The Cowboy Outfit

What then is required? Light! Light! Light in floods!

–Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“Hold that thought,” he said, and disappeared into the dark part of the house. The dark part of the house was pretty much the whole house. He had a couple of kerosene lanterns in the living room, but otherwise he was living in complete darkness.

I thought I heard him going down the stairs with his flashlight into the basement. He always had this flashlight tucked into the waistband of his pajama bottoms. He was living like a hermit right in the middle of the city, holed up in his cluttered house and sitting around all day in his pajamas.

I honestly couldn’t understand what had happened to all my oldest friends, what had gone wrong, but something had, and somehow, through some apparent miracle, I had been spared. I wasn’t the slickest-fielding shortstop in the American League, but I could still find a way to get up in the morning and get myself dressed. I still owned a functioning toothbrush.

When he finally emerged he was wearing a tan Stetson Range Rider hat, a snap-button western shirt with fancy embroidery, and a pair of cowboy boots made out of what appeared to be the shimmering scales of some sort of exotic fish. I don’t know, maybe it was alligator skin. His pajamas were untidily tucked into the boots.

“That’s much better,” he said. “I wasn’t hearing you. I’ve got an attention problem lately, and I’ve discovered that sometimes the cowboy outfit helps. So, anyway, I’m sorry: You were saying?”

I couldn’t remember what I had been saying and told him as much.

“But I asked you to hold that thought,” he said.

“I’m not sure there was really a thought there to hold,” I said. “We were just talking casually. Catching up, I guess.”

“But I sensed you were going somewhere with whatever it was you were saying,” he said. “It seemed like you were on the brink of really getting at the essential truth of the situation.”

“What situation would that be?” I asked.

“This situation,” he said. “The situation in general. I sensed you had an agenda.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you might have been mistaken. I had –I have– no agenda.”

He shrugged and slumped down onto the couch, and began to absent-mindedly strum his out-of-tune guitar. “I guess that’ll have to work,” he said. “I wish, though, that you had made that clearer before I went to the trouble of rustling up the cowboy outfit.”