Your Body is Changing (2 page)

“Well, in times of extreme quiet, such as I imagine a stakeout to be, there is a slight chance I could suffer from musical hallucinations. It’s a legitimate problem, documented in The New Yorker magazine if you don’t believe me. I don’t suffer from it chronically, to my knowledge, but there have been several times when I thought I might be on the verge. My ears have been clogged lately, and apparently the condition of musical hallucinations is exacerbated by the onset of deafness, from what I read in The New Yorker magazine.”

Just as Dud expected, Three displayed no sense of recognition about The New Yorker magazine. His bourgeois mind was stuck somewhere at the National Public Radio level of discourse.

The scotch was tasting better now and though Three kept talking, Dud tuned him out in favor of more pleasant ruminations:

I bet I’m the only living being in Lumber Land that’s even heard of The New Yorker magazine. But The New Yorker magazine doesn’t want anything to do with you if you’re not a so-called New Yorker.

There’s this mime and this lady sitting in a fancy New York restaurant and they’re holding hands across the table and the lady is saying to the mime, “We need to talk.” Now that would make a damn fine cartoon. And nobody from the so-called New Yorker magazine even had the common courtesy to call me back. I’d like to see a better cartoon than that one about a mime. Everybody hates mimes. I bet they laughed and laughed and then they said, Oh wait, this guy’s from Alabama. No way we’re cutting HIM a break. What does some JERK from ALABAMA know about MIMES? Only us sophisticated so-called New Yorkers are sophisticated enough to understand MIMES.

I bet I’m the only resident of Lumber Land, Alabama, who knows what a mime is.

You poor country hicks. It’s a guy that doesn’t talk.

I ought to go to the library down in Mobile and look up every issue of The New Yorker magazine on microfilm and make sure they never stole my idea. I bet they gave it to one of their New York artists and said, Go on ahead and do this idea, this jerk will never know, he’s from Alabama so who cares how we treat him? What’s he going to do? Sue The New Yorker magazine?

Laugh it up, boys! Wait till I write a book and they read it and say, Hey, isn’t this the guy that sent us a cartoon and we didn’t even care? Man, we should have latched on to him when we had the chance!

Too late, suckers.

I’m not even going to send them my other cartoon, which is an electric chair and in front of it there’s a sad-looking guy with his head shaved, and he’s standing by a sign that says PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED. Like one of those signs in a restaurant.

Three kept knitting and talking and talking about knitting. Dud had another drink and contemplated his favorite ideas.

IDEA: Helicopter Island, the mysterious island that can only be reached by helicopter

IDEA: A serial killer who is brilliantly clever

IDEA: Winston Churchill

If a man is not liberal when he is young, etc. I believe Winston Churchill said that. If he is not a conservative when, etc. I believe I could be another Winston Churchill if I wasn’t born in Alabama. Why the hell not? Nothing is impossible if you really try. Hold on to your dreams and they can come true. Miracles can happen in your daily life. All you have to do is look around. But whoever said that wasn’t from Alabama.

Nobody thought much of Winston Churchill either, till he rose to a crisis. If I had a crisis I could rise to it. I can easily picture myself on a pile of rubble yelling, “I can hear you! And soon the terrorists will hear you!”

“So, are you with me?” said Three. “Big stakeout tonight?”

“As tempting as your offer is, I fear I may prove to be more of a liability than anything. Last night my right arm became completely numb for over twenty minutes. I don’t want to speculate, but I can only assume it was some sort of reverse heart attack. Now if you really think…”

“Look. Forget it,” said Three. “I thought it would be cool.”

Dud was sitting in his house, thinking about how embarrassing it would be to die there. He imagined some ambulance driver carefully picking his way through the squalor so as not to contract tetanus and saying something like, “Pee-yew! No wonder he died! What a dump!” and so on. Ambulance drivers and others acquainted with death on a daily basis were known to make just such sarcastic quips on supposedly solemn occasions.

The phone rang. Dud kicked around in the papers and junk on his floor, looking for it. Finally it stopped ringing.

About twenty minutes later, as darkness fell, Dud was still sitting there and a car pulled up outside. Dud’s scalp vibrated. He puked up a little something but swallowed it down before it could get out of his mouth. Who was it? A maniac come to kill him? It was the only scenario he could imagine. Dud reached over and turned off the lamp.

Three knocked on his door, yelling, “Come on, Dud, I just saw you turn off the lights.” Dud opened up, just a crack.

“Can I come in?” said Three. “What stinks?”

“Earlier I was cooking some exotic cuisine,” said Dud. “You’re probably picking up on the unusual spices.”

“Are you going to let me in?”

“I’m not prepared for visitations. I’m busy working on my novel about the tragic suicides of famous people.”

“Well, just put on some pants and come on out, then. I swore to Farrah I’d take you with me on this fucking stakeout, okay? Look, I’ll put an extra two hundred in the kitty next week, how does that grab you?”

Dud squeezed out and shut the door quickly behind him. “These are my pants, by the way,” he said. “The official short hiking pants of a Scoutmaster.”

Three laughed. “You’re no fucking Scoutmaster,” he said.

“No, I happened to buy these at an estate sale, during a visit my late wife and I made to the Bluegrass State, Kentucky, shortly before her demise.”

“Well, they look good on you,” said Three. “Do you mind if I smoke part of a joint before we get started?” He leaned on one of the two white plaster pillars that seemed to be supporting Dud’s sagging porch. The pillar fell over and rolled into the yard, and Three nearly fell with it. When he straightened himself, his downy yellow bangs were hanging in his eyes.

“Whoa!” he said.

“Don’t worry, that hasn’t been attached in years,” said Dud. “I backed the car into it. For reasons that are too complicated to relate, it was my late wife’s fault.”

“Maybe I should save this for later, huh? A reward for a job well done.” Three carefully wrapped his joint in a piece of tin foil and restored it to the inner pocket of his light linen jacket. “I’ve got all my life to smoke this joint. So let’s make it happen. We’re taking your car.”

“Why don’t we take your car? It’s much nicer.”

“Exactly. Somebody’s bound to notice a sweet fucking ride like that, am I right? We need a piece of crap that won’t attract attention.”

“I hasten to state that my decrepit Escort will certainly attract attention, albeit in an obverse way,” said Dud.

“I have no fucking idea what you just said.”

“Anyway, a car like yours would be equipped with GPS, wouldn’t it?” said Dud. “That would come in handy in a following situation.”

“Hey, why don’t you be the goon and I’ll be the detective? Let’s go, let’s go.” Three snapped his fingers.

“I don’t have my keys,” said Dud. “They’re inside.”

“Well, let’s go inside and get them. We’re on a fucking schedule, laddie.”

“Why don’t you wait out here and I’ll go get them?”

“I need to tinkle,” said Three.

“I’d prefer you to do your business outside while I run in and get the keys,” said Dud.

“Oh well,” said Three. He opened the door and went in ahead of Dud, tripping over some of the collectibles on the floor. “It’s as dark as a fucking tomb in here,” he said.

“I live artistically. Sometimes people find it unconventional.”

“Where’s the toilet? Or let me guess. You pee in a Maxwell House can and leave it in the corner. Is that the way the artists do it? Jesus! How many cats do you have?”

“None,” said Dud.

“Well your house smells like a million fucking cats, so that’s weird.”

While Three was in the bathroom Dud rummaged around for his car keys and thought about all the things Three was sure to notice, like the squeezed-out toothpaste tube so old that the petrified gunk leaking out of the cracks was gray, and the permanent stains in the toilet, and the hissing roaches that lived behind the mirror, and the black stuff growing along the rim of the air vent, and the basket of rotting pecans in the bathtub.

The subject was a Frenchman, age 32. Thin and given to wheezing. Brown hair, usually oiled. Moustache. Ornithologist. In the USA on a work visa. Distinguishing physical characteristic: a strange concavity in the middle of his chest, like a hole smoothly covered by skin, for he had been born with his heart too far to the left, nearly under his arm. His telephone voice was odd; it frequently made people ask if he was crying. Subject believed that some acoustical property, caused by the unfortunate displacement of his heart, contributed in some manner to this aural illusion.

The Frenchman’s American fiancée suspected him of messing around, and furthermore of merely using her for a green card.

Three had given Dud the whole rundown while they sat in the dark outside the Hank Williams Museum in Georgiana, waiting for the subject to emerge, Three behind the steering wheel because he had insisted upon driving Dud’s car.

“Keep your eyes peeled for a minute,” said Three. “I’m going to knit for a while.” He reached around to the back floorboard and got his knitting basket, but found it impossible to maneuver in the Escort.

“I’m not a good person,” said Dud.

“What?” said Three.

“I think I’m starting to turn obsessive-compulsive. Every time I pass gas I say, ‘I’m not a good person.’”

“Jesus! Crack a window.”

“I told you, we can’t roll the windows down. You’re the one that picked this car! If I roll down the window it won’t roll back up. My other compulsion is I keep refining what I would say as a guest on the television program Inside the Actor’s Studio.”

“You’re no fucking actor.”

“Exactly. If I were an actor, it would not be a compulsion, but mere common sense.”

“So what would you say?”

“On the show? When they asked me my favorite sound, I would say, ‘A barber’s clippers.’”

Three thought for a minute. “You mean those electric things?” he said.

“Precisely.”

Three thought for another minute. “Huh, that’s pretty fucking good,” he said.

“These french fries taste like fish,” said Dud.

“Mine tasted like french fries.”

“There’s blood in the straw! Look!”

Sure enough, a thin band of red was visible through the grayish transparency of Dud’s plastic straw.

“What the fuck happened?”

“This milkshake is too thick. I had to suck on it so hard it made my mouth bleed.”

“You could’ve waited for it to thaw out a little bit.”

“There’s your Alabama milkshake. Too thick to drink. I read in a travel magazine about a milkshake you can get in the Caribbean. Just the right temperature. Neither too thick nor too flaccid. A delight. And scented with just a touch of tropical coconut. I ought to have known nobody would know how to make a milkshake around this hellhole.”

“God, Dud, you are such a pill. I thought this was going to be fun. Some people like their milkshakes thick. Some people think it indicates the use of real ice cream. Some people, I’d say most people, believe that the thicker the milkshake the higher the quality. Most people have the patience to wait for it to fucking thaw!”

“You drank your whole drink and I haven’t even drunk anything yet,” said Dud.

“God, do you do anything but whine? I had a Coke, okay? If you ordered a Coke you’d be done right now too. Fuck!”

“I believe cursing to be an affectation of the elite.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s one of my columns for ‘Lumberin’ Around!’”

“For what the fuck?”

“I knew Farrah never mentioned it to you. It’s a column I want to do for the paper, ‘Lumberin’ Around!’ Actually, I’m glad this came up. It gives me an opportunity to pitch you. As I express it in my column, let’s see. I point out that in so-called sophisticated films and videos, it is always the poor who use the fuck word constantly, gangsters and thugs and hoodlums and people of various ethnical derelictions and such. Whereas in real life I grew up poor and among ruffians of all varieties, and I found them to be a reticent and indeed a prudish lot.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“My father never had any money, but I recall him going over to a table of young men who were engaging in some banter—harmless banter by today’s standards—because his wife and his son were in earshot. That would be myself and my mother. These were clean-cut young men who probably attended a private university from the looks of them. I remarked at the time on the niceness of their sweaters…a precocious predilection! As I put it in the column. I believe the ribaldry involved a young woman bending over and giving one and all a view of her underpants. And their description of this momentous event in their lives was so abstract and oblique that to be honest it was only about a year ago that I figured out what they were talking about. One of them said something like ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ and pointed his fingers like the barrels of two pistols, trying to show the urgency, I believe, with which, upon the prior occasion under discussion, his eyes had gone to the suddenly visible sliver of the young lady’s underpants. You can imagine how delighted his comrades became at the randy recollection of the rowdy ruffian. That’s another direct quote. But those young men obeyed my father’s wishes for decorum at once, and with respect. They shushed their mouths, and shushed them tight. Whereas today one can’t wander out of doors without hearing the fuck word at every public location. If a Frankenstein-like doctor were able to revive him—as I postulate happening in ‘Lumberin’ Around!’—my late father would no doubt have another stroke within five minutes of his resurrection, very like the one that killed him in the first place. My observation is that those using the fuck word are well-to-do whites of the educated class—stockbrokers, professors of sociology, landed gentry, people with cell phones. Using it loudly, and with a casual pride. They’ve watched so many movies about the poor, they’ve adopted this street patois. This elite Hollywood idea of a street patois.”