“What’re you whistling?” I stopped spreading pumpkin butter on the raisin bread and looked up. “Say what?” “I asked you: what was that tune you were whistling?” The leftover mushroom-lentil soup looked thick and glutinous as an argument with a Scientologist, and I was sorry I’d even started reheating it. “Was I whistling?” “You always whistle. You are a terrific whistler. But you whistle all the time. Even if I can’t locate you, I can tell when you’re coming, even in a store, even when you were in the hospital, even in an office building. If I had gotten separated from you in, say, The Empire State Building, all I’d have to do was ride up and down on the elevator till I heard you whistling on the seventieth floor. Because nobody else whistles these days. It’s one of the great Lost Arts of the modern world. Yes, you were whistling.” “No kidding. So what was I whistling?” “That’s what I’m asking you!” There was a tone in her voice. It is a lovely voice, as anyone who has called our home can attest; a mellifluous, lyrical, patibulary, longaminous speaking utensil. Charms birds. Quietens feral beasts and patrons of Pauly Shore movies who want their ticket money back. This was not that terrific voice. This one had a tone in it. I said, “Uh…can you give me a hint what it sounded like?” She growled. Low, throaty, not reassuring. Sheesh! Whatta grouch. I was just minding my own business, trying to fix some minor lunch out of second-hand leavings. How the hell do I know what I was whistling? “Okay, so at least what’d it sound like?” I asked. Trying to be accommodating. She gave me The Look. So I dredged back through the last five minutes’ memories, and I replayed myself. (As a member of the Agile Mind Squadron, this is but one among an armory-full of mnemonic devices I use to reclaim data. And it uses much less electricity than a slow laptop.) “Oh,” I said, as I heard myself in my head, “that was the theme song from a children’s radio show called Let’s Pretend. I used to listen to it on Saturday mornings back in the 1940s. When I was a little kid.
Cream of Wheat is so good to eat
Yes we have it every day;
We sing this song, it will make us strong
And it makes us shout “Hooray!”
It’s good for growing babies
And grown-ups too to eat;
For all the family’s breakfast
You can’t beat Cream of Wheat!
“Now why the hell would I be whistling that?! I haven’t thought of that in years.”
Susan was squeezing dirty, soapy water out of a big yellow sponge. She had been washing the Packard, out front; and here she was in the kitchen, wringing out dirty, soapy water as I tried to summon the fortitude to face that hellspawn glop of mushroom-lentil soup. “You were whistling it,” she said, not looking at me, “because you can’t think of a way to start that introduction to the book, and your unconscious mind is sick and tired of waiting for you to catch up with it, and it’s signalling you.” And then she walked away.
I hate it that she’s smarter than I.
Many things have happened to both of us, you and me, the two of us, you in your place and me in mine, since last we got together here at the EDGEWORKS Spa and Storm Window Company, and I would be dilatory in my duties if I didn’t say I’m awfully sorry about the miserable crap that’s happened to you recently; but look on the bright side, there are still those three or four good things that you can cling to in wretched moments.
I don’t mean to be smartass or overbearing about it, but you know it was your fault, mostly. You keep trying to outwit yourself, but there are times when you fall back into the same old habit-patterns and reaction-formations. And then…well…you know what happened. Which isn’t to say that I’m not very sympathetic. We’re pals, you and I, and when you’re all fucked up it makes me miserable as a buzzard on a shit-wagon. Or somesuch rural phrase intended to make you feel better.
And I know it’s not going to make your lot any easier if I tell you that soon after we last met here, I had this very serious heart attack, and they cracked me open like O.J.’s alibi, and they took 27-1/2 inches of vein out of my left leg (leaving a scar that runs from my anklebone up to my groin) (and though I’ve said it elsewhere, it’s a good line, so I’ll say it again: this scar makes me look as if I finished way out of the money at the Heidelberg Dueling Academy slice-a-thon), and they built me a new superhighway in my chest. Over the counter, in lay terms, it’s called quadruple bypass surgery.
I also got this nifty zipper scar in my sternum area.
To be frank about it, kiddo, I was almost dead. Stood right at the open doorway and looked to the other side of that misty aperture. Trust me on this: you don’t come back if you go on through.
And I have had any number of interesting epiphanies, eye openers, illuminations, awarenesses, and like that. Most of all, I am now able to report, it scared the crap outta me.
And there’s been other stuff that happened, and places I’ve gone, and things I’ve done, and a few new awards won…
(Did I ever tell you that the very first award I ever copped was when I was, oh, I don’t know, maybe seven or eight, in Painesville, in Ohio, 1941 or ’42, something like that, and it was a bronze medal for kite-flying, and let me tell you, pal, I fuckin’ loved that little medal, and it’s been lost for a lot more than fifty years, and I miss the hell out of that object. I just know it’s lying up in some dusty cigar box in the back room of a gimcrack and antiquery in Weyauwega, Wisconsin or South Lunenburg, Vermont but I’ll never again hold that first treasure in my pudgy little kid’s fingers. Okay, now you flash on what you lost from your kidhood, and the two of us will take a minute or two break to sigh and go tsk-tsk and dwell on how time swirls by too fast to grab any of it, no matter how lean or pudgy the fingers.)
…and I know a long-time friend betrayed you, and that you had a few nights when the phone rang, late, waking you, and someone you love gave you the medical report; and I know the money thing didn’t get much better, but you made it through again, and like the man said, what don’t kill us only makes us stronger; and we both got suckered into seeing Independence Day and came out wondering why the hell they had to spend so much money just to update Earth vs. the Flying Saucers; but we’re still here, you and I, maybe for no other reason than to piss off our enemies (and you five redolent bags of turkey-puke know who you are, and don’t think that just because you’ve backed off for a while, that I’ve forgotten to dream about your carotid arteries and the reflective glory of an old-fashioned straight razor).
We’re still here, despite all of it; and for the most part we still have our dreams. We can still play let’s pretend.
And I’m very pleased you came back for a second helping of what I’ve spent my adult life writing. Yes, there were a lot of typos in the first book, and we’ve heard your complaints and have struggled to do a lot better this time. Mostly because of Dana Buckelew, the editor for White Wolf who is down in the pits every day, her sleeves rolled up, smudges of inferno soot on her cheeks, stoking the EDGEWORKS machinery.
(But to the one or two of you who are so goddam ignorant that you don’t appreciate the unjustified “deckle-edge” margin — considered very chic in the best publishing and design venues — which have been integrated into the page layouts by Richard Thomas and Larry Friedman, well, let’s be frank with each other: don’t you, finally, get exhausted with embarrassment as you continue to demonstrate your penchant for Not Getting The Word? You keep wandering into the meeting half an hour late, and you ask questions that were dealt with before you stumbled into the hall. You keep going out on the Internet and wondering, “Who’s this Bix Beiderbecke [Walter Damrosch, Jacqueline Cochran, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Karensky, Alfred Krupp, Florence Mills, Lucy Terry, June Christy, Hetty Green, Clarice Cliff, Babe Zaharias, Baby Dodds, Paul Muni, pick whatever name was your most recent gaffe online], anyway?” You keep believing the bullshit that you are entitled to your own opinion, when I keep telling you, over and over, that you are only entitled to your informed opinion. You keep running your face, expressing every idiot vagrant assumption that flashed behind your eyes, and just because you see similar stupidity demonstrated every night on Letterman, you keep walking into it. And there you are, yet again, dripping your faucet as the homies put it, saying bone-dumb things like how come you got those raggedy right-hand margins, can’t you afford to do ’em the way my PC does ’em, real neat and all squared up?
(No, you sorry thing, we choose to do ’em just the way Gutenberg did ’em in his Bible, the way John Peter Zenger did ’em and Emile Zola did ’em and even Mark Twain did ’em. Because, there was a time in this life, and not all that long ago, when a book was designed with some style, some dangerous panache, some chutzpah; even a bit of the old crème de la crème. It was called Lookin’ Good, and you had to pay extra for it. We give it to you free of charge, just another way in which we say, “We’re proud of these packages. You get good value for the money.” Think not? Well, consider this:
(The Ecco Press this year published Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, FIRST LOVE, as a book, with illustrations by the splendid Barry Moser. The size of the book is 6-1/2″ high by 4-1/2″ wide. It is a little book. It is 88 pages including frontmatter, short bios of Ms. Oates and Mr. Moser, and very wide margins. It is a lovely little book. It costs $18.00 in the U.S. and an unbelievable $23.99 in Canada. Yes, it is an absolutely terrific story by an author whose every book I own, illustrated with seven of the most striking Moser woodcuts you’ve ever seen — notably that Christ and the snake on page 57 — but gimme a break here, Ecco honey, it’s a measly eightyfuckingeight pages! For something close to twenty bucks, including the tax.
(And I don’t even want to think what it runs some poor damned Oates aficionado who lives in Ottawa.
(So consider: EDGEWORKS volume one stands 9-1/4″ high by 6-1/2″ wide; it contains two complete books and new additional material, such as this introduction, totaling more than two hundred thousand words [200,000]. Way more than 200,000. It runs to nearly 470 pages [four hundred and seventy] and it has photographs and an exhaustive index. And a great cover.
(White Wolf offered it to you for $21.99 [$29.99 in Canada]. With that gorgeous Jill Bauman cover.
(Now, let’s get something straight here. I’m not talking comparison of quality of the work in either book. As a long time and righteous Joyce Carol Oates/Barry Moser fan, I freely admit that Mr. Moser can draw circles — as well as polyhedrons, tesseracts, hexafoil spheroids and skiagrams — around me; and Ms. Oates — whose photo was taken with me on a June night in New York this year, in the banquet hall of the hotel where Cary Grant used to live — produces work, year after year, book after book, that is the envy of any sensible writer and the delight of any percipient reader. I am only nuts about her writing. So step off, with any suggestion that I’m saying I’m better than Oates and Moser…or admitting they’re better than I. What I’m pointing out, and shouldn’t have had to, and certainly shouldn’t have taken this long to do it — but sometimes you do piss me off — what I’m pointing out is that anyone who bought EDGEWORKS volume one got a huge value for the dollar. Now, if you hated what I wrote, that’s another matter. If you can’t stand a book, it doesn’t matter if you got it for free or your bankbook registered zero after you’d paid for it. But just strictly from the “dollar’s-worth” perspective, and the amount of sheer physical labor and talent that went into the book, anybody who is piss-ant pawky enough to kvetch about the elegance of an unjustified right-hand margin really ought to take his/her business elsewhere, and stop bitching about it on the web, because this White Wolf series is, candidly, too good for you.