The Annals

by Petronius Jablonski

  “There’s a bar we need to check out called The Silver Mine. It hasn’t changed hands in thirty years.”

  With its beige vinyl siding and white trim, it looked more like a humble home than a senescent gin mill. Only a neon light in the window revealed its quiddity. The fluid, hypnotic lilt of pedal-steel guitars and a shout from Lefty “Righty” Schlebrenski greeted us.

  “Half of the stuff he tells us contradicts the other half,” Buzzcut whispered.

  “Nonsense. The fecund evening we spent with him at Chuck’s Fourth Base could become a historical testament in its own right. Has it not occurred to you that these seeming contradictions become compatible at a deeper level? That is where a philosopher comes in. Have you not read Hegel?”

  As if to purposely avoid a confrontation with his reflection, Lefty sat at the far corner of the empty bar, engaged in his eternal and mysteriously regulated game of solitaire. Beneath a Brewers baseball cap and behind Blondefade glasses, vigilant eyes swept the cards, a televised ball game, a ten-ounce glass of beer, but ignored an inch-long cigarette ash. A truculent woman beneath a red, black, and gray beehive carded us before fetching our drinks. I blanched at the harsh lighting and unpardonable absence of a foot rail while Buzzcut lit one of my cigarettes, opened his notebook, and dispensed with all formalities.

  “Lefty, you told us about a popular bar called Robin’s Nest in the fifties. Could you have meant The Bird’s Eye in the sixties?”

  Nudged between a jar of pickled eggs and a bottle of Kesslers, my reflection stared at me. He looked restless, cheated by a promise unfulfilled. I blew smoke at him, putting a little cloud between us and giving him a ghostly pallor. I must have looked like a ghost to him as well. Seneca whispered in my ear, “What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?”

  In the men’s room I discovered a gem so precious I urinated on my shoes and a generous portion of the wall and floor before composing myself. Above the urinal, upon an ancient and inactive prophylactic dispenser, on a faded image of a buxom bikini-clad girl who “will love you for using ultra-ribbed,” some great man had inscribed something that tells us more about ourselves than the paintings in the Lascaux Caves.

  “Are you alright?” the woman asked after I returned to my stool. I put my head on the bar and laughed until I wept. Unable to transmit the revelation to Buzzcut, I pointed.

  “It’s nothing, ma’am,” he said after an unbelievably brief inspection. “Someone wrote something on the condom machine, that’s all.”

  “This is not only dissertation-worthy, it could earn me an entire chapter in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Transcribe it literatim.” Waving away his protests, I paced behind his stool with deliberate steps, avoiding the lines between the tiles. “On the essence of humor,” I said, pleased with the bold title.

  “I thought you guys was writin’ about bars,” said Lefty.

  “We cover a lot of ground,” Buzzcut said testily.

  “To philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, the quest for a common feature shared by all humorous things must seem a fool’s errand. Is it not amazing how one cryptic blatherskite can derail an entire tradition? I maintain that laughter is nothing more than an instinctive reaction to the misfortune of others. Misfortune is to laughter what dust is to a sneeze.”

  “That’s called sadism,” Buzzcut interjected in an acerbic tone, probably in the grip of some gin-induced delusion that one more night of Scrabble would have finally thawed his ice maiden. “Lots of funny things don’t involve misfortune.”

  “Consider my paradigm. Ponder the grim plight of the man who scratched ‘this gum tastes bad’ on a prophylactic dispenser. Wherefore the humor? What Aeschylus, what Sophocles could describe the torments life will divulge to him at every turn? And yet the mere thought of this poor creature chewing on a condom — perhaps, we can dream, trying to blow a bubble — induces laughter the way a tap on the knee provokes a kick. This is utterly inexplicable unless we grant that humor is an instinctive response. Compare this to the joy derived from Don Quixote, the beatings of Curly and Larry, the lamentations of Laurel and Hardy, a man slipping on a banana peel.”

  I turned to my audience. The beehive woman, her back to me, watched the ball game. Lefty shuffled his cards. Buzzcut lit a Lucky Strike and exhaled through his nose, an indicant of a kettle steaming within him.

  “Ohhh, behold the sorrows of young Bartul.”

  “I’m getting a headache.”

  “Heather must be contagious.”

  “Hey Petey, that ain’t gum in that machine,” said Lefty.

  “That machine’s empty,” the beehive woman said. “Trust me, if you guys hang around here you ain’t gonna need those.”

  “What about a loud fart?” Buzzcut said, stopping me dead in my tracks. “Those can make you laugh your head off. Where’s the misfortune?”

  “Brilliant counter-example,” I said, not conceding defeat but graciously acknowledging the often evasive nature of Truth. “Put that in a footnote. I shall attend to it later.”

  The pursuit of greener pastures sent us down the strip in search of a drinkery named Dusty’s. Buzzcut postulated that its owner, an exotic dancer in the sixties, could share an oral history spanning generations. Neon-illuminated hearths lined Packard Avenue like gaudy mausoleums commemorating fallen nights and forgotten laughter, but darkness entombed each. The contrast, in synergistic conjunction with Buzzcut’s sullen silence, disquieted me.

  “Did you know your headache positively disproves the existence of a supreme being,” I said, offering him a cigarette.

  “So it’s my fault?”

  “Your woe is a manifestation of a general premise.”

  “I know,” he said wearily. “The evil in the world disproves God’s existence.”

  “That’s not the argument I had in mind. Generations of maudlin numbskulls have clung to that withered tit. I have conceived an original disproof, devastating and brilliant. The fact that we are not filled with Styrofoam disproves his existence.”

  “What’s the connection?” he asked after a long silence. Like many men, the awesome power of philosophy both fascinated and terrified him. In our relationship, I was the candle to his moth.

  “Why would an all-powerful being resort to the frail, contrived gadgetry of brains and hearts and lungs and all the rest of the jerry-rigged contraptions that comprise us? With its bizarre design and myriad defects, the human body is like a car manufactured in Eastern Europe.”

  “What does this have to do with Styrofoam?”

  “Here is the crux. Gird yourself. Perhaps you should sit down.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “A supreme being could have ordained our functions to operate with the use of a divinely charmed stuffing. This would have the added benefit of proving his existence to us. Since no degree of scientific probing could explain its enigmatic workings, we would have to accept that a great designer created us.”

  “So if you were God you’d make living Teddy Bears?” Buzzcut said with a snort, relieved (incorrectly) that I had not disproved the existence of his beloved phantom.

  “We could look and feel the same way we do now. He is all powerful, remember? Only instead of being filled with bizarre gizmos, most of which malfunction as often as not, we would be filled with a Styrofoam-like material. The crux is actually a question of why God’s designs are suspiciously akin to Rube Goldberg’s and not more graceful, more godlike.”

  “Would we still eat?”

  “What else would we do for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

  “Speaking of bodily functions, let’s take the alley.”

  We urinated behind The Bear’s Lair, discussing the preferred agendum of a supreme designer until the unmistakable sound of vomitus splashing against the earth derailed our train of thought. Behind Dick & Debbie’s, bracing itself with one hand against an overstuffed Dumpster of ripened garbage, an elfin girl kne
lt as convulsive discharges voided the bountiful contents of her stomach.

  “The poor thing,” I said, zipping up and stepping from the shadows for a better view. As though struggling against a gale, she rose to her feet.

  “Petronius, that’s the Gobbler,” said Buzzcut, awestruck.

  “The Gobbler?”

  “Brian Waztakaluski pointed her out to me at The Pumpkin Tree. He says she entertained at Travis Olkeshevski’s bachelor party.”

  “Let me make a conjecture. The entertainment did not involve balloon twisting.”

  “That’s a good conjecture.”

  “I shall further surmise that like a plumber or electrician, she is in possession of a much sought-after skill which she exchanges for money.”

  “For a guy who hates theorizing you’re pretty good at it.”

  “A true conservative can only weep when he contemplates the curse cast by prudish enthusiasts upon the very cornerstone of capitalism, the primordial exchange.”

  “You guys got a smoke?” she said. Waist-length hair dyed luminous framed her bony face. Scrawny arms wound their way out of an AC/DC shirt stretched over a petite but pendulous bosom. If called upon to compose an appurtenance to my earlier conjectures, I would surmise, judging from the pink pool surrounding her, that the gastric distress had been brought on by the injudicious consumption of Alabama Slammers. “This thing’s harsh,” she said, squinting suspiciously at her Lucky Strike.

  “The only thing a regular one filters is full tobacco satisfaction,” I told her, dizzy with the longing of a man waiting in Taco Bell’s drive through after the bars have closed.

  “You guys horny?” She blew smoke in my face and placed her hands on curvy hips wrapped by faded and frayed jeans. “You got ten bucks?”

  I dragged Buzzcut to the other side of the dumpster. “Loan me twenty. I beg you.”

  “She’s isn’t very pretty.”

  “Pretty? She is positively hideous.”

  “Why on earth would you —”

  “At a certain point, call it the Goldilocks zone, shame and revulsion become a heady pleasure. When dosed properly, repugnance and remorse are positively intoxicating. With your twenty and my fifteen and the rest of my cigarettes I shall negotiate something most men have never even heard of. When, or if she sobers up, the very recollection may send her off to join a convent. I suggest you avert your eyes and contemplate the gruesome errands Mother Nature dispatches us on,” I said, slapping him on the back before drifting through the secret passage, remembering that Sandy and I had not met until the fall when Buzzcut and I were well nigh finished with our opus.

  Beneath the zipped-up sky the Frisbee lay next to a picnic table where the two boys sat with their parents. Sandy sat across from me and stretched, revealing several days of stubble under her arms. Sweat glistened on her face.

  “Are you proud of yourself?”

  “Very.” She stood and touched her toes, flexing slender biceps and small bulbous shoulders exposed by a tank top.

  “Before you disable us with any more bright ideas, we should commence our journey.”

  She rode my shoulders on the way to the car, steering with my head and squeezing my neck with her thighs each time I complained of back pain. The driving proceeded smoothly. My concentration, though diminished, was not congested with refuse spewed by the undertow between the conscious and subconscious. While Mary Jane gently released me from her spell, I watched fields of little golden flowers and cursed whichever evil democratic mob determined what is a weed and what is not.

  Regarding the Non-Superfluence of My Remembrance of the Night When I Did Not Meet Sandy

  With the insinuation that my recollection was inessential, the Reader exposes a breathtaking ignorance of the historian’s task, which is not to compile thrilling highlights but to build a clear window, abstaining from judgments so the Reader may undertake his own analysis. Perhaps the significance of this remembrance lay in its insignificance; perhaps it can only be appraised when compared and contrasted with other examples semiconscious phenomena. Here the Reader is condemned to analytic liberty, for the ethics of my calling prohibit me from so much as commenting on these and innumerable other scintillating possibilities. In this respect he commands my envy. If only my hands were not shackled by the integrity of a scholar and I were free to theorize.

  Had the Reader paused to contemplate the rather unsubtle point that the relevance of an event is itself a judgment, he would understand that a historian must always err on the side of inclusion, not exclusion. Note well: my remembrance is not necessarily an example of this. “Erring on the side of inclusion” is simply an expression. Like a wheelbarrow, it should not be mistaken for what it transports. (Parenthetically, the anterior point is an embryonic statement of Petronius’ Wheelbarrow, which separates the literal meaning of a phrase from its actual meaning. The folly of ignoring this distinction is pandemic. In terms of momentousness, my Wheelbarrow is the lithe Artemis nudged between the Apollo and Zeus of my Blender and Shovel.)

  If the time devoted to reading the additional pages pulled the Reader away from the symphony he is composing, his negotiations of world peace, or his unification of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, I apologize, but — as I have demonstrated in excruciating detail and with patience befitting a kindergarten teacher — I could do no other.

  I suspect, but simple decency inhibits mentioning, the actual motive lurking like a lecherous little troll beneath the Reader’s criticism. Could it be he is perturbed because the detail devoted to the allegedly irrelevant remembrance was not instead lavished upon the act of fleshy congress that occurred after Sandy extracted me from the tent on the earliest pages of Part VII? Is it the Reader’s contention that my raison d’être is his titillation? Does he not have an internet?

  Much like the instructions for changing a tire, descriptions of libidinous union need not exceed a few succinct sentences. For this there are four reasons. First and foremost, the human mind, of its own dynamism, creates more erotica than Southern California. What honest man can avow any conscious interval of more than twenty seconds where some bawdy phantasm did not dance across the stage of his mind? Diogenes, put down your lantern. You shall not find him. Even while one soars through the stratosphere of abstractions, Mother Nature takes great pains to swat him back to earth with intrusive thoughts of human pretzel-knots.

  A case in point: during my clever but innocent metaphor involving lithe Artemis nudged between Apollo and Zeus, it took no psychic to peer into the Reader’s mind. Now, why would a man turn to a great work of history for what he can procure by closing his eyes? Is this not akin to visiting Easter Island but forgoing a tour of the moai to watch Gilligan’s Island?

  Had the Reader greeted my remembrance of things past as a precious gift, a rare and intriguing story of two young historians taking their first bold steps towards greatness, I would have been delighted to gratify his request for an epilogue. Now, I do so grudgingly.

  Buzzcut, with his voluminous notes as a secondary source and his daily dialogues with me as primary, began his watershed Life of Jablonski in the fall, on which he toils to this day. A History of the Cudahy Taverns: Packard Avenue received an A- from that green-eyed, thesis-obsessed book curator. An appeal is pending with the Chair of the department. We approached a more erudite professor with a new proposal: A History of the South Milwaukee Taverns: Streets Beginning with the Letter M. Germinal research is underway.

  On the Persistence of My Memory

  With what certitude do I recall the events of my journey? With the fixedness of cogito ergo sum, that 2+2=4, and the certainty of death and taxes I remember exactly and in microscopic detail what I said and thought and felt at precise moments of my odyssey and am more than a little piqued that the Reader would even raise this question. Unleash the rabid dogs of skepticism on the virility of a historian’s memory? Release wild accusations of fallibility? You may as well pulverize the astronomer’s telescope or burn the carpenter�
�s bench. I may not recall how long I held this breath or that, but in reference to details of any greater import my memory is an almighty magnet that lets nothing fall away.

  When subjected to forty hours of television each week, forty hours of an internet, and forty hours of video games, the recollective faculty, like any neglected muscle, atrophies. O the tribulations of a well-endowed man in a land of anamnestic eunuchs, befouled with the slimy excretions of rancorous minds: suspicion from his Reader, accusations of forgery and whimsical invention. An entire civilization castrates its memory yet I stand accused of embellishment.

  (Not incidentally, this buttresses my critique of rock music by explaining why the face-slapping insult of interminable repetition is tolerated: the audience, its recollective faculty all but disintegrated, does not remember that the same phrase has already been screamed at them.)

  The single best defense of my prodigious powers of retrospection is sublimely orbicular in nature. If my memory were poor I could not have written my annals because I would not be able to remember what to write about. Indeed, the most convincing exposition of my memory is the very existence of my narrative.

  It is only a supposition, but the Reader’s prejudice against circular arguments, when conjoined to a bitter awareness of his own palsied grasp of the past, could be the malefactor plying him with defamatory questions. Perchance he once awoke in the midst of a lecture to hear a nervous teacher’s assistant deride “begging the question.” With sleep in his eyes and drool on his chin he did not bother to ask why mathematicians are permitted to argue in circles but not philosophers.

  “By what right? Are they superior to us? If your conclusion is true, why can’t you use it as a premise?” he should have said, pushing the professor’s lickspittle away from the podium, inciting the next generation of philosophers to storm the math department and take what is rightfully theirs.