The Interrogative Mood

by Padgett Powell

  Do you regard yourself a responsible person or an irresponsible person, and would you elect to be the other if you could? Does life insurance strike you as practical or as absurd, if not dishonest? Do you know anyone on whom you can drop in unannounced and in whose kitchen you might then sit and talk pleasantly? Are you engaged in a fight against clutter? Do you have in your mind an ideal color scheme for the inside of a house and for the outside? Do you like a forest of pines or mixed hardwoods? Have you ever seen a large game animal up close in the wild? Do you have trouble throwing things away? If so, do you ever retrieve them after a period of anxiety over the throwing away? Is it then easier or more difficult than the first time to throw the thing away a second time? Do you have a limit for this kind of behavior? Would you, if you could, be an altogether different person than the one you are? Given this choice, do you think many people would elect for a change or would they hold the cards they were dealt, as it were? If you contracted a disease that ate away your eyelids, would you shoot yourself?

  Could you live on a boat? If a person split his time between Memphis, Tennessee, and Memphis, Egypt, or claimed he did, do you think that existence would be thrilling or crummy? When you are in charge of satisfying children at Christmas, how serious are you about stuffing the stockings? If you were told to draw straws (short losing), and the straws were a green pine needle, a yellow pine needle, and a brown pine needle, which one would you draw? If I told you that I am made depressed by a completely still tree but that I am relatively cheered by a tree with a little wind in it whose leaves flutter or whose branches sway, even a little, would you think me strange? If you could choose between a long stay in the hospital not knowing if you would survive it and a long stay in jail knowing you would be released, which would you take? Do you belong to a health club? Have you ever baked cookies that tasted like fish? Do you get all the work done that you should in life? Is it important to you that it be done? Is your life and what you are doing with it important? What percentage of people would you say believe their lives important and what percentage admit they are not?

  Are you familiar with Trafalgar Square? Do you have it straight whether one can or cannot smell ozone? Will you readily neuter an animal? Do you find teachers of math dangerously seductive? Does a package wrapped in red ribbon bode better than one in blue? Will you wear polyester? Is it time I go? Are we done here? Have you had as good a time as I? Will you sing with me now: Oh let us be heroes, let us have emotions pure or not pure, be men or not men, let us buzz and rumble the hill and dale of daily insignificance just as confidently, just as threateningly, just as humbly in its cute red velour as does the velvet ant?

  IF YOU WERE PART of a couple living in a three-story wooden Victorian house with a bad paint job outside and a shabby interior, to the extent that some of your rooms were lit by bare lightbulbs on swinging cords effecting heavy glare on the beadboard walls, wouldn’t you consider it an appropriate diversion for the two of you to play Norman Bates and his mother at least sometimes? Do you take pleasure in cleaning and repacking wheel bearings? Did you ever wear a pair of Corfam wingtips? Would you be apprehensive about riding and handling a camel vis-à-vis riding and handling a horse? Is a camel related to a horse, and these to an elephant, and some or all of them to a rabbit? Does this sound like a tasty breakfast to you now: Atomic Fireballs, Bar-B-Q Fritos, and Coke?

  If I told you that the single most distinctive taste I ever experienced was hot radishes from the ground beside the Arlington River washed down with heavy sulfur water, would you think this but the bluster of childhood memory? If I said that not even in France forty years later could one taste anything so fine as the crisp heat of those radishes against the cool slake of that caustic funky water, would you think this but the cheer of adult memory? Have you ever seen bluster and cheer ride together this way, like Butch and Sundance? Did you know bluster and cheer are good friends?

  Is it your impression that people who worked in animation in the 1930s did more drugs than people who work in it today? What is the ideal percentage of cocoa in chocolate for you? Would you like to have been at the Alamo? Pearl Harbor? Given a choice between going horseback riding or skydiving, which would you take? What frontier of science about which you are ignorant would you most like to be informed? Who in your opinion was the greatest conqueror, militarily speaking, in history? Have you any skills in the area of weaving or knitting? Are you fond of tents? Do you like to have a wad of cash or a credit card? Have you ever been the target of small arms fire? Do you have a favorite brand of dishwashing soap or will any brand do? Do you prefer your clothes loose or trim? Do you know any knots beyond the overhand? If you found one drumstick (the musical instrument, not the chicken leg) on the ground, would you keep it? Would you rather see a season of bullfighting or take a course in machining metal? Do you remember The Edge of Night and As the World Turns? If you were sitting (say with a fountain drink and a lightly toasted egg-salad sandwich) on a stool at the soda fountain of an old drugstore of the sort nearly extinct, and a robber came in armed and commenced holding the place up, and you had a nice safe handy shot at the back of his head with a convenient good and heavy blunt instrument, would you take it? Do you find the expense of alterations at an alteration shop prohibitive? What about repairs at a shoe shop? If two people would turn the rope for you nice and slow, or at whatever speed you instructed, how long do you think you could jump rope?

  How often do you ask yourself, “What am I forgetting?” How often when you ask yourself what are you forgetting does it prove you are forgetting something? How often, when you ask yourself what are you forgetting, and it proves you are forgetting something, does asking the question prompt you to remember what you are forgetting?

  Do you have relatives to whom you wish you were not related? Have you ever dug up anything valuable? Have I carried on before you yet about how I miss the days of home milk delivery and drinking milk from those scoured heavy-lipped cold bottles, and how this want puts me in an even further more laughable panting for when a man would have brought ice to your door in a wagon, carrying a giant diamond-colored block of it to you in a big scissorlike pair of iron tongs, and setting it in your box, or in your cellar, and shoveling sawdust on it if you used sawdust for your insulation, or covering it with your heavy wet canvas if you used that, tucking it in as if it were a very cold and very dear infant?

  Do you believe that I can still have any interest in asking you questions? Do you believe it is correct to call the cry of crows “raucous”? Do you believe in lions and tigers and bears or do you believe in the lord Jesus? Have you heard the phrase “to drink the Kool-Aid”? Do you have a steady hand for bomb making? Have you ever carpeted a room with carpet samples? Would you call yourself a good file clerk with respect to your memory or a bad file clerk? What is your favorite cake? Would you prefer to have sexual relations with a tall blond German or a tall blond Swede? Do you enjoy assembling manufactured items that are sold unassembled? Have you ever set any part of yourself on fire? If civil war or an invasion or other circumstances somehow effected martial law and the need to take up arms and fight, and your father was put in local command by virtue of his having been a combat veteran, would you serve under him happily or with reservations or not at all? Do you think he would have difficulty sending you into the Valley of Death as it were? Can you see him wringing his hands over you or do you see him snapping out your orders and getting the job done? Are these questions meant to distinguish how he would treat you, a son or daughter, as opposed to how he would treat nonrelatives under his command? Why have I bogged down so in this area?

  Do you know of a likely candidate to replace me as the asker of these questions? Could you rush him to the fore? Do you know the story of the dog fighter Maurice Carver getting an injection for his impotence from Indian Sonny, the shot given him through the side vent in his overalls in Maurice’s big Cadillac right after they picked up Indian Sonny at the airport in San Antonio, and Maurice thinking he feels a st
irring in his loins and saying, “Rush me home”? Have you decided yet what historical moment you would most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears? Do you periodically walk around and check to see that “the area is secure,” or do you make fun of people who periodically check to see that the area is secure?

  Should children be taught poker? Would you like to have a small pistol in a good wooden box lined with red velvet? And maybe one big pearl beside the pistol, secure in a dimple of velvet? Would you need any more than a pistol and a pearl on red velvet to hold you content all night until you could go the following morning to a breakfast joint and eat large quantities of simple food and celebrate being just barely alive?

  We all know that pine trees do not lose all their needles at one time, unless they are dying, but do we all know that pine trees lose more of their needles at certain times than at others—that is to say…oh let’s forget this question and try another: would you say that American rock music and American cars have their classic periods in strange synchronization, and that the two hottest periods were around 1955 and 1969? Is it fair to say that there has not been a good American car since 1969 and that rock ’n’ roll was petering out hard after that?

  How can men at drafting tables in pocket protectors in Detroit and boys in jeans and long hair at synthesizers in Macon, Georgia, have been so in tune? Is there anything you can take for a persistent benign sore on your tongue, by which I mean I do not suspect this is herpes related or anything else more serious than a topical wound that just will not go away and is particularly irritated by sour foods like pineapple? If you had a loud 400 hp 1969 GTO with a Hurst three-speed on the floor and the Allman Brothers’ “One Way Out” playing as loud inside the car, would you not be unstoppable not only in all the serious adolescent ways but even now in nearly all of the serious postadolescent pre-senile ways? Can you list the things you are afraid of, or is it easier to list the things you are not afraid of, or are you afraid of nothing, or are you essentially afraid of everything?

  If you yourself are not a coward, do you look upon a coward with sympathy or with disgust? If you yourself are not a murderer, do you look upon a murderer with disgust or sympathy? Why have I altered the position of “sympathy and disgust” and “disgust and sympathy” so? Did you ever try to raise two flying squirrels by getting up every three hours and feeding them cow’s milk and stimulating their genitals with a tissue to get them to pee as your mother instructed you and seeing them die three weeks later of fever and bloat and fecal poisoning because the cow’s milk had so constipated them that they had not, in all that peeing, ever pooped? And did you wonder later how your mother would know to stimulate them to pee but not that cow’s milk would cement them up like that? And do you wonder now if she did not instruct you to tickle them with that tissue so they would “tinkle”? Do you miss your mother, if she’s dead? Do you want to spend time with her if she is not?

  Do you think there can be finer arms on a man than on a brick mason? If you are feeling low, will going to the barbershop or to the hair salon pick you up? What is your favorite sport to watch? Do you know the difference on sight between a rimfire cartridge and a centerfire? What is your position on yard raking? If you will excuse me for having deliberately bluntly phrased a previous question, and if you will accept that I am here again phrasing it so that reasonable middle-ground possibilities in your answer are excluded, may I ask you again now if, in sexual intercourse, you prefer a thrashing style like the flight of a bat or a subtle style like a worm eating its way through dirt? Will you go out of your way to get a wooden pencil or a wooden baseball bat? Have you had any medical procedures that involve the insertion of fiber-optical or other tubing in you that allows inspection of your innards? How do you stand in relation to the kind of cute crockery piggy bank that had to be broken once it was filled in order for the child to get the money she had saved? Are you much disturbed by the possibility of someone other than the child doing the breaking? Are you much less disturbed by the child herself doing the breaking? Do you travel in better underwear than you wear on a daily basis? Are you less likely to pay for a manicure or a pedicure? With what frequency do you drink a commercial milk shake?

  Do you miss Tab and do you fully understand its disappearance? If you could have a guaranteed steady supply of an expensive or illicit substance or other commodity much prized and hard to get, what would it be? Are you surprised at the low number of people crazy or the high number of people crazy? Do you know offhand whether a hippopotamus sweats? If offered a cherry or a strawberry, which do you take?

  If you had enough money to live on, could you see retiring to a small village in France and never being heard of or from again, and not speaking French when there, mostly because you can’t, but also because you have nothing to say and you’d have no one to say it to if you had something to say, and mostly just sleeping in your quaint medieval stone cottage? Could you make do with a little exercise once in a while and a piece of Beaufort of very high quality? And maybe a look-in on the pigs? What if the cartoonist R. Crumb were your neighbor? Would you sleep better, or worse, or the same knowing R. Crumb was your neighbor in the next quaint stone medieval cottage in the south of France? Would life go on, or would you have to move to another village, or would you have to abandon the idea of retiring to France altogether realizing R. Crumb had done it and that he was the tip of an iceberg going back through hundreds of persecuted sensitive American martyrs, from the Josephine Bakers and James Baldwins and Paul Robesons to the precious Fitzgeralds all the way up even to profane California cartoonists—wouldn’t you just be so yanked out of the frame that you’d feel it would be better to move not to gentle France but to, say, Burma where like Jeffrey Dahmer in prison you could be killed almost instantly when you set foot there? Wouldn’t it be better to have a Muslim in Burma put a cobra in your suitcase on day two than go through the long pleasant sunset desuetude of retiring silently in France? Would it, in fact, not be better were you to assassinate ten or so pleasant silent American retirees on your way out of sunny France en route to your rude and immediate fatal neurologic toxic death in Burma? Would there not be cause for wild cheer among a certain kind of depression-suffering person who reads the headline “Suspected Slayer of Cartoonist R. Crumb Victim of Cobra in Burma”? Would it be the worst thing said of you that your last act was expended on behalf of the depressed? Do you want something said of you, or nothing said of you, when you go?

  Do you recall that the milk in bottles delivered unto the stoop that we miss so badly sometimes turned to a clabber so heavy and yellow and thick that it could not be forcefully shaken from the bottles? Was your looking into this clabber—as rococo as bread pudding, as weird as a preserved calf—not unlike looking into your own crystal ball?

  Do you like bright steel with a sheen of oil on it? Do you have any of those old pot holders made of colorful woven cotton loops? Have you ever contributed to a children’s hospital or to an orphanage? Do you prefer a claw or a rip hammer, and do you know your weight, or are you hammer dumb—that is, is one hammer the same as another? Can you form in your mind the image of the slenderest person you have ever seen? If you were offered for free a rustic, comfortable house on stilts in a vast swamp, would you move in happily, or with reservations, or not at all? If I say to you that in my view all people fall into two camps, those fundamentally afraid of things and those fundamentally not afraid of things, would you think me radically overstating or oversimplifying? What is the largest number of people with whom you will do something as a group? Are you much of a cook? Are you partial to goat’s milk? If you could be in a civil war, would you prefer to be there as a native partisan or as a foreigner not targeted by either side and free to witness the mayhem?

  Those stamps I have asked you about before, surely—were they not called “trading stamps,” and was “green stamps” not just a local more or less trivial name because S&H stamps happened to be green? Did you have that kind too? Did they accumulate in drawers?
Do you have any idea what S&H referred to? Do you want to be buried beside your parents? Do you use perfumed boutique candles or utilitarian hardware-store candles, or do you use the one for nonemergency candle recreation and the other for emergencies? Are you handy with a splitting maul? Do you favor acetone or nonacetone nail-polish remover? How often will you mop? If you were offered a lecture about Descartes or about Alexander the Great, which would you take?

  Have you ever seen blue hills? Does the word Sioux do anything odd to you? Does good leather comfort you or are you indifferent to it or do you in fact find leather morally offensive? Would you like to live in a neighborhood where children would ask you out to play stickball with them? Do you know the function for a parabola? Do you own a soldering iron? If you found a healthy infant in a basket on your doorstep, or anywhere else, say in the bulrushes if I have the phrase right, and no one claimed him, do you think the law allows you to keep him, if you want him? Have you heard, and do you credit, the speculation that the impending wars will be over not oil but water and that they will dwarf the present wars? Do you realize that the reason diurnal animals except us are not crazy is that they drink water whenever possible all day and go to bed at dusk?

  Have I told you I have a friend who wrote in a book “Indians loved crowbars” and “They ate fat young dogs”? May I ask you if you have a friend as clever as mine, and may I say that I hope you do, but that I know you do not? Have you ever heard of the sexual practice of setting a person’s buttocks on fire and quickly spanking out the fire? Would setting a person’s buttocks on fire and spanking out the fire constitute, in your view, a violation of antisodomy laws or otherwise be regarded an unnatural act? Do you think it might be sanctioned or proscribed in the Bible? Have you been able to read the entire Bible?