Maxwell Bodenheim

“ I won’t stand for your making love to me unless you use a pair of iceman’s tongs and a mask. You are a very rough man, Herman, besides which you have a face which in its happiest moments reminds me of a cow pasture, it being so full of places I can’t look.”
“Oh, my dear young woman,” our hero moaned, “you have failed to understand me. You are my inspiration for higher things. You do not know how lewd and wicked is the world. How dangerous it is for little children to grow up surrounded by lewd and obscene literature.”
Herman’s potato head fell despairingly on Cutie’s knee. ”

“ And as far as sexual details are concerned, rusty nuts and screws always have a yen against nuts and screws oily, polished and in perfect working order. You see, Pupick, a wolf who’s lost most of his claws and teeth ties on a pair of papier mache wings and claps a cardboard halo on his head and slowly and contentedly dies of starvation, but you, Pupick—you’re worse than the wolf. You insist that everybody should have all his teeth pulled out, because you’re a sanctimonious, buttery, pimply long-face. ”

“ Herman Pupick, a prude with one glass eye and splintered pieces of glass in what passed for his heart, is forced to stagger in hilarious pursuits of Cutie herself, who represents an intelligent, involved, nicely belligerent pagan and hoyden, with a face so exquisitely [Pg 10] symmetrical, so magically, enticingly, softly, elasticly gleaming, that a paralyzed octogenarian would have jumped out of his wheel-chair in a miracle restoring him to youth. ”

“ Books which corrupt the morals of the young. Plays which stir young men and women to depravities. We will put an end to it. Don’t you understand? God has sent you to me. I have plucked you from the fire.”
Our little burning brand felt a great white light open in her soul.
“Ouch,” she murmured, “don’t pinch me so hard. I understand. I have led a sinful life, reading books unfit for children.”
“Yes, yes,” panted our hero, “your wickedness is plain to you now. Repent! Repent!”
“No,” Cutie murmured.
Herman threw his arms around her, his face shining with piety like a Christmas tree. ”

“ Throwing himself on the floor in front of Cutie, our hero sunk his false teeth into her ankle and barked for more.
“You are my inspiration,” Herman cried. “Until you came into my life, I was only an ordinary censor and reformer. Now I feel new vigor in my veins. I feel strong enough to stamp out the entire sins of our age.”
Cutie reached for a crowbar which was standing on the mantlepiece and as she did so her kimona carried the ball for ten yards around the left end. Herman couldn’t restrain himself and raised his voice in song. ”

“ No young girl should be allowed to handle them.”
Wounded though he was, our hero seized the literature which his pure soul [Pg 56] found so offensive and tore it into shreds. When he got through, the room looked as if a nanny goat had been sleeping in it.
Just as our bruised and battered killjoy had finished his job, Cutie appeared in the doorway. She was a little overdressed for a Ziegfield chorus, but nobody in their right mind would have barred her out of a school for the blind. She was holding a pair of large lavender pajamas with fancy buttons on the jacket, in her hand. ”

“ When Herman Pupick heard this he grabbed hold of his head and moaned like a lost soul.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Well,” said Cutie, “we will stop first at my little love nest and lay up for a few [Pg 55] repairs. You look as if you had just escaped from a lunatic asylum full of Swiss bell ringers. After we have restored some of your face and removed the rest of it we will make plans for the future.”
A half hour later Herman was lying on a couch in a room that smelled like the eau de cologne department of Marshall Field’s. ”

“ Still trembling with rage, Herman handed her one of his blackmailing cards.
“Here,” he said, “is my name and vocation.”
“Oh, Herman Pupick, Censor and Reformer,” Cutie read out loud. “My Gawd, the Arsenic Kid. Oh, Papa’s lost his teeth. Send for the monkey gland wagon. So you are a reformer?”
“Yes,” said Herman.
“What kind of reforming do you specialize in?” continued Cutie. “Maybe I can be a great help to you.”
[Pg 29]
“Sin,” answered Herman, “any kind of sin. Wherever I find things which incite to lewdness and debauchery, there my duty lies.”
“Amen, brother, mine too,” cried Cutie. ”

“ At present the best way to indicate the piercing impudence of a Cutie toward the perennial Fraud of Pupick would be as follows: “Look, Pupick, a person isn’t taking up for adultery just because he admits that it exists and describes the motivations and reasons which make it happen in some cases. ”

“ After all, a fig leaf is ludicrously transparent and directs attention to the object which it is supposed to hide. Again, when you examine the much-debated quality of obscenity, it is—outside of vicious, abject crudeness—impossible to establish obscenity, beyond narrow individual preference opposed by relatively tolerant slants. ”

“ When he was thirty-five years old the only flesh pots Herman had ever seen were those his wife tended on the kitchen stove. He had been married ten years and every night before sliding into the hay he and the dementia praecox case who shared his headaches would kneel beside their thorny couch and request God to keep them pure. And He did.
Herman himself was so pure that he cancelled his subscription to the Presbyterian Weekly during the War owing to a headline which appeared in that racy organ on March 3, 1917. ”

“ We were never patronizing, dry, lofty, irascible or pontifical. Again, when creations were, quite frankly, meant to be only commercial or surfacely entertaining, we did not scoff at them for failing to be esthetic. ”

“ Herman began to heave.
“I didn’t come to see a movie show,” he [Pg 40] gurgled. “Movies are lewd and obscene. Take it away.”
Dr. Kukuheimer turned on a slide showing the ruins of Pompeii. Our hero was now breathing like the winner of a fat woman’s race. Without giving him a chance to recover, Dr. Kukuheimer flashed a life sized chromo of Annette Kellerman.
Herman took one look at the fancy curves and jumped to his feet with a yell. Tearing his hair, our hero began running around the room and falling over desks. ”

“ And lifting his fanny off the floor Herman pointed his forefinger at our heroine.
“You spawn of Hell,” he cried, “you painted Jezebel, don’t try to work your sinful [Pg 30] wiles on me. I know you for what you are, a cigarette smoking, rum guzzling creature of the underworld. Begone to your devil’s lair. You soul wrecker luring innocent men to their doom with your corruptions.”
“Say,” Cutie broke in, “you poor kidney-footed clown, you one-eyed leftover, how do you get that way? ”

“ If God wants him, He can have him. And take the drain pipe, too. There are no competing claims.
“Rest in peace, Herman Pupick. The [Pg 75] bereaved world will try to struggle on a little while longer without your uplifting presence.”
Over the second grave is another $400.00 tombstone donated by Professor J. Louis Guyon, and it says on this tombstone:
“Here lies the wife of Herman Pupick. She was a woman of refinement. She couldn’t pass a bathroom without blushing. It is wrong to speak angry of the dead. ”