You & Me (3 page)

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I once heard Peter Jennings say “passenger manifesto.”

He was referring to what they said as they went down.

He was clever then.

Yes.

He was a man of the world, in the world—

And we are not.

Precisely.

How did this happen, he get to say “passenger manifesto” and be a national icon, if not some kind of oracle, at least a grand national-news-anchor corporate mouth, and we are nothing?

Hoyle and Darwin, and lard-and-hair sandwich. Peter Jennings never teased his mother with lard-and-hair sandwich, and you never would have said passenger manifesto, and there you have it.

Thank you for wrapping up another conundrum of our times.

De rien.

I would certainly like to have some ice cream.

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What are these things here?

I've never seen them before. Is it things or one thing? Where was it?

On the porch.

Let's get out of here before they or it explodes.

I am terribly becalmed by a washing machine. Is everybody?

Not everybody, surely, but most.

Had I the affluence of Peter Jennings I would put a dedicated sleep washer next to my bed, just run a low-water light cycle, no pollutants.

You could always toss in, say, your underwear at the last minute, the clothes you discarded before bed. To be practical.

You could. You could transfer them to the dryer if you got up in the night, and put poppin'-fresh BVDs on in the morning. Change your whole outlook on life, the sleep washer.

You could connect it to the bed itself and get a vibration quotient. The dryer heat could be used to toast the bed in winter.

Man. This puts a whole new spin on “white noise.”

But we don't have the affluence of Peter Jennings. A washing machine is not a frivolous appliance for us. We would not survive were we to say “passenger manifesto” on national TV. We would be subject to the cruelest of ridicule, dismissal, were we momentarily so irregularly lucky to have been employed in the first place.

So we best resign ourselves to imagining Peter Jennings sleeping next to his dedicated washing machine, his bed gently shaken, gently toasted, snapping into his fresh panties at the top o' the morning for another day of lucrative suit mouth. Just resign yourself. He delivers the manifesto, you're the passenger.

I'm too depressed to go to the creek now. Looking at the girl is utterly beyond me.

Let's just sit here.

Let's.

She'll understand.

She too is a passenger.

Bakersfield is a passenger of place.

Without a manifesto.

We are without a manifesto, not on the manifest.

Let us just sit here.

Yes.

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In the grove of trees down there is a table and a barber pole. You place your hat on the pole, and—

I do?

One does.

Why?

Would you allow me to tell you?

Prosecute your voyage.

One places his hat on the pole and a barber will emerge from the woods and give one a haircut. It is an old barber who has cut the hair of certain famous deceased men. Now he is enfeebled and shaking so badly that you will need repair to another barber for corrective attention to your new and sad-looking do.

Is the barber pole turning?

Yes. Why?

Because I would feel odd, if not outright dizzy, watching my hat turn while waiting at a table in a grove of trees for an old barber to emerge and give me a bad haircut.

I do not mean to suggest you must do it.

No no, of course I will do it. It is a grove of trees with a table and a pole and a haircut to be had, I will of course do it. Something that is done is
to
be
done, period, in the interest of good and modest citizenry.

In the interest of being a good fellow, you mean.

That is what I mean.

Yes, well, then the barber of some famous dead will affect to cut your hair as you sit at the table in a pleasant breeze by a table in the shade of the trees. The whirling of your hat will not disturb you overmuch once you begin to worry about the undeft motions of the man with scissors and razor about your neck and throat and eyes and ears and nose. The straight razor under the nose when the nose is pinched up—the razor poised for the Hitler cut, that cut which will take out the hair which would otherwise form the Hitler mustache, I mean to say—will be your worst moment.

I will sail through it as if it is the Fifth of May. The table—is the table perhaps early American, unlevel, of two or three broad virgin boards badly joined?

You have the picture, my friend.

I do. I will enter the grove of trees, placing my hat on the pole, sit in the straight-backed chair, await the geezer, accept my scary butchering, in the corner of my eye my fedora turning dizzily, my arm resting on the uneven planks of pine or walnut or cherry since indeed it could be real wood if what you say about the table is true, all of this in the shade of the trees and in a breeze. I will be oddly and momentarily a complete man living a full life.

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I don't want to go down there. Something could eat me—us. I forget you're here sometimes. Something could eat us.

I don't regard that as the worst way to go. No matter how it went down, you'd not waste away. If the thing was large enough to attack, we might presume it large enough to get it over with. You'd be part of an appetite, part of Life.

No old-folks home for you, eh? Down the hatch!

That is right. Laugh as you will.

I worry about
small
things eating me—malaria is worse than grizzlies.

Of that no doubt. I am not going down there either if you think there are mosquitoes.

Let's stay right here in our nets and eat bonbons and get fatter and whiter and stupider and lazier and more cautious as we have less to be custodial of.

Pustulent academics!

I have never heard that word before. Is it a word?

Pustulent? What other adjective could derive from
pustule
?

It sounds good, I grant you. But the red vapor of Air Spell Check puffs from your mouth when you say it. I see
pestilent
and
postulant,
but no
pustulent.
You look momentarily like a sloppy vampire when you say it.

I wish I could be a sloppy vampire. My life has come to naught.

Don't start. Let's not go there. We live there, so let's not go home.

That phrase, “go there,” is funny I think because it approximates an abstract translation of the English idea behind it.

What are you talking about?

An Italian would say, “I have large friendship and I like to go there all the time.” If you put the move on a Frenchwoman who was not ready for it, she might say, “Don't go there,” and stop your hand.

I see.

These bonbons are hard as rocks.

They came from the little Filipino lad you purchased that brutal haircut for.

He chose the barber.

No, the barber is his uncle, and he had to go to him once you made it so public you were funding the venture.

Is it my fault the uncle is inept? They'd have known the child got his hair cut no matter how it was financed. He looked like one of those faux primitives.

Now he looks like he suffered a head trauma at Sunday school.

He looks like a houseboy.

He may, but he is bringing candy to us that might be ten years old.

Well, we are free to lie here and complain of it, so what is there to complain about?

A fattening man may not bark?

I think not. Not honorably.

Do we still pretend to honor?

We do.

All right, then. I say no more about the granite nougat from the wounded boy. I will say that when I came into the café you should not have humiliated me that way.

What way?

“Are you not wearing panties?”

Oh, that.

Yes, that.

It did look as if you'd forgone pants. Everyone in there agreed. That is why they laughed.

They laughed because I gave them that Dietrich pose.

Well, that too. But the pose supported the notion that you had no pants on under that beach shirt with those tails.

These people don't know what to make of us now.

So let them not know. You become wooden in your old age.

Who does? Them?
They?

No—
you
.

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Because we don't have to do anything unless we want to.

Are you done with that?

With what?

That sentence?

Yeah, why?

Because it's not a sentence, and it's inane, for starters.

Who hung you up in the stirrup?

Did what?

Twist your drawers.

I am too tired to deal with you.

Me too you.

You too me. You sound like Tarzan.

You Jane. What the monkey name? They had them a chimp didn't they?

Cheetah.

They had a cat name Chimp?

Prolley did. They was stylin' jungle folk.

I remember when Tarzan take a shower in his clothes in New York City and rip out of his wet shirt with a muscle show.

A muscle show?

He stretch like, like a cat, and his like Arrow single-needle-tailoring oxford shirt rip to shreds right there in the shower.

Did that turn Jane on?

You know it did. Jane in her leather skirt.

Do we not have anything else we could think about?

We must, but I can't think of it.

We should read a book, about the atom bomb or something.

Or about the philosophy of aesthetics.

Or about explorers, or history, some political and economic history, this is what we should be talking about instead of Tarzan and Jane stylin' jungle porno folk with a big monkey named for a big cat.

Did Tarzan do any vine swingin' in New York?

You know he musta have, acause how else could he get around except when he was riding elephants—

—and that time he run on foot to stop Boy from going over the waterfall on the giant lily pad—

—yeah, he run then, but allus elsetimes he swingin' everywhere, and what I want to know is how did they, you know, get him the vine equivalencies in New York, like what—steel cables and shit? Tarzan could just happen on some loose electrical wire and swing to a new building.

Oh man you know he could, he was a dude.

For example, we should be discussing like the differences between Hellenistic or even Roman conquerors and Central Asian conquerors, I am thinking largely of Timur here and the path of centuries-old degradation he legacied by virtue of the policies of razing, whereas say Alexander preserved, Caesar preserved . . .

And so you have Europe as opposed to Uzbekistan, this is your thesis?

Yes it is. Do you think Johnny Weissmuller was a steroid user?

Did they have them then? He was in the Olympics in 1924?

The idea of steroids before the rise of Hitler is strange.

Steroids is what the Nazis were all about. Bullies kicking sand in the face of six million ninety-pound weaklings on the beach.

That shit is hard to believe.

Yes it is but is it not the only thing that explains the US of A going into Iraq “unprovoked”? Isn't the cordata of that game the presence of Israel and the shadow of them steroids?

You are a wise man. Is it possible to get Tarzan movies at Blockbuster?

You will recall that Jesse Whatwashisname irked the Nazis in the 1936 Olympics running faster than the bullies.

Owens. We are I think confusing Weissmuller's Olympics with Owens's. They couldn't have been in the same games, could they?

Yes. My point is that today if they redid Tarzan, Tarzan would be played not by Weissmuller but by Owens. Or Denzel as Owens.

No, it would have to be Owens, because if subs were allowed then Schwarzenegger would be Weissmuller.

Ooo. That sounds nasty.

That is nasty. Do you know how to get mold out of a car? I am afraid I enclosed a car under a car cover and now it looks like an orange been in the basket two months, an olive velvet interior head to toe.

You car messed up. I guess you could put fifty-five gallons of vinegar in it and drive around.

We could go down to Blockbuster in the vinegar and get Tarzan.