Just The Way I Like It

You see, the advantage of being a regular is they already know what you want before you even ask. Here comes my coffee with cream, not milk, and a pat of sugar on the side, just the way I like it. Two slices of raisin bread, a whole wheat blend and lightly toasted, just the way I like it. The napkin folded in a hexagonal shape and placed at a right angle to the humidifier approximately 32 degrees northwest of the butter dish and 65 inches above the level of the blue linoleum floor, just the way I like it. Temperature? 67 degrees, chill enough to keep me awake but warm enough to, well, warm me. Relative humidity 20%, barometric pressure holding steady at 8.2, wind speed 7 mph. Just the way I like it.

What time is it? I’m glad you asked. There can be only one time, one time at a time, and this just happens to be that time. Can you feel it? The date is May 22, 1990. This is the correct date, date the earth has been laboring a millennium to produce and which, in concert with geological astrophysical machinations collision of tectonical plates the motility of the amoeba blowfish up the beach an explosion of legs eggs lungs issuing forth in ninety-foot armored lizards up the boardwalk four-legged monkeys on the make fire the opposable thumb Jesus the French Revolution Nannette Fabre and the invention of cheese whiz is, I am pleased to report, and a general congratulations all the way around, just the way I like it.

Ah life. Ah memories. I motion for more coffee. And having all of us arrived here now today at the same date (and oh to the -- such the happy coincidence of the kindred soul -- very same second!), we travel onward together into the future from goal unto goal (target date May 23, 1990) accelerating blood bones gravel vapor zip culminating eventually some billions of years hence in the extinction of all life as the universal tendency from order to disorder in a closed system produces a cosmos of approximately the temperature and relative consistency of an (infinitely extended) bowl of lukewarm vegetable soup. Just the way I like it.

I call out to the waiter, "Manuel" (Manuel, my favorite among names and one which he has adopted at my request), "Manuel. Everything is as it should be. You have stood by my side lo these many years, abandoned by your wife and your children, brutalized by your peers, ridiculed by government dignitaries and pummeled by thugs in a darkened back alley, all as a consequence of your loyalty to me." Manuel, who understands no English, smiles and nods his head engagingly. Coffee, Manuel, coffee.

Not that there is no sadness in the world. Alas. How much of our lives do we spend longing for such things as can never be ours? You, for example, you who are reading this, reading and wishing that your life could be, as mine, whole and complete in every passing moment. You scrutinize the page, you struggle to in some way imitate the style of life I represent. You dye your hair, you sell your children, you purchase new furniture and dining room accessories yes, but to what end? I am the writer. You are the reader. It is I who am here -- here as in here, always here, in the hand, handsome and clubby and fat with the ichor of the limb and the blood and the bone – and you who are, alas, there. And where is there? There? There could be anywhere.

Manuel! The apparatus please. The time has come – the perfect time -- to weigh myself in the balance. Not a tally in pounds. Far too clunky a word to capture the sprightly essence of my molecular structure, a word so thickened by centuries of use, so floured and fried in the sausage and the oxen and the ingots of iron of an earlier era, so coarsened by intimations of violence (I smite mine enemies and pound them into Lobscouse) the very thought of it bruises my tender arterium. No. No. I weigh me not by the pound, no neither by the kilo nor the drachma nor the sinister foisted-upon-us-by-big-government lbs, but by a unit of measure extruded from the very crust of the earth itself: the truffle. White truffles, bushel after bushel burgled -- bravo Manuel! -- from Tuscan villas, dipped in palladium, polished to a sheen, and ladled out onto a scale balanced (like the ballast of a dirigible) to perfectly match the tender mass of (stripped down to the skivvies and minus the sneeze) me.

Gadzooks you say. How can I compete with that? Would it be possible to – no it would not. Not possible. No. Nor is it (as some of you in your daydreams imagine) possible for you to become me. Manuel (by means of a series of crude gestures) indicates that if perhaps he could just slide up under my skin that maybe he could – no, Manuel, no! Sit, Manuel. Sit. Just look at yourself. You are too big to fit under my skin. You would have to be smaller to do the thing that you are wanting to do, smaller and flatter and quicker and sharper.

But what about you, dear reader, cast into the outer darkness with the creaky bedsprings and the busted A.C. and the buzz-bomb mosquito ping-pinging at the ear, the moldy egg salad and the screech of the dumpster and the yowl of the tabby in heat, the acne and the weeping and the gnashing of the teeth? Fear not, my friend, my goodly fere, for without the you and billions like the you, the words that I launch would ultimately land on what? On nothing. The hook without the fish, the hammer without the anvil, the javelin without the set of ribs to call home.

So kudos to you readers you, who finger the ink, who -- like the cat at the cream, the wind at the flank of the glacier, the lover at the lobe of the ear -- lick the page, liquify the ink, pool it up onto the palette till the moment is ripe, yes, till the Filipino houseboy rattles down from the foothills on his rusty Schwinn with the basket of limes in the moonlight fondled (the limes not the houseboy) at the moment of ripening. Hefty limes, virginal limes, voluptuous limes, the most elliptical of which he renders into a pulpy mash and tops with a dash of salt, a splinter of Peruvian red pepper bark, a single grain of ancient Chinese gunpowder he milligrams into an eyedropper and -- just the way I like it – shakers out onto your inky tongue.

Manuel! Another Pina Colada, please. Taste too timid a word to describe the muchness of it all.

Kudos to the inkers but also kudos to the binders and kudos to the stampers! Kudos to the typesetters and the ragamuffins who, dressed in period costume (woolen knickers and burlap aprons and button-top boots with the toes protruding) lower themselves headfirst into the maw of the machinery to lubricate the presses no not with the sweat of their brow, no, but with -- in deference to their youth and inexperience -- the sweat of the brow of ‘52 Helsinki Olympian Yuri Tyukalov, gold medalist in the single scull and all-around handsome devil now collected (the sweat not the scullist) into an oilcan and squirted up into the dog lever and the feed arm and down – go Yuri go -- onto the fricative surface of every comma, umlaut, and ellipsis. Just the way I like it.

Kudos to the inseminators who, even as we speak, chug-chug away at their yeomanly duties. Godspeed, my doughty fellows! It is you who lubricate the gates of literature, who flower the world with fresh new readers. Manuel! Break out the cigars!

Cigars all around to the old faithfuls, the scores who abandon their boardrooms and their Maseratis, their duck blinds and their bodegas, their yurts and their middens and their ziggurats to pound on the gates of the cloister, scale the walls, don the robes, climb up onto the scrivener’s stool to spend themselves amid the parchment and the vellum, the punch and the mallet, the copper stylus and the quill of the peacock. Who chant beneath their cowls. Who nibble their cuticles. Who hold, in the vinegar folds of the fingers, in cinnabar and ochre, in chiplets of gold, beaten thin as the fin of an angelfish and tweezered down into the furrows wisp by wisp, and pressed into place with the tip of the pinkie, and one syllable at a time, and over the course of a lifetime, and petrified here upon the parchment, my very breath.

The sun rises and the birds sing, the cricket chitters and the nebula burns, the baby cries and the flower blooms and the mitochondria bubble in the breast of the amoeba, and all of them in honor of the sound that rides the breath of such a simple fellow as myself, such a simple fellow in a world of simple things.

Thumbs up I say to such a tender cosmos, so careful to cradle the wriggle of flesh I call, for lack of a better word, me. Easy now. Easy.

Such is the balance whereby the world on its axis spins, top so tipsy that even a stray shoelace might be enough to upend it – the aglet that flicks the pebble that dislodges the chip that tipples the boulder that thumps the slope that tremors the very cladding of the earth itself, that sends the whole mountain avalanching down to shiver the seaboard and wobble the planet out into a pirouette that – one potato, two potato, three potato, four –sends it spinning straight down into the heart of the sun. The vodka, Manuel. Yes... no, no – the other vodka. Yes.

Achtung. La hiam. Let us raise our glasses high to honor the snowflake that completes the parabola, clicks onto the curve of the drift, solves the equation. Let us honor the final note, the final pluck of the string that solves, that resolves the dissonant symphony. Salute, salud, we salute with a clink of the snifter (wait Manuel, wait for the signal) not only the final word of the final paragraph, but even and especially that last little peppercorn of punctuation, that final fly-button, that rivet that seals the sub, the -- nib of the pen, prick of the spear, tip of the cock of the killer whale -- period.

I drink. Manuel drinks. Tomorrow? Tomorrow. He gathers my things, gathers up all the flammables – my cap, my coat, my teeth, my hair – and wheels me out over the curve of the beautiful earth, out the door, and into the – just the way, just the way I like it -- fire of another day.