Going For a Beer

by Robert Coover

  Yeah? Listen, tell me, do you really get your rocks off with your little doozie, Stick Man, or do you just imagine that, too?

  Well. I guess in my world, it’s sort of the same thing.

  That’s what I thought, says the Cartoon Man, throwing down another tumblerful. I’ll stick with what I got. I don’t want to have to think it up. I love to get hit by surprises. Even bad ones. Especially bad ones. I love the danger, the speed, the contact, the whole wild toot and scramble. Bif! Boff! He drives his free fist into the bar. I need adversaries!

  As if on cue, a group of humans come in, shoulders squared, looking threatening. There he is! The Stick Man! The Cartoon Man tosses his empty glass over the bar, causing an explosive crash that makes the humans stagger back a step, and prepares to defend them both. They’ll never take us alive, Stick Man!

  No, wait, says one of the humans. We are here on a peaceful diplomatic mission.

  Bullshit! Take another step, you treacherous scumbags, and I’ll peaceful mission your ass! His head’s down and his legs are churning. He seems about to fly forward and head-butt them all. Don’t trust those shifty meatsacks, Stick Man! You know what they’re like! Let’s kill them!

  Tell him to calm down, Stick Man. And to stop using such appalling language. We are here to speak about large and serious matters.

  And we do quite a lot of killing in the human world, too, Cartoon Man, so you better cool it!

  The Stick Man assumes a posture of conciliation, something he learned on previous visits here. We should hear what they have to say, he says, but be prepared. Also something learned. Not sure what it means, but it’s effective.

  Stick Man, we realize that—excuse me, but am I looking at your face or—? never mind, I shouldn’t have asked—we realize that, as a people, we have not always received you here with the dignity and respect properly due you and, well, your kind. But now, on behalf of the entire human world, or at least that part of it which is empowered to establish committees such as ours, we are calling upon you henceforth to represent officially for us the human condition, as we understand it. We feel somehow you can encapsulate it in economical ways difficult to achieve for those of us with a, what can one say, a more complex personal architecture.

  The Stick Man’s posture of conciliation shifts slightly to express the humility he feels in the face of such an unexpected honor and, at the same time, the anxiety aroused by its implicit obligations which may include having to remain in the human world, and he knows that he is already, in exhibiting this struggle with ambivalence, exercising his new office.

  We have prepared a stage, Stick Man, that captures the essence of your world, which is to say, imitates it exactly, for you have nothing but essence there. We will provide the text each day; you will, so to speak, illustrate it.

  I have always made my own announcements, he says, letting his turned-out elbows suggest modesty and apology.

  We know that, but that’s in the stick world. This is the human world. We do things differently here.

  We hope you’ll accept our offer, Stick Man.

  And anyway you have no alternative. We always get what we want.

  You going along with this horseshit? the Cartoon Man asks at his elbow.

  It appears I have no choice.

  I could kill them all if you want me to. Wham! Ker-splat!

  No. I’ll do as they ask. It should be fun. He expresses this with a lighthearted disposition of his limbs and tilt of his head, though he recognizes (and probably reveals this to a careful observer) that a certain dissimulating artifice has crept into his demeanor, for he does not feel at all lighthearted, and he wonders if he has caught some baneful human infection. The Stick Woman was probably right. He shouldn’t have come here.

  Well then, I’m popping back to the strip to get in a few frames of the old down-and-dirty. Pow! Whop! Blam! I can use a workout. But if you need me, pal, just blow your horn.

  Wait a minute, says the bartender. Who’s paying for all this broken glass?

  Do not complain, says the leader of the humans. History has been made in here today. By next week, this will be a famous tourist attraction. You can sell the broken glass as souvenirs. In fact, you’d be doing yourself a favor to smash a few more things.

  When the Stick Man takes the oath of office on his little stage, he bends one of his stick arms at the elbow and raises his stick hand. It is the wrong arm, the left one, but no one objects, given the solemnity of the occasion. There are vast multitudes gathered to witness this oath and his premier performance, which can begin only after elaborate ceremonies and a great many lengthy orations of the sort that humans seem to require. Perhaps because their other means of expression are so limited and so occluded by their clumsy fragile integument. Or perhaps because they can never say one thing alone or directly, but must always, as if by nature, flesh out the bare bones of their simple little thoughts. He warms up for his new role by acting out the successive lines of the orations, but he is all too aware of what his posture really expresses: The Stick Man is bored to tears. Commingled with: the Stick Man is homesick. He hopes that no one perceives this, but that they all assume instead that he is responding dutifully to the text provided by the committee for the occasion: the Stick Man receives with a mixture of pride and humility the adulation of the masses.

  They do seem to have warmed to him. The speeches are flattering and enthusiastically applauded, and his every gesture brings on wild cheering. Here you see him in all his suchness, in all his plenitude! declares one speaker, and everyone claps and huzzahs. His more or less rectilinear, geniculate, and symmetrical frame is utterly without habiliment, and yet it cannot be said the Stick Man is standing here before us in the buff, for he has no buff either! Whistles and applause. He has no pelt or epidermis, no casing, sheath, or rind, no fell, fur, leather, fleece, husk, or pericarp! No flesh! Cheers and whoops of friendly laughter. Which is why his expression of our existential situation is so vivid! So transparent! He shows us the naked truth! He continues to receive the feverish adulation of the masses. He has nothing extraneous! Not even a face! Just a head that says “O!” A head wide open to all experience! What is his age? He can be—and is—a baby, child, adult, and ancient, all at once, or in any order as he pleases! Most persons are less within than they seem on the surface, the Stick Man is more! Watch him now as he ponders infinity! As he demonstrates that it is better to sit still than to rise and fall! As he counts his blessings! As he decries disorder! As he admires the perfect beauty of the human world!

  And so, at the inauguration ceremony and during the weeks that follow, he does these things and to great acclaim, not only from the crowds who gather daily before his stage, but also from the vast television audiences throughout the human world, for his every move and position are captured by the cameras and shown live every hour on the news and each evening on prime time in an edited version. He is, as the humans say, hot. A celebrity. Presidents, kings, and movie stars send their greetings and felicitations, ordinary people their gratitude and suggestions for further aspects of the human condition he might take on, professors critical disquisitions for him to comment upon by word or gesture, human women love letters. Though he would be hard pressed to respond to the latter in the ordinary way, even his ordinary way which is not theirs. The committee members who appointed him to this office were greatly disturbed by his tab, feeling that it marred the purity of his representations, sprouting there on the stick between his legs like an unruly twig, a kind of obscene error of punctuation, as one of them said, and they considered shaving it off, but they were a bit queasy about handling it, so they accepted the idea that it could be taped to the back of his hip bar with black electrical tape, provided the Stick Man kept it taped and out of sight at all times, though they do, being realists, permit him, as an official act, to meditate from time to time upon the mind-body paradox, to the delight, as with all else, of his fans.

  The committee is well pleased with his success, and on the whole t
hey treat him kindly and with consideration, but they turn a deaf ear to his expressed wish to return home, if only for a visit, believing that their world is so vastly superior to his, he should be grateful to be allowed to live in it and should desire no other. And so he goes on, though with increasing sorrow in his heart, performing in his Stick Man way the texts that they provide: The Stick Man demonstrates that good service is a great enchantment. The Stick Man recalls the joys of childhood. The Stick Man bears with equanimity the malice of others, while anticipating always their kindness. The Stick Man laughs at adversity. The Stick Man goes shopping. He takes up positions reflecting grand themes like good and evil, illusion and reality, money (his illustration of the ancient human proverb that a man without money is like a bow without an arrow, is particularly successful), religion, politics, work, and the arts of success, but also lesser elements of the human condition like desire, knowledge, manners, the digestive processes, the fine arts, and so on, as well as certain negative aspects thought to be exemplary: The Stick Man wrestles with his guilty conscience. The Stick Man is embarrassed by his bodily parts. The Stick Man is envious of the success of others. The Stick Man is obsessed by the memory of his mother. The Stick Man is afraid of heights. The Stick Man fails to understand the meaning of the universe. Of course, he’s just acting. He is not embarrassed, envious, or afraid, and he does understand the meaning of the universe, at least in Stick Man terms. It’s quite simple, but not really relevant to the human world. But he understands why they are asking him to do this. He is not illustrating their condition merely, he is also absorbing it. Sucking it up into his rectilinear and geniculate frame. The Stick Man fully recognizes that the humans hope that his taking on the human condition will free them from it. And he knows that they will be frustrated in their hope.

  As happens. After he represents the human condition, it is still theirs, not his, and the crowds begin to drift away, burdened as before. The hourly news dispatches end and The Stick Man Show moves out of prime time into the latenight comedy and extended news hour. There are no more love letters. Many do still come to see him, especially groups on package tours sold during the height of his popularity, but the expressions of excitement and delight which had previously confronted him now give way to ones of disappointment, perplexity, and even revulsion. Which he reads, of course, as self-revulsion and disappointment, for he is only reminding them of their own condition. The Stick Man contemplates the sadness of the human enterprise: a position he takes up on his own without informing the committee, his posture in effect imitating that of most of his audience, a posture appropriate as well to his stick condition, for he longs only to be back in his stick world again and with his Stick Woman and his tab untaped. He has often imagined her, when making love, in a shape the human world would call voluptuous, but he realizes, far from her, he loves her just as she is, her simple notched frame now dearer to him than anything in this world or any other.

  The committee, for its part, works hard to revive interest in him, evidently having considerable personal investment in the success of his office, as created by them. Aware that illustrated texts of edifying moral uplift are failing to attract audiences, they impose upon him the darker aspects of the human condition: The Stick Man suffers from an inferiority complex. The Stick Man tells a lie and is empowered by it. The Stick Man shows the ill effect of trying to live on hope alone. The Stick Man feels like a worm and behaves like one. The Stick Man emits a bad odor. The Stick Man fears death. Now he no longer suffers neglect. He suffers rejection. Hostility. The Stick Man is shunned as the bearer of ill tidings. Those who come to his performances do so only to insult him (Sick Sticks, they call him) and throw things at him. Their enmity worries him less than the possibility that he might be acquiring the fears and complexes that he is asked to represent. If left alone, these ideas might never have occurred to him, and he is afraid that he will contaminate the stick world with them, should he ever be able to return. The Stick Man peers into an open grave, displaying a distasteful morbidity. The Stick Man lusts after a small child. The Stick Man considers poisoning his neighbor’s dog. The Stick Man ridicules the human condition. The Stick Man betrays his best friend. He remains a celebrity, but in the way that serial killers are celebrities. There are protests and The Stick Man Show is taken off the air.

  Desperate, the committee decides to untape his tab and let it, as they say in their world, all hang out. They run electric billboard advertisements of his forthcoming texts: The Stick Man exposes his private parts, heretofore concealed. The Stick Man admires his backside in the mirror. The Stick Man goes to the bathroom standing up. The Stick Man goes to the bathroom sitting down. The Stick Man wishes someone would lick his tab. He becomes fair game for the human comedians and his ratings rise, but this is not his office as originally defined. The Stick Man laments his unhappy fate: this is the position he would assume were he not obliged to assume so many others, mostly related to his tab. The Stick Man, stroking himself, thinks of his beloved. The Stick Man attempts an act of autofellatio. The Stick Man suffers from castration anxiety. He is a celebrity again, but the committee members themselves are wrangling about ends and means. The Stick Man suggests it might be time for him to return quietly to the stick world. They don’t listen. It’s as though he’s not even there. When he timidly repeats his suggestion, they throw up a new text—the Stick Man scratches his hemorrhoids—and tell him to get to it, while they continue their deliberations.

  In the end, though some of the more sober and idealistic committee members resign in disgust, the decision of those remaining (they speak vaguely of the educational aspect) is to introduce the Stick Woman into the act, and an expedition is mounted to capture her and bring her back to the human world. The Stick Man is both elated and fearful, for the Stick Woman has never been to the human world, nor ever wished to be. Far less restless than he, she has always been happy in the stick world and unhappy whenever he left it. She arrives, chained and manacled, desperately relieved to see him again but terrified by her ordeal (she resisted her captors and now has a second elbow on her right arm), his worst fears realized. The Stick Man tenderly embraces his loved one. As officially announced. She melts into his arms. Also. The crowds have returned. Some of the delight. The cameras. She does not see them. She sees only him. She clings to him. He was not really afraid before, but now, for her, he is. They are encouraged to enjoy each other in the classical manner, and they do, though more in a consolatory fashion than a passionate one, for they are well aware that their trials are not concluded. After the initial surprise of this newest innovation has worn off, they are obliged to perform all the positions known to the human world, which they do, but, by unspoken agreement, they do not reveal those intimacies peculiar to their stick world. The Stick Man Show returns to the networks during the afternoon hours of the soap operas.

  Stick person sex is different and has a certain appeal of the sort described by the orator on the day of the Stick Man’s inauguration, namely, its naked and exemplary transparency, but in the end it cannot compete in the human world with fleshy sex. Even the simple stroking of human skin—a knee, say, or a fat bottom, a tear-stained cheek—seems to have more appeal to humans than the Stick Man and Stick Woman attempting exotic positions like the wheelbarrow or the triple X, especially given the subdued nature of their performances. The show’s ratings, at first promising, drop off again. The committee, what’s left of it, feels the act has to be more extreme, there’s no other way. Animals are ruled out. There are no available stick animals. Likewise, third or fourth parties. They decide on violence. Rape. Whips. Bondage. Torture. Disfigurement. Hammers and nails.

  The Stick Man refuses. His imagination is vast, but hurting the Stick Woman is beyond it. They have reached a point of no return. The committee meets in emergency session. It is clear to them that the show must end. But it is still in their power to decide how it will end and what they can extract from it. They consider the possibility of destroying the Stick Woman,
reducing her to a heap of broken sticks, her facial platter shattered as a mirror might be, all of her remains dumped on the stage in front of the Stick Man to see what he will do. Text: The Stick Man throws up. The Stick Man mourns his beloved. The Stick Man goes berserk. But then what would they do with the Stick Man? He’d be useless but still here. He’d probably have to be destroyed, too. So they decide to get rid of them both at the same time. A lovers’ tragedy. But it makes for better television if they can create a plot around the killings and delay over a few weeks the final denouement to lure the audiences back. They find the perfect solution: Let the audience kill them.

  First, they must begin a rumor campaign against them. They must be utterly reviled. Later, it will be seen that they were only misunderstood, but only after they no longer exist. Then it will be a sad story. Songs will be written and so on. There will edited reruns. For now, by way of letters to the editor, graffiti, anonymous advertisements, phone calls pretending to be from poll takers, dirty jokes, leaked “disclosures,” they are decried as deserters, traitors, perverts, racketeers, revolutionary anarchists, scofflaws, thieves, sex fiends, mercenaries, atheists, dangerous aliens. The crowds begin to gather once more. They are increasingly hostile. Weapons appear. Guns and knives are temptingly displayed in shop windows. The gathered multitudes shout out positions the Stick Man and Stick Woman are to take, but they have stopped performing and simply cling to one another. It is not clear whether their circle heads are looking out upon the crowd or at each other. Either way, they make a good target. Down on your knees! the mob shouts. Eat shit, Stick Man! Say your prayers! It is happening faster than the committee has expected but it is too dangerous to try to do anything about it. They watch the proceedings from the safety of a television studio. It becomes apparent to them that many in the crowd must have hankered to do this since the day of the Stick Man’s inauguration. They have not aroused them so much as released them, a lesson to be learned. Thus, they tell themselves they are not responsible for what happens next.