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 mention 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.