by David Mamet
She turned her attention to her “last meal”: chipped beef on toast, stuffed cabbage, and “junket.”
“I’ll show ’em who’s tough,” she thought. “I’ll show ’em who’s tough. I’ll eat it!”
But Chet was dead. He was dead, that hunk. Never again would he stride, “young, dumb, and full of come,” into the “Beef Encounter?” Never would he … et cetera.
We skip to chapter 12:
“But wait a second?’ Donna thought. “Hold on, here …” She took a deep breath. “This isn’t Heaven … This is Mars!”
Here follows the disquisition on the history and purpose of capital punishment.
The Trial of Ginger
The insanity defense examined. In which the defenders argue their principal acted from a lack of reason, and the State’s representative that the crime was sane.
PROSECUTOR: … you thought you were Mrs. Wilson …?
GINGER: The first or the second?
PROSECUTOR: I beg your pardon?
(Conference at the state’s table.)
Yes. The second.
GINGER: No.
PROSECUTOR: You thought you were the first?
GINGER: No.
(Conference at the state’s table.)
PROSECUTOR: Then why did you ask “the first or the second?”
(Long pause.)
(To Judge Motts) May I approach the bench?
(Counsel approach the bench. Conference at the bench. Mumble mumble mumble. Counsel return.)
How are you feeling today, Ginger?
(Pause. Defendant weeps. Pause.)
JUDGE: … may I suggest …
GINGER: I’m fine. I’m fine.
JUDGE: … if you would like …
GINGER: I’m fine.
JUDGE: … may I finish, please?
(Pause. The Judge arranges papers on his desk. The weeping stops.)
I was going to say: if you feel you would benefit from a short recess, this court would …
(Weeping begins again.)
DEFENSE COUNSEL: … Your Honor …
JUDGE: … if you cannot control your client, I shall hold you in contempt.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Your Honor …
JUDGE: … yes.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Your Honor, if it please the court …
JUDGE: I am the court. (Pause.) I am the court. You don’t have to say “Your Honor” and, “May it please the court.” I am the court. (Pause.) It’s as if you said, “Your Honor, may it please Your Honor …” (Pause.) It’s obsequious.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Beg the court’s pardon.
JUDGE: Proceed.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Your Honor …
JUDGE: … yes.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: (Consults notes.) Who can compel the human heart …?1
From the Opinion
… when will man’s nature be comprehensible? This will occur when Hell freezes over and all the little devils go ice-skating.2
Stuffed in the Airlock
Those sheets which “kept the life in the Capsule until Help arrived.” Here presented, tradtionally, in the order in which they were extracted.
The Petition
or: “The First Sheet”
The problem is this – or, to put it differently, “This is the problem” – I am “reluctant,” as the Gardener said, to put my name on anything which would – and you know that I am – disturb the status “quo.” I do not know the facts of the case sufficiently to offer an opinion other than: “It looks like many and right-thinking people are het up on both sides of the issue.” But this sentiment, although “formally” acceptable and fine and so on, fills me, as I rehearse uttering it, with a sense of incompletion and self-loathing.
So now is the time, I think, to consider, no, not the issue “per se” but that mechanism whereby we decide “that there must be two sides to the story,” and, having so decided, set out to create them.
Because, hell, are there, must there be “two sides”? I don’t think so, for:
1 I think that this dictum itself is a perfect example of one-sidedness, as we’re just meant to eat it, ex cathedra, and
2 all this froofraw about “evenhandedness” is just a bunch of crap put out there by those who gain not by peace, synthesis, rest, relaxation, no, but by there existing conflict: teachers, cops, editors, you know …
Or, or, that, perhaps, there might be “two sides,” but who is it that says it?
All the people on the other side.
For, if not, it’s just, “Let me talk myself out of the things I’ve thought, because I’m No Damn Good, and my parents are right,” or somesuch.
And now you ask me to sign up with you. To “throw my hat in the ring,” and to endorse what very well may be a position which, had I thought of it, I could support with no trouble at all. But. To be asked to enlist in the aid of one of which I must think – as you’re asking me to sign a petition against it – has to be a conflict, in which two positions exist; and, to add salt to the wound, to do it without even having time to “weigh” both sides; and plus which, which is, to me, the unfortunate, the artificial thing: to get caught in that immemorial trick bag of “There are two sides: choose one” and in all that arbitrariness – this is a situation I had hoped my age and so forth would excuse me from.
But he who flies from strife just trades the one thing for the other. And here I am lathering myself, in an attempt to escape conflict! How funny.
Now to the merits of the case. I understand them incompletely.
But, if I did understand them, or with a gun to my head, I’d have to side, not with, as you have named it, “free thought,” no, but with the Institute.
Forgive me, if you must, but, surely (I think) that is what one harvests if one sows discord.
Call me a Communist, that’s what I think.
Further, I think that petitions are just a load of crap.
Who reads them, except people who thought that way in any case.
Or their opponents just to indulge in a(n) “orgy of indignation?”
Power comes from the end of a gun.
Save your breath.
BOBBY
Tom Tiddler’s Fancy
or: Why Do Mice Like Cheese?
“The Second Sheet”
Oh Jimmy Twiddlemouse was a chipper and happy fellow that spring day.
Had his mother not fitted him out in quite the cunningest yellow knee britches and his favorite let-down flannel tartan shirt? Indeed she had. And now he fairly bursted with pride as he skipped down the lane.
“Where are you off to, rushing so lively, then?” said Ellen, the Stoat.
“I will tell you,” Jimmy Twiddlemouse replied. “But you must promise not to tell.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” squealed Ellen. “Should I prove false to my vow, may all the tortures of the Inquisition befall me. Including but not limited to: beheading, disembowelling, stones, hot oil, the rack, the pit, the iron maiden …”
This was a new side to his friend, and Jimmy stood by amazed whilst she continued.
“… the oubliette, the bastinado; torture or removal of eyes, fingers, genitals …”
He was impressed both by her choice of diversion, and by her obvious commitment to it, and her scholarship therein, bespeaking an extraordinary application.
“I had no idea,” he thought, “that she was capable of such address …”
“… the scree, the net, the ‘Wife of Bath’, the fish ladder, any and all, one or severally, administered in any order, combination or derivative.” With which she spit on her palm, and crossed it, per saltire, over that place she presumed most approximating the position of the heart.1
When All Is Said and Done
“The Third Sheet” or “Wrapper”
“People say, ‘when all is said and done,’ but who demands it?” Ginger screamed, and lapsed back into her dream of the Red Planet – into her dream of Mars.
“… in that fugue motif which,” Dr Friedma
n said, “must have accomplished something positive, as she did it so often.”
“But,” replied Dr. Mott, “yes, but, why would we assume that it was helpful? Shouldn’t we, to the contrary, assume it was other-than-helpful?” He paused. “Isn’t that the definition of disease?”
They glowered at each other across the conference table, with an enmity both unclothed and unlimited.
Meanwhile, Ginger writhed on the floor.
“Woof woof woof woof,” she barked, striving to still the tumult she perceived around her.
The two medics rolled on the floor, fighting as men fight who are neither schooled nor disposed to it, in the hope some technique or some mechanism will emerge spontaneously, grown through their rage, to grant them the victory; and wrath, increasingly, at themselves for their previously unsuspected, their new-discovered and traitorous inabilities – each discovering quickly that age-old and most practical of maxims: “Kick him in the balls.”
Ginger continued in her dream of Mars.
“Mars is far away,” she said to herself. “And I think of it in that voice which must be My Own, as it is so familiar. And I recognize it. But I only hear it in my head, I hear it when I read, and I hear it when I think of things. I hear it now saying that I hear it now, and saying that my thoughts and the Voice are the same thing.”
“Mars Mars Mars Mars Mars,” the dream went on. “This is my dream of Mars.”
“Chet are Donna are one” – here the book ends.1
Esquimaux
An interpolation
That it was happening in fact did not and could not indicate that it was, in fact, not happening, coincidentally, in fantasy – that megalomaniacal dream, of fame, of success, wealth and adulation – and did not make it any the less emotionally and psychologically pernicious.
PEDRO KHAN, BENNIGSEN: A LIFE
From Greind’s Journal:
Cf. “Eskimo pussy is mighty cold”1 by the Institute for Northern Studies, Edmonton, Alberta.
QUESTION: What was the third influence upon Shelley?
Any link, at this remove, must, of course, be suppository.
Let us, however, pick up a “worn-out tool” (Kipling, “If”).
The tool to which I refer is that of Deconstructionism.
But a deconstruction is based not upon statistical analysis, neither that “reduction” (for a fuller discussion of “reduction,” kiss my arse), but, rather, that based not unlike that elephant beloved of the ancients on whose back rested the world, and who, himself, stood four-square on the back of a giant* turtle, based, based I say, upon something firm and unmoving: upon randomness. Upon chaos, upon a criminal, nay, a psychotic aversion to meaning. Let us deconstruct (restructure) the sentence thus:
Cold, pretty Eskimo is pussy.
What have we learned?
That someone (the implied or supposed speaker, averrer, holder of opinion) finds an Eskimo “pretty.”2
It would, of course, be remarkable3 were the Eskimo not cold.
And, so, we skip on to the thrust, the burden of the deconstructed piece, “The Eskimo is ‘pussy.’”
What does this mean? Coward, craven, unmasculine, sissy, queer, gay, pansy, poufter, and so on and so on in that homophobic, illimitless* come down through and polluting the ages.4
Now: is the application of this epithet (“pussy”) related to the description of our subject as “cold?”
Is there and must there not be a link between the (remarkable) asseveration that the Eskimo is “cold”, and that s/he is “pussy”? How could there not be? It would be remiss not to remark it, it would bespeak an ignorance or partiality verging upon† the disqualificatory to ignore it.
And what would it avail?
For the truth, the truth, I say, must, and, more importantly, will come out.
It’s not only “murder” will out, it’s murder, incest, rape, and sodomy (consensual or no), fellatio, rimming and browning […]5 and, of course, drunk driving.
Now let is consider the word “is.”
Short word, one syllable, sounds like “wiz,” “jiz,” “quiz,” etc.
It is a verb. Which means “a word of doing.”
And it is a “world” of doing. It is a busy world.6
What can we say to the man or woman who “stays home?”
Not much. Not much, and that grudging and patronizing.
Therefore, “Cold Eskimo is pussy.”7
There was a fellow, hung around the igloo, and was cold. In a land where cold was not remarkable, where all were cold.
But he was colder. Why?
He was inactive.
Was he agoraphobic? Lazy? Scared of polar bears,8 and, therefore, for any of the reasons above, to be scorned?
Scorned, I say, for when has Nature, Eskimo or not, failed to avail itself of any and all societally endorsed opportunities for oppression and evil?*
On the other hand, however, is it not and always not just this particular creature, this stay-at-home, this supposed laze-about, this coward, shirker, or goldbrick, who brings to us the New Thing, which, in art, commerce, ethics or invention, irreversibly alters our lives?
A Disquisition on the Uses of Narrative
Though it is not for us to presume, it is unquestionably (or so it seems to this writer) our duty to suggest that the reader may benefit from a brief addendum which, any other than a cursory reading, be assured, will bid fair to [indecipherable]
A Disquisition on the Uses of Narrative
or: Ten Nights in a Turkish Bath
“What good is it?” or “When is the warder to come?”
So mused the Captain as the day, so long in coming as to have been thought obdurate, crept through the jalousies, throwing that strié shadow, now long, now less long, across the floor, where, had those blinds not intruded, he would have perceived – at least in the hours when the sun was low, a semblance of the outline of the Minaret, from which, yes, the muezzin called, when, yes, he, the Captain, woke from what he was surprised to learn had been sleep; for how long and often – at what the absence of his watch could not inform him had been ten, ten-oh-three, ten-oh-five, ten-twelve, etc. – had he wondered, “Will sleep never come?”, till he had come to dread it, as a state, of necessity, depriving him of a consciousness which, at the coming of the day, he would most surely and immediately require.
But he had slept. And in his sleep he dreamed.
He dreamed himself back in Hertfordshire, in that corner known as the North Wold, himself a boy, and with his uncle, fishing for the trout, the brown trout, from a bank.
“Well, let us have that ginger beer,” his uncle had said, and reached past the boy to the wicker creel.
But then, as if to sturdy himself against some unseen, some unfelt, lurch, his reach shifted, shortened, and his hand came to rest not upon the creel, but, splayed, upon the young boy’s crotch.
“Prayer is better than sleep,” he could recall the muezzin chanting such a short time ago.
And now the shadow’s progress along the floor, and to its junction with the wall, proclaimed the imminence of that time when prayer would be all, and its sequel, an eternity of nothing – the imminence of that which the vizier had referred to as the “interview.”
“Shall I be strong?” he thought.
“What are the limits of resistance?” he wondered.
“And to what end? Who would be shamed were it to be a ‘womanly performance’? It will be observed by no one save my enemies.
“No record would reach back to any whose opinion I prize, and, finally …” he thought, the concept straining the limits of his simple, theretofore unuttered store of philosophy, “… finally, I shall be no more.”
He dreamed he heard the faint half-note of a bugle.
“No,” he thought. “I shall not go that way. Death, yes. But never ‘madness.’ The regiment is long decamped. There is no possibility that they received my signal. No. No. My energies, such as remain, will be not spent in fantasy, but in whate
ver I may muster of resolve.
“First I must ask forgiveness of whatever powers may be, for my brief (I will grant myself) interregnum of cowardice. It is, of course, first, last, and always, incumbent upon me to ‘go game.’”
He thought of a warm Sussex rain, of twenty-two boys in football attire. Tired, hurt, but united in a single desire, to “help the thing along”, to “play up, and play the game,” and felt again that sharp pain in his side, which had, but not until his appointment in the long vacation, with that Belgian doctor, been revealed to’ve been a broken rib.
“Hurt, Jimmy?” Blessington had said.
“Course it hurts. Isn’t it glorious!?”
He could still smell the faint ammoniac odor of the doctor’s surgery, the subtle underlying stench of urine, which even the selfless ministrations of the Belgian Sisters could not scour away, and that how-often-thought-of indefinable scent … What was it? Lemon? No. It was not lemon. He smiled. For he knew lemon, in its many forms. From the Egypt years. From childhood, in the food, in the air, in the clothing, where the amah had put the dried rinds into the clothes press in the winter months, until the lemon came to be so much a part of him as to be perceived only upon its absence, on his removal to the school.
It was not lemon, he thought, as the doctor’s hand, supposed to be engaged in percussion of the chest, descended to his midriff, and beyond, until it grazed the first, soft tendrils of …
But wait, but wait – that sound again! Was it a bugle …?
No, the wind had shifted. It had blown the sound away. To the north? To the south? Could he frame his mind to compute its direction? And, if so, to what constsructive purpose, save the procrastination of that madness which he felt so fast approaching – the horror of which could but accentuate its approach – his clear awareness of the process of obsession both a component of and the last defense against that shameful delirium he now was sure was to accompany him into the courtyard.
