Padgett Powell - Typical - Stories

Another guy I knew in the ARMCO club had a brother who was a dentist, and this guy tells him not to worry about losing his job, to come out with him golfing on Thursdays and relax. Our guy starts going — can’t remember his name — and he can’t hit the ball for shit. It’s out of bounds or it’s still on the tee. And the dentist who wants him to relax starts ribbing him, until our guy says if you don’t shut the fuck up I’m going to put this ball down and aim it at you. The dentist laughs. So Warren — that’s his name — puts the ball down and aims at the dentist, who’s standing there like William Tell giggling, and swings and hits his brother, the laughing dentist who wants him to relax, square in the forehead. End of relaxing golf.

Another guy’s brother, a yacht broker, whatever that is, became a flat hero when we got laid off because he found his brother the steel worker in the shower with his shotgun and took it away from him. Which it wasn’t hard to do, because he’d been drinking four days and it wasn’t loaded.

Come to look at it, we all sort of disappeared and all these Samaritans with jobs creamed to the top and took the headlines, except for the freeway. The whole world loves a job holder.

One day I drove out to the Highway 90 bridge over the San Jacinto and visited Tent City, which was a bunch of pure bums pretending to be unfortunate. There were honest-to-God river rats down there, never lived anywhere but on a river in a tent, claiming to be victims of the economy. They had elected themselves a mayor, who it turns out the day I got there was up for re-election. But he wasn’t going to run again because God had called him to a higher cause, preaching. He announced this with shaking hands and wearing white shoes and a white belt and a maroon leisure suit. Out the back of his tent was a pyramid of beer cans all the way to the river, looked like a mud slide in Colombia. People took me around because they thought I was out there to hire someone.

I met the new mayor-to-be, who was a Yankee down here on some scam that busted, had left a lifelong position in dry cleaning, had a wife who swept their little camp to where it was smoother and cleaner than concrete. I told him to call Mickey Gilley. He was a nice guy, they both were, makes you think a little more softly about the joint. How a white woman from Michigan, I think, knew how to sweep dirt like a Indian I’ll never know. Maybe it’s natural. I don’t think it’s typical, though.

This one dude, older dude, they called Mr. C, was walking around asking everybody if this stick of wood he was carrying belonged to them. He had this giant blue and orange thing coming off his nose, about like an orange, which it is why they called him Mr. C, I guess. A kid who was very pretty, built well — could of made a fortune in Montrose — ran to him with a bigger log and took him by the arm all the way back to his spot, some hanging builder’s plastic and a chair, and set a fire for him. It’s corny as hell, but I started liking the place. It was like a pilgrim place for pieces of shit, pieces of crud.

Then a couple gets me, tells me their life story if I’ll drink instant coffee with them. The guy rescued the girl from some kind of mess in Arkansas that makes Tent City look like Paradise. He’s about six-eight with mostly black teeth and sideburns growing into his mouth, and she’s about four foot flat with a nice ass and all I can think of is how can they fuck and why would she let him. For some reason I asked him if he played basketball, and the girl pipes up, “I played basketball.”

“Where?”

“In high school.”

“Then what did you do?” I meant by this, how is it Yardog here has you and I don’t.

“Nothing,” she says.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I ain’t done nuttin.” That’s the way she said it, too.

It was okay by me, but if she had fucked somebody other than the buzzard, it would have been something.

I was just kind of cruising there at this point, about like leg-up in Alvin, ready to buy them all a case of beer and talk about hard luck the way they wanted to, when something happened. This gleaming, purring, fully restored, immaculate as Brillo Tucker would say, ’57 Chevy two-door pulls in and eases around Tent City and up to us, and out from behind the mirrored windshield, wearing sunglasses to match it, steps this nigger who was a kind of shiny, shoe-polish brown, and exact color and finish of the car. The next thing you saw was that his hair was black and oily and so were the black sidewalls of his car. Everything had dressing on it.

The nigger comes up all smiles and takes cards out of a special little pocket in his same brown suit as the car and himself. The card says something about community development.

“I am prepared to offer all of you, if we have enough, a seminar in job-skills acquisition and full-employment methodology.” This comes out of the gleaming nigger beside his purring ’57 Chevy.

The girl with the nice butt who’s done nothing but fuck a turkey vulture says, “Do what?”

Then the nigger starts on a roll about the seminar, about the only thing which in it people can catch is it will take six hours. That is longer than most of these people want to hold a job, including me at this point. I want to steal his car.

“Six hours?” the girl repeats. “For what?”

“Well, there are a lot of tricks to getting a job.”

I say, “Like what?”

“Well, like shaking hands.”

“Shaking hands.” I remember Earl Campbell not buying my stinky shoes. That was okay. This is too far.

“Do you know how to shake hands?” the gleaming nigger asks. Out of the corner of my eye I see the turkey buzzard looking at his girl with a look that is like they’re in high school and in love.

“Let’s find out,” I say. I grab him and crush him one, he winces.

“You know how to shake hands.”

“I thought I did.”

Who the fuck taught him how? Maybe Lyndon Johnson.

He purrs off to find a hall for the seminar, and the group at Tent City proposes putting a gas cylinder in the river and shooting it with a.22.

I’ve got my own brother to contend with, but we got over it a long time ago. He was long gone when ARMCO troubles let everybody else’s brother loose on them. He, my brother, goes off to college, which I don’t, which it pissed me off at the time, but not so much now. Anyway, he goes off and comes back with half-ass long hair talking Russian. Saying, Goveryou po rooskie in my face. It’s about the time Earl Campbell has told me he won’t wear my cleats because they stink, so I take all my brother’s college crap laying down.

Then he says, “I study Russian with an old woman who escaped the Revolution with nothing. There’s only one person in the class, so we meet at her house. Actually, we meet in her back yard, in a hole.”

“You what?”

“We sit in a hole she dug and study Russian. All I lack being Dostoevsky’s underground man is more time.” He laughed.

“All I lack being a gigolo,” I said, “is having a twelve-inch dick.” And hit him, which is why he doesn’t talk to me today, and I don’t care. If he found out I was in the shower with my shotgun he’d pass in a box of shells. Underground man. What a piece of shit.

That’s about it. Thinking of my brother, now, I don’t feel so hot about running at the mouth. I’m not feeling so hot about living, so what? What call is it to drill people in their ear? I’m typical.

HUMPY, THE STUCK-UP LIBRARIAN, ruined little Brody. There is a certain truth down in there allowing them a purchase, at least, upon what happened. For I must say that if I had not read so many books, I could only have seen Brody as a runaway and so would probably not have helped him. This is not to say, of course, that a more legitimate member of the family might not have come along, spotted him making his break, and helped him out of another motive: to teach him a lesson, let us say. His father would have done that, moral waste dump that he is.