Haven’t a Clue
“I don’t think I can make it through another day,” I say. “What are you talking about?” she says. “You have to. For one good reason, think of the kids.” “But it’s the same old thing. Day after day. Hour after hour. I go to bed so early. Why? Because by that time I have nothing to do. I’ve done everything. So I read in bed awhile, which means maybe fifteen minutes, if I’m lucky, and fall asleep and wake up too early. One, three, five. The o’clocks. More like eleven, one, three, five. Two-hour intervals, usually. My damn prostate. If it isn’t that, it’s my lower back. Mostly the right side. It keeps me up. Can’t find a comfortable position to sleep in. Maybe I need a new mattress, but I’m too lazy to go out and buy one. Listen, I’m feeling old. My gripes are just about every old guy’s gripes.” “Do the best you can. I wish I could help you.” “Your being here would help. But I wonder how much so. Oh, a lot. What am I talking about? But also my work. That’s another thing. I’m getting less inclined … how can I put it? I always like what I’m working on—oh, most of the time, and very much so. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it, right?—or I’d do much less of it. I think that’s so. It’s the work I don’t like. By that I mean, the same thing every day. Sitting down and typing, typing, and more typing. Make a mistake, start at the top of the page again. I don’t like finishing a piece—oh, finishing it is fine, but the anxiety of now not having something to work on and take up my time, and just having to photocopy each piece after it’s done. To get in my car and drive several miles to the nearest photocopy place to copy it. Seems ridiculous, the effort for so small a thing, no matter how long it is, and it takes so much time.” “Learn how to work on a computer. Get a copier to go with it, so also learn how to use the copier. Finish a piece, copy it out; you wouldn’t have to leave the house. Though every now and then, since it runs out fast, you would have to go to a store and buy copier ink, unless you bought it in bulk twelve to twenty cartridges at a time, and then you’d probably only have to go once a year. And in time—face it; it’s coming—there won’t be any copy places left to copy your pages. All that kind of work for people like you will be done on copiers at home.” “Then I’m finished. That’s all there is to it. Done for good. Or I’d find a way. I should look at it hopefully. I’d have to find a way, if I want to continue to copy my pieces, which by then—what are we giving it here? Three years? Five?—I’m not so sure I’d want to do. But eating is another example of why I don’t think I can make it through another day. I don’t like to eat anymore.” “That could be good. Keeps your weight down.” “But I eat because I know I have to if I want to stay alive. But I eat too much, more than likely a lot of that’s out of nervousness of some sort, and with no pleasure.” “So you’ve said, and it’s probably true. Find a way to work it out. It doesn’t seem like the biggest of problems. So far, none of what you’ve said does.” “You’re right. But exercising too. I exercise too much. I want to have the body of a much younger man, and when I say ‘much younger,’ I mean by thirty to forty years. I can’t have it but I work at it.” “Do you know why, other than just wanting to look good, or at least not like your more typical old man?” “I don’t. I’m going crazy; maybe that’s it. And I know all this exercising with weights and such is what’s causing my almost constant lower back pain. I go to the Y and work out for more than an hour every day of the week.” “Do it less.” “I can’t. If I miss a day—that day I’m missing, I feel lousy. Guilty. Fat. Weak. Soft. Bloated. Old. So I have to go.” “Do what you want, then. I can’t help you there, either.” “You can help me in everything by coming back.” “You know that’s silly talk.” “I know. I can say it, though, can’t I? What’s the harm? Just so you know how I feel.” “I know how you feel.” “How do you feel?” “Do you mind if I remain silent?” “No, of course not. I expect it. I’m lucky enough now to get any kind of response from you.” “You’re not getting it from me. You know that, don’t you?” “I know, I know. Don’t remind me. It’ll only make me feel even worse. But drinking too.” “What about it?” “I drink too much. Every night. Two big shots of this or that over ice, usually one and sometimes two more. Often with a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime in them, at least the first. Then, all while reading the paper, two juice glasses of wine, red or white, doesn’t matter what kind. If I don’t start off with the shots, I start with a juice glass or two of dry marsala or dry sherry, and then go to the two to three juice glasses of wine. It’s also what’s probably causing my peeing every other hour once I get to bed, not just my enlarged prostate, or the combination of the two. But the drinking helps me get to bed and helps me be sleepy, and for the next two to three hours, probably helps keep me asleep. Then I’m up every other hour, stay up for an hour, sleep, stay up for an hour, can’t sleep, sleep, and so on. I mixed that up a bit, but you get the point. Every night. Right till the morning, and usually before dawn. And the morning, what do I do?” “What?” “I get out of bed too early. Sometimes before five. When it’s still dark out. Sometimes before four. And I exercise with weights. And I stretch and do other exercises. I run in place in the same spot or sort of run in place around the house. Sometimes I get back in bed after it, sweaty. That’s how hard I work out that early in the morning. You’ve seen me. You must have. Does it help get me back to sleep? Maybe, though probably not. Eventually I might fall back to sleep. It’s always the same thing. All my problems. It’s from getting old, being old, being alone like I am. Isolated. Having nothing to do but my writing and reading and exercising. Is this any kind of life?” “I think I know what you’re saying.” “You do. I know you do. I wish I could begin seeing someone. A woman I’m attracted to and admire and like a lot. Go places with, dine out, eat in, travel, talk to, phone, be phoned. Talk about some of the same things I used to talk about with you. Books, plays, art, movies, literature, the world. What’s in today’s newspaper. Have sex. But I meet no one. I’m retired. Most people were friends with us because of you.” “Not true.” “It’s true. Few friends I had here on my own have either died or moved away. The only friends I have—the Pinskis, who were friends, equally it seemed, with us both—I see once a month for lunch in a restaurant and maybe three times a year, two of them Jewish holidays, for dinner at their house. The kids, well, they come down maybe once every five weeks or so, and how long will that last? They’ll get married. They’ll be tied down at their jobs. They’ll see me less and less, and you know me, I’ll rarely go to New York to see them.” “So change.” “I wish I could. Or maybe I don’t. New York and me? We don’t go together anymore. It’s too fast for me. It makes me confused. Even with one of our daughters sticking close to me the entire trip and guiding me through the city. So what do I do?” “I know.” “Write, read, exercise, eat enough to live, fantasize. Every four to five days, or that’s been the norm since I discovered this, I turn on the computer and Google ‘Naked women and Naked Girls’ and masturbate to one of its links. ‘Asian Girls, Teen Sex. Amateur Porn. Blondes. Hardcore.’ It’s all there. And I shouldn’t forget my favorite, ‘College Girls,’ which the last time I did it to, it had three girls on one guy and a Periodic Table of the Elements poster on the wall above the bed. You’ve seen me.” “I don’t recall.” “My big pleasure of the week. I enjoy doing it, I admit, but sometimes it seems ridiculous. There I am, sitting in the dark—and it’s always when it’s dark out. So maybe that’s also why I do it—to have something to do to stay up later than I usually do at night—and I think ‘I’m an old guy and I’m masturbating to a computer screen.’ But that’s how I am. I still have to do it. Are you surprised?” “I don’t know what to think.” “Do you think something’s wrong with me?” “I have no answers to that. And it’s probably healthy for your prostate gland. Isn’t that what you once told me?” “My mother told me. When I wasn’t seeing anyone for a long time. She said she read it and, delicate as the topic was, thought I should know. Still, doing it, and I mean right while I’m doing it, which sometimes does tend to take away s
ome of the pleasure from it but never ends up stopping me, I feel, in fact, more than ridiculous. I feel stupid and sort of sordid, doing it. To a computer screen. To people moaning and sucking and screwing and climaxing and whatnot. Three girls licking, at one time, one guy’s penis. And occasionally smiling at and hamming it up for the camera while they’re doing it, while you never see the face of the guy they’re licking the entire time. But you’ve seen me at the computer doing it. Don’t deny it.” “Who’s denying anything?” “So tell me what you think. I can take it.” “What I think? If it gives you some pleasure every so often? Even a little pleasure? Even a tiny little bit of pleasure and release and is also good for your prostate?” “Come on. Out with it.” “It’s not so bad. You almost owe it to yourself. No, I don’t know what I’m saying. Especially about your owing it to yourself. If it’s what you want to do and think you need to and there’s no harm to anyone by it, though maybe there is to those three misguided college girls.” “One even kept her glasses on. That’s all she had on. These rectangular dark frames that so many young people seem to favor today. It actually, I’ll say, made her look sexier than the other two, though they were all pretty and had good bodies.” “But what were they thinking, letting themselves be exposed like that? Their brothers, cousins, even their fathers and possibly even their grandfathers, might in all innocence, so to speak, Google that site and see them. Maybe if … oh, I don’t know. Let me alone. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think you’re unhappy, either. I don’t want to think you don’t feel well. Your mind, your body. Do me a favor?” “Anything. What?” “Stop typing. Stop putting all this down. Not only pull out what you have in the typewriter but tear up what you’ve written so far since you started this. Get rid of it all. Then cover the typewriter. Put it to sleep for the night, as you used to say. Do something else. None of this is any good for you. I can’t see where it helps.” “It helps. But I’ll do what you say. Tomorrow I’ll look at what I’ve done, and maybe then I’ll tear all of it up. But I warn you. If I can use any of it, I’ll use it. If I can use it all, I’ll use that too. You never know the next day if anything you did the previous day is good. Meaning, you don’t know until you look at it. I’ll see if there’s anything there. If there is, I’ll work on it till I finish it. I’ll enjoy working on and finishing it. It’ll give me something to do that I like to. I know I’m repeating myself here in a couple of things and also contradicting myself somewhat from what I said before, or think I am, but there it is; that’s the way I am too. Okay, I’ll stop. It’s getting dark out so I’ll probably get to sleep tonight an hour or so later than I usually do, which is good. As I said, I go to bed too early. You still there? Well, the next sound you hear will be me tearing the last page I’ve written out of the typewriter. Not tearing. I don’t want to tear it, as I didn’t tear the previous typewritten pages out of the typewriter. So I’ll pull the page out gently so it doesn’t tear. That’s more like what I’ll be doing. That will be what I’m doing. Listen and you shall hear. Oh, how corny of me. But as you know, that’s how I can be too. Not for final drafts, where I reject corniness, but firsts, where I’ll try out anything, knowing the corn will go. What else I am or can be, right now I haven’t a clue. Or I’m not sure or I don’t know. No, it’s true, I was right the first time: I haven’t a clue. Do you? I’m listening. My ear’s cocked. Okay. Nothing. I listened for about twenty seconds and there was nothing. Silence. Done for the night. I must seem so irritatingly boorish to you. What can I say other than that I know that’s how I can be too. What do you say? To what I just said. Nothing? Then let’s just go to sleep. First, though, I’ll take the paper out of the typewriter very carefully so it doesn’t tear. Then I’ll collect, in the order they were written, all the previous pages I wrote since I sat down at the typewriter—ten of them, I see—and paper-clip or staple them, with this one, page eleven, the last. Staple them. That way, after I cover the typewriter as you asked me to and get under the covers and turn off the light, I’ll go to sleep knowing I won’t lose any of the pages, which I’ve done in the past though after a lot of frantic searching always found them. So I can safely say—more than ‘safely’; I can say unqualifiedly that in all my years of doing this I never lost one. But stapling’s the best way to hold these pages together, right? Better than paper-clipping them, I’m saying, if the staple isn’t bent and goes in perfectly and the stapler doesn’t jam, right? I’m listening. You still there? Something’s got your tongue? For the last time, you still there? No? All right. No.”
Late Stories Page 20