You & I

by Padgett Powell

Well, easy now, he is after all adolescent, not fully formed. He is not to ride around wanting Jayne Mansfield—

  No, you are right, he rides around wanting J Lo. It is the same thing.

  Who is J Lo?

  A pop star. That is a contraction of her name.

  When you say pop star, isn’t there a specific field of endeavor that one first—

  Yes, but they get a little notice in one thing and then immediately are everything and it’s just easier to consider them pop stars. I have no idea what J Lo was at first. The Cragiator wants her, man, leave it at that, will you?

  I am interested only in the Cragiator’s turning his boys. I just hope to God that is not genital in its import.

  It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter.

  What doesn’t matter?

  I guess I am saying that nothing matters.

  I have no idea what you are saying, but when you say “it doesn’t matter” what is the antecedent to “it”?

  I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what the antecedent to it is.

  You have lost your mind.

  Yes, and it doesn’t matter.

  Nothing matters.

  Correct.

  If elephants go extinct, it doesn’t matter.

  Technically, no. I admit it is a shame. But a shame does not matter.

  If the Hutus slaughter the Hittites, it does not matter.

  No. Not Hitler, not Huns.

  Ants?

  They do not matter.

  If buzzards stop eating the dead?

  It will smell, the smell does not matter.

  If the globe becomes a desert?

  No.

  If the people who support classical music stop supporting it and it too goes extinct?

  No.

  If Sears fails?

  Well, that matters.

  What if you brew a roach with the coffee, as I did not too long ago, the roach sitting like a king on the throne of the funnel into the pot, if kings can be imagined boiled alive on their thrones?

  He was sitting there, dead?

  He was sitting there, upright, dead, and looking not unhappy.

  I think that mattered. I think you could not probably have drunk that coffee.

  I did not, after two sips.

  It matters if you brew a roach in your coffee then, but nothing else matters.

  You sound like a child.

  That slur is fully merited. It doesn’t matter.

  But this idea that “it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter” – this is a different debate.

  Yes, it’s where I began. Sounding like a child.

  No, a child says nothing matters, but it takes an adult to say it doesn’t matter that nothing matters, because it may well be that a lot depends on one’s claiming that nothing matters. I suspect that, if one makes the claim at all, he is saying that something matters.

  Well, the fact is, to say “It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter” is not to say “Nothing matters” at all. I said that that was an equivalent position, but that was loose. One does need to know what is referred to by the second “it doesn’t matter.” As you properly noted.

  We need a philosopher here to take over for me. Where’s the jumpsuit? I am making a run.

  You be the Cragiator and I’ll be Studio Becalmed and let’s go into them hills.

  All right as long as I don’t have to get out of this chair.

  Fair enough. Mount your pony, Sarge. Over in them hills we will have a nice camp.

  It will have a canvas water bag hanging by the stream.

  I want a pot of beans. Underground beans. What are those beans in Maine that look like cows?

  Got me there. I want a hammock and a rifle.

  Indian servant ladies.

  What?

  Indian servant ladies.

  I have never seen “Indian ladies” in a phrase. I have never seen “servant ladies” in a phrase. It’s like butler Huns, or something.

  Well, I’ll not say squaws. I don’t want squaws. I want a helpmeet with dark skin to tend the beans, that is all, in this heavenly camp we can be in without getting out of these chairs.

  I want a Campeche chair, in the camp.

  You know Peter Patout’s Campeche chair worth a half million dollars was stolen in New Orleans and he got it back?

  I do know that.

  I had the GERD all last night.

  I want a breeze in the camp. The leaves to blow into the stream and flash the silver undersides of the cotton-wood, and the Indian servant ladies’ hair to move beautifully in the sun, and the flannel shirts to be the right shirts to be wearing in the wind, and a new-car smell in the camp without a new car in the camp.

  I am tired.

  I’m tired too, Helen.

  I wish Helen hadn’t been tired.

  She wasn’t tired.

  I know. Don’t be insensitive.

  I am too tired to any longer not be insensitive. It takes a lot of energy to be sensitive.

  That may be the lesson of civilization.

  The lesson of civilization is that sooner or later we will fuck everything up, is it not?

  Roll tide.

  I’d like to get worked up about that, since it’s useless to get worked up about that.

  Tecumseh was a chief, and Mr. and Mrs. Sherman named their blue-eyed baby boy Tecumseh, and after wiping out Georgia single-handedly without finding any Indians in his path he went out West and found some Indians to wipe out. William Tecumseh Sherman. Doesn’t that just chap some ass?

  When did you become Wounded Knee?

  I am large, in the spirit.

  I want a newspaper but I don’t really want to read it.

  We might want to wrap fish or something, litter box.

  It’s Friday, someone should suit up, get a paper and some liquor and we’d be all set.

  I was in a house trailer one time, part of a party of drunks visiting another party of drunks, and the trailer hosts were called Bill and Dick and I was there partying for a good while before I realized that Bill was a woman. She was thin and had curly hair like a Marx brother, and was quiet, maybe I am thinking of Harpo – which one had the angelic white hair? And this Bill leaned forward to get a drink off the coffee table and his shirt opened a bit and I saw tiny wizened breasts and as a result started paying more attention and it developed that her name was Billie Mae or something like that and they just called her Bill. Theretofore I had been desparate trying to figure out if the rust stains on Dick’s T-shirt were rust or shit.

  You were partying, dude.

  Indeed I was.

  I have never heard wizened used before in speech.

  I have never used it before. It is the right word, I think. Her hair was not white, it was very soft-looking and curly, maybe Harpo is not the one I want, which one had brown hair? I had been sitting there trying to figure out how this effeminate queer was accepted by these trailer drunks this way when this whole Billie Mae revelation exploded on me, and these poor little tits, and the shitty shirt everyone was comfortable with, and realizing then that this Dick dude in the shitty shirt was wont to mount little Bill with her curls and little titties.

  Frightening. You were having a hardcore intro to boozing.

  I was.

  It has stood you in good stead.

  It made me Army strong. It made me be all I could be.

  Take me down to funky town if ever you were going to. Dude.

  Tell me about it.

  I’ve about had it.

  Me too.

  I’m done.

  The battle is over.

  Not lost, or won, but over.

  Amen. Take me to funky town.

  Can’t you see that, at the gates, or there waiting for Charon to tie up and watching that dog closely – is Cerberus on the boat, by the way? – saying, “Take me down to Funky Town, my man.”

  I ’magine he has heard some interesting disclaimers and directives.
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  Would I be naive though in thinking that Take me down to Funky Town might be a first?

  I’d risk it.

  What about “I missed you, Charon, you poo poo train.”

  Bold.

  After the main thrust of an activity or a venture, should one continue to give it ghost thrusts?

  As a dog does?

  I suppose.

  Well, the air thrust is funny, so I suppose one should do it if one is prepared to look like a dog humping air. For the comedic benefit it confers.

  But the ghost thrust is otherwise worthless, you think? Not likely to sire anything?

  What enterprise do you have in mind?

  Well, I was thinking of us. Sitting here. I think we have asserted ourselves and that now maybe we are ghost thrusting.

  We hardly asserted ourselves.

  Of course. But we had our say.

  We had our say.

  What is left?

  For someone – one’s daughter is the most acute vision – to come in and see our effects, our toys, books, how many or few shoes we had, observe how worn or not worn or pitiful they are (in my old man’s case it was about nine or seven pairs of Hushpuppies identical except in their pastel colors), put it all in boxes, locate the will, call some people. Feel sad. Go on her way.

  Doesn’t it seem that there used to be more to it?

  How so?

  Maybe, more to people? So that a passing had a larger moment?

  I suppose even now there is the occasional grandee. You saw Kennedy.

  I mean on a private plane, though.

  I know what you mean.

  You, for example, you even wrote some of the books this daughter will handle. What is she to do with them?

  She should put them with the others and be done and they be gone. I was a sad sack, end of chapter. I like that. I’d like a drink.

  I would too. We can at least not be maudlin on top of everything else.

  Let’s air hump to the store and repair our spirits.

  My little red shorts is already down.

  We are not yet dead.

  Not yet.

  At some point we will stop joking about it and become afraid.

  We do not have the inner resources that would allow us not to be afraid.

  Nor the wit to say that we are in the antechamber to heaven.

  We will be in the wheel-chair circle, where we said we would never be.

  That expression where the mouth is frozen open – is that what is called a rictus? Is that Latin? Does it refer to that expression only after death? What is it called when one is in the wheel-chair circle still alive enough to drool?

  Dude. Slow down.

  I was getting worked up.

  I could tell.

  My Latin was now like sixty years ago. Caesar did not do rictus.

  Caesar got out neatly before the wheel-chair circle.

  I cannot see older civilizations having had wheelchair circles, somehow. What did they do with the old folks too afraid to die?

  They stoned them. They never let them collect in corrals, high-profit corrals that offer dignity.

  We really are going to be afraid and we really are going to also refuse to die and we will give away the free dignity and purchase the other expensive dignity. I have known this since I could not even put my dog down. Fortunately he was eaten a little bit by a cougar.

  That was a stroke of luck.

  You are telling me.