Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [24]
Cid is a real estate agent. Divorced. Unlike most real estate scum, he’s a real bright guy, but he just walks around enraged all the time. He blows up at stupid and inept retail clerks. Warm beer makes him furious. During the first Gulf War, those “We Support Our Troops” banners would make him go berserk. “How many people are you willing to kill to remain dependent on foreign oil? You! I mean you, personally, how many?” he would accost some unsuspecting patriot. Everywhere Cid looks he sees inanity and stupidity closing in around him. His healthy reflex is to lash out to create neutral space for himself. As soon as he sits down, he’s at it again, red-faced over some idiot in the parking lot. I order a half-and-half and make an attempt to alter the course of his harangue. What’s the use of challenging every damn fool in your path? I argue, forgetting the fight I was dying to pick with the dweeb on the Metro platform. Cid has been practicing Zen for a while. He says it’s to calm him down, but I feel it has contributed to his frustrations. I’m not sure it’s wise to integrate universes, metaphysically, I mean. Being Aware is one thing, but trying to bring that Other, which is surmise at best, to some intersection with the corporeal is potentially dangerous, if you ask me. It certainly hasn’t calmed Cid down any.
Earl Riles is another one. Another musician. A perfectionist. He gets in these incredible funks. Hates everybody. He wears black all the time, and, although several people at the bar have recognized him, he is oblivious. Tonight we’ll all troop back to his place and sit up drinking Pernod and he’ll just let it all out. The world, according to Earl, is a place without love. He believes romance is pathetic. This belief renders him hopelessly romantic to his dark legion of followers. He, too, sees uselessness and dreck everywhere he looks. All Earl wants is a little recognition and respect. When he gets it, he finds it to be hideous and deformed. He wants to lash out as well. But at what? I’ve been hearing these laments all my life and I wonder about the syndrome at large.
As this familiar rant reaches its apogee, I’m trying to remember a passage from Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, penned in 1944:
As to whether I have been deceived, disillusioned… The answer is yes, I suppose. I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans—the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blue-print. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress—but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are not utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.
I perceive the same sense of abandonment in Cid and Earl. I feel it too, somewhat. Cid, Earl, and I are lucky in that we are able to stay mobile. I am always on the road. Cid likes to travel and Earl gets gigs twice a year in Europe, where they treat him like an artist rather than an ornament or an