&
Take me down to funky town if ever you were going to. Dude.
Tell me about it.
I’ve about had it.
Me too.
I’m done.
The battle is over.
Not lost, or won, but over.
Amen. Take me to funky town.
Can’t you see that, at the gates, or there waiting for Charon to tie up and watching that dog closely — is Cerberus on the boat, by the way? — saying, “Take me down to Funky Town, my man.”
I ’magine he has heard some interesting disclaimers and directives.
Would I be naive though in thinking that “Take me down to Funky Town” might be a first?
I’d risk it.
What about “I missed you, Charon, you poo poo train.”
Bold.
&
After the main thrust of an activity or a venture, should one continue to give it ghost thrusts?
As a dog does?
I suppose.
Well, the air thrust is funny, so I suppose one should do it if one is prepared to look like a dog humping air. For the comedic benefit it confers.
But the ghost thrust is otherwise worthless, you think? Not likely to sire anything?
What enterprise do you have in mind?
Well, I was thinking of us. Sitting here. I think we have asserted ourselves and that now maybe we are ghost thrusting.
We hardly asserted ourselves.
Of course. But we had our say.
We had our say.
What is left? For someone — one’s daughter is the most acute vision — to come in and see our effects, our toys, books, how many or few shoes we had, observe how worn or not worn or pitiful they are (in my old man’s case it was about nine or seven pairs of Hush Puppies identical except in their pastel colors), put it all in boxes, locate the will, call some people. Feel sad. Go on her way.
Doesn’t it seem that there used to be more to it?
How so?
Maybe, more to people? So that a passing had a larger moment?
I suppose even now there is the occasional grandee. You saw Kennedy.
I mean on a private plane, though.
I know what you mean.
You, for example, you even wrote some of the books this daughter will handle. What is she to do with them?
She should put them with the others and be done and they be gone. I was a sad sack, end of chapter. I like that. I’d like a drink.
I would too. We can at least not be maudlin on top of everything else.
Let’s air hump to the store and repair our spirits.
My little red shorts is already down.
&
We are not yet dead.
Not yet.
At some point we will stop joking about it and become afraid.
We do not have the inner resources that would allow us not to be afraid.
Nor the wit to say that we are in the antechamber to heaven.
We will be in the wheelchair circle, where we said we would never be.
That expression where the mouth is frozen open — is that what is called a “rictus”? Is that Latin? Does it refer to that expression only after death? What is it called when one is in the wheelchair circle still alive enough to drool?
Dude. Slow down.
I was getting worked up.
I could tell.
My Latin was now like sixty years ago. Caesar did not do rictus.
Caesar got out neatly before the wheelchair circle.
I cannot see older civilizations having had wheelchair circles, somehow. What did they do with the old folks too afraid to die?
They stoned them. They never let them collect in corrals, high-profit corrals that offer dignity.
We really are going to be afraid and we really are going to also refuse to die and we will give away the free dignity and purchase the other expensive dignity. I have known this since I could not even put my dog down. Fortunately he was eaten a little bit by a cougar.
That was a stroke of luck.
You are telling me.
About the Author
PADGETT POWELL is the author of five novels, including The Interrogative Mood and Edisto, which was nominated for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Little Star, and The Paris Review, and he has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.
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