Typical (7 page)

The presentation of gifts began with a stir—Mr. Irony presented Pampa and Borger with panty hose—“Apologies, ladies: not designer pants”—and persuaded them to don them in the cab of the log truck. When the women emerged, glossy-legged and matted, the crew and the insurance salesman all adopted a deliberately calmed-down demeanor like that of men in a bar before the storm of a bar fight.

Mr. Irony presented the driver with a case of Skoal, a particolored welder’s cap made of dungaree cloth, and a Buck knife, which, as the driver reached for it, Mr. Irony threw into the adjacent wooded lot. “The knife is guaranteed for life, even against loss, sir.” The driver donned his new cap, backwards, took a big pinch of Skoal, pocketed the fresh tin of snuff on his butt, looked sidelong at the panty-hosed women, and walked jauntily and juicy-lipped into the woods.

“A good man,” Mr. Irony remarked. He pulled from a carton a model 44 Husqvarna chain saw, started it, cut the air after the fashion of a Shriner with a big sequined sword, and motioned to the oiler to come relieve him of the saw.

“I don’t cut,” the oiler shouted over the saw.

“You cut,” Mr. Irony bellowed back. “Cut that billboard down.” Mr. Irony allowed the saw to idle.

“Taint gone fuck hisself
all
up,” Rooster said.

“Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “shut the fuck up. Taint
ain’t.”

The oiler, carrying the saw somewhat apprehensively, at arm’s length, addressed the billboard on which a candidate for sheriff promised to restore law and order to Dillon County, and cut through the first creosote pole with a clean, flexed, low turn of his body, one with the saw, and stepped to the next pole in the same crouch, and to the next and the next, and the candidate for sheriff fell on his face into the parking lot, blowing full beers off the log truck and crushing the insurance salesman’s Blazer.

“Oh shit,” the salesman said. The parking lot began to smell of perfume. “Oh God.”

“Oh boy,” Borger said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Pampa said.

“No event is unplanned for the intelligent purveyor of insurance, is it, sir?” Mr. Irony said to the insurance salesman.

“What?”

“The readiness, I believe, is all, sir?”

“Not—not
cars.
I sell life insurance.”

“Receive your gratuity, sir.” Mr. Irony handed the salesman a boxed leisure suit the color of green mint dinner candies and a gun-style hair dryer. The suit had contrasting yellow stitching and the blower a barrel the size and shape of a grenade mortar, the opening of which the salesman was measuring with his spread hand. “Damn! I can
get
another car!” he suddenly said. “No problem! Hey!” He passed his fist into the hair dryer.

The oiler dropped the chain saw on the truck bed and opened two beers, taking a sip from each. He sat on the truck bed beside the saw and crossed his legs with an odd, pensive, pursed-lip expression on his face. Mr. Irony addressed him.

“You
do
cut, sir, and with élan.”

“My knee start to give out on me.”

“Understandable. You were configured as low and sturdy as Johnny Bench.”

“Down
there, wudden I?”

“Yessir.”

“Got to fish sometime, right?”

“Right on.”

“Can’t cut bait all your life.”

“No sir.”

“Can’t cut bait all your life, right?”

“You are right.”

“Taint gone mess
up,”
Rooster said.

“I ain’t teether,” Taint said.

“Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “Mr. Taint is in a rehabilitative power drive that needs no gainsaying.”

“That his saw?”

“’Tis.”

“Gone give me them boots, homeboy?”

“Gone give you a boom box, mother.”

From Bill’s Dollar Store, a credenza-style home entertainment center is wheeled out on a four-wheel furniture dolly by two men who struggle over curbing to keep the dolly under it.

“That thing is seven foot
long,”
Rooster said.

“Big enough for a boog like you,” Taint said.

“You put that affair on your shoulder and it is yours. I have had it converted to 12 volts. Batteries included.”

“Batteries?”

“Two Die Hards in the TV compartment, wired in parallel.”

“You
trazee.”

“Hoist it up, Mr. Rooster.”

“This some kind of
race
joke.”

“Might be.”

“Hey, Rooster. So what?” the oiler said to Rooster.
“So fucking what?”

“You done mess that boy
up,”
Rooster said to Mr. Irony.

Mr. Irony and the two Bill’s Dollar employees and the oiler got under one end of the home entertainment center and, like the Marines on the flagpole at Iwo Jima, shouldered it up to a 60-degree angle. The oiler waved impatiently at Rooster to get under the giant radio.

Rooster obliged, shaking his head, and lifted the machine without noticeable strain. He took a step backwards, kicking the dolly free, and hefted the home entertainment center an inch or two forwards and backwards for balance. He swung it, like a sail boom, through an arc, looking for the others.

“I’ll say this to his
face,”
the oiler said to Mr. Irony. “You are one buck nigger, Rooster.”

“You right, Daddydied. Turn this thing
on.”

From the truck bed, the oiler leaned over and reached inside the long box, and suddenly the lot was overwhelmed with a booming radio broadcast. Rooster started to jive. He got clear of the truck, clear of the billboard, everyone backed off to give him room, and he began a blaster walk, a walk of total indifference to the world, a series of steps and half steps and backsteps, around the parking lot of the closed convenience store in Dillon, S.C.

He circled back by the group, now holding its ears. “Don’t want your boots now, homeboy. This all right,” he shouted. To the oiler: “Okay, Taint. Don’t call me a nigger ever again. You earn that first one.”

“Ladies,” he said, bowing slightly to the Available Traveling Women, the entertainment center tipping as slowly and heavily as a ship on a swell. “I’m going to go see some of the brothers.” He left the lot in the gliding, halting, butt-clenching locomotion required of a proper dude beneath a seven-foot-long, 200-pound, 80-watt-per-channel, fake-walnut-veneer, credenza-style home entertainment center.

Grease and oil—and that’s not all, I do hydraulic and seals and packing leathers—grease and oil is very important. It is not just, as far as a lubricant. I believe it is like the blood of machines. Not the energy—that’s your gas—but the blood, as far as life.
Machine
life. Saw life. Splitter life. Truck life. Backhoe life. And tools make men’s life easier. Oil is the blood of the dirt. We buried Lumpy’s Daddy Saddy. I’m okay now.

I was not for a spot there. Then we carried a fellow on the log boom thew might all Georgia that said shape up and Rooster fucked with me and I just, I don’t know, got right over it. He was, special to me, as far as almost being my own father, I thought sometimes.

My real daddy a preacher. But Lumpy daddy, before we even got married, one day he explained to me what viscosity means. That is a word I deal with. One day he give me a beer and a bowl of hot chili and he say, That—pointing to the beer—is not viscosity, and that—pointing to the chili—is viscosity. That might sound obvious to me now, but it was not obvious to me then. It was a hot chili, too. Lumpy daddy make a good chili.

I’m okay now.

Mr. Irony came to see me later that afternoon in Pampa’s and my suite—Pepe’s El Presidente Suite at South of the Border, where
Duke
recommends Men at Their Best recuperate from log-truck carriage—came to me and asked that I not make myself so scarce, explaining that “things” need me. I asked him what that was intended to mean. He said again: “Well, things need you, son.

I pondered this a moment, and it occurred to me that he somehow knew of my decision to remove myself from this account of our world tour—I had not informed him of that decision; nor, for that matter, was he, I thought at the time, aware that there
was
an account. A character in a sombrero and serape jingled on spurs into the room where we sat and announced, “The senõritas expect youse for margaritas at the Acapulco Pulquería Número Three-a.” We said okay. Mr. Irony handed him a fifty-dollar bill and he left with a flourish of his serape and a jingle of spurs.

“I was at risk as your student, I thought. The oiler guy looked like he was better raw material.”

“Pshaw. Never edge him up right. Buck him up, yes. Stop that damned whimpering, yes. But the proper attitude of self-unimportance would cast him back into the aquarium in which he died. He did resemble, as you noted, the decaying Plectostomus you found as a child that shocked you because you thought it, for weeks, merely
not moving.”

“Sir, you know everything I think?”

“Stop just short of everything.”

“What don’t you know, then? You said you stop short of—”

“You have had, I believe you confessed, my Traveling Woman while we’ve been Men at Our Best?”

“Yes.”

“Well. There are certain
final things,
in the nature of excretions and animal noises and the quality of ardor, that I choose not to know.”

“I see. But you
could.”

“I could.”

“Because you are—is omniscient a meaningful term?”

“Left field. Nothing of the kind.
Happy hour!”

With that, Mr. Irony left the suite, headed for the Acapulco Pulquería Número Three-a.

M
R. IRONY RENOUNCED IRONY
and took his place in line at Unemployment. Where once he would have found the tedium of the protracted process a delight, akin to the moves of a child’s board game, he found the desk-to-desk ordeal—and getting in the wrong line, and then getting in the right line to have it closed when he was one party from the bureaucrat serving it—officious, small-minded, forgiveless horseshit.

With a sheaf of papers so bulky that he longed for a briefcase to hold them in, he stood on one pained leg or the other lamenting his decision to quit irony. It left him uninsulated against the world, as if he had renounced drink or drugs instead. Despair came after him—with little tentacles it reached toward his balding head from the low fiberboard ceiling tiles of the Unemployment Office complex. “I rue the day I quit irony,” he remarked to the woman behind him.

“I wish I hadn’t quit Toys
“R
” Us,” the woman said.

Despite himself, Mr. Irony felt a small thrill at her response. It was, with his remark … no, he was through with irony. Fourteen hours later, on their third shift of unemployment counselors, the same woman spoke to him again: “Honey, you didn’t really
quit
your job, did you?

At this instant Mr. Irony conceived of his Desired Vocation, still a blank line on several of his multitudinous forms. He wanted to be a circus rider, a trick rider of horses going in a circle, standing on them, flipping backwards on them, maybe flipping backwards from one to the other …

“I’m worrit about you, mister,” the woman was saying. “I don’t think you know
the ropes.”

“Why not?”

“The way you
stan
there. You can’ stan there that way, all tired like, if you ever done this before. We ain’t begin to get
no
where. I’m fraid you
did
quit your job.”

“Of
course
I quit my job,” Mr. Irony said, worried that the woman had somehow detected his enjoyment in the irony of her quitting Toys “R” Us and his quitting irony.

“Child,” she said, “you can’
quit.
You got to be
fire.
You
quit,
but you git them to
fire
your ass. You quit in your
heart,
but you git fire
on paper.”

“Maybe I was fired,” Mr. Irony said.

“If you was, you
know.”

“Actually, I never really had a
job,
I had a—”

“Honey, none us ever had no
job.
Who want
that?”

“I had a … style, you might say.”

The woman looked at him with a grin. “You was some kind
pimp,
I bet. I like them miscegenational pimps—”

“No, madam, it’s—”

“Hell. Don’ get snitty.”

It was going to be a hard life, Mr. Irony saw. Without something to fill the void left by the departure of his vice, he was going to be subject to humorless days until he got high on something else. Christ was out of the question, precisely because He Himself contained no small measure of irony. Even getting high on “life itself” sounded inappropriately ironic. Only being a … circus rider made, at the moment, any kind of clean, unironical sense.

There would be no irony in standing on a horse, if you could. And if the horse moved in a circle, that was its business. And if you had to put on some tights and a sequined vest and some special slippers, and the horse had to wear some flashy, colorful hardware, that was show business. He did not see how a man who had renounced irony could go wrong being a circus rider.

He began trying to fill in Desired Vocation on his forms against his thigh. The woman behind him bent over also to see what he was writing.

“Circus rider. That’s a good one,” she said. “You catchin on. You
never
get hire.”

Even though there was a rich incense of irony about this woman and everything she said, Mr. Irony liked her. He looked at her fondly and she got down on her hands and knees.

“This the best part of Unemployment, honey. Put them foams on my back and write all you wont to. It feels
good.
Don’t poke
too
hard or you’ll come through.”

Mr. Irony did as he was told, and used the human desk as it and he moved incrementally toward their benefits.

Back at his apartment, Mr. Irony had a seizure, or something like a seizure. It was probably equivalent to the withdrawal anxiety common to boozers or druggers, only his fear was uncharted: he was sailing for the first time in the troubled, mundane waters of life without irony. It made him stand glumly beside the refrigerator, knowing that opening it and bending and looking at all the things—cruddy-lipped mustard jars, two olives in a tall bottle, a Baggie full of rotten parsley, a small German roach moving very slowly—that used to delight him in their queer combinations was not a pleasure open to him now. As a young man he had lost his women and lost his mind; as an older man he had lost money and his mind; now he had lost his irony, and it had never been this bad. Women and money were nothing to irony.