I pushed a brick out of the way to see them clearly even though she had turned sort of privately to Julian, and the brick glided all the way out of the room into a lampshade in another room. Bobby’s mother had died last week and the house was starting to show it. Nobody mentioned her. I had liked her though I never said anything to her. She wore these pastel dresses with belts and had a permanent in her hair. I don’t know what she died of; she had not to my mind been sick and she was not old-looking either. It was in a small way like hearing June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson had died — you couldn’t believe it but it probably happened. I was sitting there considering asking Bobby if he had buried his mother in the crawl space under the house like John Wayne Gacy when I looked over and Phyllis was on her knees against Julian on the sofa, grinding herself into his face, and Julian was crying and trying to suck on her, blubbering and slurping like the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a phrase I had never appreciated until that moment. He was a lonelyhearts and Phyllis had figured it out and she was giving him a tune to beat the band. It looked like a lot of fun. Her nipples were the color of the bricks, several of which were hovering near the action, like flies. Julian’s eyes were the same color red from his crying. It honest to God looked like he was crying those bogus tears of joy you hear about. I was ready to cry a little myself. Crying a little is a good thing if you can turn it off.
This had never happened before, congress between members of the Stone Club during a meeting. The shirts-off thing had been political and we had been supposed to carry on like nudists. Now that the shirts-off thing had been repudiated, we were apparently free to act like reasonable people, so Phyllis mounted Julian and the rest of us watched and shooed bricks out of the way and wondered what Bobby had done to Mrs. Thames.
I got up and called a state park in Georgia I had been thinking about and booked a cabin for a whole week for $264. Some outright solitude would do me good. With outright solitude you can do nothing, just lie there and not get up, or get up and lie back down, all day, or all night or any other stupid misuse of time because there is no one to look over your shoulder, if that is the right expression, and that is another thing about solitude, no need to worry about the right or wrong expression because you needn’t use any expressions at all.
I was just sitting there having put the phone down, thinking fondly of the prospect of my week in my cabin, which I knew was a good log cabin built in the thirties by the CCC except they had been fitted with new stoves and central air, when Janey Farrington slipped into the chair behind me and took the phone cord and got it around my neck and started to make like she was strangling me, and this was a trip because I think she was dwelling on Phyllis and Julian’s thing and on Bobby and what he did to his mother too, plus being mock strangled was fun, and I turned to her and kissed her and she asked if she could go with me to the cabin without effing everything up, as if she had read my mind, because even if she heard the whole my side of the conversation with Georgia Parks or Reserve America dot com or whoever it was I didn’t see how she knew what the cabin meant to me, maybe I had been talking out loud there. Anyway she was going wrenk wrenk with the cord, delivering these sound effects like the Psycho slashing scene a little, and these noises of exaggerated struggle like she was working hard to choke me out, and I got a brick-colored nipple in my mouth and started crying, and it felt really really really wonderful, I can’t understand it, I can’t understate it.
It was clear to me then that Bobby was going to have trouble getting anything done officially with the World Stone Club meeting. This somehow served him right, though to that point I had had no quarrel with Bobby at all. I got the phone away from Janey, who was now kissing me all “Love Me Tender” style, like she was in high school, and called 911 and said, “I am at the Robert Thames residence on Leesville Road, and we were told that Mrs. Thames died but we wonder if an investigation should not be made, no this is not an emergency, no I am not calling another number because I have called this one, thank you, good-bye.” I returned Janey’s kisses at that point. She said, “What did you do that for?” I said, “Because it feels good.” She said, “No, call the police.” I said, “I meant calling the police feels good but I see you thought I meant kissing you back feels good and it is too much work to straighten it out further and does it matter anyway, they both feel good,” and we kissed some more without any more questions.
We were perfect idiots in a chair, happy. She tasted good to me, and I must have tasted good to her, as impossible as that sounds. The room was dim and I couldn’t hear anyone else anywhere in the house and I did not see any bricks. Janey Farrington has irises that are very small and aquamarine. Her skin is fine and white. Her eyes look like some kind of seawater seen the wrong way through a telescope. It would not last for long, but it would last for a bit.
The Imperative Mood
Put that nice blue and white pitcher on the marble washstand. Determine your sock size. Play favorites. Have some. Be all you can be and all anyone else can be. Fall back and regroup. Be for heroes. Try not to fail. Recall your mother. Forget your father. Please release me. Let me love again. Trust that I will be okay.
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.