Typical (2 page)

I didn’t always feel this way, who could afford to? When I was fifteen, my uncle, who was always kind of my real dad, gave me brand-new Stetson boots and a hundred-dollar bill on a street corner in Galveston and said spend it all and spend it all on whores. It was my birthday. I remember being afraid of the black whores and the ones with big tits, black or white, otherwise I was a ace. In those days a hundred dollars went a long way with ladies in Galveston. I got home very tired, a fifteen-year-old
king
with new boots and a wet dick.

That’s what you do with the world before you doubt yourself. You buy it, dress up in it, fuck it. Then, somehow, it starts fucking back. A Galveston whore you’d touch now costs the whole hundred dollars, for example, in other words. I don’t know. Today I would rather just
talk
to a girl on the street than fuck one, and I damn sure don’t want to talk to one. There’s no point. I need some kind of pills or something. There must be ways which it will get you out of feeling like this.

For a while I thought about having a baby. But Brillo Tucker thought this up about fifteen years ago, and two years ago his boy whips his ass. When I heard about that I refigured. I don’t need a boy whipping my ass, mine or anybody else’s. That would just about bind the tit. And they’ll do that, you know, because like I say they come out
kings
for a while. Then the crown slips and pretty soon the king can’t get a opera ticket, or something, I don’t know anything about kings.

This reminds me of playing poker with Mickey Gilley, stud. First he brings ten times as much money as anyone, sits down in new boots, creaking, and hums all his hit songs so nobody can think. He wins a hand, which it is rare, and makes this touchdown kind of move and comes down slowly and rakes the pot to his little pile. During the touchdown, we all look at this dry-cleaning tag stapled to the armpit of his vest. That’s the Pasadena crooner.

I was at ARMCO Steel for ten years, the largest integrated steel mill west of the Mississippi, a word we use having nothing to do with niggers for once. It means we could take ore and make it all the way to steel. Good steel. However, I admit that with everybody standing around eating candy bars in their new Levi’s, it cost more than Jap steel. I have never seen a Japanese eating a candy bar or dipping Skoal showing off his clothes. They wear lab coats, like they’re all dentists. We weren’t dentists.

We were, by 1980, out of a job, is what we were. It goes without saying it, that is life. They were some old-timers that just moped about it, and some middle-lifer types that had new jobs in seconds, and then us Young Turks that moped
mad.
We’d filler up and drive around all day bitching about the capitalist system, whatever that is, and counting ice houses. We discovered new things, like Foosball. Foosball was one of the big discoveries. Pool we knew about, shuffleboard we knew about, Star Wars pinball we knew about, but Foosball was a kick.

For a while we bitched as a club. We were on the ice-house frontier, Tent City bums with trucks. Then a truckload of us—not me, but come to think of it, Brillo Tucker was with them, which is perfect—get in it on the Southwest Freeway with a truckload of niggers and they all pull over outside the
Post
building and the niggers whip their
ass.
They’re masons or something, plumbers. A photographer at the
Post
sees it all and takes pictures. The next day a thousand ARMCO steel workers out of a job read about themselves whipped by employed niggers on the freeway. This lowered our sail. We got to be less of a club, quick. I don’t know what any of my buddies are doing now and I don’t care. ARMCO was ARMCO. It was along about in here I told my wife I was off to Beaumont for black chicks, and there could be a connection, but I doubt it.

As far as I can really tell, I’m still scared of them in the plain light of day. At a red light on Jensen Drive one day, a big one in a fur coat says to me, “Come here, sugar, I got something for you,” and opens her coat on a pair of purple hot pants and a yellow bra.

I say, “I know you do,” and step on it. Why in hell I’d go home and pick on a perfectly innocent wife about it is the kind of evidence it convinces you you’re not a prince in life.

Another guy I knew in the ARMCO club had a brother who
was
a dentist, and this guy tells him not to worry about losing his job, to come out with him golfing on Thursdays and
relax.
Our guy starts going—can’t remember his name—and he can’t hit the ball for shit. It’s out of bounds or it’s still on the tee. And the dentist who wants him to relax starts ribbing him, until our guy says if you don’t shut the fuck up I’m going to put this ball down and aim it at
you.
The dentist laughs. So Warren—that’s his name—puts the ball down and aims at the dentist, who’s standing there like William Tell giggling, and swings and hits his brother, the laughing dentist who wants him to relax, square in the forehead. End of relaxing golf.

Another guy’s brother, a yacht broker, whatever that is, became a flat hero when we got laid off because he found his brother the steel worker in the shower with his shotgun and took it away from him. Which it wasn’t hard to do, because he’d been drinking four days and it wasn’t loaded.

Come to look at it, we all sort of disappeared and all these Samaritans with jobs creamed to the top and took the headlines, except for the freeway. The whole world loves a job holder.

One day I drove out to the Highway 90 bridge over the San Jacinto and visited Tent City, which was a bunch of pure bums pretending to be unfortunate. There were honest-to-God river rats down there, never lived anywhere but on a river in a tent, claiming to be victims of the economy. They had elected themselves a mayor, who it turns out the day I got there was up for re-election. But he wasn’t going to run again because God had called him to a higher cause, preaching. He announced this with shaking hands and wearing white shoes and a white belt and a maroon leisure suit. Out the back of his tent was a pyramid of beer cans all the way to the river, looked like a mud slide in Colombia. People took me around because they thought I was out there to
hire
someone.

I met the new mayor-to-be, who was a Yankee down here on some scam that busted, had left a lifelong position in dry cleaning, had a wife who swept their little camp to where it was smoother and cleaner than concrete. I told him to call Mickey Gilley. He was a nice guy, they both were, makes you think a little more softly about the joint. How a white woman from Michigan, I think, knew how to sweep dirt like a Indian I’ll never know. Maybe it’s natural. I don’t think it’s typical, though.

This one dude, older dude, they called Mr. C, was walking around asking everybody if this stick of wood he was carrying belonged to them. He had this giant blue and orange thing coming off his nose, about
like
an orange, which it is why they called him Mr. C, I guess. A kid who was very pretty, built well—could of made a fortune in Montrose—ran to him with a bigger log and took him by the arm all the way back to his spot, some hanging builder’s plastic and a chair, and set a fire for him. It’s corny as hell, but I started liking the place. It was like a pilgrim place for pieces of shit, pieces of crud.

Then a couple gets me, tells me their life story if I’ll drink instant coffee with them. The guy rescued the girl from some kind of mess in Arkansas that makes Tent City look like Paradise. He’s about six-eight with mostly black teeth and sideburns growing into his mouth, and she’s about four foot flat with a nice ass and all I can think of is how can they fuck and why would she let him. For some reason I asked him if he played basketball, and the
girl
pipes up,
“I
played basketball.”

“Where?”

“In high school.”

“Then what did you do?” I meant by this, how is it Yardog here has you and I don’t.

“Nothing,” she says.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I ain’t done
nuttin.”
That’s the way she said it, too.

It was okay by me, but if she had fucked somebody other than the buzzard, it would have been
something.

I was just kind of cruising there at this point, about like leg-up in Alvin, ready to buy them all a case of beer and talk about hard luck the way they wanted to, when something happened. This gleaming, purring, fully restored,
immaculate
as Brillo Tucker would say, ’57 Chevy two-door pulls in and eases around Tent City and up to us, and out from behind the mirrored windshield, wearing sunglasses to match it, steps this nigger who was a kind of shiny, shoe-polish brown, and
exact
color and finish of the car. The next thing you saw was that his hair was black and oily and so were the black sidewalls of his car. Everything had dressing on it.

The nigger comes up all smiles and takes cards out of a special little pocket in his same brown suit as the car and himself. The card says something about community development.

“I am prepared to offer all of you, if we have enough, a seminar in job-skills acquisition and full-employment methodology.” This comes out of the gleaming nigger beside his purring ’57 Chevy.

The girl with the nice butt who’s done nothing but fuck a turkey vulture says, “Do what?”

Then the nigger starts on a roll about the seminar, about the only thing which in it people can catch is it will take six hours. That is longer than most of these people want to
hold
a job, including me at this point. I want to steal his car.

“Six hours?” the girl repeats. “For
what?”

“Well, there are a lot of tricks to getting a job.”

I say, “Like what?”

“Well, like shaking hands.”

“Shaking hands.” I remember Earl Campbell not buying my stinky shoes. That was okay. This is too far.

“Do you know how to shake hands?” the gleaming nigger asks. Out of the corner of my eye I see the turkey buzzard looking at his girl with a look that is like they’re in high school and in love.

“Let’s find out,” I say. I grab him and crush him one, he winces.

“You know how to shake hands.”

“I thought I did.”

Who the fuck taught
him
how? Maybe Lyndon Johnson.

He purrs off to find a hall for the seminar, and the group at Tent City proposes putting a gas cylinder in the river and shooting it with a .22.

I’ve got my own brother to contend with, but we got over it a long time ago. He was long gone when ARMCO troubles let everybody else’s brother loose on them. He, my brother, goes off to college, which I don’t, which it pissed me off at the time, but not so much now. Anyway, he goes off and comes back with half-ass long hair talking
Russian.
Saying,
Goveryou po rooskie
in my face. It’s about the time Earl Campbell has told me he won’t wear my cleats because they stink, so I take all my brother’s college crap laying down.

Then he says, “I study Russian with an old woman who escaped the Revolution with nothing. There’s only one person in the class, so we meet at her house. Actually, we meet in her back yard, in a hole.”

“You what?”

“We sit in a hole she dug and study Russian. All I lack being Dostoevsky’s underground man is more time.” He laughed.

“All I lack being a gigolo,” I said, “is having a twelve-inch dick.” And hit him, which is why he doesn’t talk to me today, and I don’t care. If he found out I was in the shower with my shotgun he’d pass in a box of shells. Underground man. What a piece of shit.

That’s about it. Thinking of my brother, now, I don’t feel so hot about running at the mouth. I’m not feeling so hot about living, so what? What call is it to drill people in their ear? I’m typical.

H
UMPY, THE STUCK-UP LIBRARIAN
, ruined little Brody.
There is a certain truth down in there allowing them a purchase, at least, upon what happened. For I must say that if I had not read so many books, I could only have seen Brody as a runaway and so would probably not have helped him. This is not to say, of course, that a more legitimate member of the family might not have come along, spotted him making his break, and helped him out of another motive: to teach him a lesson, let us say. His father would have done that, moral waste dump that he is.

Humpy’d turn over in her grave.
They say that when a family member uses incorrect grammar—grammar so out of form, that is, that they, its chief torturers on earth, can recognize something awry.
Don’t say ain’t, your Aunt Humpy she’d turn over in her grave if she couldn’t hardly hear you.
The remonstrated child, if he has some spirit, will sneak outside and put his mouth to the ground and yell
ain’t
into the dirt, blowing ants and debris away from his dirty face. They have one of these, Brody’s wife’s sister’s child, for whom I am performing unbid the services of guardian angel, endeared more and more to the little delinquent with each lip-to-ground utterance he calls me with.

What does happen in heaven—heaven or hell, it is purely a matter of choice, and I have ever preferred, no matter the situation, the happier name for it—what does happen when one is alleged to turn in a grave is generally that one does spin, but in a kind of spiritual pirouette.
Ain’t, yestiddy, spose to,
and all precocious profanity comes shouted into the dirt and I do my tickled dance and love that child the more for daring to torture the dead.

You needn’t believe me, but that—a high quotient of daring—is what heaven (again, call it hell if you will) is all about, if I may speak in earthly parlance. Here we are the children we were born as, without the myriad prejudices and passions and myopias that made us the human beings we mortally became. And when you can see, from the vantage of correct vision restored, a young child yet unoccupied by teachings human, it will make you dance. All guardian angels are secured in the first six days of human life.

This is a bit specious-looking for you. You do not want to buy it. You wonder, I hope you do, how I inform you of Brody’s thoughts on picking damp bolls, the cruelty of having to pick damp cotton, the day he decided to run away. I tell you. Humpy, the dead egghead spinster librarian, tells you all they think and know on earth.