I have reason to suspect that Oopsie-Daisy McGillicuddy does not wear underwear for profit. She is a not-for-profit corpus chasing me uptown and down. I like the odd red sky by the water. I like the green wrinkled pea. I toured France as a teenager and had the runs and felt the women smelled not good and the men puffed much too much when they spoke, if you could call it that, and you could, French is a language. Water harbors mosquitoes, sort of; that is obvious but not in altogether obvious ways, all the time. I don’t mind speaking the untruth when it can be had. That solid shit they hit down the fairway for centuries has been hit, and played, and now we all labor on divoted ground, ground under repair. Our heads still work, it’s the course. The course has got too many people on it, and it should not have been opened to the public. Casual water — a good one.
I defer.
I have not and will not go to war. I have not and will not make money. I have not and will not break ranks with bourgeois order. I have not and will not have much fun, or much pain, in this tour of duty we will be forced to call my life. Is it sad, this not having? It might be, if one could actually think about the situation in its entirety, but if one could do that he would likely be able to engage in escaping the bourgeois board game.
What have I done, will I do? I will pay the bills, cure the ills, put on weight, engage in non-reproductive copulations with a degree of ardor that suggests a compensating for all the other, larger not having. Then it will end and some paper in my name will be redeemed and there will be a pleasant bit of change for survivors and having not wept much they will not celebrate much. They will spend it and I am gone, paper and all. How nice an idea the funeral pyre. How nice an idea the rain tire. How nice an idea chartered bus. How nice an idea large red soda waters and bad teeth. You have this, these in life. People are essentially uninteresting to each other and yet finally alien to each other to a degree that should make us all compelling of the minutest attention we can pay. But alas, we sleep the days, sometime prowl the nights, but groggily and in fits of self-interest only.
The little boy Tod’s blue trike is in the bushes with me. Mrs. McGillicuddy is underwearless on her bed watching TV. She is slack and ope-legged and hairy and not ribald, and I do don’t want to make a noise. Sitting on the seat of the blue trike is a carton, one pint, of chocolate milk, the thick dark heavy commercial glop that can be so good once every year or so. I open it and gently maneuver the trike out and ride it down the quiet street drinking my milk. It is milk of this sort that made the darker races dark, in this country. In others, where Nestle, etc., has only so far purveyed baby formula, ivory in color, the sun or other natural forces have darkened the native. There is a cool breeze blowing across the fine sweat on my forehead as I relax into my crime and ride my stolen joyous wheels. The carton in its perdurable wax fortress will hold sufficient residue of chocolate and milk to lure in and somehow not let out a very large roach, who will die. But for now I am innocent, pedaling and waving at the imaginary crowd lining the parade route. Mrs. McGillicuddy, hirsute and hungry and pink-nightied, haunts me and gives my cheerful waves an abbreviated uncertainty and hesitation to let go the handlebars, where I’ve inadvertently, now the milk is done, gripped both hands for hard pedaling and speed.
When arrested I say only “California or bust” in answer to all questions and am held for psychiatric evaluation, which does not come to anything. I go every day down to the water. Every day to the water, down or up or over or across or proximate or nearly or mostly or delicately or boldly or trepidously or joyously or sadly or bummeduply or downtroddenly or upbeatly or stealthily or healthily or lamely or gamely, I go. I take my time.
I bide it. I tried it. I tried time out and did not like it. It’s not for me. It asks too much of you. There is the incarcerated meaning of it and of course the “free” version of it. Sapling, I mean sampling, them both in my time, I find the incarcerated a cinch to manipulate and the free a bitch. No. Impossible. Free time is like a grizzly bear of disorder, multiple weapons all on a scale of destruction so large you do not even properly, by which I mean rationally, have time — well, that is obvious, that is my point here — have the wherewithal to begin to cope or adjust or posture for its advent and its certain eating you alive, timelessly, in about no time at all — that’s free time. Just bide it. Ride hide slide it. Deride it. Chide it, elide it, take pride in it, decide within it you’ve got to abide it, confide in it, be beside yourself in it, collide with it, tempocide in it. Triking down the street on Tod McGillicuddy’s trike I should have been charged with tempocide but was charged with malicious mischief — same thing — instead.
I go at or down on the water every day, except some days. Some days I lie on it like a compass needle and point eventually north. This is a function of magnetism and of getting on the water very very easily. Surface cohesion must exceed the water’s affinity for you. The water has no real affinity for you, and prefers that you merely lie on top of her rather than getting in, but you must cooperate by gently gently slowly slowly getting on, easy. I dig that, that I dig. With your head true north you can begin to think.
In the Sahara night your clothes tend to bubble off you. This is not so for all the women on safari with you. Discretion.
I go down to the water and make arithmetic in the mud. A calculus of sneaker toe. No, I but figure the compensation due Tod McGillicuddy for the (unauthorized) loan of his trike. It was impounded at the arrest and lost. The police lost Tod McGillicuddy’s trike. What wonder we have a problem with law and order. I set my mind to repay the little squirt and it came out funny. I had a trust formed in his name and a Harley-Davidson delivered to their driveway. Its reception I watched through the blinds. Tod seemed not quite to get it but his mother was excited. She wheeled it with some difficulty into the garage, which is served by an electric door. The bike was magnificent in the sun: full rakes gleaming in their ridiculous thrust, absurd tiny sexy pearl-drop gas tank, small double-decker leather seat, and titty grips of some gauzy open-celled foam I did not, but wanted to, feel before Mrs. M. put the monster away. No questions, no looking around in wonder, just secure the motorcycle, and Tod doesn’t look at it twice. Tod, my boy.
I’m whiling away some convalescent time, simple private recovery time you need after mental incarceration. It, that, being held for want of mind, suspected alleged want of mind, is thrilling: it is like going to the circus when you are young, except you are not young and you are the circus, and the doctors and the police are very young and they are watching you perform. Thrilling, this reversal, and a bit exhausting, which is why drugs are contraindicated in cases of mind watch, in my book, my small unmanly book. They lay Thorazine on you and you partake of the bear who runs over the trainer on the bicycle and no one can ever tell from the bear’s expression if he meant to do it or not, but everyone is happy to speculate for years, generally of course informing the bear with motives of vengeance as people seeing trained bear are wont, oh so wont, to do, I’m tired. An odd tear runs from my right eye as I convalesce and glance the street for Tod.
Why I resist Mrs. M.’s wanton desire for me I do not know, except that the proposition of someone looking like Lucille Ball coming after you without the talent or the money of Lucille Ball takes some getting used to, and actually Lucille Ball, as opposed to characters played by, is right good-looking, stunning even, but no one thinks this when he thinks of Lucy in her many incarnations. I submit: after Judy Garland in Oz, the national male psyche is rooted most firmly to Lucy. This is why Mrs. M. scares me, like toys you recall you lost over the years without knowing how and realizing they’re worth a fortune now — I’d like to know how my arrowheads and coin collections for God’s sake got away from me. Who would throw those away? Would your mother throw away your arrowheads and your coin collection? What wonder they let us go to Vietnam or wherever else big-eared Texans pretend we must. Then they bitch, of course, but you’re dead by the time they discover the Communist menace not to have been altogether germane. And you are no hero yourself, you also arrow-headless coinless little fyce who have had time in your ignoble pinball childhood to gobble up large portions at the table of national humanistic bunk — you are down there at induction, coughing gingerly so you don’t herniate yourself out of the chance of getting killed in order to protect your mother, who has thrown away your toys. Well, I have a piece of advice for you, me so narrowly just on mind watch: Fuck your mother. That’s the first thing to do here, fuck your mother and get on with it. All part of why Mrs. M. has got a headlock on me and all she wants is a liplock.