Until the Cows Come Home...

Udder Madness
by Woody Allen
January 18, 2010

An article published . . . by the Centers for Disease Control [reported] that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States. . . . In 16 cases, “the animal was deemed to have purposefully struck the victim,” the report states. . . . All but one victim died from head or chest injuries; the last died after a cow knocked him down and a syringe in his pocket injected him with an antibiotic meant for the cow. In at least one case, the animal attacked from behind. —The Times.

f my account of the events of the last week seems jumbled, even hysterical, forgive me. I’m usually quite placid. Truth is, the details I’m about to relate are especially unnerving, taking place as they did in such a picturesque setting. Indeed, the Pudnicks’ farm in New Jersey rivals any pastoral tableau by Constable, if not in acreage then certainly in bucolic tranquillity. A mere two hours from Broadway, where Sy Pudnick’s latest musical, “The Flesh-Eating Virus,” runs to packed houses, it is here, amid rolling hills and green meadows, that the celebrated lyricist comes to unwind and re-juice his muse. An avid weekend farmer, Pudnick and his wife, Wanda, grow their own corn, carrots, tomatoes, and a medley of other amateur crops, while their children play host to a dozen chickens, a pair of horses, a baby lamb, and yours truly. To say that for me the days up here are Shangri-La is not to oversell. I can graze, ruminate, and work over my cud, in harmony with nature, and get milked gently on schedule by Wanda Pudnick’s Kiehl’s-moisturized hands.

One thing I’ve particularly relished is when the Pudnicks invite guests to stay over on weekends. What a joy for an intellectually underrated creature like myself to be in proximity to New York’s fabulous glitterati: to eavesdrop on actors, journalists, painters, and musicians, all exchanging ideas and witty anecdotes that may be a bit swift for the poultry, but nobody appreciates a good Anna Wintour story or a freshly minted Steve Sondheim song more than I do, especially when Steve’s playing it. That’s why when included in last week’s A-list was a writer-director in cinema with a long list of credits although I was unfamiliar with the titles I anticipated a particularly scintillating Labor Day. When I heard that this auteur sometimes took the lead in his own pictures I envisioned a filmmaker-movie star as formidable as Orson Welles and as handsome as Warren Beatty or John Cassavetes. Imagine my surprise when I lamped the triple threat I speak of and registered neither a brooding cult genius nor a matinée idol but a wormy little cipher, myopic behind black-framed glasses and groomed loutishly in his idea of rural chic: all tweedy and woodsy, with cap and muffler, ready for the leprechauns. The creature proved a handful from the very first, grumbling to all about the muddled directions that had forced his chauffeur to squander hours driving around in a Möbius route, the expense of tolls and leaded regular, and the unanticipated effect of local mold spores on his precarious adenoids. Finally, I heard him demand that a wooden board be placed under his mattress, which he found too soft to appease a spine clearly en route to osteoporosis. Mr. Pudnick recalled that David Mamet had once mentioned changing planes when he heard this individual was on the same flight. I might add that the character’s incessant carping was done in a kazoolike nasal whine, as were his incessant jokes: a spate of fatal snappers designed to ingratiate but eliciting from all within earshot a columbarium-like silence.

Lunch was served on the lawn, and our friend, made bolder, thanks to a certain Mr. Glenfiddich, proceeded to hold court on subjects he hadn’t a clue about. Misquoting La Rouchefoucauld, he confused Schubert with Schumann and then attributed to Shakespeare “Man does not live by bread alone,” which even I recognized as coming from Deuteronomy. Corrected, he became peevish and offered to arm-wrestle the hostess to prove a point. Mid-meal, the insufferable little nudnick beat his glass for attention and then attempted yanking the tablecloth from the table without upsetting the china. I needn’t tell you that this proved to be a major holocaust, forever ruining at least one J. Mendel dress, and catapulting a baked potato into the cleavage of a tony brunette. After lunch, I saw him move his croquet ball with his foot, thinking himself unwatched.

As the accumulation of single malt took its toll on his capillaries, he slurred invective against the New York critics for failing to consider his last movie, “Louis Pasteur Meets the Wolfman,” for honors. By now he had begun eyeballing the comelier types, and, clasping some actress’s hand with his rodent’s paw, whispered, “Little minx, I sense by those high cheekbones that you have Cherokee blood in you.” Tact personified, the woman somehow resisted the impulse to grab his nose with her fist and give it several turns counterclockwise till it made a ratcheting noise.

It was at this point that I decided to kill him. After all, would the world really miss this fatuous little suppository, with his preening self-confidence and emetic cuteness? At first I thought of trampling the bespectacled vontz, but I felt that to do the job properly I’d need about two hundred more head to really stomp him good. There were no rocky cliffs where I could brush against the wretch with a little hip action and send him plummeting. Then it hit me. A nature walk had been mentioned, and all were anxious to participate. All, that is, except for a certain cringing homunculus, who carried on like Duse over the prospect of being in the woods among Lyme ticks and poison oak. He chose to remain in his room and make phone calls to check on the grosses of his new movie, which Variety had said would have limited appeal and suggested should open in Atlantis. My plan was to enter the house, sneak up on him from behind, and strangle the nattering little carbuncle with a sash. With everyone away, it would appear to the police to be the work of a drifter. The thought occurred to plant a fingerprint belonging to Dropkin, the handyman who once gave the Pudnicks one of those diagrams showing the outline of a body like mine and where the best cuts of meat come from.

At 4 P.M. I went to the barnyard and made sure the chickens saw me there. I walked slowly by the stable, clanging the bell around my neck to further establish an alibi. From there I strolled casually to the rear of the house. The doors were locked and I had to enter through a window, causing some carnage to a nearby table bearing a pair of Tiffany lamps. I tiptoed up the stairs, hooves en pointe, having a close call only when Paucity, the maid, came down the hall bearing fresh towels, but quickly I flattened up in the shadows against the corridor wall and she walked right by. Silently, I slipped into my intended victim’s room and waited for him to return from the kitchen, where he was raiding the refrigerator for leftovers. Alone there, he had cobbled together a costly sturgeon-and-beluga sandwich, ladling the bagel with a tsunami of cream cheese, then made his way back upstairs. Hidden in the closet nearest to his bed, I was awash in existential angst. If Raskolnikov had been a bovine creature, a Holstein, say, or perhaps a Texas longhorn, would the story have turned out differently? Suddenly he entered the room, snack in one hand, a vintage port in the other. Gathering all the stealth at my command I nosed the closet door open and silently stood behind him, clutching the sash—not an easy feat for a creature without opposable thumbs. Slowly I raised it and prepared to slip it around his throat and choke the breath of life out of the salivating four-eyed pygmy.

Suddenly, as fate would have it, my tail got caught in the closet door and I let out a loud lowing sound, a moo, if you will. He spun around now and our eyes met, his beady and darting, mine large and brown. Seeing me up on my hind legs about to do him in, he emitted a soprano bleat not unlike a particular note that Dame Joan Sutherland hits in the Pudnicks’ Decca recording of “Siegfried.” The sound alerted the multitude downstairs, who had returned when it began to rain. I panicked and stampeded toward the bedroom door, trying to body-English the stricken little measle out the window as I hustled away. Meanwhile, he produced a cannister of Mace he always carries, which did not surprise me, given the amount of enemies he must make. He tried spraying it in my face but, shmendrick that he is, he held it backward and succeeded only in crop-dusting his own wizened map. By now the household was bounding up the stairs. With a fox’s cunning I grabbed the bedside lampshade, snapped it over my head, and stood immobile while others transported the wailing pustule out the door, into an S.U.V., and off to the nearest hospital.

Later stories around the barn have it that he babbled incoherently all the way, and even a subsequent two nights at Bellevue failed to restore his reason. I know the Pudnicks have removed him from their BlackBerry and poured gasoline on his phone number, setting it ablaze. After all, he’s not just a social grub but a raving paranoid, endlessly mouthing something about attempted homicide by a Hereford.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/01/18/100118sh_shouts_allen