Padgett Powell - You & Me

Let’s stay right here in our nets and eat bonbons and get fatter and whiter and stupider and lazier and more cautious as we have less to be custodial of.

Pustulent academics!

I have never heard that word before. Is it a word?

Pustulent? What other adjective could derive from pustule ?

It sounds good, I grant you. But the red vapor of Air Spell Check puffs from your mouth when you say it. I see pestilent and postulant, but no pustulent. You look momentarily like a sloppy vampire when you say it.

I wish I could be a sloppy vampire. My life has come to naught.

Don’t start. Let’s not go there. We live there, so let’s not go home.

That phrase, “go there,” is funny I think because it approximates an abstract translation of the English idea behind it.

What are you talking about?

An Italian would say, “I have large friendship and I like to go there all the time.” If you put the move on a Frenchwoman who was not ready for it, she might say, “Don’t go there,” and stop your hand.

I see.

These bonbons are hard as rocks.

They came from the little Filipino lad you purchased that brutal haircut for.

He chose the barber.

No, the barber is his uncle, and he had to go to him once you made it so public you were funding the venture.

Is it my fault the uncle is inept? They’d have known the child got his hair cut no matter how it was financed. He looked like one of those faux primitives.

Now he looks like he suffered a head trauma at Sunday school.

He looks like a houseboy.

He may, but he is bringing candy to us that might be ten years old.

Well, we are free to lie here and complain of it, so what is there to complain about?

A fattening man may not bark?

I think not. Not honorably.

Do we still pretend to honor?

We do.

All right, then. I say no more about the granite nougat from the wounded boy. I will say that when I came into the café you should not have humiliated me that way.

What way?

“Are you not wearing panties?”

Oh, that.

Yes, that.

It did look as if you’d forgone pants. Everyone in there agreed. That is why they laughed.

They laughed because I gave them that Dietrich pose.

Well, that too. But the pose supported the notion that you had no pants on under that beach shirt with those tails.

These people don’t know what to make of us now.

So let them not know. You become wooden in your old age.

Who does? Them? They?

No— you .

Because we don’t have to do anything unless we want to.

Are you done with that?

With what?

That sentence?

Yeah, why?

Because it’s not a sentence, and it’s inane, for starters.

Who hung you up in the stirrup?

Did what?

Twist your drawers.

I am too tired to deal with you.

Me too you.

You too me. You sound like Tarzan.

You Jane. What the monkey name? They had them a chimp didn’t they?

Cheetah.

They had a cat name Chimp?

Prolley did. They was stylin’ jungle folk.

I remember when Tarzan take a shower in his clothes in New York City and rip out of his wet shirt with a muscle show.

A muscle show?

He stretch like, like a cat, and his like Arrow single-needle-tailoring oxford shirt rip to shreds right there in the shower.

Did that turn Jane on?

You know it did. Jane in her leather skirt.

Do we not have anything else we could think about?

We must, but I can’t think of it.

We should read a book, about the atom bomb or something.

Or about the philosophy of aesthetics.

Or about explorers, or history, some political and economic history, this is what we should be talking about instead of Tarzan and Jane stylin’ jungle porno folk with a big monkey named for a big cat.

Did Tarzan do any vine swingin’ in New York?

You know he musta have, acause how else could he get around except when he was riding elephants—

— and that time he run on foot to stop Boy from going over the waterfall on the giant lily pad—

— yeah, he run then, but allus elsetimes he swingin’ everywhere, and what I want to know is how did they, you know, get him the vine equivalencies in New York, like what — steel cables and shit? Tarzan could just happen on some loose electrical wire and swing to a new building.

Oh man you know he could, he was a dude.

For example, we should be discussing like the differences between Hellenistic or even Roman conquerors and Central Asian conquerors, I am thinking largely of Timur here and the path of centuries-old degradation he legacied by virtue of the policies of razing, whereas say Alexander preserved, Caesar preserved…

And so you have Europe as opposed to Uzbekistan, this is your thesis?

Yes it is. Do you think Johnny Weissmuller was a steroid user?

Did they have them then? He was in the Olympics in 1924?

The idea of steroids before the rise of Hitler is strange.

Steroids is what the Nazis were all about. Bullies kicking sand in the face of six million ninety-pound weaklings on the beach.

That shit is hard to believe.

Yes it is but is it not the only thing that explains the US of A going into Iraq “unprovoked”? Isn’t the cordata of that game the presence of Israel and the shadow of them steroids?

You are a wise man. Is it possible to get Tarzan movies at Blockbuster?

You will recall that Jesse Whatwashisname irked the Nazis in the 1936 Olympics running faster than the bullies.

Owens. We are I think confusing Weissmuller’s Olympics with Owens’s. They couldn’t have been in the same games, could they?

Yes. My point is that today if they redid Tarzan, Tarzan would be played not by Weissmuller but by Owens. Or Denzel as Owens.

No, it would have to be Owens, because if subs were allowed then Schwarzenegger would be Weissmuller.

Ooo. That sounds nasty.

That is nasty. Do you know how to get mold out of a car? I am afraid I enclosed a car under a car cover and now it looks like an orange been in the basket two months, an olive velvet interior head to toe.

You car messed up. I guess you could put fifty-five gallons of vinegar in it and drive around.

We could go down to Blockbuster in the vinegar and get Tarzan.

It is not for me to say.

To say what?

Anything.

Then why announce that you’ve nothing to say?

It’s just a polite filler, like the little business at the end of a newspaper column.

I see.

No you don’t.

You’re right, I don’t.

So why say you see when you don’t see?

All right. There’s nothing for me to say either.

But we keep talking.

Yes.

We must.

Must we?

Apparently. Evidently. I love evidently used that way.

Remember that hurricane victim sitting inside her collapsed house saying, “Evidently I’m in shock.”

Evidently she was.

Evidently.

It is hard to say what she thought she meant. The evidence that she might be in shock did not seem wanting.

So she meant, “Obviously I’m in shock”? “Apparently I’m in shock”?

No, she meant, “I’m in shock,” but some force made her preface it with “evidently.” Evidently my house is destroyed and I am therefore in shock.

Well, you know, let’s say she was in shock, and the evidence of that fact might be, to her, obscure. Say she has heard about shock, and is feeling strange, with her house gone, but she is not wailing or gnashing, she’s numb, and she gets the idea that she would be wailing and should be wailing and if she’s not then maybe she’s in shock. There’s some evidence that she’s in shock, evidently.