He flew to Las Vegas for the purposes of playing in the World Series of Poker and to play guitar with the group Van Halen but neither of these ventures worked out. He fell back on—he was a little tired of the expression to fall back on, but it was handy, and his mother had used it a lot in instructing him on how to live — he fell back on house painting for two weeks after that. The Las Vegas thing did not work out at the Milledgeville airport, where he had no identification to get on the plane with. A plane is not a Greyhound bus, he is fond of saying, or was, he no longer is. God his shoes are thin and rank and shitty-looking. If he could steal a pair of stout shiny shoes it would be a way of feeling better about things. He wonders where he is in the water column of history. He feels he is sideways to a lamb and talking to the worms. A school girl kicked him with a pair of these shoes they wear that have contrasting stitching like big dental floss, and he would like a pair of those, very effective weird-looking shoes. “Excuse me,” he periodically says to himself, “I have to go kill someone now.”
Mao
When we see the baby, it is swaddled in a tight charcoal wool coat that suggests Chairman Mao. It is held gently in place beneath the seat of a buckboard by the hobnailed boots of the coachman. From the baby’s vantage the seat above it is a maneuver of wood and steel, and the boots of the coachman are towers of oiled leather. The heel of each boot holds a fold of the Mao coat to the buckboard floor. The jarring and jolting of the buckboard produces a finally pleasant aggregation of shocks that affect the child with the sopor of morphine. It is a not unhappy baby.
When the baby is older, and all of these impressions that can be are assimilated — when all of the available archival film is properly on sprocket and in register — the arrangement of the seat over the baby will come to suggest the underside of a flowerbox of the window variety. The springs on which the seat is supported will suggest in his memory ice tongs. This conceit is enriched and a bit confusing for there are actual ice tongs in the buckboard proper, and the baby will soon enough see them. There is ice in the buckboard. The coachman is the ice man, or would be, but that he is the ice woman. The baby’s perspective up the towers of oiled leather does not at first permit it to know that it is the ice woman.
When the ice woman judges that the baby is large enough to ride on the seat without falling off, she puts it there, propped in a corner and held periodically by her hand. From the seat proper the baby can see the ice and the tongs and the ice woman delivering the ice. The tongs look angry and weird, but because he has seen the similar springs under the seat, holding the two of them up, the baby thinks of them as friendly things. He will come in time to see the tongs as not unlike the jaws of giant ants. But for now he is but a bouncing baby boy looking like a small bag of potatoes in a tight woolen bag on a buckboard seat. He has a small red hat.
His pursed red lips, like a cherry in the flat expanse of his potato face, make the ice woman want to eat him up. She does indeed kiss him with a wild unmotherly hunger that makes cannibalism tenable as she does it. She forces herself not to eat him up. He is grateful without knowing it, and likes her very much, knowing it. He comes to be her baby. Whose baby he really is, who she really is — in short, all of the film we do not have in archive — we do not know and we do not care.
We would like to instruct you not to care either. If you are the sort who must care, and must know things, we would politely suggest that this entertainment, if that is what it is, is not for you. The baby is not for you, nor hobnailed boots holding it down safely to the jarring wagon floor, nor the baby potatoed up into the hard corner of the seat in the freezing air about the ice wagon, its frozen lips a happy juicy red that the woman kisses with unmotherly abandon because she is not the mother, perhaps, or perhaps she is, or perhaps mother or not she just can’t resist kissing the red lips given that all she has in her life is cometh-ing with other people’s ice the livelong clodhopping day, watching her horse’s road apples fall into the road and steam there and be rolled into by the wagon wheels — none of this is for you, and we give you your money back, no need for the door to necessarily hit you in the back on your way out, Jesus Christ Almighty. You will misinterpret, if you were to stay, seeing the woman dismount the wagon periodically and go behind a tree and virtually outright neck with the baby she gets so hungry for him. This affection is relieved with plenty of proper nuzzling, and it all tickles and delights the baby, who is for it the happiest baby alive and who ever was alive, but you won’t be around to observe that. No, you will have bolted on behalf of the baby, to report crimes against humanity, and to watch an important show on TV. We know that one of your insurance policies is about to expire, and we are not going to tell you which one until it is too late. You have chapped our ass, and the baby’s ass, and the ice woman’s ass, entire. Get out. Your entire existence is predicated on chapping ass. You exist only to mint the dull coin of your bourgeois outrage, and to hand out this coin to the disinterested bystander, whom you presume to be the population of the whole world (now that you have “pluralized” it and “globalized” it). You are some kind of beggar in reverse, a beggar handing out moral alm no one asked you for. Let us tell you something: you can get away with that shit down here, but if we find this begging going on in Heaven or Hell, either one, there is going to be real and final trouble for you. We will stuff that coin and all the public-opinion syrup that lubricates it up both your ends. You will come to realize what nice guys we were to let you cant on down here and sing your jingles and dance your outrage jigs so happily.
Leave us and the baby Mao and the ice woman alone.
Yeltsin Dancing
To Putin I have given over everything but the nuclear suitcase. As dense as it is, I feel pretty light on my feet with only the suitcase on my hands. I look good with it, my white hair and the red suitcase. It got stuck under the bed and I popped a latch off extracting it, regrettable but the other latch holds. The landlady was demanding the rent and I had to move quickly.
Moreover, I have found the nuclear suitcase to be a superior chick magnet. Westerners in the know assure me that it can hold its own, a nuclear suitcase, with a BMW. I have replaced the cyanide vial in the handle with a 3-pack of condoms. I consider this a practical post-Cold-War accommodation and not a sacrifice to the original genius of the design. I am more likely to contract an STD than I am to have to deploy the suitcase.
I have learned to dance and believe it to be good for my heart. I do not subscribe to the platform of cardiovascular benefits said to accrue from exercise, I take simple and uplifting joy, the heart’s first and final food, from the radiance of the disco ball. In attempting to sing along with some Bee Gees cuts I have come to appreciate their talent. They are, in their lyrics, pure exotica to the Eastern mind, rather the aural equivalent of Levis. They can reach higher registers than even Michael Jackson as a child did, I believe.
Putin is fucking up, or not, I pay it no mind. He is a strong man, so if he is fucking up, it is strong fucking up.
Yes, Putin is a strong man, but the delicacy of his fingers worries me. My own are thick pink wretched protuberances, manly. His are. . his are lady fingers, which disturb me, which disturb everyone, if I may presume, on a man. But let us not dwell on the matter of Putin’s adolescent-snake fingers and my fat pan-sausage fingers. After all, I have the suitcase.