Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

Working for Brother Catcard has been fun. I got to see the whole iceberg incident, from the bow. The pastries are, I am told, and I do not have the wherewithal to doubt, as good as they are in France. My chi is in a super-flow state. I liken it to spoon-beaten magma.

Sister Willetail has improved morale with her good cheer and legs, but I am not pruriently concerned with her. The danger levels on the floor of operations are under control. If a worker gets hurt, he pretty much disappears entirely and there is not the issue of grisly remains.

We all got presents for Christmas, though it was stressed that the giving and the getting was not religiously affiliated, that the date was arbitrary more or less, at the top of the year, more a fiscal-holiday proposition. Once people started unwrapping their things they forgot to be aggrieved that we were calling it Christmas. I got a satellite-grade gyroscope. Benny and Lamar — whom I had not seen since 1960 when they were in the fourth grade, who rescued me from the mob when I was in the second grade in Ocoee Florida by schooling me at marbles, whose sister (Lamar’s) was the first girl I took prurient interest in, though I did not know what prurient interest actually was yet — showed up.

They sat in plastic-webbed lawn chairs and opened their gifts, which appeared to be candy bars, but there had to be a little more to them (the candy bars) than that, because it is fair to say that Benny and Lamar sat there regarding these things mezzed out and beatific, if you can say beatific of grisled old bum-looking dudes nobody has ever seen before except me who saw them as fine-looking (if poor) children in 1960 in a schoolyard in the orange grove that was then Ocoee Florida. Ocoee Florida is now effectively Disney World and Benny and Lamar are, as I say, bums or bum-equivalents, and that they showed up and sat there in odd cheap non-company chairs no one else was sitting in and were mesmerized by candy-bar equivalents is just one of the reasons working for Brother Catcard has been so fun.

There is a preponderance of this equivalence thing; equivalents abound, to the extent that the whole experience at Brother Catcard’s is kind of an equivalent itself, an equivalent to working, you might say. You might say the danger is an equivalent to danger, the injuries equivalent to injuries (hence no body parts). Christmas is an equivalent to Christmas, not Christmas. The presents are equivalents to presents. This can be seen in just the two I have so far listed: a gyroscope from a satellite ? A candy bar that turns the bum unwrapping it into a stoned fool? Two bums that are supposed to be the same two children you briefly knew fifty years ago and have not seen since? And you have no doubt as to who they are, immediately? Is that not an agreeable equivalent to having lost your mind?

I can hear the sandhill cranes overhead. Bats are friendly. This is impossible to credit. Brother Catcard likes us all to be happy and friendly but it has not made us like bats, and that we are all happy and friendly is as hard to credit, or harder, than that bats are friendly. This is just one of my private calculations. I make private calculations the livelong day. You recall the song “I’ve been working on the railroad/all the livelong day”? Well, we sort of have that cheer here, working in the equivalent to working for Brother Catcard. Even when Floorchief Mayo yells at you it is an equivalent to yelling and is not to be carried heavily in the heart. If your sphericals are spherical and if your tubers grow through the correct holes in the little dirigible chassis, Floorchief Mayo’s yelling does not mean shit to a tree, if I may try to quote Grace Slick, in whom I once did take prurient interest, but never met. What happened to Grace Slick? This is another zone of my private figuring on the factory floor.

What if her parents had named her Gorky Slick? I don’t think I’d be quoting her, in that event, or I’d be quoting her as singing something else entirely, would be my inclination had she been Gorky and not Grace. Small forces have large resultants. This is one reason Floorchief Mayo gets worked up about the tiny holes and the tiny tubers. A microwave oven, in the same line of reasoning, would derange the guidance chips for the bomblets, and we must consequently heat our lunch things in conventional toaster ovens and on hotplates, which return to old-fashionedism I frankly heartily enjoy whether it is slow or not. You also have a high incidence of people burning the dook out of themselves in the break room but I have seen no real complaining.

Lamar and Benny were given positions on the line, which surprised me but should not have. It is possible that they had already been hired by the time they joined us at the Christmas party, or they were being watched in the interest of hiring them according to how they took the candy-bar equivalents, etc. Let me say a word or two about that. Big Brother is Watching You, which once was a somber and dire prophetic warning of some sort as far as I can tell, is now such a given that we are frankly a little amused at the alleged concern the notion is said to have once raised. Of course he is watching you, is our position: what else would he be doing? Who would watch us if he didn’t? The idea that we might not be watched is altogether foreign, and frightening. We want to be watched.

I watched Benny and Lamar on the line. They were mercury rollers. That’s where everyone with a fine hand starts, a little surprising because Benny, at least, appears to have the shakes, but I may be extrapolating from the condition of his nose, which looks whisky-rubricated. Oh, that is too poetic and probably inaccurate. It looks as red as an angry scrotum. By which I mean one that has been used and then not used when it would like to have been used. But Benny looks steady there with the mercury, and Lamar still has a bit of the fine cut he had when he was nine. His sister must have been ten, eleven, twelve when I noticed her legs. She was wearing short shorts and her legs were tight and long, and the shorts were tight on her legs, like say a rubber band on an eggplant. I know this is a stretch but this was decades ago and I was a child not yet ruined by thoughts of this sort and now I am an adult who is. I have license. And, as I say, if not that clearly, working here for Brother Catcard is really all about manifesting an equivalence to making sense. We manifest an equivalence to working and an equivalence to being adult.

It occurs to me watching Benny and Lamar roll the mercury through the chutes to the atomizers that they are still essentially playing marbles, which is exactly what they were doing when I first saw them fifty years ago. And they were very good marble players, which is how, and I suppose why, they could afford to take me under wing and school me. We spent the bulk of the school day in a large yard worn to smooth dirt and full of incipient gangsters kneeling down playing marbles all over it. They, Benny and Lamar, did not even flinch when I showed up with the cheap goofy marbles my father got for me because that was exactly what you wanted to put into games and lose when you were learning how to play. One day early on some other boys wanted to beat me up, because I was new or had shoes, I am not sure which, or both, and Benny and Lamar stopped it by a simple military positioning: Lamar stood up to the gang in front and Benny flanked the leader and just stood there, and the gang walked off. At some time later Lamar took me in the bathroom and unwrapped some adhesive tape on his big toe and showed me that it was nearly cut off, held on by a piece of skin, and then somewhere in there I went to their house and saw their huge box of marbles, a cardboard box the size of a TV beside the kitchen door. And I got on the bus behind Lamar’s sister, which is when I saw the legs and the shorts from about a foot and a half in front of my face, going up and strong.