Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

I want to paint something but I don’t know what. Something around me needs a bold new redness or blueness and everything would be better. It will have to be a subtle hue — an auburny red, a blue with purple and aqua lurking in it like the surface of a fish, say — and it will have to be applied with consummate care so that it looks professional, not grubbed on in a hurry by someone who shops at malls and watches a lot of cable TV. This new red or blue thing around me will have to look like it came from West Germany or Sweden and has consultants behind it. It will make me or anyone else near it feel assured of things, as if, say, one could certainly afford at this moment to eat a piece of candy with no compunction. And do some exercise. Offer an apology where none might be strictly necessary or anticipated — not a big deal, mind you, but just a sign that one is sensitive. Yes. Paint.

If Greta and Kitty come over, I will make love to them simultaneously. They don’t like this particularly, but they like the alternative less. When they come over together, I feel that they have made a choice in this respect. The difficulty is ardor, specifically with showing it. Showing ardor is regarded a good thing usually, but not when a third party is idly standing by waiting her turn. So things get rather unnaturally subdued, as if there are children in the next room, say, when in fact it is a woman who ostensibly approves of everything going on sitting, or lying, right next to you.

Kitty is the younger and the prettier of the two sisters and she usually defers to Greta. She has the resources, mental and physical, that allow her to wait. Then Greta watches us with a sad and somber aspect, her lip almost trembling, and sometimes I am nearly unmanned by her expression, but Kitty’s insistent enthusiasm and fine form and gleaming eye, winking at me or Greta or both of us, keeps me to the task. They grew up on Aruba and are cosmopolitan girls. I would not expect behavior like theirs from most bona fide American sisters, unless they were from deep in the South, say Kershaw, South Carolina. The cosmopolitanism of the true sticks is huge and always surprising.

I saw some Marine recruits working their way through what is called a Confidence Course on Parris Island. It resembles an obstacle course, and whether Confidence is a euphemism or whether there is another course called an Obstacle Course I do not know. You would not think the Marines given to euphemism, but they are peculiar in their psychologies there. The boys were not prime physical specimens and from the way they were moving I believe them to have been made sore, deeply sore, by their drills. They looked to have great difficulty climbing over the equivalent of a sawhorse. I believe they were bone sore. The Marines wanted them to move when they felt they could not. This, I suppose, engenders confidence. I would like to apply myself seriously to an endeavor that would make my life a serious, confident proposition, not a whimsical one, but so far I cannot.

When you break a tennis-racket string, do you take it to the shop for restringing, or should you have bought a spare racket and continue that day with the spare? On the one hand the second racket means you have taken yourself and time seriously, on the other it means you have taken playing a game more seriously than keeping thy money in thy pocket, a Biblical injunction. So how do you tell what to do? This I cannot discover. I am not wise. I can but walk around, greeting the friends I do not have — Hi Earl, hi Wonka, hi Eel, you now Greta, now you Kitty — seeing the animals in their cages and not in their cages, the geese on the lake and not.

I could not decide whether purchasing new clothes for the entire family was better than buying these new Government Cookie Flyers. Our life would be very exciting with new cookie flyers, not to mention patriotic and support the cause, etc. We had not seen the new Government Cookie Flyers but we had heard they were sharp and well engineered, perhaps even made in Germany though of course that was being withheld, if they were of foreign manufacture. Whereas new clothes would have made us fashionable and comfortable and sporty in a more obvious if short-lived way. We’d look good, but the new cookie flyers might actually do us more good. I just could not decide.

Nothing was helping me in this decision. You heard that thousands had bought the cookie flyers but you did not see anyone with one or using one. It was like Reagan voters. But you did see people with natty clothes on, all the time, and they did not look unhappy, that their being in new clothes meant they had foregone the patriotic route and not bought a cookie flyer but the natty clothes they were openly modeling instead. Of course they might have more money than we did and might have bought a cookie flyer also and have it at home and then be out feeling good in new clothes to boot, for all I knew. Nothing was any help in trying to decide. I tried to talk even to the dog about it, thinking at first that a dog would favor a new cookie flyer over our suddenly appearing in clothes with strange smells or no smells to him, but when he sat there looking at me dumbly as I asked him if we should get a cookie flyer or clothes, I realized he was not going to tell me.

There is a guy out in the parking lot right now who I believe is unemployed, who drives a car with a missing trunk lock away from and back to the apartment several times a day, always smoking, and now he is changing tires on the car, and I thought my life superior to his until now. Out there now with a nice chrome wheel and a cigarette he looks to have more on the ball by far than I do in here in the cookie-flyer vs. new-clothes quandary. He’s a cross between Kris Kristofferson and Randall “Tex” Cobb.

I should just go out there and beat him up. That would break some logjam in here, or some ice, or something. You might not think there is a connection, or that my quandary would be served a laxative were I to without seeming provocation whip the ass of a contented layabout working on wheels and smoking, but it most assuredly would, I sense it, logically I can’t help you any. We are not in the zone of logic, we are in the zone of cookie flyers and deadbeats and indecision racking our entire mortal coil and time, what little we have of it, on earth. If you do not already divine what I am talking about, there’s nothing for it, no explaining this. It would take poetry, or religion, to get through. I don’t have those. I don’t want those. I want to know only whether to get the new Government Cookie Flyer or the clothes, period.

And now that you have your Government Cookie Flyer — you will want two or three more, to be sure, but one is a start — you shall take it from the box. Pull those brass staples out with these pliers. These are Klein, very nice, now (finally) available at Sears. I worry about Sears. Cut the tape, set your utility knife at a sixteenth, or if you are using your pocket knife you know how to pinch the blade exposing only the tip. Cut the length across and now the two sides all the way, describing an H, very gratifying somehow, like a goalpost — open the box, score a touchdown! Now the whole business will slide out. Pull the Styrofoam braces off. Now everything is bagged in a nice gray plastic, some of it actually shrink-wrapped onto the large parts. Snip those and listen for the vacuum as air enters the Cookie Flyer. Unpeel everything, lay out the parts, get the exploded view, assemble. The Germans (reveal this to no one) supply a tube of Loctite but we prefer not to use it. We keep a dedicated 5/16” nut driver tied to the Flyer and like to manually check torques continuously. It helps us stay in touch with this fine machine, we feel, and we feel better in touch with a fine machine.