The Interrogative Mood

by Padgett Powell

  What would you say is the essential business of living well? Do you know that Native American tepee rings—the rings of stones that held down the tepee fabric for a tight edge—are still in place all over the West? Is forging metal somewhat akin to kneading dough? Do you depend more heavily on air-conditioning than you think you should? If you could eat but one meat, what meat would it be? In Scrabble, do you consider yourself loose or strict when it comes to challenging competitors’ words? Where on a ten-point scale, with ten being salacious and one disgusting, would you put pornography?

  Do you tolerate speech impediments in newscasters? Are you made nervous or content or indifferent by a landscape of red clay? Do you sometimes mistake Germans for Scandinavians? On average, how many times a day do you talk on the phone? Do you know precisely what is meant by an A-line dress? Can you clog? Are you bothered by keys that apparently fit nothing, and will you save these just in case or throw them away? Do you recall what the deal was with Howdy Doody or, like me, do you merely retain the obscene freckles and have no clue what he was about? If you were offered the opportunity to live in a professionally rigged hammock in the canopy of a rain forest for a week, would you accept? Do you believe in ghosts, or want to believe in ghosts but really can’t, or dismiss ghosts outright? Have you ever made star-shaped structures of Popsicle sticks under pressure that explode when you throw them? Is there a connection of any sort between life after death and the leavening of bread?

  Can you read music? Would it be reasonable to ask someone if he or she has a favorite musical note? Would you like to visit a tar pit or peat bog, or would you rather eat cucumber sandwiches on a pleasant veranda with a civilized hostess in England? Will you wear a garment with a small tear in it? Do you cry at movies where you are intended to cry, or at other points in the drama, or not at all? What is the highest value of theft you have ever committed? Can you recall the last thing you said to an acquaintance of yours now dead? Do you wear a helmet when bicycling? In socks, what kind of material do you like? Given its shape and whatnot, does the name Hershey’s Kiss make sense to you? Can you train a dog? Right now, what is the thing or situation in your life that most confuses or baffles or paralyzes you? Are you satisfied with your intellect? With your body?

  Is it correct to say that an orange is eponymous? Why is a banana yellow and not banana? When do you think the term “britches” lost its neutrality, if it ever had it? Have you ever been accused of, or accused anyone else of, cruisin’ for a bruisin’? Can you recite the favorable economic arguments for deficit spending? Does pubic hair differ materially from nonpubic hair, do you know what the proper term for nonpubic hair might be, and do you know precisely how one is distinguished from the other? Do broken bones knit back together by essentially the same mechanism as a limb grafts to a tree? Have you ever seen any kind of live sex show? Are you comfortable around people who wear wooden shoes? Do you think dams have done great ecological harm? Does bodice ripping follow naturally upon green gowning, or is it a disconnected and more malevolent enterprise? Do you have any experience in the desert? Have you ever made an animation of any sort, even if just flip cards? In what endeavors would you say you have talent, and in what endeavors would you say you have no talent? If you could select an endeavor in which you have no talent and instead be magically and hugely talented in that endeavor, what would it be?

  If you had a friend who, while watching a movie of the legendary porn star John Holmes, got incensed and said, “Look at that son of a bitch! That thing does not even get hard! Look how it bows out like that! That son of a bitch!” would you be in sympathy with this outrage or laugh at your friend? How often do you think about the mythic water skier who skis into the ball of water moccasins? Would skiing into a ball of water moccasins constitute an urban legend even if the legend predates the term “urban legend,” and are urban legends inclusive of legends that are, like skiing into a ball of water moccasins, distinctly not urban? Does the urban in urban legend mean the legend is born among urbanites as opposed to its happening specifically in a city? Have you ever heard of the water skier who skis into a great ball of barbed wire? How would you assume these legends related: is the barbed wire a distortion of the water moccasins, the moccasins a distortion of the barbed wire, or were these legends born independently? Do you believe it could be the case that a water skier has in fact skied into a ball of water moccasins, and that another has in fact skied into a great tangle of barbed wire? Do you favor a lot of butterfat in ice cream or a little?

  Is there anything you’d like to ask me? Are you curious to know what I’ll do with the answers you’ve given me? Do you think I can make some kind of meaningful “profile” of you? Could you, or someone, do you think, make such a profile of me from the questions I have asked you? If we had these profiles, could we not relax and let them do the work of living for us and take our true selves on a long vacation? Isn’t it the case that certain people are already on to this trick of posting their profiles on duty while simultaneously living private underground lives? Can you recognize these profile soldiers by a certain dismissive calm, a kind of gentle smile about them when others are getting petty? Is in fact the character of the profile-façade person not that which is called wise? And is the person who is congruent with his daily self and who has no remote self not regarded as shallow?

  DO YOU HAVE THE locked and loaded feeling today, or the loose and dissolute? Would you molest a girl in a hospital room wearing a candy-striper outfit? Do you know precisely what a candy striper is or was? Have you ever seen a pot made of bark? What can you tell me about interstitial braces and dimensional stability?

  Do you use the word parameter colloquially, and do you run with people who do? Do you understand the physics of the bullwhip? If someone proposed “alternatives to square dancing,” what would you think he was talking about? Will you wear underwear previously worn by someone else? If you were faced with having a collection of bird nests or car fenders, which would you take? Have you ever heard the phrase, at least once used legally, “mental cruelty to a chicken”? Is life better or not better now that for the most part we live it without a daily concern with ramparts? Do you think that barbarism in the world continues apace but has shifted into subtler forms? Do you credit that there is a band called the Unhung Heroes with a hit song entitled “Look What I Found on the Ground to Mate With”? Have you handled fence staples? Do you know exactly when tinfoil stopped being tin, if it ever actually was tin? Have you ever with pleasure disassembled a perfectly good working piece of electronic gear and put it back together in a deliberately nonworking configuration? Do you like to have a wooden baseball bat around? Have you drunk wares produced from a still in the woods while standing near the still? If you have drunk from a still, was the still operator present or not? Do you like the notion of elasticity, with its princely resilience, or do you find something soft and undependable down in it? Is there anything in particular—above other things—that makes your day, or rues it?

  Is there diabetes in your family? Are you scuba certified? How much will you pay to enter a strip club? If you got a puppy, do you think witnessing its puppy energy would give you yourself a little puppy energy again? Do you like to smell and feel—they’ll squeak against your fingers—brand-new automobile tires? Have you ever paid to have something either sandblasted or gilded? Have I told you of the time my grandmother escaped the nursing home and I found her a block away on a door stoop expiring in the sun and she said to me, “What took you so long?”

  Have you ever heard the phrase “to eat the either/or sandwich”? How about “chocolate and vanilla drawers”? Regulatory commission, tertiary syphilis, roundabout way of living, otiose goose, Bernard Paperhanger, pastel bloomers, doggone stubborn, stupendous city, beribboned frank, tallywhacker body, terrible, profound, large, stunted, and benign—do these things go together? How about gassated cheerleaders—the cheerleaders, say, had gassated themselves? I should say perhaps I’m a little unsteady here, but may I say i
nstead I’m a little rocking horse here? Is the thing you notice about cheerleaders that while they do have those tight stomachs—I suppose by fashion one should say tight abs, they have no fat on their bellies—and it is arresting and interesting to see them, and this firmitude leads you right up to the breasts and your speculations thereupon, you notice how cheerleaders always seem to be refreshingly modest in that department, not amped out on silicone (I refer to the college girls, the professional sideline tramps are another matter), and you are on to the painful-looking perpetual smile that cheerleaders must maintain, and she is bouncing or otherwise celebrating the joyous routine, looking finally rather dumb, the whole thing rather dumb, not really her fault, or their fault, though you do fault her male consorts for being cheerleaders and not on the football team, what the fuck is the matter with them, and so there she is all hot and trim and bouncy and pert and full of vim vigor cheer and goodwill for your benefit, and you are supposed to want her a little and more than a little want your team to do well but you are nagged by this fact: you do not want her at all, and that not wanting has abrogated your wanting the team to do what she ostensibly wants you to want the team to do, and there you sit, a lost fan and a lost man? Do you see now what I mean when I say “gassated cheerleaders”? Can the feeling of not properly wanting a cheerleader be expanded, not unlike a gas as it were, to express your entire purchase in the world, your total stance on desire and life?

  Would you like to have an executive maid who beyond a clean house would assure that you have crisp lettuce at all times and nothing gone bad and no bills not paid? Has it ever occurred to you that people could have—and once this occurs to you, you see that they should have, and you wonder how it is that they do not have—a batting average not for baseball but for life? Wouldn’t it be handy to have a life average affixed to a person, so that a homeless person might be hitting .171, and Lance Armstrong might be hitting .338, Michelangelo maybe hit .401? If you had a life average, what do you think it would be?

  Could you entertain the idea that what undoes couples over time is that they neglect to apply polish to the grain of their wood? Is a buzzard a higher-altitude operator than an eagle? Are you familiar with Chester Nimitz? Have you ever watched serious volleyball? Do you think the phrase “in conjunction with Uranus” is responsible for the accenting of Uranus being shifted to the first syllable? Were you to be in a fatal crash, would you prefer whether it was an automobile or plane crash? Would you wear a seersucker suit or dress, or do you now? Did you get Hegel? When you have captured grasshoppers—and if you have never captured grasshoppers, just take a break while I pursue this, it is important—did you notice when you sometimes might have inadvertently squeezed them a dark fluid forms a ball or bubble at their mouths, usually purple or roan? And was it your experience that a grasshopper so squeezed when released would retract this fluid to whence it came and be apparently no worse for the wear? Can you recall the reasons for which you were catching grasshoppers? Have you seen a bullfight? If you have attended a bullfight, can you say whether on balance you took pleasure in it or not? When you have seen bullfights—and again if you have not seen them, just relax here a bit, finish up what you were doing when the grasshopper stuff began if you took a break then—when the blood is coursing down the side of the bull in those pulsing sheets from the small wounds of the banderillas, and the big one from the lance, in those blinding silver waves when the sun reflects hard off the blood, and in those somber soaked oxblood-and-black hues when the sun is not direct on the bull’s flank, did you think this horrible or beautiful?

  If everybody is back now, may I ask if your predilection to order chocolate or vanilla over time has changed or have you remained more or less constant? Would you rather be in the hospital or in jail? Why do Americans use the article before hospital and not before jail? Would you rather be in hospital or in the jail? What is the best meal you have ever had (and forgive me if I have asked this before; if I have, do not feel compelled to give me the same answer)? If something could happen right now that is not likely to or impossible but that would really cheer you up if it did, just light you up like a child again, what would it be?

  Do you know what is involved, with respect to leather, in tanning? Does a regulatory commission strike you in general as a good thing or a bad thing? In households in which a child has died, do you think what goes on at night in that household is radically different, superficially different, or no different from what goes on at night in households in which no child has died? If you were to be locked in a room naked for an unspecified length of time by a party you could not identify and for an infraction you could not determine, and you were offered a pair of wool socks or a pistol, which would you take? If it then developed that a big cat would share the room with you, would you prefer it be a lion or a tiger, given free choice? Would your choice be affected in any way were you assured both cats were friendly and that you had also, as part of the terms of your incarceration, to bathe the cat?

  Was there an opportunity for you to have had your first sexual encounter before you actually had your first sexual encounter? Was it the case that you didn’t realize it was an opportunity for your first sexual encounter? If you could, would you return to that opportunity and remove whatever prevented your realizing what an opportunity it was? Or, if you did at the time perceive that it was an opportunity, but there were other obstacles to the fulfillment of the encounter, would you have those obstacles removed and proceed with this first sexual encounter earlier than the first one you actually did experience? If there is a missed first sexual encounter in your past, do you recall the name of the person it might have involved? Would you be willing to share that name and the particulars with me?

  Do you ever buy tea already brewed in bottles or jugs? Wouldn’t it be sporty and fun to carry around a riding crop and whip things with it? Do you think of yourself as a quitter, and, if you do, was there a time you did not think you were a quitter? If there was a time you did not regard yourself a quitter, and you do now acknowledge that you are a quitter, was there one event or a series of events that persuaded you that you are actually now a quitter? In this context, or perhaps not in this context but in any pertinent context you would like to supply, do you ever call yourself, specifically, “a pussy”? If you do call yourself a pussy sometimes, or all of the time, what I think is interesting is that there must have been a time in your life, as in everyone’s life, that you did not call yourself a pussy, either because you did not yet have cause to believe you were a pussy or because the very notion of one’s being a pussy or not being a pussy had not yet entered your consciousness—and what I want to know is exactly when did this sound barrier of self-regard get punctured or broken for you? Can you believe that I once knew a girl a couple neighborhoods over who was precociously blond and developed who had drawn the attention of older boys and who succumbed to their carnal wolving but who would apparently have nothing to do with younger boys like me, and that brashly as we hovered about her house while probably an older boy was actually inside it with her or soon would be I told another of the younger boys that it might be the case that we could not have her but that I would have her before he would have her, and that this boy somehow relayed this utterance to the girl, who later confronted me with it, without scoff, with in fact a note of interest or invitation to stand and deliver, which note I did not pursue, embarrassed to have had this brashness transported to her and certain that she found me inferior to an older boy…do you have time for this?

  Do you ever burn loose threads back into place rather than snip them? Were you tormented as a child by perhaps a grandmother’s saying to your mother that she thought you needed to have a “bm,” by which she meant bowel movement? Have you seen a cormorant fly by your window in the early morning? Can you see me, when Jean Baker says “Jimbo said you said you’d fuck me before he would,” say “Yeah, I did” and ride crisply away on my banana-seated stingray bike? Have you ever milked a cow or seen a milking machine atta
ched to a cow or seen the udder washed with that iodiney solution called, I believe, Pro-teat, swabbed up under there sloppily with a rag while the cow stands there placidly, if not a hint impatient for the machine to be already on her? Can you credit that I never went back to Jean Baker’s house again?

  Did you try to learn to play the guitar as a child but fail to learn, and can you now not account for what happened to the pawn-shop guitar you tried to learn on, and are you a little mystified that it did not occur to you that perhaps you needed lessons instead of just diddling around with the thing without even a book? Is all of life clueless, or is most of it clueless with momentary bursts of clueness, or is it a spectrum of cluelessness to clueness on which people reside at various points, and are the points at which people reside on the spectrum of cluelessness fixed or variable? Would you expect if you have not been there that the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is predominately brown? What I meant was can you slide up and down the spectrum of cluelessness to clueness like a trombone or do you toot your one more or less dumb note all the livelong day? When people elect to not speak to you, should you not speak to them or deliberately continue to speak to them? If you elect to continue speaking to those not speaking to you, should the motivation be to pique them or to repair relations? If you could live on top of a mountain and grow coffee and not be rich but not have any real economic worries either and once or twice a day bury your face in a big basket of coffee beans to assay the quality of the product and otherwise eat good fruit and slowly read a book or two and wear good locally spun cotton clothes and enjoy seeing the weather come in over the mountains and sleep right there on the porch in a hammock and have a good number of dogs who maintain themselves without your having to mess with them and not be too bothered by your continuing to not speak Spanish very well, would you do it?