Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  “Can you believe her?” said Tim.

  “She’s really something,” I said.

  We reached the front of the ordering line. “You should get the tuna and artichoke sandwich,” he said. “The economics of this place escapes me. There are nine people behind the counter. They bake their own bread and they make these fantastic tuna and artichoke sandwiches.”

  We sat down outside and Tim asked me what I was up to. I told him that I’d been taking care of some chickens, and that I’d stopped drinking Yukon Jack because it wasn’t working for me and I had to finish a book of poems. I said I was thinking of trying Skoal smokeless tobacco.

  “You mean those little cans?” said Tim. “Oh God, no. If you’re going down the tobacco road you should smoke a pipe. It’s more your style.”

  “My grandfather smoked a pipe and it wasn’t good for him,” I said.

  “What about cigars? Mark Twain was a huge cigar man. Not to mention Castro, and JFK.”

  “But then you have this big brown thing sticking out of your face. I don’t want to be wreathed in plumes of smoke.”

  “I can understand that,” said Tim. “But Skoal is for rednecks.”

  I took a bite of sandwich, thinking about cigars. “Amy Lowell smoked cigars all night,” I said. “She smoked cigars and wrote poems, and boom, she was an Imagist.”

  “There you go,” said Tim.

  “But Imagism wasn’t that great. Anyway I’m done with poetry.”

  Tim scoffed. “You’re not done with poetry.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m going to play the guitar.”

  “Ah, the guitar,” Tim said. “I know two, no, three people at Tufts who’ve taken up guitar. It’s the middle-aged thing to do. At faculty parties they sneak off and play Clapton Unplugged and Blind Lemon Jefferson.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I want to get back to music somehow. I miss it.”

  “That’s true, I forgot, you used to play the oboe.”

  “The bassoon, but yes.”

  “Maybe you could write songs.”

  “Maybe. While I was driving here I was singing a song about seaweed.”

  “Leanin’ toward the carrageenan, eh? Any protest songs? Antiwar songs?”

  “No, but I’ve been working on some political poems. I’ve got a long bad poem in the pipeline about Archibald MacLeish and the CIA.”

  “Sounds unwieldy.” Tim wiped his mouth. “What we need is an anti-drone anthem. Something to sing on the barricades, like Dylan’s ‘Masters of War.’”

  I asked him what he thought was the best antiwar song ever.

  He considered the question, chewing. Donovan’s “Universal Soldier” maybe, he thought, or Lennon’s “Imagine.” No, the best antiwar song, he said conclusively, was by somebody named Bagel.

  I looked dubious. “The guy’s name is Bagel?”

  “Bogle. It’s about World War One.” He put down his sandwich and pulled out his phone again. “There’s a great version of it on YouTube, by this young kid who just sings the hell out of it.” He poked at the screen for a while, frowning, but couldn’t find the video. “I’ll send you the link. I guarantee you will shed a tear.”

  I asked Tim if he’d been on any dates. “Nothing on that front,” he said. “I’m saving all my love for Medea Benjamin.”

  I drove back to Portsmouth, up Route 95, with my tires going around and around saying the same things to the road over and over again. The road never gets it, never learns. When I veered toward the edge of the lane, my tires drove over the intermittent white lines. The sound went fft, fft, fft, like paper leaping from a copying machine. I saw a sign, SLOW TRAFFIC AHEAD, and I made a tune for it. I sang, “She said there’s slow traffic, slow traffic, slow traffic ahead.” I sang about thirty variations of that, till my voice felt scratchy. I saw the sign for the state liquor store that’s lit like a prison. I didn’t turn in the entrance. I thought about the kindness of Roz’s mouth.

  • • •

  AT IRVING CIRCLE K, I bought a purple can of Skoal Berry Blend and a green can of Skoal Apple Blend long-cut tobacco. At home I watched a YouTube video called “First Dip Video Skoal Cherry Longcut.” A seventeen-year-old boy stuffed a mass of cherry-flavored tobacco into his cheek and spat into a jar as he talked. He’d quit smoking and now he was dipping. “One of my friends who dips says you can live without your lip but you can’t live without your lungs,” he said. “I support that.” I watched several more first-dip videos—there are hundreds. Some of the dippers had special saliva receptacles called mud jugs. They expertly shifted enormous “hammers”—wads of wet tobacco—around in their cheeks and said “awesome” a lot. They compared flavors and brands—wintergreen versus apple, and Grizzly versus Cope, or Copenhagen. A kid named Outlawdipper filled half his face with Cope Wintergreen. “My gums have been killing me,” he said. “My fricking gums are all the way receded. Maybe I should stop dipping. Nah.” Talking rapidly, his personable young face deformed by the giant plug of tobacco, Outlawdipper demonstrated various styles of mud jugs available on Mudjug.com—the wood-grain mud jug, the red-bandanna mud jug, and his favorite, the carbon-fiber mud jug. “Looks gorgeous,” he says. “Just messes with your mind and your eyes.” A man who called himself Cutlerylover took an oversize dip. He started rubbing his temples with his fingers and said, “Ugh, I’m getting really buzzed, I definitely don’t like that feeling.” He turned off the camera and was gone for a while to throw up. When he came back he said, “I will never ever ever ever do that again in my entire life.” I went to Mudjug.com—selling “the only spitter good enough for the Armed Forces.” A sergeant in Iraq wrote a testimonial: “When we are on those long convoys, crammed inside our vehicles like sardines, there is just no where to spit without hittin’ somebody,” he said. But his mud jug changed all that. “I have carried this thing through some pretty rough times all through the Middle East and when the fire fights are all over, me and my Mud Jug are still there, waiting for more. It’s a tough little spittoon I’ll say that. God bless. Hoorah!”

  I went outside and sat at the picnic table with a paper towel. It was about one a.m. After rapping smartly on the lid of the tobacco can the way you’re supposed to, I sliced around the edge with my thumbnail to cut the paper seal. And then I grabbed my lower lip and made a little trough and stuffed a hairy lump of Skoal Berry Blend in there. It tasted a bit like Skittles—like a box of Skittles found after a flood in a dirty basement. My mouth began pumping out remarkable amounts of saliva, which I spit, feeling ridiculous, on the grass. I lost control of my packed hammer—bits of tobacco began drifting around the inside of my cheeks. There was no mental effect—no rush—and then suddenly, holy mindfuckery of corned beef and cowbell, my brain converged tightly on itself and blew open. My cheekbones began singing spirituals and I laughed. There was a needly coldness in my fingers. I had a strong inclination to retch, which I mastered. Interesting how the body takes over. It seemed important all at once to spit out the brown mess and wipe off my tongue and lie down on the grass. I lay there panting for a while, saying, “God help me.”

  The high was extreme but short-lived. It was an unthoughtful sort of joy—too violent. No doors of perception opened. I thought of John Candy, in Splash, saying, “My heart’s beating like a rabbit.”

  • • •

  HOW DO YOU DO? I’m officially a resident of the United States of America. Millions of other people live in this country with me, and I don’t know their names. I have lots of words in my head, bits of pop music, phrases, names of places, and scraps of poetry and prose. “Tough stuff.” “Rough trade.” “Party hardy.” “Cheez Whiz.” “Telefunken.” “Matisyahu.” “Znosko-Borovsky.” “Misty moisty.” “Serious moonlight.” “Mud jug.”

  I have this recurring problem with my jaw that I very much want to tell you about.

  But maybe not now.

  No matter how hot t
he night, if you go out in a T-shirt and you lie on the grass for a while it’s eventually going to get chilly and you’re going to want shelter. That’s my hard-won truth of the night. That and that Skoal Berry Blend isn’t the drug for me.

  Three

  SOME PEOPLE I DON’T KNOW very well are coming for tea today. I washed the dust off the teapot and found a couple of tea bags and wiped down my grandmother’s tea tray. These semiformal social events destroy me. I spent two hours straightening the living room and making sure the downstairs bathroom was usable. The vacuum cleaner hose is extremely kinked and gets clogged easily, and I had to repair the sweeper attachment with duct tape. Why did I say tea? Because I wanted to be welcoming and I didn’t want to give them dinner or lunch or drinks. I should have just said come and sit in the yard and have a beer and some chips and some green guacamole squirted from a plastic pouch—I would be happier and probably they would be happier.

  One is a poet I met in Cincinnati when I gave a reading there last year—a woman with a friendly, loud laugh and dramatic lipstick—and one is I think her boyfriend, who is a filmmaker, and they want to make some kind of documentary about rhyme. Because I published an anthology, Only Rhyme, a few years ago, they think I can help them, perhaps with raising money or suggesting people to interview. They’ve got their project up on Kickstarter. And I want to say, Good luck, I can’t help you very much, I’ll give thirty dollars to your Kickstarter fund, but I don’t know anything useful about poetry anymore. I love it, sort of, but I also don’t love it and don’t understand it, and every day I live, it seems more mysterious and farther away from me. But I won’t say that, of course. I’ll just pour the tea and hand around the plate of shortbread cookies.

  • • •

  HEY, JUNIOR BIRDMEN. I’m Paul Chowder and I’m here in the blindingness of noon near the chicken hut talking only to you about the things that need to be talked about. You know what they are. Love and fame and nothingness and sunken cathedrals and the Sears traveling sprinkler. Nan will be home tomorrow.

  I want to be starting out. I want to be speaking in a foreign language. I want to offer an alternate route. I want to amass ragged armfuls of lucid confusion that make you keel over.

  I want to write songs. Not poems anymore—songs. In fact, I made up another song in the car yesterday. It’s a protest song. This is how it goes: “I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, baby, and I’m not killing anyone.” The tune has a little of the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” in it.

  The most useful thing I learned when I was in music school was not the augmented sixth chord, or how to write a canon at the half step, or how to scrape a certain part of the reed to make the high D easier in the bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring. The most useful thing I learned, I learned in orchestration class. The teacher said, “Here’s the first thing you need to know: The orchestra doesn’t play in tune. That’s what makes it sound like an orchestra. It can’t be perfectly in tune. If it was perfectly in tune, it would have an entirely different sound. It’s a collective musical instrument that is always slightly out of tune with itself.”

  Which is also true, in a different way, of the piano. The piano is tuned to be slightly out of tune—that’s part of what gives it its character. The mis-tuning is called “equal temperament.” Also, wood is a complicated, tissuey substance, with columns of water in it, and sound travels from the piano wires through these long cellusonic resonators, and when it flares out into the auditorium, it’s messed up slightly. It’s been batted around—and now it’s warmer, with a mist of imprecision over it. The timber has fogged the timbre, thereby creating the necessary out-of-tuneness, the naturalness, the untrue trueness of piano sound, or orchestral sound. That’s what music relies on: the singularity of every utterance.

  • • •

  IT TURNED OUT the Kickstarter couple weren’t very interested in the shortbread cookies. They’d brought a video camera and lights, and they wanted to interview me about the history of rhyme. I said that part of what happened to rhyme in the twentieth century was that there was so much brilliant recorded lyricizing by Cole Porter, by Leiber and Stoller, by Mann and Weil, by Lennon and McCartney, and etcetera, that by the sixties and seventies the old Ella Wheeler Wilcox approach, the Sara Teasdale approach, the A. E. Housman approach, the Robert Frost approach, didn’t make sense anymore, and the poets had to figure out what they could do that was artier and more elevated. And what they did was to ditch the badminton net—they ditched rhyme altogether.

  As I was talking, it occurred to me that what was so appealing about song lyrics was that the music fogs over the consonants and dissolves them. “All you need is the same vowel sound and you’ve got a rhyme,” I heard myself saying. “It’s very liberating.” I got my speakers and played the videomakers a song I like by Stephen Fearing, “Black Silk Gown.” Stephen Fearing sings, “The night is shot with diamonds, above these dark New England towns, / And the highway drawn beneath me like a black silk gown.” If it was a printed poem, the rhyme of “towns” and “gown” wouldn’t sound quite right, but with the music going, it’s perfect. In the studio, Fearing installs a tiny microphone inside his acoustic guitar, and the sounds he plucks from it are very big. He’s a monkey-fingered madman guitar player.

  After they packed up their video equipment and left, I drove to Planet Fitness and used the machines there, watching the newscasters move their mouths on the bank of television screens and listening to Donovan sing “Universal Soldier.” It is a good protest song, written by Buffy Sainte-Marie. Then I got in the car and drank some Pellegrino and sweated. I sat bent over with my head on the steering wheel and let all of my self and my mind flow into my lips, so that they were swollen with unvoiced words. I thought of male actors with big lips and how if I had big lips I could stand with a slight frown and ploof out my full set of lips and maybe that would be attractive to women, since women seemed to like James Dean and other sexually ambiguous people. My lips felt like a horse’s lips. Just give me an apple and I’ll wimble at it. Hi, I’m Harry Connick, Jr. I would really like to be Harry Connick, Jr.

  Time now to get my frequent burrito card punched again at Dos Amigos Burritos.

  • • •

  IT’S ALWAYS BETTER to start fresh than to rewrite. The cult of rewriting has practically sunk poetry. For instance, right now, hell, I could begin a poem with “I dusted the side table with one of her underpants.” That’s not a bad beginning. I could take it from there. It’s true. I have an old pair of Roz’s underpants, and sometimes if I have to make the living room presentable for teatime guests I squirt some Old English furniture polish on my grandmother’s table, which was unfortunately refinished at one point with polyurethane, and I polish it to a nice shine.

  Today I thought, My birthday is coming up, and nobody knows I want a guitar: I’ll just go to Best Buy and buy myself one. So I did, admiring as I drove into the parking lot the splendid striped colors of the new sign at the Old Navy store, which is trying to relaunch itself in a changed world. Best Buy is faltering a bit, too, I’d read—nobody is buying CDs, and Netflix and other movie streamers have destroyed the DVD business, and videogame sales are off. But there was plenty of noise in the music department, and my guitar was still there. It was a Gibson Maestro. The word “Maestro” was in fifties handwriting script, and the box said: “Everything you need is right here!” I rested it on the roof of my car and tore it open. Inside was a black guitar with six strings, a black case, a strap, some picks, and a warranty. Hah, a warranty. How many of these warranty cards have I seen and thrown out in my life? A hundred? I knew the guitar would never break, and it hasn’t.

  I got in the car and plucked a note with my thumb on the biggest, fattest string. An almost incomprehensibly gorgeous sound gushed out of the big hole, from inside the guitar’s wooden velodrome. It made something vibrate in my pitui
tary gland. “Ooh, that’s so nice,” I said.

  I drove home and worked through the first few guitar lessons in GarageBand. I practiced chords until the tips of my fingers hurt terribly. You have no idea how sharp guitar strings are. I looked at my fingers and saw deep red grooves. Fortunately the string just missed the numb skin graft on my index finger, where I once cut it slicing bread.

  I wanted to play minor chords immediately, but the cheerful, well-groomed instructor from GarageBand was sitting on his stool telling me how to play major chords. They always start you off with major keys even though minor is where you generally end up.

  • • •

  LONG YEARS AGO I wrote a poem called “Misery Hat.” It was about a magical hat that the narrator, a woman, knits out of yarn from a mysterious yarn store, and when she puts it on she can sense any misery within a five-mile radius. She senses human misery and animal misery and sometimes even plant misery—the misery, for instance, of a neglected banana turning black in a bowl. She’s dissatisfied with the hat and she knits a bigger one, with yellow and brown and green and black stripes, that can sense any misery anywhere in the world. She sits miserably doing nothing, wearing her long floppy hat. I sent the poem to Peter Davison, the poetry editor at The Atlantic. He sent it back. Later, after he’d published another poem of mine, “Knowing What to Ignore,” he took me to lunch at the St. Botolph Club. I had a delicious bowl of leek soup and suddenly he leaned forward and whispered to me that Walter Cronkite was at a table across the room. I looked and, wow, there was Walter Cronkite, looking a little older than when he cried on the news after Kennedy was shot, but not that much older.