–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana
The other night I dreamt I was in a boat floating in thick fog, talking to God.
Look, He says to me, I’m just hoping to catch a few fish. I didn’t come down here to listen to you bitch.
I wouldn’t think you’d need to fish, I said.
Very few people in this world need to fish, He said. But it just so happens I like to fish. I’m a sportsman, and though, yes, I could technically cheat –at this as well as at anything else I damn well please– that’s never been my style. I don’t much go in for flashy stuff and intervention. The fish don’t know who’s on the other end of the line, and that’s the way I like it. The truth is that if they did know, it would only make it all the more difficult for me to catch them. Do you think for one minute that if those fish down there knew I was in this boat they would eagerly impale themselves on my hook just to make me happy? I can assure you they would not. Unless and until somebody wants or needs something virtually all of creation runs from me. Oh sure, there are nuts –there are always nuts– but I think you know what I mean. You’re all fish to me –understand, of course, that I’m now speaking metaphorically, but that’s the way I’ve always thought of you– and when I go fishing it’s virtually always bad news for somebody. And I’m terribly sorry, my friend, but today that somebody is you.
And with that God pushed me out of the boat.
–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana
I can’t deny that I am offended when certain individuals question my credentials as an authority on the sedentary lifestyle. God knows, yes, unquestionably I am offended. I say let these critics come here and gaze upon me in my unlaundered pajamas, as I slump here on the floor eating Tootsie Rolls and composing lazy and, quite honestly, uninspired monologues to my dog. I lack the energy or attention span for television. I can’t be bothered by the weather, understanding as I do that in my present state it can have no bearing –I’ve no intention of setting foot outdoors any time soon, implying as such an adventure would that I have some destination in mind, something compelling enough to drive me up the stairs for a change of clothing. Not likely. Not likely at all.
I suppose, though, that eventually –rather soon, actually– it will be necessary for me to venture out for a new supply of Mountain Dew.
Time doesn’t stand still. It never does that. It dribbles along the floor like a capsule full of light, throwing off odd little wobbly shadows. When the arm of the turntable drifts slowly across the black surface of the record and settles in its cradle the silence sounds like a car alarm bleating across the muffled fields in the darkness.
Haven’t moved. Sitting still. Some curiosity about that pile of books tottering in the corner. Looking for a moving surface, line, origin. Backspace. A clear dream would leave you even more confused than when you blank-screened your way through every flat stretch of darkness, with only some vague whoof booming in an otherwise empty fog.
Fred’s infatuated, you recall hearing some stranger say, and you try to imagine the rest of the story, to no avail. Outside your windows the night is full of people with big plans, lashed to each other by the lunging insecurity of a big city. Lost luggage. Elder clutter. Monument. Why, I oughtta….hang on a second. Hang on a second….No, sorry, it’s gone. Lost it. I felt an idea creeping along the margins of my brain.
I cannot the American say ‘piece of cake.’ Go far, I driving. Car has problem, slow, then not moving. My mother she mooing, with me unhappy. Things are problem. We must going a great distance away, life to do over. Beginning new, with family there in restaurant. Town is small. Wife she wants the television, things to sit.
I miss my days as a juggler, when I had a little bicycle and a wagon and I went from town to town, camping under the stars at night and entertaining in the streets and town squares every day. Eventually, however, things changed and it became necessary for me to make some adjustments in my act. The city fathers wanted me to include a message, to lecture the local children about bicycle safety and kindness to the elderly. Before too long I was instructed to include information regarding the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, and to warn the children about the perils of unplanned pregnancy. I was told that I was no longer to camp out under the stars, and eventually the little town banned juggling altogether and I was conscripted to work in a local dental office.
I get disturbed when clothes disappear. Everyone does, I know, but it’s not like I can, you know, tolerate much disappearance. I have no wardrobe, dammit. I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. And I have to be honest with you, I never expected to see Mark Trail’s girlfriend –actually, I think they might be married now– in a bikini. I was just so taken aback.
I never learned how to say "These things don’t matter." I never learned how to sit still, to stare hard at one thing. I did, however, learn how to sit up all night, rocking in place, my mind a buzzing test pattern, the static symphony that follows "God Bless America" when the little local radio stations sign off for the night. But if you sit there on the floor for too long and for too many nights you start to lose touch with some of the old, vague stirrings, good feelings, what’s it’s like to walk in the quiet country, the stubbled fields dusted with snow, the hard gravel frozen under your feet. Walking the railroad tracks, the sky layered and gray and settling low over the landscape, the impressionism of late November, the muffled silence, a distant skreeing of a crow wobbling black above the trees. The murmur of a creek rippling through a fractured stretch of open water, the flat clanging of a railroad crossing further out in the country.
The ceaseless rustling of grain elevators, the farm houses settled down the long driveways in the falling darkness, the sound of your own breath, the rough rasp of prairie grass and corn stubble, dog clattering in the ditches, the tiny snap of a shotgun someplace far off in the country, the distant scrape of a jet plane sounding like a moon-dragged, storm-tossed sea. Spires on the horizon along the town’s edge, water towers, gas signs looming. You start to lose touch with those things, with the person you once were in a long ago place.
Now, back on the floor, Coltrane at his fattest and most mournful. Thick. Screwing higher, more lost, more puzzled, more hurt. Jimmy Garrison playing the bass like a talking drum. In the fog there is an automobile wearing a shroud, a casket wrapped in a flag, a large animal breathing through its nose, sinking deeper into the mud.
The board of directors retreats to a backwoods resort, where they will drink all weekend and brainstorm names for funeral homes. Forest Park. Shady Oak. Final Rest. Comfort Care. Sounds too much like a nursing home. Meadow Wood. Paradise Valley. Ever Rest. These names, they will all agree, sound too much like cemeteries, so for a time they will simply make up names, fictional families and hyphenated partnerships with some suggestion of quiet, appropriate dignity: Birnstead and Mather. Hambrooke and Pierce. Junius-Peavy. Aarden and Sons (The double-a was a nice touch and would gain them prime placement in the Yellow Pages). The board of directors intends to buy up funeral homes in small towns all over the Midwest, and then to franchise them back to the yokels. Death was a growth industry in these towns –death and methamphetamine– and even as they drink themselves insensate they are secure in the knowledge that their plan is a sound one.
