Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

At a mattress store where I worked briefly, there was a drinking fountain that offered very cold refrigerated water. I used to stay up all night writing poems and then go to work hauling mattresses around, and to stay alert I would put a Reese’s peanut butter cup in my mouth and start chewing it and then take a sip of water and the cold water would mix with the chocolate and the sweet peanut butter and the two would help each other. Cold fountain water through a Reese’s cup, nothing better.

I used to want to start a museum of the water fountain. I saw an old water fountain from Paris in an antique store. I wanted to amass a collection and open a museum that would be listed in one of those books of eccentric museums. You’ve seen that book, Little Museums ? Because when you consider it, a drinking fountain is probably the most important single piece of plumbing that you drink from without a glass or a cup. Can you think of any other piece of plumbing that allows you to drink from an arch of cold water, when it’s functioning correctly at least? I think you’d be hard pressed. “I turn it up,” writes Marchette Chute. “The water goes / And hits me right / Upon the nose. / I turn it down / To make it small / And don’t get any / Drink at all.” A classic poem.

After I first met Roz, I called her up at work and said, “Roz, I have the most terrible hangover, do you have any recommendations?” She said, “Yes. Go to the drinking fountain and bend down and go into one of those altered states of hypnotic drinking, where your throat just goes ng, ng, ng, ng and you think you’ll never breathe again but will simply drink at this fountain for your whole life.” I said, “Okay, I’ll try it.” I called her back and said it had helped. That’s how we got together.

• • •

WHAT IT COMES down to, for the working poet, is this. Either you can go have the eggs Benedict at the place with the copper tables, and it’ll cost you nine dollars, plus a big tip — sometimes as much as five dollars in tip if you occupy a whole booth for a long time, wearing a big pair of headphones when it’s crowded — or you can make a sandwich for yourself, and wash an apple, and cut some carrots, and eat it in the car, and it’ll cost maybe two dollars. You can eat five times as many meals if you don’t go to the place with the copper tables.

On the other hand, it’s helpful to be around people. You can listen to the jokey fat men flirt with the older waitress.

“More coffee, my good sir?”

“Yes, please, precious, and on second thought I’ll have another side of home fries.”

“Aren’t you a big spender today.”

“I don’t pay alimony and I don’t pay child support. I’ve got all the money in the world.”

“How nice for you.”

I think my brakes are really going. They’re soft and they make a scraping sound. My penis is soft and it doesn’t make a scraping sound.

What I miss about Roz is of course her lady parts and her pleasure frown and her funny talk. She has a kind of genius for coming up with odd but friendly words for things. She’s a namer of unnameables. But the main thing I miss is how nice she is to people. When her friend Lucy’s father died she made a card and baked her a loaf of cranberry bread. She’s full of ideas about what other people would want. She’s the opposite of selfish. Her unselfishness was a revelation to me. She was, and is, full of this quality that I’ve come to take seriously, which is lovingkindness. Lovingkindness, all one word.

I tried for a while to get her to come to Quaker meeting with me, because in many ways she’s an extremely Quakerly person, but she didn’t want to. Her mother is Irish Catholic and her father is Russian Jewish, and in her case that mixture resulted in an incredibly nice human being who has no interest even in a religion as disorganized and uncodified as Quakerism.

I feel sad that we’ve become so formal with each other now. But that’s what happens. We’re more relaxed with each other via email, which is a bad sign.

• • •

HELLO MY TINY MUMBLES, welcome to the Chowder Hour of Razorwire and Shiny Festal Splendor. Glad you could join me. I’ve found a new chord on the guitar and with it I’ve written part of a song called “Love Is an Amazing Magnet.” I’ve also embarked on a song about doctors, inspired by Roz’s radio show. I stayed up late rhyming “Nexium” and “thyroxin,” and I wrote way too many verses, some of which are:

The doctor’s in

The nurse is hot

Swab some cotton

Cause you’re getting a shot

Tell me a symptom

I’ll tap your vein

I’ll pap your smear

And scan your brain

Crap in a baggie

Piss in a cup

Another appointment

For a follow-up

Tubes in your pipes

Wires in your head

Keep you alive

Till you’re practically dead

The chorus is “Oh babe, I can’t wait, for you all day.” I’m going to play Roz some of my songs, and then she’s going to say good-bye to Harris the doctor and get back together with me. Because I know her. It’s time. But what if I try and it doesn’t happen? Then I’ll be sad — much sadder than if I hadn’t tried, because it really will be the end.

THE GUITAR LESSON did not go well. My fingers didn’t want to cooperate and I had some trouble with tuning. I tightened the E string too hard and snapped it — classic stupidity — and the teacher, who was a pleasant aging hipster sort of gentleman, showed me how to replace it. That was helpful. He also showed me “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the proper way to strum it. That was a good song to start with, because Dylan’s singing is sometimes a little shaky — not as shaky as mine, but he’s no Harry Nilsson. I asked the teacher who his favorite singer was. “That’s an impossible question,” he said. But he said he liked people like Steve Winwood.

Quaker meeting is in eight minutes. I’m parked in a space across the street. I don’t want to go in, because I stink of cigar. But I am going to go in anyway, because I like the goodness in these people and I always feel better after I’ve gone.

• • •

AND NOW MEETING is over and I’m back in the car. One of the elders, Chase — the man who sang “How Can I Keep from Singing?”—was shaking hands at the door when I went in. Meeting was crowded and there were a number of young children. I sat down in an empty stretch of pew far enough away from the next person, a filmmaker I knew slightly, so that I thought he wouldn’t smell me. I put my finger through my key ring and closed my fist around my car key. People were smiling and looking around, as they do while latecomers arrange themselves. The last to arrive were a mother and her three children, followed by an older man in a white shirt who sat next to me. He was a bit out of breath from hurrying, and I heard his breathing gradually slow down. I listened to the clock for a while and thought about how many people were wearing plaid. One woman had gotten her hair cut short in a way that looked very good. I closed my eyes and felt that time was moving faster, maybe a little too fast. The windows were open, and the door was open, and the sound of a passing car traveled slowly through the room. After that there was stillness. A little boy held his mother’s gold watch, turning it in his hands and smiling a secret smile. Then the silence changed and deepened, and for several seconds it was perfect and I felt a sort of ecstasy. Then someone shifted and adjusted a pillow for her back, and I could feel my pew bend when the man next to me crossed his legs. Again a car sound poured softly in through the windows and out the open door. We were permeable. We were a meeting permeated with openness.