Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

You see, I come back at him, quantity of opposition between us has increased to a qualitative change.

But he reaches for the good book that’s dropped to the floor by his file crate: "Con" is right, he says: (Not "Pro," I quick-quip) Convert, I say.

He says, Look here (but I can’t see the long footnote he’s holding up): I should have kept up with my fuckin’ chemistry, he’s saying in somebody else’s voice. What I know about paraffins and fatty acids?

Baby, you don’t need to know that shit (I reply); Marx didn’t know much more chemistry than Lenin knew about rocks; it’s what you make of it (I act like I’m kidding, lift the open book out of his hands and see the chem footnote adapted from Hegel’s breakthrough vision and I recall you don’t need Marx to tell you a quantitative change builds up and bursts into qualitative (water heated to steam, I’ll take water any day and so would Mir’s dad’s tenants though steam is welcome in season) and mine came the morning I woke and knew my billion colloid cells were truly under suspension not solution

but I’m thinking of Ruth M. Heard, Jim — why? — I tell Juan, Look it’s all in Hegel, the evolution and obstacle quest of the spirit, that’s what you’re doing in here.

He grabs the book away, I’m still talking: Your brothers and sisters have got all they need except luxuries and freedom from worry.

But (he replies, because Jim whatever you hear ‘bout prison violence, we have a lot of time to rap in the abstract), they got (he says) freedom not to think why the boss knows more of what I need to know than I do, but I need to only because he knows, when neither of us really needs this business.

The light falls, Jim, through thick and thin, I hear it, actually sloshing around my vocal cords, and each sees the other in pieces. We both know who said that, Jim; I feel we both know. Though he, the gentleman from Chile, told his contact here, who passed it on to Efrain, who got to me, that he thought he had heard it said at Cape Kennedy near the coffee machine by a passing journalist or, sensitive as it was (though who knows what it means— except me and you, that is), by an otherwise menacingly ambitious photo-journalist with whom the Chilean has found himself involved.

Do we all live alike in here? I ask Juan; and Ruth M. Heard, who I saw maybe ten, twelve times during my formative years, is with me and against me (I’m excited)— Man, did you ever have raps like this Outside?

You’re getting silly again, Foley, says strong-man friend Juan, What are you putting off? go away and leave me alone (and well it isn’t as if I don’t have letters to spirit out of here!). And Jim, I remember how Ruth Heard said how her father believed in speaking out and would pack a Thermos of Indian tea (how she learned to drink it without sugar) for the two of them on London Sunday morning and a cheese sandwich each, and her sister going up and downstairs every minute while her mother sat by the radio; So Ruth and her dad went off on a double-decker for hours with two changes to get to Hyde Park where royalty’s galloping around — you have been there, Jim, I am sure. And here her father would get on a box at Hyde Park Speakers Corner and talk, and talked even when they turned away because he believed in a new all-purpose tax, and in changing the time standard for England, and in experimenting with having every area in the world on the same time. He wore a dark brown suit, red tie, gray felt hat like a labor leader, and he could interrupt his address to catch the attention of someone, tourist or resident— speaker-shopping — but he kept talking even against ultimate noise interference, like if the machine you’re driving is working O.K. you forget what a jerk you are, but if you bust a fan belt in the boondocks (and the car is "borrowed" at that) it all comes down on you, what you are.

Juan says he wants to get to the bottom of why things happen. I say you can’t blame it all on Monopoly or Race. He’s thinking I know about his little baby brother, no baby now. There’s a lot of water under the wall between him and me and I’m going to leave him now and go around the corner, it’s time to eat, he bides his time, his food and roof, his heat and light are free but he must work overtime for that one corn as the Good Father says that’s only Juan’s subsistence before he begins to even think of his family’s, which he does not.

And Jim, take Charlie with his animal eyebrows, who’ll always listen and bring you together with someone you don’t know and even he is coming to think the Education Programs maybe sedate you, and knows the Colloidal Unconscious is neither powerful nor a drug. And Smitty will never tell you but he knows he’ll never be a journalist but comes to the workshop to stay out of his cell till eight-thirty and to add to his tape collection while trying to go on closing his eyes to his little woman (with the highest heels that make her taller than he is broad); and you, Jim, see Efrain, soon to be released, going up and down in that elevator because he put up a curtain across his cell bars and wouldn’t take it down, only the beating he took on the way to the Box is in his head now and his dreams shared with his Iroquois lady who can massage even his fingertips-fingerprints and nobody laid a finger on him for a long time I think (though sometimes I think every guy in here knows news I don’t); and nobody kids around with Smitty lately, but he’s got his tapes with guys sharing their thoughts and feelings (you don’t get that on the Outside so much), so you know that these guys are not just (as the foreign gentleman was heard to say to his contact here) vacuum-packed for burial in space, that even if in the cemetery here where you don’t want to wind up alone, on the headstone they got a number (that’s all) so let’s face it, they’re not dealing with death’s sting even at the end when, whether felt or not, it comes, these guys rapping on tape are just as alive, Jim, as you saying (also on tape, where I first heard you), that it was maybe just due to your chemistry that you were unconscious all these years which I don’t quite believe you, these guys they are not vacuum-packed for burial in space, that’s what our mutual acquaintance the South American said who we both know though how well is like why you’re here — he said the astronauts look alike, and a man he met there in Florida called them all sealed up in their suits unknown soldiers which made an impression on the South American and on me because the astronauts aren’t typical at all. Yet in your head it’s mainly me I hear talking (smile) and the time we had a Visitors Hours visit as private as such can be with the waste product at the high desk on the platform catapulting butts every twenty minutes depth-charging over the desk to be swept up (no waste/make work) by some half-visible con, not to mention in the corners above the junk dispensers the two closed-circuit videos scanning the room as if you would steal me and my annual value of fourteen thousand five hundred dollars when at best you rent my heart, friend, and all you can get at except to reach across the steel counter to press the flesh is the dispenser’s white-flour sandwiches (crisped by time) in their lighted windows and the no-cal leukemi-aid and the potato curls which they hold down inflation by filling the bag less up but then they rethink the price two months later, which I owe you thirty cents for: we spoke so little of the Chilean economist that I wondered was he our connection after all, though I figured you had come to your own discovery of the Colloidal Unconscious as well as through our economist-exile who had mentioned it to you.

I wondered how much he was our connection because — let’s be frank at least in heart-to-heart — when I asked if you had an address for him better than mine which is a "Care-of " that just isn’t where a man with a dignified manner and a head like that hangs his hat (not even an apartment over the deli in question), you paused to let, I know, those sub-microscopic half-knowing mirror-particles face me a message: which was, Can’t you give me an address?