Gary Lutz - Partial List of People to Bleach

Huffe-snuffe, okay? Right, right, have not the slightest notion what huffe-snuffe means. Know only that, as far as I am concerned, it looks great, has one of those ferociously endangered hyphens in the middle of it, and that it, huffe-snuffe, came up this morning in the course of my reading here and there in Hugh Kenner’s A Homemade World , which book, to my mind, is a pretty swell book, you got me? Look, I’m not saying this has anything to do with Gary Lutz or with his Partial List and so on, or with, unless it’s supposed to be nor with, the publisher of same. Fine, fine, I guess good manners, had that etiquette had the least little control of me, would have called for the distinguishing of this element from that element with quotation marks or some such typological (typographical?) device, setting this apart from that, as per, for instance, nor with — thus: “nor with” or nor with . Are you following me? I am going to take it for granted you are following me, but even if you aren’t, what am I to do about it? Simplify matters? Go about my business here, in Lutz’s behalf, not to mention in probably yours, in a less congested way? Sorry, no can do. Well, I can, I expect I can — but won’t. Fair enough? You bet it’s fair enough. I mean, face it, let’s face it — I was reading Kenner, on the one hand, and struggling to set up a new TV, on the other, when the day’s post came and therein the appeal from Lutz’s benefactor to speak up, introduction-wise, for Lutz. Swell. Am I happy to do that? Yes, I am happy to do that! Also proud, pleased, tickled to death, to affiliate myself with you-know-who and with the reprint of you-know-whose Partial List and so forth and so on. Except, pay attention — there’s the Kenner disquisition for me to get back to and, not unchallengingly, working out the facilitating, wire-wise, of this new TV of mine — a, hey, Insignia. Sure, sure, would have laid out for the Samsung if I had any brains, but figured better to save the bucks and throw in with the Best Buy house-brand, which I did, which I did, but which hook-up — I mean, getting it (the TV) going — I’ve gone ahead and put on hold for a trice (ditto Kenner, ditto the Kenner) while I handle this Lutz thing — not anywhere close to lustrously maybe (I’m distracted, I’m too distracted for luster) — but, you know, officially adequately. Uh-oh, is it not unlikely you’ve been sitting there and forgotten all about huffe-snuffe? I did. Well, almost — I almost did. You think I should hasten myself to the dictionary apropos of this (huffe-snuffe) or, mal-apropos of it, skip it and just keep it (huffe-snuffe) a mystery?

Well, to me, anyway.

Anyhow, that’s, um, it.

Trice over, trice finished, which word I do not, even remotely, know the definition of, either. My golly, all this is starting to seem to me, Lutz-wise, uncannily appropriate. Perhaps even indicative, mayhaps a jot luminescent. If so, if you get something from this you could not have gotten by reason of a reasonable approach, you’re just where it’s best for you to be — at the beginning of a one-of-a-kind experience, at the beginning of the impudently singular, at the beginning of — oh, to heck with it! — beginningness.

— Gordon Lish, New York, June, 2013

I remember buying something once — I can’t remember what — in the stationery aisle of an all-night drugstore, something I did not need. All I remember is what the card accompanying it said: “101 Uses for Home, School, Office.” I remember thinking there was a home, a school, an office in my life, so why not? Make the purchase, look alive. This was how long ago?

HOME

The home in this case was actually two homes. First, my apartment, which was just mounds of filthied clothes, newspapers, index cards, depilatories, razors, and paper plates forming a ragged little semicircle around wherever I happened to be crouched on the floor when I was home. (I owned no furniture; I was afraid of heights.) And then her place, a house she rented, a place she vacuumed and dusted, where I slept with her, where she made the bed. She had a name, a job, a kid, a parrot, a couple of ex-husbands, relatives, neighbors she concerned. When she wasn’t drunk, I was her project.

SCHOOL

I taught at a school, a college — actually, a community college. The students hated me, and most who got stuck in my courses eventually dropped. I would step into a classroom on the first day of the term, and a good third of the kids, furious that I was going to be the teacher, would get up and walk out. On those who remained, I got my revenge by ladling out all A’s — even an A for the kid who slept through my entire last term, because I was jealous of his frictionless, rubber-limbed sleep. I would often want to stop talking — there was never any discussion; I filled the room with words for seventy-five-minute sessions, displacing the air with sequences of salival syllables arranged to give one the feeling, afterward, of having heard something like a lecture, something that could survive on a margin-doodled notebook page in a plausible outline of a plausible topic — so that I would not wake the kid up, even though it was obvious he could sleep through disquiets of any kind. (My own sleep was and continues to be a tiresome business — battering, sloppy, unproductive.) Shall I admit that more than once I wanted to share that kid’s sleep — i.e., to be fucked and fucked and fucked by him until I bled?

OFFICE

I shared what had once been a large supply closet with a history teacher, a woman who smelled like the exhaust fumes of a bus and who canceled her classes at least once a week. One morning, as I was repositioning books and papers on my desk, an elaborately coiled pubic hair — it called to mind a notebook spiral — slid out of a folder labeled “to be filed” that I had been trying to find a new place for, and landed on the carpet. This was carpet the color of pavement. My officemate was nowhere to be found, and the office door was shut, and locked, so I got down on my knees and sought out the hair. I thought the thing would be a cinch to find, but it wasn’t. I just couldn’t put my finger on anything. I borrowed a piece of cellophane tape from my officemate’s desk (I had never asked for any supplies, but my officemate had a metal tape dispenser — a big thing, a console, really — and a stapler and a hole-puncher and a telephone) and thought that if I dragged the strip of tape, with the adhesive side down, along every square inch of the carpet, the hair would eventually cling to the tape. But after about five minutes, I gave up — not because the phone rang (it was my officemate’s phone, obviously, and it never rang) or because there was a knock at the door (I had signed up for five office hours a week, but nobody ever came by except for students asking after my officemate or dropping off get-well-soon balloons), but because I did not know up to what point, to what extent, I was supposed to keep going along with my life.

I moved in with my sister and her girlfriend after my little marriage had started to wear itself to the bone again.

I was twenty-seven, mostly unknown to myself, known best by my sister, who said, “You won’t have to do anything yet.”

But I had always made sad work of persons. Even now, in these later, these punchier times, everything is just modicums of what it once was.

My sister and her girlfriend were, both of them, paralegals. They were renting a house at the confusing end of town. This was out beyond where people still felt any need to mix.