Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker
By Stuart Y. Silverstein
Published October 20, 2009 (Paperback) Scribner
Unwittingly, I fell in love with Dorothy Parker’s quips long before I knew they were hers. Read every footnote in Not Much Fun — some of them take up half the page — and you will understand. One of the famed writers at the Algonquin Table in the twenties, Dottie, as she was called, was known to brandish her sharp wit in word games. Use horticulture in a sentence. Dottie said, “You can take a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”
Something about her life compelled me to want to be her, although I banished myself from writing poetry in my early twenties. I felt the practice reinforced the evil I had survived till that point. I slammed the door on the early rapes, my mother’s suicide attempts, my stepfather’s violence, and my real father’s disappearance. Much like Dottie, I turned to drink, instead. I loved being brilliant on the air the next morning – or so I thought. Having drunk the guys under the table the night before, I was still drunk, and therefore lacked my acute self-criticism. I quit drinking about twenty years ago, finally pushed to sobriety when a disc jockey gave me a big hug, whispering that he remembered the time I’d been naked in the houseboat. Naked? Houseboat? I still don’t remember. Dottie, at a bar, was asked by the bartender “What are you having?” She replied “Not much fun.”
Dottie fell for married men, wrong men, bad men. She got pregnant by one and had an abortion, quipping, “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”
I feel her pain. These days, I do EMDR in therapy, trying to rewire my brain so that maybe someday I will find healthy men erotic.
My pain tolerance is exquisitely high. I once had an ectopic pregnancy, and the tube burst, filling my body with blood. I didn’t know anything was wrong, but I’d suspected I was pregnant, and happened to have had an imaging scheduled for that day. Saved my life. Don’t ask why my pain tolerance is high. You will not want to hear that story. I will say that I learned from trying to save my mother’s life – after her numerous suicide attempts – that that was a cowardly way to go, and when I was a kid, I cut, hiding the marks as best I could.
No one noticed. Just like no one noticed when I read Dorothy Parker’s famous poem Resume in front of my sixth grade class. Hello, teacher, why in hell would an eleven-year old read a poem like this?:
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
I made it. The book is funny. And, morose, too, truth be told.
