Cries for Help, Various Read online

  Another is no one watching when you sleep, and when you don’t. You may pursue whatever is mindless until you yourself are tired of it. You may control the density of stuff in the refrigerator. If you find your fly open, you may leave it so for a bit. No rush.

  Lonely and a little chilly, I go down to the Thumb and Thumb Lingua Spanka Academy for some human intercourse and convivialismatic rompromp. Earl Thumb gouges my eye not five feet in the door, and Wonka Thumb comes over with a broom and pretends to sweep me, trash on the floor, back out the door. “You fuckers,” I say, and Earl is at the computer telling me I am not paid up, and Wonka drops a knee on my stomach and hisses viciously, “I bet you think you need a woman!” He begins outright beating me with the broom as Earl hands me a dues bill. It’s always good here, always fun. A child runs naked screaming through the room with a smile on his face, looking for approval, and disappears into the locker room. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s a boy we are going to adopt,” Wonka says, “as soon as we decide what to rename him. Negotiations are underfoot.”

  “Don’t you think Eel is a good name?” Earl says.

  I say I do or I don’t, it depends on the boy’s character. If he is an Eel, well then maybe. You have to wait it out, as with a dog. “Great character-warping injustice is done at the maternity ward with the birth certificates,” I say.

  “Eel Thumb,” Wonka says.

  “Eel Thumb,” Earl says.

  “He belongs to one of Earl’s ex-wives.”

  “Can you lend me ten dollars?” Earl says, apparently to me. They want to buy supplies to make pull-candy to entertain the boy, and I contribute ten dollars.

  I go on my way, feeling better.

  At the used-car dealership around the corner a fat salesman is leaned into the open hood of a car throwing onions from it without regard to where they fly. “There’s going to be hell to pay when I catch the fuckers did this,” he says, still in there, addressing no one but himself. I cop two whole nice onions.

  The zoo has about a 65% occupancy rate as near as I can tell. It is finally better to determine a cage outright empty than to contain a moribund specimen of this or that, and 35% empties makes for a mood-lightening visit. The concessions are all closed, which also helps. The little train is not running. No geese are around the lake. The action is limited to a BFI truck arming up dumpsters and banging them into itself and setting them back down. The bull elephant gets a boner standing in his compound by himself. It pulses down to the ground, looking part leg, part trunk, touches dirt, and then throbs shrinking back up into himself. Fine day at the zoo all around.

  The helicopter factory, where I am said to work, has an area of rotor blades that I love. It is two acres of stacked, carefully packed alloy blades that look like giant slender knives, sashimi knives for whales, say. The blades are coated with Teflon-ey stuff in subtle yellows and grays that makes them just reek of well-made. I like to feel the coatings, thump and pat and stroke the blades. I object to wearing my hard hat and in a stupid protest have pasted a nude Ridgid Tool calendar girl inside it, distorting her as I am told the figures are distorted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is hard to tell in fact that it is a naked woman inside my hat. Nonetheless, this announces somehow that the hat and my wearing it I regard as absurd. I would never have an upright and intelligible picture of such a woman on, say, the door of my locker.

  Not having pets is depressing, but having pets is a troublesome prospect. So I hold steady, without.

  I had a wife but she ran off and married the President of the United States. Her ultimate choice of mate subjected me to an unusual level of scrutiny from our government. I was at first regarded as part of her background, as something about which all should be known, and then I was regarded as a potential threat to her and to the President. I have assured three branches of federal law bureagents that I am happy for her, and for Him. They almost believe me sometimes. A brown car is parked at all times on my street with one or two bureagents in it. The best I can do. I do not overtly notice them, which they prefer. You may not, I have discovered, offer baked goods to your stakeout men without causing them some paperwork they would prefer not having to do. I remember when they explained all that to me (“off the record”) saying, “Gee whiz.” That’s all I could come up with. Not Holy cow, not Boy oh boy, not Dang, not Darn, not Fuck that, but Gee whiz!

  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.

  Change of Life

  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 ment
ion 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.

  Sweep up the chips, put them in one or two of the plastic bags, put the Styrofoam braces back in the box in the correct orientation, tape the box lightly back up, put it in the attic or basement. Sometimes these days one is asked to ship in original container but also sometimes in a new container the warranty server provides, you do not ever know in advance, so we’ll have you save the box.

  Behold the brand-new Government Cookie Flyer on your floor. Congratulations. Your life has changed, it is safe to say. Very safe to say. One’s life changes all the time, one might say, or it does not change all the time, another might say, and both might be right. When we caught the magnificent catfish in the muddy Brazos and ate it, and can still see that shiny gray fish fighting on that shiny red mud, so handsome, so strong, undone by his appetite for a chicken gizzard, we might say our life changed, or we might not. But with the Government Cookie Flyer on your floor, your life has changed.

  The moment I touched the Flyer my life did change. I saw to the core of adult capitalist life, what constitutes the Highest Good: IT IS THE MOMENT YOU INDUCE OTHERS TO GIVE YOU A LOT OF MONEY FOR SOMETHING THAT DID NOT COST YOU MUCH TO SUPPLY. This I now know is the only lasting thrill—not meeting a woman or having good drugs or securing a good job or car or seeing God or whatever. The thrill that the Big Boys are about is in duping for cash. I took the Flyer out and let one fly right by the idiot mechanic in the parking lot as he performed his endless machinations on his beloved car. He stood up from the wheel he sat on while studying a brake drum, stamped out his cigarette, advanced on me with the built-in menace in his gait, and said he would give me the pink slip to the car at that moment, and do me a barbecue that night, and invite his wife’s sister over for me to meet, that she was newly divorced and lonely and hot, if I would give him the Flyer. I said no way with such certainty that he stopped lighting the new cigarette he was about to light and kicked me squarely in the groin. He looked at me a moment on the ground, lit the cigarette, and returned to the car.

  Now things are so clear. When I see any government functionary, say the Secretary of State, or Defense, speaking ostensibly about this diplomatic matter or that military matter, respectively, I can now divine the truth underlying the positions. The man speaking, were he not in Government service, would be a major CEO pulling a multimillion-dollar salary, an income he has chosen to forego for the nonce in order to protect thousands of other multimillion-dollar salaries, and on this his integrity depends, if not his life. His colleagues the Big Boys watch him serve and protect, and they hold open a position for him when he is done with the sacrifice. They are the high priests in the world’s most successful religion. Every store is a church, every ad a psalm, every entrepreneur a preacher, every buyer a believer. And it all rests on a solid spiritual principle: since material goods are insignificant and money crass, why not always give a little more than the material is worth? What harm there? The Government Cookie Flyer makes this abundantly clear, inadvertently I’m sure. But a machine of this genius has unpredictable powers, few limitations, a broad adaptability for perhaps unlimited uses. Among them—and this application I am certain was not intentional, for it strikes at the heart of a large market just now, if not the largest market on earth—is that I need not use a phone. I may think of a call and let the Cookie Flyer fly, and the matter is done, not one dial tone, fiber optic, roam, message, beep, vibration, satellite involved. The called party strangely knows the import of my call and communicates his or her response on the return fly, coterminous with his receipt of my call. Thus, in effect, I can communicate with everyone on earth, just sitting here, sometimes without their being aware of it. Just a side benefit of owning the Government Cookie Flyer, like a small potato chip, or piece of a chip, on the plate of a very large and ultimately satisfying meal. With the Flyer I called my doctor about the embarrassing prospect of having him inspect my throbbing testicles and learned that only an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory is indicated, ice if I want to amuse myself with frozen parts, and that any permanent damage, unlikely, will be in the positive direction of free and non-surgical vasectomy, which I needed anyway. I have put an ice pack in my shorts and eaten some aspirin and flown a call to my malicious neighbor yet working on his car, asking him if he is absolutely certain of his tattooed wife’s fidelity, sometimes a problem with a woman so much younger than an aging, balding, overweight hu
sband and with a woman so goddamned good-looking, a fact he overlooks, has he taken a good look at her lately? The answer that came back, as he sat staring at the wheel bearings, was No, bullshit, and he got up and went in the house, from which I now hear noise, very satisfying as I adjust the ice cubes better.

  Cries For Help, Various

  Cry for Help from France

  My toilet is from Paris. A coward is full of bluster about living well. A coward is terrified of even being alive. He may be also afraid—and this is congruent with the more popular visions of cowardice—of the opposite, both in its extreme, final expression (death), and in its less acute expressions (injury). But fear of injury or death, running from battles or fistfights, etc., is just shallow cowardice; in fact it may not be cowardice at all. It may be mere anxiety, and usually rather rational at that. Who is to be faulted for preferring not to have his nose broken or not to die on the ground in the dirt without any painkillers or a girl to wipe one’s brow? No, that is cosmetic cowardice. True cowardice would embrace a broken nose or the spectacle of one’s guts flying while being afraid of buying a new car or getting married or having a child or changing jobs or selecting this coat over that coat or eating at a restaurant that is too expensive or one that is not expensive enough. A true coward knows the phrase Go for it and he deigns not go for it. Going for it scares him to death. He is so far from going for it that he does not even conceive what is to be gone for. This is why he does not perceive, usually, that he is a coward. Excuse me, I’ve been writing this, just now, and I’ll admit to bearing down a bit to try to get my meaning correct, and clear if it is correct, and I fancy at this point it is clear but not yet correct—when a fat boy skipped by on the street, trying to skip, so uncoordinated that it lent the impression that his bones were soft, or even possibly bending. A goofy, happy, or let us say perhaps an unhappy boy trying to be happy, badly skipping down a sunny street in France. It is likely, in my imagination, at first, that this boy is not a coward. Then I immediately correct: he is likely not yet a coward. He does not know. He is still at the level of trying to see if his overfed and underused soft body will respond to a command he gives it, which command should be fun to obey. He has gone around the corner, gone with his early unconscious exploration into cowardice, and I now sit here with my later investigations. I am at a good oak table. I have coffee. It is quiet in this nice house in France. Send me some money, you people. I am just like Robert Crumb, who has retired to south France, except he can draw.