Padgett Powell - You & Me

You hadn’t been diddling Mr. Porter’s daughter had you?

No. I had not touched her. I did not know that was part of the plan. I just wanted a look. But since I did not know about touching, I thought looking contained the entire crime. Having looked was enough if I had been lying in the dirt under their giant live oak with giant Mr. Porter looming over me, and small meek Kathy standing by regarding her two heroes in the throes of some contest — fighting over her, were we? It could have been an interesting moment, but I at least was not man enough for it.

But today we are men enough to walk into the slums of Bakersfield and look at a poor girl in a shack.

Well, yes. It is different. The voyeurism here involves her poverty and our hopelessness. That is to say, she is truly hopeless, and we are only constitutionally hopeless, as men who cannot connect to the world of men proper, and we want something from her, from her true and honest despair as opposed to our bogus and self-generated despair.

I had no idea going to the creek could offer this much.

Kathy was apple-cheeked and freckled and hopeful, willing to entertain me in my excitement and not outright condemn me for it, even after her father gave her the finger wag. This other girl is dull in the eye. You have seen her. We have no communication with her. No one in her community is going to approach her with a proposition as innocent as mine to Kathy. That is the little moment that transfixes me when I see her. How good to Kathy I was, fumbling in the early teeth of desire, how good her father was to us both. How this girl today has none of that goodness. How the world has rotted in fifty years, is what I am saying.

There was a poor girl fifty years ago in the same way.

That might be true, but I was not there to see her. Somehow today I am. Something has changed which effects that simple, or not simple, change.

You are today a dirty old man, is part of it.

That is why I am taking a Dr. Bronner’s peppermint shower before I go out winderpeekin’.

I once heard Peter Jennings say “passenger manifesto.”

He was referring to what they said as they went down.

He was clever then.

Yes.

He was a man of the world, in the world—

And we are not.

Precisely.

How did this happen, he get to say “passenger manifesto” and be a national icon, if not some kind of oracle, at least a grand national-news-anchor corporate mouth, and we are nothing?

Hoyle and Darwin, and lard-and-hair sandwich. Peter Jennings never teased his mother with lard-and-hair sandwich, and you never would have said passenger manifesto, and there you have it.

Thank you for wrapping up another conundrum of our times.

De rien.

I would certainly like to have some ice cream.

What are these things here?

I’ve never seen them before. Is it things or one thing? Where was it?

On the porch.

Let’s get out of here before they or it explodes.

I am terribly becalmed by a washing machine. Is everybody?

Not everybody, surely, but most.

Had I the affluence of Peter Jennings I would put a dedicated sleep washer next to my bed, just run a low-water light cycle, no pollutants.

You could always toss in, say, your underwear at the last minute, the clothes you discarded before bed. To be practical.

You could. You could transfer them to the dryer if you got up in the night, and put poppin’-fresh BVDs on in the morning. Change your whole outlook on life, the sleep washer.

You could connect it to the bed itself and get a vibration quotient. The dryer heat could be used to toast the bed in winter.

Man. This puts a whole new spin on “white noise.”

But we don’t have the affluence of Peter Jennings. A washing machine is not a frivolous appliance for us. We would not survive were we to say “passenger manifesto” on national TV. We would be subject to the cruelest of ridicule, dismissal, were we momentarily so irregularly lucky to have been employed in the first place.

So we best resign ourselves to imagining Peter Jennings sleeping next to his dedicated washing machine, his bed gently shaken, gently toasted, snapping into his fresh panties at the top o’ the morning for another day of lucrative suit mouth. Just resign yourself. He delivers the manifesto, you’re the passenger.

I’m too depressed to go to the creek now. Looking at the girl is utterly beyond me.

Let’s just sit here.

Let’s.

She’ll understand.

She too is a passenger.

Bakersfield is a passenger of place.

Without a manifesto.

We are without a manifesto, not on the manifest.

Let us just sit here.

Yes.

In the grove of trees down there is a table and a barber pole. You place your hat on the pole, and—

I do?

One does.

Why?

Would you allow me to tell you?

Prosecute your voyage.

One places his hat on the pole and a barber will emerge from the woods and give one a haircut. It is an old barber who has cut the hair of certain famous deceased men. Now he is enfeebled and shaking so badly that you will need repair to another barber for corrective attention to your new and sad-looking do.

Is the barber pole turning?

Yes. Why?

Because I would feel odd, if not outright dizzy, watching my hat turn while waiting at a table in a grove of trees for an old barber to emerge and give me a bad haircut.

I do not mean to suggest you must do it.

No no, of course I will do it. It is a grove of trees with a table and a pole and a haircut to be had, I will of course do it. Something that is done is to be done, period, in the interest of good and modest citizenry.

In the interest of being a good fellow, you mean.

That is what I mean.

Yes, well, then the barber of some famous dead will affect to cut your hair as you sit at the table in a pleasant breeze by a table in the shade of the trees. The whirling of your hat will not disturb you overmuch once you begin to worry about the undeft motions of the man with scissors and razor about your neck and throat and eyes and ears and nose. The straight razor under the nose when the nose is pinched up — the razor poised for the Hitler cut, that cut which will take out the hair which would otherwise form the Hitler mustache, I mean to say — will be your worst moment.

I will sail through it as if it is the Fifth of May. The table — is the table perhaps early American, unlevel, of two or three broad virgin boards badly joined?

You have the picture, my friend.

I do. I will enter the grove of trees, placing my hat on the pole, sit in the straight-backed chair, await the geezer, accept my scary butchering, in the corner of my eye my fedora turning dizzily, my arm resting on the uneven planks of pine or walnut or cherry since indeed it could be real wood if what you say about the table is true, all of this in the shade of the trees and in a breeze. I will be oddly and momentarily a complete man living a full life.

I don’t want to go down there. Something could eat me — us. I forget you’re here sometimes. Something could eat us.

I don’t regard that as the worst way to go. No matter how it went down, you’d not waste away. If the thing was large enough to attack, we might presume it large enough to get it over with. You’d be part of an appetite, part of Life.

No old-folks home for you, eh? Down the hatch!

That is right. Laugh as you will.

I worry about small things eating me — malaria is worse than grizzlies.

Of that no doubt. I am not going down there either if you think there are mosquitoes.