The Teachings of Don B.

by Donald Barthelme

  She listened. “What is that sort of funny thrimp-thrimp sound? Thrimp thrimp thrimp thrimp thrimp thrimp?”

  “That is the sound made by the nation’s terrific and gigantic electronic computers pulsing,” I said. “Of which there are now perhaps thirty-five thousand in use, from sea to shining sea. It is estimated that there will be eighty-five thousand of them in use by 1975. And a substantial portion of these computers are playing games, Amanda, even as you and I. The businessmen are playing Daddy Warbucks games, the Lost Horse game for example, in order to establish patterns that will enable them to mangle the competition. The military men are playing war games, Escalation for example, in order to test the efficacy of alternate responses to the provocations of the enemy. And to make new enemies, for all I know. The scientists are playing scientific games, and some people are playing plain old checkers. And Marshall McLuhan says that games are dramatic modes of our psychological lives, providing release for particular tensions in social groups. And Huizinga says that the play element in culture serves a civilizing function, combining an agonistic principle of competitiveness with a ludic principle, or pure play. And Shub in his Game Theory and Related Approaches to Social Behavior . . .”

  “Yes,” Amanda said, “but what about me? My head is full of Diplomacy, and my heart is full of Careers. And my hands are full of Hoodwink, and my bank account is full of Monopoly money. I’m exhausted, Hector. I’m tired of playing games. I want—”

  “I know,” I said. “Relax, Amanda. We can lick this thing. Just trust me.”

  “What do you propose?” she asked, her brilliant aqua eyes full of fondness and eye shadow. “What?”

  “New games,” I said. “New games, Amanda, to set the turkey of mental excitement flying through the thin air of intellectual irresponsibility.”

  “New games?” I noticed that the blood had run out of her face. But I could not see where it had gone. “You mean people can make up their own games? Isn’t that . . . hubris?”

  “Have another brandy,” I said. “Have another brandy, and we will play Contretemps, the Game of Social Embarrassment. And Cofferdam, and Double Boiler, and Hubris too, if you like. Listen to the names of these glorious new games—Leftwards, Gearbox, Dentist’s Appointment, and Stroke. We will invent them together, dear friend.”

  “How is this game played? Contretemps or whatever it is?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that question,” I said, “because I know the answer. One starts with a situation, a social situation. One with a potential for embarrassment. One in which one is a bit out of one’s depth, so to say. Then the potential is actualized. Imagine for instance that you are attending a lavish reception at the Court of St. James’s. You have just converted your holdings in sterling, which were vast, into Siamese baht. In consequence, the Queen’s allowance has been cut. You notice that she is wearing last year’s tiara. You step up to be presented. You notice that she is staring at you with a funny expression on her face.”

  “Not bad,” Amanda said. “Give me another one.”

  “Okay. A more elaborate one. You are attending a lavish reception at the Court of St. James’s. Present also is Lord Snowdon, husband of Princess Margaret and famous photographer. The editor of the Sunday Times color—that should be colour—magazine is there too. Lord Snowdon has been on assignment for the magazine. He is doing a picture story on—”

  “The Stones.”

  “Very good. He is doing a picture story on the Stones. Lord Snowdon is showing his prints to the editor. You are looking over their shoulders. As it happens, you too have recently taken some colour shots of the Stones. With your old box camera.”

  “Your old box camera that was your great-grandmother’s that you found in an old trunk in the attic and that is held together with masking tape,” Amanda said.

  “Superb. Whereas Lord Snowdon has been shooting with a pair of matched Hasselblads with four-thousand-dollar lenses. You regard Lord Snowdon’s pictures over the editor’s shoulder. Then you reach into your reticule and withdraw your own pictures. ‘These are terrible,’ you say, ‘but I thought you might just . . .’ The editor gazes intently at your photographs. He drops Lord Snowdon’s photographs on the floor. ‘By God,’ the editor says. ‘You mean you . . . with your great-grandmother’s camera held together with masking tape . . .’ Lord Snowdon is staring at you with a funny expression on his face.”

  “Quelle horreur!” Amanda murmured.

  “That is Contretemps,” I said. “The situations tend to get more and more elaborate and horrible. A particularly good game for self-punishment, if that is what you crave. The situation in which you are in the studio of a famous artist, one who paints pitiful little girls with big eyes, and your own child, come to have her portrait done, refuses to open her eyes at all—that one is rather stimulating, I must say. And there are others. You are on the operating table. You are draped with a white sheet. You have borrowed a kidney from a friend. Now it is time to return it. The doctor—”

  “More games,” Amanda said. “More games and more brandy.”

  “We could play Broadway Flop,” I said. “The Game of Ill-Conceived Musical Comedy. One attempts to construct the particular work least likely to get out of New Haven alive. A Lionel Bart musical based on The Waste Land, for example. Titled Wasteland! At the finale, Albert and Lil decide to leave Rats’ Alley and make a new start in America. Or we could play Bag, the History of Jazz Game. The object of the game is to bring jazz up the river from New Orleans. Conflict provided by evil commercial-music interests who want to stop the spread of the New Thing. The evil commercial-music interests represented on the board by—”

  “Squares,” Amanda said triumphantly, and I gathered her into my arms. Then we played Famous Last Words, the Game of Deathbed Utterances, locked in a lovers’ embrace on the fire escape. People down below stood agape, hanging upon the tense exchange between us.

  “It is enough,” I said.

  “Immanuel Kant,” she said.

  “If there is no question, there is no answer.”

  “Gertrude Stein.”

  “This is a fickle and faithless generation.”

  “Captain Kidd.”

  “Bertie.”

  “Queen Victoria.”

  “I do not understand what I have to do.”

  “Leo Tolstoy.”

  “Hang on to the Matchless; it will make millions again.”

  “I can’t remember, I can’t remember!”

  “Tabor, the Silver King,” I said. “Didn’t you see The Ballad of Baby Doe?”

  “These games are marvelous,” Amanda said. “I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial. These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as—”

  “Yes,” I said. Then we played:

  Crise du Cinéma, in which one improves existing films by supplying new casting and variant endings (Doris Day for Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls; after El Sordo’s band is wiped out, Maria persuades Robert Jordan to settle with her in a nice suburb of Barcelona).

  Zen Zen (pointless answers are given to simple questions. “Where is the Administration Building?” “Ha-ha. Your hat is falling off.” Blows are exchanged).

  Break the Ball (an accumulation of balls from ball games—footballs, baseballs, basketballs, tennis balls, cricket balls—is demolished, using a twelve-pound sledge).

  “What comes after Break the Ball?” Amanda asked.

  “After the Ball Is Over. A fine game played with an empty punchbowl and four hundred overcoats. You attempt to find your overcoat in the pile of overcoats. You are forbidden to use your hands, feet, or teeth. Or anybody else’s hands, feet, or teeth.”

  “Games are the enemies of beauty, truth, and sleep,” Amanda said. The brandy was almost gone.

  “There remains one more game.”

  “What is it?”
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  “Ennui,” I said. “The easiest of all. No rules, no boards, no equipment.”

  “What is Ennui?” Amanda asked, setting it up for me.

  “Ennui is the absence of games,” I said, “the modern world at its most vulnerable.” But she had folded her tent dress and silently stolen away.

  AN HESITATION ON THE BANK OF THE DELAWARE

  Well, General Washington, sir, we are just about ready to croff the Delaware. The men are ready. Their morale is good. The boats are prepared. Shall I give the word?”

  “Just a moment, Major Kinsolving. A dispatch rider is due, carrying word of the ftate of the heating plant in my houfe in Virginia. It’s been acting awfully cranky. And another dispatch rider is due, bringing news of the well that is being dug at my estate at Fig Island, off the Carolinas. We have gone down forty-three feet and not yet got water. And I await ftill another messenger, carrying intelligence of my summer home in Georgia. We’ve been having a few problems with the fenestration. Rude boys have been breaking windows by throwing giant crayfish at them. It’s moft annoying.”

  “But, General, unless we launch the boats pretty shortly, the attack will lose the element of furprife. Dawn is faft approaching. Although I admit nobody likes to have his carpets littered with wet, muddy giant crayfish.”

  “And then there is the matter of the mosquito nets for my tiny little retreat and hideaway in the Louisiana Territory. The mosquitoes down there are fomething fierce, Kinsolving.”

  “You certainly have a lot of houfes, General. Although I’m not being critical. I understand. Everybody understands. The four million pounds that these houfes have coft the infant Republic doesn’t bother us a bit. Even though most of us have had to sell our cow to pay for them. We didn’t need a cow anyway. A cow was, for most of us, an unnecessary luxury. The fecurity of your mind and person is, of courfe, paramount.”

  “You do understand, Kinsolving. You showed that when you picked out the wallpaper for my houfe in Angle, Vermont. That was nice wallpaper.”

  “No more than you deserve, General, you being the Father of Our Country and all. No man can lead the patriots into battle without solid-silver wallpaper in his houfe. Or one of his houfes. The General Fervices Administration howled, of courfe.”

  “Is the General Fervices Administration standing on the bank of this river, preparing to launch one of the decifive battles of the war? No. No, it is not. But to business. My boat. Is the hand-carved rosewood seat in place?”

  “It is, General. The Fecret Fervice installed it. Although, I might point out that you’re fupposed to be ftanding up. Wrapped in your cloak against the icy winds. A ftern and determined expression on your vifage.”

  “A good bunch of boys, the Fecret Fervice. What about the beaten-gold boat bottom?”

  “Done and done. The gold beaters have finished their arduous labor.”

  “And the costly Oriental rugf in place, on the farther shore?”

  “Yef.”

  “And the golf courfe?”

  “Eighteen holes, General, each hole and approach beautifully landscaped by private contributions extracted from a grateful and nearly beggared citizenry. You have a foursome scheduled with Cornwallis and the other soon-to-be-defeated Limey generals at three-thirty fharp.”

  “Very good, Kinsolving. To the boats, then. But wait! I just remembered. What about the houfe for my horfe? Have the funds been appropriated?”

  “Sir, I regret to tell you that there can be no houfe for your horfe. Both the Houfe Appropriations Committee and the Horfe Appropriations Committee bounced it back.”

  “No houfe for my horfe?”

  “The Continental Congress resolved that your famous plainneff and modefty would be ill ferved were it known that a houfe for your horfe was paid for from the public purfe.”

  “No houfe for my poor horfe! Oh, vile! My horfe, houfeless! Suddenly I feel infecure, Kinsolving—terribly, terribly infecure. Tell the army to get out of the boats. And send the Congress a ftatement: one river crossing under hazardous conditions, two thousand pounds, payable in advance. We don’t budge until we get the fhillings.”

  “Two thousand pounds! The exact cost of the houfe for your horfe!”

  “I trust the gentlemen in Philadelphia will get the meffage. If the young nation is to endure, the serenity of my head is crucial, Kinsolving, absolutely crucial. And it takes a heap of houfing to make a head at home.”

  I HAVE FOR SOME TIME . . .

  I have for some time longed to “leak” something to a national magazine, and now, at last, I have a burst pipe which might interest you. This is good stuff, so pay attention. The president’s energy bill has been having a rough time in the Senate, as you know, and the president has had some angry words for “narrow, special-interest attacks on . . . the national energy plan.” Who is he talking about, exactly? The true gen, from a guy I know who is very, very close to Jody Powell, the president’s press secretary, is this: The plot to wreck the energy bill is the work of none other than China’s notorious Gang of Four, which has half the Senate by the throat! Yes, it’s Chiang Ch’ing and her pals, up to their old tricks. Well, I was flabbergasted, as I assume you are, but the notion took on more credibility when my source listed for me the names of the particular senators around whose Adam’s apples the Gang’s tendrils restlessly wrap, unwrap, and rewrap. (I can’t reveal them here, because of the libel laws.) What a Gang! They have already rented an office on H Street and applied for a Blue Cross group policy. How did the Gang get from mainland China to the continental U.S.? The answer, for students of Comparative Disinformation, is ridiculously simple: they had standby seats on the Bell & Howell plane.

  THE GREAT DEBATE

  The exhilarating Ford-Carter debates in September 1976 were such a significant—many say decisive—factor in that year’s presidential campaign that the historian’s urge to get them down on paper as soon as, or even sooner than, possible will be readily understood. Such an exercise in Preemptive History will be derided by those members of the profession still shackled to more traditional procedures, but for those ancients a fig, I say, a fig. The first of the prime-time debates (September 8) was set in a Denver studio and reached an estimated thirty-two million people. Both candidates wore blue suits, wine-dark ties, and a certain amount of unbleached flour. In addition, President Ford wore two left shoes and Governor Carter spent the entire hour tossing from hand to hand a bale of alfalfa. Herewith the transcript:

  MR. FORD: Well, I would just like to welcome Governor Carter—I mean former Governor Carter—to the studio here tonight and to America, our America. I have been following with interest his various appearances around the country and in a general way listening with interest to some of the things he has been saying in his various public appearances, and I would just like to say here that in my opinion he has done very well, extraordinarily well, for someone who was at the beginning of the campaign only a dim little cloud on the horizon—a cloud no bigger than a little wee dark cloud, you might say.

  MR. CARTER: He who hath Love in his heart hath in his heart Love.

  MR. FORD: What I would like to put in front of the American people tonight are some of our programs and achievements which affect in one way or another each and every American—when I say “our” I mean of course programs and achievements generated by my Administration, and by that I don’t mean only the President but the whole team. One of the most important of these is, I think, our new initiative in international relations—that is, the relations between the various nations of the world who relate to each other and to themselves. In phasing out the outmoded concept of détente and offering what I think and hope is a very creative new approach—what I have called faerdigskranskelse, which is Finnish for “dynamic tension”—or rather I didn’t call it that, Secretary Kissinger called it that, and because he called it that I just naturally, as who wouldn’t, began calling it that—in conceiving this new concept, and I know it’s hard to pronounce but most new things are a lit
tle difficult to pronounce at first until you get the hang of it. Say after me: “Faerdigskranskelse.”

  MR. CARTER: He who hath faerdigskranskelse in his heart hath no room in his heart for Love.

  MR. FORD: And I think this new concept will also satisfy those critics of our policies who feel, honestly and sincerely, that we have not been in the past sufficiently rigid in our international posture, in our dealings with those who call themselves, rightly or wrongly, enemies of freedom, and I think this will go a long way toward correcting that. Faerdigskranskelse plain and simple, or, in English, dynamic tension.

  In addition to this new initiative in the international area, we have sent to the Congress proposals for five new initiatives in the domestic area. Now, as you know, we have been working very hard on the problem of unemployment, which means, very simply, that there are individuals in this country today who do not have employment, or jobs. These individuals, and it’s been running and will continue to run for the foreseeable future at about seven and a bit percent, and what we have done on that is to send to the Congress proposals that will, in the event that Congress sees fit to implement them, permit a crash program, nationwide—a very important and I think creative program that is fiscally responsible, fiscally sound—to develop something that is very much needed in America: an artificial peanut butter. This is also, I may say, directly related to the problem of hunger in this country, because, as you know, most of the children, the young children, in this country have as a mainstay of their diet peanut-butter sandwiches, very often peanut-butter-and-jelly, and the development of a new low-cost peanut butter that they could put on their bread when they come home from school or even take to school with them for their lunches would be of inestimable value to the mothers and fathers who are now paying what we consider ridiculously high prices for the so-called organic product, and we hope to put three to four million people to work in that program.