Typical
Authors: Padgett Powell
Stories
Padgett Powell
For Pat Strachan
Letter from a Dogfighter’s Aunt, Deceased
Mr. & Mrs. Elliot and Cleveland
The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping
Truth is greatly overrated, volition where it exists must
be protected, wanting itself
can be obliterated, some people
have forgotten how to want.
—Donald Barthelme
Y
ESTERDAY A FEW THINGS
happened. Every day a few do. My dog beat up another dog. He does this when he can. It’s his living, more or less, though I’ve never let him make money doing it. He could. Beating up other dogs is his thing. He means no harm by it, expects other dogs to beat him up—no anxiety about it. If anything makes him nervous, it’s that he won’t get a chance to beat up or be beaten up. He’s healthy. I don’t think I am.
For one thing, after some dog-beating-up, I think I feel better than even the dog. It’s an occasion calls for drinking. I have gotten a pain in the liver zone, which it is supposed to be impossible to feel. My doctor won’t say I can’t feel anything, outright, but he does say
he
can’t feel anything. He figures I’ll feel myself into quitting if he doesn’t say I’m nuts. Not that I see any reason he’d particularly cry if I drank myself into the laundry bag.
I drank so much once, came home, announced to my wife it was high time I went out, got me a black woman. A friend of mine, well before this, got in the laundry bag and suddenly screamed at his wife to keep away from him because she had
turned
black, but I don’t think there’s a connection. I just told mine I was heading for some black women pronto, and I knew where the best ones were, they were clearly in Beaumont. The next day she was not speaking, little rough on pots and pans, so I had to begin the drunk-detective game and open the box of bad breath no drunk ever wants to open. That let out the black women of Beaumont, who were not so attractive in the shaky light of day with your wife standing there pink-eyed holding her lips still with little inside bites. I sympathized fully with her, fully.
I’m not nice, not too smart, don’t see too much point in pretending to be either. Why I am telling anyone this trash is a good question, and it’s stuff it obviously doesn’t need me to tell myself. Hell, I know it, it’s mine. It would be like the retired justice of the peace that married me and my wife.
We took a witness which it turned out we didn’t need him, all a retired JP needs to marry is a twenty-dollar tip, and he’d gotten two thousand of those tips in his twenty years retired, cash. Anyway, he came to the part asks did anyone present object to our holy union please speak up now or forever shut up, looked up at the useless witness, said, “Well, hell, he’s the only one here, and
y’all
brought him, so let’s get on with it.” Which we did.
This was in Sealy, Texas. We crossed the town square, my wife feeling very married, proper and weepy, not knowing yet I was the kind to talk of shagging black whores, and we went into a nice bar with a marble bartop and good stools and geezers at dominoes in the back, and we drank all afternoon on one ten-dollar bill from large frozen goblet-steins of some lousy Texas beer we’re supposed to be so proud of and this once it wasn’t actually terribly bad beer. There was our bouquet of flowers on the bar and my wife was in a dressy dress and looked younger and more innocent than she really was. The flowers were yellow, as I recall, the marble white with a blue vein, and her dress a light, flowery blue. Light was coming into the bar from high transomlike windows making glary edges and silhouettes—the pool players were on fire, but the table was a black hole. All the stuff in the air was visible, smoke and dust and tiny webs. The brass nails in the old floor looked like stars. And the beer was 50¢. What else? It was pretty.
She’s not so innocent as it looked that day because she had a husband for about ten years who basically wouldn’t sleep with her. That tends to reduce innocence about marriage. So she was game for a higher stepper like me, but maybe thinks about the cold frying pan she quit when I volunteer to liberate the dark women of the world.
I probably mean no harm, to her or to black women, probably am like my dog, nervous I won’t get
the chance.
I might fold up at the first shot. I regret knowing I’ll never have a date with Candice Bergen, this is in the same line of thought. Candice Bergen is my pick for the most good to look at and probably kiss and maybe all-you-could-do woman in the world. All fools have their whims. Should an ordinary, daily kind of regular person carry around desire like this? Why do people do this? Of course a lot of money is made on fools with pinups in the backs of their head, but why do we continue to buy? We’d be better off with movie stars what look like the girls from high school that had to have sex to get any attention at all. You put Juicy Lucy Spoonts on the silver screen and everybody’d be happy to go home to his faithful, hopeful wife. I don’t know what they do in Russia, on film, but if the street women are any clue, they’re on to a way of reducing foolish desire. They look like good soup-makers, and no head problems, but they look like potatoes, I’m sorry. They’ve done something over there that prevents a common man from wanting the women of Beaumont.
There are many mysteries in this world. I should be a better person, I know I should, but I don’t see that finally being up to choice. If it were, I would not stop at being a better person. Who would? The girls what could not get dates in high school, for example, are my kind of people now, but
then
they weren’t. I was like everybody else.
I thought I was the first piece of sliced bread to come wrapped in plastic then. Who didn’t. To me it is really comical, how people come to realize they are really a piece of shit. More or less. Not everybody’s the Candy Man or a dog poisoner. I don’t mean that. But a whole lot of folk who once thought otherwise of themself come to see they’re just not that hot. That is something to think on, if you ask me, but you don’t, and you shouldn’t, which it proves my point. I’m a fellow discovers he’s nearly worth disappearing without a difference to anyone or anything, no one to be listened to, trying to say that not being worth being listened to is the discovery we make in our life that then immediately, sort of, ends the life and its feedbag of self-serious and importance.
I used to think niggers were the worst. First they were loud as Zulus at bus stations and their own bars, and then they started walking around with radio stations with jive jamming up the entire air. Then I realized you get the same who-the-hell-asked-for-it noise off half, more than half, the white fools everywhere you are. Go to the ice house: noise. Rodeo: Jesus. Had to quit football games. There’s a million hot shots in this world wearing shorts and loud socks won’t take no for an answer.
And un
like
high school, you can’t make them go home, quit coming. You can’t make them quit playing life. I’d like to put up a cut-list on the locker-room door to the world itself. Don’t suit up today, the following:
And I’m saying I’d be in the cut myself. Check your pads in, sell your shoes if you haven’t fucked them up. I did get cut once, and a nigger who was going to play for UT down the road wouldn’t buy my shoes because he said they stank—a nigger now. He was goddamned right about the toe jam which a pint of foo-foo water had made worse, but the hair on his ass to say something like that to me. I must say he was nice about it, and I’m kind of proud to tell it was Earl Campbell wouldn’t wear a stink shoe off me.
Hell, just take what I’m saying right here in that deal.
I’m
better than a nigger who breaks all the rushing records they had at UT twice and then pro records and on bad teams, when I get
cut
from a bad team that names itself after a tree. Or something, I’ve forgotten. We might have been the Tyler Rosebuds. That’s the lunacy I’m saying. People have to
wake up.
Some do. Some don’t. I have: I’m nobody. A many hasn’t. Go to the ice house and hold your ears.
This is not that important. It just surprised me when I came to it, is all. You’re a boob, a boob for life, I realized one day. Oh, I got Stetsons, a Silverado doolie, ten years at ARMCO, played poker with Mickey Gilley, shit, and my girlfriends I don’t keep in a little black book but on candy wrappers flying around loose in the truck. One flies out, so what? More candy, more wrappers at the store. But one day, for no reason, or no reason I know it or can remember anything happening which it meant anything, I stopped at what I was doing and said, John Payne, you are a piece of crud. You are a common, long-term drut.
Look
at it.
It’s not like this upset me or anything, why would it? It’s part of the truth to what I’m saying. You can’t disturb a nobody with evidence he’s a nobody. A nobody is not disturbed by anything significant. It’s like trying to disturb a bum by yelling
poor fuck
at him. What’s new? he says. So when I said, John Payne, you final asshole, I just kept on riding. But the moment stuck. I began watching myself. I watched and proved I was an asshole.
This does not give you a really good feeling, unless you are drunk, which is when you do a good part of the proving.
I’ve been seeing things out of the corners of my eyes and feeling like I have worms since this piece-of-crud thing. It works like this. I’m in a ice house out Almeda, about to Alvin in fact, and I see this pretty cowboy type must work for Nolan Ryan’s ranch or something start to come up to me to ask for a light. That’s what I
would
have seen, before. But now it works like this: before he gets to me, before he even starts coming over, see, because I’m legged up in a strange bar thinking I’m a piece of shit and a out-of-work beer at three in the afternoon in a dump in Alvin it proves it, I see out the corner of my eye this guy put his hand in his pants and give a little wink to his buddies as he starts to come over. That’s enough, whatever it means, he may think I’m a fag, or he may be one himself, but he thinks you’re enough a piece of shit he can touch his dick and wink about you, only he don’t know that he is winking about a known piece of shit, and winking about a known piece of shit is a dangerous thing to do.
Using the mirror over the bar about like Annie Oakley shooting backwards, I spot his head and turn and slap him in the temple hard enough to get the paint to fall off a fender. He goes down. His buddies start to push back their chairs and I step one step up and they stop.
“What’s all the dick and grinning about, boys?”
On the floor says, “I cain’t
see.”
“He cain’t see,” I tell the boys.
I walk out.
Outside it’s some kind of dream. There’s ten Hell’s Angel things running around a pickup in the highway like a Chinese fire drill, whatever that is. In the middle by the truck is a by-God muscle man out of Charles Atlas swinging chains. He’s whipping the bikers with their own motorcycle chains. He’s got all of the leather hogs bent over and whining where he’s stung them. He picks up a bike and drops it headfirst on the rakes. Standing there with a hot Bud, the only guy other than Tarzan not bent over and crying, I get the feeling we’re some kind of tag team. I drive off.
That’s how it works. Start out a piece of shit, slap some queerbait blind, watch a wrestling match in the middle of Almeda Road, drive home a piece of shit, spill the hot beer I forgot about all over the seat and my leg.
