lamp on the end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room.
I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don’t know what it was, and ran for the stairs.
Jeffty’s parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.
I fell twice rushing up the stairs.
There isn’t much on television that can hold my interest. I bought an old cathedral-shaped Philco radio in a second-hand store, and I replaced all the burnt-out parts with the original tubes from old radios I could cannibalize that still worked. I don’t use transistors or printed circuits. They wouldn’t work. I’ve sat in front of that set for hours sometimes, running the dial back and forth as slowly as you can imagine, so slowly it doesn’t look as if it’s moving at all sometimes.
But I can’t find
So she did love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can’t hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn’t such a terrible thing.
It’s a good world, all things considered. It’s much better than it used to be, in a lot of ways. People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Tell me.
Somebody please tell me.
How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?
Writers take tours in other people’s lives. As I write this, I’m sitting on an American Airlines flight between Toronto and Los Angeles. I’ve just come back from delivering a lecture at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, about 265 kilometers from Toronto and I’m sitting here at 37,000 feet above Bryce Canyon annoying the other passengers with the tippy-tap of my portable Olympia.
I tell you this because it happened again in Kingston:
Some wiseass took a tour through
The feep in question is Gary Crawford, an otherwise nice guy who attempted to encapsulate me for a female housemate of his by quoting out of context one line from the introduction to my collection
Her response to that line, when Gary suggested she attend my lecture, was something akin to this: “Go see that sexist pig asshole? Forget it.”
For the introduction to that book, I wrote an essay in which I attempted to summarize everything I thought I knew for sure about love; everything I’d learned in the forty-one years I’d been around at that point, five years ago. It was not a very long essay.
But in that essay I recounted an anecdote concerning myself and the woman who was to become my fourth wife. We had just met, were just beginning to date, and she asked me how many women I had been with. “Been with”: that’s one of those phrases we use.
After a few days of hemming and hawing, and avoiding answering the question because I didn’t think she really wanted to hear the truth, I was pressured into answering, and I did. It was a substantive number of liaisons.
Gary Crawford read that line about how many women I’d “been with” to this total stranger, this Anne who shares the cost of renting a house up in Kingston; and with a demonstration of provincial audacity that resonated perfectly with the concretized tenets of the Judeo-Christian Ethos, she concluded I was a brutalizer of women, a shallow gigolo or profligate tramp; a womanizer of the most odious sort.
Ah, lady, would that it were so. Too much pain and visceral material expended during the course of my love life ever to garner me such unassailable encomiums. No, kiddo, I’m just a slave of love like you.
The judgment is one, clearly, of geography… not morality.
But there it was happening to me again: some reader taking a tour through my life and doing it with considerable ineptitude, and then reporting back to strangers the skewed visions he had had while on his jaunt. And there goes Anne, getting all pruney around the lips and calling me bad names.
I won’t run my credentials. Call me what you will. It’s your problem and none of my own, friends. Anarchist, rakehell, asshole, monster, pyromaniac, child molester, assassin, lover of the music of Lawrence Welk… the most awful things you or I could think of. What the hell do I care? I’m
And no one ever said Dostoevski was a paragon of the virtues; but I’ll bet he bought his way into Heaven with
Why does he tell us all this?
I tell you all this because the next story you’ll read here is about fucking. No, not lovemaking, or “being with,” or anything more meaningful sexually than fucking. And I tell you all this ahead of time so you will understand that I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word
The same goes for love and sex.
Writers take tours in other people’s lives. This is a hippity-hop through all of yours; even you too, Anne; you who engage in all that deep breathing about love and romance and the intricate pavane of sexual encounter when the truth of the matter is… the whole damn subject is mostly just funny.
When they unscrewed the time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing.
Every head turned away. The word that sprang to mind first was,
They wouldn’t tell Enoch Mirren’s wife he was back. They evaded the question when Enoch Mirren’s mother demanded to know the state of her son’s health after his having taken the very first journey into another time/universe. The new President was given dissembling answers. No one bothered to call San Clemente. The Chiefs of Staff were kept in the dark. Inquiries from the CIA and the FBI were met with responses in pig Latin and the bureaus were subtly diverted into investigating each other. Walter Cronkite found out, but after all, there are even limits to how tight security can get.
Their gorges buoyant, every one of them, the rescue crew and the medical team and the chrono-experts at TimeSep Central did their best, but found it impossible to pry temponaut Enoch Mirren’s penis from the (presumably) warm confines of the disgusting thing’s (presumed) sexual orifice.
A cadre of alien morphologists was assigned to make an evaluation: to decide if the disgusting thing was male or female. After a sleepless week they gave up. The head of the group made a good case for his team’s failure. “It’d be a damned sight easier to decide if we could get that clown out of her…him…it…that thing!”
They tried cajoling, they tried threatening, they tried rational argument, they tried inductive logic, they tried deductive logic, they tried salary incentives, they tried profit sharing, they tried tickling his risibilities, they tried tickling his feet, they tried punching him, they tried shocking him, they tried arresting him, they tried crowbars, they tried hosing him down with cold water, then hot water, then seltzer water, they tried suction devices, they tried sensory deprivation, they tried doping him into unconsciousness. They tried shackling him to a team of Percherons pulling north and the disgusting thing to a team of Clydesdales pulling south. They gave up after three and a half weeks.
