You & Me (13 page)

&

So, look.

Where?

No, here. At some point we cannot keep sitting here proposing absurdist trips to the liquor store, pondering pederasts on the school bus. Adopting impossibly sweet boys from Kenya.

I want a houseboy until he is Herschel Walker.

I do too. So we keep on with this blather, the want of testosterone, others knowing how to live but not us, and finally there is one of us can't walk or something, do you realize that this can get ugly, as they say?

We enter assisted-living facilities!

No, we don't, but if we do, we still then get transferred to the drool-circle facility. We are in assisted living right now.

So what are you saying?

I think there is a point after which the jokes stop and we have to figure out how to die.

Weeping bitterly and unchallenged by the roadside.

Precisely.

Where does that come from, anyway?

I do not know. I thought it was yours.

Let's say Shelley.

Do you know him?

No.

How did Byron die?

Don't know. Lot of those guys got off with consumption early.

Do you think we could have a duel?

We could joke about a duel for weeks and never do it. What would be the odds of two fatal shots? One of us would be dead, the other unable to off himself, and be charged with murder.

What if one of us has a stroke and the other has to cope?

I dig where you coming from. I need a drink. What about an adventure that wipes us out? Imprudently film the griz.

What?

Film the griz.

You have lost your mind.

It works. You live in a school bus for a few months, talk to the griz a few years, show them off to your waitress girlfriends, finally talk to the wrong griz, and you're out.

I see no griz.

Point.

Is it going to rain?

I hope so.

If it rains my spirits will lift.

&

I like to watch the action glow.

How does the action glow? What action?

No,
glow
is not a verb.

What is
glow
?

Glow
is a noun.

I thought
action
was a noun.

No.
Action
is an adjective. Action glow. The glow of the action.

You like to watch it?

Yes, I like to watch the action glow.

What does that mean?

Don't know.

Are you looking at the freeway? A field of lightning bugs?

No idea what I mean.

I distrust people who call them fireflies.

I remember that. Those people. They are the same people would pronounce the
t
in
often
and say
interest
with three syllables. Where do they come from?

They come from a strange room.

Can they be forgiven calling lightning bugs fireflies now that we have killed off the lightning bugs?

Do you recall the occasional accident when a lightning bug got crushed and smeared and the smear glowed?

Yes.

Was that action glow?

I think it was. That is not what I had in mind when I said it but now I think I can say that is what I had in mind, like that. Not restricted to that, mind you.

Of course.

It's a useful concept.

Apparently.

It's not much different, grammatically, from, say, blowhole.

I imagine a whale watcher watches the action glow above the blowhole, in certain light.

That phosphorescent glow in the water, in surf, is that animals of some sort? Is that a smearing as it were of lightning bugs, real small ones, in the ocean?

Either that or it's some kind of elemental sparking.

What, like tiny
flint
?

Am I Jacques Cousteau?

Weep for Phiweep.

He died on a wocky outcwopping.

We are going to hell.

To watch the action glow. We'll enjoy it.

&

Let's run over there and pick that trash up.

That the brothers' trash.

It's in our world, dude, and it's not rocking our world.

It seems to me that the debate about civilization and the nuanced forms it can take, whether democracy is the summum bonum and so forth, whether socialism is tenable or evil, and so forth—

Yes?

Well, the debate can stop as soon as you recognize that a good half the people on earth are willing to unwrap their Snickers and drop the wrapper as they bite into the candy bar. The egalitarian saviors standing next to them can shut the fuck up right then and there.

That is an indelicate and unattractive figure of speech, shut the fuck up.

I find it indispensable in certain instances, this being one.

What if I were to contend that the egalitarian savior who won't shut the fuck up is, though, in a sense dropping his own Snickers wrappers all over the environment as well. They are spewing forth in a self-appointed proselytizing that the simple candy eaters did not ask for.

You are strengthening my case, not weakening it.

I can see that.

Half the world is an animal and the other half a meddling high-minded egghead and they are not coming together except in certain forms of predation and exploitation of the other. This is why tyrants have their spectacular runs. They force peace momentarily. Then the candy eaters start to get a leg up, or the meddlers do, and the pseudo-truce starts to fray, and someone offs the tyrant, or he dies naturally if he was really good, and it's back to chaos.

So you do not want to go pick up the trash?

I don't, but I would like it not to be there.

Let's just pick it up.

People will drop more of it as we do it. At our feet.

Yes, we will appreciate that as a confirmation of our intellectual superiority. We knew that would happen. We will look around for a Stalin to materialize and stop it. People do not care what is done to them if they see the shit slapped out of the other half.

If you had a good clear fingerprint on a Tayto bag and you could take it to Stalin and get the owner of the print hung, would you do it?

I would do it. I would also gas anyone yelling “In the hole!” at a golf tournament. The people who yell this from the tee would drop dead right there, at the tee. The people saying it near the green, where it is tenable that the ball go in, could be buried to their necks in the sand traps and left there to keep saying “In the hole” until they expired. There would be hundreds of tired decomposing faces in the sand, posing a new kind of hazard for golfer and spectator alike.

All right. While we are at it, I want anyone using a cell phone in a car to be put into a Final Demolition Derby wherein your car has to be moving as a salvation number flashes among hundreds of false salvation numbers flashing from hundreds of sites in the arena, on the walls, on billboards, on the license plates of other cars, on the radio dials inside the cars, and you have to dial these numbers as you drive in the demolition and get the one right number to be saved. Otherwise you drive and you dial and you crash until you die there doing just that.

I think many of those people will enjoy that.

You are probably right. Still, it will be better than the gladiators were to Rome.

&

Do you remember that nice little ham we got?

We got a ham?

Not recently. That girl who is a cook sent it to us.

Like, a real ham?

Yes.

Vaguely.

It was not the standard name but it was the real deal. Like Edwards. An Edwards ham.

That does not sound correct, Edward's ham.

No, but it was a correct ham.

I would like to have some drugs.

I would too, but I am trying to think of the name of the ham.

What you are supposed to do in this instance is save the packaging. A ham of this sort, if I have it right, comes in a fetching muslin bag with a lot of logoage and ethos printed on it. You take the ham out of the bag and put it in the bathtub or whatever other ritual you are so traditionally expected to so fondly perform, perhaps as instructed to do even on this very bag, and eventually eat the ham and discard the bathwater but you save the bag.

Logoage.

Yes, sometimes a want of logoage. Like, just a name, so simple that it
looks
like a logo. “Edwards Ham” might be just this sort of nonlogo logo. Only the cognoscenti know about Edwards Ham, the nonlogo says.

All right. Help me find the quiet Edwards Ham bag.

All right. Maybe we will locate drugs in the search.

Glory be to God.

Lay me down to sleep beside the calm waters. No sheep. I don't want to be on the ground near sheep. Frankly I'd be less bothered if I were on the ground near lions than were I on the ground near things grazing.

Do you have any idea where the ham bag would be?

No.

&

Have you been there when the famous fall down drunk and you must help them up and they get angry with you for it?

We have all been there for that.

When we fall down ourselves and have to help our own self up others get angry with us for it.

Yes. We are the small not famous with whom everyone is allowed to be angry.

When we fall down and get up we can even be angry with ourselves.

Yes.

We are the unthanked, the angry-with.

We are the small.

May we quit?

Quit what?

Quit. As in Thou shall not quit, commandment eleven I guess.

Oh yes, we may quit.

We may be
quitters
?

Oh yes.

People will then be more angry—

Beyond angry.

I think about the slaughter of the Indians. Had we been able to quit, we might not have done that. But we could not quit.

Is that a pink poodle?

I would say apricot.

Is that a cat with it?

I believe that to be a blue creme.

A woman is walking a dog and a cat by our house in these rude suburbs and the dog is pink and the cat is blue. She does not appear to be drunk. Or famous.

She is motoring along. Apricot and blue creme.

Call out to her.

And say what?

I don't know.

No.

Why not?

I am afraid to.

&

Would you be interested in a book entitled
The Cragiator Turns His Boys
?

I suppose I would. What is the Cragiator?

I don't know.

You don't know this book?

This book does not even exist. I have envisioned it.

Well what is the Cragiator?

I think the Cragiator is a fellow named Craig whom his boys call the Cragiator.

His little posse.

Yes, I suppose.

This all makes sense. I recall Studio Becalmed.

I think the Cragiator is of a substantially later generation.

We can bank on it. He cannot be as robust as Studio.

He will be to a degree more pitiful.

Well, easy now, he is after all adolescent, not fully formed. He is not to ride around wanting Jayne Mansfield—

No, you are right, he rides around wanting J Lo. It is the same thing.

Who
is
J Lo?

A pop star. That is a contraction of her name.

When you say pop star, isn't there a specific field of endeavor that one first—

Yes, but they get a little notice in one thing and then immediately are everything and it's just easier to consider them pop stars. I have no idea what J Lo was at first. The Cragiator wants her, man, leave it at that, will you?

I am interested only in the Cragiator's turning his boys. I just hope to God that is not genital in its import.

&

It doesn't matter that it doesn't matter.

What doesn't matter?

I guess I am saying that nothing matters.

I have no idea what you are saying, but when you say “it doesn't matter” what is the antecedent to “it”?

I don't know. It doesn't matter. If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what the antecedent to it is.

You have lost your mind.

Yes, and it doesn't matter.

Nothing matters.

Correct.

If elephants go extinct, it doesn't matter.

Technically, no. I admit it is a shame. But a shame does not matter.

If the Hutus slaughter the Hittites, it does not matter.

No. Not Hitler, not Huns.

Ants?

They do not matter.

If buzzards stop eating the dead?

It will smell, the smell does not matter.

If the globe becomes a desert?

No.

If the people who support classical music stop supporting it and it too goes extinct?

No.

If Sears fails?

Well, that matters.

What if you brew a roach with the coffee, as I did not too long ago, the roach sitting like a king on the throne of the funnel into the pot, if kings can be imagined boiled alive on their thrones?

He was sitting there, dead?

He was sitting there, upright, dead, and looking not unhappy.

I think that mattered. I think you could not probably have drunk that coffee.

I did not, after two sips.

It matters if you brew a roach in your coffee then, but nothing else matters.

You sound like a child.

That slur is fully merited. It doesn't matter.

But this idea that “it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter”—this is a different debate.

Yes, it's where I began. Sounding like a child.

No, a child says nothing matters, but it takes an adult to say it doesn't matter that nothing matters, because it may well be that a lot depends on one's claiming that nothing matters. I suspect that, if one makes the claim at all, he is saying that something matters.

Well, the fact is, to say “it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter” is not to say “nothing matters” at all. I said that that was an equivalent position, but that was loose. One does need to know what is referred to by the second “it doesn't matter.” As you properly noted.

We need a philosopher here to take over for me. Where's the jumpsuit? I am making a run.