The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy, page 35
Inadvertently scattering the inhabitants of a hobo jungle, she moodily drank their bitter black coffee and spent the night on a musty mattress in a culvert near their fire. The illustrated magazines of a certain type which those lonely and semihermitical men used to while away the hours of their solitude, she merely fed into the flames in disgust.
Much of the next day Dorothy spent in a eucalyptus grove destined soon to be “developed” into total destruction. She gave a lot of thought to her condition. It was no doubt the celery tonic in which the incompetent quack-doctor Songhabhongbhong Van Leeuwenhoek had administered the so-called glandular extract – containing as the soft drink must have done, certain elements very similar to the wild celery stalks eaten by the increasingly rare mountain gorilla of Sumatra – which had caused this change to come upon her. Of this she was certain.
Since it wasn’t concurrent with her monthly cycle, and seemed not even to be identical with the full moon, she wondered if its occurrence might have something to do with her sign: Aries on the cusp. Vaguely she remembered hearing of a certain economically priced astrologer mentioned by her mother before she left to become an Avon Lady in Anaheim – or so her father said; perhaps (Dorothy now wondered for the first time) he had been shielding some less respectable occupation.
Her thoughts were interrupted with the utmost suddenness by the appearance in the grove of a simian-like creature who appeared equally startled. For a long moment both stood still, each staring at the other. Was this another increasingly rare Sumatran mountain gorilla? Another victim of the celery and hormone tonic? – No. It appeared to be a man in a flea-bitten gorilla suit! And it held a bottle of something wrapped in a brown paper bag.
“Listen,” it said (or, though the voice was slightly slurred, it was a masculine voice – said he). “In times past, honey, when I was a well-known star of stage and screen, I drank nothing but the best Madeira, with a preference for sercial, but when you’re down it’s all over with the imported vintages. Any kind of sneaky pete will do. Go on, my dear. Go on and take a hit.” His sunken snout came so near to her face that she sensed it wasn’t his first drink of the day.
The well-known former star of stage and screen took the bottle and slid the top of it up high enough so that he could uncap it and drink of its contents, and yet quickly slide it back down inside the paper bag; for many people might object to someone blatantly imbibing alcohol in public – even in a eucalyptus grove which had formerly served as the site of a hobo jungle – for to do so is against the law.
Next, and though he had gallantly offered her a hit, he proceeded to do the following: turning slightly at an angle away from Dorothy, he fumbled his paw into his pelt and produced a second bottle, a smaller one with clear liquid in it; of this he swiftly drank and swiftly disposed of it once again in a pocket of some sort; and next he took a much longer tug of the cheap wine. Then he offered it to her again, and as she hesitated, thinking of a tactful refusal, he said, “It’s only polite to offer, but to insist would be most impolite.” – And jerked it away.
His voice had become increasingly slurred, and as he lurched off down the road, Dorothy considered the possibility that the clear liquid was vodka. It was only because he half-turned his head, and inclined it as though in invitation for her to accompany him, that she followed. Grotesquery prefers company, and she thought that she might as well go along – because she wasn’t sure what else to do. So follow she did.
Now and then some of the passers-by looked at them, but nobody looked twice. Not only was this Hollywood, but this was the famous “Gower St Gulch”, as outsiders in the know called it. To those on the inside it was merely “The Gully”.
To outsiders not in the know it might have seemed as if preparations were being made for the annual cattle drive to Dodge City, so numerous were the men in cowboy outfits. There was a slight stir in their ranks, seemingly caused by a dark man wearing a soiled khaki shirt and faded dungarees, moccasins and a pair of reddened eyes, who was standing on the sidewalk and shouting:
“Slant-eyes folks and Mexicans and Very Light Coloured People, keep the hell outa the gully!” he yelled, in particular directing his cries to several people in war paint and feathers. “Leave the depictation of Native American Indian roles to jen-u-wine Native American Indians! – You, you, Marcus Garvey Doothit, professional name Marco Thunderhorse, I’m addressing myself ta you, don’t gi’ me no bull about yer Grandmother bein’ a full-blood Cherokee Injin!”
M. G. Doothit, aka Marco Thunderhorse, gave a scornful pout and said, “All I have to say to you, Amos Littlebird, is that sticks and stones and arrows and musket balls may break my bones, but ethnic epithets merely reflect upon those who hurl them.”
Scarcely had all this faded behind them when Dorothy and her lurching companion encountered a scowling young man bearing a sign which read:
SO-CALLED “SCIENCE FICTION” MOVIES/STOP LIBELLOUS PORTRAYALS OF SO-CALLED “MAD SCIENTISTS”. SCIENCE IS THE HOPE OF THE PEOPLE!
It was not yet the 1960s, but the winds were full of straws.
By and by they came to a high wire fence surrounding a barracks-like compound; and here the senior simian figure paused to drain both of his bottles and hurl them away. Then he approached the gate in, for the first time, a fairly good simulation of an apelike lope. A grey-haired man stepped out of a booth, beaming.
“Gee, good morning, Mr Bartlett Bosworth,” he exclaimed. “Only last night I was saying to my wife, ‘Guess who I saw at AESSP this a.m., sugar?’ And she says, ‘Who?’ And I told her, ‘Remember Bart Bosworth who played Greeta Garbo’s boyfriend and also he played Mree Dressler’s grown-up handsome son?’ And she says, ‘Sure! What’s he doing now?’ And I told her, ‘He’s imitating a gorilla for Alf Smatz, King of the D-Movies,’ and she says, ‘Oh gee, what a shame,’ and –”
Thickly, from behind his gorilla mask, Bart Bosworth said, “Both of you just take your pity and divide it in two and then you can both shove it.” And he lurched on through the gate.
The grey-haired man, no longer beaming, pointed to Dorothy and asked, “Who’s this?”
“Who’s it look like? Myrna Loy? My understudy.”
The gateman turned his attention to other arrivals. Ahead of them was a sign reading: ALFRED EMMANUEL SMITH-SMATZ PRODUCTIONS. POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT AT POPULAR PRICES. The way seemed endless, but Bartlett Bosworth evidently knew his way.
By and by they came upon a clearing in a jungle. Scarcely had Dorothy time to express surprise in a single squeal, when Bart Bosworth, uttering a huge and hideous hiccup, fell full length upon the synthetic turf and began to snore.
This dull and repetitious sound was interrupted by a short, sharp slap: a man in the long-considered-obsolete uniform of a moving-picture director (including turned-around cap), had occasioned this by striking his forehead with the flat of his hand. “Again!” he cried. “Again! Drunk yesterday, drunk the day before – get him up! Hot coffee, bennies if anybody’s got any, an ice pack. But get him up, get him sober!”
Although a shrivelled-looking chap with the air of a superannuated yes-man turned round and round like a dervish, shrilling: “Right, Chief! Yes, Chief! Hot coffee! Benzedrine! A nice pack!” others were not convinced.
“ ’S no use, Mr Smatz,” said the script girl.
“Wouldn’t help, Alfy,” called down the cameraman.
“We couldn’t get him sober yesterday and we couldn’t keep him sober the day before,” declared a blond, youngish-looking fellow in short khaki pants and shirt, and a pith helmet.
And in a high, petulant voice, a bosomy blonde youngish-looking woman dressed similarly announced that she was “fed up with alla this stuff” – actually, she didn’t say stuff – and in another minute would go sit in her dressing room.
“Get somebody else,” advised somebody else, “for the ape part.”
The man with the turned-around cap gave, through his megaphone, an anguished howl. “Even in a low-budget film no one could afford to maintain a shikker gorilla on the payroll! – Also,” he said, giving the youngish-looking woman a baleful stare, “histrionics in high places I’m not appreciative of; also, furthermore, in low-budget films high places ain’t so damn high. – What, ‘Get somebody else?’ Who, ‘Get somebody else?’ Where, ‘Get somebody else for the ape part?’ Ape-part-playing is a dying art, gorilla suits cost a fortune – and if I had a fortune would I be making D-films? No,” he answered.
Then an odd expression came over his face. One hand he cupped around his ear; the other hand he used to shade his eyes. “Wait. Listen. Look. Just before shikker here, he plotzed, didn’t I hear like a high-pitched squeal which clearly indicated astonishment and alarm? Sure I did. So. Okay. Who squealed?”
Voices were heard denying that he or she or they had squealed. Ears were cupped and eyes were shaded . . . It was very soon indeed that fingers were pointed. Dorothy, realizing that concealment was useless, shyly stepped forward.
Alfred Emmanuel Smith-Smatz – “Alfy” (for it was he) – clapped both hands together. “Dotty!” he exclaimed. “Not only did you chase away Sandra, that yenta; early this morning I get a phone call from my thirty-year-old stepson Sammy, the schmuck: ‘Mommy is so terrified she swears she’ll never leave Desert Hot Springs again’ – but you are still giving out the intelligent squeals, with expression! Bartlett Bosworth never got no expression in his squeals; that’s the way it is with them silent screen stars: squeak, yes; squeal, no. Are you a quick study, Dotty? Yeah? Good! So take a quick sixty seconds to study the next scene . . . You got it? Yeahh! Yeay! Lights! Camera! Dolly in on Dotty, this great little gorilla lady! ACTION! Let’m roll!”
The rest is Film History, even if much of it must be concealed from the fans and the gossip columns and the world at large. To be sure, Alfy Smatz (“King of the D-Movies”) was a bit put out at first when he learned that Dorothy couldn’t play gorilla roles week after week; but only during those weeks when the moon is full in central Sumatra.
But the month has, after all, more than one week. The first week Dorothy, in her own natural form (with artfully padded hips and bosom) plays the heroine in a science fiction film as the daughter of (despite feeble social protest) the mad scientist. The second week Dorothy is kidnapped from various wagon trains and restored to various wagon trains by, alternately, Marco Thunderhorse and Amos Littlebird. The third week Dorothy is, first, threatened by love-starved Arabs, and second, saved from same by the noble efforts of either Marco or Amos in jellabas. – But the fourth week in the AESSP shooting schedule: Ahah!
In the fourth week of every month Dorothy stars in one STARRING JEANNIE OF THE JUNGLE, THE WORLD’S MOST LOVABLE LITTLE GORILLA film after another after another after another. These movies have wowed the fans in every drive-in in North America, and break records in every box office from Tampa to Tahiti; and, boy! How the money rolls in!
Dorothy has paid off her father’s debts and retired him on a personal pension, with modest privileges at the gaming tables in the poker palaces of Gardena.
Every now and then she and her blond, youngish-looking leading man of the moment get into her lemon-yellow Pigh-afetti-Zoom convertible to visit Luanne and Angela. They are green with envy. Again and again, separately and together, Luanne and Angela wonder. What is the secret of Dorothy’s success? It isn’t looks. It isn’t figure. What? What? What?
It’s showbiz, is what.
Dr Songhabhongbhong Van Leeuwenhoek has never been heard from again.
Serves him right.
THE AFFLICTION OF BARON HUMPFELHIMMEL
John Kendrick Bangs
John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) is another of those great humorists from the last century whose stories have pretty much been forgotten except for the frequently reprinted “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” (1891), perhaps one of the best-known humorous ghost stories. In his day he enjoyed marked success in his ability to debunk well-known books and individuals. His greatest success came with A Houseboat on the Styx (1895), in which the ghosts of various characters, real and literary, come together on their way to Hades. His most humorous stories will be found in The Water Ghost and Others (1894), Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (1898), Over the Plum-Pudding (1901), The Inventions of an Idiot (1904) and the longer works Alice in Blunderland (1907) and The Autobiography of Methuselah (1909).
Everybody said it was an extraordinary affair altogether, and for once everybody was right. Baron Humpfelhimmel himself would say nothing about it for two reasons. The first reason was that nobody dared ask him what he thought about it, and the second was that he was too proud to speak to anybody concerning any subject whatsoever, unless questioned. That he always laughed, no matter what happened, was the melancholy fact, and had been a melancholy fact from his childhood’s earliest hour. He was born laughing. He laughed in church, he laughed at home. When his father spanked him he roared with laughter, and when he suffered from the measles he could not begin to restrain his mirth.
The situation seemed all the more singular when it was remembered that Rupert von Pepperpotz, the previous Baron Humpfelhimmel, and father of the Laughing Baron, as he was called, was never known to smile from his childhood’s earliest hour to his dying day, and, strangest of all, was a far more amiable person, despite his solemnity, than the present Baron for all his laughter.
“What does it mean, do you suppose?” Frau Ehrenbreitstein once asked of Hans Pumpernickel, her husband’s private secretary.
“I cannot tell,” Hans had answered, “and I have my reason for saying that I cannot tell,” he added, significantly.
“What is that reason, Hans?” asked the good lady, her curiosity aroused by the boy’s manner.
“It is this,” said Hans, his voice sinking to a whisper. “I cannot tell, because – because I do not know!”
And this, let me say in passing, was why Hans Pumpernickel was thought by all to be so wise. He had a reason always for what he did, and was ever willing to give it.
“They say,” the good Lady Ehrenbreitstein went on – “they do say that when last winter the Baron while hunting boars was thrown from his horse, breaking his leg and two of his ribs, they could not be set because of his convulsions of laughter, though for my part I cannot see wherein having one’s leg and ribs broken is provocative of merriment.”
“Nor I,” quoth Hans. “I have an eye for jokes. In most things I can see the fun, but in the breaking of one’s bones I see more cause for tears than smiles.”
And it was true. As Frau Ehrenbreitstein had heard, the Baron Humpfelhimmel had broken one leg and two ribs – only it was while hunting wolves and not in a boar chase – and when the Emperor’s physician, who was one of the party, came to where the suffering man lay he found him roaring with laughter.
“Good!” cried the physician, leaning over his prostrate form. “I am glad to see that you are not hurt. I feared you were injured.”
“I am injured,” the Baron replied, with a loud laugh. “My left leg – ha-ha-ha! – is nearly killing me – hee-hee! – with p-pain, and if I mistake not, either my heart – ha-ha-ha-ha! – or my ribs – hee-hee-hee! – are broken in nineteen places.”
Then he went off into such an explosion of mirth as not only appeared unseemly, but also deprived him of the power of speech for five or six minutes.
“I fail to see the joke,” said the physician, as the Baron’s laughter echoed and re-echoed throughout the forest.
“Th-there – hee-hee! – there isn’t a-any joke,” the Baron answered, smiling. “Confound you – ha-ha-ha-ha! – oho-ho-ho! – can’t you see I’m suffering?”
“I see you are laughing,” the physician replied – “laughing as if you were reading a comic paper full of real jokes. What are you laughing at?”
“Ha-ha! I – I d-dud-don’t know,” stammered the Baron, vainly endeavouring to suppress his mirth. “I – I don’t feel like laughing – hee-hee! – but I can’t help it.” And off he went into another gale. Nor did he stop there. The physician tried vainly to quiet him down so that he could set the fractured bones, but in spite of all he could do for him the Baron either would not or could not stop laughing. When he was able to move about again it was only with a limp, and even that appeared to have its humorous side, for whenever the Baron appeared on the public streets he was always smiling, and when the Mayor ventured to express his sympathy with him over his misfortune the Baron laughed again, and mirthfully requested him to mind his own business.
Then it was recalled how ten years before, when the famous Von Pepperpotz Castle was destroyed by fire, the Baron was found writing in his study by the messenger who brought the news.
“Baron,” the messenger cried – “Baron, the chateau is burning. The flames have already destroyed the armoury, and are now eating their way through the corridors to the state banquet-hall.”
The Baron looked the messenger in the eye for an instant, and then his face wreathed with smiles.
“My castle’s burning, eh? Ha-ha-ha!” was what he said; and then, rising hurriedly from his desk, he hastened, shouting with laughter, to the scene, where no one worked harder than he to stay the devastating course of the flames.
“You seem to be pleased,” said one who noticed his merriment.
The Baron’s answer was a blow which knocked the fellow down, and then, striking him across the shoulders with his staff, he walked away, muttering to himself:
“Pleased! Ha-ha-ha! Does ruin please anybody – tee-hee-hee! If the churls only – tee-hee! – only knew – ha-ha-ha-ha!”
That was it! If they only knew! And no one did know until after the Baron had died without children – for he had never married – and all his possessions and papers became the property of the state. Through these papers the secret of the Baron’s laughter became known to the good people of Schnitzelhammerstein-on-the-Zugvitz, and through them it became known to me. Hans Pumpernickel himself told me the tale, and as he has risen to the exalted position of Mayor of Schnitzelhammerstein-on-the-Zugvitz, an honour conferred only on the truly good and worthy, I have no reason to doubt that the story is in every way truthful.
