[Faith-talk] A funny read in intellectualism

[Kendra Schafer]

Hi all? 
Can you please try again? The body of it was blank. 
Kendra

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 12, 2015, at 2:39 PM, Poppa Bear via Faith-talk <faith-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> It’s a short piece. 
> 
> The Whore of Mensa
> 
> By Woody Allen 
> 
> 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 Vassar 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 Gs’ worth, I’m sure of that,” he said with a grin, and
> picked up the phone and dialled a number. I took it from him and winked. I
> was beginning to like him.
> 
> 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 the 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 makeup.
> 
> “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 naïve 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 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’d 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 pencilling 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, “O.K., 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.”
> 
> 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 décor 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 Bartók 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 devéised 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.”
> 
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