a guest post from a past version of me, circa 2011-09-14
While I was spending my time walking the wires, an unforeseen phenomenon occured to me. I became able, in fact unable not, to hear people’s private conversations. But only little bits of them. Here and there, in all the towns I would slice above and across, snips of dialog would suffuse my being, prickling through my hard, cracked leather bootsoles, flowing up through me like red water through a celery stalk on an elementary school’s windowsill.
There was this one guy who had been informed by very powerful glow-worms that he must, for the rest of life, act pretty much constantly like a big dork, or else his father would die. The guy was twenty-one at the time. There really is no justice in this world, except for the fact that the glow-worms kept their word. His dad hadn’t died so far. But think of it — what if you had to act like a complete dork, all the time — I mean, of course you would do it, unless you wanted your dad to die. Well, this guy didn’t want that, and so he graciously complied. It was brutally hilarious.
There was another young man whom I overheard confessing, to the only person he dared, a very young woman, wise, as they say, beyond her years, the fact that he did not believe in God. “Oh, maybe god with a small ‘g,’” he said. “I don’t think I can avoiding believing in something like that, despite all my reason. But definitely not God with a big ‘G.’” This confession would have seemed unremarkable except for the fact that the young man was well on his way to becoming a Catholic priest. “I’d like to think that god, or God,” he said to the very young woman, “wouldn’t mind so terribly much. As long as I don’t hurt anyone, and do my duties convincingly and well.”
A teenager in Osceola cracked wise to his collected friends: “You never quit smoking. You just vary the interval between cigarettes.” Then he cracked open another beer.
When I came down off the wires and returned to the crumbling house on B– street, Cholula had moved upstairs. There were mushrooms growing under her mattress, to her horror. She lugged it out to the weedlot, and sidled her and her belongings into the hidden room behind the bathroom. She still pretends not to be jealous of Miranda. Or hell, maybe she really is above all that. Maybe it’s just me — I make up these little dramas because I can’t imagine being above them all, myself.
“Blala lala choopie la doopie doo!” squawked the guy who had to act like a dork. “Piddley shiddley addley poooo!” There then followed a series of loud thumps.
At a youth counseling center in inner Milwaukee, the Catholic priest-to-be said to a dreadlocked kid in a torn muscle shirt, “No. That’s okay. I’m not going to preach at you. You don’t have to listen to what I believe when you come here.”
As a large sausage and mushroom pizza landed grandly on the formica in a booth near the back of Tom and Gus’s, just off Osceola’s dilapidated town square, the teenager said, “There’s no such thing as smart people and dumb people any more. That doesn’t matter. It’s just nice people and mean people.” There was much clattering of silverware and scattering of parmesan and hot red pepper flakes. What he didn’t say was that he had acquired this philosophy during the long road back to something resembling civilisation from the seedy depths, played out in the seediest pockets of town one could find in rural Iowa in those days, of his addiction to cocaine — a drug he might never have taken but for want of the attentions of a girl for whom he had thought he had had real feelings.
Whenever I try to play guitar, Cholula smokes. Whenever I try to be alone, she has some kind of crisis.
“I am Wee Todd Ed!” intoned the lifetime dork. “I am Sofa King Wee Todd Ed!”