by Roy Blount
I never threatened the colonel’s record, and I never developed the eloquence it would take to convince crowd after crowd, as the colonel did, that microdots were scattered like silica gel (something else he thought he’d made up, he just liked the sound) over every American’s skin and hair and could tune in the infinite. He never even had to move into galvanism many a night, he could go on about microdots alone to the great majority of hearts’ content.
What I did do, though, was get into Creationism very early on. I went from community college to community college at $200 a pop, telling groups of the credulous (and I don’t put credulousness down) that what we needed was not just Creationist Science but Creationist Football and Creationist Journalism as well. And Scientific Religion.
Sure, religion can be scientific, I made clear. Back with the ancient Greeks, religion was empirical. If you propitiated the gods, there wouldn’t be any of them swooping down and mounting you in the guise of a swan. And it worked. You could test it out. And by the same token today, if you believe that there is a Creator behind every snowflake, every war and decent TV show, it makes you feel better. Don’t it? It works.
But where I ran into trouble, I had a backup group, the Roylettes, behind me going, “So fine, so fine, so fine.” Three black women back there, gitting it.
And I had people come up to me after the show and say, “That’s racist.”
And I had to stop and think. Well, I guessed it was. I guessed I was implying, unthinkingly, that black people could git it better than white. So I engaged three white women. To tell the truth, they didn’t git it quite as well, but they got it pretty well.
And I had people come up to me after the show and say, “That’s sexist.” And I had to stop and think. Well, I guessed it was true, I was implying that women could git it better than men. So I got me three backup men. Called them the Roysters. They didn’t git it quite as well as the women, for my taste, but they got it all right. But then they’d get to fighting so bad. And then, too, some people came up and said, “Are your men all straight?”
And I said, “Well, I think so,” and I went off to the side and made them “Dress right, dress” and they looked pretty straight to me, but “No,” the people said, “we’re talking about you being heterosexist.” And I had to admit that I was implying, without meaning to, that straight men got it better than gay, so I made some changes and next time I was all ready to say, “The one in the middle is gay and the other two don’t mind at all,” but this time the people said, “You’re being age-ist.”
And I had to admit that I had been unconsciously implying that young people git it better than old, so I got three old men, one of whom was straight and one of whom was gay and one of whom was so old it didn’t make any difference to him, and they didn’t really git it as well as the young ones but they still added something, and the next show some animal rights people came up and said, “That’s speciesist.”
And I had to admit that I was suggesting that people git it better than other species, so I tried pigs. Well, first I tried dogs, but they got to fighting worse than the Roysters used to. I’d be pounding home a point and the Royotes, I called them, would be back there going, “Yark, yike, aroo, grrngrrIKE!” and chewing on each other. Then cats, but they were too independent, and threw up.
So, pigs. Pigs are smart. But they aren’t meant for a chorus. You’re on tour and your bus is getting lower and lower on the shocks and you come to realize it’s them pigs, the chorus, getting heavier and heavier. But I stuck with them and then one evening I was waxing up a pretty high sheen on Creationism and the pigs were back there gitting it, not too well but pretty well (you notice I don’t say “for pigs”), and somebody came up right in the middle of my talk and said, “That’s elitist.”
So, I put the pigs out front. Went along that way for a while—tried it with them gitting it out front while I tried to make the talk, and with me gitting it in back while they tried to make the talk. And one night a committee came up to the stage and said, “Is your man back there a secular humanist?”
And tell you the truth, I just tiptoed away and let the pigs deal with it. I decided if people couldn’t tell where I stood with the minority community, on the one hand, and with the Divine Presence, on the other, just from the text of my remarks, they weren’t ever going to be placated in my presence.
So now I do text exclusively. And I know in my soul, there are people out there finding me wanting on all kinds of ismic and istic grounds, but I can’t hear them doing it. I do miss having somebody going “so fine, so fine” behind me, but let me tell you one thing. Black, white, men, women, straight, gay, old, young, human, canine, feline, pork: they will all eat and drink up 4½ cents of every nickel you clear, and there’s not a blessed one of them that you can be safe in assuming is not hopped up on some kind of drug.
FOR THE RECORD
“I was asked to demonstrate the step,” said England’s Wayne Sleep, 25, a soloist with the Royal Ballet and specialist in the entrechat. … “Then the producer said how about breaking the record? So I did.” … Sleep’s acrobatics on a London TV program stunned balletomanes all over the world; he became the first person in recorded history to cross and uncross his legs five times in a single leap. The Feat is known as an entrechat douze for its twelve movements: the leap, live crossings, five uncrossings and the landing. Not only was Sleep’s feat unprecedented, but only Russia’s late, great Vaslav Nijinsky had ever been credited with an entrechat dix.
—Newsweek
A dreamlike leap
By England’s Sleep!
He didn’t doze,
He did a douze.
His legs arose
In curlicues.
He shrugged, “Okay, I’ll make a run,”
And then went heavenward (that’s one),
And five times crossed, and uncrossed five,
And then returned to earth alive.
And on TV, no less. Voilà!
Sleep’s the king of entrechat.
Nijinsky, may he rest in peace—
Would that he were above the ground!
Nijinsky settled for but dix
Movements in a single bound.
A joy forever. He will last.
And yet … his mark has been surpassed.
Will Chaplin, too, be cast in doubt?
Will someone edge Caruso out?
But look! As consternation reigns
Among the world’s balletomanes,
We see Nijinsky rise again.
His spirit jumps into our ken:
He climbs, descends, meanwhile with ease
Weaving patterns with his knees,
And stops just off the ground, and says,
To open with some humor, “Treize.”
And now he’s serious; now he soars
Sufficiently to cry “Quatorze!”
And now, although he starts to pant,
Up he goes—he’s done a vingt!
And now he’s really going good.
Nijinsky, folks, has just vingt-deux’d.
We sense he could go on to cent-deux
But evidetuly doesn’t want to.
For now, with one great closing spring,
He goes through untold scissoring
And disappears—a quantum leap—
And leaves the blinking world to Sleep.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RIGHT, RIGHT. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. “WHAT do I care?” cries the poor scuffling soul who paid for the book. Or badgered the town librarian into ordering it; or may even have hijacked a light plane and flown over the metropolitan area towing a banner saying “BUY [for instance] ONE FELL SOUP, SO I CAN BORROW IT.” Imagine, going to the trouble of an aerial banner, that long, with italics.
And does this general reader ever get “acknowledged”? No, it is always the same old editors, wives, and (not in this case) foundations. And the reader is supposed to read this? There aren’t enough demands on his or her time? Hey, the reader could be ou
t boating.
I would like, even so, to list a great many people who have made everything, except breathing under water, possible; but they would probably start fighting among themselves, as at a wedding reception. You know, you always want to assemble your polymorphous friends from all over. Then when you do manage to pull some of them together, they stand around wondering, “What are they doing here?”
I will say this: If it weren’t for Ann Lewis I would probably be an astrophysicist or some damned thing. Part of “Chickens” comes from a theme I wrote for her in the tenth grade.
And here, more or less chronologically, are the editorial folk who have enhanced, boosted, harbored, commissioned, or stood still for, on an actual hands-on or hands-off basis, the particular stuff in this book (just this book, otherwise I would have to mention … never mind):
Jack Spalding, Reese Cleghorn, Barbara LaFontaine, Pat Ryan, Ruth Rogin, Liz Darhansoff, Peter Davison, Dick Pollak, Geoffrey Norman, Lee Eisenberg, Roger Angell, Paul Kurt Ackermann, James Seay, Pauline Kael, Jon Swan, St. Nemeg del Wonkca, Gordon Lish, John Walsh, Kerry Slagle, Jon Carroll, Esther Newberg, Rob Fleder, Jim Morgan, Rust Hills, Bruce Weber, Bill Whitworth, Garrison Keillor, Tracy Young, Dominique Browning, Natalie Greenberg, Mike “Sey Hay” Brandon, and Peter Davison again. And Joan Ackermann-Blount, in a capacity that resists definition.
Could I quickly mention, also, Joel McCrea? I just thought he was a hell of an actor. And Julie Christie is the most attractive woman in the movies. There. I’ve said it.
Other key names abound in the text.
About the Author
Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy … and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.
Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.
In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”
Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The contents of this work originally appeared in the following periodicals and collections: Antaeus, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlantic, Best of Business Quarterly, Bred Any Good Rooks Lately?, Business Month, Condé Nast Traveler, Esquire, Food and Wine, A Garden of Earthly Desserts, Gentleman’s Quarterly, Harper’s Bazaar, The Inc. Life, Light Year ’87, National Geographic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, PC Computing, Rolling Stone, Soho News, Southpoint, Special Report, Vogue.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Kitchen Sink Press, Inc.: “Nancy Is Herself” is reprinted with permission of Kitchen Sink Press, Inc., No. 2 Swamp Road, Princeton, WI 54968.
Sports Illustrated: “47 Years a Shot-Freak” (“Couldn’t Use Them in a Game”) from April 20, 1970, issue; “And Now for the Resurrection” from the April 12, 1971, issue; “Yo Yo Yo, Rowa uh Rowa, Hru Hru” from the November 13, 1972, issue. Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972 by Time, Inc. Reprinted courtesy of Sports Illustrated. All rights reserved.
Spy Magazine: The “UnBritish Crossword Puzzles.”
Copyright © 1991 by Roy Blount Jr.
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-5772-0
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