Traveling Sprinkler (5 page)

Boy, she was pretty, though. I waggled my Shropshire lad that night.

I
'M SITTING
in a very small park in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I live. There are two branches that face each other across a square of mulch and a weeping fruit tree in the middle. I have a corncob pipe between my middle molars. It has a yellow plastic stem and it was made in Missouri. The tobacco came from Turkey—it was a special kind of tobacco, said the tobacconist at Federal Cigar, who was apportioning it into plastic bags with zip tops. The reason it's so special is that it was dried over a smoky fire. In other words, it's smoked tobacco that you smoke. One bag cost eight dollars, and the corncob pipe cost five dollars. The only thing I don't like about the pipe is that I can taste the yellow plastic of the stem, which has a flavor of Bic pens, and if I'm going to be chewing on something I'd rather be chewing on wood. The smoke itself seems to be turning my tongue into a pink tranche of smoked salmon.

There's a protest outside the North Church today—high school kids with a big sign that says “Occupy,” and what they're protesting is global warming. What a hopeless cause. The earth has been warming and cooling for a billion years and they want it to stop. Why not protest actions that we can easily end, like the intentional killing of people with missiles in foreign countries? Start small.

One thing that interests me is how long it takes to smoke a pipe. I'm stoned out of my brain stem right now, and there still seems to be a lot of smoked turkey left in the cob. Fortunately there's a strong sideways wind.

•   •   •

T
HIS MORNING
I
read some articles on how to get better posture. The best advice I found was to imagine your nipples and then imagine your way four inches down on your rib cage below them and then imagine that two large steel hooks had hooked under two ribs and were pulling you diagonally up toward the sky. When you do this you immediately sit with better posture. And you really have to imagine your own nipples only once, thank God.

I want to improve myself in a dozen ways. But my fingers are trembling because of the pipe tobacco and I feel a little queasy.

I should be standing outside one of President Obama's campaign offices with a sign that says “Our President Is Killing People.” The next day my sign would be: “Abolish the CIA.” And the next day the sign would be: “Drones Are Bad News for Civilization.” My friend Tim goes to marches and carries signs, and he says it feels good. He got arrested once.

A bird has dropped a half-eaten berry on my keyboard. It landed on the tilde key. Maybe it was not half eaten but fully shat. I put my corncob pipe down and blew on the dark fragment of berry and it hopped away onto the mulch next to the metal bench. I imagined the two hooks winching me up, lifting my slouching corpse skyward.

A man walked past, smoking a cigarette, wearing a black stoner T-shirt. “How are you doing?” I said, waving my new pipe at him. “Not bad, and you?” He walked away across the parking lot.

•   •   •

T
ODAY IS A CLOUDY DAY.
I woke up and I was amazed by how completely roasted and smoked my tongue felt. It's been many hours since I smoked a pipe, and my tongue is still recovering. It was a piece of meat in my mouth that didn't want to be steak or corned beef, it wanted still to be my own tongue. My very own talker, my slipper and slapper of mysteries.

I could be on the elliptical trainer at Planet Fitness listening to pumping music right now. The slogan of Planet Fitness is that it's the “Judgment Free Zone.” You can be fat or thin, old or young, and they want you there exercising. I try to go every other, every third, day.

The problem with the corncob pipe, aside from the fact that it bothers my jaw and roasts my tongue, is that I feel as if I'm impersonating Vannevar Bush. Bush was a famous war scientist who helped create the atomic bomb, and he also was a great pipe smoker and a great carver of pipes. He made presents of his handmade pipes to his cold-warrior friends. He gave a pipe to James Conant, the head of Harvard University and purger of Communists, and he gave a pipe to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. “I trust,” Bush wrote to Dulles, “that the pressure of the administration will not be so intense that you cannot find the time occasionally to put your feet on the desk, smoke the old pipe, and puzzle out the course of affairs in the queer world we live in.”

Dulles replied on CIA letterhead—an eagle poised on a shield bearing a strange crystal star. “As I write these lines I am smoking with contentment, and no little pride, the pipe which bears your initials and which I know is your own handiwork,” he said.

Perhaps Allen Dulles smoked Vannevar Bush's pipe as he mulled over the CIA's coup in Iran and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.

I
ALMOST SKIPPED QUAKER MEETING
because I hadn't had a shower and it's hard to sit silently for an hour if you're not clean, but then I went anyway. As I drove I listened to Beth Orton sing a song that goes: “I don't want to know about evil, only want to know about love.” I think that's very true. Sometimes you don't want to know about evil, you just want to know about love. You want to take off the misery hat and think only about the good things.

When I got inside, the clock was ticking and I was two minutes late and discombobulated, and it took me a while to settle down. I held my car keys. I always hold my keys during meeting. I clutch them at first and later my grip relaxes and I feel the smooth mountain range with my thumb.

Excuse me now while I throat-clear. Harrooom! God, that's nasty. As soon as I start talking into this thing—this little Olympus recorder—my vocal cords become coated with a resistant substance that has to be ground away by an enormous throat process. And then it's as if I'm a kid who's fallen on his bicycle and skinned his knee: there's this damaged, wrecked, injured vocal cord, with half of its phlegm scraped away and half still there. It's just really revolting. I'm sorry about it. It's a product of my own nervousness. I have to overcome some powerful desire to be entirely private by talking to myself in this almost public way. Whisper-talking. Breaking the silence.

•   •   •

T
HE IDEA OF
BREAKING THE SILENCE
is important in Quakerism. You don't want to break it. You want to wait for it to stop being brittle. You want to ease into it, merge with it, and find that you are speaking. I think I'm becoming a Quaker, even though I don't believe in God. “God” is an embarrassing word. I can't say it without getting a strange, hollow, do-gooderish feeling in my throat. Gourd. Gawd. Gaudí. Mentally I substitute the word “good” for “God,” and that helps. Good is God.

I started going to Kittery Friends Meeting a few years ago. My friend Tim had a very nice, very smart girlfriend, Hannah, who was a Quaker, and she'd gotten him going to meeting with her, and one day he was explaining to me how great it was and how there were some quite nice seemingly unattached women there who went almost every Sunday and I remembered that John Greenleaf Whittier was a Quaker and I thought, Why not go and see? I thought I wasn't going to speak, but gradually the silence got to me. A half hour passed, and then forty minutes, and someone said something about two stones side by side in a river and my blood started pounding in my ears and with five minutes to go until meeting ended I stood and said something cryptic about the incredible uncertainty of joy. I sat down shaking, trembling, quaking.

I went back two weeks later. Hannah broke up with Tim and moved away, and Tim got a better job at Tufts University, but I've been an attender at Kittery Friends Meeting on and off since. That's what you are: you're an attender. After you're an attender for a while, you can become a member, but I'm happy just being an attender.

•   •   •

I
HAVEN'T MOWED
the lawn recently because I don't want to buzz through all the dandelions. My new plan is to smoke one enormous ugly cigar per week. Just one—or two, or three, or twelve if it's necessary. A huge nasty grotesque cigar, not from Cuba, because fifty years ago Kennedy imposed a trade embargo on cigars—first securing twelve hundred H. Upmann Petit Coronas for himself and his friends—and since then we have tortured and isolated that impoverished country, all because its inhabitants “embraced” Communism. What they embraced is a hope that things could be better. That's all they embraced. These tags that people use: freedom fighter, terrorist, Communist, fellow traveler, dupe, stooge. I want to forgive everyone. I want to do better with my life. Maybe doing better is somehow finding a way to make people's imaginations work better.

Imagine a drone. Can you imagine a drone? An unmanned aerial killing machine? I will try. I read that they sound like lawnmowers. Here I am in my driveway, listening, and—yes—I can hear a distant lawnmower. What if I knew that that aerial lawnmower could at any moment blow up my house? What if in trying to blow up my house it blew up Nan's house, killing the chickens, killing both her and Raymond?

Tim told me he's going to write a book about drones. A few years ago he went to the Hannah Arendt conference at Bard College, where a man from Atlanta gave a talk on robot warfare and how it was inevitable, and how very soon drones would have software that incorporated the rules of warfare so that onboard drone computers could decide, using either-or algorithms, whether a target was legitimate and whether a missile attack would result in an acceptably low number of civilian casualties. Then the drones would not need any human operators living in Syracuse or Nevada. No human person would ever have to push a button to fire a drone missile. Everything would be preprogrammed and hands-free and guilt-free. Tim came back from the Bard conference very upset, and he began making notes for his drone meditation. Will Tim's book do anything at all to stop targeted killing? Possibly. Probably not. I have no faith in books to stop anything. You need something more than a book. If I wrote a poem against drones, would that help? Not a chance. You need more than words. You need shouting. You need crowds of people sitting down in the road. You need audible outrage.

I have just reread parts of the article in
The New York Times
that upset me so much. It's about President Obama's kill list. Why is a kill list a bad thing?

It's a bad thing because—oh gosh, where to begin.

•   •   •

I
BOUGHT SOME
B
UNNY-
L
UV CARROTS
and a bottle of Pellegrino and I aired out the picnic basket in the sun so that it would smell fresh. Then I remembered my car. It was a horrendous mess—papers were in there, and paperbacks, bags of old things, empty pouches of Planter's trail mix (“Join Mr. Peanut on a taste adventure”), sand, and now cigar ash. The ashtray was positively Pompeiian. It wasn't up to birthday snuff. I drove to the convenience store and I threw out all the trash and put quarters in the jukebox of emptiness and vacuumed the sand out of the passenger side—and the old ends of antacid, and the very dirty pennies that were stuck together from coffee spills. I heard the coins clack up the hose and I liked the sound, and I heard the sand granulate up the hose and I liked that sound, too. But still the car wasn't clean.

I went to the gas pump and got some paper towels and I dipped them into the squeegee water and cleaned the mud and dirt off the edges of the passenger door. That's the first thing you see when you open the door. I got the car looking reasonably kempt, as if I wasn't some homeless guy with a decrepit car. While I was cleaning, the smell of the windshield water got to me and I started to think, You sad fool, you're preparing for this picnic as if it's a date, but it's not. You're seeing your dear friend Roz. You're not winning her back.

•   •   •

I
WANT TO KNOW
more about songwriters. I went to Antiquarian Books on Lafayette Road to look through the music shelves. John, the owner, who is an enthusiastic member of Mensa, says he has a quarter of a million books, plus a Babylonian tablet in storage that he wants to sell for one point five million dollars. His aisles are ten feet high and double-stacked on each side with book piles—some of the aisles are so completely booked in and narrow that you have to walk sideways. John has gotten a bit portly, and some aisles he hasn't been able to fit into for years. He has an adults-only collection in the back—I've bought some racy things there to read with Roz.

This time I bought Chuck Berry's memoirs, a biography of Kurt Cobain, and a scarce collection called
Outstanding Song-Poems and Lyricists
, edited by a theatrical agent, which has many hundreds of songs written by obscure men and women who, in 1941, were eagerly hoping for their words to be set to music. There were love poems and antiwar poems and pro-war poems, all waiting for singers to sing them. On page 206, I read the beginning of a song by Mrs. Percy Halbach:

The nights were new; what did you do?

You ruined my life completely; we were making love so sweetly

You big bad moon.

Not too shabby, Mrs. Halbach. John said, “My best customers are the submarine men, because they never get claustrophobia when they're halfway down an aisle.” When I left, John was negotiating with a cheerful couple who wanted cash for their trunkful of nineties VHS porno tapes.

I parked in the Starbucks parking lot and lit a Murciélago cigar with a black bat on the label—
murciélago
means “bat” in Spanish—and began reading about heroin overdosages in Kurt Cobain's biography. Suddenly there was a crunch and the car lurched forward. My head was thrown back and my new Craftsman's Bench cigar cutter flew into my coffee. I said, “What the fuck?” and got out, expecting to see damaged metal. A young woman with hoop earrings emerged from a big white sedan, her hand on her clavicle. She'd backed right into me. “I am so, so, so sorry,” she said. We studied our bumpers—no harm done. She apologized again. I said, “I've done it myself, it's all good, no worries, bye.” She got in her car and drove off. A lot of life is like that.

•   •   •

I
T'S AMAZING TO SEE
the little kids in Quaker meeting, how they learn to sit quietly. They only have to sit for fifteen minutes, and then they go downstairs to paint peace signs on stones, but at first they can't do it and they poke each other and laugh and twist in the pews and climb on their parents' laps and whisper and tap their feet. Or they page through picture books. You can hear the long, slow turning of their wider-than-it-is-tall books. It's like the pages are being cut with a paper cutter, schwoooof. Then eventually the silence begins to work on them. There's a Swiss writer who wrote a book called
God Is Silence
.

The dumbest thing I ever did was not having children. Absolute dumbest thing. Even worse than selling my bassoon. I see the error now. My sister's kids are turning out great. They were shockingly spoiled when they were little, but now their true personalities have taken over and they're just nice calm tall young people with personalities. One is at Kenyon College studying something with lasers and the other is an intern at a dollhouse museum.

Nan's son Raymond is another great kid. He has gotten deeply into music in the last few years. Nan seems to think that I might serve as a role model for him, which is completely wrong but flattering. He refused to do homework and he didn't want to go to college, and instead he's in his room making beats on a beat-making machine with square rubber pads. In the summer he works at Seacoast Nursery hauling around baby trees, and he spends his money on music equipment. A few years ago I heard him banging away on a drum set. Gradually he got better. He had a good rhythmic ear. Then I heard him playing the electric guitar—that was last year. Now I don't hear him because he works with headphones on.

He reminds me a little of me in his single-mindedness, except that he's doing pop music and I was doing classical music in high school. I barely passed Algebra II and I refused to write papers on
King Lear
, which I thought was an unbearable, false, vile jelly of a play with no beauty in it anywhere, and instead I read Aaron Copland's book on music and Rimsky-Korsakov on orchestration. Rimsky-Korsakov really understood the bassoon—that's why he gave it
Scheherazade
's D minor solo. In minor keys, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, the bassoon has a “sad, ailing quality,” while in major keys it creates an “atmosphere of senile mockery.”

I read some of Stravinsky's books, too, all written with the help of the overly allusive Robert Craft, including the one where he says, “I am the vessel through which
Le Sacre
passed.” And I read one of Paul Hindemith's books. Hindemith, a composer, outraged me when he wrote that the bassoon, “with its clattering long levers and other obsolete features left in a somewhat fossil condition,” was due for a major overhaul. I had to admit, though, that the keys did make a lot of noise. There's no way to play a fast passage without some extraneous clacking. Listen to
Scheherazade
—you'll hear all kinds of precise metallic noises coming from the bassoonist.

I secretly wanted to be a composer, and when I wasn't practicing bassoon I was at our old Chickering piano, plinking away, writing scraps of piano sonatas in a little stave-lined notebook that I still have. And then I read Keats's sonnet and realized I wasn't going to have any success as a composer. I went to Berkeley for a while, and then to France, where I discovered Rimbaud's
Illuminations
—Rimbaud is a great sea poet—and while I was in Paris some Smith College students gave a party and I danced with two smiley girls, one in a skirt and one in sexy plaid pants, and I discovered that I enjoyed dancing with smiley Smith girls. When I got home to America,
Saturday Night Fever
was playing in movie theaters, and Elvis Costello was watching the detectives, and the Talking Heads were doing “Take Me to the River,” and I suddenly thought, I've missed the boat, I want to hear music I can dance to.