You & Me

You & Me by Padgett Powell Page A

Book: You & Me by Padgett Powell Read Free Book Online
Authors: Padgett Powell
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are doing when they hold the crotch.
    Is your hand going to be out in front of you as if you are riding a saddle and holding the pommel?
    No. This saddle pommel is in my mind, and I need it.
    I need a shovel to lean on, in my mind only. Also I need to shave the hair off the back of my neck.
    That is another kind of want. Unless you purport to do that too with the shovel.
    I know it. I don’t.
    I wish the masseuse team would get here, speaking of it.
    Put on the jumpsuit and go to the liquor store.
    Not without my pommel. I can’t.
    Did you hear about the kid who punched out the school-bus driver?
    Did he suspect him of pederasty?
    That was not intimated in the news report. What was intimated was that an innocent man was attacked by an early irrigible thug.
    By what?
    Incorrigible.
    You said irrigible?
    I did.
    What does that mean?
    I don’t know, I’ve never heard it.
    It sounds like it should be a word, though.
    It does.
    The irrigible thug. Almost the opposite of the incorrigible thug. Is corrigible a word?
    I think not.
    Then the word for what we mean by corrigible should be irrigible.
    Irrigable almost works too.
    That is a word.
    Scrabble master! Give me the jumpsuit and the cord. Plug me in. I’ll get Nordic Blue vodka and be a dandy there and back.
    I’ll hold my pommel if the brothers mess with me. I’ll say I’m looking for that irrigible punk that slapped the pederast bus driver and that I aim to seduce him with my suit and my juice.
    There is a fine line between humor and stupidity.
    The line is finer all the time.
    The bird doesn’t change.
    The bird does not change.

&
    Be all that you can be.
    Talking bout.
    Hongry jack.
    Pluperfect.
    Tell me a story, Susie Q.
    Release me and let me love again.
    You never loved.
    That is true.
    Nor I.
    Why is it?
    Why are we deformed?
    We do not know. Can the deformed see their deformity?
    The club foot yes, the club heart no.
    Tender is the meat.
    I loved the name and the actual thing called the trundle bed as a child.
    I made beds with my mother. She taught me the pillow-case thing where you hold the pillow with your chin. It fascinated me for some reason, not knowing immediately why she had bowed her head like that.
    What about that weird inversion method, the inside-out grabbing of the corners of the pillow—
    No, that is perverse. I won’t have it. That is like sock bunchers. Socks should be pulled on I don’t care if it stretches the shit out of them, not rolled on like a rubber or something, a rubber on your foot, I won’t have it.
    There is a lot we won’t have.
    There is a lot we don’t have.
    And that by God is the way God wants it. Let’s shut the fuck up and not pray.
    Tang. What a drink that was.
    Do you recall Fizzies?
    That was a pioneer, a harbinger of fast-food badness, headed our way.
    Is it tenable that our bad appetites are what is actually ruining the world?
    Whoever controls the sugar in its cheapest form will control the world. Fifty-five gallons of corn syrup can do more to move and control people than fifty-five fifty-five-gallon drums of oil. The oil can be all gone and people will be fighting over sugar.
    You’ve gone all pundit on me here.
    Pundit. Pundit. Pundit. How much pun could a pundit pun if a pundit could pun pun?
    Give me the suit. I am headed for the store. The days of the professional drinker are over but we air not whupped yit.

&
    We are perfect.
    Pluperfect.
    Pretorian guards of the sane.
    I wish dinosaurs had made it.
    No shit.
    Don’t criticize me. Did you hear that hot rod or whatever the fuck that was last night? What was that?
    Loud machine.
    No shit.
    We talking in circles, we hear where we coming from, but we talking in circles.
    I hope my deodorant does not fail.
    How long before we smell like old men?
    Last year, dude.
    Probably so.
    Have you seen a lot of chicks coming through here?
    Well, it’s not the Manson ranch, I’ll grant you that.
    Do we not

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