Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Anybody could do anything, and sooner or later everybody has. It’s a mess and I’m hungry. The womb has to dilate before people can get out. They in there saying “Hep me!” behind a sphincter. My knowledge of medicine does not exceed that of the average layman. Of this I am proud. I know doctors whose knowledge of medicine does not exceed that of a layman and I would as soon not be associated with them. If anyone suggests there’s a goddamned thing wrong with eating soft bread, he is not a doctor. I fell hard as a child for the fiery hot non-chewable gumball, or it wasn’t a gunball— gum ball — must have been called a jawbreaker. They were a fine invention on the plane of human nonnecessity, on which plane we need more play. I am probably a classical anarchist, but have no classical education or manners. Blue porcelain that is not too delicate is a good thing. A hayride with a buxom laughing lass of East European stock is a good thong, I mean thing. Drinking some wine and ravishing her should she want that, also. If she does not, hail fellow well met and get out of the wagon in a good homey spray of moonlight and be of good cheer. She should be, too. If she is not, attribute it to the rotten modern world along with everything else that rightly displace. The stray straw on your person brush incompletely off entering the solid, below-grade, amber-lit tavern that warmly invites you to its bosom for the night. Say practical things, and not an abundance of them, to the company of the evening. Do not discuss annuities or topics such as that. Be hearty and agreeably tired, like everyone else behaving himself. That is a good mantra, not just tonight but always: I want us all to behave ourselves (chuckle).

I am withering on the vine of the afternoon of my afterlife, having consumed my afterbirth. Et my own. Became perennially hungry. Mrs. M. I am afraid is at the door. Glowering:

— What is the matter with you?

— Madame, what is not?

— You a pederast? Throws hip out.

— I have many faults, and some I do not know about, but that inclination is not among the known or the unknown, I fain. (She appears mollified, to soften; I am encouraged to issue some more.) Though we would be remiss not to entertain what Coleridge intended to say when he spoke of things visible and not in the universe: people, he tried to say — but couldn’t because the Romantic Age disallowed the diction, let alone the sentiment — people are much more a piece of shit than not a piece of shit—

Mrs. M. has slammed the door and left. I can’t afford to worry the matter of her errant accusation, truly ungrounded, any more than one can afford to worry the matter of exclusion from jury duty. Whatever else may be said about the modern world, you can securely say that if you are seated on a jury today there is something irretrievably wrong with you and at least one team of lawyers, who are troubled themselves, knows it.

Had dog, dog died. Been in stir, got out. I think sometimes of lovely things, the slender turquoise glass on a white table in the black room. There is nothing else in the room. There is not the mateless sock, the canned-ham can in the plastic garbage pail, the torn mail, the carpet, the lowering ceiling, the mortgaged walls, the crudescence of life, the chaff of slow daily dying (unsolicited credit-card applications). Only the aqua vase on white on black, no flower necessary to behold its beauty. A large fire needs be set around the vase. That is house-cleaning beyond the tolerances of the bourgeois.

— Then why don’t you ask me out !

Mrs. M. has burst back in. And burst back out before I can answer. Which is good: all I have in mind to utter is How’s Tod’s bike? Which for all I know Mrs. M. is eating piece by piece in her Genie-guarded hot garage. There is a fine long red hair hanging from the doorknob. It lifts gently away and around the room in its random reach, not unlike a tentacle. A tentacle of rosy doom from the nice lonely octopus across the street. It is time, perhaps, for burglar bars.

Because once you decide anything, nothing is possible. Because…So I decided to hit the dusty trail, which is not dusty and not a trail but a web of human snail paths of mucus in the considerably lapsed garden. I had an appointment of sorts at the halfway house, where the sheriff expected me to surrender myself after I watered my plants, or some such nonsense I’d made up during the incarceration pro tem. I took some pills someone had prescribed and called Safety Cab and was met at the curb at dawn by the curiously agreeable purring, smoking cold cab driven by the curiously agreeable, smoking, cold cabdriver wearing his leather jacket and sporting his earthly wisdom. “I am supposed to go to Tacachale, but take me to the airport.”

“I got you. Wouldn’t go to Taco Charley’s my own self.”

And with chuckles all around, stopping at the Sprint store for coffees so large it takes two hands to negotiate them so my man at the wheel has to use a straw, we head for aeroporto. We pass the very hospital they expect me at: a fully respectable mental hospital once called Sunland now uplifted by the Amerindian moniker — is the suggestion here that Indians had mental problems? That they deserve to have large holding pens of adult retards named after them? — Tacachale. In two minutes it was renamed on the street of political skepticism Taco Charley’s. I was altogether calmed by my resolve to disregard.

“Naw,” my driver is saying, shaking his head and sipping his straw as we pass the compound. “You don’t look like no burrito to me.” The fix is in: Why do I not go to Mexico? Isn’t that the place for me? I do don’t see why not.

Allow me to explain a few things. It is not altogether unfitting that They want to have a look at me in the burrito bin. That much even you know given the little…dog trotting down the street. But I argue that once you let Them single you out, arbitrarily electing not to lock up every other person in the world today, all of whom necessarily belong in there with you, including Them, of course, which is why They have positioned Themselves at the front of the room with the clipboards and the whistles, you have allowed a gross injustice and you should not go gentle into that nightie. So go to Mexico. That is where I want to go.

“I want to locate me a fifty-pound Chihuahua,” I tell my driver, Nat. “Nat, I could stop the world I had me a fifty-pound Chihuahua.”

“Know you could.” He laughs. “Definitely stop it wid dat !” We are tee-hee tee-hee in the getaway car, enjoying the odd, scant pretense of racial harmony. (“Some cracker bust out Taco Charley’s get in the cab today? He gone go to Mexico, he say, get him a fitty-poun’ Chihuahua dog!” “What you do?” “Put him on the plane!” “Heard that!”) The whole goddamned world has gone into ten-four good buddy, give or take some melanin. I am not a Royalist, but I would not mind being the King. Is all. Have me some purlieu around the castle, and these lurcher dogs what hold the trespasser down, without hurting him but scaring the potty training out of him until the King’s men get there with the Pampers and the cuffs. In those days this lurcher dog hold down a man trying to get your deer; today a man will break in to eat your potato chips. Well he will certainly break in to eat your deer also, if you have it, but more likely you don’t. More likely you are not the King. The King more likely has marital problems, or something, a hole in the trailer floor. I have tried to live a good, clean, cogent life, but it has been hard, and I do not think the fault lies with me. Some people seem to know things, and I am not among them. Not among the people who seem to know, not in the seeming know. Not. Airport. Brokers, for example, lawyers. Don’t they just ooze with knowing? Their entire Being says, You don’t know. You take your psychoanalyst, by contrast a learned man who at least has the dignity to say, Tell me about it, there’s some things in your messed-up head I don’t know. And well, once you blubber them he of course knows all about it and then is paid to ooze his knowing in controlled dribble all over your prostrate grateful form, fishing out your money, but still he does not answer the phone: “Freud, Jung. Will you hold?” AeroMexico. Via Fort Worth. Get me some spurs en route. Spurs and sunblock, all I need, and a copy of Dog World.