Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

Do you think there can be finer arms on a man than on a brick mason? If you are feeling low, will going to the barbershop or to the hair salon pick you up? What is your favorite sport to watch? Do you know the difference on sight between a rimfire cartridge and a centerfire? What is your position on yard raking? If you will excuse me for having deliberately bluntly phrased a previous question, and if you will accept that I am here again phrasing it so that reasonable middle-ground possibilities in your answer are excluded, may I ask you again now if, in sexual intercourse, you prefer a thrashing style like the flight of a bat or a subtle style like a worm eating its way through dirt? Will you go out of your way to get a wooden pencil or a wooden baseball bat? Have you had any medical procedures that involve the insertion of fiber-optical or other tubing in you that allows inspection of your innards? How do you stand in relation to the kind of cute crockery piggy bank that had to be broken once it was filled in order for the child to get the money she had saved? Are you much disturbed by the possibility of someone other than the child doing the breaking? Are you much less disturbed by the child herself doing the breaking? Do you travel in better underwear than you wear on a daily basis? Are you less likely to pay for a manicure or a pedicure? With what frequency do you drink a commercial milk shake?

Do you miss Tab and do you fully understand its disappearance? If you could have a guaranteed steady supply of an expensive or illicit substance or other commodity much prized and hard to get, what would it be? Are you surprised at the low number of people crazy or the high number of people crazy? Do you know offhand whether a hippopotamus sweats? If offered a cherry or a strawberry, which do you take?

If you had enough money to live on, could you see retiring to a small village in France and never being heard of or from again, and not speaking French when there, mostly because you can’t, but also because you have nothing to say and you’d have no one to say it to if you had something to say, and mostly just sleeping in your quaint medieval stone cottage? Could you make do with a little exercise once in a while and a piece of Beaufort of very high quality? And maybe a look-in on the pigs? What if the cartoonist R. Crumb were your neighbor? Would you sleep better, or worse, or the same knowing R. Crumb was your neighbor in the next quaint stone medieval cottage in the south of France? Would life go on, or would you have to move to another village, or would you have to abandon the idea of retiring to France altogether realizing R. Crumb had done it and that he was the tip of an iceberg going back through hundreds of persecuted sensitive American martyrs, from the Josephine Bakers and James Baldwins and Paul Robesons to the precious Fitzgeralds all the way up even to profane California cartoonists — wouldn’t you just be so yanked out of the frame that you’d feel it would be better to move not to gentle France but to, say, Burma where like Jeffrey Dahmer in prison you could be killed almost instantly when you set foot there? Wouldn’t it be better to have a Muslim in Burma put a cobra in your suitcase on day two than go through the long pleasant sunset desuetude of retiring silently in France? Would it, in fact, not be better were you to assassinate ten or so pleasant silent American retirees on your way out of sunny France en route to your rude and immediate fatal neurologic toxic death in Burma? Would there not be cause for wild cheer among a certain kind of depression-suffering person who reads the headline “Suspected Slayer of Cartoonist R. Crumb Victim of Cobra in Burma”? Would it be the worst thing said of you that your last act was expended on behalf of the depressed? Do you want something said of you, or nothing said of you, when you go?

Do you recall that the milk in bottles delivered unto the stoop that we miss so badly sometimes turned to a clabber so heavy and yellow and thick that it could not be forcefully shaken from the bottles? Was your looking into this clabber — as rococo as bread pudding, as weird as a preserved calf — not unlike looking into your own crystal ball?

Do you like bright steel with a sheen of oil on it? Do you have any of those old pot holders made of colorful woven cotton loops? Have you ever contributed to a children’s hospital or to an orphanage? Do you prefer a claw or a rip hammer, and do you know your weight, or are you hammer dumb — that is, is one hammer the same as another? Can you form in your mind the image of the slenderest person you have ever seen? If you were offered for free a rustic, comfortable house on stilts in a vast swamp, would you move in happily, or with reservations, or not at all? If I say to you that in my view all people fall into two camps, those fundamentally afraid of things and those fundamentally not afraid of things, would you think me radically overstating or oversimplifying? What is the largest number of people with whom you will do something as a group? Are you much of a cook? Are you partial to goat’s milk? If you could be in a civil war, would you prefer to be there as a native partisan or as a foreigner not targeted by either side and free to witness the mayhem?

Those stamps I have asked you about before, surely — were they not called “trading stamps,” and was “green stamps” not just a local more or less trivial name because S&H stamps happened to be green? Did you have that kind too? Did they accumulate in drawers? Do you have any idea what S&H referred to? Do you want to be buried beside your parents? Do you use perfumed boutique candles or utilitarian hardware-store candles, or do you use the one for nonemergency candle recreation and the other for emergencies? Are you handy with a splitting maul? Do you favor acetone or nonacetone nail-polish remover? How often will you mop? If you were offered a lecture about Descartes or about Alexander the Great, which would you take?

Have you ever seen blue hills? Does the word Sioux do anything odd to you? Does good leather comfort you or are you indifferent to it or do you in fact find leather morally offensive? Would you like to live in a neighborhood where children would ask you out to play stickball with them? Do you know the function for a parabola? Do you own a soldering iron? If you found a healthy infant in a basket on your doorstep, or anywhere else, say in the bulrushes if I have the phrase right, and no one claimed him, do you think the law allows you to keep him, if you want him? Have you heard, and do you credit, the speculation that the impending wars will be over not oil but water and that they will dwarf the present wars? Do you realize that the reason diurnal animals except us are not crazy is that they drink water whenever possible all day and go to bed at dusk?

Have I told you I have a friend who wrote in a book “Indians loved crowbars” and “They ate fat young dogs”? May I ask you if you have a friend as clever as mine, and may I say that I hope you do, but that I know you do not? Have you ever heard of the sexual practice of setting a person’s buttocks on fire and quickly spanking out the fire? Would setting a person’s buttocks on fire and spanking out the fire constitute, in your view, a violation of antisodomy laws or otherwise be regarded an unnatural act? Do you think it might be sanctioned or proscribed in the Bible? Have you been able to read the entire Bible?

What are three basic things you need to be content in life? Would you rate yourself as more tired than you used to be or as a person who still has all the getup-and-go that it takes? When offered meat or poultry with a stuffing or dressing, do you first taste the meat or the dressing? Do you favor a hemline above or below the knee? Has your position with respect to birders changed over the years or remained the same? If right now you were on your deathbed but not feeling too bad and could have some one thing brought to you, what would it be? Do you like flannel? Is there a location or locale on earth you consistently think of as preferable to the one you are usually in? If asked to draw a circle, will you freehand it or effect a compass with the tools at hand? When you trap a rat in a spring trap, do you feel triumphant or bad? Have you ever knelt down and said to the rat, aloud or not, “It was a mistake, I regret what I have done to you, I wish you could now go on about your business, it’s just that your eating my shit was at the time pissing me off, but now I see that you just had to do it, and what really kills me is how clean and innocent you look”?