You & I

by Padgett Powell

  God, I feel small and dumb.

  Anything happen?

  No, the usual small and dumb.

  When, what I want to know, did we feel otherwise?

  When we were five.

  When we were small and dumb.

  Yes, then we did not feel small and dumb.

  Were we large and smart?

  I would say we were expansive and hopeful, full of cheer and possibility – we were then the way one is supposed to be as an actualizing human adult, who is actually small and dumb.

  It’s almost a kind of Darwinian irony, isn’t it?

  I have no idea what a Darwinian irony is, but I think you have struck the nail on the head anyway.

  That is so gratifying, as opposed to striking the thumb.

  Or missing the nail.

  What is that called, when you miss and hit the wood and leave the impression of the hammer face in the wood?

  That is called a…

  Like, a rose, a…

  We are senile. Look, here’s one right here in the window sill.

  I’m calling it a rosedale.

  It is not a rosedale.

  I know it is not a rosedale. I am senile, not retarded.

  You are small and dumb. We are small and dumb.

  Eggzackly. We have proved our point.

  You know that thing, where you are supposed to live every day as if it’s your last?

  Yes.

  Do you have any idea how that is actually done?

  No, not beyond that we don’t do it.

  I know we do not do it. But were we to do it, what would we do?

  I have no idea. I sense we have talked about this before.

  It frequently troubles me.

  Okay. Let’s do it. Live every day of our lives as if it’s the last day of our life. Let’s see, that’s LEDOOLAIITLDOOL. It sounds like a Mayan god.

  Get me a ticket to Tahiti!

  I want to live on the left bank! Speak French well!

  Paul Newman!

  What?

  Fucker in a race car drinking beer and not getting fat, every day of his life like the last, ledoolaiitldool! And handsome as shit! So handsome he did not even run around with women!

  I want to put my own shoes, or someone else’s come to think of it, in an advancing tide of lava!

  Ivory-billed woodpecker! Get me to that swamp!

  Dancing classes in the afternoon!

  That’s expensive.

  Yes, but.

  True. Ledoolaiitldool, how quickly one can forget. Sitting here on a budget. In fact, it’s living every day of your life as if it’s your last dime. That’s what it really is.

  I saw on TV last night that Jack Nicklaus has three grass tennis courts at his house. Different kinds of grass.

  We do not have any grass in the yard. The yard is ten by ten feet.

  Jack can ledoolaiitldool, we can’t—

  No, that is not true. That is the conventional failure everyone makes. We can ledoolaiitldool, even without resources, if we can figure out what it really means to ledoolaiitldool. It does not involve going to Paris if you cannot go to Paris. It must involve doing what one can do.

  Is there a way of going to the liquor store as if it’s that last trip?

  What if it is not a matter of doing something but of thinking something?

  Hmmm. Rad. It probably is. That is why we can’t do it.

  We cannot conceive of life as ending today and therefore of living today as if there is no tomorrow.

  We would not think that way if we were playing tennis on that court over there and let’s say you said, Jack, fuck court No.1, this Bahia shit, I want to be on that clipped Scottish pubic hirsuteness you got over there, thanks for having us out, Jack!

  You have lost it again.

  I know it. I like losing it.

  It may be what we do toward ledoolaiitldool. Lose it.

  Lose it like there’s no tomorrow.

  LILTNT. Liltnt. Lil’ TNT.

  Here we are at Alfred Nobel!

  Einstein!

  What?

  Well, he won it, didn’t he?

  I suppose. The nuclear-bomb man got the dynamite man’s prize.

  How did Nobel get so much money for gunpowder and Einstein so little for so much more?

  Conundrum of the age, if you ask me. Teaching at Princeton, an old man.

  Is it because the age of colonialization was over so Einstein had only people to blow up instead of people to put to work?

  Suits me. Ledoolaiitldool!

  Lil’ TNT.

  When was the last time you had a friend?

  I do not know.

  When was the last time you read a newspaper?

  Same answer. Is it the same question?

  It is the same question.

  Well, certainly it is the same answer.

  Did we leave the earth, or were we never on it?

  We tried to be on it.

  Precisely. You had some friends as a child, did you not? Wasn’t there a point you even subscribed to a newspaper and thought you were in the game? And then at a point you had no friends and no use for the paper, like a worm in a bed of worms.

  Like a what?

  Worm bed. The conceit is somewhat forced.

  I’d say errant altogether.

  Maybe that too. Does it matter? Can a conceit describing a man with no friends and no newspaper be aught but errant? Isn’t errancy the issue? Isn’t then the errant conceit perfect? Isn’t the unerrant conceit to suggest the ultimately errant state—

  I get it. My objection to worm bed is withdrawn.

  I would not wish to work – not that I wish to work for anyone – for the New Orleans Police Department.

  Yeah. Count me out too.

  Counting you out too.

  NOPD, unh uh.

  Would like to take a drive in an old heavy Cadillac convertible on like US 90 somewhere, maybe on a dapply part in a sunny swamp. Purchase something nice for a little girl, put it on the seat beside me, and ride home with it like Clyde Barrow chewing gum and with hair tonic in my shiny shiny hair.

  You have lost it again.

  Beginning to really like losing it.

  Sometimes…

  Yes. That says it all.

  I wish it would rain.

  I wish I had Kathy to talk into taking her clothes off in the playhouse and then when she tells me her father told her not to do that anymore I could run and hide and be afraid of his coming to my house and effecting the end of me. What if, I wonder, we could know even then that our parents would laugh at something like that, and we could have lived lives of relative cheer and comfort instead of in stupid little recesses of complete ignorance? What I am saying – am I saying this? – is that one’s whole life is not having the wit to not be afraid of Kathy’s father. This is why we do not know, have a clue, really, how to live today as if it’s the last day of our lives. We think we have the score because we can see that fifty years ago we did not have the score, bolting from the playhouse, but the fact is we are bolting from another playhouse today. We do not even recognize it as a playhouse.

  You sound like William Faulkner.

  Mr. Bill? Why thank you.

  So, look.

  Where?

  No, here. At some point we cannot keep sitting here proposing absurdist trips to the liquor store, pondering pederasts on the school bus. Adopting impossibly sweet boys from Kenya.

  I want a house boy until he is Herschel Walker.

  I do too. So we keep on with this blather, the want of testosterone, others knowing how to live but not us, and finally there is one of us can’t walk or something, do you realize that this can get ugly, as they say?

  We enter assisted-living facilities!

  No, we don’t, but if we do, we still then get transferred to the drool-circle facility. We are in assisted living, right now.

  So what are you saying?

  I think there is a point after which the jokes stop and we have to f
igure out how to die.

  Weeping bitterly and unchallenged by the roadside.

  Precisely.

  Where does that come from, anyway?

  I do not know. I thought it was yours.

  Let’s say Shelley.

  Do you know him?

  No.

  How did Byron die?

  Don’t know. Lot of those guys got off with consumption early.

  Do you think we could have a duel?

  We could joke about a duel for weeks and never do it. What would be the odds of two fatal shots? One of us would be dead, the other unable to off himself, and be charged with murder.

  What if one of us has a stroke and the other has to cope?

  I dig where you are coming from. I need a drink. What about an adventure that wipes us out? Imprudently film the griz.

  What?

  Film the griz.

  You have lost your mind.

  It works. You live in a school bus for a few months, talk to the griz a few years, show them off to your waitress girlfriends, finally talk to the wrong griz, and you’re out.

  I see no griz.

  Point.

  Is it going to rain?

  I hope so.

  If it rains my spirits will lift.

  I like to watch the action glow.

  How does the action glow? What action?

  No, glow is not a verb.

  What is glow?

  Glow is a noun.

  I thought action was a noun.

  No. Action is an adjective. Action glow. The glow of the action.

  You like to watch it?

  Yes, I like to watch the action glow.

  What does that mean?

  Don’t know.

  Are you looking at the freeway? A field of lightning bugs?

  No idea what I mean.

  I distrust people who call them fireflies.

  I remember that. Those people. They are the same people who would pronounce the t in often and say interest with three syllables. Where do they come from?

  They come from a strange room.

  Can they be forgiven calling lightning bugs fireflies now that we have killed off the lightning bugs?

  Do you recall the occasional accident when a lightning bug got crushed and smeared and the smear glowed?

  Yes.

  Was that action glow?

  I think it was. That is not what I had in mind when I said it but now I think I can say that is what I had in mind, like that. Not restricted to that, mind you.

  Of course.

  It’s a useful concept.

  Apparently.

  It’s not much different, grammatically, from, say, blowhole.

  I imagine a whale watcher watches the action glow above the blowhole, in certain light.

  That phosphorescent glow in the water, in surf, is that animals of some sort? Is that a smearing as it were of lightning bugs, real small ones, in the ocean?

  Either that or it’s some kind of elemental sparking.

  What, like tiny flint?

  Am I Jacques Cousteau?

  Weep for Phiweep.

  He died on a wocky outcwopping.

  We are going to hell.

  To watch the action glow. We’ll enjoy it.

  Let’s run over there and pick that trash up.

  That the brothers’ trash.

  It’s in our world, dude, and it’s not rocking our world.

  It seems to me that the debate about civilization and the nuanced forms it can take, whether democracy is the summum bonum and so forth, whether socialism is tenable or evil, and so forth—

  Yes?

  —Well, the debate can stop as soon as you recognize that a good half of the people on earth are willing to unwrap their Snickers and drop the wrapper as they bite into the candy bar. The egalitarian saviors standing next to them can shut the fuck up right then and there.

  That is an indelicate and unattractive figure of speech, shut the fuck up.

  I find it indispensable in certain instances, this being one.

  What if I were to contend that the egalitarian savior who won’t shut the fuck up is, though, in a sense dropping his own Snickers wrappers all over the environment as well. They are spewing forth in a self-appointed proselytizing that the simple candy eaters did not ask for.

  You are strengthening my case, not weakening it.

  I can see that.

  Half the world is an animal and the other half a meddling high-minded egghead and they are not coming together except in certain forms of predation and exploitation of the other. This is why tyrants have their spectacular runs. They force peace momentarily. Then the candy eaters start to get a leg up, or the meddlers do, and the pseudo-truce starts to fray, and someone offs the tyrant, or he dies naturally if he was really good, and it’s back to chaos.

  So you do not want to go pick up the trash?

  I don’t, but I would like it not to be there.

  Let’s just pick it up.

  People will drop more of it as we do it. At our feet.

  Yes, we will appreciate that as a confirmation of our intellectual superiority. We knew that would happen. We will look around for a Stalin to materialize and stop it. People do not care what is done to them if they see the shit slapped out of the other half.

  If you had a good clear fingerprint on a Tayto bag and you could take it to Stalin and get the owner of the print hung, would you do it?

  I would do it. I would also gas anyone yelling “In the hole!” at a golf tournament. The people who yell this from the tee would drop dead right there, at the tee. The people saying it near the green, where it is tenable that the ball go in, could be buried to their necks in the sand traps and left there to keep saying “In the hole” until they expired. There would be hundreds of tired decomposing faces in the sand, posing a new kind of hazard for golfer and spectator alike.

  All right. While we are at it, I want anyone using a cell phone in a car to be put into a Final Demolition Derby wherein your car has to be moving as a salvation number flashes among hundreds of false salvation numbers flashing from hundreds of sites in the arena, on the walls, on billboards, on the licence plates of other cars, on the radio dials inside the cars, and you have to dial these numbers as you drive in the demolition and get the one right number to be saved. Otherwise you drive and you dial and you crash until you die there doing just that.

  I think many of those people will enjoy that.

  You are probably right. Still, it will be better than the gladiators were to Rome.

  Do you remember that nice little ham we got?

  We got a ham?

  Not recently. That girl who is a cook sent it to us.

  Like, a real ham?

  Yes.

  Vaguely.

  It was not the standard name but it was the real deal. Like Edwards. An Edwards ham.

  That does not sound correct, Edward’s ham.

  No, but it was a correct ham.

  I would like to have some drugs.

  I would too, but I am trying to think of the name of the ham.

  What you are supposed to do in this instance is save the packaging. A ham of this sort, if I have it right, comes in a fetching muslin bag with a lot of logoage and ethos printed on it. You take the ham out of the bag and put it in the bathtub or whatever other ritual you are so traditionally expected to so fondly perform, perhaps as instructed to do even on this very bag, and eventually eat the ham and discard the bath water but you save the bag.

  Logoage.

  Yes, sometimes a want of logoage. Like, just a name, so simple that it looks like a logo. “Edwards Ham” might be just this sort of non-logo logo. Only the cognoscenti know about Edwards Ham, the non-logo says.

  All right. Help me find the quiet Edwards Ham bag.

  All right. Maybe we will locate drugs in the search.

  Glory be to God.

  Lay me down to sleep beside the calm waters. No sheep. I don’t want to be on the ground near sheep. Frankly I�
��d be less bothered if I were on the ground near lions than were I on the ground near things grazing.

  Do you have any idea where the ham bag would be?

  No.

  Have you been there when the famous fall down drunk and you must help them up and they get angry with you for it?

  We have all been there for that.

  When we fall down ourselves and have to help our ownself up others get angry with us for it.

  Yes. We are the small not famous with whom everyone is allowed to be angry.

  When we fall down and get up we can even be angry with ourselves.

  Yes.

  We are the unthanked, the angry-with.

  We are the small.

  May we quit?

  Quit what?

  Quit. As in Thou shall not quit, commandment eleven I guess.

  Oh yes, we may quit.

  We may be quitters?

  Oh yes.

  People will then be more angry—

  Beyond angry.

  I think about the slaughter of the Indians. Had we been able to quit, we might not have done that. But we could not quit.

  Is that a pink poodle?

  I would say apricot.

  Is that a cat with it?

  I believe that to be a blue creme.

  A woman is walking a dog and a cat by our house in these rude suburbs and the dog is pink and the cat is blue. She does not appear to be drunk. Or famous.

  She is motoring along. Apricot and blue creme.

  Call out to her.

  And say what?

  I don’t know.

  No.

  Why not?

  I am afraid to.

  Would you be interested in a book entitled The Cragiator Turns His Boys?

  I suppose I would. What is the Cragiator?

  I don’t know.

  You don’t know this book?

  This book does not even exist. I have envisioned it.

  Well, what is the Cragiator?

  I think the Cragiator is a fellow named Craig whom his boys call the Cragiator.

  His little posse.

  Yes, I suppose.

  This all makes sense. I recall Studio Becalmed.

  I think the Cragiator is of a substantially later generation.

  We can bank on it. He cannot be as robust as Studio.

  He will be to a degree more pitiful.