“Why don’t you write that a person with a broken mind can be mended? And he can go on being useful like me. Broken minds can go on to being productive, like me.”
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“Would you swim in coffee if it wasn’t too hot?” he asks in a recent issue mainly devoted to coffee questions. “Yessss, I would,” responds Ed Poindexter, and asks, “You want to know my Social Security number?” John Lowthers replies, “Well, I don’t know, it depends on if it was sweetened up enough.” And Frank Kanslasky retorts: “You get in there first and then I’ll follow you.” Andy Legrice is also not about to have anything put over on him: “No, you don’t swim in coffee, you drink it! Where do you live?! You put cream in it.” But Ed Poindexter comes back with, “Yes, I’d swim in coffee if it wasn’t too hot, but the trouble is, it’s too hot. And expensive.”
The Duplex Planet started as a mimeographed newsletter-type thing at the Duplex Nursing Home, where Greenberger worked, in the Boston area. He started asking the patients questions, recorded their answers, and typed up the results as a form of entertainment for them. He found, though, that the subjects of his interviews weren’t much interested in the results–they mostly threw away their copies of the publication–but friends of his found it fascinating and funny. So it naturally evolved into a magazine that presents its subjects, its characters, to an outside audience.
Hauptschein expected to use the magazine as source material for his own writing, and he’s done that–in fact he’s now writing a play based on the characters in the Duplex Planet–but he’s also found in it a source of inspiration. Describing himself as coming out of the tradition of surrealism, Hauptschein is particularly interested in creations based on the unconscious, and he finds Greenberger’s interviewees often “more able to deal with some philosophical or larger questions, in a weird sort of way, than most people, whose subconscious is not accessible to them.”
The Atlantic and all the oceans having a rolling surf
Though the Duplex Nursing Home closed down a few years ago, Greenberger continued to see the people he’d known there, as well as other old people he sought out elsewhere. He’d quit working at the nursing home some years before it closed, not being really interested in either social work or administration. “I thought it better to just keep these people as my friends,” he says.
