E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dinosaurs and lady friends Twenty-five years after the first edition of the Duplex Planet was published, David Greenberger is still discovering strange poetry in the words of the elderly BY CHRIS WRIGHT

N, the fourteenth letter of the English lingo

Is the first letter of about five hundred words

Is contained in the word bingo

And is not compared to a buccaneer’s slashing swords

Ernest Noyes Brookings

One wintry afternoon 25 years ago, a young man sat in his Brookline apartment stapling sheets of paper together. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but this was important work, work that would change his life and the lives of dozens of others, people who thought they were beyond changing. Nor could he have known that these typed, mimeographed pages — one man’s thoughts about mustaches, another’s request for a smoke — would go on to inspire books, films, songs, paintings, comics, poems, sculptures, theatrical performances, and an R.E.M. album cover. The day David Greenberger produced the first issue of the Duplex Planet, he could’ve had no idea that he was, in a literal sense, making history.

It’s difficult to say what, exactly, the Duplex Planet is. Today, a quarter-century after he toiled over that stapler in Brookline, even Greenberger has difficulty characterizing it. "I’m doing this thing that isn’t quite one thing or another," he says. "It falls between the cracks." Stated simply, Greenberger conducts interviews with elderly people, writes them down, and puts them in a magazine. This, though, doesn’t begin to capture the power of his work. "I’ve given a face and a character to aspects of decline," he says. "Everything in nature comes together, and everything comes apart."

If a crow would see my picture the crow would fly away.

Viljo Lehto

GREENBERGER’S STORY begins in February 1979, at the Duplex nursing home, in Jamaica Plain. At the time, Greenberger, a college graduate in his mid 20s, was at loose ends about what to do with his life. He had an idea that he wanted to be involved with old people, though he didn’t know how, or even why. He’d recently made friends with a man in his 70s named Herb, and this had had an impact on him. He’d been able to see beyond the wrinkles. They’d had fun together. So when he heard that the Duplex was looking for an activities director, Greenberger applied. "I thought I’d find more guys like Herb," he recalls. "I didn’t know to what end. I didn’t have a plan."

This might seem like an odd career choice for a 25-year-old man — particularly one with Greenberger’s interests. A transplant to Boston from Erie, Pennsylvania, he was in a relatively successful band, called Men & Volts. A graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art, he was a budding painter. He liked to write. With thick-framed glasses and a mop of curly hair, he had that artsy-brainy-geeky look that women love. And yet, at a time when many of his peers were directing their energies toward more age-appropriate activities — getting laid, getting high — Greenberger was seeking out the company of people his grandparents’ age. "They seemed a little exotic to me or something," he says.

Greenberger didn’t really know what to expect when he arrived at the Duplex. A quirky, shambolic institution housing 45 men in various stages of decline, the place was part of a dying breed — the small, privately owned nursing home that favors intimacy over the bottom line. The owner of the Duplex, as Greenberger remembers him, was "a South Boston, skirt-chasing, hard-drinking, dirty-joke-telling guy who had a heart of gold." A few of the staff members had been there for decades. "Sometimes," says Ed Alessi, a social worker who had clients at the home, "you couldn’t tell the staff from the patients."

Even at the Duplex, Greenberger stood out. Alessi recalls a dance he organized early on. "He had a band play, a rock band. One woman got up and started belting out this blues number. It was just dynamite. This, if you know about nursing homes, was out of the norm. This is not playing bingo or doing arts and crafts." Another unusual activity Greenberg encouraged was conversation. Men used to hearing little more than a hollered "How are you?!" from people were suddenly confronted with Greenberger’s more probing questions: "What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?" or "Why do people kiss?" And these: "Would you swim in coffee if it wasn’t too hot?" "How close can you get to a penguin?"

David Greenberger: Who invented sitting down?

Bill Niemi: Probably the inventor of the first chair.

As soon as he started at the Duplex, Greenberger began carrying a little notebook around with him. "I’d write down everything — ‘Can I get a cigarette?’ — anything at all," he says. "I didn’t know what it was for." One afternoon, he decided to type up, staple, and give copies of his notes to the men, many of whom were, at best, from blue-collar backgrounds. "They couldn’t have been less interested. Basically, they were saying, ‘Is this all we get? Isn’t there cake?’ They shuffled away, most of them." That night, Greenberger took the notes home with him. His roommates were considerably more enthusiastic, reading excerpts aloud to each other, passing copies on to their friends. The Duplex Planet was born.

The first issue of the Duplex, available for $1, came out in 1979. Greenberger would sell it at local record stores or by subscription, relying on word of mouth and a few press reviews for publicity. In some ways, you could describe this odd little magazine as an early example of the offbeat chapbooks that exploded in the 1980s and ’90s — a kind of proto-’zine. The size of a theater program, with a raw, Spartan design, the book would often feature photographs of Duplex residents or artwork they’d created. The real attraction, though, was the interviews, the fragments of thought recorded by Greenberger, which ranged from the astute to the mundane, the poetic to the muddled. Sometimes the Duplex’s content was very funny. Sometimes it was terribly sad. Often it was both at the same time. What the magazine never was, though, was boring.

David Greenberger: What do you think George Washington’s voice sounded like?

Frank Kanslasky: Like Jimmy Durante. Who can prove it? Can you prove it? No one can. Let it go. Jimmy Durante. Ever hear him talk? He didn’t sound too bad. You don’t want him to sound like Tarzan, do you?

David Brewer: It sounded like a dollar bill.

Greenberger knew immediately that he’d hit on something special with the Duplex Planet. Three years after he’d started at the home, he quit his job and devoted himself to producing the magazine — supplementing his income with the occasional graphic-design job. He stopped painting. The band fell apart. "I felt like I had found my voice with this," he says. "I felt that this was the thing I was meant to do — even if I didn’t know what the this was." Greenberger did know what the this wasn’t — it wasn’t oral history, and it wasn’t man-on-the-street stuff. "I didn’t want to talk about issues," he says. "I wasn’t trying to get stories of the time they saved a dog from a burning building. It was anything they wanted to talk about, you know, ‘What happened to your other shoe?’"