Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

If someone approached you saying “Lead me to the music,” how would you respond? Is there a name to complete this progression: Rasputin, Robespierre, Robbe-Grillet, Robert Goulet, and…? If you could spend some time with a young Judy Garland or a young Lucille Ball, whom would you pick? If you had house painters drinking on the job, would you provide them booze? Is there anything or anyone that you’d say you are “enamored of”? If you could disappear from your native country and live comfortably in another, what country would you choose? What is your position on the recreational use of drugs, and, if you partake, do you have a favorite drug? Is to your mind the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment” in any way oxymoronic? Can you define “ayurvedic”? If you were in a metal-roofed bungalow in a tropical country during a seemingly endless monsoon rain and were told that you were under house arrest and not to leave the bungalow, which instruction you could barely make out under the deafening rain on the metal roof, what would be your first response? Will you buy expensive stationery or will pretty much any old paper do for your correspondence? Have you ever crossed a river sill? Do you know what is meant by halberd and halyard? Do you sleep in pajamas? Do you enjoy defecating? Is there hope for peace in the world, all over it and at one time?

Will you be traveling significantly this year? I believe I asked you this before, but let me again if I did, because it is important to me: can you picture those old metal roller skates that had a metal shell or clamp up front under which you slid your shoe and a leather ankle strap in the rear to secure your ankle, the chief feature of which skates was that they had no flexibility or suspension and the wheels gained no traction whatsoever if you were on a surface smooth enough to pretend to skate on in the first place, and which, the wheels, since that surface was generally concrete, gradually wore down to sandblasted-looking remnants of themselves and became even more useless and treacherous than they had been new, so that the net effect of skating on these things was akin to ice skating on concrete? Weren’t those old metal roller skates great? Would the equivalent today to the old metal roller skate not involve some Kevlar/Teflon-ey wheels, a microchip gyroscope, a laser level, a GPS, a twenty-four-hour customer-service support hotline, a built-in cell phone with a speed dialer to call it, a liability waiver/rider to attach to one’s homeowner’s insurance policy, and a streaming video feed into the brain of the skater of an exciting virtual landscape to skate when the skater just preferred to put on the skates, or think about the skates, and stay on the couch?

What would you say is the essential business of living well? Do you know that Native American tepee rings — the rings of stones that held down the tepee fabric for a tight edge — are still in place all over the West? Is forging metal somewhat akin to kneading dough? Do you depend more heavily on air-conditioning than you think you should? If you could eat but one meat, what meat would it be? In Scrabble, do you consider yourself loose or strict when it comes to challenging competitors’ words? Where on a ten-point scale, with ten being salacious and one disgusting, would you put pornography?

Do you tolerate speech impediments in newscasters? Are you made nervous or content or indifferent by a landscape of red clay? Do you sometimes mistake Germans for Scandinavians? On average, how many times a day do you talk on the phone? Do you know precisely what is meant by an A-line dress? Can you clog? Are you bothered by keys that apparently fit nothing, and will you save these just in case or throw them away? Do you recall what the deal was with Howdy Doody or, like me, do you merely retain the obscene freckles and have no clue what he was about? If you were offered the opportunity to live in a professionally rigged hammock in the canopy of a rain forest for a week, would you accept? Do you believe in ghosts, or want to believe in ghosts but really can’t, or dismiss ghosts outright? Have you ever made star-shaped structures of Popsicle sticks under pressure that explode when you throw them? Is there a connection of any sort between life after death and the leavening of bread?

Can you read music? Would it be reasonable to ask someone if he or she has a favorite musical note? Would you like to visit a tar pit or peat bog, or would you rather eat cucumber sandwiches on a pleasant veranda with a civilized hostess in England? Will you wear a garment with a small tear in it? Do you cry at movies where you are intended to cry, or at other points in the drama, or not at all? What is the highest value of theft you have ever committed? Can you recall the last thing you said to an acquaintance of yours now dead? Do you wear a helmet when bicycling? In socks, what kind of material do you like? Given its shape and whatnot, does the name Hershey’s Kiss make sense to you? Can you train a dog? Right now, what is the thing or situation in your life that most confuses or baffles or paralyzes you? Are you satisfied with your intellect? With your body?

Is it correct to say that an orange is eponymous? Why is a banana yellow and not banana? When do you think the term “britches” lost its neutrality, if it ever had it? Have you ever been accused of, or accused anyone else of, cruisin’ for a bruisin’? Can you recite the favorable economic arguments for deficit spending? Does pubic hair differ materially from nonpubic hair, do you know what the proper term for nonpubic hair might be, and do you know precisely how one is distinguished from the other? Do broken bones knit back together by essentially the same mechanism as a limb grafts to a tree? Have you ever seen any kind of live sex show? Are you comfortable around people who wear wooden shoes? Do you think dams have done great ecological harm? Does bodice ripping follow naturally upon green gowning, or is it a disconnected and more malevolent enterprise? Do you have any experience in the desert? Have you ever made an animation of any sort, even if just flip cards? In what endeavors would you say you have talent, and in what endeavors would you say you have no talent? If you could select an endeavor in which you have no talent and instead be magically and hugely talented in that endeavor, what would it be?

If you had a friend who, while watching a movie of the legendary porn star John Holmes, got incensed and said, “Look at that son of a bitch! That thing does not even get hard! Look how it bows out like that! That son of a bitch! ” would you be in sympathy with this outrage or laugh at your friend? How often do you think about the mythic water skier who skis into the ball of water moccasins? Would skiing into a ball of water moccasins constitute an urban legend even if the legend predates the term “urban legend,” and are urban legends inclusive of legends that are, like skiing into a ball of water moccasins, distinctly not urban? Does the urban in urban legend mean the legend is born among urbanites as opposed to its happening specifically in a city? Have you ever heard of the water skier who skis into a great ball of barbed wire? How would you assume these legends related: is the barbed wire a distortion of the water moccasins, the moccasins a distortion of the barbed wire, or were these legends born independently? Do you believe it could be the case that a water skier has in fact skied into a ball of water moccasins, and that another has in fact skied into a great tangle of barbed wire? Do you favor a lot of butterfat in ice cream or a little?

Is there anything you’d like to ask me? Are you curious to know what I’ll do with the answers you’ve given me? Do you think I can make some kind of meaningful “profile” of you? Could you, or someone, do you think, make such a profile of me from the questions I have asked you? If we had these profiles, could we not relax and let them do the work of living for us and take our true selves on a long vacation? Isn’t it the case that certain people are already on to this trick of posting their profiles on duty while simultaneously living private underground lives? Can you recognize these profile soldiers by a certain dismissive calm, a kind of gentle smile about them when others are getting petty? Is in fact the character of the profile-façade person not that which is called wise? And is the person who is congruent with his daily self and who has no remote self not regarded as shallow?