The Interrogative Mood (11 page)

Is it hard for you to resist the demands of whiny people? Have you ever wound an armature for an electric motor? Do you know precisely what a chilblain is? Do you bite your tongue or grind your teeth at night? Have you ever witnessed any credible sign of ghosts? Do you read a newspaper to discover what is going on or for other reasons? If you were now thirteen again, what would you do that you did not do when you were thirteen the first time, and what would you not do that you did? Do you own Allen wrenches? Does it seem to you that the phenomenon of people secretly drinking on the job has virtually disappeared? Have you ever dropped something like a box of books out a third-story window and found its impact inordinately funny? Do you prefer loose pants, to the point of slovenliness, or tight pants, to the point of dapperness? Are you thrilled by new automotive concepts? Can you execute a one-handed cartwheel?

What period of history most interests you? If someone knocked on your door and handed you the leash to a large standard poodle and said it was yours, would you resist or acquiesce in the receipt of this animal? Would you rather see a clown act at the circus predicated on cartoon violence or see a big cat get in a good swipe at the lion tamer and cut him badly? Do you recall the moment you first rode a bicycle? Do you actually handle bullies or do you just know what is to be done with bullies but don’t do it? Do you use any glue to hand or are you made nervous by not having the correct glue for this or that repair? Do you know the names of your first three lovers?

Why do plants and trees rot agreeably but animals rot so disagreeably? What today would make you cry? Are you sure your relatives like you? Do you still use the word
retarded
? Are you interested in military history more than your reading in or knowledge of military history might suggest? What do you think of when you hear the term “strap-on”? Do you know the literal translation of
bas relief,
and do you know if there is any other sort of relief? Do you have long-range plans for self-improvement or have you about given up in that area? Would you rather lift weights
until you sweat or sit in a sauna until you sweat? Do you favor any sort of cracker over other crackers?

Would you prefer to spend a day at a mental hospital or a day at a mall? The jewelry called turquoise—is that the original noun, correctly used, from which the color turquoise has been appropriated, similar to the appropriation of “gold”? Do you know any outright buffoons? Can you take apart a clothes dryer and get it going right? Do you know what bean futures are? Would you say there is anything you care passionately about? Can you imagine accurately certain smells—say, the smell of cedar? Are you preintellectual, anti-intellectual, intellectual, or postintellectual? Would you have a life with sugar cane and a mule and land, or a life with an apartment and some cans of soup and a phone? Do you know what the phrase “turtle head” means when used so: “My sister was standing under the hoop not moving because she said she had a turtle head”? May I tell you that the author of that sentence illustrating turtle head is not me and I don’t know who the author is? Do you use facial cleansers with abradant particles in them? Do you enjoy hockey? Are there circumstances in which you would take off your clothes in public, excluding their being on fire? Do you
find black lipstick attractive? Have you ever worn any “moleskin” pads against corns? Would you be interested in having a deglanded skunk as a pet?

Did you know that when a cow is slaughtered you want it stunned, but not dead, from the time you raise it by a chain on one rear leg (you’ll be dodging the other three) and swing the cow over a drain and cut its jugulars or carotids by quick vertical slashes to the throat that release gallons of blood, the ready falling out of the cow and pumping out of the cow of which is chiefly why you want the cow not dead but stunned, and that as this blood pours forth the cow enters a deepening sleeplike state, its heart continuing to pump, its muscles continuing to contract, its legs thrashing less violently, all of which is important for the blood to be able to keep exiting, and that well after the blood has trickled to a stop, when the skinned head is put in a rack for a pathology inspection, the facial muscles will be crawling as if rather large worms are at work in the face?

Do you like estate sales? Do you know what kind of acreage one would have to plant in coffee in order to produce enough coffee just for one’s own consumption, or if such a venture might be feasible? Should a
girl be discouraged from bra stuffing? Do you know why or how, and to what extent, trucking has replaced rail shipping? If you saw on a T-shirt the slogan
BLOOD IS LIKE A PARACHUTE,
what would you think that slogan intends to mean? Are there means of determining how accurate one’s oven thermostat is other than by incorporating an after-market oven thermometer, the accuracy of which itself may need proofing? Am I wasting your time? Are you wasting mine? Can life be viewed as time wasting and time not wasting? Do the not wasters prove better off than the wasters? Are the wasters liabilities or are they assets to the not wasters? If a man is running a ninety-degree grinder and it catches his pants and torques into him and he sees blood coming through his jeans at the crotch and he says “Hmmm,” and puts the grinder down and sits on the bumper of his truck and lights a cigarette before investigating what is wrong in his pants, and before heading to the ER, is he, would you say, wasting time or not? Do you know what culottes are?

WHAT POWER MAGNIFICATION DO
you like in a binocular? Have you ridden those electric buses that connect
to cables over the street by means of a rig similar to that used by bumper cars at the fair and that can come untracked and so have to be put back on track by the driver using nonconductive ropes tied to the contact rig? Do you like hanging file folders? If I invited you now to drive around in a bright red car on this bright day, would you like to come? Do you regard a particular day of the week as sinister? Is
revolted
a word you use without irony? When you envision restoring the world to any of its better former states, do wolves figure into your visions? Do you like it when people sing “Happy Birthday” to you?

To be an anarchist, properly speaking, does one need to actively undo government or may one just passively not participate? Do you know of or perhaps own any dead trees that you are particularly fond of and wish to see stand for longer yet? Is the charge that manufacturing a Puerto Rican Barbie is racist mitigated or not by the fact that Puerto Rican girls are wild for Puerto Rican Barbie and indifferent to white Barbie? Have you ever had to maintain a swimming pool for your mother, and if so, did this job reduce your fondness for swimming in pools and perhaps for pools themselves?

May I tell you that I once knew a refrigerator man, who called them simply “boxes,” who would come to my house if I poked a hole in the Freon lines trying to defrost the freezer with an ice pick, and fix the hole with epoxy he mixed right there on the bottom of a Coke bottle, and who once brought his assistant Burgess with him and after the repair had been effected said to me, “Now, we know you smart, you go to college, and we wanting to ax you a question, because you smart, you go to college, and…” and went on like that until I said, “All right, Nevada, I’m not smart but we’ll say I’m smart, what is the question?” and Nevada said, “Well, Burgess’s pennis don’t get hard, and we wondering if you could recommend something for Burgess’s pennis to get hard,” and Burgess offered up as proof of his lost virility a brief testament that before this debilitation had obtained one could hear him bust a nut, as he put it, for blocks on Beaver Street in Jacksonville, Florida, where they knew I was from, and that so moved was I by their appeal to my eminent authority and by the pronunciation
pennis
and by Burgess’s obvious anguish—he was wringing his hands at the red kitchen table—that I stepped without hesitation to the cabinet and withdrew my
Bob Hoffman Protein Powder for weight lifters and mixed some of it with a honey-and-vinegar cocktail over ice and told Burgess to drink it all at once, and he did, and shortly said he thought he felt something, and then said he was sure he felt something, positive he felt something, and his soaring spirits lifted him away from the table and Nevada carried him on to his appointment with virility? Would it matter in your decision to accept it or not whether the large standard poodle brought to your door and offered to you was white or black, and whether it had the fancy haircut or not?

Would you prefer to expire on a fair day or foul, or do you think you’ll be past appreciating and lamenting the weather by that point? Can you handle honey without getting it on your fingers? Do you know if the Japanese Zero was actually painted chrome yellow or did it for some ahistorical reason appear in that color in the American polystyrene models later made of it? Do you know the names of your great-grandparents? Would you stand a better chance of hitting a long-legged bird with a bolo or with a boomerang? Are you a connoisseur of chocolate, or is your appetite for it unrefined? Can you lay up a basketball? Do you like
starch in your clothes? Do you favor any one form of sexual congress over others? Do you prefer hyperactive children or slow children? How far will you walk to procure a daily newspaper? Can you successfully hit the Close Door and Open Door buttons on elevators in time? Do you have any interest in being in a terrorist organization, and if so, which one appeals to you as having the most justified mission? At what point is a gosling a goose?

Do you go in for the tall tale? Do you own any leotards? Are you familiar with the term “the fancy”? Can you spit well? Are you bothered when a popular local weatherman is dismissed for sexual dalliance in a public restroom? Did you have an aunt or an uncle of whom you were more fond than your other relatives? Do you understand when you can cook on copper and when you cannot? Knowing what you might about construction, if you had to build a bridge or dig a tunnel of equal length, which would you prefer? What do you think was the gentlest, sanest civilization in history? If you could transport to a past civilization, which one would it be? What breed of chickens attracts you most? In sexual attraction, is there a feature or set of features that you find is a deal maker or a deal breaker?
Has it occurred to you at some point that you are a whole lot less gifted than you might have once thought yourself, in one or in several aspects of your youness, or have you maintained a more or less steady assessment of your abilities and talents and indeed of your worth? Is your ass inordinately chapped by television chefs who in your view cannot cook, or are you amused by them, or are you as indifferent to them as to other pretenders about you?

Isn’t the weather nice today? Is there anyone whom you’ve been thinking about calling for some time for no really good reason so that if you do call you’ll have to explain yourself as just assenting to a whim? Do you like it when people to whom you’ve done no wrong arrange themselves to be done with you? Would you rather be a lumberjack, a plumber, or a croupier? Do you like to handle lead? Have you ever pinned butterflies? In tennis, do you favor a lot of topspin or do you like a flat ball? Have you been so thirsty that you’ve drunk questionable untreated water? Have you heard that water buffalo are more dangerous than tigers and lions and elephants? Was prom-going fun or a misery for you? Would you like, right now, some cornbread?

ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH
the economics term “elasticity of demand”? Does the prospect of a vacation tire you out? Do you know a rasp from a file? Have you ever gone out the window or the emergency door of a bus? Have you hunted ducks, and if so, did you use decoys, and if so, did the decoys seem to make the hunting unfair? Would you be more interested in the murder of one chocolatier by another chocolatier than in the murder of one jockey by another jockey? Is there a profession the murder of one member of which by another would interest you more than all other intraprofessional murders? Is there a category of interprofessional murder that would interest you more than others?

Do you sometimes find some appeal, as opposed to your customary cynical derision of the idea, in the notion of issuing a Cry for Help? If a good friend said to you “I’ve never really been happy,” apparently in earnest, would you laugh? Would you have anticipated that Jack LaLanne would outlive Buddy Ebsen? If you were to be confined in close quarters with it, would you prefer a horse, a mule, or a donkey? Do you have
a tattoo? Do you use the terms “alloyed” and “unalloyed”? How do you hold with corporal punishment of children? Would a long view through space and time of human history on the earth resemble the compressed photography you may have seen of maggots working a corpse?

Do you know the difference when they are on the wing between a gull and a tern? What are the factors that influence your selection of automobile tires? How many times can you recall as a child eating a good-sized spoonful of dirt? Do you prefer being colder than you wish to be or hotter than you wish to be? If you were from this moment on to be known by any two-name combination of these names—Alice, Emily, Katherine, Sveta, Bruiser, Frank, Gerard, Tyrone—what would your new name be? Do you know who invented Velcro, and when? Do you know how many human lives there have been, including the present batch, and whether the present number alive exceeds the number alive at any time in the past? Have you ever packed your own wheel bearings? What do you do when you get to feeling really low?

If you did play marbles as a child, do you know rings, pig’s eye, what is meant by “dates,” and so forth?
Have you been responsible for the death of a songbird? Do you shine your shoes? Does the phrase “rampart standard” mean anything to you? Is there a candy bar you like over others? Why do “making hay” and “haymaker” have substantially different meanings? Does “bimbo” refer only to women? How would you, on impulse, fill this in: “We got to get us some [blank] down heah”? How about “crispins and lardons”? If you heard of a “chiropractic boondoggle,” what would you think that might involve?