Padgett Powell - You & Me

What if it is not a matter of doing something but of thinking something?

Hmmm. Rad. It probably is. That is why we can’t do it.

We cannot conceive of life as ending today and therefore of living today as if there is no tomorrow.

We would not think that way if we were playing tennis on that court over there and let’s say you said, Jack, fuck court No.1, this Bahia shit, I want to be on that clipped Scottish pubic hirsuteness you got over there, thanks for having us out, Jack!

You have lost it again.

I know it. I like losing it.

It may be what we do toward ledoolaiitldool. Lose it.

Lose it like there’s no tomorrow.

LILTNT. Liltnt. Lil’ TNT.

Here we are at Alfred Nobel!

Einstein!

What?

Well, he won it, didn’t he?

I suppose. The nuclear-bomb man got the dynamite man’s prize.

How did Nobel get so much money for gunpowder and Einstein so little for so much more?

Conundrum of the age, if you ask me. Teaching at Princeton, an old man.

Is it because the age of colonialism was over so Einstein had only people to blow up instead of people to put to work?

Suits me. Ledoolaiitldool!

Lil’ TNT.

When was the last time you had a friend?

I do not know.

When was the last time you read a newspaper?

Same answer. Is it the same question?

It is the same question.

Well, certainly it is the same answer.

Did we leave the earth, or were we never on it?

We tried to be on it.

Precisely. You had some friends as a child did you not? Wasn’t there a point you even subscribed to a newspaper and thought you were in the game? And then at a point you had no friends and no use for the paper, like a worm in a bed of worms.

Like a what?

Worm bed. The conceit is somewhat forced.

I’d say errant altogether.

Maybe that too. Does it matter? Can a conceit describing a man with no friends and no newspaper be aught but errant? Isn’t errancy the issue? Isn’t then the errant conceit perfect? Isn’t the unerrant conceit to suggest the ultimately errant state—

I get it. My objection to worm bed is withdrawn.

I would not wish to work — not that I wish to work for anyone — for the New Orleans Police Department.

Yeah. Count me out too.

Counting you out too.

NOPD, unh -uh.

Would like to take a drive in an old heavy Cadillac convertible on like US 90 somewhere, maybe on a dapply part in a sunny swamp. Purchase something nice for a little girl, put it on the seat beside me, and ride home with it like Clyde Barrow chewing gum and with hair tonic in my shiny shiny hair.

You have lost it again.

Beginning to really like losing it.

Sometimes…

Yes. That says it all.

I wish it would rain.

I wish I had Kathy to talk into taking her clothes off in the playhouse and then when she tells me her father told her not to do that anymore I could run and hide and be afraid of his coming to my house and effecting the end of me. What if, I wonder, we could know even then that our parents would laugh at something like that, and we could have lived lives of relative cheer and comfort instead of in stupid little recesses of complete ignorance? What I am saying — am I saying this? — is that one’s whole life is not having the wit to not be afraid of Kathy’s father. This is why we do not know, have a clue, really, how to live today as if it’s the last day of our lives. We think we have the score because we can see that fifty years ago we did not have the score, bolting from the playhouse, but the fact is we are bolting from another playhouse today. We do not even recognize it as a playhouse.

You sound like William Faulkner.

Mr. Bill? Why thank you.

So, look.

Where?

No, here. At some point we cannot keep sitting here proposing absurdist trips to the liquor store, pondering pederasts on the school bus. Adopting impossibly sweet boys from Kenya.

I want a houseboy until he is Herschel Walker.

I do too. So we keep on with this blather, the want of testosterone, others knowing how to live but not us, and finally there is one of us can’t walk or something, do you realize that this can get ugly, as they say?

We enter assisted-living facilities!

No, we don’t, but if we do, we still then get transferred to the drool-circle facility. We are in assisted living right now.

So what are you saying?

I think there is a point after which the jokes stop and we have to figure out how to die.

Weeping bitterly and unchallenged by the roadside.

Precisely.

Where does that come from, anyway?

I do not know. I thought it was yours.

Let’s say Shelley.

Do you know him?

No.

How did Byron die?

Don’t know. Lot of those guys got off with consumption early.

Do you think we could have a duel?

We could joke about a duel for weeks and never do it. What would be the odds of two fatal shots? One of us would be dead, the other unable to off himself, and be charged with murder.

What if one of us has a stroke and the other has to cope?

I dig where you coming from. I need a drink. What about an adventure that wipes us out? Imprudently film the griz.

What?

Film the griz.

You have lost your mind.

It works. You live in a school bus for a few months, talk to the griz a few years, show them off to your waitress girlfriends, finally talk to the wrong griz, and you’re out.

I see no griz.

Point.

Is it going to rain?

I hope so.

If it rains my spirits will lift.

I like to watch the action glow.

How does the action glow? What action?

No, glow is not a verb.

What is glow ?

Glow is a noun.

I thought action was a noun.

No. Action is an adjective. Action glow. The glow of the action.

You like to watch it?

Yes, I like to watch the action glow.

What does that mean?

Don’t know.

Are you looking at the freeway? A field of lightning bugs?

No idea what I mean.

I distrust people who call them fireflies.

I remember that. Those people. They are the same people would pronounce the t in often and say interest with three syllables. Where do they come from?

They come from a strange room.

Can they be forgiven calling lightning bugs fireflies now that we have killed off the lightning bugs?

Do you recall the occasional accident when a lightning bug got crushed and smeared and the smear glowed?

Yes.

Was that action glow?

I think it was. That is not what I had in mind when I said it but now I think I can say that is what I had in mind, like that. Not restricted to that, mind you.

Of course.

It’s a useful concept.

Apparently.

It’s not much different, grammatically, from, say, blowhole.

I imagine a whale watcher watches the action glow above the blowhole, in certain light.

That phosphorescent glow in the water, in surf, is that animals of some sort? Is that a smearing as it were of lightning bugs, real small ones, in the ocean?

Either that or it’s some kind of elemental sparking.

What, like tiny flint ?

Am I Jacques Cousteau?

Weep for Phiweep.

He died on a wocky outcwopping.

We are going to hell.

To watch the action glow. We’ll enjoy it.

Let’s run over there and pick that trash up.

That the brothers’ trash.

It’s in our world, dude, and it’s not rocking our world.