“I was at risk as your student, I thought. The oiler guy looked like he was better raw material.”
“Pshaw. Never edge him up right. Buck him up, yes. Stop that damned whimpering, yes. But the proper attitude of self-unimportance would cast him back into the aquarium in which he died. He did resemble, as you noted, the decaying Plectostomus you found as a child that shocked you because you thought it, for weeks, merely not moving.”
“Sir, you know everything I think?”
“Stop just short of everything.”
“What don’t you know, then? You said you stop short of—”
“You have had, I believe you confessed, my Traveling Woman while we’ve been Men at Our Best?”
“Yes.”
“Well. There are certain final things, in the nature of excretions and animal noises and the quality of ardor, that I choose not to know.”
“I see. But you could.”
“I could.”
“Because you are—is omniscient a meaningful term?”
“Left field. Nothing of the kind. Happy hour!”
With that, Mr. Irony left the suite, headed for the Acapulco Pulquería Número Three-a.
Mr. Irony Renounces Irony
MR. IRONY RENOUNCED IRONY and took his place in line at Unemployment. Where once he would have found the tedium of the protracted process a delight, akin to the moves of a child’s board game, he found the desk-to-desk ordeal—and getting in the wrong line, and then getting in the right line to have it closed when he was one party from the bureaucrat serving it—officious, small-minded, forgiveless horseshit.
With a sheaf of papers so bulky that he longed for a briefcase to hold them in, he stood on one pained leg or the other lamenting his decision to quit irony. It left him uninsulated against the world, as if he had renounced drink or drugs instead. Despair came after him—with little tentacles it reached toward his balding head from the low fiberboard ceiling tiles of the Unemployment Office complex. “I rue the day I quit irony,” he remarked to the woman behind him.
“I wish I hadn’t quit Toys “R” Us,” the woman said.
Despite himself, Mr. Irony felt a small thrill at her response. It was, with his remark … no, he was through with irony. Fourteen hours later, on their third shift of unemployment counselors, the same woman spoke to him again: “Honey, you didn’t really quit your job, did you?
At this instant Mr. Irony conceived of his Desired Vocation, still a blank line on several of his multitudinous forms. He wanted to be a circus rider, a trick rider of horses going in a circle, standing on them, flipping backwards on them, maybe flipping backwards from one to the other …
“I’m worrit about you, mister,” the woman was saying. “I don’t think you know the ropes.”
“Why not?”
“The way you stan there. You can’ stan there that way, all tired like, if you ever done this before. We ain’t begin to get nowhere. I’m fraid you did quit your job.”
“Of course I quit my job,” Mr. Irony said, worried that the woman had somehow detected his enjoyment in the irony of her quitting Toys “R” Us and his quitting irony.
“Child,” she said, “you can’ quit. You got to be fire. You quit, but you git them to fire your ass. You quit in your heart, but you git fire on paper.”
“Maybe I was fired,” Mr. Irony said.
“If you was, you know.”
“Actually, I never really had a job, I had a—”
“Honey, none us ever had no job. Who want that?”
“I had a … style, you might say.”
The woman looked at him with a grin. “You was some kind pimp, I bet. I like them miscegenational pimps—”
“No, madam, it’s—”
“Hell. Don’ get snitty.”
It was going to be a hard life, Mr. Irony saw. Without something to fill the void left by the departure of his vice, he was going to be subject to humorless days until he got high on something else. Christ was out of the question, precisely because He Himself contained no small measure of irony. Even getting high on “life itself” sounded inappropriately ironic. Only being a … circus rider made, at the moment, any kind of clean, unironical sense.
There would be no irony in standing on a horse, if you could. And if the horse moved in a circle, that was its business. And if you had to put on some tights and a sequined vest and some special slippers, and the horse had to wear some flashy, colorful hardware, that was show business. He did not see how a man who had renounced irony could go wrong being a circus rider.
He began trying to fill in Desired Vocation on his forms against his thigh. The woman behind him bent over also to see what he was writing.
“Circus rider. That’s a good one,” she said. “You catchin on. You never get hire.”
Even though there was a rich incense of irony about this woman and everything she said, Mr. Irony liked her. He looked at her fondly and she got down on her hands and knees.
“This the best part of Unemployment, honey. Put them foams on my back and write all you wont to. It feels good. Don’t poke too hard or you’ll come through.”
Mr. Irony did as he was told, and used the human desk as it and he moved incrementally toward their benefits.
Back at his apartment, Mr. Irony had a seizure, or something like a seizure. It was probably equivalent to the withdrawal anxiety common to boozers or druggers, only his fear was uncharted: he was sailing for the first time in the troubled, mundane waters of life without irony. It made him stand glumly beside the refrigerator, knowing that opening it and bending and looking at all the things—cruddy-lipped mustard jars, two olives in a tall bottle, a Baggie full of rotten parsley, a small German roach moving very slowly—that used to delight him in their queer combinations was not a pleasure open to him now. As a young man he had lost his women and lost his mind; as an older man he had lost money and his mind; now he had lost his irony, and it had never been this bad. Women and money were nothing to irony.
At the Unemployment Office he had been denied benefits because he had had no employer. His case worker finally did not doubt that he might have been fired after reading his aptitude questionnaire (under skills, Mr. Irony listed “left-handed”). When the issue of self-employment was broached, Mr. Irony denied stringently that he had been his own employer, a flatly ironic notion and one therefore not available to a reformed ironic. The entire affair—two days and six hours and forty-eight minutes from taking a number to being dismissed as ineligible for benefits—which once would have made his day, or week, was as disappointing as it would have been to the common fools down there trying to get something for nothing. He realized, finally, standing by the refrigerator, just before he opened it and ate the two olives and scared the roach and squeezed a green juice from the parsley Baggie, that being down there had been off limits; what was more ironic than getting paid for not working only if you could prove someone had deemed you unsuitable for working? Why couldn’t you be paid for not working if you were suitable? Only the unfit benefit. It was not Darwinian. It was ironic. It had been, he saw now, a close call, close to a “slip” in the parlance of reforming abusers of substance and, he supposed it was fair to regard himself, abusers of style. He was a reforming abuser of style, a reforming ironic.
There were no books for him, no post-or pre-traumatic stress syndromes, no Adult Children of Ironic Parents groups to go to, no women counselors that spent their lives holding your hand if you’d had too much fun abusing something and now wanted as recompense to hold hands with idle women. No nothing. He was alone. He might have been on Mars. This gave him comfort. At least he was not in a herd of whiners who pulled out a poker chip and explained its significance before they told you their name. Mr. Irony resolved he would carry a cow chip before a poker chip, if that was not ironic—already, he was relieved to discover, he was not sure what irony was. A positive sign.
Still, he was pretty certain that extracting from the pocket in a somber, proud, ceremonious fash
ion and confidentially beginning to explain to an innocent bystander that what this cow chip represented was … was ironic. Perhaps he could, for a while, find a substitute for irony. Substitute therapy was common, even if it itself was perhaps a little ironic.
He had recently witnessed a father and young daughter purchasing some candy for the mother’s birthday. The child, who was allowed to select the candy, decided on chocolate-covered peanuts, and decided that they were “pretend poops.” Indeed, the candies had looked like small, hard turds.
“But don’t tell Mommy we’re giving her pretend poops,” the father instructed.
The child grinned wickedly. “It’ll be … pretty surprisy!”
That, Mr. Irony thought, might be an acceptable substitute for ironic: surprisy. Irony he could quit, but, as methadone to his heroin, he could not quit that which was surprisy.
“Surprisy it is, then,” he announced, still leaning against the refrigerator, immediately looking less glum. He then crawled out of his own kitchen window and crawled back in. It felt good. He felt fine. Not himself, but all right.
“All surprising right,” he said, beginning a rubber-legged dance that came to him. He bandied this way through the apartment, saying “Surprise you!” to walls and paintings and furnishings. He told everything to surprise off. “Just get the surprise out of my way,” he said to a pair of boxer shorts, and deftly toed them—through an incredibly long arc—into the clothes hamper. Suddenly, badly, he wanted a uniformed maid working full time in his small apartment, altogether too small for such a servant, and he wanted only new clothes.
Piling all of his old clothes into a heap, and thinking of how he might safely present himself at the haberdasher’s naked, he paused to congratulate himself: not just any man could kick irony once it had its teeth in him. A lesser man, one less surprisy, would have failed.
The Modern Italian
MARIO MOSCALINI PASSED ON his way out the door every morning one of several Michelin guides to Italy that were kept open to his favorite passage about modern Italy. He sometimes glanced at the books, but he had long before memorized the passage:
Modern Italy.—In this land abounding in every type of beauty, the modern Italian lives and moves with perfect ease. Dark-haired, black-eyed, gesticulating, nimble and passionate, he is all movement and fantasy.
This overflowing vitality appears in many modern achievements that may surprise the visitor. Improvement of the soil, industrial complexes, nuclear power centres, dams, motorways and skyscrapers, characterize the fantastic economic development which has taken place after World War II, giving Italy a new look and belying the legend of the macaroni-eating, guitar-playing Italian. A new way of life has been created in the country.
On Mario, one such modern Italian, these words had the calming, assuring effect of a psalm.
He was thinking specifically of the moving about modern Italy with perfect ease as he whipped his taxi through the customs gates at the port of Livorno to pick up his first fare of the day, a merchant seaman. Mario liked sailors. Unlike regular tourists, they were not finicky about what they wanted to see or do or where they wanted to go. They wanted food, women, to sleep, and they spoke in a direct fashion. With a sailor Mario was free to be himself, a man.
The sailor this morning was well-fed-looking, and Mario was not surprised to hear him ask for a “puta” right away. He turned to the sailor and said, with a conspiratorial wink, “I have large size.”
“Not a fat one,” the sailor said.
“No,” Mario said, “you do not seize my meaning. I have large size.” He held up his arm, flexed, his fist touching the ceiling of the cab.
“Non capisco Italiano,” the sailor said.
“You not must to know Italiano. In plain English, I have large size.” He winked again.
“Let me out,” the sailor said.
“But we are not to la puntana so presto—”
“You take her,” the sailor said, stepping from the moving taxi and running down the street.
Mario Moscalini was nimble enough, to be sure, to have caught the man, but it was just a matter of a language barrier, or something, and the skipped fare was not large, so he elected to just move on with traffic. Later he regretted this decision somewhat, because the day proved very dull, and it would have been enlivening to have stopped the sailor and wildly demanded his fare—and more, as reparation for the rudeness—and generally to have demonstrated to the fool what passion can mean. The man had been at sea too long for his own good.
It was not until he was on his way home that things picked up. He was tired, and it was funny the way it worked, but the best things seemed to happen to him when he was too tired to avail himself of golden opportunity. And if ever a golden opportunity bore down on him, it did as he clicked off his duty lights. He saw Cicciolina, pornostar and parliamentarian, by the side of the road, alone and needing a ride. She was supposed to be in Rome making legislation or movies. But she was here under a streetlight. Something was wrong, entirely out of place, so he got her into the cab without pressing her for an explanation. She would volunteer her troubles if she wanted to. Mario respected a person’s privacy if he respected anything in the world. And he respected l’onorevole Cicciolina if he respected anyone in the world. If she had not had the sense to pull her dress up over her tette at her press conference at Piazza Navona in Rome when she won her seat in parliament, he had been told that the very irreplaceable Bernini fountain there could have been much more seriously damaged than it was. People acted as if they had never seen tette before. It was ridiculous. Still, hers were a bit special, they looked good in movies, and it made him wonder if they were like movie stars themselves—maybe not so great-looking in real life. He thought she would be glad to show them to him, even if she was in some kind of trouble, so he turned down an oddly unfamiliar street—he knew Livorno backwards, he thought—where he could park if she agreed to a showing, and they were suddenly surrounded by the blue lights of polizia. How could she be in trouble with the law? She was the law.
An officer approached Mario’s window, pointing adamantly in the direction they had come. Then he threw his arms to heaven and shook his head. Mario saw now the one-way signs he had—it was incredible—been going against. And he a professional driver. That was why the officer was so wild in his gesticulations probably. Mario had let down the fraternity of professional men on the road. He got out to face the officer.
When the officer again pointed and raised his arms in total surrender at a move so unnimble as Mario’s, Mario fell to his knees and sculpted giant breasts in the air before his chest as he had seen Greek sailors do many times when they danced in the port bars.
He was overcome by a passion that had not seized him so in the car—he suddenly knew why men had broken a foot off a river god when they saw l’onorevole Cicciolina’s tette. “Her tette were credimi, eccellente—grande, pesante—”
“Whose?” the officer said.
“L’onorevole Cicciolina’s.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Now?”
“She was in the taxi with me—it’s why I took the bad turn—”
“Where is she now?”
“Disappeared, apparently. You did not see her?”
“No.”
“She’s fast. It’s almost incredible, but I think she’s in trouble with the law. That’s why she vamooshed. Is she wanted by the law?”
“You were in a fantasy,” the officer said.
“I doubt it.” Mario met the officer eye to eye. He held his ground. “I doubt that extremely.”
The officer pursed his lips. “Good for you. No ticket today. Buon viaggio. I’d like to meet her, too. Here’s my number.”
“Ciao,” Mario said. He doubted that l’onorevole Cicciolina would consort with polizia but he held his tongue. Let the officer dream.
He sped homeward, thinking that if the officer had not been one policeman but a whole band of carabinieri with Uzis
, and they had opened fire, he and Cicciolina would have looked a lot like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, except his Fiat was a little smaller than Clyde’s coupe, and Cicciolina’s tette were a lot larger than Bonnie Parker’s. He threw the officer’s number out the window, an act he would regret when he got home.
At his house the first thing he saw was a man looking into his windows. Fearing he might be an assassin, perhaps some new form of competition among taxi drivers, he circled the block until the man disappeared, discovering in his revolutions that his Fiat, though now getting on in miles, still got good rubber going into both second and third. When the man had gone, he realized that a taxi-driver assassin would not linger in the absence of a taxi, so he was probably fantasizing a bit, but still, you could not rule anything out these days. You have CIA, the Israelis are back-to-the-wall, look at Libya, and the French can be so snotty. Mario had had nightmares since hearing in childhood about tiny Frenchmen with wires who had been deadly on Germans who were caught patrolling lines—from behind, total surprise, wire through neck. There was an air of lunacy about it, but Mario thought it just could have been a lost Frenchman looking to kill him for some fantastic reason, kill him with a wire, if it was still true that they were good with the wire.
Getting out of his car, Mario stepped on a wire. This nearly gave him an infarto. But he saw, before he stopped breathing altogether, that it was only his radio antenna that he had yanked two mornings ago from the red hands of the neighbor’s six-year-old. He had given the child a very stern talking-to about antenna stealing leading straight to bank robbing and jail, gesticulating with a razor motion at his throat. The child, still holding the snapped-off antenna, did not seem to understand, so Mario choked himself until blue to demonstrate the effects of hanging as he had seen them in Westerns. At this the child dropped the antenna and ran off laughing. Mario left it there. It was not sightly to reconnect a ripped-out antenna, and less sightly to stick in its place a coat hanger. Besides, his radio did not work. It had blown out one night as he passed a nuclear power station. He had a vaguely dishonest feeling after scolding the child, because the radio was useless and because he had himself wanted to be a bank robber before circumstances led him into taxi driving.
Typical Page 6