Disjointed Fictions (2) “Why is there sex?” All of the scientists just puffed on their pipes and shrugged their shoulders and looked at each other helplessly. Finally one of them said: “Our ignorance is atlantic.” “Could you be more specific?” Barbara asked him. When Barbara Walters went to the moon, she was accompanied by the President of the United States. It was a long trip and they had to sleep on the way there. During this time, the neurons in the pontine stem at the back of Barbara’s brain fired rapidly and automatically, generating nerve impulses that activated her forebrain. Barbara’s forebrain imposed images and narratives on the arbitrary firing of her pontine. The results of all this were dreams. On the spaceship on the way to the moon, Barbara dreamed that she was back in second grade. It was Hobby Day and she had left her stamp collection in the downstairs closet at home. Miss Gura called on her and Barbara just stammered. “I…I forgot it,” she said. Miss Gura looked very displeased and the children started to laugh. “You will never be a television personality now,” Miss Gura told her. Barbara felt ashamed and very small. She started crying because this mistake had cost her her destiny. Then the President shook her back to reality. “It was just a nightmare,” he told her. “Nothing to worry about. You’re here with me and millions of television viewers and we are on our way to the moon.” “Thank God,” said Barbara Walters. “You’re welcome,” said Curious George. PROGRESS After the bus arrived at the Port Authority I started walking. I walked to the East Side and went into Bloomingdale’s. I was trying on cotton shirts in front of the mirror in their Young Men’s Shop and trying to see what I would look like in them when I felt him touch my shoulder. “You shouldn’t wear cotton shirts,” he said. I could see him in the mirror. He was just about an inch or two taller than me. “You should really wear knit shirts. Have you ever tried on a Huk-a-poo?” He brought one over, laid it out over my chest and stomach. “This should be your size. You’re a small, all right. Try this on.” I went into the dressing room, took off the cotton shirt, put on the knit shirt. It was clingy and it had women’s faces as the design on it. He was waiting for me in front of the mirror. His own shirt was pulled up. He was examining his stomach. “That looks great on you,” he told me. “But you shouldn’t button those top two buttons. It looks sort of stretched-out over there.” He unbuttoned the buttons. “There! That looks nice. I wish I could wear these kind of things, but my belly sticks out. I’m doing a lot of sit-ups now, thirty every night just before I go to bed, but they just make you firm, they don’t really take off the pounds.” I looked at us both in the mirror. A floorwalker was staring at us. I guess he thought we were brothers. “I’ve been skipping rope also,” he told me. He was scratching his elbow. “Muhammad Ali does a lot of that. In fact, I think he endorsed the rope that I have at home. It’s called the Rope-a-Dope after him.” He and I went into the dressing room and I put back on my own shirt. It had a small mustard stain on it, from the frankfurter I got at the Port Authority. He didn’t watch me as I changed. He turned away but he kept talking. “Do you like yogurt?” he asked me. I shrugged. “Never tried it.” “No? Come on and we’ll get some frozen yogurt. I’m supposed to be eating yogurt anyway because I’m taking tetracycline for my acne. The tetracycline takes away bacteria and if you don’t want diarrhea you should eat a lot of yogurt.” He paid for my shirt. The cashier smiled at us when she gave me the package. “Of course frozen yogurt really doesn’t have that much bacteria. I think it gets killed off when they freeze it. But you’ll probably like it better than non-frozen yogurt. I think you should get banana the first time. It isn’t so sour.” I really didn’t think much of the yogurt. The banana tasted pretty sour to me. It reminded me of when I was a little kid and my parents took me to a rum distillery in Puerto Rico and there were these big vats of fermenting rum. That smelled sour, too. I didn’t get sick then – in fact I even drank a rum coke they gave us for free – but in the fall, when I had a stomach virus up at school, I couldn’t get that sour smell of fermenting rum out of my mind. So I didn’t eat much of my yogurt. He was disappointed. “You can’t just not eat anything,” he said, annoyed. “No wonder you’re so skinny. Frozen yogurt’s got less calories than ice cream, though.” He ate my yogurt too. Then we went to the parking lot to get his car. “It’s a Chevette,” he said. “See, it’s good on mileage and it’s just small enough so I don’t have to be bothered chauffeuring all my friends around. I have a lot of friends and hardly any of them have cars. They depend upon me a lot, but I’m trying to stop them from taking advantage of me.” I frowned. He put his hand on my shoulder again. “Hey, I didn’t mean you….I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Except the Bronx. I don’t know my way around there too well.” Some man screeched up with the Chevette and we got in it. “My name’s Eric,” he told me as we drove off. “Eric St. James Cornell.” “I’m Ricky,” I told him. On Lexington Avenue he went through a red light. It was more or less decided that I was going to stay with him. He had a circular apartment. Every room was connected to every other room. The first thing he said to me when we got there was: “Listen, if the phone rings, I want you to answer it and say I’m not home. I can’t be bothered with any of my friends tonight. I’m tired and I want to cook us a nice dinner. Do you like stuff cooked in a wok?” I said I wasn’t sure. “Don’t worry, you’ll like it,” he said, smiling. “It’s chicken, but Vietnamese style. There’s pineapple in it, and coconuts. You’re not allergic to any of that stuff, are you?” “No,” I said, and then I cleared my throat. I sat on the bed, which was round, too. I could hear his voice from the kitchen. He was cooking things already. “I bet you’ve been living on junk food,” his voice said. “I bet you eat all that stuff with empty carbohydrates and additives in it. Like Pringles Potato Chips.” He stuck his head in the bedroom. “You know they’ve got all these chemicals in it, don’t you?” “I like Wise better anyway.” He winked at me. Or maybe it was a twitch – I hadn’t known him long enough to be sure. “Wise isn’t so good for you, either. You should try the sesame sticks I buy in the health food store. I’d let you have some now except I had a big party the other night and everyone ate them. I’ll get some more tomorrow.” He was back in the kitchen. I started to open his desk drawer, wondering if he could hear the noise. Then I heard him tell me to put on my new shirt for dinner. His table was low so we had to sit on the floor like Japanese. The Vietnamese chicken was pretty good. I didn’t eat the mushrooms. “…So then this girl said, ‘I’ve only had three major beaus.’ And I said to her, ‘That puts you two up on The Amateur Hour, except they had Ted Mack, too.” He laughed so much he started coughing. I laughed too, a little. The phone rang. He sort of jumped up. “You answer it,” he ordered me. “Tell them I’m not home but be sure to find out who it is.” It turned out to be a wrong number. They wanted a lady named Diane. Eric didn’t talk much for a while. We had fresh pineapple slices for dessert. I figured he really must have liked pineapple a lot to have it twice in one meal. Suddenly he jumped up again. “My meeting!” he said. “I forgot. I have to go to this important block association meeting. I’m the head of the tree parent committee and I’ve got to bring the chart I made of all the trees on the block so that people can sign their names by the tree they’re going to be tree parents of.” He rushed to the bedroom and got his chart. I could tell he had spent a long time on it. It was on oaktag, and he drew the chart with different colored magic markers. “Will you clean up?” he said as he hurried out. “Sure,” I said. But he had already slammed the door. I was nervous because it was three o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t come back. I couldn’t imagine a block association meeting taking that long. Nobody could argue for that many hours about what trees they were going to take care of. I started wondering if Eric got mugged or murdered or had an accident or something. I thought of calling the police but they would have asked me what I was doing in his apartment. By four o’clock I was scared out of my wits. I began to think about the time they called me into the headmaster’s office up at school and told me what happened to my parents, and I hate thinking of that. The only pills in his medicine cabinet were tetracycline and Tylenol and I had already taken four Tylenols and they hadn’t helped. I found the number of an all-night drugstore who delivered in the phone book and I called them up. “Can you deliver to my apartment right away?” I asked the druggist. I gave him the address and then said, “The name’s Cornell.” “Certainly,” the druggist said. “I’ll send our boy out right away. What is it you want?” I thought for a moment. “Compoz,” I told him. I figured that would help me sleep. “Well, you sound pretty composed right now, Mrs. Cornell,” the druggist said. He thought I was a woman. I guess I have a pretty high voice. I guess I sounded calm too, even though I was anything but.” I laughed a little, trying to keep sounding like a lady. “Yes,” I said to the druggist. “But a little more composure couldn’t hurt.” I waited and waited but nobody came. I closed my eyes for just a minute and before I knew it, I was having this really bad dream. It was about my parents and the accident and Eric came in at the end without a head and said how he needed my head to replace his, which had been cut off. I woke up sweating bullets. The digital clock was it was after six a.m. I had no idea what to do. I put on the TV and watched a test pattern. It made me feel less alone. At seven o’clock The Today Show came on. They were just about to have Floyd Kalber give the news when I heard the door open. “Eric?” I shouted out. “No, drugstore,” a voice said. At first I thought it was Eric joking, because it sounded a lot like him, but then I realized he wouldn’t have known about the drugstore. The boy came into the bedroom. He was wearing a Huk-a-poo shirt similar to the one I’d bought, only his designs were of dancers. “You wanted Compoz?” he said. I stood up and went over to take the package from him. He was just an inch or two shorter than me. “How come you took so long?” I asked him. I opened the bottle and swallowed two tablets without water although it was probably too late. On TV Lew Wood was giving the weather. He shrugged his shoulders. I figured he was waiting for a tip. All night I had gone through all of the drawers and couldn’t find any of Eric’s money. I didn’t know what to do. The kid looked tired. He was Italian or Puerto Rican. “Hey,” I said, embarrassed. “I don’t have money for a tip and I don’t even have money to pay for the Compoz.” I thought he might get really mad, but he didn’t. “That’s okay, man,” he said. “Maybe I could make you breakfast or something,” I said to him. “I’m not sure of where things are in the kitchen, but maybe I could find a skillet and make us French toast.” He smiled. “That’s cool, man. I dig French toast.” “Yeah,” I told him. We went into the kitchen. “Of course you have to be careful not to get too many eggs, for when you get older,” I said. “Cholesterol.” He sat down on the floor by the table, unbuttoned another button on his shirt. ”My name’s Rico,” he said. I found the skillet in a cabinet below the stove. “I’m Ricky,” I told him. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE HUMANS Look: A man is writing a story. That man is me. I am a man even though I do not think of myself as a man. Most of the time I think of myself as a guy. Sometimes I think of myself as a fiction writer. If I were to be killed when my car turned over on the New Jersey Turnpike, the headline on page 23 of The Daily News would read MAN, 26, DIES IN JERSEY AUTO CRASH. If I were to be found dead and decomposing in Morningside Park one early spring morning, the headline on page 17 of The New York Times would read BODY DISCOVERED IN PARK; POLICE TERM IT ‘SUICIDE’. If I were to write wonderful books and grow old gracefully and become a member of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, the headline on page 11 of The New York Post might read WRITER HONORED AT FORUM, but I doubt it. I doubt it because of the trouble this writer, this body, this man is having writing his story. The man gets an idea for a story and begins writing it. The first three pages come off his typewriter like apple butter. Then he stops to read over what he has written. He realizes that the conception of his story is brilliant. It is clever and would be just the thing for The New Yorker. When the man realizes how good his story is, he cannot go on with it. He puts away his typewriter and the pages he has written and he remembers back to a social psychology class in college where the instructor lectured on fear of success. The man goes to the mirror and stares at himself. He takes off his glasses so he doesn’t appear so clear. “Oh, well,” he says aloud to his reflection, “I never promised you a prose artist.” Then he puts on his glasses and goes outside. Listen: One of his stories contains a character who asks the question “Can you repeat the past?” This refers to a line in The Great Gatsby, a book by another man, another body, another author. How does his other character react when he is asked this question? “You can repeat the past only on the final Sunday in October when you set the clocks back an hour for Standard Time,” he says. How does his first character react when he hears this sentence? We do not know. The story ends with that sentence. Pay attention: A man is doodling in a notebook. The pages of the notebook are light green with darker green lines. This man is doodling because he should be writing. This is what he is doodling: A rectangle with a straight vertical line under it. This is supposed to represent a placard or a picket sign. There is lettering inside the rectangle. The rectangle says THE UNIVERSE BELONGS TO THE ORGANISMS. Watch this: A man is thinking that watching videotapes can be scary. It can be scary because it is unlike film. Videotape makes people look as if they are alive. It is 12:39 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and the man is watching Chico and the Man on Channel 4. It is a rerun. The actor in the show killed himself a year back. The man watching the show is scared because the actor looks too alive. Film is much easier to deal with for scared people. Eavesdrop: These are some of the things a man says at a Halloween party: To a tall widow with one breast who is dressed like a witch: “Yes, well, I once held a Ph.D. from Harvard but he wriggled out of my grasp.” To two former colleagues who are impersonating a happily married couple: “I hear all people do in Buenos Aires is go to the movies.” To a man who has corrected his pronunciation of the noun commune: “This morning I read about a man who was fatally shot three times. Apparently the first two fatal shots didn’t take.” To his best friend of twenty years, a childhood playmate, a Jew who is dressed as an Arab and who has been discussing his apprehension over the circumcision of his yet-unborn son: “You’re making a mountain out of a mohel.” To his own reflection in the bathroom mirror: “Feeling sorry for yourself is wonderful.” Consider: A man is thinking about values. Formerly he didn’t give much thought to values. If somebody had asked him why he didn’t give much thought to values, he probably would have said, “Because I don’t think about things that I don’t think about,” or something similar in intent. He thinks of a woman who was upset because Helen Gurley Brown had fired her as an editor of Cosmopolitan. He thinks of his grandmother urging him to make her a great-grandmother before it is too late. He thinks of a third woman who loves Hummel figures more than she does trees. He thinks of an entire organization that loves trees more than it does people. He thinks of various things that he has read and various things, some resembling this story, that he has written. He thinks of mnemonic devices; of the college president telling the protesting disabled students, “You haven’t a leg to stand on”; of Einstein saying the universe is subtle but not malicious; of a singer singing a song entitled “Why Do People Criticize My Lifestyle?” on the Mike Douglas show. He thinks of his own brother-in-law, a cocaine dealer, saying on the phone to a customer: “I don’t have anything at the moment, but tomorrow’s another story.” Then he stops thinking of values and starts writing a story entitled “Tomorrow’s Another Story,” a story about values which he never finished. Pay attention:
Copyright © 2001 Richard Grayson |