by Jon Doughboy
(I’m behind a porta potty quietly, stealthily inhaling the fumes of public effluvia and observing a woman, an important person to me, The Important Person, a relation of conflicted yet nonetheless enduring intimacy, as she listens to a podcast and enjoys or feels compelled to enjoy or is willing herself to enjoy an Indian summer stroll through the park):
It’s her birthday. For it, to celebrate it, mark it, her boyfriend rustled up two ribeyes, not your run-of-the-mill flesh either, fancy ones, grass-fed, marbled and thick, aged in the mines of Moria or some such butchery worthy of Soutine, and broccoli rabe which is an act of selflessness—the mark of any true gift—because he, the selfless boyfriend (subtle, muffled clearing of the throat), hates eating the bitter greens and hates making them, the tedium of the added step of blanching, and a couple of big fat taters to complete the meal. He’s a big fat tater himself, bloated with liquid calories, and should be the one out here walking, she thinks, burning calories, shaving a micrometer or two off the old love handles before gorging on such sumptuousness, shouldn’t he? It’s sunny, lovely, the last Saturday in September, and the leaves are changing in this first-tier park in her third-tier city.
The leaves are changing, the years are passing, and Robert Pogue Harrison is, finally—stop the presses, she thinks, (I know this because I know how deep her love of Harrison runs, how large her heart is, how patient and forgiving) hold the intellectual phone (this is just the sort of clever expression she’d deploy)—doing an episode on Giambattista Vico.
She watches (as I watch her) one diligent overalled worker put in Saturday hours to lay new tennis courts and the chemical stink of the process irritates her nostrils (and to a lesser degree, thanks to the masking odors of human excreta fermenting in the porta potty, mine) as Harrison quotes Vico (and I know exactly what podcast she is listening to, what episode, and how far she is into said episode because she announced this information upon her departure after once again trying and failing to convince her boyfriend to commit to the detox process in a professional setting, entering the inpatient-outpatient-never-ending-AA-meetings pipeline as if anyone’s life is ever really manageable—where’s this greater Power when you need them? What if there was never any sanity to restore?).
I set the same podcast up on my phone to ensure perfect synchronicity between us, aurally, that is, if not emotionally, before slipping out the side door and overcoming the initial trembly, clammy, irritable symptoms of withdrawal to race down the hill beyond the baseball field to claim this prime surveilling location behind the porta potty next to the tennis courts and Harrison quotes Vico to the both of us “the order of ideas must follow the order of institutions” something “huts” somethings “finally go mad and waste their substance” somethings, many profound things “dissolute,” and she’s walking over and around countless corpses of smushed lanternflies wondering if we’ll regret this holocaust since she recently read (and reported to me with the wistful tenderness of a lapsed vegan and half-hearted environmentalist and weary partner to a semi-functioning alcoholic) these polka dot beauties might not be so harmful to our native trees as we, protectors of our native forests, have been led to believe. Up ahead is a Shiba Inu, its butthole winking at her like they’re in cahoots, a conspiratorial anus (I see you too), as it’s being led by its owner, a thin man with a disproportionately large ass (a feature she finds unattractive in men and which, despite the extra pounds I’m packing, I’m proud to say I don’t possess), and Harrison says something about Vico’s exhumation, about Michelet being seized by a frenzy upon discovering Vico.
If she can get past her fears (wholly unwarranted) of her boyfriend succumbing to hallucinosis again and having a seizure, she’s probably thinking about her own frenzied listens to Harrison’s podcast “Entitled Opinions,” for some reason shelving her contempt for academics (as a former and failed academic herself though I’m not sure she’d put it in precisely such pejorative, self-denigrating terms) and just basking in (I see that smile, the one so seldom seen at home these days, the charming little flash of tea-stained teeth) Harrison’s genuine love for thinking. She wonders if she loves anything in her life with a comparable enthusiasm or devotion, wonders where her humanizing event is, when it’ll come, whether she’ll recognize it, whether her boyfriend will enable or obstruct or play any part in such an act of recognition. She appeals to Harrison: what do you think, Robert? Who is your supreme deity and what was his bursting forth like (I confess to sharing her curiosity)? Did you take a picture? Did you commission a commemorative plate? How do you celebrate your birthday?
Here's a slight hill now as consciousness is sparking in her brutish mind, absorbing this habitat, the trash degrading along the curb, paper to pulp, plastic to pollutant, fifths of Hennesy buried in the shrubs, necks of Sutter Home bottles poking out of mounds of mulch like glass tombstones, empty, the deliciousness they contained long since imbibed, the wide old oaks giving up their acorns, the sumacs shedding their sticky, lanternfly-shit coated leaves, converting this nature into a world, a meaning-laden world, and she’s thinking of her white lily birthday cake (a $40 confection, I’ll note) and what it means, the whole raspberries crowning it, the six bottles of cheap white zinfandel in the crisper drawer even though she doesn’t really drink and certainly not white wine let alone that swill. She sees ahead, like divine providence (I see her seeing but does anyone see me? And do I really see her? Do I even see me?), as Harrison says “to provide literally means to foresee,” sees her drunk boyfriend pulling the steaks off the grill and stumbling inside with the tray of seared meat, passing the steaming rabe and the potatoes burning in the oven, slamming sideways into the gyotaku print her recently deceased mother brought back for her as a souvenir from Japan with its purple pressing of dead sardines, fish eyes more lifeless than an addict’s when they’re shuffling up and down the ward sedated on benzos, the glass in the frame shattering on the linoleum floor. Shards and shame. Combativeness underwritten by denial. His face puffy, incredulous, shattered and shattering too, lips sneering a challenge, cheeks slack with a drunken laxness she’s come to recognize and loathe. He’ll put the steaks on the counter and say “happy birthday” in a jokey tone as if he’s mocking both the possibility of happiness and her birth.
Harrison is now monologuing about Vico’s cyclical view of history which she subscribes to (as do I, as far as I understand it as a less-learned man nevertheless quite familiar with doomed repetitions), cycles and counter cycles in the ward of time, a back and forth of growth and decay, development and decline, not an inevitable arc of progress, no, certainly not that—we’re human after and above and beneath it all. She’s seeing ahead again, providere, providentia, perceiving the steaks resting on the cutting board and the cake coming to temperature, hears herself tell her boyfriend, this she living in a future cycle that her present (and his and, if I can’t rally, mine) is decaying into “the cake looks beautiful, the steaks too, but I wish you wouldn’t drink so much, wish you weren’t such a drunk, because it makes me wonder about the cause of your drinking (‘guilt,’ my old sponsor said, ‘resentment, suspicion,’ listing the feelings family members or loved ones of alcoholics and addicts often struggle with) and if that cause is me and if you can only stand me when you’re drunk and what that says about us since I can’t stand you when you’re drunk and whose fucking birthday is it anyway and why are you fucking doing this to yourself, to us, to me? Why?” and Harrison says, quoting Vico, “providence for its extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand” somethings “they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree” somethings, many wise things, “obstinate factions and desperate civil wars.”
She pauses the podcast (I see her pause the podcast. Is our listening still in sync? She balls her fists. Though I have no right to, I ball mine in clammy solidarity). She doesn’t know if she has any substance to waste (neither do I. Who can? How can we?) but she knows (I think she knows, hope she knows) man wasn’t meant to see ahead and providence should remain the purview of the divine and, regardless of their current cycle, of how severe her boyfriend’s trembling is or how vivid his delirium, that he cooks a mean steak (I do) and loves her very much (I do, I really do).
______
I is 117 others, a consortium of heteronyms sometimes found scribbling under the name Jon Doughboy @doughboywrites.
[GO HOME.]