The Teachings of Don B.

by Donald Barthelme

  Parenthetically, large numbers do not frighten the modern citizen. I’ve noticed that. For instance, the number of dogs worldwide is thought to be between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty million. Quite a few dogs. The number of people on earth, as of the most recent figures, is something like four billion seven hundred sixty-six million three hundred and twenty-four thousand. The national debt is running right around a trillion eight hundred billion. The notion of forty-one mil didn’t scare me. I mean, it was a problem, but superable.

  There were some small, trivial items among my thirty-two unsigned checks: a few dollars for Bill, so that he can get a new transmission for that Chevy (his transmission junked out in July; he’s the man who gave me a thirty-mile tow when my radiator blew in Maine a couple of years ago), and a neat one thousand for the National Endowment for the Arts, earmarked for a struggling young country fiddler of promise. On Wednesday night, I watched the Lotto machine make the plastic balls bounce and bubble on television and checked the numbers as they appeared on the screen. My ticket, when I compared it with the numbers on the screen, was not what you’d call handsome—it was downright meager. But I was sane, even serene.

  RETURN

  I went on the Azalea Trail, and shot one, right through the heart. I took the dead azalea home and put it in my freezer, and all at once I was seized by a deep and fearful melancholy. Had I done something wrong? I had been long away from Texas, living in the wicked, sinful cities of the East—perhaps I no longer understood Texas ways, perhaps the roar and clatter of New York City had permanently damaged the delicate tissues of my flabellum. Had I misunderstood the Azalea Trail?

  But I put my melancholy aside and went vigorously about the business of getting connected. I got myself connected to Southwestern Bell, and Entex, and the Light Company, and cable TV, long lines binding me once again into the community. I subscribed to two of our great city newspapers, the American one and the Canadian one, and I bought an Old Smoky barbecue pit.

  I set out to sail Buffalo Bayou on a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood powered by eight mighty Weed Eaters and I saw many strange and wonderful things. I saw an egret and then another egret and a turtle and a refrigerator without a door on it and a heron and a possum and an upside-down ’52 Pontiac. And I said to myself, This blessed stream contains many strange and wonderful things. It was getting dark now, and the moon had risen, and I saw a wise old owl sitting in a tree. So I throttled back my eight powerful Weed Eaters and spoke to the owl, saying, “How’s by you, boychick?”

  And then I looked closely and saw that it wasn’t a wise old owl at all; it was Philip Johnson, out hunting for new clients, by the light of the moon. So I congratulated him on all his great and tall new buildings, and we gazed together at the glowing tower of the city, all the great and tall new buildings glowing like the wondrous towers of Oz, we looked at them and were content.

  But then my melancholy came upon me with doubled force, and I decided to take additional measures. So I joined the First Baptist Church of Aldine, the First Baptist Church of Alvin, the First Baptist Church of Friendswood, the First Baptist Church of Golden Acres, the First Baptist Church of Jacinto City, and the First Baptist Church of the Woodlands. Then I started in on the Methodists. Before I had finished, I was a member in good standing of some two hundred twenty congregations, and had been appointed to a number of important committees. I was on the Old Clothes Committee here, and the Potato Salad Committee there, vice-chairman of the Fellowship of Song Committee at another place, and treasurer of the Total Immersion Committee at yet another place. It felt fine, being connected.

  But by this time I was a little tired of being good, you can be good just so long and then you get a little tired of it. So I decided to be bad, and went out to find some Totally Nude Live Girls. And found some, right there on South Main, acres and acres of them. Totally Nude Live Girls. And I must tell you that they were lovely, rarely had I seen Totally Nude Live Girls quite so lovely, so I sat down, and took off my shoes, and began to talk to them.

  It was a slow afternoon and there must have been forty or sixty Totally Nude Live Girls in that bar, and they all began to confide in me, telling me their hopes and fears, their visions of the future, and their regrets about the particolored past. One Totally Nude Live Girl told me that she was from Secaucus, New Jersey, and had only been a Totally Nude Live Girl for a month, but it was better than being a mailman, which is what she had been in Secaucus, New Jersey, because of the dogs scaring you all the time, she knew she was supposed to like dogs but she really didn’t, and so on. She was very nice. I liked her.

  We were drinking, me and the forty or sixty Totally Nude Live Girls, martinis and margaritas and one thing and another, buckets and buckets of them, there was loveliness in every direction, as far as the eye could see, and with a rush the melancholy came upon me once again, because nothing can make you so melancholy, sick in the heart, as forty to sixty excited, confiding, lovely, and partially drunk Totally Nude Live Girls. So with regret I put my shoes on and left them, promising to write.

  That was what I was, I remembered, a writer—a strange fate but not uncongenial. I remembered that years ago, as a raw youth, I had worked for the Houston newspaper that is now the Canadian one. This was shortly after the Civil War. The newspaper building was populated with terrifying city editors whose gaze could cut brass, and ferocious copy desk men whose contempt could make a boy of twenty wish that his mother and father had never met. I loved working there. They paid us in pretzels, of course—I got about forty pretzels a week, and then, when I got back from the Spanish-American War, I got a generous raise, to fifty. Pretzels.

  When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture that noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach . . . So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.

  But I had no time to dwell upon these precious memories. I had been long away from Texas and had to reacculturate, fast. So I joined the YMCA, the AAA, the American Legion, the Art League, the Fern Society, the Canary Club, the Turnverein, the AFL-CIO, the Great Books Council, the Clean Air Caucus, the Loyal Order of Moose Number 2106, Planned Parenthood, the Gay Coalition, the On Leong Merchants’ Association, the Mothers of Twins Club, and Mensa. These new associations greatly enriched my life. I was caught up in a whirl of activity, so to say, zipping over to the Fern Society to inspect a comely new frond one day and to the Canary Club to look at a bold new Meistersinger the next, protesting outrages with my brothers of the Gay Coalition in the morning and cuddling nurselings with my fellow mothers of the Twins Club in the afternoon, and thinking the long long thoughts of Mensa all the while.

  Yet the melancholy hung about me like an unchampionship season and I realized that I needed professional help. So I went off to consult a true expert in unhappiness, the Hunchback of the Galleria. I found the Hunchback up by the running track, watching with fascination the tiny, graceful skaters inscribing ampersands on the ice far below. “Hunchback,” I said to him, “what is wrong with me? Am I laboring under some kind of a curse? Can it be that the deep and fearful malaise which informs all my days is the result of my having shot that damned azalea?”

  “Woe,” said the Hunchback, “woe unto him who—”

  “Hunchback,” I said, “what is this woe-unto-him-who business? Can you give me a straight answer, or not?”

  “Woe,” said the Hunchback, “woe unto him who, or, take another case, woe unto her who—”

  He could see that I was becoming a little exasperated, so he said, in the wisest p
ossible tones, “Why are you being so hard on yourself?” and then was off, swinging on a rope through the great cathedrallike spaces of the Galleria, and I thought I heard bells ringing, but maybe I didn’t. In fine, I obtained no satisfaction, any ordinary shrink could have said to me, “Why are you being so hard on yourself?” and many have, I was disappointed.

  I was disappointed, so I took myself to the Opera to cheer myself up. It was a grand evening, with a lot of flash and glitter, there were Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces and pumpkins and Mercedes-Benzes pulling up to the glistening façade of the Opera. I parked my mule and rushed inside, all of us were in a high state of pleasurable tension because we were going to the Opera, going to grasp that core experience of culture which is the Opera, that irreducible minimum of irrefrangible soul stuff which the Opera is.

  And as I made my way to my seat in Row GGI saw a caped and masked figure lurking in the shadows. My God! I thought, It’s the Phantom of the Opera! But it was only Philip Johnson, seeking new clients in the corridors of the Opera, and I said to him, “Noble architect! Can you design for me some kind of an azalea that I can plant somewhere on the surface of this wondrous city and thus redeem, in some measure, the hasty and ill-considered act of azaleacide that I would not have committed had I not lingered too long in the wicked, sinful cities of the East and gotten my values screwed up?” And the great architect whipped from his sleeve his magic Eberhard Faber 2B pencil and waved it in the air, and sketched a most beautiful stainless steel azalea nine hundred feet high. My melancholy fell away from me, and I was content. And some day, God and the Gerald D. Hines Interests willing, you’ll see this nine-hundred-foot-high stainless steel azalea, taking its place with the city’s other great and tall monuments in the garden of the creative imagination.

  AT LAST, IT IS TIME . . .

  At last, it is time to speak the truth about Thanksgiving. The truth is this: it is not a really great holiday. Consider the imagery. Dried cornhusks hanging on the door! Terrible wine! Cranberry jelly in little bowls of extremely doubtful provenance which everyone is required to handle with the greatest of care! Consider the participants, the merrymakers. Men and women (also children) who have survived passably well through the years, mainly as a result of living at considerable distances from their dear parents and beloved siblings, who on this feast of feasts must apparently forgather (as if beckoned by an aberrant Fairy Godmother), usually by circuitous routes, through heavy traffic, at a common meeting place, where the very moods, distempers, and obtrusive personal habits that have kept them happily apart since adulthood are then and there encouraged to slowly ferment beneath the cornhusks, and gradually rise with the aid of the terrible wine, and finally burst forth out of control under the stimulus of the cranberry jelly! No, it is a mockery of a holiday. For instance: Thank you, O Lord, for what we are about to receive. This is surely not a gala concept. There are no presents, unless one counts Aunt Bertha’s sweet rolls a present, which no one does. There is precious little in the way of costumery: miniature plastic turkeys and those witless Pilgrim hats. There is no sex. Indeed, Thanksgiving is the one day of the year (a fact known to everybody) when all thoughts of sex completely vanish, evaporating from apartments, houses, condominiums, and mobile homes like steam from a bathroom mirror.

  Consider also the nowhereness of the time of the year. The last week or so in November. It is obviously not yet winter: winter, with its death-dealing blizzards and its girls in tiny skirts pirouetting on the ice. On the other hand, it is certainly not much use to anyone as fall: no golden leaves or Oktoberfests, and so forth. Instead, it is a no-man’s-land between the seasons. In the cold and sobersides northern half of the country, it is a vaguely unsettling interregnum of long, mournful walks beneath leafless trees: the long, mournful walks following the midday repast with the dread inevitability of pie following turkey, and the leafless trees looming or standing about like eyesores, and the ground either as hard as iron or slightly mushy, and the light snow always beginning to fall when one is halfway to the old green gate—flecks of cold, watery stuff plopping between neck and collar, for the reason that, it being not yet winter, one has forgotten or not chosen to bring along a muffler. It is a corollary to the long, mournful Thanksgiving walk that the absence of this muffler is quickly noticed and that four weeks or so later, at Christmastime, instead of the Sony Betamax one had secretly hoped that the children might have chipped in together to purchase, one receives another muffler—by then the thirty-third. Thirty-three mufflers! Some walk! Of course, things are more fun in the warm and loony southern part of the country. No snow there of any kind. No need of mufflers. Also, no long, mournful walks, because in the warm and loony southern part of the country everybody drives. So everybody drives over to Uncle Jasper’s house to watch the Cougars play the Gators, a not entirely unimportant conflict, which will determine whether the Gators get a bowl bid or must take another postseason exhibition tour of North Korea. But no sooner do the Cougars kick off (an astonishing end-over-end squiggly thing that floats lazily above the arena before plummeting down toward K. C. McCoy and catching him on the helmet) than Auntie Em starts hustling turkey. Soon Cousin May is slamming around the bowls and platters, and Cousin Bernice is oohing and ahing about “all the fixin’s,” and Uncle Bob is making low, insincere sounds of appreciation: “Yummy, yummy, Auntie Em, I’ll have me some more of these delicious yams!” Delicious yams? Uncle Bob’s eyes roll wildly in his head. Billy Joe Quaglino throws his long bomb in the middle of Grandpa Morris saying grace, Grandpa Morris speaking so low nobody can hear him—which is just as well, since he is reciting what he can remember of his last union contract; and then, just as J. B. (Speedy) Snood begins his ninety-two-yard punt return, Auntie Em starts dealing second helpings of her famous stuffing to everyone, as if she were pushing a controlled substance, which it well might be, since there are no easily recognizable ingredients visible to the naked eye.

  Consider for a moment the Thanksgiving meal itself. It has become a sort of refuge for endangered species of starch: sweet potatoes, cauliflower, pumpkin, mince (whatever “mince” is), those blessed yams. Bowls of luridly colored yams, with no taste at all, lying torpid under a lava flow of marshmallow! And then the sacred turkey. One might as well try to construct a holiday repast around a fish—say, a nice piece of boiled haddock. After all, turkey tastes very similar to haddock: same consistency, same quite remarkable absence of flavor. But then, if the Thanksgiving pièce de résistance were a nice piece of boiled haddock instead of turkey, there wouldn’t be all that fun for Dad when Mom hands him the sterling silver, bone-handled carving set (a wedding present from her parents and not sharpened since) and then everyone stands around pretending not to watch while he saws and tears away at the bird as if he were trying to burrow his way into or out of some grotesque, fowllike prison.

  What of the good side to Thanksgiving? you ask. There is always a good side to everything. Not to Thanksgiving. There is only a bad side and then a worse side. For instance, Grandmother’s best linen tablecloth is a bad side: the fact that it is produced each year, in the manner of a red flag being produced before a bull, and then is always spilled upon by whichever child is doing poorest at school that term and so is in need of greatest reassurance. Thus: “Oh, my God, Veronica, you just spilled grape juice [or “plum wine” or “tar”] on Grandmother’s best linen tablecloth!” But now comes worse. For at this point Cousin Bill, the one who lost all Cousin Edwina’s money on the car dealership three years ago and has apparently been drinking steadily since Halloween, bizarrely chooses to say, “Seems to me those old glasses are always falling over.” To which Auntie Meg is heard to add, “Somehow I don’t remember receivin’ any of those old glasses.” To which Uncle Fred replies, “That’s because you and George decided to go on vacation to Hawaii in the summer Grandpa Sam was dying.” Now Grandmother is sobbing, though not so uncontrollably that she cannot refrain from murmuring, “I think that volcano painting I threw away by mistake got sent me
from Hawaii, heaven knows why.” But the gods are merciful, even the Pilgrim-hatted god of cornhusks and soggy stuffing, and there is an end to everything, even to Thanksgiving. Indeed, there is a grandeur to the feelings of finality and doom which usually settle on a house after the Thanksgiving celebration is over, for with the completion of Thanksgiving Day the year itself has been properly terminated—shot through the cranium with a high-velocity candied yam. At this calendrical nadir, all energy on the planet has gone, all fun has fled, all the terrible wine has been drunk.

  But then, overnight, life once again begins to stir, emerging, even by the next morning, in the form of Japanese window displays and Taiwanese Christmas lighting, from the primeval ooze of the nation’s department stores. Thus, a new year dawns, bringing with it immediate and cheering possibilities of extended consumer debt, office-party flirtations, good—or, at least, mediocre—wine, and visions of cheapskate excursion fares to Montego Bay. It is worth noting, perhaps, that this true new year always starts with the same mute, powerful mythic ceremony: the surreptitious tossing out, in the early morning, of all those horrid aluminum-foil packages of yams and cauliflower and stuffing and red, gummy cranberry substance which have been squeezed into the refrigerator as if a reenactment of the siege of Paris were expected. Soon afterward, the phoenix of Christmas can be observed as it slowly rises, beating its drumsticks, once again goggle-eyed with hope and unrealistic expectations.