Nonculture

Boom boom, bang bang, lie down, you’re dead.  That’s what the song said, and that’s how I felt.  I was in the Fletcher Memorial home.  Or, I would have been, had my name been Fletcher.  Instead, I was in a home that hadn’t earned a name yet.  You need to be dead and remembered to be a memorial, and neither my house nor I had achieved that yet.  In attempts to avoid it, I filled the home with loud music and cats and left the windows open so that traffic and airplanes could come in and try to drown the silence.  But nothing could drown that silence; it was impervious and methodical.  Like the inaudible drip of an IV.

I might have been pacifying myself with the drink, but that’s only what the psychiatrist would say.  I wasn’t pacifying anything; I was feeding something.  A better psychiatrist would have said that.  A psychologist might have even gone far enough to help me find out what it was I was feeding.  But who has the time to endure that kind of therapy?  A Psychiatrist is the way to go, especially if you serve as your own.

“Nobody is ever completely happy,” Dave said earlier as we sat up on the porch, “it’s the human condition.  If you don’t have something to eat you up, you’ll find something.  Then you’ll fight it all the way.”

We agreed to the obvious and the cliché, which the beer helped flow easily.  We further agreed that we both had it made; we didn’t really have that much to worry about.  But we talked out of one side of our mouths while feeding the other, like wood chippers spewing logs into mulch.  We were starving for substance, but couldn’t find the nutrients to fill us.  We let the excrement of what we digested fall right out of our mouths.  Patting ourselves on the back with nothing to burp up but the rum soaked breath of what we fought all the way, neither rich nor dead nor remembered, we were left to our own devices of exploration.

And that’s what the song said; lie down, you’re dead.  Boom boom, bang bang.  The words seemed funny but sad to me, which is how the truth always sounds.

“Gotta get home to the wife and kids,” Dave said, topping off his tallboy can, crumpling it in his hand and tossing it off of the porch and into the dumpster that took up half of the yard.  “Thanks for the smokes.  We on for the re-screening of Picking Up Steak this weekend?”

“No thing on the smokes, and yeah, we’re on,” I said, and he pulled off in his SUV.

After he left, I decided to ring up the rest of the usual suspects.  I wouldn’t mind getting out.

“I can’t go out tonight, in the doghouse,” said the first one I rang up.

“Can’t go out tonight, work,” said the second.

“No can do, baby on the way,” said the third.

I’d struck out.  It was me, the cats, and the IV.  I cursed the oncoming evening for what it was becoming; I cursed getting up in the morning for what it would be.  I moved the ashtray, smokes, glass, and phone off of the porch and placed them at the typewriter.  I went back to the screen door and latched it, placed the mini ironing board upon it, set the plastic bin of Christmas wrapping paper up against that, and a large golden pot up against that.  Fort Knox.  I had a cat that would do anything to escape.  So far he’d chewed through screen and several layers of chicken wire and wood to get out.  I had to admire his spirit, but if he made it through this contraption I’d finally have to drown him in the bathtub.  If the raccoons didn’t chew him up first.

At the typewriter, I load the sheet of paper and take a drink, and then decide to refill the drink.  I make sure I have enough stock.  Good to go on the rum and soda and smokes.  I sit back down. 

The paper looks at me and says,

“You’ll never be remembered.”

I sit back for a second looking at it.  Did this page just taunt me?

I say back to it, “If I fill you up with the right combination of words, words that people love or hate, even words that people fight over, I’ll be remembered.”

“But they will be indifferent,” the little page says back, “the words and the people who read them.  You can’t even figure out what makes you hungry.  How you gonna feed something to somebody else?”

“Well, if I write, I’m feeding you.  And feeding you is coming from me, right?”

I swear that blank page just smirked at me, sitting there, loaded and empty.  All high and mighty and white.  It fluttered a little in a breath from the ceiling fan, then said,

“Right.  What’s that you’re drinking there?”

“Rum.  What of it?”

“An empty drink.”

“What of it?” I ask, feeling like a broken record.

“You’re feeding yourself with nothing, so you got nothing.”

“Look at you!  A blank page analyzing me!” 

I realized I was yelling at my typewriter, which was ridiculous.  “I am arguing with a goddamn piece of paper,” I say aloud.

“But I could be your greatest creation,” the page jests back.

“You could be kindling,” I tell the pulp. 

“I could be a love letter or a suicide note,” it says.  “If you were capable of either.”

“You could be the Great American Novel.”

“Let’s not get out of hand here, Black.”

I rip it out of the machine with a quick jerk.  It pulls out of the roller with a vvwwwhhip, and it rolls itself a little in fear.  I hold it up,

“You’re pretty uppity for something that’s about to reduce its visible surface space by about one thousand percent.”

“Oh, that’s going to help,” it pompously flutters.

I roll the piece of paper into a ball, a real tight little ball, and throw it on the floor, which shuts it up real quick.  The cat comes out from somewhere and begins batting it around.

“How you like that for a creation?” I say, and load another piece of paper. 

But I realize that asshole piece of paper was right; I’d probably never be remembered.  It’s funny, like smashing your knuckles into glass while breaking into your own house only to find the key above the door later is funny.  It was also sad, like rescuing your pet from a raccoon only to have it attack you later in a rabid, frothy rage is sad.  But that can also be funny, if it happens to somebody else.  It’s true.

The next page doesn’t speak to me, which is preferable.  It’s quiet as my IV.  But neither do the keys of the typewriter; the whole contraption is dead.  Or my fingers are.  Does it matter? 

I watch the cat bat around the paper for a minute, finish a smoke, then go to refill my drink.  The faucet drips, slow and methodical like everything else, somehow still louder than the cars below and airplanes flying overhead. 

I time my pour to three drips.  There’s an art to a good drink.  First, you need plenty of ice.  Don’t worry about skimping on the ice to get more liquid in the glass unless you’re at a bar.  In a bar it’s perfectly acceptable to complain about too much ice.  At home, load up the ice.  Next, pour a touch of your mixer in first, then no less than three fingers of booze, no matter what size of glass.  I’d suggest four or five for a tumbler, or a juice glass if you aren’t a professional.  Then top it back off with your mixer.  The object is to surround your subject with distractions.

While pouring in the kitchen, I hear a CRASH!

I know immediately what it is.  The goddamn cat has knocked over the container and the ironing board and is no doubt already through the screen.  I don’t stop what I’m doing; at least one of us is getting out tonight.  So much for Fort Knox.

I pour the drink and stir it – you must stir it, and look through the small kitchen window down at my neighbor’s yard.  A chaise lounge is set out where the beautiful wife suns herself.  A hose is half coiled where they play with and bathe the dog.  A grill is at the side of the garage where the husband cooks July 4^th burgers and corn on the cob.  I’d watched that wife many drunken afternoons, sunning in her bathing suit, tan, living The American Dream.  The trophy wife.  I’d masturbated to The American Dream.  Boom boom, bang bang.  We all have.  In silence and unremembered, we all have. 

We might as well lie down and be dead, pretending we’re all a Fletcher; worthy of remembrance and a memorial.  Then maybe, just once, there wouldn’t be a morning to curse.  There’d be no dreams left to fight and we could eat mulch until we burst like firecrackers.