You & Me: A Novel

by Padgett Powell

  When in fact you are not, but you badly want to be, out there—

  Exactly. Make us a drink if you will.

  I will, my brother. I will go to the porch and make them on the washing machine, which I like to do, and from there I will call into the house and say, “I am out here making drinks,” and even this little echo of “out there” will gratify us a bit and keep us from being depressed and terrified.

  We are geniuses.

  We are not taking the pills that give you the Tantric ejaculation.

  Grossoroni. I want clean gin with juniper berries in it. I can see a juniper berry rolling on the Sahara like a BB on a sixteen-lane highway. You remember when that joke was “four-lane” highway?

  You remember when we thought the idea of Chernobyl was bad?

  I have no idea what a juniper berry actually looks like. I picture a blueberry crossed with a caper. Rolling across a dune as tall as Fate.

  As what?

  Nothing. I’ve lost it.

  When I make the drinks on the washing machine, there is always a tiny bit of sand on the lid under the glasses and I swirl the liquor and hear a faint gritty noise and it makes my day. At this moment “out there” is precisely under the glass in my hand.

  You have lost it too.

  No contest.

  We must have our desires, even if they are not desires.

  Perfect smart retard! We should coin something so objections will abate if we go public—like “smard.”

  If I had access to a child I would buy it some marbles today. I would please the little bastard with something lovely and love the little bastard for being pleased and being lovely itself, the little bastard I would by that point not be calling a little bastard but would in fact by that point be in love with. My brain has become like unto a dog’s, I think.

  A dog is smard, very smard.

  The essence of smard.

  &

  What about airplanes?

  What about them?

  As Out There.

  Well . . . yes, but a rather populist view isn’t it?

  I don’t mean the Out There of being out there in one, alone and free and silent and all that horse. I mean the hangar, the clean huge spotless concrete floor. The plane with no grease on it. The brilliant dials and gauges. The firmitude of the wings. The good paint. The spanking new of things or the seasoned worn-glove old of things, nothing shitty. You know, a small plane in a good private hangar. I feel out there just imagining myself next to a plane like this.

  We are not going to own such a plane.

  No.

  So it’s an impossible exclusive Out There, for us. The fuckers.

  True. Still: red and white cub on that squeaky weird-ass pebble-grained epoxy flooring, man.

  That floor that has like Pollock in it?

  Yes.

  That is Out There.

  For us, though, we are going to be in a field of used Huggies. The Wal-Mart parking lot at noon for us. There we are, dazed from trying to figure out if the bananas are plastic or real.

  &

  So we are agreed that the best thing would be to be out there on the desert in a clean Piper Cub in the good worn leather seat fingering the rich knobbery.

  Assolutamente.

  It is dark today.

  Looks like hurricane.

  Can’t be.

  I know.

  We need a child.

  I know. But we won’t pass the adoption profile.

  Maybe in Kenya we would.

  Where the qualification is Mzungu?

  I would not think it more demanding than that.

  I don’t know—the Brits leave their footprint. Could be a pedophile-quotient assay right up front.

  So what will we do with this child, assuming we are not proven pedophiles, or if the Kenyans do not care that we are if we are?

  I want him to grow to be strong and reserved and smart and take this chainsaw here, which I haven’t yet purchased for him, and slowly cut this house apart and burn it for warmth until we and it and everything else in it is gone, and he then, the child, is a stunning athlete and goes to Harvard and speaks well of his two Mzungu uncles whom he could not have done it all without, and he has one of those impossibly beautiful sets of brilliant white teeth and smiles a lot while saying this about us, and we are rotting happily in the sand out there by the little twisted clean Piper Cub wreck in the sand. That is all I want.

  Will he not be sad?

  He will not.

  Why not?

  I don’t know.

  Su visión es mi visión.

  For me it comes down to this: We were not sane men, but we were better than many. Our boy will somehow know this. It will sustain him. He conquers the NFL and then Harvard Medical and he knows that he was put there by two old pops who had nothing, least of all pretension. Out of our agreeable daft arises his untaught heroic. That which we so lacked. That is what I want.

  What’s his name?

  Stanley. They have named him Stanley and we want to change it but, agreeably daft, we can’t.

  Okay. God am I tired.

  I’m tired too, Helen.

  What?

  Nothing.

  &

  Do you see a problem with my outfit?

  Have you lost your mind?

  No. I just thought that was funny.

  It is.

  Do you recall when we wanted to go to the liquor store in the orange jumpsuit with an electrical cord trailing out of it all the way back to the house?

  Vaguely.

  I recall that we thought of this, and that it was funny or had some point, but now I don’t know what the point was, or the humor, exactly.

  &

  We need things. Let me rephrase that: we need things.

  I got the first one but not the second.

  Things would give us some distraction.

  Bass boat, bearer bonds—that kind of thing?

  Well, I am thinking, yes.

  I thought we wanted house fire.

  We do, but I think we want house fire only because we don’t have good things that really provide the distraction we need.

  Wives, jobs?

  Yes. Maybe.

  All the things that the people we despise have that we see make them despair, we don’t have, and now we want them?

  Well, maybe. All we do is talk and sit here. We have nothing. Those people are humanly realized and all that, and I grant you many are fucked up, but cannot there be a few who actually do have it going on? Like, real and smart days, and fun and accomplishments—you have to admit we do not effect that, sitting here doing our thing. Pondering plane wrecks in the desert as a good thing.

  I heard about this football coach fired twice in the same year by different teams.

  Well yes and what about being one that would, say, win the national title twice in three years, have a wife, and children not arrested for anything, have his organization like a little military under him, redeem some criminals by giving them some legal violence to channel their evil intent through, lovely second home like on the beach to keep you from wanting to burn down the primary—don’t you think that might be all right, if you could get it?

  You are talking about being a real man.

  I am.

  You will be on medication and having retrograde ejaculations before the week is out you keep this up.

  &

  I need a saddle pommel. To steer me through the house. Not a horse or a saddle.

  Just a disembodied pommel?

  Exactly.

  We could get you one of those four-wheel walkers and put a set of longhorns on it. You couldn’t go through a doorway but you’d be stylin’, stuck there.

  I just need the invisible saddle pommel to hold on to. I think it’s what the rappers are doing when they hold the crotch.

  Is your hand going to be out in front of you as if you are riding a saddle and holding the pommel?

  No. This saddle pommel is in my mind, and I need it
.

  I need a shovel to lean on, in my mind only. Also I need to shave the hair off the back of my neck.

  That is another kind of want. Unless you purport to do that too with the shovel.

  I know it. I don’t.

  I wish the masseuse team would get here, speaking of it.

  Put on the jumpsuit and go to the liquor store.

  Not without my pommel. I can’t.

  Did you hear about the kid who punched out the school-bus driver?

  Did he suspect him of pederasty?

  That was not intimated in the news report. What was intimated was that an innocent man was attacked by an early irrigible thug.

  By what?

  Incorrigible.

  You said irrigible?

  I did.

  What does that mean?

  I don’t know, I’ve never heard it.

  It sounds like it should be a word, though.

  It does.

  The irrigible thug. Almost the opposite of the incorrigible thug. Is corrigible a word?

  I think not.

  Then the word for what we mean by corrigible should be irrigible.

  Irrigable almost works too.

  That is a word.

  Scrabble master! Give me the jumpsuit and the cord. Plug me in. I’ll get Nordic Blue vodka and be a dandy there and back.

  I’ll hold my pommel if the brothers mess with me. I’ll say I’m looking for that irrigible punk that slapped the pederast bus driver and that I aim to seduce him with my suit and my juice.

  There is a fine line between humor and stupidity.

  The line is finer all the time.

  The bird doesn’t change.

  The bird does not change.

  &

  Be all that you can be.

  Talking bout.

  Hongry jack.

  Pluperfect.

  Tell me a story, Susie Q.

  Release me and let me love again.

  You never loved.

  That is true.

  Nor I.

  Why is it?

  Why are we deformed?

  We do not know. Can the deformed see their deformity?

  The club foot yes, the club heart no.

  Tender is the meat.

  I loved the name and the actual thing called the trundle bed as a child.

  I made beds with my mother. She taught me the pillow-case thing where you hold the pillow with your chin. It fascinated me for some reason, not knowing immediately why she had bowed her head like that.

  What about that weird inversion method, the inside-out grabbing of the corners of the pillow—

  No, that is perverse. I won’t have it. That is like sock bunchers. Socks should be pulled on I don’t care if it stretches the shit out of them, not rolled on like a rubber or something, a rubber on your foot, I won’t have it.

  There is a lot we won’t have.

  There is a lot we don’t have.

  And that by God is the way God wants it. Let’s shut the fuck up and not pray.

  Tang. What a drink that was.

  Do you recall Fizzies?

  That was a pioneer, a harbinger of fast-food badness, headed our way.

  Is it tenable that our bad appetites are what is actually ruining the world?

  Whoever controls the sugar in its cheapest form will control the world. Fifty-five gallons of corn syrup can do more to move and control people than fifty-five fifty-five-gallon drums of oil. The oil can be all gone and people will be fighting over sugar.

  You’ve gone all pundit on me here.

  Pundit. Pundit. Pundit. How much pun could a pundit pun if a pundit could pun pun?

  Give me the suit. I am headed for the store. The days of the professional drinker are over but we air not whupped yit.

  &

  We are perfect.

  Pluperfect.

  Pretorian guards of the sane.

  I wish dinosaurs had made it.

  No shit.

  Don’t criticize me. Did you hear that hot rod or whatever the fuck that was last night? What was that?

  Loud machine.

  No shit.

  We talking in circles, we hear where we coming from, but we talking in circles.

  I hope my deodorant does not fail.

  How long before we smell like old men?

  Last year, dude.

  Probably so.

  Have you seen a lot of chicks coming through here?

  Well, it’s not the Manson ranch, I’ll grant you that.

  Do we not fantasize about having the Filipino houseboy to make the drinks?

  We do?

  I do.

  You don’t want him for anything other than the drinks, though?

  Maybe run the vacuum a little. What would that hurt?

  That would not hurt a thing.

  I love Lucy.

  What?

  That was a bizarre and seductive thing to name a show. I do love Lucy.

  Lucy who?

  Lucille Ball.

  Who does not?

  People don’t actually look at her since they were told to laugh at her. She was hotter than—

  Yes, it is a widely unknown known fact.

  The Widely Unknown Known. I want a show called that. Why don’t we storm Hollywood with our genius?

  I don’t know.

  Do you know that the destruction of animal habitat, say that of the gopher tortoise, is now largely in the hands of licensed professionals? That there is so little natural habitat left that the predation of it is reserved to the nonprofit profiteers instead of the real profiteers?

  That makes sense but I confess I was not aware of it.

  The government of India for example shoots the tigers now.

  Is Sunday school still a going thing?

  Say what?

  It must be, to some extent, but I hardly see how.

  Look, if people can be taught still to think “socialized medicine” is the worst thing that can happen, particularly the ones already on Medicare and Social Security, they still make their kids go to Sunday school. Don’t you let the BB of your brain roll too far down the razor-blade highway without realizing that.

  You’re on fire, dude.

  If I could I would get up right now and watch Jack LaLanne and exercise with him.

  Do you think when we put on the jumpsuit and head for the liquor store we are perversely channeling Jack LaLanne?

  When the brothers contest our passage we’ll wish we were.

  I have never seen anything like those fingertip pushups. They don’t even do that in cartoons.

  Okay, look. Take Lucille Ball and Jack LaLanne. Throw in Barney Fife. Is it not the case that things were once richly conceived and executed by authentically talented people and that today we are pale not even imitators but just goofballs somehow making money going through the motions?

  Cancel the subscription!

  When I take that multivitamin without eating something I feel a little upchucky.

  &

  God I feel small and dumb.

  Anything happen?

  No, the usual small and dumb.

  When, what I want to know, did we feel otherwise?

  When we were five.

  When we were small and dumb.

  Yes, then we did not feel small and dumb.

  Were we large and smart?

  I would say we were expansive and hopeful, full of cheer and possibility—we were then the way one is supposed to be as an actualizing human adult, who is actually small and dumb.

  It’s almost a kind of Darwinian irony, isn’t it?

  I have no idea what a Darwinian irony is, but I think you have struck the nail on the head anyway.

  That is so gratifying, as opposed to striking the thumb.

  Or missing the nail.

  What is that called, when you miss and hit the wood and leave the impression of the hammer face in the wood?

  That is called a . . .

  Like, a rose, a . . .

>   We are senile. Look, here’s one right here in the windowsill.

  I’m calling it a rosedale.

  It is not a rosedale.

  I know it is not a rosedale. I am senile, not retarded.

  You are small and dumb. We are small and dumb.

  Eggzackly. We have proved our point.

  &

  You know that thing where you are supposed to live every day as if it’s your last?

  Yes.

  Do you have any idea how that is actually done?

  No, not beyond that we don’t do it.

  I know we do not do it. But were we to do it, what would we do?

  I have no idea. I sense we have talked about this before.

  It frequently troubles me.

  Okay. Let’s do it. Live every day of our lives as if it’s the last day of our life. Let’s see, that’s LEDOOLAIITLDOOL. It sounds like a Mayan god.

  Get me a ticket to Tahiti!

  I want to live on the Left Bank! Speak French well!

  Paul Newman!

  What?

  Fucker in a race car drinking beer and not getting fat, every day of his life like the last, ledoolaiitldool! And handsome as shit! So handsome he did not even run around with women!

  I want to put my own shoes, or someone else’s come to think of it, in an advancing tide of lava!

  Ivory-billed woodpecker! Get me to that swamp!

  Dancing classes in the afternoon!

  That’s expensive.

  Yes, but.

  True. Ledoolaiitldool, how quickly one can forget. Sitting here on a budget. In fact, it’s living every day of your life as if it’s your last dime. That’s what it really is.

  I saw on TV last night that Jack Nicklaus has three grass tennis courts at his house. Different kinds of grass.

  We do not have any grass in the yard. The yard is ten by ten feet.

  Jack can ledoolaiitldool, we can’t—

  No, that is not true. That is the conventional failure everyone makes. We can ledoolaiitldool, even without resources, if we can figure out what it really means to ledoolaiitldool. It does not involve going to Paris if you cannot go to Paris. It must involve doing what one can do.