Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Driggers and I matriculate smoothly from the dump to the bar, a good one about like the dump, no seagulls allowed. Actually a species of seagull is allowed. It sits at the bar from 11 a.m. on, and at about 7 p.m. starts flying from man to man. And at about 10 that night Driggers and I do the Act. He beats everybody in the place once on the pool table and circles around to the first boy he beat and says to him, “Rack ’em up, futhermucker,” prompted by the legend on the boy’s T-shirt (FUTHERMUCKER, with some kind of bug-eyed Big Daddy Roth cartoon). Driggers is a genius; he calculates this “innocent” remark of his to enrage the boy, it does, and the boy has the cue ball and draws back to throw it and Driggers has him in a headlock before I can move. Driggers pops him with little uppercuts with the cue ball in the boy’s very hand as I manage to wedge him off, which he allows me to do.

“Button your lip, button your coat, let’s go out dancing,” I say, and he says, “What the fuck you talking about?” and I say, “Mick Jagger,” and he says, “I’m just playing pool,” smiling the while at the boy and looking at him so intensely the boy stops in his selection of a pool cue and decides not to advance and I buttfuck-waltz Driggers, smiling at everyone, out the door. No one ever advances on Driggers once he is restrained and they see his look, with which he invites them to advance on him, pinned. I’d let him go if anyone ever came on, but they don’t. Nor does anyone ever bother me, handler of this dog they do not want back on the ground. This is good, because I am a pussy. Driggers is…well, Driggers went.

Outside, to conclude the fair day, I say, “Driggers, my wife and child have decamped.”

“I heard about that.”

“I feel like—”

“Make you a better man.”

“What?”

“Make you a better man.”

“Is that all you got to say?”

“Yep.”

And it was. And it was not a bad thing to have said, after I got through formal umbrage, which I thought obligatory. Formal umbrage (and other things) was going to have to go.

“You wouldn’t use words like decamped, maybe people stick around.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“How about erstwhile ? As in my erstwhile boon companion so totally fucked up from, he says, Vietnam that if he shoots pool someone got to the? Bulldozers erstwhile in the Nam —that is so cool, when you guys say that, the de mon strative — make him askeert today of bulldozers pushing people’s Pampers around?”

“Go ahead. Get it out of your system.”

We both start laughing. When I drop him off he says again, “Make you a better man,” and slams the truck door. Driggers slams things as a matter of course. Never put what you can throw. It’s his métier. I put. I tiptoe, whisper. People leave me. Women slide off like snakes. You’d find Driggers on the floor wrapped up in about a thirty-foot anaconda, calling for his hunting knife, having fun. “She’s gone be leaving,” he’d say, “but we have to talk .”

I survey the quiet, my clean floors, still clean. The phone rings.

“What did you mean, ‘Mick Jagger’?”

“He wrote that.”

“Wrote what?”

“Button your lip, button your coat, let’s go dancing.”

“How do you know this shit?”

“Actually, for all I know, Ron Wood or Keith Richards — I don’t know who wrote it. Jagger sang it.”

“Amazing. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I won’t be needing to work so much, and the music can be louder. The balanced-diet shit is out, and NPR. Under every rock is something good if you can scrape off the mold and if the grubs don’t scare you into dropping the rock and refusing to move and groove into the New. Skylights may be in order, light shows. Goddamn overhead projector and Jell-O and oil and hippie chicks. The problem is the hippie chicks are younger than my daughter. I need they mommas. They mommas got some sense. Everyone has sense, that is basically the problem I face. I am either behind or too far ahead — so far ahead I bid to lap them. I therefore look behind. I’m through with these sense fuckers. I’ll just run by, run through, forget the baton shit.

New Outgoing Message: Hello, you’ve reached trouble. If you make sense, I won’t call you back. If it makes sense to call you back, I won’t. If this makes sense to you, you have the right number. I do not listen to the messages on this machine. As near as I can tell, these machines make no sense. You’ve called me, uninvited, I am not interested in you or your business; if you are interested in mine, here, take this, my best shot: My floors are clean. And they will remain so.

A bird comes in the house, or is in the house. Won’t listen to reason, of course. Runs from me. Has been in the house. I did not see it come in. It may have just come in, though. I can’t say. I can’t say a lot of what I am tempted to say, all day. None of us can. I aim to clear some of this up, this presumption, inaccuracy, outright fallacy that governs our days. Clear it all up. Why not. Some new light, new music. Most of the furniture is hers and is designed to burn. Teddy bears on top, beware the burning teddy-bear draft, the noxious gas of child-gone toys going, too.

Call Driggers. “Driggers, do not get downwind of the burning bear. You can sit on the goddamn burning sofa, though.”

“Shit, I know that.”

“You do?”

“Learned ’at first thing in the Nam.”

“You fucker.”

“You take it easy.”

“Roger.”

“Wilco.”

TATTIE ELAINE MCGRIM BOLIO Pearsall reports, indiscreetly, seeing Robert on New Year’s Eve in Ybor City, drunk. She mimics the way he was walking, stiff-chested and aslant and veering and thin-legged, like the Planter’s Peanut on a toot, if it is not too hard to imagine the Planters Peanut getting soused and walking crookedly on those spindly legs, which bend ever lower with each step, while his body takes on the solid-looking heft and bulk of a keg of something which keeps getting closer to the ground. Keeping him upright are his friends Mr. and Mrs. M&M and their new blue baby boy. Mr. and Mrs. M&M are drunk, too, but their new blue baby boy is as sober as a brand-new piece of candy, which is just what he is. Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall, which is not her real name, because I cannot recall her real name, is a bitch, a sweet one, whose reporting of Bobby on the occasion of his perambulating Ybor City like a legally drunk Planter’s Peanut is not, I don’t think, judgmental. She means no harm by it. She saw it, saw him, she says so, that is all. She is not mean. She is not a bitch. She is a sweet girl of the sort I never knew. I am a hero. She is a sweet girl of the sort I will never know. I will the a hero and she will be a sweet girl of the sort I never knew. As I lie dying a hero I will be able to say she is a sweet girl of the sort I have never known.

I’d like to slap the smile off the face of new blue baby boy M&M, is what I, hero, would like to do. Where precisely does a piece of candy, let alone a new controversial— unproven —one, GET OFF smirking at an honest drunk, even if a young one? Does a piece of candy think it is better than a drunk man? Has it come to this? When in a few years Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall has had the shine knocked off her by Life, when her lipstick’s on a little crooked and is a little more orange than it should be, or when she has quit lipstick altogether and has shortened her name to McGrim, ha, or maybe to Tattie McGrim, in which case she would be a stripper, or to Paula Bolio, in which case she will be a damned good piece of prohibito hablar in these days of Niceness, or to Elaine Pearsall, in which case she will be rich, I would like to have her. That I would like, a hero like me.