Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

DO YOU HAVE THE locked and loaded feeling today, or the loose and dissolute? Would you molest a girl in a hospital room wearing a candy-striper outfit? Do you know precisely what a candy striper is or was? Have you ever seen a pot made of bark? What can you tell me about interstitial braces and dimensional stability?

Do you use the word parameter colloquially, and do you run with people who do? Do you understand the physics of the bullwhip? If someone proposed “alternatives to square dancing,” what would you think he was talking about? Will you wear underwear previously worn by someone else? If you were faced with having a collection of bird nests or car fenders, which would you take? Have you ever heard the phrase, at least once used legally, “mental cruelty to a chicken”? Is life better or not better now that for the most part we live it without a daily concern with ramparts? Do you think that barbarism in the world continues apace but has shifted into subtler forms? Do you credit that there is a band called the Unhung Heroes with a hit song entitled “Look What I Found on the Ground to Mate With”? Have you handled fence staples? Do you know exactly when tinfoil stopped being tin, if it ever actually was tin? Have you ever with pleasure disassembled a perfectly good working piece of electronic gear and put it back together in a deliberately nonworking configuration? Do you like to have a wooden baseball bat around? Have you drunk wares produced from a still in the woods while standing near the still? If you have drunk from a still, was the still operator present or not? Do you like the notion of elasticity, with its princely resilience, or do you find something soft and undependable down in it? Is there anything in particular — above other things — that makes your day, or rues it?

Is there diabetes in your family? Are you scuba certified? How much will you pay to enter a strip club? If you got a puppy, do you think witnessing its puppy energy would give you yourself a little puppy energy again? Do you like to smell and feel — they’ll squeak against your fingers — brand-new automobile tires? Have you ever paid to have something either sandblasted or gilded? Have I told you of the time my grandmother escaped the nursing home and I found her a block away on a door stoop expiring in the sun and she said to me, “What took you so long?”

Have you ever heard the phrase “to eat the either/or sandwich”? How about “chocolate and vanilla drawers”? Regulatory commission, tertiary syphilis, roundabout way of living, otiose goose, Bernard Paperhanger, pastel bloomers, doggone stubborn, stupendous city, beribboned frank, tallywhacker body, terrible, profound, large, stunted, and benign — do these things go together? How about gassated cheerleaders — the cheerleaders, say, had gassated themselves? I should say perhaps I’m a little unsteady here, but may I say instead I’m a little rocking horse here? Is the thing you notice about cheerleaders that while they do have those tight stomachs — I suppose by fashion one should say tight abs, they have no fat on their bellies — and it is arresting and interesting to see them, and this firmitude leads you right up to the breasts and your speculations thereupon, you notice how cheerleaders always seem to be refreshingly modest in that department, not amped out on silicone (I refer to the college girls, the professional sideline tramps are another matter), and you are on to the painful-looking perpetual smile that cheerleaders must maintain, and she is bouncing or otherwise celebrating the joyous routine, looking finally rather dumb, the whole thing rather dumb, not really her fault, or their fault, though you do fault her male consorts for being cheerleaders and not on the football team, what the fuck is the matter with them, and so there she is all hot and trim and bouncy and pert and full of vim vigor cheer and goodwill for your benefit, and you are supposed to want her a little and more than a little want your team to do well but you are nagged by this fact: you do not want her at all, and that not wanting has abrogated your wanting the team to do what she ostensibly wants you to want the team to do, and there you sit, a lost fan and a lost man? Do you see now what I mean when I say “gassated cheerleaders”? Can the feeling of not properly wanting a cheerleader be expanded, not unlike a gas as it were, to express your entire purchase in the world, your total stance on desire and life?

Would you like to have an executive maid who beyond a clean house would assure that you have crisp lettuce at all times and nothing gone bad and no bills not paid? Has it ever occurred to you that people could have — and once this occurs to you, you see that they should have, and you wonder how it is that they do not have — a batting average not for baseball but for life? Wouldn’t it be handy to have a life average affixed to a person, so that a homeless person might be hitting.171, and Lance Armstrong might be hitting.338, Michelangelo maybe hit.401? If you had a life average, what do you think it would be?

Could you entertain the idea that what undoes couples over time is that they neglect to apply polish to the grain of their wood? Is a buzzard a higher-altitude operator than an eagle? Are you familiar with Chester Nimitz? Have you ever watched serious volleyball? Do you think the phrase “in conjunction with Uranus” is responsible for the accenting of Uranus being shifted to the first syllable? Were you to be in a fatal crash, would you prefer whether it was an automobile or plane crash? Would you wear a seersucker suit or dress, or do you now? Did you get Hegel? When you have captured grasshoppers — and if you have never captured grasshoppers, just take a break while I pursue this, it is important — did you notice when you sometimes might have inadvertently squeezed them a dark fluid forms a ball or bubble at their mouths, usually purple or roan? And was it your experience that a grasshopper so squeezed when released would retract this fluid to whence it came and be apparently no worse for the wear? Can you recall the reasons for which you were catching grasshoppers? Have you seen a bullfight? If you have attended a bullfight, can you say whether on balance you took pleasure in it or not? When you have seen bullfights — and again if you have not seen them, just relax here a bit, finish up what you were doing when the grasshopper stuff began if you took a break then — when the blood is coursing down the side of the bull in those pulsing sheets from the small wounds of the banderillas, and the big one from the lance, in those blinding silver waves when the sun reflects hard off the blood, and in those somber soaked oxblood-and-black hues when the sun is not direct on the bull’s flank, did you think this horrible or beautiful?

If everybody is back now, may I ask if your predilection to order chocolate or vanilla over time has changed or have you remained more or less constant? Would you rather be in the hospital or in jail? Why do Americans use the article before hospital and not before jail? Would you rather be in hospital or in the jail? What is the best meal you have ever had (and forgive me if I have asked this before; if I have, do not feel compelled to give me the same answer)? If something could happen right now that is not likely to or impossible but that would really cheer you up if it did, just light you up like a child again, what would it be?

Do you know what is involved, with respect to leather, in tanning? Does a regulatory commission strike you in general as a good thing or a bad thing? In households in which a child has died, do you think what goes on at night in that household is radically different, superficially different, or no different from what goes on at night in households in which no child has died? If you were to be locked in a room naked for an unspecified length of time by a party you could not identify and for an infraction you could not determine, and you were offered a pair of wool socks or a pistol, which would you take? If it then developed that a big cat would share the room with you, would you prefer it be a lion or a tiger, given free choice? Would your choice be affected in any way were you assured both cats were friendly and that you had also, as part of the terms of your incarceration, to bathe the cat?