Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

I go at or down on the water every day, except some days. Some days I lie on it like a compass needle and point eventually north. This is a function of magnetism and of getting on the water very very easily. Surface cohesion must exceed the water’s affinity for you. The water has no real affinity for you, and prefers that you merely lie on top of her rather than getting in, but you must cooperate by gently gently slowly slowly getting on, easy. I dig that, that I dig. With your head true north you can begin to think.

In the Sahara night your clothes tend to bubble off you. This is not so for all the women on safari with you. Discretion.

I go down to the water and make arithmetic in the mud. A calculus of sneaker toe. No, I but figure the compensation due Tod McGillicuddy for the (unauthorized) loan of his trike. It was impounded at the arrest and lost. The police lost Tod McGillicuddy’s trike. What wonder we have a problem with law and order. I set my mind to repay the little squirt and it came out funny. I had a trust formed in his name and a Harley-Davidson delivered to their driveway. Its reception I watched through the blinds. Tod seemed not quite to get it but his mother was excited. She wheeled it with some difficulty into the garage, which is served by an electric door. The bike was magnificent in the sun: full rakes gleaming in their ridiculous thrust, absurd tiny sexy pearl-drop gas tank, small double-decker leather seat, and titty grips of some gauzy open-celled foam I did not, but wanted to, feel before Mrs. M. put the monster away. No questions, no looking around in wonder, just secure the motorcycle, and Tod doesn’t look at it twice. Tod, my boy.

I’m whiling away some convalescent time, simple private recovery time you need after mental incarceration. It, that, being held for want of mind, suspected alleged want of mind, is thrilling: it is like going to the circus when you are young, except you are not young and you are the circus, and the doctors and the police are very young and they are watching you perform. Thrilling, this reversal, and a bit exhausting, which is why drugs are contraindicated in cases of mind watch, in my book, my small unmanly book. They lay Thorazine on you and you partake of the bear who runs over the trainer on the bicycle and no one can ever tell from the bear’s expression if he meant to do it or not, but everyone is happy to speculate for years, generally of course informing the bear with motives of vengeance as people seeing trained bear are wont, oh so wont, to do, I’m tired. An odd tear runs from my right eye as I convalesce and glance the street for Tod.

Why I resist Mrs. M.’s wanton desire for me I do not know, except that the proposition of someone looking like Lucille Ball coming after you without the talent or the money of Lucille Ball takes some getting used to, and actually Lucille Ball, as opposed to characters played by, is right good-looking, stunning even, but no one thinks this when he thinks of Lucy in her many incarnations. I submit: after Judy Garland in Oz, the national male psyche is rooted most firmly to Lucy. This is why Mrs. M. scares me, like toys you recall you lost over the years without knowing how and realizing they’re worth a fortune now — I’d like to know how my arrowheads and coin collections for God’s sake got away from me. Who would throw those away? Would your mother throw away your arrowheads and your coin collection? What wonder they let us go to Vietnam or wherever else big-eared Texans pretend we must. Then they bitch, of course, but you’re dead by the time they discover the Communist menace not to have been altogether germane. And you are no hero yourself, you also arrow-headless coinless little fyce who have had time in your ignoble pinball childhood to gobble up large portions at the table of national humanistic bunk — you are down there at induction, coughing gingerly so you don’t herniate yourself out of the chance of getting killed in order to protect your mother, who has thrown away your toys. Well, I have a piece of advice for you, me so narrowly just on mind watch: Fuck your mother. That’s the first thing to do here, fuck your mother and get on with it. All part of why Mrs. M. has got a headlock on me and all she wants is a liplock.

Sunny, fair, down-to-the-water cloudy, I go. My pants are fitting not well, my shoes seem askance independent of my feet, I hear the odd wailing noise in one ear. I fancy eating some sugar, good crystalline gob of it partially dissolved in thin coffee. One of those two-stage plastic cup-and-base rigs be nice, white cup like a space capsule, detaches for orbit into the garbage when the bum they’ve sold it to is through with it down to the Krispy Kreme. Yessiree, I’ma headed down to the water for a doughnut and a very white plastic cup of coffee, which I will be allowed nay expected to call by some hip street appellative: Give me a cup o’ that Java, miss, some o’ that mud, tee-hee. Life.

Use of this product may be hazardous to your health — I read on the door to the Jules Vermin Studio of Dance. So I went in. There were floor marshals from ACE and Civil Defense around the floor, and the couples were belted together and helmeted and wearing boxing groin guards. They stepped only on painted yellow footprints on the floor. It was explained by a taped message playing repeatedly that a certain kind of neck strain might result from looking constantly at the footprints but that this was preferable to the kinds of injuries that would result from looking up. No one looked up. The marshals seemed satisfied, most satisfied. I suddenly wanted to eat some Japanese food and retired from the Jules Vermin Studio without receiving any instruction. And knew in a vision that were Mrs. M. and I ever to dance it would be in the moonlight and we would not watch where we were going. How hard to do, I thought, but how obvious it is that you should live every day as though you are dying. Why do only brain-tumor folk seem to actually get on this with any arguable grip? Them and, say, junkies. Them and junkies and, say, preachers. Them and junkies and preachers and, say, people who want you to invest in their real-estate scam? And the ACE marshals want you to live as if this is not the last day of your life. Why, it occurs to me to ask, does anybody care how I live my life? First, last, what is it to you? Who are you? If you are fired up about how I live this day, what are you doing with yourn? That what I wantn know. I talkn funny, so what. I been sick. When you sick you say things. You say things today you might not be able to say tomorrow. You say things today you might not be able to say tomorrow when you not sick, people say you a artist. People say you a artist you say anything come to mind or come to not mind. Ray Charles, boy. Thing come to mind, say it; thing come to not mind, say it. Not mind be body? Thing come to body, say it; body catch a body comin’ thew the rye. Nobody got the leapest idea what rye is anymore, might as well say if a body catch a body comin’ thew the prom.

I believe in many things, none of which comes to mind. I am in arrears pillwise.

I am a demographer in the demopolis. I am of a fragile solidity, like Aristotle. I—

Lord, how time flies when the tourniquet is on. Little Tod M.’s big old hog breathes idle in his garage. I been down but not like this before. You don’t shoe horses without their walking on your back. The bluebottle fly is a thing of the past. Tawdry sentiments dress like women. People behave like their mothers. I’m down to my last dime. Forever is a chute of bugs in a thimble of sense. Sweeteners go to hell. Be patient, my pretty, the sandman uses the postal service just like everybody else wears his pants. Downtown it is holy. Before the Lord has had his way He will have slept. Before time began there was no money. Now they say time is money. I refute that. Anybody could.