Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

My grandfather smoked pipes. Stéphane Mallarmé smoked cigars. Both of them died of throat cancer. Yesterday I went into Federal Cigar and I said to the man at the register that I needed a really good powerful cigar — a cigar that would help me finish a book of poems. “You want something full-bodied,” he said. He led me into the silent humidor room with its wall of dense brown cigars in boxes looking like old leather-bound books of unread sermons in a historic house in the Yorkshire moors, and he said, “Do you want strong but smooth, or do you want something that will really—” He trailed off.

“I want something that blows my head off,” I said. “Something that really mops the floor with me.”

He nodded and handed me a Fausto Esteli. “This’ll do it,” he said.

I bought two Faustos, a Viaje Summerfest, a Fuente Opus X, and a sampler pack of five miscellaneous cigars in a plastic bag.

• • •

BEFORE I BEGAN driving around in my car last year, I stopped writing poems altogether for a little while. I think I know the reason why. It’s not because I’m “blocked.” What a misleading term, “writer’s block,” based as it is on a false physical analogy. No, it’s because my anthology, Only Rhyme , was actually selling. Not selling hugely well, but selling fairly well in a steady sort of way. It’s used as a textbook in some big southwestern universities, who — I’m just guessing — employ it for their own reactionary purposes. And that is a very good thing for me, because life is expensive. The IRS isn’t happy with me. I took the first royalty check and spent it right away and made no estimated payments. I gave a hundred dollars to the War Resisters League and fifty dollars to Common Dreams.

But the minor success of Only Rhyme meant that whenever I thought about a poem I was working on, part of me looked at it with a jaundiced eye, the way a professional anthologist would. I asked myself, Is what I have made today good enough to anthologize somewhere? And no, of course it wasn’t. Most poems aren’t anthologizable. Most poems are just poems.

So I had to learn to forget. I eventually did, more or less. I’m not an anthologist, I am a free man!

• • •

SECOND THOUGHTS about the title. I called my editor back. “Sorry to bother you, Gene,” I said. “It’s just that I sensed you weren’t crazy about Misery Hat . Am I right?”

Gene said, “To be perfectly honest, the word ‘misery’ stops me. It isn’t exactly the sellingest word to put on the cover of a book. Stephen King did it, but I’m not sure it’s the right move for you.”

I told him that I’d been writing a lot in my car. Maybe the book could be called Car Poems ?

He said, “Hmm, maybe, maybe.” I could tell he didn’t like Car Poems much, either.

“How about Listen to the Warm ? I’m joking, that’s a book by Rod McKuen.”

“Don’t fret yourself over the title,” Gene said. “We can get to that later. Just write the poems.”

I moaned and said, “Honestly, and I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m not much of a poet these days. I was sitting in Quaker meeting the other day and I realized I didn’t want to write sad complicated poems, I wanted to write sad simple songs. In other words, I want to write sad poems that are made happier by being singable.”

“Well then, write them, sing them,” Gene said. “Sad simple poems are perfectly acceptable. Come on, now.”

“You’re right. Thanks, Gene.”

“And don’t be afraid of putting a little sex in them, the way you used to. That always spices things up. Chastity is for whores.”

• • •

PEOPLE OFTEN CONFUSE the words “bassoon” and “oboe,” as Tim did. I think it’s because the word “oboe” sounds sort of like a sound emanating from a bassoon: oboe . But the two instruments look very different. The oboe is small and black and your eyes pop out staringly when you play it, and it’s used all the time in movie soundtracks during plaintive moments, whereas the bassoon is a brown snorkel that pokes up at an angle above the orchestra. You almost feel you could play it underwater while the violists and oboists gasp and splutter.

I used to really want to be a snorkler. I had black swim fins, and my grandparents took us on a cruise of some Greek islands — oh, forget it. Not now.

I’m down to the nub end of this Fausto cigar. I actually singed an eyebrow hair relighting it, if that’s possible. Sometimes a cigar is just a bassoon.

When you played a long tone on the bassoon, the veins would come out in your neck and in your forehead, and your hands would feel thick with an oversupply of blood, but still you would keep playing the note, pumping it fuller and fuller, because the note was everything — this hump-shaped swell of non-music was all that you were aiming to achieve. It was premusical music. It taught control. Control was everything. I was determined to become the greatest bassoonist that the state of New Hampshire, that the world, had ever known. I was very ambitious back then.

Billy Brown always knew the weeks when I had concentrated on long tones, because those were the weeks in which I sounded especially bad. The practicing broke me and exhausted me and hurt my jaw. I was completely devoted to this expensive folded cylinder of maplewood with the metal U-turn at the bottom. The spit gathered there like a noxious underground lake where a spit Kraken lived. It was a postwar Heckel, made in Wiesbaden, Germany. It came in a wooden crate, like a plain coffin, with the word FRAGILE stenciled on it.

ROZ WROTE that she’s feeling better. She sent me a whole list of three-word lines, including “crack the nut,” “drop the pants,” “shake the stick,” and “learn to dance.”

What do I know about sex? People taking their clothes off and fucking their way around the house? Fifty Shades of Marvin Fucking Gaye?

Roz was — no doubt is — a wonderful sexpot. We used to pour each other tiny glasses of Tyrconnell and put them on our bedside tables. Tyrconnell was our sex drink. Let me tell you, the Irish did a lot more than save civilization. The first time she sipped it, Roz described how it tasted. Her first sip, she said, tasted of primeval forest. Then the second sip: slate patio. Third sip: patio furniture with slippery steps down to the garden. Fourth sip: meat, meat with heavy, dark green vegetable matter on an earthenware platter. Fifth sip: swallowing the platter. Sixth sip: recovery, bisque-colored envelopes.

Sometimes along with the Tyrconnell we used to read each other Victorian pornography, skipping the incestuous parts, which isn’t easy, because there is an astonishing amount of incest in Victorian pornography. Why is there so much incest? Aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers — was sex with near relations really the be-all and end-all of the era of Palmerston and Disraeli? When it isn’t incest, it’s birchings and floggings and nuns and priests. Nunnery stories can be good, though. Dirty doings in the confessional can be good. And harem stories can be good.

• • •

I FEEL LIKE a traveling sprinkler that’s gotten off the hose. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m unprepared. Good for me. I could make some extra money this summer shrink-wrapping boats. I should do that.

I want it all to seem easier for me than it is. I want people to think that I’m a fountain of verbal energy. I’ve never really been a fountain.

There’s an excellent children’s poem about a drinking fountain. The poet’s name is Marchette Chute. I was fascinated by the drinking fountains in high school, with the warm, suspect water that came up past the steam pipes. There was usually some flesh-colored gum lying like a tiny naked baby Jesus in the drain. I was thirsty, and yet the water burbled up and just barely crested past the germ-laden part.