I am silly. I am a quitter, also. These are the twin tines of the actual devil’s fork. These days you cannot find well-made toys unless you are prepared to spend a fortune, a fact or surmise or opining that I tender in irrelevant position to my argument about silliness and quitting. On silliness and quitting: you can induce any roomful of folk you collect to volunteer by show of raised hands who among them has beat his child, gone queer, voted Republican, voted Democrat, voted Communist, slept with his daughter, laughed at Jerry Lewis, gambled away the trailer payment, flushed the puppies down the toilet, financed many abortions, coveted whatever, humped whatever, killed whomever, and denied it all, but not one of them will confess to being silly and not one of them will admit to being a quitter. I slept with my daughter and I did not stop! This reminds me of a joke I cannot remember.
I understand that songbirds are doing well in the nozoney modern world. In the vast expanse of survivors’ electronic vigor and bitchamp, it will be prettily sung tunes and Hallmark cards and no one quitting, no one silly. The world will want a blacksmith. Mark me on this. Red wagon.
I met a woman riding by in a convertible, she looked sadly happy, I left her alone, you know, since she wasn’t happily sad, a condition I might not worsen, sadly happy I leave alone—just waved to her there in that Fury III, wondering where she got such a car. It was army duck green; she had orange lipstick, oddly attractive. I saw a woman in a black Ford pickup looking neither sad nor happy. I saw a good saddle shop. I saw a turtle a time or two. I saw kites and hate. I saw obscene rain. I saw, I saw, I saw: vidi, vidi, vidi. That Caesar was a card. He had a tough but variegated line whore. Slap that (whore). I’d be all right if something would go ahead and happen.
Altogether, bye. Life is kapok, a material I do not understand. Lillie Langtry is coming over in her red Maserati, going very fast, to take me to lunch, because her husband, who flies planes on secret missions for the Air Force, is flying a plane on a secret mission for the Air Force, and Lillie is lonely and so am I. That I, too, am lonely I have accidentally tendered as part of the reason Lillie is Maserati-ing over fast and lonely herself, but it is not, of course, my loneliness, that’s part of her motivation. My loneliness, we should say, my horniness, is just happy-accidentally congruent to Lillie’s loneliness, should say horniness. Captain Barfheart in the plane has the unhappily incongruent horniness, but he has all that ordnance and hardware and thrust and fire and speed to compensate, for the nonce, and all I’ve got is me bed, which don’t fly and don’t fly over Europe looking for red menace or over Libya or Iraq looking for sandy menace or lines of death in the sand. And silliness: he who will never admit to quitting will confess, once in a while, that he did a certain and specific silly thing in an uncharacteristic moment. But you can get him to admit he has slept with his mother before you can get him to admit he is silly. He ain’t silly, and he don’t quit. This is why I like the idea of Lillie Langtry coming over. Captain Barfheart ain’t silly and don’t quit—ergo thatair F-16—and Lillie Langtry going to kiss me, which is silly, and she going to keep kissing me till Captain Barfheart come home, when we going to quit. And I will have been silly and I will be a quitter. I am not going to say, Now, Lillie, you run off with me, we can outrun Captain Barfheart and the Air Force and napalm. I am going to say, Lillie, wash your ass and go home, and Lillie, also silly and a quitter, will. Red bird outside, blue bird outside, yellow bird in a cage.
I had me a four-pound canary, I could stop the world. No need to go to Mexico and find pills, either. I could just bust out of here and make it to Pets Aplenty before the pills I already have run out. They got more pills and Dixie cups in here than Las Vegas got dice and cups. Hmm, hmm, than liver got iron. Hmm, hmm, than water got wet. Hmm, hmm, than Howdy Doody got freckles—no, doodoo. It is a pleasure for an adult to say doodoo. I could just spray-paint me a owl. I believe they have a owl what is yellow anyway; I could just say it is a canary. Here is a canary. I am pretty sure he will eat yours. If your canary is lonely, put him in there with mine, I am pretty sure he won’t be lonely after that. You silly son of a bitch. Cease pining for your Tweety-bird posthaste.
Why I’m in here, all this untethered aggression. Wanting a owl canary. Like wanting a dog lion. A minnow killer whale. Put your mouse on that ice cube in the aquarium and my minnow will knock him off it and we can see if your mouse can swim, then let’s jerk off, okay?
Life is ash. I prefer a cloudy day early in the week, a sunny day late. Lillie has a fine smooth adulterated ass, heart-shaped and firm and edible like a Carvel cake. If Captain Barfheart called in a air strike, strafed the primitive village of my bedroom, it would be all right, provided Lillie and I were done. I’d have a calm moment there, still flushed with the testosterone ground fire, to think, I did not get anything I did not deserve. This would mean, neatly, and unusually—because usually something don’t mean two things at once unless it’s idiotic or, worse, cute (deliberately ambiguous)—that I deserved the bombing and that I deserved Lillie. A good piece of ass gets you blown well to pieces, and just what is wrong with that? What is subject to the appellate process, due or no, about that? If more folk would take a deep breath and take their being blown to hell, it would be a better place. Instead, it’s: I don’t quit, am not silly, and will not die. Someone else will be silly, quit, and die before I do. What would be funny would be if everybody had a statistician clocking him and posting his win-lose ratios on him, like LED tattoos. Marriage: 3-2. Child-support payments: 437-23. Get-rich-quick schemes: 0-6. Ideas: 2-567. Cars: 1-34. Sexual impulses to fruition: 6,784-21. Fruition to friendship: 18-3. Friendship: 0-3. Jobs resigned/fired: 8-13. Overall life slugging average: .183.
The ramparts about the Silly Castle would begin to crumble quickly. Life is sidewalk. Sidewalk is more crack than walk. All walk is side walk. Wabash, Wabash cannonball, downtown to the soul-food mall, not chitterlings but Nikes.
Decembre LX7, or sometime. I had a conversation with a mid-level Brit. I understand that is a coarse, if not crude, way of putting it, that they can place themselves to the millimeter in the graduated social cylinder in which they teem by hearing a sentence or two. I can deduce Not the Prince and Not a Cockney, leaving a vast middle ground where I don’t know if my man went to public versus private, etc. Anyway, had one of these fellows, he took some umbrage or another, and I found myself “informing” him of “my position” in this fine, hair-splitting disquisition which suggested I wasn’t a colonist but one of the true Empire cross, like himself, and this surprised him about as much as it did me. Unfortunately, or not, I have forgotten the speech and its concerns entire, and tell it now only because I know nothing else to tell. Life is lull. Life is many things other than personal-aggrandizement options and clear thinking about them. This is why people start getting excited at the prospect of hurricanes and kamikaze and death camps and bank robberies and such.
I know a man who is dying, and I should call him up. What stops me, for the moment, is knowing it will come to saying, “Jerry, I know that you are dying and I thought I should call you up.” Actually, it will come of course to not saying that, when it is perfectly obvious to both of us that that is what is being said, and there we will be, in a Final Moment, lying. I will be lying to a dying man, a dying man will be lying to me, and we will feel worse than if I had not called at all. One fewer call, two fewer lies, humankind soars into the side of the barn. I do not understand, or expect anyone else to, that last little conceit. We fly gracefully, tactfully, a few minutes more, but into the wall of hick domesticity, even as one of us dies. Mayhaps I meant that. I know a girl named Tina who has thick ankles, but they support sturdy legs. She shaves these, and runs with these, and accuses men of sexually harassing her. I suspect they are not guilty. I know another woman who holds the same job Tina once did who has slender ankles supporting perfect legs, on which she does not, to my knowledge, run. She does not accuse men of sexually harassing her. I suspect they are guilty.
I suspect I am guilty. Of what
is vague, so what I’d like to do is confess to everything, serve my time, and come out clean and debtless to Society. Just go in for about, oh, thirty years, read some books and be buggered, try to stay in shape, and come out clean-slated. Until, I suppose, you talked to someone, you would not be guilty of anything. You could be very careful about what you did, what you acquired, whom you promised what, and maybe you could remain innocent in a way you really had no chance to as a child, coming out of that prison. You would be in a position to tell the world where to get off the bus. I remember seeing Tom Snyder say to Charles Manson, “Charles, get off the space shuttle.” This was in response to Charles’s affecting to not know about the murders, which piqued Tom. Charles is in a position to say, Get off the space shuttle to the world. Next to Hitler he is the Hamburglar. But.
Life is dominoes and regret. That is the common view, except you are supposed to manage the regret to its extinction. Some buffalo near here were corraled for a brucellosis check and one of them was positive but half the herd died fighting in the corral. That is how you manage something to extinction. I’ve had trouble in my day with dominoes and regret—you can control more in life than you do in a board game or a card game, and whatever regret obtains isn’t going to conveniently kill itself off in your lifetime. Regret is as perdurable as tar.
My back is stiff. Is that true, not true, relevant, not, sufficient, in-, necessary, un-? Life is cartilaginous approximating and infrequent bone-hard acting. Colorful tops that spin, children should, plenty of, have. Life I am not up to. It gets me down, and you’d think that funny but it’s not, it’s true, germane or no. How can the only thing we’re here to do—whether you understand it or not—strike you as unappealing or difficult or as something you’d rather not do? In a firestorm of mystery and event, you sit fixed on the plain of combat, repeating, “I’d rather not.”
When I got back from Mexico, I did not know what century it was or what sex I was, but other than that was fine. I felt relaxed. Felt. The condition of feeling relaxed when you are not is coma, if the misapprehension is physical, and comatose or catatonic if the misapprehension is psychological.
I don’t hopalong Cassidy. There’s weather and there’s change, of clothes, seasons, silver. And of weather. The weather is partly moldy. Mocher, moody, mooch, moreso.
Aliens of Affection
ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER—which he had never been on before and now that he was on it could not imagine what it was, or what it looked like, or what he looked like on the watchtower, other than the way he usually looked—Mr. Albemarle patrolled. At each end of his walk, or watch, or beat—he had no idea what you called the path he trod until the fog suggested he turn back and tread until the fog at the other end suggested he turn back again—Mr. Albemarle crisply about-faced, having seen and heard nothing. He was on the top of a wall, as near as he could tell, which was one of several walls, as near as he could tell, constituting a garrison or fort or prison, or, as near as he could tell, someone’s corporate headquarters. Where or how the term “watchtower” had obtained and why, he did not know. He was not on a tower, and if he watched anything it was that he not step off the wall into the cool gauzy air and fall he had no idea how far down onto he had no idea what. If he was on a watchtower, he could only surmise there was a moat, ideally with something dangerous in it, below. But he had no actual vision of anything, and no idea why he was on the watchtower, or whatever it was, no idea why he was walking it and no idea what he was watching for. He had an idea only about why the phrase “all along the watchtower” kept playing in his head: he’d heard it on the radio.
What he seemed to be doing, more than watching or towering or guarding, was modeling. He kept seeing himself stroll and turn in the fog on the wall as if he were on a runway, and he had multiple-angled views of himself, as if he were turning around before a tripartite mirror in a clothing store. There he was: some kind of guard (for what?) showing, mostly to himself, some clothes that looked strange on him, or not, that he would buy, or not, and have put in a bag, or not; he might wear them out of the store with his old clothes in a bag. That moment had given him a good feeling as a young man—wearing, as it were, virgin clothes fresh from the rack to the street, his old sodden worn duds in a lowly sack at his side. There were no pleasures, large or small, in his life now. He had mismanaged his affections.
All along the watchtower, then, in the fog, he watched, he supposed, for affection. That was the enemy. It was in the belly of a beautiful gift, companionship, which gift was always good to receive until this monster of happiness began to pour out of it and run amok and make him so happy that he betrayed it. Nothing so sweet as true affection could be trusted. True affection is too good to be true. It contains, perforce, disaffection. He walked his wall, all along the watchtower. The fog was lustrous and rising and a comfort. Mr. Albemarle pronounced, orated really, as though he were Hamlet, or some other rarefied speaker, which he was not, the following speech into the fog, aware that loud disputations of this sort surely violated the prescribed duties, whatever they were, of those who perambulate the watchtower:
My specialty is the mismanagement of affections. A cowboy of the heart, I head ’em up and move ’em out: lowing, bellowing, grunting, snorting emotions of slow stupid tenderness driven in mad droves to their end. All you need for this, in the way of equipment, is a good strong horse between your legs. I am a cowboy, or, as they say in Sweden, a cawboy. Caw.
Some sodiers showed up. “Hey! Cawboy!” they said, or one of them said. It was a sudden foggy profusion of boots and nylon webbing and weapon noise, all halt-who-goes-there, etc. Mr. Albemarle defended himself against soldiers by calling them, in his mind, sodiers. He defended himself against not ever having been one and the possible indictment of manhood that might constitute, and he defended himself against their potential menace now—as they halted him when he should have been halting them by the terms of his not clearly understood position all along the watchtower—by calling them, in his mind, sodiers. The sodiers said, “Hey, cawboy, you got any cigarettes?”
Mr. Albemarle did and shared them all around, and they were immediate fast friends, he and the sodiers.
“You sodiers are okay fine,” he boldly said to them.
“We know it,” they said, lifting their heavy steel helmets to reveal beautiful multicolored denim welder’s caps on backwards on each of their heads. They all smiled, each revealing one missing central incisor, right or left. There were nine sodiers and Mr. Albemarle did not have time to get a count, how many right, how many left incisors missing. He had once considered dentistry as a sop to his mothers hopes for him. A dentist talked him out of it. “I clean black gunk out of peoples mouths all day, son.” That did it. The same dentist, it occurred to him now, had earlier talked him out of being a sodier. “All you do is say, You three guys, go behind that truck and shoot the enemy. What’s there to learn in that?”
This was a sufficiently strong argument, with the black gunk looming as well, to talk young Mr. Albemarle out of enlisting in ROTC and getting educational benefits to allow him to go to dental school. The final straw was the dentists asking him what he, the dentist, might do about his sagging breasts. His years slumped over patients, cleaning black gunk, on a short stool on wheels, had not maintained a firm tone in the dentist’s pectoral muscles, and they indeed drooped, reminiscent of a budding girl’s breasts. Mr. Albemarle, who was then eighteen and in fine shape himself and not called yet Mr. Albemarle, told the dentist to lift weights, but to his knowledge the dentist never took his advice.
“You sodiers have good shit, it looks,” Mr. Albemarle said.
“We have very good shit,” they said. They each searched themselves and gave to Mr. Albemarle a piece of gear. He received from them, all of them standing all along the watchtower and blowing exhales of white smoke into the white fog, a collapsing titanium mess cup with Teflon coating on it that was very sexy to the touch; a boot knife that was too sharp to put in your boot; an O.D. green t
ube of sunblock, a jungle hammock, with roof and mosquito netting, a pair of very fine, heavy socks (clean), a box of 9 mm shells, an athletic supporter, a flak vest, and a jammed M-16 rifle that the sodiers thought was easily fixable but for the life of all of them they could not fathom how.
Mr. Albemarle put on and strapped on all his new gear and passed around more cigarettes in a truly warm spirit. “Do you sodiers,” he asked, “know anything about all along the watchtowering?”
“What do you mean?” they asked.
“Like, what I’m supposed to do.”
The sodiers looked at Mr. Albemarle and briefly at each other. “You doing it, dude,” one of them said, and the others agreed.
“All right, I can accept that,” Mr. Albemarle said. “But there is a certain want of certainty regarding just what it is I’m doing.”
“Well put,” a sodier said.
“We are in a not dissimilar position ourselves,” said another, to general nodding all along the watchtower.
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