The Twilight of the Bums (12 page)

Say! interrupts Two, speaking of certificates of deposit, how will I know when you are dead?

Easy, One replies, his closed hand tracing the flat line of the horizon, I'll send you a death certificate.

Two receives this information unflinchingly and turns to gaze into his friend's dear face. I'll beat you to it, he says grinning.

Oh no, you won't, One cries out, I've always been first in everything we've done.

Dear reader: somewhere in this volume, probably in pages you have already consulted since the two bums have more of a past than a future, you will find a literary effort concerning the sociology of wifehood. Would you be so kind as to consult that effort and tell us who you think
Sophie
is?

With our typical arrogance, it never occurred to us that the lit. effort in question is loaded with ambiguity on this point. Is
Sophie
the mother, the mistress, or, indeed, the wife?

Please write to us and clear this up, if you would be so kind. We're in hot water until we hear from you. Answer with due caution, however, since no matter what your answer is, it will implicate you.

As it often happens in a lifelong partnership (even with old friends) the two bums had a fight. It started as a shouting match about something or other but quickly degenerated into ugly pushing, ugly shoving, and ultimately: violent fisticuffs.

You, dear reader, may wonder what caused such a tempest on the usually tranquil sea of their friendship … [and wonder too at the excessive literary writing in the preceding two lines].

Even the two derelicts, when they reconciled and embraced after three weeks of refusing to exchange a single word could not recall the reason for this bitter dispute, but the black eye on Bum One and the swollen lip on Bum Two were proof enough of the violence of their combat.
[Such an enjambment, even in prose, as exampled above, was brought into the culture of poetry by Victor Hugo himself -- alas!].

You may, Dear Reader, if you wish, imagine a cause for this bloody fight, or, better yet, you may go sock your own beloved and crack his or her lip, bruise his or her eye, but as for us, we suspect that in the case of our two derelicts it was the same old reason that causes friendships to dissipate:
stubbornness!

As is often the case, indeed, if we may be so bold, as is always the singular case, it may be stated with indubitability that
Literature
(here we indict
Art
as well) refers, first and foremost, to itself; and, as a corollary to this first assertion, we asseverate that often it is
Literature
itself which is least aware of this fact.

If you have not yet given up the ghost in repellent boredom as yet, we offer as an example, before our own story begins, the Bartok/Shostakovitch/ Lehár number: B's parody of S unaware of S's parody of L. Are we boring you? On we rush.

It is night, deep night somewhere in Bohemia, and the bums, still hitchhiking west toward the western foci of civilization and its discontents: Paris or Dachau. Deep night on a stretch of dark deserted road, the bums tossed out there by a busload of Irish Separatists Soccer Club members who mistook Bum 2 for an English lord, kicked them out after a good thrashing with their soccer shin guards. Deep night, the old bums exhausted, hungry, and so thirsty they are passing the business end of a tossed cigarette butt back and forth for the moisture in the tobacco. Rather than wait, they determine to set out on foot, to walk -- surely a town lies ahead, somewhere. The bums struggle along, side by side, hand in hand, lest they lose one another in the complete starless moonless night. Like the heroes of old, on this night, they have no private thoughts.

Perhaps, says one to the other, we are already dead. I was just about to utter that very thought, the other replies.

Soon thereafter the road tends downward and in a distance only defined by their appearance the old men could see a series of lights, perhaps torches, in a single file, moving slowly toward them. About two kilometers ahead, although calculating distance without reference points is -- oh well, this rhetoric already implies its conclusions so why waste time and space, eh?

The rest is quickly narrated. The old guys jump off the road and hide in a ditch. The string of lights draws nearer, now moaning is heard, formless moaning but moaning finding a form in that formlessness, moaning discovering a rhythm of sorts, a shape to contain the implied grief. At 50 meters a mule pulling a small cart is noted in the semi-darkness (for it is not as dark now as before because we have removed the clouds that were hiding the Moon eh! why not). On either side of the cart, torch bearers. Behind, a small group of hooded figures. Everyone moaning, moaning from the pit of the stomach, the way Tibetan Buddhist monks pray. At 20 meters a coffin is revealed atop the cart. Also, inflated rubber tires on the mule cart.

It's a night burial, whispers one to the other. Yes, whispers the other back, a big sinner. Only big sinners are buried at night.

Soon enough the burial procession has disappeared from sight and the old men are again on the road in the dark (the Moon is back behind the clouds), stumbling along, holding hands, now certain that a town lies within walkable distance.

One of the bums says to the world and his friend and himself, it doesn't get any better than this. One replies, my thought exactly, his brainpan working furiously to assemble the depressing realizable lyric which Edith Piaf planted there some 50 years ago.

We the undersigned members of the Cervantist Society wish to state for the record that your literary effort
NIGHT BURIAL
has been cleared of all charges brought before our body pertaining to elements in that effort thought to have been plagiarized from
DON QUIXOTE
.

A double-blind computer scan, the DNA testing of our profession, betrays no literary influence whatsoever in your piece.

We do wish to observe, however, that the Lehar operetta which Shostakovitch rakes over the coals so in the first movement of his 7th Symphony was the favorite tune of Adolph Hitler, especially in those glory days when the Reich was on the march southwest to its biggest prize: Paris. Thus, in mocking it with such violence, we hear Shostakovitch's intention to pound old Lehar down the Furher's throat.

Yours respectfully,

Ramón Hombre Della Pluma
President ex cathedra

One quiet lazy fall day their black-market contacts all made, their pockets thick with yen and military scrip from various shady deals bargained and settled in the back alleys of Yokohama, the two draftees slipped into their zoot suits (custom made in Hong Kong) and jeeped off in an officer's vehicle to a famous tattoo parlor in the Tokyo Ginza.

Tattooing, as our readers are certainly aware, is something of an art form in Japan, although suffering some during the post-war occupation and reconstruction period, which eventually necessitated in most parlors the institution of a side business to thicken the cash flow, in this case the ever-reliable sex shop with all the essential instruments of pleasure.

So the
Big Good Time Sex & Tattoo Shop
was quite a busy power point, and there our two draftees wended their way to get laid and tattooed (young men, trust us, don't know which end is up).

Draftee One was first under the tattooing needle, the master creating a small pear on his right buttock. When One rolled aside to another table for his pear to cure a while, Draftee Two bared his back and prepared for an enpicturement of his first parachute jump in full battle gear, a big multicolor picture of the open chute stretching from shoulder to shoulder, but just as the master's needle was about to draw the first line, Draftee Two stood up, bowed to the master and paid for his and his friend's tattoo with an arrigato gozimus.

The master turned to slather curing cream on One's pear, humiliated that personal need did not allow him to refuse the cash for work he had not done. Probably only readers with any sense of history will have a clue as to why Draftee Two also felt disturbed, in an unexpressed way, on that special day, 40 years ago, when Draftee One got a pear needled into his ass, and he got nothing.