Ten
ROZ WROTE that she’s feeling better. She sent me a whole list of three-word lines, including “crack the nut,” “drop the pants,” “shake the stick,” and “learn to dance.”
What do I know about sex? People taking their clothes off and fucking their way around the house? Fifty Shades of Marvin Fucking Gaye?
Roz was — no doubt is — a wonderful sexpot. We used to pour each other tiny glasses of Tyrconnell and put them on our bedside tables. Tyrconnell was our sex drink. Let me tell you, the Irish did a lot more than save civilization. The first time she sipped it, Roz described how it tasted. Her first sip, she said, tasted of primeval forest. Then the second sip: slate patio. Third sip: patio furniture with slippery steps down to the garden. Fourth sip: meat, meat with heavy, dark green vegetable matter on an earthenware platter. Fifth sip: swallowing the platter. Sixth sip: recovery, bisque-colored envelopes.
Sometimes along with the Tyrconnell we used to read each other Victorian pornography, skipping the incestuous parts, which isn’t easy, because there is an astonishing amount of incest in Victorian pornography. Why is there so much incest? Aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers — was sex with near relations really the be-all and end-all of the era of Palmerston and Disraeli? When it isn’t incest, it’s birchings and floggings and nuns and priests. Nunnery stories can be good, though. Dirty doings in the confessional can be good. And harem stories can be good.
• • •
I FEEL LIKE a traveling sprinkler that’s gotten off the hose. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m unprepared. Good for me. I could make some extra money this summer shrink-wrapping boats. I should do that.
I want it all to seem easier for me than it is. I want people to think that I’m a fountain of verbal energy. I’ve never really been a fountain.
There’s an excellent children’s poem about a drinking fountain. The poet’s name is Marchette Chute. I was fascinated by the drinking fountains in high school, with the warm, suspect water that came up past the steam pipes. There was usually some flesh-colored gum lying like a tiny naked baby Jesus in the drain. I was thirsty, and yet the water burbled up and just barely crested past the germ-laden part.
At a mattress store where I worked briefly, there was a drinking fountain that offered very cold refrigerated water. I used to stay up all night writing poems and then go to work hauling mattresses around, and to stay alert I would put a Reese’s peanut butter cup in my mouth and start chewing it and then take a sip of water and the cold water would mix with the chocolate and the sweet peanut butter and the two would help each other. Cold fountain water through a Reese’s cup, nothing better.
I used to want to start a museum of the water fountain. I saw an old water fountain from Paris in an antique store. I wanted to amass a collection and open a museum that would be listed in one of those books of eccentric museums. You’ve seen that book, Little Museums? Because when you consider it, a drinking fountain is probably the most important single piece of plumbing that you drink from without a glass or a cup. Can you think of any other piece of plumbing that allows you to drink from an arch of cold water, when it’s functioning correctly at least? I think you’d be hard pressed. “I turn it up,” writes Marchette Chute. “The water goes / And hits me right / Upon the nose. / I turn it down / To make it small / And don’t get any / Drink at all.” A classic poem.
After I first met Roz, I called her up at work and said, “Roz, I have the most terrible hangover, do you have any recommendations?” She said, “Yes. Go to the drinking fountain and bend down and go into one of those altered states of hypnotic drinking, where your throat just goes ng, ng, ng, ng and you think you’ll never breathe again but will simply drink at this fountain for your whole life.” I said, “Okay, I’ll try it.” I called her back and said it had helped. That’s how we got together.
• • •
WHAT IT COMES down to, for the working poet, is this. Either you can go have the eggs Benedict at the place with the copper tables, and it’ll cost you nine dollars, plus a big tip — sometimes as much as five dollars in tip if you occupy a whole booth for a long time, wearing a big pair of headphones when it’s crowded — or you can make a sandwich for yourself, and wash an apple, and cut some carrots, and eat it in the car, and it’ll cost maybe two dollars. You can eat five times as many meals if you don’t go to the place with the copper tables.
On the other hand, it’s helpful to be around people. You can listen to the jokey fat men flirt with the older waitress.
“More coffee, my good sir?”
“Yes, please, precious, and on second thought I’ll have another side of home fries.”
“Aren’t you a big spender today.”
“I don’t pay alimony and I don’t pay child support. I’ve got all the money in the world.”
“How nice for you.”
I think my brakes are really going. They’re soft and they make a scraping sound. My penis is soft and it doesn’t make a scraping sound.
What I miss about Roz is of course her lady parts and her pleasure frown and her funny talk. She has a kind of genius for coming up with odd but friendly words for things. She’s a namer of unnameables. But the main thing I miss is how nice she is to people. When her friend Lucy’s father died she made a card and baked her a loaf of cranberry bread. She’s full of ideas about what other people would want. She’s the opposite of selfish. Her unselfishness was a revelation to me. She was, and is, full of this quality that I’ve come to take seriously, which is lovingkindness. Lovingkindness, all one word.
I tried for a while to get her to come to Quaker meeting with me, because in many ways she’s an extremely Quakerly person, but she didn’t want to. Her mother is Irish Catholic and her father is Russian Jewish, and in her case that mixture resulted in an incredibly nice human being who has no interest even in a religion as disorganized and uncodified as Quakerism.
I feel sad that we’ve become so formal with each other now. But that’s what happens. We’re more relaxed with each other via email, which is a bad sign.
• • •
HELLO MY TINY MUMBLES, welcome to the Chowder Hour of Razorwire and Shiny Festal Splendor. Glad you could join me. I’ve found a new chord on the guitar and with it I’ve written part of a song called “Love Is an Amazing Magnet.” I’ve also embarked on a song about doctors, inspired by Roz’s radio show. I stayed up late rhyming “Nexium” and “thyroxin,” and I wrote way too many verses, some of which are:
The doctor’s in
The nurse is hot
Swab some cotton
Cause you’re getting a shot
Tell me a symptom
I’ll tap your vein
I’ll pap your smear
And scan your brain
Crap in a baggie
Piss in a cup
Another appointment
For a follow-up
Tubes in your pipes
Wires in your head
Keep you alive
Till you’re practically dead
The chorus is “Oh babe, I can’t wait, for you all day.” I’m going to play Roz some of my songs, and then she’s going to say good-bye to Harris the doctor and get back together with me. Because I know her. It’s time. But what if I try and it doesn’t happen? Then I’ll be sad — much sadder than if I hadn’t tried, because it really will be the end.
Eleven
THE GUITAR LESSON did not go well. My fingers didn’t want to cooperate and I had some trouble with tuning. I tightened the E string too hard and snapped it — classic stupidity — and the teacher, who was a pleasant aging hipster sort of gentleman, showed me how to replace it. That was helpful. He also showed me “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the proper way to strum it. That was a good song to start with, because Dylan’s singing is sometimes a little shaky — not as shaky as mine, but he’s no Harry Nilsson. I asked the teacher who his favorite singer was. “That’s an impossible question,” he said. But he said he liked people like Steve Winwood.