When the ice woman judges that the baby is large enough to ride on the seat without falling off, she puts it there, propped in a corner and held periodically by her hand. From the seat proper the baby can see the ice and the tongs and the ice woman delivering the ice. The tongs look angry and weird, but because he has seen the similar springs under the seat, holding the two of them up, the baby thinks of them as friendly things. He will come in time to see the tongs as not unlike the jaws of giant ants. But for now he is but a bouncing baby boy looking like a small bag of potatoes in a tight woolen bag on a buckboard seat. He has a small red hat.
His pursed red lips, like a cherry in the flat expanse of his potato face, make the ice woman want to eat him up. She does indeed kiss him with a wild unmotherly hunger that makes cannibalism tenable as she does it. She forces herself not to eat him up. He is grateful without knowing it, and likes her very much, knowing it. He comes to be her baby. Whose baby he really is, who she really is—in short, all of the film we do not have in archive—we do not know and we do not care.
We would like to instruct you not to care either. If you are the sort who must care, and must know things, we would politely suggest that this entertainment, if that is what it is, is not for you. The baby is not for you, nor hobnailed boots holding it down safely to the jarring wagon floor, nor the baby potatoed up into the hard corner of the seat in the freezing air about the ice wagon, its frozen lips a happy juicy red that the woman kisses with unmotherly abandon because she is not the mother, perhaps, or perhaps she is, or perhaps mother or not she just can’t resist kissing the red lips given that all she has in her life is cometh-ing with other people’s ice the livelong clodhopping day, watching her horse’s road apples fall into the road and steam there and be rolled into by the wagon wheels—none of this is for you, and we give you your money back, no need for the door to necessarily hit you in the back on your way out, Jesus Christ Almighty. You will misinterpret, if you were to stay, seeing the woman dismount the wagon periodically and go behind a tree and virtually outright neck with the baby she gets so hungry for him. This affection is relieved with plenty of proper nuzzling, and it all tickles and delights the baby, who is for it the happiest baby alive and who ever was alive, but you won’t be around to observe that. No, you will have bolted on behalf of the baby, to report crimes against humanity, and to watch an important show on TV. We know that one of your insurance policies is about to expire, and we are not going to tell you which one until it is too late. You have chapped our ass, and the baby’s ass, and the ice woman’s ass, entire. Get out. Your entire existence is predicated on chapping ass. You exist only to mint the dull coin of your bourgeois outrage, and to hand out this coin to the disinterested bystander, whom you presume to be the population of the whole world (now that you have “pluralized” it and “globalized” it). You are some kind of beggar in reverse, a beggar handing out moral alm no one asked you for. Let us tell you something: you can get away with that shit down here, but if we find this begging going on in Heaven or Hell, either one, there is going to be real and final trouble for you. We will stuff that coin and all the public-opinion syrup that lubricates it up both your ends. You will come to realize what nice guys we were to let you cant on down here and sing your jingles and dance your outrage jigs so happily.
Leave us and the baby Mao and the ice woman alone.
Yeltsin Dancing
To Putin I have given over everything but the nuclear suitcase. As dense as it is, I feel pretty light on my feet with only the suitcase on my hands. I look good with it, my white hair and the red suitcase. It got stuck under the bed and I popped a latch off extracting it, regrettable but the other latch holds. The landlady was demanding the rent and I had to move quickly.
Moreover, I have found the nuclear suitcase to be a superior chick magnet. Westerners in the know assure me that it can hold its own, a nuclear suitcase, with a BMW. I have replaced the cyanide vial in the handle with a 3-pack of condoms. I consider this a practical post-Cold-War accommodation and not a sacrifice to the original genius of the design. I am more likely to contract an STD than I am to have to deploy the suitcase.
I have learned to dance and believe it to be good for my heart. I do not subscribe to the platform of cardiovascular benefits said to accrue from exercise, I take simple and uplifting joy, the heart’s first and final food, from the radiance of the disco ball. In attempting to sing along with some Bee Gees cuts I have come to appreciate their talent. They are, in their lyrics, pure exotica to the Eastern mind, rather the aural equivalent of Levis. They can reach higher registers than even Michael Jackson as a child did, I believe.
Putin is fucking up, or not, I pay it no mind. He is a strong man, so if he is fucking up, it is strong fucking up.
Yes, Putin is a strong man, but the delicacy of his fingers worries me. My own are thick pink wretched protuberances, manly. His are . . . his are lady fingers, which disturb me, which disturb everyone, if I may presume, on a man. But let us not dwell on the matter of Putin’s adolescent-snake fingers and my fat pan-sausage fingers. After all, I have the suitcase.
The suitcase I gave to Putin, and familiarized his creepy fingers with the lethal toggles and keyholes and buttons thereof, is a dummy. This fact he will never discover. Even if he is moved to deploy his suitcase, which he will not be, any more than was I, he will attribute the ensuing non-end of the world to mechanical dysfunction of the suitcase, not to fraudulence of the suitcase. He will shake his head at the irony of the faulty nuclear suitcase—no better than any other modern technical manufacture, the portable red seat and soul of universal destruction!—and call for a red phone and be on about the business of ending the world. The false suitcase will never be exposed as such. It will sit innocent in the fallout, forgotten.
I have an opportunity to procure some dance instruction from one or another of Travolta’s instructors for one or another of the movies, I am uncertain as to which. When I dance, sometimes I have an odd vision of myself as the American comedian Jack Benny. Then, standing beside me, but not dancing, is his manservant, Rochester, on his face the kindest smile of disapproval. I should not be, the smile seems to say, boogying. I know I should not be boogying, I want to say, who are you, Rochester, to presume—when, of course, I see that Rochester is not really there and I, having lost the beat, am bumbling in the sparkling light on the dazzling plastic floor. I check my bearings and locate my real nuclear suitcase under my table and my drink on my table. In the old days the parasol in my drink was a radio but these days the parasol is not a radio.
I am free now, too, to have a dog. I did not think it fair before to subject a dog to presidential protocols. And my dear Naina objected. Now we have parted, she and I, and I leave any explanation of that to her. I wish her well. I consider a dog.
None of the girls drawn to me, with or without the power of the suitcase, has voiced an objection to my having a dog. For this and other reasons, like their modern underwear, I am fond of their company. The difficulty with having a dog, from the perspective of a free dancing man who can destroy the world, resides merely in selecting which breed. After that the matter is downhill. I know how to look at a pedigree and I know how to evaluate a puppy. If you have been leader of the second-most-powerful nation on earth, the elected leader, and the first such to leave office voluntarily, you know how to administer the puppy test. You place him on his back and hold him there with the palm of your hand and see if he accepts it and stays, or struggles to free himself.
Many of the girls who have come to me have been in the movies as James Bond girls. They are relieved to discover that the suitcase is real, unlike Bond’s gadgets, which they with some measure of disgust dismiss as phony, all. I wonder at their naivete—what did they expect?—but with girls of this sort, looking the way they do, silicone bombshells, I would be a bit naive myself to point out the lunacy of thinking James Bond should be possessed of real weapons. It occurs to me that Putin is like James Bond in this rega
rd, a humorous conceit.
I have given some thought, as I dance and have many perfect girls and visit kennels, that I might seek employment. What I would most like to be is a television weatherman. I detect that one has little need for a background in meteorology, as indeed the news broadcasters are not required to be, or to have been, reporters. I have this fuzzy vision: dancing in place, my dog at my side and my suitcase in my hand, I point at snow on the map, my white hair looking like snow itself over my florid face, a bursting red tomato of happiness, applause issuing from the studio audience of Bond girls. I call my show “The Good News of Bad Weather.” The suitcase is in view at all times as I predict dire weather. What fine irony! Even the girls appreciate it: the bad weather is in the red thing at my side, they know. I am so not James Bond, they say. This is true.
With or without such a sinecure, do I not have the world by its yaitsi? Few men evolve to such Elysian fields in their lifetime. I am lucky, lucky man.
Yeltsin Spotted Abroad in a Bar
We’ve got to get these wagons unloaded. The channel, tubing, I-beam, pipe, rod, conduit, connectors, the milled bombs, the forged doohickeys—I forget what they’re called, are those bells? Why are we stocking bells?—those drilled blocks, the bolts, the cams, tailpipe, Torquemada, tensiometers, and if that is a case of Hi-Bounce Pinky I can’t believe it, but maybe we are to improve our morale with ball games, unload them too, unload it all. The mattresses, the dressers, the mannequins, the raincoats, the marshmallows, the monster makeup, the marble cake, the crabs, the electrical tape, the torque wrenches, the pills, the mustard plasts, the canaries, the tomato starts, the non-medicine, the dogs, the magazines, the men’s underwear, the dailies, the trusses, the small-caliber arms, the hex nuts, the candy. Did anyone see my wife drive up? Might have sat there a bit and then eased off? I have found her before down at the corner pottoed after easing off like that, no honking or attempt to notify me that she’s here, just sits there two minutes looking straight ahead and then eases down to Raben’s and has about six gin and tonics before anybody can get there, I have no idea what it is all about.
I have no idea what you and your wives are all about and I have never seen any of them at the loading dock or in Raben’s I don’t think—there is never anyone in there but my wife and a bartender who appears to be mute, and possibly deaf, who at first I thought was Boris Yeltsin and nothing yet has made a very strong argument that it is not Boris Yeltsin except that I don’t know how he’d get here and get employed, etc. My wife’s odd behavior is so . . . odd that I finally decided that if it was Boris Yeltsin maybe that was so odd that it began to explain her behavior, because nothing else did. She sits there and is truculent, if that is the word, she kind of pouts, and says nothing, as I sort of console her off the stool and steer her out. Defiantly sad, is that better, yes, and she doesn’t look at Yeltsin, but Yeltsin looks directly at us, intently, as if he has no American manners; I don’t know for a fact that some Europeans have the manners of children when it comes to looking directly at what they find curious, but I think I have heard something to that effect, and if I have then this looking right at us of Yeltsin’s is another circumstantial thread or tiny fact or twin premise upon which I base the conjecture that it is Boris Yeltsin actually tending bar in Raben’s right here in Youngstown. There is no talking to my wife about it. If I say “Is that Boris Yeltsin serving you these drinks so fast?” she looks at me incredulously and does not say a word. If I say “Why do you not wait for me?” and “Why are you smashed?”—nothing. She goes to bed and sleeps well and there is no mention of any of this until the next time it happens.
None of you has had your wife do this? Have any of you been in Raben’s and seen this Yeltsin character? Well, somebody go, I’m feeling a little isolated here.
Yeltsin and Canaries
I have procured a cage of canaries to go with the red nuclear suitcase, literally and aesthetically balancing me as I move from room to room in the free-market world. They look good together, in one hand the fluttering yellow birds inside the brass wire, the red anodized solid bomb valise in the other, white-haired I tottering stoutly between them, these my chief worldly possessions. The Porsche given me by Kohl I have lost. I have a toilet kit and a preserved leech in a bottle. I am fond of this in a way hard to understand. I do not know how I acquired it. The leech is beautifully segmented and looks like prime, chewy licorice in saline. The bottle cap is matching black. It is all in all a handsome if unusual accoutrement for a traveling dancing nuclear man.
Something somewhat alarming seems to be happening to, or with, or on, or in, or about—I hardly expect to get the English preposition right, whoever can—my fingers. They are shrinking and drying. More precisely, I sense that they are stubbifying and desiccating, becoming, that is, more blunt and more psioritic. They are becoming small fat white bratwursts as dry as toast. It will be difficult soon to carry the suitcase and the birdcage. I have the hope that if I can sling some blood into them that my fingers can grow, reverse this trend. You may see me on the dance floor whirling in an excessive-looking way, arms out like a child pretending to be a gyrocopter. I am aware that this is inelegant dancing, trust me, but I sacrifice style to health, or under health, or into health, whatever. I think most sympathetically of the cartoon character’s three-fingered hand as I seem to tend that way myself. And small stubby hands do not attract chicks. I keep them hidden, or safely in prominent view when holding the red suitcase. No one regards what holds the suitcase. No one regards who holds the suitcase. The red suitcase diverts attention from the very disco ball itself.
Dancing is the meat-eater’s meditation. When you have a disco ball overhead and a plexiglass floor of flashing neon underfoot and 120 decibels in your ear bones, you are nowhere else but in the room and thoughtless.
Working for Brother Catcard
Working for Brother Catcard has been fun. I got to see the whole iceberg incident, from the bow. The pastries are, I am told, and I do not have the wherewithal to doubt, as good as they are in France. My chi is in a super-flow state. I liken it to spoon-beaten magma.
Sister Willetail has improved morale with her good cheer and legs, but I am not pruriently concerned with her. The danger levels on the floor of operations are under control. If a worker gets hurt, he pretty much disappears entirely and there is not the issue of grisly remains.
We all got presents for Christmas, though it was stressed that the giving and the getting was not religiously affiliated, that the date was arbitrary more or less, at the top of the year, more a fiscal-holiday proposition. Once people started unwrapping their things they forgot to be aggrieved that we were calling it Christmas. I got a satellite-grade gyroscope. Benny and Lamar—whom I had not seen since 1960 when they were in the fourth grade, who rescued me from the mob when I was in the second grade in Ocoee Florida by schooling me at marbles, whose sister (Lamar’s) was the first girl I took prurient interest in, though I did not know what prurient interest actually was yet—showed up.
They sat in plastic-webbed lawn chairs and opened their gifts, which appeared to be candy bars, but there had to be a little more to them (the candy bars) than that, because it is fair to say that Benny and Lamar sat there regarding these things mezzed out and beatific, if you can say beatific of grisled old bum-looking dudes nobody has ever seen before except me who saw them as fine-looking (if poor) children in 1960 in a schoolyard in the orange grove that was then Ocoee Florida. Ocoee Florida is now effectively Disney World and Benny and Lamar are, as I say, bums or bum-equivalents, and that they showed up and sat there in odd cheap non-company chairs no one else was sitting in and were mesmerized by candy-bar equivalents is just one of the reasons working for Brother Catcard has been so fun.
There is a preponderance of this equivalence thing; equivalents abound, to the extent that the whole experience at Brother Catcard’s is kind of an equivalent itself, an equivalent to working, you might say. You might say the danger is an equivalent to da
nger, the injuries equivalent to injuries (hence no body parts). Christmas is an equivalent to Christmas, not Christmas. The presents are equivalents to presents. This can be seen in just the two I have so far listed: a gyroscope from a satellite? A candy bar that turns the bum unwrapping it into a stoned fool? Two bums that are supposed to be the same two children you briefly knew fifty years ago and have not seen since? And you have no doubt as to who they are, immediately? Is that not an agreeable equivalent to having lost your mind?
I can hear the sandhill cranes overhead. Bats are friendly. This is impossible to credit. Brother Catcard likes us all to be happy and friendly but it has not made us like bats, and that we are all happy and friendly is as hard to credit, or harder, than that bats are friendly. This is just one of my private calculations. I make private calculations the livelong day. You recall the song “I’ve been working on the railroad/all the livelong day”? Well, we sort of have that cheer here, working in the equivalent to working for Brother Catcard. Even when Floorchief Mayo yells at you it is an equivalent to yelling and is not to be carried heavily in the heart. If your sphericals are spherical and if your tubers grow through the correct holes in the little dirigible chassis, Floorchief Mayo’s yelling does not mean shit to a tree, if I may try to quote Grace Slick, in whom I once did take prurient interest, but never met. What happened to Grace Slick? This is another zone of my private figuring on the factory floor.
What if her parents had named her Gorky Slick? I don’t think I’d be quoting her, in that event, or I’d be quoting her as singing something else entirely, would be my inclination had she been Gorky and not Grace. Small forces have large resultants. This is one reason Floorchief Mayo gets worked up about the tiny holes and the tiny tubers. A microwave oven, in the same line of reasoning, would derange the guidance chips for the bomblets, and we must consequently heat our lunch things in conventional toaster ovens and on hotplates, which return to old-fashionedism I frankly heartily enjoy whether it is slow or not. You also have a high incidence of people burning the dook out of themselves in the break room but I have seen no real complaining.
Cries for Help, Various Page 13