” I said, and hung up.

“I shaved and grabbed some black coffee while I checked over the Monarch College Outline series. Hardly an hour had passed before there was a knock on my door. I opened it, and standing there was a young redhead who was packed into her slacks like two big scoops of vanilla ice cream.

“Hi, I’m Sherry.” They really knew how to appeal to your fantasies. Long, straight hair, leather bag, silver earrings, no make-up.

“I’m surprised you weren’t stopped, walking into the hotel dressed like that,” I said. “The house dick can usually spot an intellectual.”

“A five-spot cools him.”

“Shall we begin?” I said, motioning her to the couch. She lit a cigarette and got right to it. “I think we could start by approaching Billy Budd as Melville’s justification of the ways of God to man, n’est-ce pas?”

“Interestingly, though, not in a Miltonian sense.” I was bluffing. I wanted to see if she’d go for it.

“No. Paradise Lost lacked the substructure of pessimism.” She did.

Right, right. God, you’re right,” I murmured.

“I think Melville reaffirmed the virtues of innocence in a naive yet sophisticated sense – don’t you agree?” I let her go on. She was barely nineteen years old, but already she had developed the hardened facility of the pseudo-intellectual. She rattled off her ideas glibly, but it was all mechanical. Whenever I offered an insight, she faked a response: “Oh yes, Kaiser. Yes, baby, that’s deep. A platonic comprehension of Christianity – why didn’t I see it before?” We talked for about an hour and then she said she had to go. She stood up and I laid a C-note on her.

“Thanks, honey.”

“There’s plenty more where that came from.”

“What are you trying to say?” I had piqued her curiosity. She sat down again.

“Suppose I wanted to have a party?” I said.

“Like, what kind of a party?”

“Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”

“Oh, wow.”

“If you’d rather forget it…”

“You’d have to speak with Flossie,” she said. “It’s cost you.” Now was the time to tighten the screws. I flashed my private- investigator’s badge and informed her it was a bust.

“What!”

“I’m fuzz, sugar, and discussing Melville for money is an 802. You can do time.”

“You louse!”

“Better come clean, baby. Unless you want to tell your story down at Alfred Kazin’s office, and I don’t think he’d be too happy to hear it.”

She began to cry. “Don’t turn me in, Kaiser,” she said. “I needed the money to complete my Master’s. I’ve been turned down for a grant. Twice. Oh, Christ.”

It all poured out – the whole story. Central Park West upbringing, Socialist summer camps, Brandeis. She was every dame you saw waiting in line at the Elgin or the Thalia, or penciling the words ‘Yes, very true’ into the margin of some book on Kant. Only somewhere along the line she had made a wrong turn.

“I needed cash. A girl friend said she knew a married guy whose wife wasn’t very profound. He was into Blake. She couldn’t hack it. I said sure, for a price I’d talk Blake with him. I was nervous at first. I faked a lot of it. He didn’t care. My friend said there were others. Oh, I’ve been busted before. I got caught reading Commentary in a parked car, and I was once stopped and frisked at Tanglewood. Once more and I’m a three time loser.”

“Then take me to Flossie.”

She bit her lip and said, “The Hunter College Book Store is a front.”

“Yes?”

“Like those bookie joints that have barbershops outside for show. You’ll see.”

I made a quick call to headquarters and then said to her, “Okay, sugar. You’re off the hook. But don’t leave town.”

“She tilted her face up toward mine gratefully. “I can get you photographs of Dwight Macdonald reading,” she said.

“Some other time.” FLOSSIE’S

I walked into the Hunter College Book Store. The salesman, a young man with sensitive eyes, came up to me. “Can I help you?” he said.

“I’m looking for a special edition of Advertisements for Myself. I understand the author had several thousand gold-leaf copies printed up for friends.”

“I’ll have to check,” he said. “We have a WATS line to Mailer’s house.”

I fixed him with a look. “Sherry sent me,” I said.

“Oh, in that case, go on back.” he said. He pressed a button. A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie’s. Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, “Wallace Stevens, eh?” But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master’s, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine’s over Freud’s conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing – the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York.

“Like what you see?” a voice said behind me. I turned and suddenly found myself standing face to face with the business end of a .38. I’m a guy with a strong stomach, but this time it did a back flip. It was Flossie, all right. The voice was the same, but Flossie was a man. His face was hidden by a mask.

“You’ll never believe this,” he said, “but I don’t even have a college degree. I was thrown out for low grades.”

“Is that why you wear that mask?”

“I devised a complicated scheme to take over The New York Review of Books, but it meant I had to pass for Lionel Trilling. I went to Mexico for an operation. There’s a doctor in Juarez who gives people Trilling’s features – for a price. Something went wrong. I came out looking like Auden, with Mary McCarthy’s voice. That’s when I started working the other side of the law.”

“Quickly, before he could tighten his finger on the trigger, I went into action. Heaving forward, I snapped my elbow across his jaw and grabbed the gun as he fell back. He hit the ground like a ton of bricks. He was still whimpering when the police showed up.

“Nice work, Kaiser,” Sergeant Holmes said. “When we’re through with this guy, the F.B.I. wants to have a talk with him. A little matter involving some gamblers and an annotated copy of Dante’s Inferno. Take him away, boys.” Later that night, I looked up an old account of mine named Gloria. She was blond. She had graduated cum laude. The difference was she majored in physical education. It felt good.

This version of Woody Allen’s WHORE OF MENSA was typed for educational purposes only by SYSOP Bob Hirschfeld and brought to you originally by the BBS of Greater Phoenix Mensa.

http://woodyallenitalia.tripod.com/short-uk.html

I’ve been away!  I’m so sorry, my little nothings!  My absence can be explained in the following blurb from New York magazine:

The [Ten] Greatest Excesses of Art Basel 2009

1. David LaChapelle’s Art Deco “Happy New Year 1932.” As the party began, synchronized swimmers in flowered bathing caps and glittering maillots dove into the Raleigh pool and performed “Putting on the Ritz.” Commissioned to do a photo series by the German luxury automaker Maybach ($500,000 per car), LaChappelle hung a nifty giant photo above the bar, showing the car running over someone at a wedding party gone mad. “When we come to care about things too much — art, cars, anything — that’s decadence,” the artist said, waxing philosophic. By the end, the event looked like the birthday party scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, except with hundreds of black and silver balloons and less clothing. Anthony Haden-Giuest ended up mostly naked, wearing little other than a party hat.

I was there, though clothed, but not entirely dry the whole time.  Oh, and I got in by crawling beneath some bushes and a table.  God bless the Raleigh.

I once read this Times article about blogging and the fact that it’s an often-abandoned hobby.  I have a complex now, because of that and my favorite Simone Weill quote.

One of my favorite artists this year was Peter Liversidge.  He retroactively stole my proposal ideas!  That didn’t make any sense, but I had the idea before I saw his stuff, which is great.

The summer when I was twenty, I lived in a big old mansion on Riverside Drive in New York, in a room I had rented out from a friend. I was remarkably cut off from everything in the beginning of that season; the house’s thick walls and old carpeting were relics of a dead gilded age, and moving from that environment into the “real world” made me feel like a human prolepsis, not to mention I had lost my cell phone and broken my computer and had no television and very few people were living in the building at the time. My one source of entertainment for these particular three weeks was a) Tropic of Cancer and b) a stray CD given to this friend of mine by another friend’s boyfriend, who had very eclectic taste in music and went on to meet with some great success as the front man of a cheery, ironically (?) preppy indie band.

I can only remember two songs on the CD. One was 4 by Aphex Twin, and the other was a song by Kate Bush, the title of which I never knew UNTIL yesterday, when I managed to find it by Googling what I what was able to discern from the lyrics as “I don’t know why I’m crying” (a feat, if any of you listen to Kate Bush.) Though much of Kate Bush’s library is available on iTunes, this particular song, “Suspended in Gaffa,” is not. It is discordant and odd and haunting and energetic all at the same time. The lyrics are eerie…definitely contain some Biblical allusions that were always beyond me, or I’ve forgotten (aside from the camel and the eye and fitting through it thing. That one I got.) Below is the link. Enjoy!

http://laurasha.com/tunes/gaffa.mp3

So I have this thing about cults, especially ones that incorporate group chanting/dancing to their worship repertoire (this is kind of all of them.) My unprofessional opinion (I’m an unlicensed, practicing therapist) is that this is because I grew up in a decidedly dogma-free household and community, and now crave restrictions, belief systems forced on me, and community-wide demonstrations of religious ecstasy.

I also like revolutions because, well, let’s face it, who doesn’t love a good revolution?

And world music.

So all these things kind of come together in this movie The Dancer Upstairs, directed by John Malkovich (him, too, I like) and released in 2002. The movie wasn’t critically lauded but I found it quite compelling. It takes place in some hypothetical, EveryCity, Latin America, and is centered around a detective, portrayed by Javier Bardem, as he tries to track down the leader of an ephemeral revolutionary party named Presidente Ezekiel. Ezekiel likes to quote communist philosophers and Kant and Nazi politician Hermann Wilhelm Goring (responsible for the title), and is also a fan of guerrilla and terrorist warfare, including suicide bombings and dog slaughterings. Bitchin’.

IMDB says…

The story is inspired by the Maoist insurgency in Peru known as the Shining Path. Its leader Abimael Guzmán, who was known by the nom de guerre President Gonzalo, was captured in an apartment above a ballet studio in the capital Lima in 1992. The ballet teacher Yolanda was based on Maritza Garrido Lecca, the woman in whose apartment Guzmán was found. Bardem’s character was inspired by Benedicto Jimenez and General Antonio Ketin Vidal, the leading figures responsible for Guzmán’s capture.

So there are a lot of things I really like about the movie, one being that everything is so misty and unclear the whole time. There are sinister forces at work in this provincial Latin American capital, invisible wires buzzing all the time, sending out Maoist aphorisms, creating secret societal connections, developing plots. I’m sort of the opposite of many movie goers, I think, in that I prefer not to be spoon fed everything; I appreciate a little mystery, even at the end of the day. I savor discomfort, I guess. Your every day cinematic masochist. In this movie, things are teased out well, but the majority of the action, at first, is shrouded in darkness and lit only by fireworks (the guerrilla group is fond of turning off the city’s power and then setting off fireworks), and I find it really interesting.

Any way, at one point Detective Rejas (Bardem) and another detective find a tape that a devotee is leaving for Ezekiel in a pre-determined drop off location. They intercept the drop off, grab the tape and examine it. It seems to be innocuous, until during the credits, the screen flickers (like the film has been cut) and it cuts to a party of people dancing joyously to a song that I have been TRYING to track down for ages. There’s a group clapping part, so I was SOLD! Once I found the name of it, I had to find an MP3 online, and now I pass it along to you. Enjoy yourself some Egyptian hoopla. Fuck Monday. Start a revolution.

http://sudairy.com//music/audio/awedouny.mp3

I was completely enchanted by this piece by Spencer Finch when I saw it this past December at Art Basel in Miami (where in the world was I.D.?) and have managed to track down some nice pictures of it. Finch made Rorschachs of colors that he claims to have seen in his dreams. Beneath each are tiny explanations such as “Knitting a sweater and crying” or “Ham in a Mercedes Limousine”, etc.

You know what I looooove? Categories! So I’m making a new category. This category is: Things I Love That I Go to Inappropriate Lengths to Track Down. It’s pretty much a category within a category, as the definition of category is: any general division. Things I like! Things I like MORE! The exact thing I like about the thing I like!  Things I like within things I like! It’s a bonANza of specification!

So sometimes I get fixed on things and then I go to “inappropriate lengths” to track these things down, and then I get sort of proud of myself for my perseverance, but I have no one to whom to brag about it.  I figured: hey, the internet!  This is where we all blow our meaningless and futile activities out of proportion, right?  And display them to a faceless and nameless crowd?  Wee!  Cue applause.

Okay so I have this obsession with quoting, quoting accurately, I should say.  I was quite taken by this compliment a steel magnate gave to a woman in the first season of Mad Men, the scandalous and sumptuously styled show on AMC (returns in August for its third season.)  Noticing that the first season was on demand out here on THE END (Where in the World is I.D.?), I decided to watch each episode until I found the quote.  I didn’t have to get very far, though.  It appears in the fourth episode.  Pete Campbell, the weaselly professional schmoozer, brings over two women as eye candy/”companions” for his client, the steel magnate.  Particularly taken by one of them (“Would you look at that!  You could lose a nickel in those dimples!”), he asks her what she does for a living.

“Well, I’m an actress,” she responds, “and I’m also taking some classes at Hunter.”

“Really?” he says.  “I would have thought you slept all day and bathed in milk.

Boys…write this one down!  Methinks it will work quite well.

In hindsight, this is actually the second post that falls under this category…

I have a very meticulously maintained list of my style icons, past and present, one of which is the bombass sixties/seventies fashion model Penelope Tree. Penelope had quite the late-sixties life: she lived in a trippy London townhouse with photographer David Bailey (upon whom the protagonist in the fantastic Antonioni film Blow-Up was based), played a lot of I-Ching in their purple living room, experimented with heavy eye make-up and was described by John Lennon as, “Hot, hot, hot, smart, smart, smart!”

Any way, Penelope’s first professional portrait was taken by the well-known chronicler of the bizarre, peripheral and deformed, Diane Arbus. Legend has it that Arbus took Penelope’s portrait when she was a tender thirteen years old, and her aristocratic parents threatened to sue if the pictures were ever released.

For years, I have been searching for this picture, fantasizing about the aesthetic orgasm I might have if I saw the product of the collaboration of two complete weirdos. And by searching, I really mean “Google Imaging.” Today, I gave it a shot again, and for some reason, this time I found it no problem! (I am aware of my technological limits, so please spare me. I figured out how to get pictures in this shit, didn’t I?) Turns out Ms. Tree’s photo sold for $15,000 (estimated price prior to auction: 6-8 thou) at Christie’s in April 2008. Just a wee bit out of my price range.