Typical (16 page)

Of lunatics I am glibly, blithely unafraid. Unless they get near me, particularly if they are undiagnosed. Of lunacy I am afraid: my own. Of course. Being afraid of only the common scary things in life is scary. There is more to be afraid of, and to be
more
afraid of, than the putative fearful.

I am afraid of stupidity—as in lunacy, my own. The stupidity of others is, usually, a comfort. Not always.

It’s comforting to be well off in terms of money, but even a sackful of money is a temporary phase of a sack of nothing, and therefore money can give you real creeps.

Sex. Who is not afraid of sex? One is afraid of sex outright (rare), afraid of
one kind
of sex, afraid of certain acts of sex, afraid of
not
having some kind of sex or enough sex or of not having any sex at all—of sex, who is not, somewhere, sometime, afraid?

There’s a high-singing dude behind a door where I sit and have coffee right now. I doubt that he is afraid of anything at all. He’s not afraid, for one thing, of sounding more like a woman than a woman can. I wouldn’t be either, come to think about it, but I can’t begin to do it. I’ll wager—just natural laws—he’s afraid of
something,
but I suspect it’s trivial if it exists at all.

The trivial for me is, of course, one of the truly frightening things in the world. Again:
one’s own
is the corker here, and yet one practices triviality all one’s life in preparation for coming to terms with it; one trains for an entire fifteen rounds of being pronounced trivial, and then, right at the end, one relaxes and gets knocked out by the fact of one’s triviality. Very scary, this bugger.

Now
is a scary item if ever there was one. I have, I suspect, never not miffed the now. Now is too fast for me. Now leads to drinking. Drinking undoes now handsomely. Dismantles the whole onslaught. And in that refuge, respite of straight time, you can be afraid to come back, very very afraid. Very. Very.

I think of Mrs. Jenkins. I wish I knew her. I’d have her sexless, therefore free of that kind of fear. Yes: the only sexual fear pertaining to Mrs. Jenkins is the feeblest one: of not having any at all.
No sex with Mrs. Jenkins.
Let’s establish that. It’s out of the way. Of no concern, to us or to Mrs. Jenkins. Mrs. Jenkins, whatever else might plague her, is not afraid of having no sex with us either. Or with anyone. Mrs. Jenkins is, as the phrase goes, whatever it means actually (but we’ve established our own meaning), sexless, save for her marital relations. God, I like her already. To Mrs. Jenkins you will not sing, If you want to be a friend of mine, bring it with you when you come. You won’t sing it because, if she understands it, it’s bad form, and if she doesn’t, it’s pointless, leads to explication, embarrassing self-explication.

Embarrassment, taken to soaring heights, can be scary.

So: with Mrs. Jenkins we will observe correct manners. We are getting to know her. We are going to neither broach nor have sex with her, and we will be correct in all dealings with her. As correct as an etiquette book, if possible. Though here we will have to guess, not ever having read one, except for amusement, and then only parts, of course. One might consider reading etiquette books entire, even current ones, if they exist, and remaking oneself in their image, but I find this scary and probably unnecessary for our relationship with Mrs. Jenkins. With Mrs. Jenkins, I should think a program of simple but vigilant common decency would be sufficient. Mrs. Jenkins should not be judged boring by this prescription for our deportment with her. We will be boring.

Mrs. Jenkins will be so interesting she will scare you.

Will we want to know about her husband? Even though we ourselves are not to be sexually interested in Mrs. Jenkins, still we might, within the boundaries of common decency, determine that Mr. Jenkins is himself a cad unworthy of Mrs. Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins is probably just a middling kind of oaf very much like ourself, but he is enjoying the advantages of and therefore our vague scorn for his no-cut contract on the Mrs. Jenkins team.

Mrs. Jenkins makes love to Mr. Jenkins with a lot of jewelry on.

Mrs. Jenkins will atomize perfume into the sheets, a cloying sweetness that suggests
Ding dong! Avon calling!
and prevents you from breathing properly and makes you feel superior to people (like Mr. Jenkins) afraid of human odors and all the funky delights found beyond the gates of excess as you in your superior way regularly find and love them.

Mrs. Jenkins may even work herself out of a girdle. She may have a cellulite problem. It is possible, though, given her manner—a kind of quiet,
Come home, boy
attitude she manages by patting the mattress twice beside her hip—that Mrs. Jenkins is the most powerfully attractive woman we have ever seen and we may champ at the bit of our contract with her, that clause about not having sex with her which we agreed to early in the imagining of her, and which was necessary
for
the imagining of her, but which we now, as we smell her room odiously sweet and see her bashfully and yet boldly pat the bed beside her inviting, dimpled thighs, regret. And in that regret, within the boundaries of common decency, we assault the privileged Mr. Jenkins, who usurps our place in all that perfume.

Mr. Jenkins probably has more and better diplomas than we have, and yet has arguably not done much with them. We have done more with our few, poor certificates. Mr. Jenkins has never really not had money, and that he has not had a lot has never bothered him. Mr. Jenkins is some kind of asshole on cruise control. It would not be inappropriate, within the boundaries of common decency, if we were to lift him from his Masters-and-Johnson-guided toils upon Mrs. Jenkins by a wire garrote around his neck.

Here we would have a problem. Mr. Jenkins is the kind of guy who would, somehow, get both hands under the garrote before you hoisted him up to the ceiling and, though capable of talking, say nothing. Out of some kind of prudence, too, rather than fear. Mr. Jenkins has a manual in his head for all occasions.
The best thing to do, in case of wire garroting when making love to your wife, is, after you have inserted your hands under the garrote to prevent serious injury to your neck, say nothing to your assaulter, who anyway may be, and in many cases is, invisible. Do not try to reason with the invisible lovemaking garroter. He can be made more dangerous.

“We will let you down if you’ll talk,” you tell him, but he will still just hang there, breathing a mite harder perhaps than he was moments before, his eyes very slightly widened, perhaps.

Mrs. Jenkins,
yes:
all that perfume, dimpled flesh, bangles bangling! Mr. Jenkins levitated, prudent, above us.
If the invisible lovemaking garroter assumes your position with your wife, remain calm. An outburst on your part, even a show of agitation, can be disastrous. The garroter need not, should not, for example, see you wiggle
y
our legs or run in space above him. Hang motionless. He will forget you.

If you could figure out what to do with the Mr. Jenkinses of the world, both before and after you’ve garroted them to the ceiling, you’d be a lot better off, infinitely better off, infinitely.

L
ABOVE WAS SCARED. HARD
not to be, in those circumstances. I’m scared, too. My circumstances are different.

I’ve changed my name, to Bobby Love II. You change your name when your schemes don’t work out and you move to Texas—the kook who wrote the book says so—and my father had done all but the name changing, so I added that.

One thing that will scare you is reading about your old man in a book, and scare you more if the book is not supposed to be true but is. Everything else in the book is made up, probably, but my father’s part. He put a proposition to a student and she was young and he lit out, had to—there was a fat, deranged, older-brother type he was scared of, and what the book doesn’t say is where he landed.

He landed in El Campo, Texas, schoolteaching, this time pawed the oldest, skinniest, safest girl in town, and had me, and I got rid of the Labove as fast as possible. My father was haunted by the memory of touching the Varner girl for all of five seconds the rest of his life. There was nothing subtle or serious about it, except that he was scared. After a time he was scared of
fruit.

“What she was like, I need Italian to tell you,” he said once. Once, he cut up a melon into pieces so small we couldn’t pick them up on a knife as you might peas.

Our mother—mine; he called her Mother, too—was a stick. If the one he ran from was a melon, our mother was a vine, and she had a great calming effect on him. He’d kick back in a straight chair, front legs about one inch off the floor, regard her in a squint, standing there before us in a limp, unironed dress, and say, “Hadley, am I ever glad to see you.” He might say this one hour after seeing her last. She’d stand there, with a mixing bowl on her slim hip maybe, shake her head at him, and go on with her business, which was only running the house. Thus, Labove was secure.

I saw at some early age that I was not going to be wildly successful in life. Either that, or I decided somehow at some early age not to
be
wildly successful in life. Or both, conceivably, though neither vision nor plan will I claim to have consciously held. Let me sing, a bit out of key, rudely, oh, you boring devils, for I am scared and I am Bobby Love II.

One day a fellow student in our miserable school here handed me
The Hamlet
and said, “Your father’s in this book.” I looked and there was a Labove pawing a child in a classroom. Funny, I thought, and I thought to borrow the book and present it, much as the kid had to me, to my father. I gave no credence to the remote possibility that the book’s Labove was my father until my father looked at the book and I saw him react. The legs of the straight chair came down their one inch into a crisp, four-legged address, and the book was planted square on the table, and my father’s face held six inches above it in a trance. Backwards he read, then back to his name, then forwards and backwards and forwards and forwards more, then he skipped back way before and read forwards. Half an hour later: “Is this book suitable for students your age?”

“How would I know?” I said.

“You know this is a work of
fiction,
do you not?”

“I suppose it is. Is it?” By this I meant I hadn’t had time to tell if the book was a novel or what. I’d had enough time to tell it wasn’t Shakespeare’s
Hamlet,
and that my father’s name was in it, and that the named Labove was a schoolteacher like my father.

My father was out the door. When he returned, the book was not with him. I said nothing, though I was going to have to give it back to the boy who’d borrowed it from the library. It was one of those times we are all familiar with: more was happening before me than I could guess with the aid of a hundred questions answered, so the prudent course was to ask
none.
Preserve your innocence
as is,
cut your losses, maintain the dignity of the ignorant. For two weeks the boy railed for his book. Then he came up and said, “Forget it.”

Now
a question: “Why?”

“Don’t know. There’s no fine. No record I checked it out.
No book.”

There are many libraries in the world, even the world of El Campo, Texas, in these times, and I thereupon located the nearest
Hamlet
to fall outside the zone of Labove’s control. There it all is, my father and the melon-breasted child and all—if you are contemplating at any level the wildly unsuccessful life yourself—you need to know.

Four years later, when I was eighteen, I said as a joke to him, “Do you think I might change my name, legally?”

He pushed his fingers together, tip to tip, in a slow accordion motion, or if you want to see it, you can imagine one hand being a spider, albeit a five-legged spider, and the other hand being its reflection in a mirror. Now you have to wonder what a spider is doing calisthenics on a mirror for. Perhaps the spider is not doing calisthenics but is slipping. But how slowly, near meditatively, the spider is slipping, up and down, on the mirror, which mirror is held, sideways, by my father, whose hands the spider is, whose … one of the things you get wildly unsuccessful in, if you try, or do not try
not
to, is in your brain. Your brain can get out of hand. It can let you, or make you, paw a child, for example.

When he got through finger meditating, when the spider had pursed its mind, my father said, “Why would you want to change your name?”

“Oh,” I said, “to something snappier. Less chic. Something more American,
with
it.”

“I see,” he said.

“Love,”
I said.

He thought for a minute and pushed back in the chair, front legs a rare full three inches off the ground. “What she was like, I need Italian to tell you. Change your name.”

This I did.

Things I am scared of: words like
empyrean
and
sentience.
Ignorance in general, but not much and not often. But sometimes, bad. All people, especially children, who have the most courage. Financial newspapers, not a word of which I get. It is possible not to be afraid of your bank balance, but once it gets very low, all you can do is be afraid of it. Same with one too high. Police, of course; all law, in fact. Law is a giant web we’ve paid someone to erect so we can watch other people, and eventually ourselves, foul in it. Circuses I am not afraid of.

Housepainting is not scary, but the likelihood of
poor surface preparation
is very high and therefore frightening, and housepainting is therefore also. All things which someone other than yourself must be entrusted to do are frightening, and all things which you alone must do are terrifying. Getting up early in the morning.

Fishing, though, is not frightening. However: if it’s any good, it’s expensive, and if it’s not, it’s dumb.

Eleemosynary.
Litigation. Lack of litigation.

Brilliant discovery.

New women, old women. Medium-known women are not frightening. But they come from the new and grade ever so hard to tell scarily into the old.