Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

Whatever floats your boat, go ahead and float it. Do not have large untenable quantities of despair. Do not go to parades. When you feed orphaned wild animals, do not expect them to make it. Be forewarned. Be careful that your genitals do not show outside the strict confines of your underwear. Learn at least three racquet games during your lifetime. Study the coin flip. Please understand, and have according sympathy when relevant, that pink-skinned people and animals have tender feet.

If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction. Let us abort the mission, if we are on one. Supply me with the name of that comic who climbed into a condom and tell me if it was specially manufactured or off the shelf. Be more forgiving. Test the wind. Brave the currents. Be strong, strong, strong. Tell me my name. Be gone.

Go to harbor town and pee on someone’s boat. Chase dreams. Smoke a pipe, or pipes. Fix the toilet. Put on those wax lips over there and wear them all day, I don’t care how deformed and drooly they get, if you take them out at any point I will call the law. Try to keep your temperature in the accepted homeostatic range for humans, can you? Hand me that newspaper without letting it make a sound. If I make a sound reading it, be grateful that I, not you, made the newspaper make a sound. Just thank your lucky stars, young man, thank your lucky stars.

Sit in good old overstuffed chairs the livelong day and rejoice that you are not mixed up in the turmoil inside a church or outside the perimeter of a military position under attack or near an abortion clinic or in an airport. Prepare colorful drinks that are not particularly tasty but don’t have to be — look at them! Call all your pets to you, living and more importantly dead. Keep your belt cinched just a tad tight. Believe in Jesus whether you do or not. Remove staples when you discover them not to be actually stapling things together and carefully discard them. Sing songs to ladies and appreciate the scarves they wear. Determine, were you to have put in your will the method by which you would like to be put to death, if this could have any bearing on how the state might put you to death should it come up.

Do not always be of good cheer; sometimes act as if you are a possum. Throw rocks at children. Leap tall buildings, of course. Remain calm. Try to win. Be winning whether you win or not. Declare bankruptcy not quite with pride. Alternate the theories you entertain about all things. Investigate leather tanning. Learn to swim again. Steadily decline in all your strengths until that steadiness is your strength. Purchase a packet of indigo dye and place it so that you can regard it every day. Call your friend who walked the wire in the circus and ask about the shoes. Change the linen. Realize yet again that for a long time you had too much courage to kill yourself or even entertain it but that now you can entertain it but have too little courage to do it. Regret that you have never seen a real cotton field in operation or a cotton exchange either and that these wants are both unrelated to many other things you should have witnessed but did not, both of the sort you can imagine and, worse, of the sort you cannot even conceive you are so small and deprived. Locate, purchase, and construct an industrial-grade galvanized swing set in your backyard, and if you do not have a backyard in the backyard of someone with a child whom you can convince that you mean the child no harm.

Try to be the best you can be, and the worst. Prepare for Armageddon. Get to the bottom of baking. Imagine a conversation with Charles Manson. Try things. Invent something. Dilute dilute dilute the Dr. Bronner’s. Heap up the seconds. Take dance instruction, and step lively. Har’ to lee. Ponder NASA photos and wonder if there isn’t more wonder in them than you actually see. Run to the store.

Lecture the pets. Try all the doors and windows for fit and trim and of course security and attend anything found amiss. Give some thought to purchasing an incandescent lightbulb or two before they go extinct — would one in a very out-of-the-way place, seldom used, like the closet under the stairs, be so bad? Walk the yard looking for snakes without any thought of seeing one. Whistle for your dog dead now fifteen years. Clean the kitchen. Pay a bill or two, get the phone, and reach out and touch someone. String the hammock and practice the diagonal lie. If this does not come naturally to you, reflect on just how far you are also from ever speaking Spanish naturally, or speaking it at all, or speaking any language at all, and admit that you are a retard uncomfortable even in a hammock who will need the Language Fairy to come down and put a language under your pillow if you are ever to have a foreign language. Envision some new, cool colors all through your house and go to bed.

List the wounds you do not want, in order: head wound, genital wound, ass wound, spleen wound, eye wound, extremity wound, thumb smash, skin scrape, splinter. Decide that you have had enough surgery and can go the rest of the distance unaided or propped up by the knife. Fill out that exhausting questionnaire and take it to the will attorney. Have a little buzz on when you go in there. Rule out radiation therapy along with the surgery. It’s going to be the hammock and the perfected diagonal lie from here on in. Recall that frisky young whippersnapper Tennessee Williams whom you once so admired and still do. Recall that time you saw the 1 % play for the first time. In your mind sit again on those pale green wooden stools in that cafeteria and watch Allen and Bob play in front of where the dirty thick-plastic beige dishes went in with the spaghetti sauce on them. Recite: Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, oh oh oh. Call North Carolina and see about a dog. Decide that deciding it is too late to rescue yourself may be itself rescue, but concede this salvation-by-surrender argument may be fallacious if not outright childish. Recall the boy in the back of the car saying, when someone in the front of the car derogated Elvis for liking the party girls to keep their panties on, “Just what’s wrong with that!”

Hold your horses. Allow interest to compound, simply or whatever the other thing is. Do not have traffic today with a doctor. Read between the lines only ; it’s easier than reading the lines. In the event that armed men of any sort enter the building, watch their feet closely. Try to recall the smell of caged mice, and the image of the child of yours separating the twist ties one by one until they made a fine large mess that had to be put in a baggie, and the same child picking back up the flowers dropped in the aisle of her grandfather’s wedding, and the same child telling you at age five, fishing, “Look, it goes under, and nothing! This is ruining my life.”

Inspect the phrase “resistant incoherence” as it pertains to John Ashbery, whose incoherence you have not so much resisted as found incoherently beautiful. Realize that you cannot take time out like this for reveries so private when people are expecting you to get on with the business of telling them what to do. So, people: get yourselves on with the business of doing what you need to do, and realize that sometimes in every life that will necessarily involve wasting a lot of time on fruitless pursuit of that which can be interesting only to you, and only in a way that at some point you will invariably yourself declare the time to have been spent pointlessly — have at it! If Helen Vendler writes “resistant incoherence” and you want to roll that around in your mouth like an unsatisfying little candy trying to suck off the — ant and put in its place — ed , leaving you a more satisfying “resisted incoherence,” because you resisted it, it is not resist ant , it is incoherent , well this is your business and your business alone and nobody’s business but ; yet even this improved candy is not that hot, what happened to the old horehounds that were so thrilling to pronounce as an adolescent, whore hounds! whether they were actually good to eat or not, but they were, were they not? And were they not heavy heavy sassafras, not resistant sassafras but sassafras that you re sis ted because it was too strong, as like, well, sometimes people get too enthusiastic about how well they think they make dressing for turkey and overload it with sage? Recall the time Charlie Geer freehanded the grits into the pot of boiling water on Cumberland Island, the time his uncle woke up on the rolling waterbed with his exgirlfriendJoanieloveofhislife on the other side of it being boinked by the new guy. Don’t ask people to go there. People, don’t go there, just accept that Holmes Geer eventually killed himself, that I then taught his nephew in school after having gone to school myself with the uncle, and that the nephew taught me you can freehand grits, resistant instruction.