“What happen?” I say.
The cops be laughin. “Air bag, you dumb fuck,” one says to me.
I looks up and see the cameras. I get kicked again while I’m bein pulled to my feet. But I dont care. The cameras is pointin at me. I be on the TV. The cameras be full of me. I on TV. I say, “Hey, Mama.” I say, “Hey, Baby Girl. Look at me. I on TV.”
7
It was the middle of July and Washington was a big bowl of soup. I was parked in the study, counting time to the air-conditioning unit in the window. I picked up the heavy black telephone and called my agent, who recognized my voice and said, without much pause, “Are you crazy?”
“No, not quite,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“This thing you sent me. Are you serious?”
“Yeah, why not? You’ll notice I didn’t put my name to it.”
“I did notice that. But I’m the one who has to try to sell it, with my name. I have to work in this town.”
“Look at the shit that’s published. I’m sick of it. This is an expression of my being sick of it.”
“I understand that, Monk. And I appreciate your position and I even admire the parody, but who’s going to publish this? The people who publish the stuff you hate are going to be offended, so they won’t take it. Hell, everybody’s going to be offended.”
“The idiots ought to be offended.” I looked over at a cluttered secretary desk across the room. On the lowered surface, below the encased medical books was a gray box.
“So, what do you want me do?”
“Send it out.”
“Straight or with some kind of qualification? Do you want me to tell them it’s a parody?”
“Send it straight,” I said. “If they can’t see it’s a parody, fuck them.”
“Okay, I’ll send it out. A couple of times, anyway.” Yul sighed. “But no more than that. This thing scares me.”
“I understand,” I told him.
My tools were in storage in LA and I found myself missing the smells of wood, glue and varnish. I missed the splinters and the blisters, the sawdust and the red eyes. More than a few times I found myself standing in the garage, imagining Mother’s Benz parked elsewhere and the space filled with table saws and planers and jigsaws and stacks of wood. I bought some basic hand tools and built a birdhouse, painted it and gave it to Lorraine for the garden. Then I began visiting antique shops in Northern Virginia, in Falls Church and Maclean and as far away as Manassas, picking up a rabbet plane here and a block plane there, hammers, chisels, mallets, until I was a collector. I didn’t want to be a collector and decided I had to build something and that something became a nightstand for Mother. While I was using the rabbet plane to make the sloping edge of the table’s top, I considered Foucault and how he begins by making assumptions about notions concerning language that he claims are misguided. But he does not argue the point, but assumes his notions, rightly or wrongly, to be the case. As I recalled his discussion of discursive formations, I stepped away and looked at myself. To watch shavings fall away from a fine piece of ash wood and have such thoughts. I could feel my sister watching me.
I was just tall enough to dunk the basketball, but not quite big enough to get close enough to the basket in a half-court game to do so. I enjoyed the exercise and the game, but not so much playing the game. I wasn’t very good at it. I would catch the ball, look to make a reasonably safe pass while dribbling, then make that reasonably safe pass and move to another spot on the perimeter. One day, a sunny May Saturday, I was playing on a court near my house. I was seventeen and feeling more awkward than I ever had or would feel again. I had been playing for about thirty minutes, making safe pass after safe pass when I found myself considering the racist comments of Hegel concerning Oriental peoples and their attitude toward freedom of the self when I was bumped into the lane and so appeared to be cutting to the basket and the ball was thrown back to me. I threw up a wild and desperate shot which had no prayer of going in; it was ugly. A member of my team asked me what I was thinking about and I said, “Hegel.”
“What?”
“He was a German philosopher.” I watched the expression on his face and perhaps reflected the same degree of amazement. “I was thinking about his theory of history.”
The order of the following comments escapes me now, but they were essentially these:
“Get him.”
“Philosophy boy.”
“That’s why he threw up that brick?”
“Where the hell did you come from?”
“What are you thinking about right now?”
“You’d better Hegel on home.”
Novel idea: The Satyricon
Let us put this affrontery behind us. This from Fabricus Veiento, and he laughed in the middle of his lecture on the follies of what we took generally to be religious belief, though he couched it in terms of particular mania for revelation and prophecy. Indeed, all lofty themes, religious, political or otherwise, were equal in their being subjects of ridicule or simple askance-looking. Indeed (again), I learned from him and agreed that the seductiveness of the verbal engagement which Veiento so disparaged was the reason why so many pupils, namely young men like myself, grow up to be idiots. That the young would rather be entertained by tales of the extreme rather than the mundane is not arguable. Pirates defeat accountants. Beheadings outweigh slivers of wood in buttocks.
Academic training catering to such vulgar taste can only promise vulgarity. Rhetoricians are at the root of the decline of Oratory — empty speech for empty heads, pretending eloquence and so redefining the very thing it has killed.
While paying Mother’s and my own bills in mid-August, I found myself nearly ready to accept the poorly salaried lecturer position at American University. I put in a call to my brother to see if he might be able to help.
“I have no money,” he said.
“She’s your mother, too,” I said.
“I can’t even see my kids,” Bill said. “I have my own problems.”
“Do you have a car?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What kind of car is it?” I asked.
“What are you asking?”
“Is it expensive?”
There was a long pause and he said, finally, “I don’t actually own the car. It’s a corporate lease. I’m incorporated. I get paid a salary and that’s just enough for me to live.”
“Can you take a less expensive apartment?” I asked. “Listen, Bill, I’ve left my job to come here and live with Mother. You could do a little something.”
“Sell the house and move her to a cheaper place.”
“The house is paid for. There is no cheaper place.”
“But selling it would give you some cash. You could get three-four hundred thousand for that house.
“Actually, Monk.” His pause was a fat one if not terribly long and I could imagine his habit of looking at the ceiling before speaking. “I’ve taken a lover.” Taken a lover was how he put it. Removed one from the closet? Conned one out of his savings? Taken a lover.
“So?” I said.
“His name is Claude.”
“I don’t care what his name is,” I told him. “What is he? French?”
“I want you to meet him.” And suddenly Bill’s voice was different, but it was more than just the sound of a man in love. His pronunciation changed. It was not quite that he developed a stereotypical lisp, but it was close.
“Why are you talking like that?”