Prelude
When I was young, girls had penes. In my dreams they often still do. How this jibes with the fact that I consistently find chicks with dicks mildly alarming when they turn up in porn, I don't quite understand.Fugue
I am weary of living in Squalor. I tell Paul, on the lawn just outside the open front door: I can't live like this. Like what? says he, and I indicate with a sweeping arm the avalanche of dirty laundry our housemates have left in looming piles everywhere. I tell him: I know you were upset about it before we went on vacation, but I'm upset about it now. That's it, I say. I'm putting everyone on notice. Claim it and stow it by next Saturday or it's trash. I go poking around some of the clutter. There are books on shelves along the staircase, some of which I know belong to Bob. These are piled with laundry, too.At the top of the stairs I am in the long house, and these central second story rooms are my favorite rooms. In some sense they are mine, though I am not a regular occupant. I set about straightening and am faced with the choice: Make the beds or no? I recall recent Internet advice that making the bed every day helps dust mites propagate. I contemplate a system whereby thinnish top mattresses are daily removed and hung on the walls, so as to kill or discomfit the mites. The side room, in a place where there's no room for a side room, has beds under eaves; it both the playroom in the house in Folsom where I grew up and the guest room in the Paynes' house in Vermont.
Yes, this is my favorite room of the house—and I tell JoJo as much—even though it's now on the ground floor and on the end of the house, with a single window in the middle of the back wall. There is a train going by; except maybe we're on it. And there must have been a door there in the wall, because now we're out on the lawn, on the corner, near the school bus stop, and I'm chatting with Sharon, in a very pleasant and quiet dusk, about the film festival we're about to go to. The festival is in Brooklyn, which reminds me, Aren't we in Brooklyn now? Yes, Sharon says. It may no longer be the long house, but this house is certainly in Brooklyn.
The bus comes. Neither Sharon nor I has ridden this line before, and Sharon asks the driver questions, holding up transit. A young hipster woman offers aloud the advice that we "Figure it out, people." Sharon figures it out and we board, only now we're in a taxi, four across the back seat: Sharon, I, Hipster Woman, Hipster Woman's companion, who happens to be Hipster Man. She is short, cute, ruddy, hair in a bob, Henry Blake fishing cap. Peppermint Patty, I think, but nobody asked me. (In retrospect, she might have been a long-lost acquaintance from the Fruity Pebbles gang in Newark.)
I am in that mindspace where I could be truly annoyed at her "Figure it out, people" or just pretend annoyed. I say, I hope that wait wasn't too long for you. She responds with what I perceive as elaborately fake singsong niceness: No, it wasn't. I respond, I'm so sorry!—matching her intonation exactly, mockingly. She laughs and says, I said it wasn't. I know that's what she said, but I was just being a bitch. I say to her, Oh, I thought you were just being a bitch. She laughs. We're keeping it light. We're sitting smoosh next to each other but we're a million miles apart but we're keeping it light. Like you do.
We talk about the film fest. Are you a fan of the films of Jim Jarmusch? I ask her. Are you kidding? she says: In the last three hours I've become one! She mentions that she and her companion saw a film at the fest the other day featuring a woman in a tiny bikini; apparently its tininess was something to behold. I recall having heard a radio announcer mentioning something very similar, and offer that this must be The Tiny Bikini Film Festival. But of course it was probably just one film that they both saw. Or maybe she heard the same radio broadcast and never saw the film at all. And maybe the radio man was making shit up as well.
Although the taxibus never dropped us off, we're in a diner now in the bustling city, and the counter guy, who is possibly Chris Pratt, is speaking into a contraption that he intends as a microphone, but it's really a funky old camera. Or maybe a pizzelle iron. In either case, he amuses as intended. There are funky contraptions hung about the walls of the diner; it's hipster heaven. There are also a couple floor-model Victrolas (Victrolae?). I wonder that the Victrolas aren't just useless things to be in the way, since there are no records about, but apparently some of the staff enjoy putting round things that are not records on the turntable and playing them. This, I am assured, allows them to here short-wave radio from under the sea.
The hipster chick, still by my side at the counter of the diner, tells me that the server, Doug, "...is smarter than you. Doug is smarter than me. Doug is smarter than everyone we know." Everyone knows that Chris Pratt is a goofus, but I believe her. Hell, I've never known what "smart" means.
At this point I have to pee. So I pee. And then, Don't Ask Me Why, the big silhouette grasshopper vomits Maalox instead of tobacco juice. It sets up like cement within seconds. Shortly thereafter, my friend, who is part Queen Latifah as Big Mama and part LaWanda Page as Aunt Esther—they intersect at the hat—chases some bullies away. She's always been good to me.
