War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (12 page)

Dear Son,

Hopefully your father left you a
really fancy antique car in his will. That’s what you’re going to
need here. Yes. I see it. It's hard to say what’s an integral part
of who anyone is. Hand me that clapper board. And go again but with
more external bravado. In your case, the burnt orange 1974 MGB that
may have meant everything to two generations of men, separated
forever now by an eroding clock—death, really—with its resonant
second hand in the night.

11 — Rubberband
Ankles

I asked the advice of a
writer. He said, “Take out the function words and work it over
again.” So I went to my wardrobe and ripped the legs off my pants
and tore the sleeves from a thousand shirts. Practical pockets full
of change, of car keys and annoyance, useless slabs of fabric freed
from duty, frayed out at the edges, dropped to the floor. Take out
the function. Okay. So I’m left naked wearing a bit of embroidered
appliqué thinking, “This can’t be right. Maybe he meant something
different.”

68 — Doting
Daddy

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

My wife just had her first baby, and
it’s obvious that she has no idea what she’s doing. When I’m out on
the screened-in porch getting high with my buddies we talk about
how she can’t even hold the thing right. I really want her not to
fuck my kid up. Can you tell me how to set her straight?

Dear Doting
Daddy,

Shut up! Don’t bother me right now!
For the love of Christ. Can’t you see I’m busy? I’m staring at
anxiety and dependency whipping up out of a chimney. I’m listening
to a reconstructable street. There are men under the pavement,
adjusting things. So if you ever want your wife to have a chance,
cut her off the marketed-magazine-mothering-kryptonite. She does
not need to know the effect of soft plastics leeching into liquids
and forever damning unborn male genitalia.

There are no dragon kites to fly on
the beach at this point. Just keep telling your wife she's doing it
right, you’re doing it right, that you trust both her and yourself,
and I am telling you, you'll be riding down the freeway waving that
child out the sunroof, letting him cut fuses short and shoot bottle
rockets at the tires of passing cars in no time!

And you’d better fucking listen to
this: Teak furniture under redbud trees in spring does nothing to
block out the woman walking with a cane, the garbage truck, the car
with its hazard flashers on parked across the sidewalk in the
neighbor’s driveway, the stolen stop sign, the sinkhole without an
orange cone, the bus with no air-conditioning, the pedantic
pedestrian response to a self-preserving cyclist on the sidewalk
who doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks, the rapture (an
apocryphal joke, you know), the panty lines of strangers, the one
tiny scratch that will ruin a good piece of furniture, the steep
loose-graveled hill-climbing ends of fire service roads in
old-growth forests where lit matches should never get dropped, the
bunker no one would actually build in the backyard (not for real),
the broken cord on the blinds, the old toilet that uses too much
water for any sensible, conscientious, person of sleepless social
awareness.

69 — Boys Club
Relic

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I was hoping to buy a t-shirt that
expresses my worldview. But I don’t really have one. I make minimum
wage right now and am living at home. I go over to my friend’s
house next door and help him when his truck isn’t running good.
Sometimes I give my buddy fifty bucks if he’s out of work or
something. But I don’t really know what I think about everything
enough to get the right t-shirt.

Dear Boys Club
Relic,

My grandmother is recovering from a
hip replacement. This summer she needs someone to look after her
and help out with getting the mail and groceries.

71 — Calm &
Collected

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I’m recently divorced and find myself
foundering in a wash of traditions that could have meant something
if marriage, family, home, love, commitment, and tradition amounted
to much in my personal experience. It’s Christmas Eve. We’re
supposed to be hanging stockings for children who were never born.
Is there some way that I can keep myself from going over to my
ex-husband’s apartment and eviscerating him with a butcher
knife?

Dear Calm &
Collected,

What you want to do in this case is
pack as much ancillary meaning into your life as possible. It’s
sort of a trick, because those huge things like marriage and
children and holidays are annoyingly large meaning suckers. It’s
not like nutritional data, circulation, passing motorcycle cops,
manganese, incidence numbers for worldwide injuries, neon green eye
shadow, wrinkled silk suits, shadowboxing, sleek cars rushing
through sunlit tunnels, pleated leather, plated scallops, a black
calfskin sectional couch, heels on a chair back, freckles,
butterfly migrations, cots and footlockers, snakeskin mini-trench
coats, puppies in the mountains, pearl drop earrings on a
cobblestone side street, sequin tentacles, and an updo stuffed with
paper begonias. If you’re not careful marriage, children, and
holidays assume this disproportionate status in a life. It’s easy
to lose sight of all the ridiculously small areas of existence into
which you can invest meaning if you are diligent and committed. For
instance, you can have a shadowy figure in taxi yellow jeans invest
meaning two nights a week after he guzzles a six-pack can-by-can,
claims to have lost his cell phone, again, and arrives at your
house banging on the windows and falling through the screen
door.

74 — Repressive

Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

Sometimes I fantasize about sex. But I
don’t think I’m that good at it. It seems like you’d have to be
really, really good at it to meet the cultural standard. I don’t
even have a ten-foot set of feathered wings. And I really have a
hard time imagining slathering myself with a hot-thick layer of
banana-passion body oil so I can be all self-possessed to hump two
truckers and a wombat.

Dear
Repressive,

You’re not alone. Well. You are. But.
I mean a lot of people—look, it doesn’t matter. Just listen.
Visualization is everything. Let's set a scene:

1) It’s early. So. Get there. Get
hateful and empowered.

2) It’s a twin bed. Like at camp.
Steel spring frame. Rusted-out joints. Everything.

3) Now. Think of other sweaty people.
As many as you want. But. There’s no reason to get greedy. Good.
Get all worked up physically.

Take it further. Figure it out. Have
any sort of sweaty successful early morning interaction with two
other people in a twin bed. I know it’s tough to imagine. But try.
See it: Someone periodically stands up only to dive back in. That
forces someone else down between the mattress and the wall, which
make things impossible for whoever ends up in charge of fellatio.
Don’t give up. I know it sucks. Seems like a terrible cross between
naked roughhousing and the most awkward cramped contrivance for
sex. Let it lead to flesh dripping with sweat, covered with a
salt-glistening moist heat. Good. Wait. Yeah. You’re right. Let’s
start over. This isn’t even close to the most ideal fantasy
ever.

75 — Embarrassing Evidence
of Societal Entropy

Dear
Fake Advice Columnist,

I’m single and, okay, I’m too old to
be single. Let’s face it. I’ve got a vaginal death maw that can’t
be unleashed at any backyard barbecue. It scares people. Men are
afraid of its becoming a trap. But worse, married women are afraid
their husbands are gonna fall into it and be ripped away into the
vacuum of its black hole.

So. Because of the vaginal death maw,
I guess I understand why invasive control freaks who like me are
always trying to set me up with these random single guys. Now.
These guys aren’t random to the control freaks. They’re random to
me. And. I’m random to them. But. The fact that these single guys
are random to me and I’m random to them isn’t what matters. What
matters is that the invasive control freaks get to neaten up their
lives and get rid of any remnant single people. It’s the same as
the way they put away their Christmas lights in big plastic tubs.
They like order, I guess.

Anyway. So me and these
random-to-me-me-random-to-them single guys are supposed to go on
dates or whatever. Sometimes I guess I do putter around my
apartment thinking, "Gosh, I hope utter satisfaction comes to me by
means of being a pawn in someone else's desire to stave off the
socially awkward moments that the threatening presence of single
people creates so that my being around stops undermining their
entire familial structure." Well, okay. Fine. But. Yeah. I hate
dating random people and random people hate dating me.

Dear Embarrassing Evidence
of Societal Entropy,

Remember that game called Memory? I
love that game! My kids have a version with famous photographs of
all the national parks.

37 — Celebrating a 25th
Anniversary

Service
culture? What are you talking about? Pull off I-65 at exit 215. Go
past the Arby’s, the McDonald’s, the KFC, the gas station that used
to be owned by the Carters and could still be. Blinker’s on. Take a
left. Limestone gravel parking lot. No ruts. No bumps. Always well
maintained because Mr. Cover owned the Dairy Queen and he was also
a contractor, as well as an eighth grade social studies teacher—all
of which helped him stay in business as a small farmer in the
outlying rural area around my hometown of Rensselaer,
Indiana.

The Blizzard and I grew up together.
My dad took me to DQ. He liked ice cream. Once in a while, I’d go
with the neighbor kids. We’d ride in another dad’s classic Skylark,
or another year in his VW punch bug with countless golf tees on the
floorboards. Other times, we went as a family of four, after
church, plays, band concerts, piano recitals, and honors programs.
We talked and laughed with people we knew who came in talking about
great steals and slides evidenced by grubby socks held up with
elastic from polyester uniforms, after Little League and summer
softball. Yeah, I like Dilly Bars. And, the Peanut Buster Parfait
has a place in my heart. But. Please. Step aside and let me order a
Reese's Pieces Blizzard, medium.

The Blizzard maker has a lot of
artistic control. Or did in those days. The portions weren’t
specified. So. The quantity of candy was an art more than a
science. So was the length of time on the Blizzard machine. I loved
it when they crushed the pieces beyond recognition, which made the
whole thing orange. And, other times, I loved it when the pieces
were just barely chopped, by some uninvested drive-thru slacker
with no job security. The visored teenager haphazardly handed me
something slipshod and careless, something in a blue-backgrounded
waxed paper cup, something like a Reese's Pieces sundae.

Ours was the regular DQ layout. There
were plaques with pictures of softball teams near the entry and
smudges of ketchup on the swinging trash can door didn’t last very
long. The vertical glass-doored refrigerator meant for pre-made ice
cream cakes later replaced a glass-covered chest of Dilly Bars. In
the bathroom, there was that strange fabric loop with which to dry
your hands. It replenished itself somehow. It’s possible that a few
giggling girls may once have stayed in the bathroom diligently
trying to pull out the whole thing.

There is a misconception about the
Midwestern work ethic. Probably reinforced by people like the DQ
owner, with his four unrelated careers. I’m not saying that many,
many people don’t work very, very hard. You have to when you’re
poor. It’s imperative. But if you are sixteen, or seventeen, or
(God forbid) eighteen, there is a different brand of vigor,
something less harried, something less—well, less.

At Dairy Queen, for at least
twenty-five years, having a job—okay, fine, I’ll go—pays for the
teenage gas that you need to drive an hour to get to the movies, if
that’s the plan, with a date or a friend. Having a job means that
for a few hours you aren’t drinking beer in the backseat of a car,
drag racing between the cornfields somewhere. Having a job means
you aren’t pregnant, just yet. Fine. These reasons to work—yours
and your parents’—are a little different from working for the
underwater mortgage, for the car title, for the night class, or for
the kids’ Little League uniforms.

I don’t know if it’s worse to work for
the gas to drive to the movies or to be doing it for the revalued
mortgage. It’s hard to say. And I don’t know if there is less
perceivable angst in the teenager spooning glops of pineapple, hot
fudge, and strawberry sauce on top of some ice cream and a broken
banana or in the woman forced to take her child to work one day
after learning her sitter “doesn’t work bank holidays.”

Because maybe the teenager just got
dumped. Maybe the father of four who thinks his kid should get a
job to keep him out of trouble just found out his mother is dying
of something he can’t comprehend. Maybe the twenty-seven-year-old
is trying to find a way to pay for rent and student loans and
martinis and credit card payments all at the same time. Maybe these
three can’t be bothered, don’t have the time or patience or luxury
to believe in God, in Country, in all the things that help turn
“just getting by” days into diligent Midwestern work ethic days,
into humble, hardworking, heaven-entry, patriotic, hellishly
successive, interminable days of showing up—again—to the same
place, to work.