Padgett Powell - You & Me

Was Yeats a card?

Yes.

Would he have liked variegated terrain or monoterrain?

That is close to monotrain.

Yes it is.

I don’t know. All those guys, they drank, they did not want the ground playing any more tricks than it had to. I am thinking they’d go for monoterrain. Your poets with broken noses are unbecoming.

The mail just came.

It is not worth the powder it would take to blow an ant an inch to go get that mail. I knew a jolly woman in Georgia who would say stuff like that. She had terminal psoriasis at the end. Do you recall when you could get letters from girls?

Those were the days in which hormones ran like gurgling brooks in our veins and melted our knees with need.

Yes, those days, and those days are not these days, and that mail contains nothing.

Moreover, I shudder now to realize it is not Yeats but Trouser Snake Eliot who coined the sound of wide water. I apologize. I have rued the day.

Ease up. The day was rued when we came upon it, or when it came upon us, and beheld us marring the horizon, sitting here like unconquerable savages, men missing their dogs and talking pointlessly unless talking to the dead. Let’s sharpen something.

Do you recall the Mexicans sharpening the big knives on the concrete abutments under the bridge and cutting up the sharks?

I will never forget it. They were not big knives, they were outright plain old simple all-they-could-get machetes. Slicing up sharks with machetes!

Hand to mouth.

Mouth to hand.

Hand to hand.

Mouth to mouth. They were not bums sitting on their hands and complaining.

We are good at it, being bums. In our way we have made something also of a desperate situation. It is true that we are not carving up monsters of the deep with farm implements, but—

And that guy writing on the sharks with the charcoal.

I am not sure it was charcoal. It might have been a piece of asphalt. From the road.

This is making do: cut up the fish with something you find in the field, establish ownership with something you find on the road, and go home to something that is not properly a home, I am sure—

And not a word of complaint. Heroes!

We should go to Mexico and shut the fuck up. It’s the least we can do.

That is funny. It is the most we can do.

All right. If the least you can do is congruent to the most you can do, is it an argument to do it or to not do it?

This requires more math than I have.

Is the age more mean-spirited than previous ages?

Except for the Middle Ages, as near as I can tell.

Then I think we should do the thing that is the least we can do even if it is congruent to the most we can do. Board this shack up and head out.

The thing I hate about travel the most is not being able to command a space and relax when you have to go to the bathroom.

That is your chief concern?

Yes.

We go, then.

All right.

Good boy.

I am a good boy.

I am too. And Studio. And we are gone.

Do we terminate the mail, cut off the—

No. Do not even lock the door. Turn something over. We will be the suspected victims of Foul Play.

The bus-driving pedophiles got us.

Our play was foul, and it came home to roost. We will be like John Effing Kennedy.

Except no Marilyn, we did not try to do in Castro, nobody knows what happened to us—

Yes, and nobody cares.

We are free men.

We were always free, it just took us some time to see it.

Do you feel free?

I feel as free as a green jujube being wedged from its red brothers in the box.

Spring forth, jujube.

Jujube the man!

Studio, Jayne, Jujube One, Jujube Two, ghost dog, gone.

What is a concrete abutment?

Something that butts out made of concrete.

Yes. And this the Mexicans sharpened the knives on. But architecturally, what is an abutment, technically?

I do not know. And you know that I do not know. You are indicting me early in the morning.

I am indicting us .

Fair enough. We know nothing.

We are innocent of knowledge.

We are innocent period.

Guilty.

We are guilty of being innocent? Do I smell the big Iron?

No, it is not the Iron. Of being innocent is what men like us are most guilty. It is our central guilt. There is no excuse for it. Here: do you have any idea what is meant by one currency weakening against another, or one nation seeking to duplicate its own government in another country by invading it? I am saying, Can you read a newspaper and understand what you are reading?

No.

Because you are innocent. Here’s another form of the questions: if you were to sally forth onto variegated terrain and had the option of putting on your Sunday pants, your sunder pants, or your underpants — some song lyrics I think I misheard — which pants would you select?

My underpants.

We are men who find the silliness of that idea attractive. We are innocent. We are guilty.

Of being innocent.

Precisely.

This song said… what?

I swear it said, “Put on your Sunday pants and…” But it sounded like sunder pants or underpants finally.

It was not sunder pants, that’s too archaic and good.

It was not underpants because that does not take itself seriously enough for a million-dollar-making industry-backed recording. Ronnie Van Zant is not going to sing “underpants” dead or alive.

Isn’t what we are innocent of, beyond not knowing what “weakening currency” means, this: knowing who we are? Of knowing who and what we purport to be ? Of having a secure sense of our histories and our desires and our—

Yes, we are outside the gravid circle of adults.

We are not burdened by purpose.

We are not even obliged by point .

Yet we are here, and from a distance of five yards look not unlike those inside the gravid circle of knowing who they are and what they want.

This is not quite true. I have just seen photos of Chinese telecom executives. They look exactly like Chinese communist big shots from forty years ago. They look like American auto executives, in their posed confidence. We do not look like these men from even a hundred yards. Either they are terrorists or we are terrorists.

Are we what is called “nihilists”?

I do not think so. Nihilists live inside an even graver circle more certain of itself.

Head for that taco stand.

There’s grease ahead.

That grease will make it so that you do not give a shit where you take a shit, and shit, my friend, you will.

This I understand. I am an imminent defecator in a land foreign to me.

And this precisely defines us: The others are in a land familiar, at all times, and they are not going to be seized by inopportune bowels. They have a plan for pooping. That is the difference between good CEOs and us.

We are bums, then.

Yes, we are talky bums with decent clothes and odor under control but bums all the same, innocent of survival.

The tacos are a quarter and they are shaved off that cone of meat and flies there onto a piece of wood. We will die.

We certainly will. We are afraid of life but not of death.

Hello.

Hello, good-bye. We must learn to say, Double tortilla, no onions.

Tasty!

I’m having a hard time.

Why is that?

I do not know.

I mean, what is the complaint?

The complaint is I am having a hard time and I don’t know why.

You are testy today. You know that we believe a man not in the hospital or not in jail is not really having a hard time.

We say we believe this, and superficially we do, but deep down we complain like children.