Long Time Leaving (46 page)

And so, when my computer abruptly stops doing what it is supposed to do, for reasons of its own, it not only disdains polite apology but
informs me that “this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.” The first time I saw that on my screen, I braced myself to hear sirens. Then I thought about suing for slander. Now I know that “an illegal operation” or, how about this one, “a permanent fatal error,” is the uncivil equivalent of “Woops, sorry, I'm afraid you'll have to back up and start over.” Once on Amazon.com I accidentally clicked where asked to (“Check Out Our Advertisers! Click Here!”) and got this response: “The HTTP request was in an invalid format or contained invalid data. Reason: Invalid cookie checksum. For further assistance contact the server administrator.” I like that
further
assistance. I have no server administrator, and I resent the implication that I do, though not as deeply as I resented the message that jumped into my face once when I was trying to print out
something that I myself, with my own two hands, and with absolutely no administration or assistance, had written.
“You don't have permission,” the message said, “to modify this print job.” I understand the purpose of all this. It is to induce me to smash the machine with my fists and feet so that I have to buy another one. But when tech support is a fellow member of the human family, why should my not knowing any more about what's wrong with my computer than tech support does be grounds for tech support treating me like dirt?

As it happens, my own mind is capable of gathering, processing, storing, and retrieving disparate information. Pick a topic. Legs and feet, say. Just offhand, I can download a string (or pack, or bunch—unlike computer techs, I can roll with different terms) of recently acquired leg-and-foot-related items.

In Detroit, I heard of a man who had one leg so much shorter than the other that, as my informant put it, “he was known as Mister Step-and-a-half. And what a beautiful dancer! He had an operation to even them out, and after that he was never the same.”

At “Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia, I heard a sad story about Robert E. Lee's great grey horse Traveller. After Lee's death, Traveller had the run of the campus. Today the door to his stable is kept open, so that his ghost can—and, they say, does—return from time to time. Traveller died, I was told, in great prolonged agony because he stepped on a nail, got lockjaw, and nobody was man enough to put him down. The responsibility surely lay with Marse Robert's eldest son, Custis Lee, who succeeded him as president of the college. In that capacity, Custis was a doleful, barely functioning figurehead—that is well established—but you know that he knew that his daddy would have wanted him to put poor Traveller out of his misery.

I may not pervade the universe as thoroughly as Microsoft, but I do get around. At Bellagio, the exclusive retreat for writers, scholars, and artists on Italy's Lake Como, I learned something memorable about kangaroo legs. Joan and I hobnobbed there with a Mexican artist named Lourdes who painted bits of English roadside terrain. I don't mean she painted pictures of hedges and hillocks, I mean she painted vivid Latin colors on the hedges and hillocks themselves and took photographs of the result. Also in our group was a wonderful fellow named Habib who staged plays of Shakespeare and Molière, back home in Bhopal, with local actors who were illiterate. He would read out their parts to them, and they would take it from there improvisationally.

When it came time for Habib to give his presentation to the assembled residents at Bellagio, he gave a talk entirely in Urdu. Joan and I and our new friends Harold (avant-garde composer), Don and Doris (authorities on Gambia), and Teresa (Italian scholar) had plotted with Habib. As he spoke, we nodded and looked thoughtful, as if we were following his every word. Then we asked him complicated questions—Joan delivered hers in Japanese. The assembly listened gravely, until finally Habib confessed, in English, that what he had just been saying at length was that he hadn't gotten any work done on his autobiography because he couldn't stop looking out his window at the ferryboats going back and forth across Lake Como. The vista from that villa! Whenever anyone bids me behold anything through any window in the world for the rest of my life, I will be able to say, “You call that a vista?”

Habib's petite round wife, Moneeka, would sing, when urged, “All of Me,” very much like Ella Fitzgerald. Habib was eighty-something and tended to mutter and cough through his pipe, but we got to know him during an excursion to the town where Mussolini was arrested. (Il Duce tried to sink down into his greatcoat, but then someone cried, in Italian, “Melon head!”) As we got into a cab at the end of our stay, Habib held the door for Joan and murmured, “You should get those legs insured.”

But that's not the leg item I had in mind. A retired British seaman named Robert Brewster was at Bellagio with his wife, an American who studied Swedish immigration policy. In the course of seeing the world with the Royal Merchant Marine, Brewster told me, he took time off to live among Australian aborigines and study their ways.

And did he learn to play the didjeridoo? Indeed he didjeridid. But it was kangaroo hunting that he found most interesting. The bushmen set out on the hunt barefooted, he said, and armed only with boomerangs and knives.

“Can you run a kangaroo down?” Brewster asked them.

Of course not, they indicated with a look. But see, that was all right. That was not like how the computer experts reacted when I reached out for help. They reacted by hanging up (both Anouks) or giving me misery-prolonging advice that they did not expect either me or themselves to understand. The aborigines knew what they were doing. And they were willing to educate Brewster. All in good time.

“Can you knock a kangaroo out with a boomerang?” he asked.

Get serious, said the look they gave him.

A kangaroo hopped into sight.

Whoosh! The best marksman of the group flung his boomerang. It hit the kangaroo in the left leg. The kangaroo sped away more or less rightwardly. And what did the bushmen do but speed off in the
opposite
direction.

“Well,” said Brewster, “I was young and quite fit then, and the aborigines were small. I kept up, to be there when their curious strategy paid off. Obvious, really, when you think about it.”

I thought about it.

He gave me a look no doubt not unlike those the bushmen had given him. But that was all right, that was part of his narrative strategy; it was not a way of making me give up and go away, which is the hope of every “tech support” voice.

“A kangaroo hit in one leg,” Brewster went on, “will hop around in a circle. As he came around, they met him head-on and dispatched him with the knives.”

So what did I do with that information, you may ask. The next day at Bellagio, I learned that the universe is now believed to be in the shape of a doughnut. In a twinkling of infosynthesis, I wrote the following:

I put this forward not as a cosmological breakthrough. My work is my work; take it as it is. But must I do it on an instrument that disappears under my fingertips with no provocation? And when I appeal for help, must all technicians start with the assumption that I, never mind the instrument, am beyond redemption?

I know, many of the people we turn to for help are in Pakistan or somewhere. But as we have seen, language barriers can make communication more interesting.

Joan's late father, the inimitable Thomas Griswold, Sr., would enliven family gatherings with favorite recitations. One of his best was what he heard an infuriated Japanese man say to the train station agent in New Haven when his luggage had gone missing:

“It's mighty damn seldom about my bag. You no more fit to run station than to see fit. You can kiss my ass and I'm just the one to do it. That's all I hope.”

Maybe that's how I sound to tech support people. I know it's how they sound to me. So let's cherish that in one another. At the end of the day, we'll have material to share with folks at home.

I
n Augusta, Georgia, you can get a world-class bagel and world-class grits on the same plate. And, of course, there's the Haunted Pillar. Another thing, it's a good town for listening to people talk. Last time I was in Augusta, I overheard a young woman on the phone saying, “Back when my brother was a thief?” and I couldn't help lingering to hear her go on:

“He broke into these people's house through the kitchen, and they were home. There was still food warm on the stove. He peeked in the living room, saw the people eating dinner, watching TV. My brother just sat down in the kitchen and fixed himself a plate. He didn't even get caught, that time. Mama said, ‘That's my boy. He a
sweet
thief. Steal the sweetness out of cake and it won't fall.’ ”

If it's
golf
you're interested in, when you're in Augusta, by all means drive by the Augusta National Country Club. There's a wall around it, but I'll tell you how to look for the gate. After you've had your boiled-on-the-premises bagel and your stone-ground grits at Mally's, “Where North and South Meet in Perfect Hominy,” head west on Broad Street till it turns into “Washington, and go on past the sign that says
REVEREND
ANGEL, READER PRAYER FOR HAPPINESS SUCCESS LOVE ADVICE IN BUSINESS
MARRIAGE SPIRITUAL LOVE—
but don't go too far west, or you'll wind up in Martinez (pronounced
Mar
-tin-ez), Georgia, where the road is lined with a lot of dining establishments that are not unique. You know, there's a drive-through Italian place and a Chinese superbuffet and a Hooters, and
several
places where you can get all the buffalo wings and chicken fingers anybody could ever want. It's no wonder you never see a buffalo that can fly anymore, or a chicken that can pick guitar.

If you get out that far, turn around quick and head back on “Washington, and now you're looking up to your left—you'll see a little cinderblock place with a sign on it that says
MASTERS CORNER. MASTERS OF CONVENIENT SERVICES. ALL YEAR TANNING, OPEN M-
. At least that's what it said when I was in town last. I don't know whether “Open M-” means the all-year tanning is available just on Monday, or whether a
W
and an
F
may have fallen off the sign. And next to Masters Corner is a parking lot and on the other side of the parking lot is “The Master's Plaza,” which used to be a
shopping center featuring a Piggly Wiggly but has been transformed into a Whole Life Ministry, Hispanic Fellowship and Christian Bookstore. The bookstore doesn't have just books—I found a T-shirt there with a big picture of an iguana on it that said “Iguana Be More Like Jesus.” The iguana is a big, beautiful green thing.

And so is Augusta National. You'll see the gate to it there on your right, across the road from Masters Corner and the Master's Plaza. They won't let you in without a badge, but I have been there in the past, for the Masters Tournament, and I can tell you that just about everything is green. And mannerly. Though they do say in town that at the last couple of Masters some guy was going up to women in the galleries and asking them, “Do you want to have your nipple pierced? For free?” And all he was after, really, was a chance to see their breasts.

Which is certainly not reflective of the general tone of the Masters. The Augusta National folks may not even know about the nipple man, but he is a matter of concern to Augusta's reputable tattooing, piercing, and scarification parlors, like Allan Bates's. He runs several of them, including Rage Tattoos, which he says is “across the street from my ex-wife,” but we were talking in his Broad Street parlor, Tribal Urge, which is catty-corner from the Haunted Pillar, when he told me about this guy—who apparently doesn't even know
how
to pierce nipples right. But I guess a lot of women think, well, anybody who comes up to you at the Masters ought to know what he's doing. And then they're sorry.

According to Allan. Whose wife, Jill, posed for us out in front of the Haunted Pillar in a spiked bra and black thigh-high boots and a G-string, because we wanted to be sure her dragonfly-and-tribal-markings tattoos would show (she used to dance naked at the Discotheque lounge there a few doors down on Broad, but she got fired because of the tattoos, which is like firing somebody for the roses in her cheeks). The Haunted Pillar is fascinating to me as a student of history and the supernatural, but just in and of itself, standing there on the street corner physically, it doesn't look like much, in a photograph, without Jill in front of it. And, well, the police came.

Four patrolmen and a paramedic. A neighbor had complained of indecent exposure, which the police (I'd say reluctantly) had to concede was not the case, even though it was Sunday morning, because, as one of the officers put it, Jill's “indecent parts
are
covered.” But when I tried to explain to the first officer who arrived on the scene that the reason we needed somebody pretty in the picture was to compensate for the fact that the Haunted Pillar itself just looks like a slightly out-of-whack stack
of rounded bricks covered with cement, he just kept looking at me funny.