It is a spectacle beyond the mere remarkable if a boy, white or black, is in Ban Lon with walnut clubs and deformed, to my mind.
The remarkable knows no color, in the progressive view.
Yes. Are you meaning to specify, by the way, a walnut clubhead or clubs with walnut shafts, because I think that—wooden shafts—is even more . . .
Remarkable?
Yes. Certainly by that I would mean also more visually striking and more anachronistically arresting. One would ignore the white or black crippled boy in fey spongelike material to focus on the antiques in his possession. One might even worry that he would break them, if you specified that this boy is actually golfing.
Actually he is not. He is sitting on the hood of a new BMW with a Swedish-looking model of tremendous height and minimal clothing posing for photographs for an automobile advertisement. Insofar as I could gather. For all I know, now that I think about it, they may have been advertising her clothes, or his, conceivably they were advertising the girl for a men’s magazine, though it did not appear a lascivious endeavor.
&
I think I want me some morphine.
Why?
Because I ’magine it is good.
You have not had it?
No, not the real thing. I want to sleep in that red field outside of green Oz, with Dorothy. Or without Dorothy. The prospect of sleeping with Judy Garland is not halcyon.
The prospect of sleeping with anyone is not precisely halcyon.
Right. That I can forego. Were it not for the stupefying nuclear force of hormones the race would cease. I just want the morphine—a wide calm sound in my brain, my body itself as smooth and cool as water. An heavenly balm. All my cells whispering kindly to me, “Everything is all right.” This I want.
You want so little. You are filled with jejune longing, for an old man.
Jejune Longing is the chewing gum of Life. It’s what they named Juicy Fruit after.
&
Isn’t the essential question whether one reuses split shot or not? Doesn’t that just about say it all?
Don’t you think it’s configured a bit narrowly? What if, say, one doesn’t fish?
All right. Let’s explain that a split shot is a tiny ball of lead with a split in it which allows it to be crimped onto a fishing line for the purpose of sinking the line. And that usually once a split shot is crimped onto a line and used it is thrown away if it has not been already lost in the course of the fishing. But that a certain kind of person will take a crimped split shot and reopen it, usually by pressing a knife into the original crimp and gently reopening the shot, being careful not to go too far and cut the little shot entirely in half. And that this certain kind of person will take pleasure in this salvage beyond the saving of two cents or ten cents or the effort of buying a new pack of split shot that much sooner. He or she will take pleasure in this microsaving of a tiny lead hinge that is not a micro pleasure but instead some kind of huge and hugely gratifying anal balm.
Have you lost your mind?
Well, yes. And of course that is what we are talking about, don’t go getting Pat Boone on me now. The question that this split shot question asks is whether a man has lost his mind and does not care, or whether he has proudly arrived at the terminus of his adult life, or at the prime phase of it as it bears unto the sunset, with his “sanity” in hand. If he says, “I don’t save split shot,” we know he is correct and adult and proud and all grown up, as it were. If he says, “I save every split shot I can,” we know he is just as proudly crazy and that he has refused to grow up.
And we think that he has actually a superior position in this refusal.
Yes. He would not then also say, for example, “I support our troops.”
That would be one dimension but there are many dimensions to this lunacy that is not lunacy, you mean.
Yes, I do so mean.
I wish that you were a woman sometimes.
I do too. That you were.
Because we could make love instead of talking all the time.
Yes.
We could make love as it is, but . . .
I just can’t see it. I like the political dimension of it, the nose-thumbing, but God, the actual thought of it . . .
Why don’t we find us some split-shot-saving women?
It would be better if we found some who would not themselves save split shot but who would humor us in our saving split shot. I would really like to have a girl who would hold open the little Take a Boy Fishing Today tin while I carefully pressed the knife into a used split shot and then let me put it safely in the tin, looking briefly to see if you can tell the difference between the used and the virgin split shot, and then say to me, “Come to bed, sugar, them split shot are safe and sound.” Wouldn’t that be grand?
I think that would be the best thing in the world. Since “It Opens with Two Fingers” she could slide the tin shut with two fingers! You could be a perfect idiot with a girl who wanted you in bed.
And with the perfectly preserved little lead hinge! That is really what the split-shot question seeks to discover: Are you a perfect idiot or are you some kind of custodial correct adult ass? Isn’t that the idea?
Yes. That is the idea.
&
I wake up trepid. Do you wake up trepid?
I fear I do. What does trepanning mean? Maybe I wake up trepanning. I wake up trepanning if it means shaking from trepidation.
Are we but recently afraid, or were we always afraid but too slow or blustery or full of hormones to know it?
We have always been afraid. We are only now sufficiently feeble to visibly shake. We quaked all along but were steadied by testosterone and received bravura. We looked fine.
We stood firm.
We shouted, “Hello! Stand and deliver!” If it were a man before us, we said, “Cross me and I will kill you!” If it were a woman, we said, “Take off your clothes!”
Now we jump off the trail and hide in the woods if anyone approaches.
Lest a woman say unto us, “Cross me and I will kill you,” or a man, “Take off your clothes.”
What goes around comes around—is that not the way it is popularly put these days?
I believe so. You may also say that the chickens have come home to roost, frequently said by people with no knowledge whatsoever of chickens, when chickens do not leave home to begin with. It is apt for their enemies to say upon the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, for examples, that the chickens have come home to roost, and no one will question the utterance.
Such people are people not yet trepid. We should not be uncharitable with them. They will come in time to tremble and shut up.
Out the window I not infrequently see chipmunks.
A chipmunk is professionally trepid all its life.
A chipmunk is a cute and honest poor soul that does not presume.
&
What do you know about the desert?
Nothing.
Okay. End of subject.
Should we go?
Yes. We should go.
To revel in our not knowingness.
To be put off by the desert because we do not understand its desertness and are frightened by it and disgusted by our not knowingness.
But then is it not the case that after we are frightened and disgusted we will fall under the illusion that we have learned something about the desert and be less unhappy with it?
Yes. Our tiny growing familiarity alone, as we sit there or walk around parched and frightened, will convince us we now know more than we did before the onset of the fear and the disgust, and we will feel better about the desert.
Veterans of an hour in the desert, we will like it, a little bit.
Yes. When you see a Gila monster emerge like a bizarre beaded purse you will love him as if he is your own mother. You will imprint on him as does a gosling on the first thing that it sees move and you will have a mother and not be sore afraid as you were even though they say your
mother can kill you if you let her chew on you.
Or a sidewinder! I was born to love a sidewinder. Do you remember Studio Becalmed?
I will never not remember Studio Becalmed.
Nor I.
What is your point?
I believe that Studio Becalmed had a sidewinder in his pants.
That is vulgar and senseless and juvenile and almost funny. God, in His infinite wisdom, has seen to it that our mothers do not chew on us when we are infants but wait until we are older and can take it.
Or at least can resist it and issue poisons of our own.
What if Studio Becalmed in the Final Alps of Heaven repudiated Jayne Mansfield and took up with Jejune Longing?
It disturbs me to think of that, even if by that point Jayne is headless, as I suppose she would be, even in the final alps of heaven.
You don’t think that things would be restored to some kind of corporeal pristinity in heaven, or perhaps be noncorporeal?
I cannot say. If things are noncorporeal will it be meaningful that Studio “repudiates” one woman for another? Do we not mean by saying “repudiate” that he would eschew Jayne and lie down with Jejune Longing? In your view will there be no intercourse in heaven? Is it worth going then?
You have a point. Somehow I do not see rutting and grunting in heaven. Nor can I see it allowed exactly in hell. This very prospect is somewhat like the desert to us. Will rutting and grunting be allowed in the afterlife?
What would happen in heaven were Studio to say, “Jayne, be okay if Jejune Longing came over?” and Jayne were to say, “Sure, babe”?
A sidewinder touches the ground with only ten percent of himself, if that. He does not get burnt and he does not bog down in all that sand.
He knows the desert.
He knows no fear and no disgust.
Do you ever have a longing for a good, fast car?
Sometimes. I like the restored hot rod.
I saw a man on television presented with the surprise gift of his junk car fully restored. He wept before it. The mechanics who did the work laughed, gratified and sympathetic, to see this man weep before his new hot rod. All he could say was, “It’s everything,” and sniffle. He opened the hood and beheld the specialness under there and fell back in a whole new paroxysm of ecstasy.
He’s an idiot. I envy him.
I regard him a larger idiot than you do and I envy him more.
He is a kind of sidewinder, is he not?
Well, that seems a bit of a stretch, metaphorically, but I will call the weeping idiot we admire a sidewinder if you will. What harm could lie in that?
I am particularly drawn to advanced technology in spark-plug wires and to the arresting colors they now make them in. They are not black now. They are orange, chartreuse.
Wires the color of liquor!
People the color of dogs!
Why did you say that?
I don’t know.
&
In what environments should a man have it together? In a chamber of surgery, with a scalpel in his hand?
Yes. There he should have it together in the extreme.
Are there other venues where he should really have it together?
No. Let us say he is holding on to the back of a garbage truck and stepping off it as cans of garbage on the curb are approached and swinging these cans of garbage into the truck and setting them down empty, or tossing them any old way, and stepping back on the truck (which has not come to a real stop) as it progresses toward the hundreds or thousands of cans remaining on the route—he does not need to have it together for this, and this is essentially not unlike any other human endeavor on earth just now, except for surgery.
By “just now” do I detect that you believe that at one time more men had it together?
You do detect that suspicion. I cannot call it a full-on belief. I just think that given the near total dissolution upon us now that it, our dissolution, could not have ever been greater, not even when we were crawling from the cave, and that to have survived this far we must have had it together more back then than now. People did not always eat sugar and talk all day on cell phones and go to war simply because they were told they were unpatriotic if they did not.
I am not unsympathetic to your position. I wonder though if the case may not be made that people would have always eaten sugar and talked on cell phones had they had access, and that what has alarmed you is the novel number of idiots now upon us. The base percentage of crackpottage remains the same but the absolute numbers have shot through the roof. For example: you can wrestle yourself to the ground weighing solicitations for you to contribute funds either to save an endangered paucity of animals or to feed an endangering surplus of starving people, who are the primary endangerment to the animals, but nowhere does anyone solicit funds from you to limit the numbers of the starving people.
That’s an example, exactly, of what?
I don’t know. I do not have it together well enough to have any idea.
I thought so.
Here’s another example: I heard recently of a bear eating cherries off a suburban cherry tree, who, the bear, then killed the tree.
And this news serves us how?
It serves my thesis: In earlier times the bear never would have wrecked the tree. A bear is no less survival-savvy than a man, and is as smart, etc., as anyone who has ever seen one ride a bike in the circus without killing everyone concerned can attest. Were this bear not subject to the same forces that have made men the trivial fat loose cannons they are today, he would never have harmed the tree that feeds him. He is a symbol of modern man in modern times.
He’ll eat anything?
He’ll do anything.
I myself am frequently visited by an odd vision which is possibly not germane to whatever you are talking about. I see myself drinking tepid and not very satisfying water from a tangerine-colored aluminum tumbler in extreme ambient heat, I see a water moccasin, and I hear the noise of cicadas or some other leg-sawing racket-specializing insects in pine trees, or at least in the bush all about, a noise that rises and falls in volume and possibly pitch in a way that seems to resonate with my very head at moments, or within my head, I don’t know precisely how one speaks of resonance but think I grasp it, physically speaking. It is possible that this noise even gets the rather yellowy orange tumbler I am drinking the hot water from to vibrating in a way that shocks my teeth and makes the water taste bitter. The water moccasin is a benign, sturdy, calm presence in all this, not, as it were, holding his ears or calling for ice water. The water moccasin alone, I now realize, has it together.
It is germane to whatever I am talking about.
It would appear to be.
That surprises me.
Me too.
I did not think even what I was talking about was germane.
To what?
Well, to anything at all in general and specifically to what I was talking about.
Can one talk about something and have it be not germane to itself?
Well, yes, I think this may be the quintessence of not having it together.
Talk that is not germane to its intention—in other words, the nattering of the mad.
Yes, if the mad have an intention.
They probably do. They have just lost it.
I wonder if your water moccasin would allow himself be petted?
I could put my hand inside the otherwise useless metal tumbler and stroke his neck and find out. My sense is that he would not mind.
Can you, in your vision, be careful so that he cannot get a bite in above the tumbler on your wrist?
Yes. I will present him the bottom of the tumbler, slowly, right to his chin, and stroke him under the chin if he assents.
The caterwauling bug song will abate as you do this.
I will momentarily not hear it. The sound will be there but I will have pushed the “attenuate” button. I have seen one of these on a fancy car radio. My mind will be with the mind of the moccasin.
You will forget the bad tangy water and the stupid metal cup and the bug song.
I will be somewhere else.
&
Will we be able to cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees, is what I am wondering.
You mean as opposed to wondering if we should, or if it will occur to us to want to do that, or—
No, I mean, precisely, Will we be able to cross a river and rest in the shade of the trees. I grant that we are too daft to have it occur to us. Perhaps you have not noticed, but the river is a concrete ditch now, usually, if it is not altogether underground beneath roads, and the trees are an automobile dealership. A man would need say today, after his arm is blown off, Let us cross that water-control canal there and repel the salesmen and crawl under the F-150s, where I wish to die.
We are living when before we would not have lived, and now we are dying where we would not have died.
That is almost epitaphic. When he should have not, he lived. Where he should have not, he died.
It will perplex the cemetery goer.
The cemetery goer, in my experience, is already perplexed. I see no harm in keeping him that way. I need some coffee, my friend.
I am in want of recreational drugs, untattered clothes, psychological counsel, carnal affection, a dog, and a child upon which to lavish trinkets and advice.
I fear for this child.
Not more than I.
&
What is Life like once it fully collapses around you, sir?
Has it fully collapsed around me?
You were averring this last night after your thimble of wine.
My thimble of wine has made my head hurt.
I refilled it for you several times, imprudently. At your insistence.
I insist on nothing anymore. I don’t have it in me to insist.
That’s what you say, sir. But after a thimble you will insist on another.
I dispute it, and it is not in me anymore to dispute, either.
You said, “My trumpet of vino is exhausted, Charles, fill it quick because Life has collapsed around me. Julia Child is dead. Fill it before I join her.” I felt unable not to comply with this request, sir, as you had phrased it and supported it.
You & Me: A Novel Page 4