Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

If I told you that the single most distinctive taste I ever experienced was hot radishes from the ground beside the Arlington River washed down with heavy sulfur water, would you think this but the bluster of childhood memory? If I said that not even in France forty years later could one taste anything so fine as the crisp heat of those radishes against the cool slake of that caustic funky water, would you think this but the cheer of adult memory? Have you ever seen bluster and cheer ride together this way, like Butch and Sundance? Did you know bluster and cheer are good friends?

Is it your impression that people who worked in animation in the 1930s did more drugs than people who work in it today? What is the ideal percentage of cocoa in chocolate for you? Would you like to have been at the Alamo? Pearl Harbor? Given a choice between going horseback riding or skydiving, which would you take? What frontier of science about which you are ignorant would you most like to be informed? Who in your opinion was the greatest conqueror, militarily speaking, in history? Have you any skills in the area of weaving or knitting? Are you fond of tents? Do you like to have a wad of cash or a credit card? Have you ever been the target of small arms fire? Do you have a favorite brand of dishwashing soap or will any brand do? Do you prefer your clothes loose or trim? Do you know any knots beyond the overhand? If you found one drumstick (the musical instrument, not the chicken leg) on the ground, would you keep it? Would you rather see a season of bullfighting or take a course in machining metal? Do you remember The Edge of Night and As the World Turns? If you were sitting (say with a fountain drink and a lightly toasted egg-salad sandwich) on a stool at the soda fountain of an old drugstore of the sort nearly extinct, and a robber came in armed and commenced holding the place up, and you had a nice safe handy shot at the back of his head with a convenient good and heavy blunt instrument, would you take it? Do you find the expense of alterations at an alteration shop prohibitive? What about repairs at a shoe shop? If two people would turn the rope for you nice and slow, or at whatever speed you instructed, how long do you think you could jump rope?

How often do you ask yourself, “What am I forgetting?” How often when you ask yourself what are you forgetting does it prove you are forgetting something? How often, when you ask yourself what are you forgetting, and it proves you are forgetting something, does asking the question prompt you to remember what you are forgetting?

Do you have relatives to whom you wish you were not related? Have you ever dug up anything valuable? Have I carried on before you yet about how I miss the days of home milk delivery and drinking milk from those scoured heavy-lipped cold bottles, and how this want puts me in an even further more laughable panting for when a man would have brought ice to your door in a wagon, carrying a giant diamond-colored block of it to you in a big scissorlike pair of iron tongs, and setting it in your box, or in your cellar, and shoveling sawdust on it if you used sawdust for your insulation, or covering it with your heavy wet canvas if you used that, tucking it in as if it were a very cold and very dear infant?

Do you believe that I can still have any interest in asking you questions? Do you believe it is correct to call the cry of crows “raucous”? Do you believe in lions and tigers and bears or do you believe in the lord Jesus? Have you heard the phrase “to drink the Kool-Aid”? Do you have a steady hand for bomb making? Have you ever carpeted a room with carpet samples? Would you call yourself a good file clerk with respect to your memory or a bad file clerk? What is your favorite cake? Would you prefer to have sexual relations with a tall blond German or a tall blond Swede? Do you enjoy assembling manufactured items that are sold unassembled? Have you ever set any part of yourself on fire? If civil war or an invasion or other circumstances somehow effected martial law and the need to take up arms and fight, and your father was put in local command by virtue of his having been a combat veteran, would you serve under him happily or with reservations or not at all? Do you think he would have difficulty sending you into the Valley of Death as it were? Can you see him wringing his hands over you or do you see him snapping out your orders and getting the job done? Are these questions meant to distinguish how he would treat you, a son or daughter, as opposed to how he would treat nonrelatives under his command? Why have I bogged down so in this area?

Do you know of a likely candidate to replace me as the asker of these questions? Could you rush him to the fore? Do you know the story of the dog fighter Maurice Carver getting an injection for his impotence from Indian Sonny, the shot given him through the side vent in his overalls in Maurice’s big Cadillac right after they picked up Indian Sonny at the airport in San Antonio, and Maurice thinking he feels a stirring in his loins and saying, “Rush me home”? Have you decided yet what historical moment you would most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears? Do you periodically walk around and check to see that “the area is secure,” or do you make fun of people who periodically check to see that the area is secure?

Should children be taught poker? Would you like to have a small pistol in a good wooden box lined with red velvet? And maybe one big pearl beside the pistol, secure in a dimple of velvet? Would you need any more than a pistol and a pearl on red velvet to hold you content all night until you could go the following morning to a breakfast joint and eat large quantities of simple food and celebrate being just barely alive?

We all know that pine trees do not lose all their needles at one time, unless they are dying, but do we all know that pine trees lose more of their needles at certain times than at others — that is to say…oh let’s forget this question and try another: would you say that American rock music and American cars have their classic periods in strange synchronization, and that the two hottest periods were around 1955 and 1969? Is it fair to say that there has not been a good American car since 1969 and that rock ’n’ roll was petering out hard after that?

How can men at drafting tables in pocket protectors in Detroit and boys in jeans and long hair at synthesizers in Macon, Georgia, have been so in tune? Is there anything you can take for a persistent benign sore on your tongue, by which I mean I do not suspect this is herpes related or anything else more serious than a topical wound that just will not go away and is particularly irritated by sour foods like pineapple? If you had a loud 400 hp 1969 GTO with a Hurst three-speed on the floor and the Allman Brothers’ “One Way Out” playing as loud inside the car, would you not be unstoppable not only in all the serious adolescent ways but even now in nearly all of the serious postadolescent pre-senile ways? Can you list the things you are afraid of, or is it easier to list the things you are not afraid of, or are you afraid of nothing, or are you essentially afraid of everything?

If you yourself are not a coward, do you look upon a coward with sympathy or with disgust? If you yourself are not a murderer, do you look upon a murderer with disgust or sympathy? Why have I altered the position of “sympathy and disgust” and “disgust and sympathy” so? Did you ever try to raise two flying squirrels by getting up every three hours and feeding them cow’s milk and stimulating their genitals with a tissue to get them to pee as your mother instructed you and seeing them die three weeks later of fever and bloat and fecal poisoning because the cow’s milk had so constipated them that they had not, in all that peeing, ever pooped? And did you wonder later how your mother would know to stimulate them to pee but not that cow’s milk would cement them up like that? And do you wonder now if she did not instruct you to tickle them with that tissue so they would “tinkle”? Do you miss your mother, if she’s dead? Do you want to spend time with her if she is not?