he has improvised a workable system of government based on divine monarchy and has rewarded my loyalty by allowing me to sit by his right hand at mealtime. Plus I also am responsible for seeing the latrine is spotless.
The Discovery and Use of the Fake ink Blot
There is no evidence of a fake ink blot appearing anywhere in the West before the year 1921, although Napoleon was known to have had great fun with the joy buzzer, a device concealed in the palm of the hand causing an electric-like vibration upon contact. Napoleon would offer the regal hand in friendship to a foreign dignitary, buzz the unsuspecting victim’s palm and roar with imperial laughter as the red-faced dupe did an improvised jig to the delight of the court.
The joy buzzer underwent many modifications, the most celebrated of which occurred after the introduction of chewing gum by Santa Anna (I believe chewing gum was originally a dish of his wife’s that simply would not go down) and took the form of a spearmint-gum pack equipped with a subtle mousetrap mechanism. The sucker, offered a fresh stick, experienced a piercing sting as the iron bar came springing down on his naive fingertips. The first reaction was generally one of pain, then contagious laughter, and finally a kind of folk wisdom. It is no secret that the snappy-chewing-gum gag lightened matters at the Alamo considerably; and although there were no survivors, most observers feel things could have gone substantially worse without this cunning little gimmick.
With the advent of the Civil War, Americans turned more and more to escaping the horrors of a disintegrating nation; and while the Northern generals preferred amusing themselves with the dribble glass, Robert E. Lee passed many a crucial moment with his brilliant use of the squirt flower. In the early part of the War, no one ever came away from smelling the apparent “lovely carnation” in Lee’s lapel without getting a generous eyeful of Suwanee River water. As things went badly for the South, however, Lee abandoned the once- fashionable artifice and relied simply on placing a carpet tack on the chair seats of people whom he did not like.
After the War and right up to the early 1900s and the so-called era of the robber barons, sneezing powder and a little tin can marked ALMONDS, wherefrom several huge spring serpents would leap into the victim’s face, provided all that was worthy in the area of tomfoolery. It is said J. P. Morgan preferred the former, while the elder Rockefeller felt more at home with the latter.
Then, in 1921, a group of biologists meeting in Hong Kong to buy suits discovered the fake ink blot. It had long been a staple of the Oriental repertoire of diversions, and several of the later dynasties retained power by their brilliant manipulation of what appeared to be a spilled bottle and an ugly inkstain, but was in reality a tin blot.
The first ink blots, it was learned, were crude, constructed to eleven feet in diameter and fooled nobody.
However, with the discovery of the concept of smaller sizes by a Swiss physicist, who proved that an object of a particular size could be reduced in size simply by “making it smaller,” the fake ink blot came into its own.
It remained in its own until 1934, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt removed it from its own and placed it in someone else’s. Roosevelt utilized it cleverly to settle a strike in Pennsylvania, the details of which are amusing. Embarrassed leaders of both labor and management were convinced that a bottle of ink had been spilled, ruining someone’s priceless Empire sofa. Imagine how relieved they were to learn it was all in fun. Three days later the steel mills were reopened.
Mr. Big
I was sitting in my office, cleaning the debris out of my thirty-eight and wondering where my next case was coming from. I like being a private eye, and even though once in a while I’ve had my gums massaged with an automobile jack, the sweet smell of greenbacks makes it all worth it. Not to mention the dames, which are a minor preoccupation of mine that I rank just ahead of breathing. That’s why, when the door to my office swung open and a longhaired blonde named Heather Butkiss came striding in and told me she was a nudie model and needed my help, my salivary glands shifted into third. She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.
“What can I do for you, sugar?”
“I want you to find someone for me.”
“Missing person? Have you tried the police?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Lupowitz.”
“Call me Kaiser, sugar. All right, so what’s the scam?”
“God.”
“God?”
“That’s right, God. The Creator, the Underlying Principle, the First Cause of Things, the All Encompassing. I want you to find Him for me.”
I’ve had some fruit cakes up in the office before, but when they’re built like she was, you listened.
“Why?”
“That’s my business, Kaiser. You just find Him.”
“I’m sorry, sugar. You got the wrong boy.”
“But why?”
“Unless I know all the facts,” I said, rising.
“O.K., O.K.,” she said, biting her lower lip. She straightened the seam of her stocking, which was strictly for my benefit, but I wasn’t buying any at the moment.
“Let’s have it on the line, sugar.”
“Well, the truth is-I’m not really a nudie model.”
“No?”
“No. My name is not Heather Butkiss, either. It’s Claire Rosensweig and I’m a student at Vassar. Philosophy major. History of Western Thought and all that. I have a paper due January. On Western religion. All the other kids in the course will hand in speculative papers. But I want to
I opened a deck of Luckies and a pack of gum and had one of each. Her story was beginning to interest me. Spoiled coed. High IQ and a body I wanted to know better.
“What does God look like?”
“I’ve never seen him.”
“Well, how do you know He exists?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
“Oh, great. Then you don’t know what he looks like? Or where to begin looking?”
“No. Not really. Although I suspect he’s everywhere. In the air, in every flower, in you and I- and in this chair.”
“Uh huh.” So she was a pantheist. I made a mental note of it and said I’d give her case a try- for a hundred bucks a day, expenses, and a dinner date. She smiled and okayed the deal. We rode down in the elevator together. Outside it was getting dark. Maybe God did exist and maybe He didn’t, but somewhere in that city there were sure a lot of guys who were going to try and keep me from finding out.
My first lead was Rabbi Itzhak Wiseman, a local cleric who owed me a favor for finding out who was rubbing pork on his hat. I knew something was wrong when I spoke to him because he was scared. Real scared.
