You cant argue that your encounter with Diamond hasnt been interesting. And no matter what he might presume, you, of all women, do not regard every male you meet as a potential partner in a domestic compromise. But fairies? First, he makes fools-fools!-of you both by raving in public about frognappers from outer space, and now hes talking fairies. Please! If its all a joke, let him share it with the cockroach. You have other chores.
Its disappointing because I was rather hoping we could have done some business together: Ive got a plan… . But its probably best I do it on my own. As for the, uh, sex part, those things happen. No regrets. As long as youre disease-free. You are, arent you? He merely grins, and the reflected grin looks by no means out of place next to the vermin in the window. See? Youre impossible. (The irony of asking a cancer victim if he is disease-free is lost on you.) And I absolutely cannot deal with those public displays of yours. Your scenes.
Really? I thought you were quite a sport at the Bull and Bear last night.
Okay, damn it, Ive been a little out of control lately. Ive been flighty at times. This is not an easy time for me. But thats not who I am.
Who are you, Gwendolyn?
You sigh, bite the kiss-sack you call your lower lip, and turn away from the window. Im a blackballed jockey on a lame horse in a fixed race. But Im not a quitter. Ill ride to the finish. And Ill ride alone. Now. If you want, Im willing to drive you back to the bowling alley. But thats the extent of it. Ive got moves to make.
As you rummage for your car keys, he taps the plate glass next to the giant roach. Gwendolyn, he says, if our child should turn out like this, would you love it anyway?
TWELVE TWENTY-TWO P.M.
Diamond accepts a lift, but not to Thunder House. He requests to be driven to the Sorrento, the aging but still graceful hotel on First Hill, where Dr. Yamaguchi is reportedly staying. Ive got moves of my own, he says. He lays a hand on your thigh. You slap it away.
No, Larry! Please. Its after the bell. Okay? My lifes hectic enough right now. Im not sure I could even handle a normal relationship, but certainly the last thing in the world I need is some kind of collision.
Au contraire. A collision is exactly what you do need, because collisions are transformative. A relationship can occasionally fulfill a person, but only a collision can transform them. Its the same for cultures as it is for individuals. Shall I cite historical examples?
What makes you think, Mr. Arrogant, that I need to be transformed?
Because thats what were here for. Its obvious. Or do you think were here to service our debt?
Im a growing person. Ive grown a lot. How would you know whether Ive grown or not?
Im not talking about growth. Little tadpoles dont just grow into big tadpoles and call themselves frogs, the way little children grow into big children and call themselves adults. Tadpoles are transformed into something entirely other.
You are about to shriek, Who gives a hoot what tadpoles do?! when you are forced to slam on the brakes to avoid plowing into a shopping-cart train that is crossing the intersection of First and Denny against the light. Around six months ago, several of those homeless individuals who push all of their earthly belongings-and often the days pickings from refuse cans-along the streets in appropriated supermarket carts got the bright idea to start convoying. It quickly caught on. Nowadays there are convoys or trains, as they are called, thirty or forty carts long, and they have attained a certain amount of protection-from cops, the rich boys, and bullying peers-and a certain amount of power, especially over motorists, for downtown traffic is frequently at the mercy of these squeaky-wheeled, slow-moving, irreverent caravans of detritus and desperation.
You are both vexed by the delay and rattled by its source, but Diamond surveys the scene with an expression of wonder. Can you picture them trasversing the Sahara, he asks, on their way to Timbuktu? And his wonderment only increases when, a few blocks farther, you see a toolless burglar smash a car windshield with his head, a procession of hysterical half-naked Christians flagellating themselves with strips of steel-belted radials, and a cadre of neo-Marxists extolling the joys and benefits of bloody revolution to clusters of purple-lipped winos, hip-hopping crack runners, and a few dazed couples newly exiled from suburbs that no Jacuzzi salesman will ever cruise again. Lining the curbs, like storks on a rail, and sometimes executing disjointed veronicas in traffic, as if bullfighting were an event in the Special Olympics, panhandlers of all ages, races, social backgrounds, and degrees of mental health screech, mumble, warble, and whine their pleas for alms; and as you pass the corner of First and Stewart, you can swear you hear the strains of a familiar theme being played on a Jews harp.
Diamond must have noticed your grimace because he says, Yes, yes, I agree: its much too early for Strangers in the Night. If the guy had his wits about him, hed ply us with a diurnal tune. With that, he throws his head back and launches into Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.
I really dont understand how you can be amused by this degradation.
Congratulations, hoptoad. Once again youve hit upon the wrong word. The theater of man is not always amusing, but it is always theater, and theater can be marveled at even when its content is somber and harsh. Youre acquainted with Greek tragedy?
The next thing you know, you are sounding like Belford Dunn. These people arent performing, for Gods sake. Their misery is real.
Everybodys performing. We only think its real.
Oh? Is that another nugget of wisdom you dug up in Timbuktu? I hope you make it in to see Yamagoofy. Hell give you a free enema just to hear you yak. You swerve to miss one jaywalking wino and then another. If the Titanic had been a Porsche, it would still be afloat. Of course, if winos were icebergs, scabs would wear snowshoes, and fleas would need picks. I have a friend, you say, who believes that its our fault these people are in the streets and our duty to shelter and feed them. That may have made sense at one time, but now therere so many of them.
Yes, isnt it grand? A bum or two on a corner is a bittersweet vignette, but this, this is spectacle! Numbers aside, your friend is a presumptuous twit to be assigning blame and delegating duty. Your friend insults the homeless by giving them no credit for having made the decisions that shaped their lives, and demeans them further by declaring them powerless to alter their situations. Therere many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that theyre victims.
Now wait a minute, Larry. You try, quite hypocritically, to approach it from Belfords point of view. I doubt very much if anybody chose this as a way of life. I mean, can you see the kids hanging out at the video parlor after school, one says he wants to be an engineer someday, a couple want to be lawyers, a girls ambition is to study veterinary medicine, and then this other kid says, Gee, I think Ill be a homeless person-or else a stinking toothless wino who sleeps on cold cement? I dont buy that.
Nor do I. And yet, except for the legitimately, congenitally insane, each and every one of them is where they are because of choices they made. Dumb choices. At some point, the gods placed two sealed bags in their vicinity and said Choose. One bag had a pepperoni in it, and one had a turd. Now, if they had bothered to examine the bags, to squeeze or shake or smell them-pepperoni having a decidedly different feel, bounce, and fragrance from its excremental counterpart-well, you get the picture. But because the turd bag was closer at hand and they didnt have to exert themselves to retrieve it or because it looked to be lighter and thus easier to carry, or larger and thus promised more of something for nothing, or because they were distracted by television-actually, if theyre watching a lot of TV, they may already have selected the shit-or because the turd bag was decorated in the colors of their favorite team …
Maybe somebody else chose for them.
Thats very often the case. But we can choose to make our own choices.
Easier said than done.
What isnt? If youre going to complain because there frequently are extenuating circumstances or because were forced to choose bag
s when were too young or uninformed to know what were doing, youll have to take it up with the gods. Uncle Larry didnt invent the system. All Uncle Larry is saying is that individuals have to accept responsibility for their own bad choices. If every time we choose a turd, society, at great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all. Maybe it boils down to the premium we want to place on liberty. Its numero uno in Uncle Larrys book, far out in front of food and shelter, though only a clam whisker ahead of your little—
Stop it!
If the Porsche had rather be racing on the Autobahn at 120 mph than idling through a stream of vaguely hostile pedestrians at First and Pike, gateway to the fabled Pike Place Market and center of the wino universe, it doesnt let on. The throttled-back Porsche behaves as if it is sipping brandy and puffing a cigar in the library of a Bavarian hunting lodge. If only you were as equanimous. For years, the down-and-out have secretly annoyed you, and for years, Belfords teary-eyed concern for them has made you feel guilty. Now, here is a guy suggesting that both annoyance and concern may be misplaced, that the homeless are simply players in one great pageant and may be essential, even intrinsic, to the plot. At least, you think that is what he is saying. Resisting, more out of fear than kindness, the urge to honk your horn at the actors who are clotting the crosswalk, you say, The fact is, Larry, therere people out there who did choose your pepperoni, who grabbed it and ran with it, who didnt quit school or flunk out, who didnt rob a convenience store or steal a car or get pregnant, get married too young or get hooked on booze or crack, people who made the most of a happy childhood or transcended a rotten one, who worked hard and made a success of themselves in business, only to have the rug yanked out from under them when the economy went south. What about them? Arent they victims?
They are if they think they are. Everybodys got …
A hard-luck story. Thats all you have to say? A temporary break in the procession allows you to gun the Porsche through the intersection.
I apologize if my incipient boredom is a millstone around the neck of this conversation, but as far as Im concerned, these matters are all sociology and noise. Noise and sociology. I should remind you, however, that authority-and fate-can be outwitted and that for every actual victim in our culture, therere a hundred who victimize-and trivialize-themselves by indulging their anger and nursing their bitterness. Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.
And thats all you have to say?
I wouldnt have said that much if you werent such a little mango-bruiser. Come on, pussy butter …
Dont call me that!
Apparently, you want me to chirp a lament for our brothers and sisters in the financial sector, but the Ice Capades will be touring Hell before your doomed colleagues inflate a gas bubble of sympathy in my dirty breast. Ruined investors and bankrupt bookies alike, most of them set themselves up for whatevers happened to them by buying into the Lie.
Did they, now? And what lie is that?
The Lie of progress. The Lie of unlimited expansion. The Lie of grow-or-perish. Listen. We built ourselves a fine commercial bonfire, but then instead of basking in its warmth, toasting marshmallows over it, and reading the classics by its light, we became obsessed with making it bigger and hotter, bigger and hotter, until if the flames didnt leap higher from one quarter to the next, it was cause for great worry and dissatisfaction. Well, any Bozo on the riverbank could have told us that if you keep feeding and feeding and feeding a bonfire, sooner or later you burn up all the fuel and the fire goes cold; or else the fire gets too huge to manage and eventually engulfs the countryside and chars its inhabitants. Nature has always set limits on growth: limits on the physical size of individual species, limits on the size of populations. Did we really believe capitalism was exempt from the laws of nature? Did we really confuse endless consumption with endless progress? Benjamin DeCasseres, a Frenchman who lectured at Timbuk U., defined progress as the victory of laughter over dogma. Now theres a victory worth celebrating.
In English, there is a quaint expression, making good time, a colloquialism that if taken literally implies that time is something that can be crafted or manufactured, and either poorly so or else expertly, a notion every bit as fanciful and illogical as naming a star sitting trouser-until one becomes acquainted with quantum physics, whereupon one learns that time, as measured by clocks on earth, is, indeed, a contrivance, a thing we have conveniently made up. Moreover, the better time we make, which is to say, the faster we go, the less time there is, so that by the time we reach the speed of light, there is no time at all, indicating, perhaps, that the only good time is a dead time. Something else to ponder is that if higher science has justified the figure of speech, making good time, might not it someday validate the name, sitting trouser, as well? For the moment, however, it is enough to say that you are fairly flying along First Avenue, making good time at last on your trip to the Hotel Sorrento.
You downshift, turn eastward up Marion, and within a few steep blocks leave the last remnants of the spectacle behind. Soon, shopping-cart convoys will have been replaced by luxury automobiles, derelicts eclipsed by folk in Easter finery. This lifts your spirits, and there is barely an accusatory burr in your voice when you say to Diamond, Youre a man whos turned against money.
He emits half a cackle. The bottom half. Thats like saying Ive turned against the crowbar or the hoe.
But …
Like saying Ive turned against the stunt double.
The what?
The surrogate who stands in for principals and does their stunts for them.
Oh, you say, but you dont quite get it.
Surely, my dear, Im not so obtuse that youve mistaken me for an ascetic. One of those self-destructive poverty snobs. Have you ever seen an ascetic who was merry and bright? Have you ever heard of a saint who was creative, brilliant, attractive, or anything besides a masochistic, sexually dysfunctional, unnatural egotist who thinks he or shes spiritually superior to you because he or she revels in misery and you dont? People whove bought into poverty are just as shallow and exploitative as those whove bought into wealth. Both have been stultified by their lack of imagination.
Well, thats certainly not your problem.
Ill accept that as a compliment. Especially since, as an autistic child, I began life with no imagination whatsoever. Why, when I was six years old, I was as prosaic as a bean-counter in a bureau.
Honest? I remember you saying youd been autistic, but I thought it was one of your jokes.
As seen from the pad, its all a joke, even autism-but therere good jokes and bad jokes, and autism, on its own terms, is worse than that chicken that keeps crossing that road.
Im afraid I dont know much about it, but I guess the doctors dont, either.
My theory, and few if any doctors subscribe to it, is that unlike ordinary emotional disorders, which, as Papa Freud taught us, are usually the result of childhood trauma, autism is the result of fetal trauma, something that disturbs us while were still in the waters of the womb. While were in our minnow stage. I mean minnow stage literally, by the way. We all start out as seafood.
Not wishing to test those waters, you ask, How were you able to overcome it? The autism?
Dolphins cured me.
Good grief! You give him a look that prompts him to say, Dont give me that look. Save that look for the apologists at your disco tomorrow. When I was eight, my parents took my sisters and me to a place in Florida where we could swim with dolphins. After an hour, I came out of the water and asked for a peanut butter sandwich. Up to that point, Id never spoken. Not one word. The next day, we did it again. This time, I emerged from the water and hugged my father. It was the first time Id voluntarily touched another human being. My dad took a leave of absence from his job, and we stayed at Grassy Key for several months. I swam every day with the dolphins, and by the time I was nine, I was a so-called n
ormal boy. A very naughty boy, but, by psychiatric standards, normal.
But how … ?
Autistic children are disappeared into themselves. The dolphins broke through, went in there, and brought me back. How? We could communicate, the dolphins and I, because we were on the same level. The self-contained, intrauterine level. The submarine level. Emotionally, autistic children are still in the womb. Underwater. They cant relate to land animals. To life in the air. Somehow, the dolphins showed me how to make the transition from a liquid to a gaseous environment. It seems perfectly logical. Its well known that depression and hypertension can be reduced by simply observing fish in a tank.
Maybe that explains …
Why Im a Nommophile? Not entirely. However, its safe to say that I am more disposed than most to drawing major conclusions from the arcane aquatic traditions of the Bozo. But you dont want to talk about that. You want to talk about money.
Thats unfair. Moneys not the only thing Im—
Dont be defensive. Itd be a bad sign if you werent inclined toward abundance. Abundance in all things-material, emotional, intellectual, spiritual-is the goal of any first-rate soul. But into which of those categories does money fit? Automatically, you say material. Uncle Larry disagrees. Uncle Larry says spiritual. Money may be our greatest spiritual teacher. More edifying than a stadium full of swamis. Nothing can knock a pilgrim off the path as fast as money. Thats the job of a spiritual teacher, you know. Not to hold us on the path, but to knock us off of it. Until we can stay on the path without ever being knocked-or tempted-off, until we can resist the teachers carrot and withstand his rod, our transformative journey can be little more than fits and starts. When it comes to illuminating the inner structure of consciousness and highlighting its weaknesses and flaws, nothing, not even love, casts as bright a beam as money. The things were willing to do to obtain it, to protect it, to express our guilt over having it, are incomparably revealing. Theres a thin line between charity and greed: at bottom, theyre both expressions of insecurity and manifestations of ego. If you want to know how insecure you are, how swollen and stiff your ego is, what your chances are of staying on the path, just examine your attitudes toward the juice. Moneys a terrible servant but a wonderful master. Far be it from Uncle Larry, my dear, to come between a seeker and her guru.