This is a story I left out of Naked Parrot. I wrote it in my twenties, while I was imitating David Foster Wallace and experimenting with form, and after it I explain why it didn’t make the book.
It Must Be What You Think It Is
Roswell, GA. December 14th, 2007.
“So, then, it’s a bad thing. What you’re saying is it’s a bad thing?”
“No. It can’t be a bad thing. If it was a bad thing, I wouldn’t do it. It must be a good thing. It makes me feel good, which makes it a good thing.”
“But then like afterwards you feel bad. That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Right but that doesn’t make it inherently a bad thing.”
“There are aspects that are bad and there are aspects that are good.”
“I’m thinking.” He pauses. “That was a pause, to signal that I’m thinking because you raise a good point. It’s not a great point. Not a stumper. Just a good one. A point with legs, so to speak. Figuratively. Speaking, that is. It’s an angle I haven’t considered. But it’s not the conclusion I’m driving at. It’s not exactly what I’m saying because while, sure, there are some good qualities about it—i.e., for example, how it feels good and provides like a little escape from the day and the wife and those quarrelsome kids—there are also a few bad qualities. Like, again, for example, how it’s like mega, uber-addictive in sneaky ways that I never thought it could—or would—be. It’s not like drugs where you know what you’re getting into. Or alcohol, which is slower, definitely, but just because it’s slower doesn’t mean it’s not addictive and we know it’s addictive because we know someone who doesn’t drink. You see Randy at a party or eating sushi with his wife and you think: Oh, well, there goes Randy. He doesn’t drink because he got hit with a few DUI’s and once took his pants off at Lisa’s and embarrassed his first wife, who, of course, left him because he drank too much and lost his job et cetera, et cetera. But this? Well, this is addictive in a highly sneaky, very subconscious kind of way.
“Porn.”
“Porn.”
“Internet porn?”
“Internet porn, sure. Yeah, mostly internet porn. But all types, really. There’s all kinds of porn. It traverses every medium. It’s in magazines and on old videotapes and in novels about women and men. It’s even on the radio.”
“The radio?”
“Right, yeah. Definitely, it’s on the radio. People go on the radio and they hop on these little machines and orgasm all over the place and overweight guys like me listen in and get hard listening in and then they call into the show and say, Wooooo Doggy, into the receiver and the shock jock hoots and hollers and everybody has a great time and these girls huff and puff until the shock jock brings the next girl on the show the next week to hop on an even bigger machine with more like gusto or compute or glam-o-rama and the girl goes orgasmo everywhere.”
“Do these machines have a name?”
“They call it The Floppy 5000.”
“So, you’re addicted to radio porn.”
“And that’s what I’m saying. I’m sitting here. I’m facing you in your living room on this brisk December night while your wife’s in the shower and I’m saying I need help, like I need a radio porn intervention.”
“Please don’t talk about my wife.”
“So it has all of these characteristics of the more socially acceptable like addictions and whatnot: it’s a bad thing that feels good, it’s sneaky in its addictive power, and it’s everywhere. The radio never stops. The radio is 24/7. But that doesn’t make it socially okay. Like a socially normal thing. You can’t go up to somebody and say: Hi, I’m John Jacobs. I’m addicted to terrestrial radio pornography. I couldn’t go up to your wife and say that. That would be crazy. She would slap me. I mean, she wouldn’t slap me because she knows me and knows how kind I am and how I would never hurt a fly, which is just an expression because of course I would hurt a fly, but that’s not really the point.”
“Let’s leave my wife out of it.”
The centralized heating cranks on and the two men shift one way, then another. Warm air pumps through the living room.
“What I’m saying is that I need an intervention. I want you guys—you and your wife and whoever else you think should come—but definitely your wife, to like throw me an intervention because I’m addicted, Duane. I’m addicted to radio porn and I diddle my giblets all the time and I can’t even sleep because the radio doesn’t sleep. I just sit in my basement and listen to beautiful women do grotesque things to The Floppy 5000 and I listen to the radio shock jock who grunts and groans and talks about her hoo-hahs and sometimes pontificates on how 9/11 was a hoax. So I’m thinking if you got some friends together and like one of those counselors we could have an intervention and that would be pretty good for me. My wife could come, even.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be a surprise? The intervention? I don’t think you’re supposed to know about it.”
“You’re right. Forget I said anything about your wife.”
Why I left this out of Naked Parrot
“It Must Be What You Think It Is” almost made it into the second edition of Naked Parrot. The first edition was much more serious and took on a lot of heavy themes. For the second edition, I took most of those out and replaced them with humor, which is what I prefer to write anyhow. “It Must Be What You Think It Is” made the shortlist because it’s funny, but that’s about it.
I wrote it in my twenties, when I was reading a lot of David Foster Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Infinite Jest, and his essays. At some point I decided to imitate him, and this is what came out. The tone is his, the language is his, and so is the content, really. The narrator comments on his own pauses. He stacks qualifiers until the sentence loses track of where it was going: “so to speak. Figuratively. Speaking, that is.” He says “i.e., for example.” The jokes are all in the digressions, and nothing much happens. These are many of the reasons I loved reading DFW.
Most of Naked Parrot pays close attention to physical things: the way a hand holds a tomato, a faded stain at the bottom of a bowl, fingerprints on the stem of a wine glass. Feeling rides on the objects, and the sentence moves on. Even the loud pieces, like “The Manifesto,” are built out of images. This story is almost all talk. The only physical thing in it is a heater.
The bigger problem is that it doesn’t say anything interesting. Most of the pieces in Naked Parrot have something to say about the themes I keep coming back to: family, substance abuse, technology, the South. This one is about addiction, and, in a way about technology, but it doesn’t say anything new or interesting about addiction or about our addiction to technology. I also wanted it to be fragmentary, but when I revised it, I didn’t think it had communicated much of anything, aside from being funny.
And I’m not sure it’s even that funny. It feels immature to me now, like a joke you’d tell in your early twenties. I’ve said before that I like some of the writing in this book precisely because it isn’t any good, so the book is uneven on purpose. But uneven isn’t the same as empty. Most of what made it in is saying something in a voice I recognize as mine.
Naked Parrot is out now in paperback, hardcover and Kindle.