No, I should not. But have you ever heard of feeling insurance?
The premiums would be impossible, the actuarial tables a nightmare.
And this is why Lloyds does not offer it. Blues insurance. Quite an idea.
Verification tricky. Who would not claim?
Precisely.
Let’s go down to the creek and stare Despair down.
All right. Fortify ourselves with some Kool-Aid? Chocolate milk? Morphine? Lip balm? A Dr. Bronner’s peppermint shower? Sit-ups? Read this article about adult-retardation hospitals being phased out of existence by progress? Put on clean underwear? Promise ourselves a shoe-shopping trip after the creek stroll?
You are incoherent, almost.
The edge of incoherence is a strong position, militarily speaking. Not incoherence outright, but the selvage as it were, affords a bidirectional moment between dissolution and precipitation, liquid and solid, that can absorb about any assault, any direction, gross or subtle, acid, base, land, sea, or air. The mind properly speaking is in a condition suggesting pickle relish, or chow-chow as it gets called. I am in chow-chow readiness for the creek. Head full of chow-chow I could go on and watch you watch the girl in the shack and not be over disturbed.
You don’t get disturbed there. You did not climb the rope with Kathy Porter’s parts in your fetid brain and a hawser burning through your crotch as the earth spun to meet you and drive your weakened knees into your chin. The true difficulty of such a maneuver is of course avoiding the terminus on the end of the rope, board or large knot. That is why you have to clear away from the rope. Getting away from a rope as you slide down one is a subtle athletic proposition, because of course as you get free of it, it is weightless and can offer no resistance to your push, so you are pushing an object that affords variable, decreasing resistance, and if you push it too hard once your weight is clearing it you will introduce into it a curve that will wave down the rope and whip the end of the rope, which is what your push is designed to enable you to avoid, into approximately your genitals by towing your buttocks through them. Thus you can see why I could no longer afford to perform this trick for Kathy Porter once she had informed her father of our inclinations in the playhouse. I could never have successfully negotiated the rope escape had I had to worry also about him staring down at me once I hit the ground in my tumescent exhaustion from the climb and fall. Can you imagine the difficulty of sticking a landing for Bela Karolyi if you’d been diddling his daughter?
You hadn’t been diddling Mr. Porter’s daughter had you?
No. I had not touched her. I did not know that was part of the plan. I just wanted a look. But since I did not know about touching, I thought looking contained the entire crime. Having looked was enough if I had been lying in the dirt under their giant live oak with giant Mr. Porter looming over me, and small meek Kathy standing by regarding her two heroes in the throes of some contest — fighting over her, were we? It could have been an interesting moment, but I at least was not man enough for it.
But today we are men enough to walk into the slums of Bakersfield and look at a poor girl in a shack.
Well, yes. It is different. The voyeurism here involves her poverty and our hopelessness. That is to say, she is truly hopeless, and we are only constitutionally hopeless, as men who cannot connect to the world of men proper, and we want something from her, from her true and honest despair as opposed to our bogus and self-generated despair.
I had no idea going to the creek could offer this much.
Kathy was apple-cheeked and freckled and hopeful, willing to entertain me in my excitement and not outright condemn me for it, even after her father gave her the finger wag. This other girl is dull in the eye. You have seen her. We have no communication with her. No one in her community is going to approach her with a proposition as innocent as mine to Kathy. That is the little moment that transfixes me when I see her. How good to Kathy I was, fumbling in the early teeth of desire, how good her father was to us both. How this girl today has none of that goodness. How the world has rotted in fifty years, is what I am saying.
There was a poor girl fifty years ago in the same way.
That might be true, but I was not there to see her. Somehow today I am. Something has changed which effects that simple, or not simple, change.
You are today a dirty old man, is part of it.
That is why I am taking a Dr. Bronner’s peppermint shower before I go out winderpeekin’.
&
I once heard Peter Jennings say “passenger manifesto.”
He was referring to what they said as they went down.
He was clever then.
Yes.
He was a man of the world, in the world—
And we are not.
Precisely.
How did this happen, he get to say “passenger manifesto” and be a national icon, if not some kind of oracle, at least a grand national-news-anchor corporate mouth, and we are nothing?
Hoyle and Darwin, and lard-and-hair sandwich. Peter Jennings never teased his mother with lard-and-hair sandwich, and you never would have said passenger manifesto, and there you have it.
Thank you for wrapping up another conundrum of our times.
De rien.
I would certainly like to have some ice cream.
&
What are these things here?
I’ve never seen them before. Is it things or one thing? Where was it?
On the porch.
Let’s get out of here before they or it explodes.
I am terribly becalmed by a washing machine. Is everybody?
Not everybody, surely, but most.
Had I the affluence of Peter Jennings I would put a dedicated sleep washer next to my bed, just run a low-water light cycle, no pollutants.
You could always toss in, say, your underwear at the last minute, the clothes you discarded before bed. To be practical.
You could. You could transfer them to the dryer if you got up in the night, and put poppin’-fresh BVDs on in the morning. Change your whole outlook on life, the sleep washer.
You could connect it to the bed itself and get a vibration quotient. The dryer heat could be used to toast the bed in winter.
Man. This puts a whole new spin on “white noise.”
But we don’t have the affluence of Peter Jennings. A washing machine is not a frivolous appliance for us. We would not survive were we to say “passenger manifesto” on national TV. We would be subject to the cruelest of ridicule, dismissal, were we momentarily so irregularly lucky to have been employed in the first place.
So we best resign ourselves to imagining Peter Jennings sleeping next to his dedicated washing machine, his bed gently shaken, gently toasted, snapping into his fresh panties at the top o’ the morning for another day of lucrative suit mouth. Just resign yourself. He delivers the manifesto, you’re the passenger.
I’m too depressed to go to the creek now. Looking at the girl is utterly beyond me.
Let’s just sit here.
Let’s.
She’ll understand.
She too is a passenger.
Bakersfield is a passenger of place.
Without a manifesto.
We are without a manifesto, not on the manifest.
Let us just sit here.
Yes.
&
In the grove of trees down there is a table and a barber pole. You place your hat on the pole, and—
I do?
One does.
Why?
Would you allow me to tell you?
Prosecute your voyage.
One places his hat on the pole and a barber will emerge from the woods and give one a haircut. It is an old barber who has cut the hair of certain famous deceased men. Now he is enfeebled and shaking so badly that you will need repair to another barber for corrective attention to your new and sad-looking do.