You & Me

by Padgett Powell

Well, that too. But the pose supported the notion that you had no pants on under that beach shirt with those tails.

  These people don’t know what to make of us now.

  So let them not know. You become wooden in your old age.

  Who does? Them? They?

  No—you.

  &

  Because we don’t have to do anything unless we want to.

  Are you done with that?

  With what?

  That sentence?

  Yeah, why?

  Because it’s not a sentence, and it’s inane, for starters.

  Who hung you up in the stirrup?

  Did what?

  Twist your drawers.

  I am too tired to deal with you.

  Me too you.

  You too me. You sound like Tarzan.

  You Jane. What the monkey name? They had them a chimp didn’t they?

  Cheetah.

  They had a cat name Chimp?

  Prolley did. They was stylin’ jungle folk.

  I remember when Tarzan take a shower in his clothes in New York City and rip out of his wet shirt with a muscle show.

  A muscle show?

  He stretch like, like a cat, and his like Arrow single-needle-tailoring oxford shirt rip to shreds right there in the shower.

  Did that turn Jane on?

  You know it did. Jane in her leather skirt.

  Do we not have anything else we could think about?

  We must, but I can’t think of it.

  We should read a book, about the atom bomb or something.

  Or about the philosophy of aesthetics.

  Or about explorers, or history, some political and economic history, this is what we should be talking about instead of Tarzan and Jane stylin’ jungle porno folk with a big monkey named for a big cat.

  Did Tarzan do any vine swingin’ in New York?

  You know he musta have, acause how else could he get around except when he was riding elephants—

  —and that time he run on foot to stop Boy from going over the waterfall on the giant lily pad—

  —yeah, he run then, but allus elsetimes he swingin’ everywhere, and what I want to know is how did they, you know, get him the vine equivalencies in New York, like what—steel cables and shit? Tarzan could just happen on some loose electrical wire and swing to a new building.

  Oh man you know he could, he was a dude.

  For example, we should be discussing like the differences between Hellenistic or even Roman conquerors and Central Asian conquerors, I am thinking largely of Timur here and the path of centuries-old degradation he legacied by virtue of the policies of razing, whereas say Alexander preserved, Caesar preserved . . .

  And so you have Europe as opposed to Uzbekistan, this is your thesis?

  Yes it is. Do you think Johnny Weissmuller was a steroid user?

  Did they have them then? He was in the Olympics in 1924?

  The idea of steroids before the rise of Hitler is strange.

  Steroids is what the Nazis were all about. Bullies kicking sand in the face of six million ninety-pound weaklings on the beach.

  That shit is hard to believe.

  Yes it is but is it not the only thing that explains the US of A going into Iraq “unprovoked”? Isn’t the cordata of that game the presence of Israel and the shadow of them steroids?

  You are a wise man. Is it possible to get Tarzan movies at Blockbuster?

  You will recall that Jesse Whatwashisname irked the Nazis in the 1936 Olympics running faster than the bullies.

  Owens. We are I think confusing Weissmuller’s Olympics with Owens’s. They couldn’t have been in the same games, could they?

  Yes. My point is that today if they redid Tarzan, Tarzan would be played not by Weissmuller but by Owens. Or Denzel as Owens.

  No, it would have to be Owens, because if subs were allowed then Schwarzenegger would be Weissmuller.

  Ooo. That sounds nasty.

  That is nasty. Do you know how to get mold out of a car? I am afraid I enclosed a car under a car cover and now it looks like an orange been in the basket two months, an olive velvet interior head to toe.

  You car messed up. I guess you could put fifty-five gallons of vinegar in it and drive around.

  We could go down to Blockbuster in the vinegar and get Tarzan.

  &

  It is not for me to say.

  To say what?

  Anything.

  Then why announce that you’ve nothing to say?

  It’s just a polite filler, like the little business at the end of a newspaper column.

  I see.

  No you don’t.

  You’re right, I don’t.

  So why say you see when you don’t see?

  All right. There’s nothing for me to say either.

  But we keep talking.

  Yes.

  We must.

  Must we?

  Apparently. Evidently. I love evidently used that way.

  Remember that hurricane victim sitting inside her collapsed house saying, “Evidently I’m in shock.”

  Evidently she was.

  Evidently.

  It is hard to say what she thought she meant. The evidence that she might be in shock did not seem wanting.

  So she meant, “Obviously I’m in shock”? “Apparently I’m in shock”?

  No, she meant, “I’m in shock,” but some force made her preface it with “evidently.” Evidently my house is destroyed and I am therefore in shock.

  Well, you know, let’s say she was in shock, and the evidence of that fact might be, to her, obscure. Say she has heard about shock, and is feeling strange, with her house gone, but she is not wailing or gnashing, she’s numb, and she gets the idea that she would be wailing and should be wailing and if she’s not then maybe she’s in shock. There’s some evidence that she’s in shock, evidently.

  So the old bird is actually pretty smart, not inane?

  It is not for me to say.

  &

  Are we perfect?

  No.

  You have such a poor attitude.

  I confess it.

  You would.

  Should I deny that I have a poor attitude?

  Anyone with a proper attitude would deny that he has a poor attitude.

  But I have a poor attitude because I confess that we are not perfect. I should claim that we are perfect, indicating that I am a lunatic.

  No, indicating that you are a positive thinker.

  You would like me to be more positive?

  Yes.

  That will make it all better?

  Yes.

  All right. We are perfect. Tomorrow we will make a million dollars. My dog will never die. The dead one did not die. No more deer will be struck by cars. My intellectual fundament is not subject to measurement or decline. My soul is eternal. The hungry children of the world tomorrow will find bacon and eggs in their stockings. Rosy human potential is limitless.

  See? Is that so hard?

  No. It is not hard at all. Imbecility is the greatest feel-good power on earth. It’s why so many are drawn to it, like religion. It is a religion.

  There you go again, taking a turn for the worse.

  I must pull up out of the trees. I recant. Imbecility is a rare affliction that we are rapidly eliminating as we evolve into the perfect species on the happy planet. Any more talk out of me of the other sort and I’ll just wear the dunce cap for a bit.

  &

  I’m bopping in my head to something something the Midnight Rider.

  What?

  It’s a song. I never listen so I only know the last words in a line, if that. Something, something, the Midnight Riiiider . . .

  Why don’t they saponify hemp oil itself?

  Who?

  Well, they, They, anybody, but this Dr. Bronner outfit would be a more logical party than say Colgate-Palmolive. They recently made a big deal of putting hemp oil in place of jojoba oil in their soaps.

  The famous hippi
e soaps.

  Yes. Hemp for the hippie, you see.

  Does the hippie want hemp in everything he uses?

  That would seem to be the premise. So what I am saying is why not just take straight hemp oil and saponify it?

  Maybe it would be lousy soap.

  It probably would be lousy soap, but what’s that got to do with anything? Hemp oil is probably a lousy additive compared to jojoba oil, which itself was regarded as a magical elixir and selling aid for years. Now it’s out. Hemp is in. I’m seeing this. When the hemp soap is worn down to suppository size, you slip it up the bombay winking portal like a suppository and get high.

  Or you cut it down, like a plug of chew—

  Or they just make it in suppository form, like these little parlor soaps in baskets in B&Bs—

  Those are called parlor soaps?

  I don’t know. Novelty soaps? Demitasse?

  They have wrappers on them, pleated wrappers—

  Like candy, sort of. Anyway, the hippies just pop these hemp-soap suppositories in and go about their buzzy days.

  The oil surely won’t deliver a buzz.

  I’m thinking it won’t, but that won’t be a total dissuasion. A man can have an assful of gushy hemp oil on hand anytime a narc elects to conduct a body search. It will be a kind of countercultural chaw. The laxative value is probably high.

  They can sell it as Soap Not On A Rope.

  This is my million-dollar idea for today.

  &

  These bullet things—

  You mean our heads?

  Yes, we have to do something about these bullet things, our heads if you insist—

  What can we do about our own heads?

  I don’t know but we cannot very well sit around uncomplaining and content with powder for brains, can we?

  From an ethical point of view, or from perhaps a social point of view, you are right, we do not want to be perceived as having been content to having had bullets for brains. But from let us say a naturalistic point of view, is one really capable of repudiating his own brain? Has this been done too often in the animal kingdom?

  So you maintain we just sit around like the howitzer heads we are until we go off?

  Yes, we just calmly take aim at an enemy downrange, which is anyone who happens to be downrange, and sooner or later, according to high principles of military art or acknowledging the low principles of happy circumstance putting a victim in our crosshairs, we kill. We use our heads and annihilate. It’s easy. It’s what we are designed to do. We are bullet heads. You need to relax.

  That much is true. I do. Need to relax.

  We all do.

  All us bullet heads need to chill.

  Right on. We could hurt ourselves if we don’t.

  Bullets don’t just go off by themselves.

  No, they don’t.

  Exhale.

  Okay.

  They’ve started letting us take the yoga classes if we wrap our heads in towels.

  That is good news.

  Yes it is.

  &

  That is a man with fifty functional rain hats.

  What do he paw fink?

  What?

  A man with fifty hats makes me think of a joke about a bear. A country boy is told that a bear hibernates all winter. What do he do? the boy asks. He sucks his paw, the teacher says. What do he paw fink? the boy asks. You needed to have been there.

  Where?

  I will estimate that I heard my aunt tell this about 1962 in a rented cabin on the Crooked River in Georgia. Boozists and card players.

  Big hit, was it?

  Medium hit. They lost a large quantity of beer leaving it in a chest freezer too long, looked like ropes of intestines and brown glass in there. Good snake count outside. Rough river with some salt water in it. Nice place. These places are all gone now. At least I fink they are.

  I fink so too. My paw is dead.

  Mine too. This is one reason why I do not discredit totally a man with fifty rain hats.

  I am not following you, but I dig where you comin’ from.

  My paw could wear one of those hats were he here. I did not really know him. That is a shame. Had I to do it over again, and if he himself had fifty rain hats, I would not laugh at him for that, is all I am—

  —Yes yes, perfectly clear.

  You going to pay me, or whut?

  How much you worth?

  Four grand.

  Four grand.

  Yes.

  Okay.

  You don’t think I am worth four grand?

  I said I’d pay.

  You said, Okay. You have doubts.

  Okay, I doubt that you are worth four grand.

  Okay. Pay me.

  That is what I said I would do. No one who argues to effect the initial status quo is worth four grand.

  I made an error. I have mental problems.

  I would say that you do. It may take your four grand to begin to address them.

  That would be a waste of money. My first purchase will be a deep-fried hamburger, followed by a nice leather bag for some new toiletries. I lost all my toiletries in the misplaced-car incident, or series of misadventures related to losing the car, I should say.

  Your toiletries.

  My toothbrush and chiefly my Eveready badger-bristle shaving brush, which I had had over twenty-five years. It’s like losing a child, or a parent. When I get a good new ditty bag and a shaving brush in it I can begin to reassimilate into normal living. Hat, boots, beer come next. Redhead on my arm. Hot-air-balloon vacation, that kind of thing, snap me back into my BVDs just fine.

  Four grand will get you there?

  I should think so. Yes.

  You’ll stop this trebly warbling and trembly walking around and all the goddamn moping and incoherent expressions of your pain as if only you have any, and the incessant holding of your large face in your tiny hands?

  Yes, I shall stop all that.

  Four grand is cheap if it will stop the lugubrious flood of you.

  Well, pay up, and I’m a new me, that’s all I can tell you.

  &

  Is it better to have continuity of no content or discontinuous content?

  What is “content”?

  I use it as an irritatingly vague substitute for seriousness of purpose or meaningfulness in living, or something similarly perhaps as irritating as “content”—

  I get the drift. I would say it is better to have content without the continuity if the alternative is smooth unbroken vapidness such as the sort we practice in these dialogues every day.

  I’ll mark you down in the intellectual column. I am not surprised. I’m penciling you in right beside Bertrand Russell.

  I’ll take it. One might be penciled in beside, say, Jerry Lewis.

  Listen, I’d rather not talk today. I want to go watch old tennis players be displaced by young tennis players and the crowd weep as they retire and then start cheering for the new cocky-bastard upstarts who have sent them to pasture. This I want to do today, and nothing else. I want a cool soda water in my hand and a hat on my head and to not be overweight myself watching the elderly depart. I can from this position think gently of my own death.

  You almost got some content going on.

  I got it going on.

  You’ll look like a tennis groupie but you’ll have secret ponderment.

  No one will know.

  You’ll be a subversive in the stands, a thought arsonist. You’ll be like a Frenchman.

  &

  I’d like to see some flying dogs.

  Are there flying dogs?

  Not that I know of. Seeing some would improve my mood tremendously, though.

  I suspect it would. Mine too.

  Cheer us right up, flying dogs.

  Raining cats and dogs.

  Like to see cats bouncing off cars.

  Why’d they call combat air battles “dogfights”?

  They wanted to see flying dogs too.

  &
r />   And today, today what shall we do? What we shall do today is . . .

  Is carry placards on the street.

  For whom? For what cause?

  I do not know that. May we not just carry a generic placard for A GOOD CAUSE? Let people fill in the specifics, according to their own designs and divinations of what cause needs supporting?

  They might arguably be much more likely to actually support the cause if we let them supply it.

  Indeed they might.

  So how does our sign read? Here, I have the fat Sharpie, the white board, these handy furring strips.

  What are furring strips exactly?

  These sticks.

  I know it’s those sticks, but why are they called furring strips? What is furring?

  Can’t you just make a sign and put it on a stick and go out on the street with it and start a movement and change the world without pestering the shit out of people about a word?

  You can say “furring strip” without a clue what you are saying and be unbothered?

  Write STAMP OUT FURRING—THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIME on your placard. On mine I am going to merely put SUPPORT THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIME. This covers the spread. Let’s go.

  Let’s take some of that lemonade. It’ll be hot.

  You got it. Stamp out sugar, the moral imperative of our time.

  You is a Communist. You put that on your sign and we are both dead men.

  &

  The red Ban Lon shirt and the dark walnut clubs made the strange deformed Negro boy wielding them look remarkable.

  That is the most idiotic utterance I have ever heard come out of you.

  Why?

  Why?

  Yes, why?

  Because if the combination of Ban Lon and walnut and deformity moves you only to remark, as the word remarkable suggests, then you suffer a catastrophic failure of the imagination.

  I do. I do suffer that. So do you. Are you mental?

  I thought you said arf you mental.

  You neglect to note Negro when you list Ban Lon and walnut and deformity.

  It is a spectacle beyond the mere remarkable if a boy, white or black, is in Ban Lon with walnut clubs and deformed, to my mind.

  The remarkable knows no color, in the progressive view.

  Yes. Are you meaning to specify, by the way, a walnut clubhead or clubs with walnut shafts, because I think that—wooden shafts—is even more . . .