Deadpan

"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing." Robert Benchley. If true, and you can't trust Christopher Buckley, but even if not, it would be a very cool thing to have said. My mentor in the book business, the editor-in-chief at Beacon Press, along with his pal Desmond, would sit around after dinner, drinking very good whiskey and smoking like coal-fired power plants, making up quotes. I dined with them several times, and I was young and stupid. They delighted in pulling my chain. Both of them were reprobates and spoke 3 or 4 languages that had been dead for thousands of years. They wouldn't let me drive, so after an evening of conversation, would tuck me away in a former chicken-coop that had been out-fitted with a cot. Great evenings, followed by massive Edwardian breakfasts, where there were designated people to beat you on the back if you stopped breathing. Good to have back-up. The rain on the roof is perfect for taking a nap, a beat that defines sleep. You couldn't parse shit from such a random sampling. I was raking crap from the grader ditch, leaves and twigs, thinking I could alter the flow, when I realized I had no control, zero, nothing I did mattered. Maybe a little, in terms of immediate drainage, but I'm not a player here, in terms of the long term, the longer calendar the Aztecs followed. Another cycle of moons, another, what do you call them? years? About half-way to the woodshed is the actual crest of the ridge, I can joke about it all I want, but it is the actual crest, and I'd like to build a small mud hut there, where I could retreat, with a few coals, and eke out a living. I don't want that other stuff, the bling, the fame, the money; I just want kimchee and some crackers. Blue-gill fillets and hush-puppies. Cole-slaw. You interview the poorer classes and they always fall back on cabbage and cornmeal. RC cola and a moon-pie. I never thought much about it, because I've always loved cornbread, and cabbage cooked with salt-pork. Now I know we were very poor, but at the time I was completely oblivious, when Dad was at sea, I'd kill a couple of squirrels with my slingshot and Mom would make a stew. When Dad was on shore duty we'd fish, and eat perch fillets. Not only that, but other folks would come over, bearing potato salad and hush-puppies, and while the adults drank homebrew and moonshine, we kids would pelt city buses with rings of rubber we cut from old inter-tubes fired from great contraptions that looked like they might besiege castles. No one paid any attention to us. If you needed stitches, they just hauled you off to the hospital on the base. It was just assumed that you'd get dinged up: if you throw rocks at each other, eventually someone's going to get hurt. I have a few scars, and each of them has become a novella. Relatives were the worst, my cousin Jackie was forever beating the shit out of me, and my older sister would join in. My usual defense was to find a cave that I could hide in, and scare the holy hell out of them. We drew a truce, when I was 14 or 15, because they realized, I could probably defeat them in open combat. Growing up, right? an increment, a single cog at a time. I don't begrudge any of it.