Bad Jokes

Bad Jokes

Spring has sprung,

The grass has riz!

I wonder where

The birdies iz.

-Anon.

 

Well, the birdies are finally here, I’m happy to say, building nests, swearing at each another at the top of their voices, and crapping on our New Hampshire cabin’s back deck, bless their messy little hearts.  In honor of them, and of the return of spring after a long, snowy winter, I’ve decided to take a break from doom and gloom in my blog,  and try to keep things light and funny, or at least goofy. So here are some jokes. Some of them are groanworthy puns, some are shaggy dog stories, and some are wry philosophical tales drawn from various regions and traditions.

******

The Sufi writer Idries Shah introduced America to Mullah Nasruddin in a little book called Another Way of Laughter, which was published in the late 1960s.  Mullah Nasruddin is a Persian folk hero, a classic “wise fool,” and the stories about him date back to the 13th century CE.  He’s depicted in Persian manuscripts wearing an oversized turban, riding an undersized donkey, and he often has a rooster perched on his shoulder.  Because he is a Sufi, he is not allowed to preach in Baghdad’s Shiite mosque, so he hangs out in the bazaar talking to anyone who will listen, and stealing from time to time in order to support himself and his shrew of a wife.  Absent the stealing, he resembles Socrates, who also had a termagant wife, and was considered suspect by the Athenian religious authorities.

 

Mullah Nasruddin strolled into the bazaar one morning and met a fellow who had a brilliantly-colored parrot for sale.  The huckster was singing the glories of his bird to the passersby: “See how beautiful he is!  And he’s devout – he  can recite the first twenty-six suras of the Holy Qu’ran!”  He clicked his tongue at the parrot, and sure enough, the bird began to repeat the suras in impeccable Arabic.  “A wonder bird, my friends,” said the huckster.  “Only ten silver pieces!”

Nasruddin returned home and came back with his own parrot, who had scabies and was missing many of his feathers.  He set it on a stand next to the other merchant’s bird and began to sing out, “Buy my parrot!  Only twenty silver pieces!”  The owner of the other bird jeered at him.  “That mangy creature isn’t worth a copper!  My bird talks!”

“Yes,” said Mullah Nasruddin, “but mine thinks.”

******

Mullah Rasruddin was traveling on camelback across the desert with two friends, a Jew and a Christian. They had waterskins on their saddles, but because they had expected to reach Baghdad by nightfall, they hadn’t brought much food.  At midday they stopped at an oasis, topped off their waterskins, and ate everything they had, except for a piece of halvah that was too small to divide up.  They proceeded on their way, but a sandstorm hit them. They took shelter behind a rocky escarpment, dismounted from their camels, and settled down to wait out the storm.  It blew all afternoon and into the evening before finally subsiding.  Loath to travel during the dark hours, when djinns and afreets come out to prey on travelers, they resigned themselves to a hungry night, but before going to sleep, they made a pact.  In the morning, they would recount their dreams, and whoever had the best one would get the halvah.

The three woke at dawn, and the Christian was the first to speak.  “My friends, I have had a wondrous vision! As I lay on the hard ground, an angel of the Lord, his golden wings spread wide and his countenance radiant, appeared to me. ‘“Brother Theodosius,” he said, “be of good cheer. You have been a good and faithful servant of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and as a reward, He has vouchsafed you a glimpse of Heaven.’”  He took me by the hand and together we flew beyond the sky, to a holy place in which I beheld the seraphim and cherubim arrayed in glorious ranks around the throne of God, singing His praises in ravishingly beautiful voices, while the saints stood listening blissfully.  My heart was gladdened, and the angel brought me back to join you, feeling the peace that passes understanding.”

The Jew said, “I dreamt that Moses came from around the scarp, his face shining, his hair and beard whiter than lamb’s wool.  ‘“Rabbi Eleazer,’ he said, ‘you have lived a holy and devout life, keeping the commandments, teaching God’s chosen people how to interpret the Torah and the Talmud, performing the proper rites, and doing a kindly mitzvah every day for someone in need. Come with me and behold what awaits your soul after the Messiah comes.’ He took me up Jacob’s Ladder to the realm of the Ancient of Days, where I saw the faithful gathered into Abraham’s bosom, while David played his harp and the shofars sounded, making the stars dance for joy. Then I was returned to this vale of tears, but with a strengthened spirit, assured that my sorrows will be eased in the fullness of time.”

Eleazer and Theodosius turned to Mullah Nasruddin, but his face was downcast and it was a long time before he spoke. Finally he said, “Well, friends, I was too hungry to sleep.  I lay wide awake and first I saw a fellow with wings approach you, Brother Theodosius, and carry you  to heaven.  Then an old geezer with a long white beard took you, Rabbi Eleazer, up a ladder to paradise.  I felt miserably lonely until Muhammad, blessings be upon his holy name, came around that big rock and walked up to me. He didn’t look happy. ‘Mullah Nasruddin,’ he growled, ‘you are a worthless scalawag.  You should be ashamed to call yourself a Muslim. You idle your time away in the bazaar telling silly stories to fools, and even stealing things when you think nobody’s looking.  Your skinny donkey and your mangy rooster are smarter than you. Your wife despises you, with good reason, for you haven’t provided for her as a husband should.  Even though they are infidels, Rabbi Eleazer and Brother Theodosius are better men than you are. Now they’ve gone off to visit their paradises, and left you all alone.  So you might as well eat the halvah.’”

******

Bert And I is a collection of stories about a pair of crusty Maine farmer-fishermen, first published in the 1950s by Robert Bryan and Marshall Dodge. Since I don’t have the book in front of me, I’ll have to draw on my imperfect memory to tell a couple of the tales. Hope my approximations are reasonably close to their orginals.

 

Bert and I were down at the dock spreading our fishing boat’s nets out to dry, and he says to me, “I read in the paper that Jethro Willis is running for selectman.”

“Jethro Willis?” says I. “Fella that tends the drawbridge over the canal? I’ll tell you something about him. Last June my Jersey bull ate something that didn’t agree with him, and got seized up tighter than Portland cement.  The vet come by and said the bull had to have an enema. We needed a kitchen baster and a length of rubber hose to do the job, and I didn’t have either one.  But then I thought of my grandfather’s old Spanish-American War bugle, so I fetched it down from the attic.  The vet greased it up, and while I held the bull’s halter rope, he rammed it up the bull’s bunghole. Well, that bull went crazy.  Yanked the rope out of my hand, kicked a hole in the barn wall, and charged down the road to the canal with the bugle blatting away like the cavalry was coming.  Jethro Willis raised the drawbridge, and the bull went into the drink.  We managed to haul him out afore he drowned, but ever since, he ain’t been worth a damn with the breeding cows.  So I tell you, Bert, any fool who don’t know the difference between a canal barge horn and a bull with a bugle up his ass ain’t getting my vote for selectman.”

 

Bert was sitting in the rocker on his front porch sipping ice tea one Sunday afternoon in June when he heard a car coming up the side road that leads from the state highway.  It was one of those little foreign sports cars, and it buzzed past his house, stopped with a screech of brakes, turned around, and snarled  back down.  It stopped again at the base of the hill, took a left, accelerated to top speed, stopped again, turned right, and howled back on up.  The driver brought it to a halt with another screech, and shouted, “Which way to Millinocket?”

“Don’t you move a god damn inch,” said Bert.

 

My wife Clara died, five o’clock this morning. Well, she’d been sick a long time, so perhaps her death was a mercy. I phoned Dod Adams, the undertaker, and then I got busy finishing Clara’s coffin. I mashed my thumb nailing down the lid, strained my back lifting the coffin into the back of the wagon, and when I harnessed up the mare, the off trace broke, so we had to set off with Bessie pulling crooked.  We started down the slope leading into town, and a horse-fly bit Bessie on the butt.  She snorted, got the bit in her teeth, and took off at a gallop.  We came a-rocketing down the hill hell bent for election.  On the last curve in the road, Clara shot out of the wagon and flew right through the post office window. I finally got Bessie stopped, turned her around, and drove her back to the post office.  Tut Tuttle, the postmaster, was peering out the window, leaning his elbows on the end of Clara’s coffin.

“Lucky thing I had the grating up,” said Tut.

“Ayuh, lucky thing you did,” said I.

“Dod Adams went by awhile ago, heading for your place.”

“Guess I must have missed him.”

“Ayuh, guess you must have.”

“Oh, Tut,” I said, “This day has been one long fezzle from beginning to end.”

 

Bert and I went down to the beach to load the bait and tackle into our dory, and we found a body floating in the kelp.

“That looks like Tom the Lighthouse Keeper’s body,” says Bert.

“So it does,” says I.

So we drug it ashore and then rowed out to Quahog Point.  Bert knocked on the door to the lighthouse, and someone said, “Who is it?”

“Tom?  You there?” Bert asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“It’s Bert,” says Bert.  “We found a body in the kelp.  Thought it might have been you.”

“What were it wearing?”

“Hmm, let me see… checkered shirt, bib overalls, and rubber boots.”

“Was they high boots, or low boots?”

“They was low boots.”

“You sure?”

“Nope, nope, now I think about it, they was high boots rolled down low.”

“Oh, well then, ‘twarn’t me.”

******

A pilgrim had traveled all over the world searching for an enlightened sage who could tell him the meaning of life.  Time after time he had been disappointed.  Some of the sages were charlatans who wanted money, some had refused to talk to him because he was a foreigner, and some had given up talking altogether.  Finally he heard about a great swami who lived in a cave high in the Himalayas.  The swami, it was said, was the wisest man on earth, and he was willing to share his wisdom with anyone who made the effort to seek him out.

So the pilgrim made his way to the foothills of the moutains and began to ascend.  The ascent took three days, and several times he almost fell.  Finally, with the last of his strength, he climbed the cliff just below the cave, and staggered into it.  Though the temperature was well below freezing, the swami was naked, sitting cross-legged, covered only by his long hair and beard.  His eyes were closed, and he wore a beatific smile.  The pilgrim didn’t want to disturb the holy man’s meditation, but the swami, without opening his eyes, said,  “Welcome, seeker!  Ask your question, and I will answer it.”

“O great swami, what is the meaning of life?”

“The jewel is in the lotus,” replied the swami serenely.

“What?”

“The jewel is in the lotus.”

“Oh, come on!  That’s just a mantra!  It isn’t the meaning of life!”

“It isn’t? Damn!”

******

God had decided to take a vacation, and He asked the angel Gabriel for advice.  Gabriel said, “Well, Lord, You could go skiing in the Methane Mountains of Titan.”

“Brr, too cold, Gabe.”

“OK, then how about Venus?  The whole place is one big sauna.”

“Nah. It’s too much like Satan’s hangout, and it’s covered with clouds.  I like seeing My stars at night.”

“There’s always Earth.  Lots of different climate zones, and human beings are kind of interesting.”

“Earth?  Don’t mention that place to me.  I took My last vacation there two thousand years ago, knocked up some girl, and they’ve never stopped talking about it.”

******

In ancient times, Persia was ruled by a powerful Shah.  He had two sons, the Shan and the Shin.  The Shan was the Shah’s heir apparent, a handsome young man whose generosity toward the commoners  had made him  extremely popular. But he had the falling sickness, which had to be kept a secret, lest the people lose faith in him, and, by extension, the whole regime.  His younger brother, the Shin, was assigned to stay by the Shan’s side whenever  he appeared in public.  If he showed signs of going into a fit, the Shin was supposed to help the royal attendants surround him and hustle him back to the palace as quickly as possible.

The Shin was also good-looking, and he had an eye for the ladies.  During one trip to the bazaar with the Shan, a bevy of young lovelies began flirting with him, and he let his brother walk on ahead of him so he could chat with them.  A sudden clamor of shocked voices made him spin around, fearing the worst.  Sure enough, the Shan was having a full seizure, twitching and jerking on the ground, foaming at the mouth, and uttering incomprehensible sounds.  The Shin and the royal attendants picked him up and carried him to the palace as fast as they could, but the damage was done: in a few hours, everyone in Baghdad knew the Shah’s heir was possessed by a demon.  An angry mob surrounded the palace, and the royal guard had to use bloody force to put down the riot. The Shah was furious. He summoned the Shin and roared, “Where were you when the fit hit the Shan?”

 

Sir Chumley Foulkes-Tweake, an official of the British Raj, was on a hunting expedition into a little-known area of the jungle outside Delhi, where a flock of the legendary Foo birds was rumored to dwell. Sir Chumley had bagged tigers, bears, and panthers, but the mysterious avian creatures had always eluded him, and he was determined to shoot one.  He had a hard time finding a guide, however, for the Foo was considered unlucky by the natives. They told him that if someone startled the bird, it would take to the air and fly in ever-diminishing circles until it was hovering right above whoever had scared it. It would then deposit a copious pile of dung on the man’s head. Wiping off the dung was considered very bad karma: it would cause the man to spend his next incarnation  as a cockroach.

But Sir Chumley thought the natives were silly, superstitious Wogs, and considered their story tosh. He kept offering more and more money until finally an old man agreed to take him to the Foo’s haunts for eight hundred rupees, enough to keep the codger and his family fed for a year. It was money well spent. Within two hours, the guide pointed to a large bird with gold and purple plumage perched on a limb of a nearby banyan tree, clucking and preening its feathers. Sir Chumley took careful aim with his rifle and began to squeeze the trigger.  But a mosquito bit his cheek, making him flinch, so his shot went wild. The startled Foo bird did exactly what the natives said it would, and the gob of poop on Chumley’s head stank to high heaven.  Instinctively he raised his hand to wipe it off, but the guide grabbed his arm.

“No, no, sahib,” he said. “If the Foo shits, wear it.”

*******

For twenty-five years, four friends had played golf together at the local country club every Saturday morning from spring into fall, weather permitting. One lovely day in June, the four men were walking toward the third hole’s green after teeing off, and a funeral procession came down the road that abutted the fairway. Instead of making his approach shot, one of the foursome stood up straight and took his cap off as the hearse passed.  The other golfers asked him why.  “Least I could do,” he answered.  “We were married for forty years.

******

One summer in the early 1970s, I was between acting jobs, and my brother Mike had just graduated from Harvard.  He was at loose ends, too, and so was a buddy of his named Seldon T. “Hercules” Kirk. We wound up in an apartment in Somerville, just outside Cambridge, Mass, and we decided to keep ourselves in rent money, weed, beer, and food by forming a house painting company.  None of us had ever painted a house before.  Hence the title of the following piece (OJT stands for On the Job Training).

OJT

“What we could do,” said the King of Cork, “is make a bosun’s chair.”  He and my brother Mike and I  were looking at the first house we’d ever been hired to paint.  It was a three-storey Victorian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gone baggy and blowsy like a Gay Nineties brothel Madam past her prime. It belonged to a young Harvard assistant professor of mathematics who had known Mike while he was pursuing his combined math and philosophy major in that exalted seat of learning.  After my brother graduated Magna Cum Laude the month before, he told the professor that he’d decided to use his Harvard degree to become a housepainter.

“Glad to hear it,” the assistant professor said.  “Honest labor.  And my house could use a paint job.  Have you ever painted a house before?”

“No,” Mike said, “but I went to Harvard and my brother Toby went to Yale and the King of Cork went to Syracuse.  You know my major, my brother was a drama major, and The King of Cork majored in art and captained the wrestling team.”

“Sounds like you have filled parameters, then.” the assistant professor said.  “The King of Cork?”

“Well, we call him Herk, which is short for Hercules, because he’s very strong.  But…”

The King of Cork broke in.  “You don’t have to talk for me, you know.  I’m a fully sentient human.”  He stuck out a muscular hand and the assistant  professor shook it, wincing only a little.  “Good grip.  Pleased to meet you,” said the King.  “I’ve been doing a little genealogical research, sir, and I have determined that I am a lineal descendant of the last ruler of the Kingdom of Cork, before it just turned into some place in Ireland.  The Corkians haven’t had a King in a long time.”

The assistant  professor looked at him for awhile and finally said,  “I’m sure they will be very happy when you claim your throne.  It will be like Aragorn coming back to Gondor, in the last book of The Lord of the Rings.”

The King of Cork beamed.  “Right on,” he said.

So we got the job.  But there was a problem.  My brother, a mathematician, after all, had calculated the amount of paint it would take to give the old whore new make-up, and he knew how much the paint would cost, along with the scrapers and brushes and rollers and cleaning solvents and tarps and so on, and he’d added it all up and stuck on a charge for our labor so that we had a chance of finishing the job with enough money left over to keep us in bad food, good reefer and Kruger Cream Ale for a week or so after we finished.  We might even be able to pay the next month’s rent on our apartment in Somerville.

But we had no ladders.  We did have about a hundred feet of  rope which someone had left in a closet of our Somerville apartment, maybe for escaping the place in the event of fire, always a possibility in that wooden three-decker, especially now that we were living in it, because we were always smoking something or other while we were there, sometimes in bed.  The King of Cork had thrown the rope in the back of our  vehicle with the paint and the rest of the stuff,  because a neatly-coiled hundred-foot length of rope adds a touch of professionalism to any contracting business.  Unfortunately nobody could see it, because the vehicle was my gray 1961 Pontiac Catalina station wagon.   It was already moribund when I’d bought it for  $100 in 1969, and although I’d put about $300 more into it since  to keep it gasping along, it was the automotive equivalent of a zombie, which is why we called it the Gray Ghost.

The only thing we knew about housepainting is that you work from the top down, since it would be  idiotically depressing if your  perfectly smooth coat of paint on the ground floor was ruined by the drips you made next day on the second storey.  Our problem was getting to the top.  Of course real housepainters use scaffolds, but those were way out of our budget, and Mike had figured our outlay so precisely that ladders, new ones anyway, would break our little bank.  So we stood around and thought over the King of Cork’s idea.  Of course none of us had ever rigged a bosun’s chair, a rope harness that was used at sea to swing a bosun, or some other nautical notable, from one ship to another during the Heroic Age of Iron Men and Wooden Ships.  But we’d all read a lot of salty old books, and the King of Cork had even seen a picture of the rig.

“It’s nothing but  a parachute harness,” he said, as if that would help.  But it didn’t, because although we all knew the principle of parachute harnesses, we’d never made one of those either.  We looked at the tall house for awhile longer and shared a joint.  Finally Mike said, “Mountain climbers!” like Archimedes jumping out of his bathtub and running naked around Syracuse hollering “Eureka!” because he had discovered the principle of liquid displacement.

“Do what?”  I said.  Reefer takes people in different ways. Mike generally connected with at least a side yard of the Ground of All Being and found jewel-like spiders weaving glittering webs of associations.  The King of Cork developed grandiose fantasies punctuated by brilliant flickers of insight which turned out to be gibberish.  I just got very stupid and stared at ordinary objects with my mouth open, watching them turn into gaudy monsters.  Like the big house in front of me, which was beginning to behave like an enormous  raddled old bawd.  There were two dormer windows set next to each other on the top floor, like eyes, and one of them winked at me.

But Mike was out there with Archimedes.  “Mountain climbers use ropes, right?  They rig them up cliffs, they hoist each other up and down, they even make little cradles to sleep in overnight when they’re caught in a storm!  So all we have to do is check the mountain-climbing literature!”

“Yeah, cool,” I said, still wondering why the house had winked at me, “but aren’t we supposed to be painting this thing?”

“It’s prep work,” my brother said. He didn’t know any more about housepainting than I did, but he knew prep work was essential, and he loved doing research.

“What’s wrong with the bosun’s chair?”  the King of Cork said.

“Impractical,” Mike said flatly.  “Only one of us could use it at a time.”  He took a last toke from the joint and squeezed it out, sticking it in the little tin box he carried in his pocket for roaches.  “With a little mountain climber savvy all three of us could use the rope to paint the house.  See, we could get a plank and rig the rope around it and…”

“Um, do you know any mountain climbers?”  I asked.

“What difference does that make?  I’m sure there are manuals.  Even pictures, with how to tie the knots.  We should go to the library.”

“Far out,” I said, which was what I generally said back then when dope had made me too slow to hop a ride onto anyone else’s equally hell-bound train of thought.  “But what about if we could find some actual mountain climbers?  We could trade this rope for a couple of ladders.  I mean, mountain climbers need rope, right?  And if they had some ladders, they’d be glad to get rid of them, because ladders don’t do you much good when you’re climbing Mount Everest.”

“What are you talking about?”  my brother said.  “Mountain climbers always carry ladders, to get across crevasses on the ice-fields.  Well, actually the Sherpas carry them, at least in the Himalayas.  But that’s changing.  The Sherpas are organizing in Nepal, and today Tenzing Norgay would tell Edmund Hillary to pay him a living wage or haul his own ass up Everest.  Consciousness continues to evolve, especially in Nepal, and you might as well accept it, Toby.  And don’t call the mountain Everest.  Its real name is Chongolangma, Mother Goddess of the Snows.”

“There was a middleweight guy on the wrestling team who liked to climb mountains,”  the King of Cork said.  “Well, more tall rocks.  But he never used rope.  He thought it was for sissies.  The asshole finally fell off some cliff.  Broke  both legs, so he was out for the season, and it hurt the team. The hell with him.  We ought to do the bosun’s chair, fling the rope around the chimney, haul away, and it’s  into the air, Junior Birdmen!”  The King knew a lot of theme songs from obscure radio kiddy-shows of the 1930s and 40s, and I never dared ask him why, because I knew he’d tell me, for hours.

The house winked at me again, and I realized there was some kid standing at the dormer window looking down at us.  The assistant professor had a lot of children, Mike said, which was probably why he couldn’t afford real housepainters.  Mike had also said that the man had gotten on tenure track at Harvard for doing something interesting with imaginary numbers, perhaps another reason why he’d hired conceptual housepainters.

But another way reefer used to fool with me was to make me extremely suspicious of anyone I didn’t know who stared at me when I was stoned.  Where Mike saw intimations of the unity of all being, I saw snitches and snoops who might call the cops.  “Don’t look,” I hissed to Mike,  “but there’s a kid up there spying on us.  We have to look busy.”  Of course Mike looked straight at the window and waved.  The King of Cork looked up too, and flashed the kid a peace sign. The kid gave him the finger. He disappeared from the dormer window, probably to call the cops and say there were three dirty hippies in his front yard, smoking reefer and casing the joint.

But the King of Cork saved us.  “Man, flashing the rigid digit when I gave him the Vee, that’s cold! It reminds me of Billy Baseball.”  Billy Baseball was what we called the hard-ass  leader of a gang of child criminals who stole everything that wasn’t nailed down in our neighborhood.  He wore a Red Sox cap and sometimes he carried a fungo bat, probably not because he played in Little League.  When my brother’s putt-putt 90 cc. motorbike went missing, we decided to void the Peace ‘n’ Love clause in our contract with the wicked world. We grabbed the little thug off the street and hauled him into our apartment for a chat.  He blamed the theft on some older kid named Kevin Aherne.  “Kevin Aherne did it!” he squalled.  “I sweah to Gawd!” So we told him that unless the motorbike came back, we were going to do to him exactly what Kevin Aherne would do, if he found out who had ratted him out. It reappeared the next morning, not much the worse for wear, and Billy Baseball became our friend.  “Yez need anything, ahsk me,” he said.

So when Mike heard his name, his airy mind took off from the weed patch in the Ground of All Being and soared back onto the Field of Karma, armed with Arjuna’s bow of perception and arrow of  logic.  “Billy Baseball can probably get us some ladders,” he said.  “We can trade the rope for them.  Billy Baseball seems like a kid who can use rope more than ladders, being that he’s a gangster.  He probably needs to tie people up every now and again.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

“No bosun’s chair?”  the King of Cork said.

“Nope,” Mike said.  “Sorry, Herk.”  My brother had turned into the organizer he’d been at Harvard, when he led a local group of Vietnam War resisters who boarded buses carrying draftees to the induction center to tell them they could still refuse to get sworn in as soldiers.  He’d been arrested for that activity, of course,  but I didn’t have anything smarter to offer.

So he and I unloaded the Gray Ghost and spread our tarps over the bushes in front of the house, and the King of Cork drove back to Somerville  to find Billy Baseball and make a rope-and-ladder deal, because it had been the King’s highly-developed wrestler’s musculature which had scared the kid shitless during our conference with him.  The King never wore a shirt if the weather was warm. In fact he never wore anything but the filthy pair of painter’s bib-alls he’d acquired somewhere when we decided to become career housepainters.  Meanwhile Mike and I began scraping old paint off the house as far as we could reach.  At one point the kid from the window came out of the house  and said, “Whatcha doing?”

“Prep work,” my brother said.  “Prep work is even more important than painting.  It’s Rule One of the Housepainters’ Creed.”

“You’re painting my house?”  the kid asked suspiciously.  He was a square-headed, thick-bodied specimen, bigger and stronger than Billy Baseball, and for a stoned moment I wondered if he was the real Kevin Aherne.  But this was affluent Cambridge where 100-year-old houses rotted with a measure of decorum, two MTA stops away from splintery Somerville where the three-deckers just fell down suddenly when they got tired of people living in them.

“That we are, m’boy, that we are,” I said, doing my best W. C. Fields.  But the kid was too young to have seen Fields even on late-movie tv, and he scowled.  “So why are you starting at the bottom?  You don’t know anything about housepainting.”

“It’s a new technique,” Mike said.  “You want to learn it?  The company can use a new apprentice.  Here’s a scraper, you can start with the front steps.”

“What company?  You’re not a company, you’re just trying to rip off my Dad.”

“Of course we’re a company, “ I said.  My paranoia was peaking, and I thought the little pit-bull was about to whip out a Junior Crimestoppers Badge.  “We’re the Ace Painting Company.”

“Ace and Acme Painting Company,” my brother added.

“Ace and Acme OK Painting Company,” I riffed.  We were grinning at each other and we’d almost forgotten the kid.

“Ace and Acme OK Painting and Music Company,” my brother topped me, punching his fist into the air the way he used to do when he scored a goal as a hockey player.

“What music?”  I said.

“Well, we play music, don’t we?”

“Sure, but it’s terrible.” I said.

“I like it,” said my brother.

“Yup, but you have a tin ear.”

“Well, fine, Mister Fancy-Pants Fake Guitar Player, go piss up a rope,” said my brother.

“I’m calling the cops,” the kid said, and went back into the house.

Fortunately the King of Cork rolled up in the Gray Ghost at about that time, with two ladders strapped precariously on the car’s roof with what looked like old packing twine, full of knots and thoroughly frayed.  The ladders were made out of wood and they were missing a rung or two here and there.  I flashed on the ladder Richard Hauptmann had cobbled together when he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. Mike’s and my mother was a fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s writing, and I’d been reading up on the kidnapping, precisely because Anne leaves it out of her elegant little books.  Another way dope takes me is to send me into endless pointless digressions from the business at hand.

“Toby?  Anyone home?”  my brother said.

“These are the worst ladders in the history of laddery,”  I said.

The King of Cork looked hurt.  “You are not being a nice person, Toby,” he said.  “Billy Baseball was a tough nut to crack.  He liked the concept of a hundred feet of rope, but he only had the concept of  a couple of ladders in return, so he took me to a place where there were hypothetical ladders and I did the rest.”

“You stole them,” my brother said.

“Jesus, the Tompko Brothers ganging up on me again,” said the King.  “You wanted ladders, I got ladders.  What’s the problem?”

So when the Cambridge Police squad car cruised down the assistant professor’s street, the King of Cork and I were on the rickety ladders scraping down the top storey and Mike was working on the porch and steps.  The King of Cork was singing a terrible, tuneless little work song he’d invented.  “Gonna paint this house/gray today!/What kind of painting is this?”  He sang it very loudly, over and over and over, and I’d already  asked him once to shut up. He just grinned and said, “Come on, Toby, I thought you liked folk music.”  “You’re not a folk,” I said.  “’Course I am.  I’m a horny-handed son of toil, singing to make my weary hours pass.”  And he went on singing.

But he stopped when the squad car stopped and the two cops got out.  Mike went over to talk to them.  From high above, I couldn’t hear the conversation, and I was worried because my brother had already been arrested once, and  he’d gotten on some FBI list of subversive insurrectionist terrorists, for interfering with the United States Government’s production of cannon-fodder. Although I knew Mike could spin a line of bullshit charming enough to dazzle a Harvard assistant professor into hiring a trio of bozos to paint his house, if the cops asked him for ID, we’d all be in the soup.

The King of Cork seemed to have the same idea. He leaned around on his ladder and said, “You know, Toby, we really ought to go down and shit.” It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, and I turned in time to see his ladder sliding ever so slowly across the wall until it reached the corner of the house and went down.

I watched the King’s fall from grace with my mouth open, as usual, goggling like the stoned cretin I was.  He landed  in the privet hedge which ran along the side of the house, and the cops forgot all about Mike and raced to his rescue like the heroes they were.  By the time I finally broke my daze and climbed down my own ladder – very carefully – the King was already on his feet, patting himself to make sure he was all still there.

“I’ve had worse takedowns on the wrestling mat,”  he told one of the cops.

“You were a wrestler?”  the cop said.  “I wrestled, myself, in high school.”

“What weight class?” the King asked him.

“150.  Porked up a little since then,” the cop said, patting his little cantaloupe belly.

“Yeah, that’s the trouble,” said the King, patting his own expanding gut under the bib-alls.  “You do the weight-training, pack on muscle, and as soon as you quit wrestling, it all turns to fat.”

“You’re sure you’re all right?”  the cop said.  “Never better,” said the King.  “Raring to go.”  He burst into song.  “Gonna paint this house/gray today/what kind of painting is this?”  The cop looked at him for a moment and finally said, “Oh, I get it.  It’s a riddle!  It’s housepainting!”   “Bingo, officer,” said the King of Cork.