You & Me (12 page)

&

Be all that you can be.

Talking bout.

Hongry jack.

Pluperfect.

Tell me a story, Susie Q.

Release me and let me love again.

You never loved.

That is true.

Nor I.

Why is it?

Why are we deformed?

We do not know. Can the deformed see their deformity?

The club foot yes, the club heart no.

Tender is the meat.

I loved the name and the actual thing called the trundle bed as a child.

I made beds with my mother. She taught me the pillow-case thing where you hold the pillow with your chin. It fascinated me for some reason, not knowing immediately why she had bowed her head like that.

What about that weird inversion method, the inside-out grabbing of the corners of the pillow—

No, that is perverse. I won't have it. That is like sock bunchers. Socks should be pulled on I don't care if it stretches the shit out of them, not rolled on like a rubber or something, a rubber on your foot, I won't have it.

There is a lot we won't have.

There is a lot we don't have.

And that by God is the way God wants it. Let's shut the fuck up and not pray.

Tang. What a drink that was.

Do you recall Fizzies?

That was a pioneer, a harbinger of fast-food badness, headed our way.

Is it tenable that our bad appetites are what is actually ruining the world?

Whoever controls the sugar in its cheapest form will control the world. Fifty-five gallons of corn syrup can do more to move and control people than fifty-five fifty-five-gallon drums of oil. The oil can be all gone and people will be fighting over sugar.

You've gone all pundit on me here.

Pundit. Pundit. Pundit. How much pun could a pundit pun if a pundit could pun pun?

Give me the suit. I am headed for the store. The days of the professional drinker are over but we air not whupped yit.

&

We are perfect.

Pluperfect.

Pretorian guards of the sane.

I wish dinosaurs had made it.

No shit.

Don't criticize me. Did you hear that hot rod or whatever the fuck that was last night? What was that?

Loud machine.

No shit.

We talking in circles, we hear where we coming from, but we talking in circles.

I hope my deodorant does not fail.

How long before we smell like old men?

Last year, dude.

Probably so.

Have you seen a lot of chicks coming through here?

Well, it's not the Manson ranch, I'll grant you that.

Do we not fantasize about having the Filipino houseboy to make the drinks?

We do?

I do.

You don't want him for anything other than the drinks, though?

Maybe run the vacuum a little. What would that hurt?

That would not hurt a thing.

I love Lucy.

What?

That was a bizarre and seductive thing to name a show. I do love Lucy.

Lucy who?

Lucille Ball.

Who does not?

People don't actually
look
at her since they were told to laugh at her. She was hotter than—

Yes, it is a widely unknown known fact.

The Widely Unknown Known. I want a show called that. Why don't we storm Hollywood with our genius?

I don't know.

Do you know that the destruction of animal habitat, say that of the gopher tortoise, is now largely in the hands of licensed professionals? That there is so little natural habitat left that the predation of it is reserved to the nonprofit profiteers instead of the real profiteers?

That makes sense but I confess I was not aware of it.

The government of India for example shoots the tigers now.

Is Sunday school still a going thing?

Say what?

It must be, to some extent, but I hardly see how.

Look, if people can be taught still to think “socialized medicine” is the worst thing that can happen, particularly the ones already on Medicare and Social Security, they still make their kids go to Sunday school. Don't you let the BB of your brain roll too far down the razor-blade highway without realizing that.

You're on fire, dude.

If I could I would get up right now and watch Jack LaLanne and exercise with him.

Do you think when we put on the jumpsuit and head for the liquor store we are perversely channeling Jack LaLanne?

When the brothers contest our passage we'll
wish
we were.

I have never seen anything like those fingertip pushups. They don't even do that in cartoons.

Okay, look. Take Lucille Ball and Jack LaLanne. Throw in Barney Fife. Is it not the case that things were once richly conceived and executed by authentically talented people and that today we are pale not even imitators but just goofballs somehow making money going through the motions?

Cancel the subscription!

When I take that multivitamin without eating something I feel a little upchucky.

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God I feel small and dumb.

Anything happen?

No, the usual small and dumb.

When, what I want to know, did we feel otherwise?

When we were five.

When we
were
small and dumb.

Yes, then we did not feel small and dumb.

Were we large and smart?

I would say we were expansive and hopeful, full of cheer and possibility—we were then the way one is supposed to be as an actualizing human adult, who is actually small and dumb.

It's almost a kind of Darwinian irony, isn't it?

I have no idea what a Darwinian irony is, but I think you have struck the nail on the head anyway.

That is so gratifying, as opposed to striking the thumb.

Or missing the nail.

What is that called, when you miss and hit the wood and leave the impression of the hammer face in the wood?

That is called a . . .

Like, a rose, a . . .

We are senile. Look, here's one right here in the windowsill.

I'm calling it a rosedale.

It is not a rosedale.

I know it is not a rosedale. I am senile, not retarded.

You are small and dumb. We are small and dumb.

Eggzackly. We have proved our point.

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You know that thing where you are supposed to live every day as if it's your last?

Yes.

Do you have any idea how that is actually done?

No, not beyond that we don't do it.

I know we do not do it. But were we to do it, what would we do?

I have no idea. I sense we have talked about this before.

It frequently troubles me.

Okay. Let's do it. Live every day of our lives as if it's the last day of our life. Let's see, that's LEDOOLAIITLDOOL. It sounds like a Mayan god.

Get me a ticket to Tahiti!

I want to live on the Left Bank! Speak French well!

Paul Newman!

What?

Fucker in a race car drinking beer and not getting fat, every day of his life like the last, ledoolaiitldool! And handsome as shit! So handsome he did not even run around with women!

I want to put my own shoes, or someone else's come to think of it, in an advancing tide of lava!

Ivory-billed woodpecker! Get me to that swamp!

Dancing classes in the afternoon!

That's expensive.

Yes, but.

True. Ledoolaiitldool, how quickly one can forget. Sitting here on a budget. In fact, it's living every day of your life as if it's your last
dime
. That's what it really is.

I saw on TV last night that Jack Nicklaus has three grass tennis courts at his house. Different kinds of grass.

We do not have any grass in the
yard
. The yard is ten by ten feet.

Jack can ledoolaiitldool, we can't—

No, that is not true. That is the conventional failure everyone makes. We can ledoolaiitldool, even without resources, if we can figure out what it really means to ledoolaiitldool. It does not involve going to Paris if you cannot go to Paris. It must involve doing what one can do.

Is there a way of going to the liquor store as if it's the last trip?

What if it is not a matter of doing something but of thinking something?

Hmmm. Rad. It probably is. That is why we can't do it.

We cannot conceive of life as ending today and therefore of living today as if there is no tomorrow.

We would not think that way if we were playing tennis on that court over there and let's say you said, Jack, fuck court No.1, this Bahia shit, I want to be on that clipped Scottish pubic hirsuteness you got over there, thanks for having us out, Jack!

You have lost it again.

I know it. I like losing it.

It may be what we do toward ledoolaiitldool. Lose it.

Lose it like there's no tomorrow.

LILTNT. Liltnt. Lil' TNT.

Here we are at Alfred Nobel!

Einstein!

What?

Well, he won it, didn't he?

I suppose. The nuclear-bomb man got the dynamite man's prize.

How did Nobel get so much money for gunpowder and Einstein so little for so much more?

Conundrum of the age, if you ask me. Teaching at Princeton, an old man.

Is it because the age of colonialism was over so Einstein had only people to blow up instead of people to put to work?

Suits me. Ledoolaiitldool!

Lil' TNT.

&

When was the last time you had a friend?

I do not know.

When was the last time you read a newspaper?

Same answer. Is it the same question?

It is the same question.

Well, certainly it is the same answer.

Did we leave the earth, or were we never on it?

We tried to be on it.

Precisely. You had some friends as a child did you not? Wasn't there a point you even subscribed to a newspaper and thought you were in the game? And then at a point you had no friends and no use for the paper, like a worm in a bed of worms.

Like a what?

Worm bed. The conceit is somewhat forced.

I'd say errant altogether.

Maybe that too. Does it matter? Can a conceit describing a man with no friends and no newspaper be aught but errant? Isn't errancy the issue? Isn't then the errant conceit perfect? Isn't the unerrant conceit to suggest the ultimately errant state—

I get it. My objection to worm bed is withdrawn.

I would not wish to work—not that I wish to work for anyone—for the New Orleans Police Department.

Yeah. Count me out too.

Counting you out too.

NOPD,
unh
-uh.

Would like to take a drive in an old heavy Cadillac convertible on like US 90 somewhere, maybe on a dapply part in a sunny swamp. Purchase something nice for a little girl, put it on the seat beside me, and ride home with it like Clyde Barrow chewing gum and with hair tonic in my shiny shiny hair.

You have lost it again.

Beginning to really like losing it.

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Sometimes . . .

Yes. That says it all.

I wish it would rain.

I wish I had Kathy to talk into taking her clothes off in the playhouse and then when she tells me her father told her not to do that anymore I could run and hide and be afraid of his coming to my house and effecting the end of me. What if, I wonder, we could know even then that our parents would laugh at something like that, and we could have lived lives of relative cheer and comfort instead of in stupid little recesses of complete ignorance? What I am saying—am I saying this?—is that one's whole life is not having the wit to not be afraid of Kathy's father. This is why we do not know, have a clue, really, how to live today as if it's the last day of our lives. We think we have the score because we can see that fifty years ago we did not have the score, bolting from the playhouse, but the fact is we are bolting from another playhouse today. We do not even recognize it as a playhouse.

You sound like William Faulkner.

Mr. Bill? Why thank you.