Padgett Powell - You & Me

Yes, I shall stop all that.

Four grand is cheap if it will stop the lugubrious flood of you.

Well, pay up, and I’m a new me, that’s all I can tell you.

Is it better to have continuity of no content or discontinuous content?

What is “content”?

I use it as an irritatingly vague substitute for seriousness of purpose or meaningfulness in living, or something similarly perhaps as irritating as “content”—

I get the drift. I would say it is better to have content without the continuity if the alternative is smooth unbroken vapidness such as the sort we practice in these dialogues every day.

I’ll mark you down in the intellectual column. I am not surprised. I’m penciling you in right beside Bertrand Russell.

I’ll take it. One might be penciled in beside, say, Jerry Lewis.

Listen, I’d rather not talk today. I want to go watch old tennis players be displaced by young tennis players and the crowd weep as they retire and then start cheering for the new cocky-bastard upstarts who have sent them to pasture. This I want to do today, and nothing else. I want a cool soda water in my hand and a hat on my head and to not be overweight myself watching the elderly depart. I can from this position think gently of my own death.

You almost got some content going on.

I got it going on.

You’ll look like a tennis groupie but you’ll have secret ponderment.

No one will know.

You’ll be a subversive in the stands, a thought arsonist. You’ll be like a Frenchman.

I’d like to see some flying dogs.

Are there flying dogs?

Not that I know of. Seeing some would improve my mood tremendously, though.

I suspect it would. Mine too.

Cheer us right up, flying dogs.

Raining cats and dogs.

Like to see cats bouncing off cars.

Why’d they call combat air battles “dogfights”?

They wanted to see flying dogs too.

And today, today what shall we do? What we shall do today is…

Is carry placards on the street.

For whom? For what cause?

I do not know that. May we not just carry a generic placard for A GOOD CAUSE? Let people fill in the specifics, according to their own designs and divinations of what cause needs supporting?

They might arguably be much more likely to actually support the cause if we let them supply it.

Indeed they might.

So how does our sign read? Here, I have the fat Sharpie, the white board, these handy furring strips.

What are furring strips exactly?

These sticks.

I know it’s those sticks, but why are they called furring strips? What is furring ?

Can’t you just make a sign and put it on a stick and go out on the street with it and start a movement and change the world without pestering the shit out of people about a word?

You can say “furring strip” without a clue what you are saying and be unbothered?

Write STAMP OUT FURRING — THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIME on your placard. On mine I am going to merely put SUPPORT THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIME. This covers the spread. Let’s go.

Let’s take some of that lemonade. It’ll be hot.

You got it. Stamp out sugar, the moral imperative of our time.

You is a Communist. You put that on your sign and we are both dead men.

The red Ban Lon shirt and the dark walnut clubs made the strange deformed Negro boy wielding them look remarkable.

That is the most idiotic utterance I have ever heard come out of you.

Why?

Why?

Yes, why?

Because if the combination of Ban Lon and walnut and deformity moves you only to remark, as the word remarkable suggests, then you suffer a catastrophic failure of the imagination.

I do. I do suffer that. So do you. Are you mental?

I thought you said arf you mental.

You neglect to note Negro when you list Ban Lon and walnut and deformity.

It is a spectacle beyond the mere remarkable if a boy, white or black, is in Ban Lon with walnut clubs and deformed, to my mind.

The remarkable knows no color, in the progressive view.

Yes. Are you meaning to specify, by the way, a walnut clubhead or clubs with walnut shafts, because I think that — wooden shafts — is even more…

Remarkable?

Yes. Certainly by that I would mean also more visually striking and more anachronistically arresting. One would ignore the white or black crippled boy in fey spongelike material to focus on the antiques in his possession. One might even worry that he would break them, if you specified that this boy is actually golfing.

Actually he is not. He is sitting on the hood of a new BMW with a Swedish-looking model of tremendous height and minimal clothing posing for photographs for an automobile advertisement. Insofar as I could gather. For all I know, now that I think about it, they may have been advertising her clothes, or his, conceivably they were advertising the girl for a men’s magazine, though it did not appear a lascivious endeavor.

I think I want me some morphine.

Why?

Because I ’magine it is good.

You have not had it?

No, not the real thing. I want to sleep in that red field outside of green Oz, with Dorothy. Or without Dorothy. The prospect of sleeping with Judy Garland is not halcyon.

The prospect of sleeping with anyone is not precisely halcyon.

Right. That I can forego. Were it not for the stupefying nuclear force of hormones the race would cease. I just want the morphine — a wide calm sound in my brain, my body itself as smooth and cool as water. An heavenly balm. All my cells whispering kindly to me, “Everything is all right.” This I want.

You want so little. You are filled with jejune longing, for an old man.

Jejune Longing is the chewing gum of Life. It’s what they named Juicy Fruit after.

Isn’t the essential question whether one reuses split shot or not? Doesn’t that just about say it all?

Don’t you think it’s configured a bit narrowly? What if, say, one doesn’t fish?

All right. Let’s explain that a split shot is a tiny ball of lead with a split in it which allows it to be crimped onto a fishing line for the purpose of sinking the line. And that usually once a split shot is crimped onto a line and used it is thrown away if it has not been already lost in the course of the fishing. But that a certain kind of person will take a crimped split shot and reopen it, usually by pressing a knife into the original crimp and gently reopening the shot, being careful not to go too far and cut the little shot entirely in half. And that this certain kind of person will take pleasure in this salvage beyond the saving of two cents or ten cents or the effort of buying a new pack of split shot that much sooner. He or she will take pleasure in this microsaving of a tiny lead hinge that is not a micro pleasure but instead some kind of huge and hugely gratifying anal balm.

Have you lost your mind?

Well, yes. And of course that is what we are talking about, don’t go getting Pat Boone on me now. The question that this split shot question asks is whether a man has lost his mind and does not care, or whether he has proudly arrived at the terminus of his adult life, or at the prime phase of it as it bears unto the sunset, with his “sanity” in hand. If he says, “I don’t save split shot,” we know he is correct and adult and proud and all grown up, as it were. If he says, “I save every split shot I can,” we know he is just as proudly crazy and that he has refused to grow up.