I became a trotting-horse racer in the New World. I was walking by the track and a fellow I was afraid was going to try to panhandle me or sell me drugs or a girl said, “Much you weigh, mon?” to which I said, “Say what?”
“If you not over one fitty, come scrate wit me now at dis time immediately.”
I was put on a scale and then put in a cart and a bell rang and a horse pulled me around a track and I was handed fifty, or fitty, dollars. I do this twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. My style has developed as an imitation of what I did, apparently successfully, that first time: I just hold the reins lightly on the horse’s back. No urging or cajoling. The horse wants to run or he doesn’t. I concentrate only on staying in the cart and keeping my little helmeted head level. I admire the other drivers’ more active styles, but that’s not for me, in the New World. I am called El Placido. My colors are pink and black and green. I watch my weight. The cart and the harness tack is well made and I admire it. It smells good and feels good and heavy. At speed in a race there is a good breeze in your face and there is a good quantity of mud and dirt aflyin’. It’s all good. I do not smile inauthentically in the New World. Here’s a good saying: So-and-so has enough money to burn a dead mule.
Friendlies, or family-friendly things, or something like that. I dreamed a fellow saying or writing something like this. It was of course to have meant something, and perhaps it would, or would have, were I to recall exactly what the fellow wrote or said, but I do not. I do not because my mind is shot. In the New World, as in the Old, it pays to secure a position that a shot mind does not impeach or imperil but in fact enhances and aggrandizes. Thus I keep my head very level in the horse trotting. Here’s a good saying: No human sorrow ever stopped the world.
From a fellow with one hand at a market I purchased a box of parrots. They looked up like puppies when you peeked in. I got them home and opened the four box-top flaps completely and let the birds fly out. I opened all the doors and windows. All but two birds more or less straightaway left the building. One clung to a cornice and said something very close to “Polly want a cracker.” I will be making a supreme effort to hear this more clearly if it is repeated and to find crackers here in the New World. The other bird that stayed in the house perched on my shoulder, which delighted me. He bit my earlobe very hard, I thought certainly removing it, and I flinched and somewhat swatted at him, and he fluttered and puffed out his feathers and gave a loud caw, and then rather primly and ceremoniously readjusted his feet on my shoulder and looked me in the eye, evenly, as if to say “My bad,” and he has not tried to eat my earlobe again, if that is in fact what he tried to do, or was thinking of doing. My experience with parrots is early but I see that it may prove hard to ascribe motive with them. Was it a bite of some kind of vengeance? Was he off his rocker from being boxed like a puppy? Is he in love with me and unaware of his strength? I believe him to be aware of his strength because I have seen him bite through a tin can since the earlobe adventure. Here’s a good saying: The New World may be in fact a very, very, very, very Old World.
On purchasing in the New World: as I have intimated previously, this is a curious operation. The credit cards my wife happily bounded over hill and dale with are useless, as is cash, had she any. Moreover, most strangely, outright bartering or trading also seems to be not done. I got the parrots, for example, by merely looking curiously at them through the slits in the box top, lining up their small bright eyes with mine, and eventually also lining up my eyes with those of the proprietor of the parrot business, the man sitting beside the box of parrots. He gently pushed the box toward me and gave a very slight backhand gesture near the box that clearly said, Take it away. Nothing was required of me but that I comply, and the sense was palpable that a large social error of some sort would have resided in my not complying. I take it that the parrot man can go look at something that attracts him or that he needs and it will similarly be made his, and that at some point I too will make this dismissive gesture regarding something I have that someone has lingered upon for a moment. It is a rather thrilling non-commercial commerce and I hope it works. Here’s a good saying: Do not be in too big a hurry to lick the red off your candy.
At the track they told me my silks needed pressing and that a girl would be by my place to attend to it. The next day a young woman named Evita arrived and put the place in tip-top shape, bed made, floors spotless, the silks hung on a wire, a bowl of bright fruit, giant camellias floating in a dish. She showed me around with some pride as if it were a place new to me, which it was. I said, “Mighty tidy,” which phrase Evita repeated, apparently not comprehending but liking it. She got on the bed and patted it next to her. I lay down with her and she instituted unapologetic and hungry carnality. The bed was mussed and she got up and put it to rights and left. Here’s a good saying: Apply shingles from the bottom up.
I am a member of the Country Club for Revolutionaries Only. The clubhouse is of unpainted cinder block and about twelve feet by twenty feet, a bar and a few tables. We drink but water. The members speak of scoring well or not scoring well, happily, but there is no golf course. Nor is there a tennis court or a pool or any property whatsoever outside, as near as I can tell. We toast to the revolution, we share the water, we speak of shooting well or not well, happily. There is another club in town sometimes spoken of: the Country Club for Those Who Mourn Lost Spouses. There is a latent note of derision when mention of this club is made, and an almost tacit tongue-clucking that says the sons of bitches over there (playing actual golf and drinking booze), as opposed to the sons of bitches over here (playing phantom golf and drinking water), do not know what they are doing. Here’s a good saying: What goes around comes around.
My two parrots, the two who stayed with me — Polly, usually on the cornice, to whom I closely listen for another pronouncement upon wanting a cracker, and the other, mostly on my shoulder, who seems now to tease me by feinting at my earlobe — I have noticed are colored exactly as are my racing silks, green and black and pink. That this coincidence, or very opposite of coincidence, took me so long to notice is disturbing. It forces me to wonder if the parrots who escaped were colored differently and if the non-alignment, as it were, of their colors is what persuaded them to fly away. It forces me to ponder the question of coincidence, which I see in Darwinian terms, or not: is the likeness of my birds and my colors a kind of natural selection, or is it a sign that there is a designing instrument in our midst? When I am in my silks it appears that there are three birds in my bungalow, one of them larger and less bright. Here’s a good saying: Don’t hesitate to insulate your house, especially the floor.