Traveling Sprinkler (7 page)

“No no no. Cigars.”

“Oh, baby. Why?”

“I tried a corncob pipe and it was no good for me. Before that, I tried a can of Skoal, and it made me ill. I've stopped drinking. No beer, no Yukon Jack, no Tyrconnell. I need some new tongue-loosening addiction.”

“I can't imagine you as a cigar smoker—I don't want to imagine you as a cigar smoker.”

“It's just a phase. It's my brown period.” I stuffed the plastic bag that my sandwich came in into the picnic basket. “Are you still on friendly terms with that doctor dude?”

“Harris.” She nodded.

“Isn't ‘Harris' kind of a needless encumbrance? Does he really know you and understand you?”

Roz gave me a look. “Progress is being made,” she said. “There are complications.”

“Because I know you and I love you,” I said. “It's my birthday and I can say that.”

“Then what about that woman in Pennsylvania?”

“You'd moved out, you were gone!” I said. “It was brief and fleeting and completely wrong in every way.” Several years ago I had an untidy interlude with a poet from Lehigh University, and I'd made the mistake of telling Roz, hoping it might make her jealous and bring her back.

“I moved out because you were being impossible,” Roz said. “We had no money and you were singing in the barn all day long.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

She looked at her hands. I made a big sigh. Smack whimpered from the back and Roz gave him some of her sandwich.

“Cigars,” she said. “Not good.”

“I'll stop smoking them if you move back in with me.”

“Please, I'm serious. The show is so much work, and—I wasn't going to tell you this—but I'm anemic. I'm very anemic. I have pica.”

“Oh baby, how absolutely awful.” I moved the picnic basket clumsily so I could hold her hand. “What's pica?”

“Do you remember how I used to have those terrible periods that just went on and on?”

I said I certainly did.

“Well, they're worse now,” Roz said. “They last more than a week and I go through boxes of ultra tampons. It's a festival of gore every month. I haven't been sleeping, because when you're anemic you don't sleep. You just sit up eating poppy seeds and anything crunchy. Sesame seeds—I eat tubs of sesame seeds. And dry oatmeal. Sometimes I want to eat the whole sidewalk. That's what pica is. For instance.” She pointed. “See that big rock? To me it looks chewable. I want to eat that rock. That's how messed up I am.”

“Oh my goodness,” I said. “Are you taking iron pills?”

“Yes, yes, but they don't agree with me. I've been eating masses of collard greens, though.”

“What does the gynecologist say?”

“She says—” Roz started to cry.

“Sweetie!” I said.

“Don't worry, it's not cancer. But it sure is a pain.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin and took a breath. “I'll be fine. I have to go now. I have to read a stack of research papers. We have a show coming up on colonoscopies. Harris thinks they're a false religion, that most of them are unnecessary, and he's pretty convincing.”

“Good, because nobody's going to be poking around in my bottom. A doctor snuck a thermometer in there when I was five years old and it was horrible. Humiliating.”

Roz smiled. “I'm sorry to hear that,” she said.

“Ah, don't be, water under the bridge.”

“Well, happy birthday, honey.” She kissed me on the cheek and drove off in her sporty battered car.

R
OZ LOOKED PALE,
now that I think of it. She's working too hard. I sent her an email thanking her for the egg salad sandwich. “I'm worried about you,” I said. “Call me if I can do anything. Thank you for the picnic. Love -P. PS Forgot to say—great show on spinal fusion surgery! PPS I'm having problems writing lyrics. Only if you have time—can you think of some random three-word phrases, each using only one-syllable words?”

When Roz first moved in with me, I dusted off the traveling sprinkler and showed her what it looked like. I showed her how it worked, how you hooked up the hose to its fundament and the water surged in and up through its bowels and out the two twirly wands and how you could adjust the angle of the spray that came from the rusted ends of the wands. She lifted it and remarked at how heavy it was. She was delighted by it in her good-natured way. “It's so simple,” she said.

I don't want to say that a traveling sprinkler is the best way to water a lawn, because it isn't. The best way to water a lawn is to live in a place where there's enough rain, and when there are hot, dry months the lawn just stops growing and gets dusty. That's how you should water a lawn. But if you want to have a big garden party and you want really green grass for it—say you want to have a wedding or a game of badminton and you want the grass to be very healthy and strong to hold up under all those happy, playful feet—then you lay out the hose course. You make the track. It's better than the Disney Monorail. It's better than the water slide made of plastic.

You lay that hose out like you're squirting icing on a coffee cake, in a big set of repeating S's. You can't make the turns too sharp—nothing can be abrupt or “discontinuous,” as they say in Algebra II. The brilliance of the whole thing comes in its ability to ride its source of power. It's a serious cast-iron machine.

When we first got together, Roz had wanted to have a baby, and like the selfish dumbass I was I'd said, “Not now”—which meant not ever.

•   •   •

I
'M LISTENING
to a song called “Jacuzzi Games,” by Loco Dice. There are no words. A woman makes soft but unfeigned-sounding murmurs and purrs of sexual pleasure over a good beat, with some added echo. The bassline doesn't change. I've been working on my traveling sprinkler poem. When I'm fiddling with a poem it's better not to have any words coming in the headphones. But then I sometimes reach a point when I'm totally absorbed. Then I can play any song at all, words or not. I don't hear the words as words. Those are the best times. I can be listening to Springsteen singing “Pink Cadillac” in a shady spot on Inigo Road and be writing about sitting in a treehouse reading William Cullen Bryant's poem “A Hymn of the Sea” while smoking a huge, nasty cigar from Federal Cigar, as I did yesterday. “A Hymn of the Sea” is in an ornate edition with a hundred engravings and my grandfather's name written in pencil in the front. He wanted to be a poet and didn't quite make it. My great-grandfather wrote light verse. I come from a long line of extremely minor poets.

My grandfather smoked pipes. Stéphane Mallarmé smoked cigars. Both of them died of throat cancer. Yesterday I went into Federal Cigar and I said to the man at the register that I needed a really good powerful cigar—a cigar that would help me finish a book of poems. “You want something full-bodied,” he said. He led me into the silent humidor room with its wall of dense brown cigars in boxes looking like old leather-bound books of unread sermons in a historic house in the Yorkshire moors, and he said, “Do you want strong but smooth, or do you want something that will really—” He trailed off.

“I want something that blows my head off,” I said. “Something that really mops the floor with me.”

He nodded and handed me a Fausto Esteli. “This'll do it,” he said.

I bought two Faustos, a Viaje Summerfest, a Fuente Opus X, and a sampler pack of five miscellaneous cigars in a plastic bag.

•   •   •

B
EFORE
I
BEGAN
driving around in my car last year, I stopped writing poems altogether for a little while. I think I know the reason why. It's not because I'm “blocked.” What a misleading term, “writer's block,” based as it is on a false physical analogy. No, it's because my anthology,
Only Rhyme
, was actually selling. Not selling hugely well, but selling fairly well in a steady sort of way. It's used as a textbook in some big southwestern universities, who—I'm just guessing—employ it for their own reactionary purposes. And that is a very good thing for me, because life is expensive. The IRS isn't happy with me. I took the first royalty check and spent it right away and made no estimated payments. I gave a hundred dollars to the War Resisters League and fifty dollars to Common Dreams.

But the minor success of
Only Rhyme
meant that whenever I thought about a poem I was working on, part of me looked at it with a jaundiced eye, the way a professional anthologist would. I asked myself, Is what I have made today good enough to anthologize somewhere? And no, of course it wasn't. Most poems aren't anthologizable. Most poems are just poems.

So I had to learn to forget. I eventually did, more or less. I'm not an anthologist, I am a free man!

•   •   •

S
ECOND THOUGHTS
about the title. I called my editor back. “Sorry to bother you, Gene,” I said. “It's just that I sensed you weren't crazy about
Misery Hat
. Am I right?”

Gene said, “To be perfectly honest, the word ‘misery' stops me. It isn't exactly the sellingest word to put on the cover of a book. Stephen King did it, but I'm not sure it's the right move for you.”

I told him that I'd been writing a lot in my car. Maybe the book could be called
Car Poems
?

He said, “Hmm, maybe, maybe.” I could tell he didn't like
Car Poems
much, either.

“How about
Listen to the Warm
? I'm joking, that's a book by Rod McKuen.”

“Don't fret yourself over the title,” Gene said. “We can get to that later. Just write the poems.”

I moaned and said, “Honestly, and I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm not much of a poet these days. I was sitting in Quaker meeting the other day and I realized I didn't want to write sad complicated poems, I wanted to write sad simple songs. In other words, I want to write sad poems that are made happier by being singable.”

“Well then, write them, sing them,” Gene said. “Sad simple poems are perfectly acceptable. Come on, now.”

“You're right. Thanks, Gene.”

“And don't be afraid of putting a little sex in them, the way you used to. That always spices things up. Chastity is for whores.”

•   •   •

P
EOPLE OFTEN CONFUSE
the words “bassoon” and “oboe,” as Tim did. I think it's because the word “oboe” sounds sort of like a sound emanating from a bassoon:
oboe
. But the two instruments look very different. The oboe is small and black and your eyes pop out staringly when you play it, and it's used all the time in movie soundtracks during plaintive moments, whereas the bassoon is a brown snorkel that pokes up at an angle above the orchestra. You almost feel you could play it underwater while the violists and oboists gasp and splutter.

I used to really want to be a snorkler. I had black swim fins, and my grandparents took us on a cruise of some Greek islands—oh, forget it. Not now.

I'm down to the nub end of this Fausto cigar. I actually singed an eyebrow hair relighting it, if that's possible. Sometimes a cigar is just a bassoon.

When you played a long tone on the bassoon, the veins would come out in your neck and in your forehead, and your hands would feel thick with an oversupply of blood, but still you would keep playing the note, pumping it fuller and fuller, because the note was everything—this hump-shaped swell of non-music was all that you were aiming to achieve. It was premusical music. It taught control. Control was everything. I was determined to become the greatest bassoonist that the state of New Hampshire, that the world, had ever known. I was very ambitious back then.

Billy Brown always knew the weeks when I had concentrated on long tones, because those were the weeks in which I sounded especially bad. The practicing broke me and exhausted me and hurt my jaw. I was completely devoted to this expensive folded cylinder of maplewood with the metal U-turn at the bottom. The spit gathered there like a noxious underground lake where a spit Kraken lived. It was a postwar Heckel, made in Wiesbaden, Germany. It came in a wooden crate, like a plain coffin, with the word
FRAGILE
stenciled on it.

R
OZ WROTE
that she's feeling better. She sent me a whole list of three-word lines, including “crack the nut,” “drop the pants,” “shake the stick,” and “learn to dance.”

What do I know about sex? People taking their clothes off and fucking their way around the house? Fifty Shades of Marvin Fucking Gaye?

Roz was—no doubt is—a wonderful sexpot. We used to pour each other tiny glasses of Tyrconnell and put them on our bedside tables. Tyrconnell was our sex drink. Let me tell you, the Irish did a lot more than save civilization. The first time she sipped it, Roz described how it tasted. Her first sip, she said, tasted of primeval forest. Then the second sip: slate patio. Third sip: patio furniture with slippery steps down to the garden. Fourth sip: meat, meat with heavy, dark green vegetable matter on an earthenware platter. Fifth sip: swallowing the platter. Sixth sip: recovery, bisque-colored envelopes.

Sometimes along with the Tyrconnell we used to read each other Victorian pornography, skipping the incestuous parts, which isn't easy, because there is an astonishing amount of incest in Victorian pornography. Why is there so much incest? Aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers—was sex with near relations really the be-all and end-all of the era of Palmerston and Disraeli? When it isn't incest, it's birchings and floggings and nuns and priests. Nunnery stories can be good, though. Dirty doings in the confessional can be good. And harem stories can be good.

•   •   •

I
FEEL LIKE
a traveling sprinkler that's gotten off the hose. I don't know where I'm going. I'm unprepared. Good for me. I could make some extra money this summer shrink-wrapping boats. I should do that.

I want it all to seem easier for me than it is. I want people to think that I'm a fountain of verbal energy. I've never really been a fountain.

There's an excellent children's poem about a drinking fountain. The poet's name is Marchette Chute. I was fascinated by the drinking fountains in high school, with the warm, suspect water that came up past the steam pipes. There was usually some flesh-colored gum lying like a tiny naked baby Jesus in the drain. I was thirsty, and yet the water burbled up and just barely crested past the germ-laden part.

At a mattress store where I worked briefly, there was a drinking fountain that offered very cold refrigerated water. I used to stay up all night writing poems and then go to work hauling mattresses around, and to stay alert I would put a Reese's peanut butter cup in my mouth and start chewing it and then take a sip of water and the cold water would mix with the chocolate and the sweet peanut butter and the two would help each other. Cold fountain water through a Reese's cup, nothing better.

I used to want to start a museum of the water fountain. I saw an old water fountain from Paris in an antique store. I wanted to amass a collection and open a museum that would be listed in one of those books of eccentric museums. You've seen that book,
Little Museums
? Because when you consider it, a drinking fountain is probably the most important single piece of plumbing that you drink from without a glass or a cup. Can you think of any other piece of plumbing that allows you to drink from an arch of cold water, when it's functioning correctly at least? I think you'd be hard pressed. “I turn it up,” writes Marchette Chute. “The water goes / And hits me right / Upon the nose. / I turn it down / To make it small / And don't get any / Drink at all.” A classic poem.

After I first met Roz, I called her up at work and said, “Roz, I have the most terrible hangover, do you have any recommendations?” She said, “Yes. Go to the drinking fountain and bend down and go into one of those altered states of hypnotic drinking, where your throat just goes
ng, ng, ng, ng
and you think you'll never breathe again but will simply drink at this fountain for your whole life.” I said, “Okay, I'll try it.” I called her back and said it had helped. That's how we got together.

•   •   •

W
HAT IT COMES
down to, for the working poet, is this. Either you can go have the eggs Benedict at the place with the copper tables, and it'll cost you nine dollars, plus a big tip—sometimes as much as five dollars in tip if you occupy a whole booth for a long time, wearing a big pair of headphones when it's crowded—or you can make a sandwich for yourself, and wash an apple, and cut some carrots, and eat it in the car, and it'll cost maybe two dollars. You can eat five times as many meals if you don't go to the place with the copper tables.

On the other hand, it's helpful to be around people. You can listen to the jokey fat men flirt with the older waitress.

“More coffee, my good sir?”

“Yes, please, precious, and on second thought I'll have another side of home fries.”

“Aren't you a big spender today.”

“I don't pay alimony and I don't pay child support. I've got all the money in the world.”

“How nice for you.”

I think my brakes are really going. They're soft and they make a scraping sound. My penis is soft and it doesn't make a scraping sound.

What I miss about Roz is of course her lady parts and her pleasure frown and her funny talk. She has a kind of genius for coming up with odd but friendly words for things. She's a namer of unnameables. But the main thing I miss is how nice she is to people. When her friend Lucy's father died she made a card and baked her a loaf of cranberry bread. She's full of ideas about what other people would want. She's the opposite of selfish. Her unselfishness was a revelation to me. She was, and is, full of this quality that I've come to take seriously, which is lovingkindness. Lovingkindness, all one word.

I tried for a while to get her to come to Quaker meeting with me, because in many ways she's an extremely Quakerly person, but she didn't want to. Her mother is Irish Catholic and her father is Russian Jewish, and in her case that mixture resulted in an incredibly nice human being who has no interest even in a religion as disorganized and uncodified as Quakerism.

I feel sad that we've become so formal with each other now. But that's what happens. We're more relaxed with each other via email, which is a bad sign.

•   •   •

H
ELLO MY TINY MUMBLES,
welcome to the Chowder Hour of Razorwire and Shiny Festal Splendor. Glad you could join me. I've found a new chord on the guitar and with it I've written part of a song called “Love Is an Amazing Magnet.” I've also embarked on a song about doctors, inspired by Roz's radio show. I stayed up late rhyming “Nexium” and “thyroxin,” and I wrote way too many verses, some of which are:

The doctor's in

The nurse is hot

Swab some cotton

Cause you're getting a shot

Tell me a symptom

I'll tap your vein

I'll pap your smear

And scan your brain

Crap in a baggie

Piss in a cup

Another appointment

For a follow-up

Tubes in your pipes

Wires in your head

Keep you alive

Till you're practically dead

The chorus is “Oh babe, I can't wait, for you all day.” I'm going to play Roz some of my songs, and then she's going to say good-bye to Harris the doctor and get back together with me. Because I know her. It's time. But what if I try and it doesn't happen? Then I'll be sad—much sadder than if I hadn't tried, because it really will be the end.