account factoid, this microblip on the screen of memory. My mother used to rub it into my hair when I was just a wee thing, a mere mite of a lad. They sold it in the local barbershops, and it came in a clear glass bottle about yea big. The spout was black, I believe, and on the label there was a picture of some grinning idiot boy. A wholesome, idealized numskull with perfectly groomed hair. No cowlicks for that lunkhead, no wobbles in the part for that pretty fellow. I was five, six years old, and every morning my mother would give me the treatment, hoping to make me look like his twin brother. I can still hear the gloppity-gluggity sound as the goo came out of the bottle. It was a whitish, translucent liquid, sticky to the touch. A kind of watered-down sperm, I suppose, but who knew about such things then? They probably manufactured it by hiring teenage boys to jerk off into vats. Thus are fortunes made in our great land. A penny to produce, a dollar to buy, and you figure out the rest. So my Polish mother would rub the O’Dell’s Hair Trainer into my scalp, comb my disobedient locks, and then send me off to school looking like that ass-wipe kid on the bottle. I was going to be an American, by gum, and this hair meant that I belonged, that my parents knew what was fucking what.
“Before you break down and weep, my friend, let me add that O’Dell’s was a sham concoction, a fraud. It didn’t train hair so much as glue it into submission. For the first hour, it would seem to do its job, but then, as the morning wore on, the glue would harden, and little by little my hair would be turned into a mass of rigid, epoxified wires—as if a springy metallic bonnet had been clamped over my head. It felt so strange to the touch, I couldn’t leave it alone. Even as my right hand gripped the pencil, making with the two plus threes and six minus fives, my left hand would be wandering around up north, poking and picking at the alien surfaces of my head. By midafternoon, the O’Dell’s would be so dried out, so thoroughly drained of moisture, that each strand of coated hair would be turned into a brittle thread. That was the moment I was waiting for, the signal that the last act of the farce was about to begin. One by one, I’d reach down to the base of each strand of hair rooted in my scalp, pinch it between my thumb and middle finger, and pull. Slowly. Very slowly, sliding my nails along the entire length of the hair. Ah. The satisfactions were immense, incalculable. All that powder flying off of me! The storms, the blizzards, the whirlwinds of whiteness! It was no easy job, let me tell you, but little by little every trace of the O’Dell’s would disappear. The do would be undone, and by the time the last bell rang and the teacher sent us home, my scalp would be tingling with happiness. It was as good as sex, mon vieux, as good as all the drugs and drink I ever poured into my system. Five years old, and every day another orgy of self-repair. No wonder I didn’t pay attention at school. I was too busy feeling myself up, too busy doing the O’Dell’s diddle.
“But enough. Enough of this tedium. Enough of this Te Deum. Hair trainer is just the tip of the iceberg, and once I start in with this childhood dreck, we’ll be here for the next sixteen hours. We don’t have time for that, do we? Not for castor oil, not for pot cheese, not for lumpy porridge, not for Blackjack gum. We all grew up with that junk, but now it’s gone, isn’t it, and who the hell cares anyway? Wallpaper, that’s what it was. Background music. Zeitgeist dust on the furniture of the mind. I can bring back fifty-one thousand details, but so what? It won’t do you or me an ounce of good. Understanding. That’s what I’m after, chum. The key to the puzzle, the secret formula after four-plus decades of groping in the dark. And still, all this stuff keeps getting in my way. Even as I breathe my last, I’m choking on it. Useless bits of knowledge, unwanted memories, dandelion fluff. It’s all flit and fume, my boy, a bellyful of wind. The life and times of R. Mutt. Eleanor Rigby. Rumpelstiltskin. Who the fuck wants to know them? The Pep Boys, the Ritz Brothers, Rory Calhoun. Captain Video and the Four Tops. The Andrews Sisters,
“But don’t get me wrong. There’s too much out there not to feel tempted. The lure of particulars, I mean, the seductions of the thing-in-itself. You’d have to be blind not to give in once in a while. I don’t care what it is. Just pick a thing, and chances are a case can be made for it. The splendor of bicycle wheels, for example. Their lightness, their spidery elegance, their shining rims and gossamer spokes. Or the sound of a manhole cover rattling under a truck at three in the morning. To say nothing of Spandex, which has probably done more to spruce up the landscape than any invention since the underground telephone wire. I refer to the sight of Spandex pants plastered across the behind of a young chick as she strides by you on the street. Need I say more? You’d have to be dead not to warm to that. It darts and dives at you, keeps churning away in your head until it all melts down into a big, buttery ooze. Vasco da Gama in his puffy pantaloons. FDR’s cigarette holder. Voltaire’s powdery wig. Cunegonde!
Cunegonde! Think of what happens when you say it. See what you say when you think it. Cartography. Pornography. Stenography. Stentorian stammerings, Episcopalian floozies, Fudgsicles and Frosted Flakes. I admit that I’ve succumbed to the charms of these things as readily as the next man, am in no wise superior to the riffraff I’ve rubbed shoulders with for lo these many years. I’m human, aren’t I? If that makes me a hypocrite, then so be it.
“Sometimes, you just have to bow down in awe. A person comes up with an idea that no one has ever thought of, an idea so simple and perfect that you wonder how the world ever managed to survive without it. The suitcase with wheels, for example. How could it have taken us so long? For thirty thousand years, we’ve been lugging our burdens around with us, sweating and straining as we moved from one place to another, and the only thing that’s ever come of it is sore muscles, bad backs, exhaustion. I mean, it’s not as though we didn’t have the wheel, is it? That’s what gets me. Why did we have to wait until the end of the twentieth century for this gizmo to see the light of day? If nothing else, you’d think roller skates would have inspired someone to make the connection, to put two and two together. But no. Fifty years go by, seventy-five years go by, and people are still schlepping their bags through airports and train stations every time they leave home to visit Aunt Rita in Poughkeepsie. I’m telling you, friend, things aren’t as simple as they look. The human spirit is a dull instrument, and often we’re no better at figuring out how to take care of ourselves than the lowest worm in the ground.
“Whatever else I’ve been, I’ve never let myself be that worm. I’ve jumped, I’ve galloped, I’ve soared, and no matter how many times I’ve crashed back to earth, I’ve always picked myself up and tried again. Even now, as the darkness closes in on me, my mind holds fast and won’t throw in the towel. The transparent toaster, comrade. It came to me in a vision two or three nights ago, and my head’s been full of the idea ever since. Why not expose the works, I said to myself, be able to watch the bread turn from white to golden brown, to see the metamorphosis with your own eyes? What good does it do to lock up the bread and hide it behind that ugly stainless steel? I’m talking about clear glass, with the orange coils glowing within. It would be a thing of beauty, a work of art in every kitchen, a luminous sculpture to contemplate even as we go about the humble task of preparing breakfast and fortifying ourselves for the day ahead. Clear, heat-resistant glass. We could tint it blue, tint it green, tint it any color we like, and then, with the orange radiating from within, imagine the combinations, just think of the visual wonders that would be possible. Making toast would be turned into a religious act, an emanation of otherworldliness, a form of prayer. Jesus god. How I wish I had the strength to work on it now, to sit down and draw up some plans, to perfect the thing and see where we got with it. That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab, humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.
“Okay, snicker if you like. If I gush, I gush, and that’s all there is to it. It feels good to let the purple stuff
