I was in the midst of one of my periodic spasms of energy born of guilt. You go along thinking you are properly maintaining your houseboat and your runabout, going by the book, keeping a watchful eye on the lines, the bilge, the brightwork, and all. But the book was written for more merciful climates than Florida, once described to the King of Spain by DeSoto as "an unhabitable sandspit," even though at the time it was inhabited by quite a lot of Indians.
Suddenly everything starts to snap, rip and fall out, to leak and squeal and give final gasps. Then you bend to it, or you go live ashore like a sane person.
Travis: I played all the games of What if. I counted the ladies I have known. I replayed the hard shots -- given and taken. Remembered grief, remembered pleasure. I thought of all the choices made, the doors I've slammed shut, the seasons which have closed down on me, games called on account of pain. All that shit, Meyer. You know. A man's head goes round and round about about. Filth and glory. The whole schmear. ...
Meyer: You question the validity of the mission. Thus you question the validity of the missionary. A loss of faith. That is corrosive. At that point you question existence itself, the meaning of it. A common human condition. Those with no imagination never really feel despair. Congratulations!
And I had a sudden wrenching urge to shed my own identity and be somebody else. Somehow I had managed to lock myself into this unlikely and unsatisfying self, this Travis McGee, shabby knight errant, fighting for small, lost, unimportant causes, deluding himself with the belief that he is in some sense freer than your average fellow, and that it is a very good thing to have escaped the customary trap of regular hours, regular pay, home and kiddies, Christmas bonus, backyard bar-B-cue, hospitalization, and the family burial plot.
All we have, I thought, is a trap of a slightly different size and shape. Just as the idea of an ancient hippie is gross and ludicrous, so is the idea of an elderly beach bum. I dreaded the shape of the gray years ahead and wished to hop out of myself...
The world is full of contention and contentious people. They will not tell you the time of day or day of the month without their little display of hostility. I have argued with Meyer about it. It is more than a reflex, I think. It is an affirmation of importance. Each one is saying, "I can afford to be nasty to you because I don't need and favors from you, buster." It is also, perhaps, a warmed application of today's necessity to be cool. ...
If I were King of the World I would roam my kingdom in rags, incognito, dropping fortunes onto the people who are nice with no special reasons to be nice, and having my troops lop off the heads of the mean, small, embittered little bastards who try to inflate their self-esteem by stomping on yours. I would start the lopping among post-office employees, bank tellers, bus drivers, and pharmacists. I would go on to checkout clerks, bellboys, prowl-car cops, telephone operations, and U.S. Embassy clerks. By God, there would be so many heads rolling here and there, the world would look like a berserk bowling alley. Meyer says this shows a tad of hostility."
It was a fine day for walking, and there was lots to look at around that great curve of Bay Street. I whistled one of my tuneless tunes, strode my loose-jointed, ambling, ground-covering way, squinted when the sun shone between the buildings on the bag shore. I smiled at a brown cocky city dog and nodded at a fish-house cat nested into a windowsill. Gulls tipped and dipped, yelled derision and dirty gull-words. Steel tools made music when dropped on concrete floors. Cars and trucks belched blue, gunning at the lights. A paste-white lady with sulfur curls, wearing bullfighter pants and leopard top, slouched in a doorway and gave me a kissy-looking smile. Spillane had shot her in the stomach a generation ago, and she was still working the streets. I told her it was a lovely evening and kept going. Even the wind-swept half sheet of newsprint that wrapped itself around my ankle had some magic meaning, just beyond the edge of comprehension. I picked it off and read that firebombs had crisped four more West German children, that 30 percent of Florida high-school graduates couldn't make change, and 50 percent couldn't comprehend a traffic citation. I read that unemployment was stabilized, UFOs had been seen over Elmira, the latest oil spill was as yet unidentified, and, to make a room look larger, use cool colors on the walls, such as blues and greens and grays.
I wadded it to walnut size and threw it some fifteen feet at a trash container. The swing lid of the trash container was open about and inch and a half. If it went in, I would live forever. It didn't even touch the edges as it disappeared inside. I wished it was all a sound stage, that the orchestra was out of sight. I wished I was Gene Kelly. I wished I could dance.
I often wonder what basic insecurity I must have to make me so anxious for approval. I touched the tape over my eye. It had not been entrapment, or even pursuit. No promises made. It had been a happening, not important, happening only because of the time and the place and the shared, nagging sence of depression. There in the yellow-glowing darkness she had been small, limber, greedy, slightly sweaty, her hair stiff from sprayings, humming with her pleasures and making them last. I knew the reason for the hate. No matter how she thought of herself, she was severely conventional little person and could not accept pleasure for the sake of pleasure, but had to cloak it in romantic rationalization. Like one of her lyrics -- it must be love because it feels so good.
I found it ironic that I shared her disease, that puritanical necessity to put acceptable labels on things. The quick jump has always made me feel uneasy. Life cannot become a candy box without some kind of retribution from the watchful gods. I had shared her bed with such a familiar anticipation of the uneasiness that would follow that I had been unable to enjoy her completely. This is the penalty paid by the demipagans, always to have the pleasures diluted by the apprehensions, unless all labels are in order.
I wandered the road, finding the smooth parts, feeling underneath the deepwater tan, the heat of the long May day in the sun. I had a stack of those old-fashioned photographic plates in the back of my mind. The big camera had been made of brass and oak. I had spent a lot of the day ducking under the black cloth, raising high the T stick with the magnesium powder in the groove along the top of the bar, focusing the big lens, waiting until she held still, then triggering the powder. Poom. And a cloud of white smoke, and another image of Gretel tucked away forever.
Long ago a picture must have been an event. Capturing a living image had become too ordinary a miracle, perhaps. They go about with their automatic-drive Nikons and OM-2's and their Leicaflexes, and put their finger on the button, and the hand-held machinery makes a noise like a big toy cricket. Reep, reep, reep, reep. A billion billion slides, projected once, labeled, and filed forever. Windrows of empty yellow boxes blow across the Gobi, the Peruvian highlands, the temple steps at Chichacastenango. The clicking and whirring and clacking is the background sound at the Acropolis, at the beach at Cannes, on the slopes at Ville-franche. All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, "Mom, I don't know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?" "Throw them out, dear."
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