Monday, August the 29th, 2005

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A Dobson Anecdote

It would be no exaggeration to say that Dobson was besotted with cinema. He was always a great filmgoer, and on occasion his enthusiasm led him into typically preposterous escapades. There was a period when he became infatuated with Hollywood films about lowlife gangsterdom and seedy urban hustling. One day he announced to Marigold Chew that he was going to run a numbers racket.

“What are you talking about?” asked Marigold.

Dobson explained that in many of the films he had been watching, characters were often employed as “runners for the numbers racket”, and that he found such a trade diverting. “It will make a change from writing pamphlets,” he said.

Having studied his sources carefully, Dobson worked out that “running the numbers” involved roaming the streets tracking down his clients and taking money from them. But first, he reasoned, they needed their numbers, a side of the racket that was probably not shown in the films because it lacked drama. He approached his new career methodically, first drawing up a list of people to whom he could give numbers. Deciding to limit himself to a dozen clients, he included his next door neighbours on both sides, the post office person, a crestfallen chap who walked his dog along the street every day, the bell foundry janitor, Mrs Pod and the five orphans she taught in her ramshackle Sunday School, and—because he could think of nobody else—Marigold Chew.

This much accomplished, Dobson realised that he did not know which numbers he ought to give them. He spent a few weeks catching up on appropriate films, but learned nothing new, so he buried his head in ancient numerological and astrological texts, much as, he suspected, characters like “Two Hats” McGulligan did off-screen before entering the numbers racket.

Having chosen twelve numbers, Dobson wrote each one down on scraps of paper and spent an overcast afternoon distributing them to his clients. Only Marigold asked him what he thought he was doing, to which he replied “I am running a numbers racket. That is your number. Keep it safe.”

Dobson's excitement mounted as the week went past. To calm himself down, he spent much of the time at a pigsty, observing pigs doing what pigs do. Then, after seven days had elapsed, he went roaming around to collect his money. Life imitated art, however. Each of his twelve clients whined and wheedled and pleaded for more time to pay, complaining of a lack of funds and promising that they would pay up as soon as they could. Dobson found the whimpering of Mrs Pod's orphans particularly exasperating, so much so that within hours he decided to go back to pamphlet-writing.

About two years later, Marigold Chew asked him about his numbers racket, but by then Dobson's cinematic enthusiasm was for films about the earth being invaded by hostile extra-terrestrial beings with suckers and tentacles, and he was busy writing an essay explaining why they always landed their spaceships near major American cities, rather than, say, English seaside resorts or campsites.

Source : Some Things Dobson Did When He Was Not Writing Pamphlets, ed. Aloysius Nestingbird et al