Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Charlie says: "This is Foley I told you about: I told him what you said."

Charlie with amazed animal eyebrows, open cell on Honor Block, the will to get people together, but what animal? — I’m thinking and will come up with it.

Why then it was my turn, and I said once upon a time I had been into it, too — (I feel we are now at a later time; been meeting here the guys and I with you, Jim, for a month maybe). But I said I’d been into it because one day long ago I made the papers without writing a word. Got locked up, and then diversified. You could wrap the whole Northed in a year’s American newsprint coast to coast, that’s what my substitute teacher Ruth M. Heard passed on to us in high school one day thank God I was present, she from England which is how she had all this information about the U.S. and you cocked an eye my way and said if we’re making a present of the whole Northeast, we’ll miss the individual states less, but who gets them? First come first serve?

Now, I have sweated out why I’m in here, for I had the chance. But I get you too, Jim, when you wondered what you were doing here; and were aware that the previous time you had just told stories — and had we brought in our leads this time? And then you discovered the kernel of corn in your right hand and put it down on the desk beside your cigarettes, and pointed at it and asked Smitty how he would record this. (You still there, Jim?)

Now you said — and I’m reporting, if not briefly — that you were used to getting substitutes instead of what you might be looking for — oh this hit me so hard — and was the story of your obstacle-course life as a newsman. But I want to know this: say a government contractor gave you what he wanted you to get, like a press release saying that they were a Future Firm operating in a frame of no less than Energy itself and had subsidized mental hospitals in their state and dropout training programs — this, though, instead of you knowing what was going on; and I wanted to ask you amid the noise of those criminal types what you go down to Venezuela or up to Chicago for besides the truth.

Last week when you came the first time and Smitty said he would drum up some more guys, you had said pass the word but I confess I listened to Smitty’s one and a half tapes with the break at seven-fifteen and then eight and then to conclusion at eight-thirty-five and his unit picked up even your footsteps coming closer.

Which seemed right, for then you said you sometimes thought you were out of it, all these years, filing stories; but you had talked to a tall, bald, intelligent (nor did I like how those words went together) South American economist, and this unconsciousness trick was your chemistry, you did say, and nothing to get upset about, but if nothing happened to him this South American economist would be worth talking to — did I get it right? Smitty wouldn’t let me run the tape through again. You were predicting the future. You were. I think you had been there.

Prosecutor said I the perpetrator could not be two places at once, so how could I plead not guilty? Where he was coming from, he was right.

I am getting scrambled in your head. With more variety out there, you get less cluttered than us in here. Or are we your visiting nightmare? Half-known people flowing through here, glimpsed like beginnings of stories and as after-images. Your daughter saw a father get ripped off in a D.C. park while teaching his twin sons to bike-ride.

Fill out — thank you in advance for filling out — the enclosed form the office sends, so you can get permission to write me even though you did it already, and vice versa. I mean a personal visit even more than a personal letter (not dictated to your secretary if you had one — smile) would facilitate communication on a variety of fronts. Which you guessed the second meeting I came to, for you looked at me at eight-twenty and asked when visiting hours were.

Yes, I am here not there. And Miriam — I used to reach to touch Miriam in traffic, who wanted to get a good job as a secretary and go to community college — listens to me in a booth against the jukebox telling where ostriches can be seen in their native habitat but even a South American ostrich will run out of darkness if the multinats find they got a market for sand. Someday there could be a landbridge from there to Australia where there’ll be so much sand those swans of the desert will never think of sticking their heads in it which I doubt they ever did anyhow, while I’m telling Miriam we will find a way to Australia and she says, You’re crazy, George, and I to her, Crazy? Crazy? if I’m crazy I got no place to go! — you needed to be quick to keep her in line, even on a hot day when her kind Aunt Iris (have I described her?) said you could grill an American cheese sandwich on the lid of "our" garbage cans.

Yes I am here not there. Yet I have put together eight plus years inside here when maybe I never could out. Am I getting briefer or longer? I look both ways. You still there? I hear you requesting clarification on how you sleep through your own execution, and on that long-brained Norwegian non-farmer whose name you must know who wore a fur cap to cover his predictions one unstated, to wit that Women, heretofore conspicuously consumed by men who might either want to show off their wives’ seeming leisure or be proud of the job the wife had landed superior to their own, would one day give away their husbands as some conspicuous munificence an unsuspecting fellow woman might think insane generosity. I hear you, I don’t deny it, nor confess either.

I am getting through to you sometimes direct by multiple word-bypass. Eases workload, dissolves congestion. Seventeen hundred criminal types longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic, black, Irish, Italian, and out-of-state; one Jew transferred to a minimum security and shortly after took a walk, reportedly to a Tasmanian key. All this we have got here — plus but one Chair available on in-house postcard for a dime, black-and-white Early American furniture model, a museum piece guaranteeing us maximum security, built as we are right into these hypothetical hills, we got our old Chair we don’t let anyone sit in long, whereas you got an electronic teletype component suitcase you’re telling us news-gathering is all about now, but I didn’t quite believe you, Jim, though I can believe your jokes — because there’s no reason you should open with us.

Good to have news of multinational world and of exec sent to wrong city and nobody notices. But I don’t believe that’s what happens from my reading of history. I have one for you. From Chilean. The difference between the multinational executive’s dream and his nightmare: his dream is to live in London on an American salary with a Chinese cook and a French wife. But instead he’s living in Paris on a Chinese salary with an English cook — and an American wife. Our Chilean economist told me that one just a week before he flew to Cape Kennedy and he got it from his wife.

And since I didn’t hear you say you were not to be quoted, you said you sometimes thought the truth about the corporation you’d followed across state and national borders for a "puzzling" length of time might have been in fact close to you all that time, might have been at arm’s length — you laughed— closer still.

I am only reporting, as you said to while you also said, Make it up first.

(Thanks for bringing the filled-out form with you. I didn’t expect you so quick. I’m veteran of too many potential visits; I see a motorist at 60 mph on a country road waving to a walker who waves back. My mother saved up for driving lessons, she took them at age fifty-one on West Fourteenth Street, and just as well there was no family car to fight over.)