White Noise - Don Delillo [28]
“You’re saying it’s more or less universal, to be fascinated by TV disasters.”
“For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”
“I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.”
“Feel bad,” he said.
“It’s obvious,” Lasher said. “We all feel bad. But we can enjoy it on that level.”
Murray said, “This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they’ve forgotten how to listen and look as children. They’ve forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people’s eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It’s a simple case of misuse.”
Grappa casually tossed half a buttered roll at Lasher, hitting him on the shoulder. Grappa was pale and baby-fattish and the tossed roll was an attempt to get Lasher’s attention.
Grappa said to him, “Did you ever brush your teeth with your finger?”
“I brushed my teeth with my finger the first time I stayed overnight at my wife’s parents’ house, before we were married, when her parents spent a weekend at Asbury Park. They were an Ipana family.”
“Forgetting my toothbrush is a fetish with me,” Cotsakis said. “I brushed my teeth with my finger at Woodstock, Altamont, Monterey, about a dozen other seminal events.”
Grappa looked at Murray.
“I brushed my teeth with my finger after the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire,” Murray said. “That’s the southernmost point I’ve ever brushed my teeth with my finger at.”
Lasher looked at Grappa.
“Did you ever crap in a toilet bowl that had no seat?”
Grappa’s response was semi-lyrical. “A great and funky men’s room in an old Socony Mobil station on the Boston Post Road the first time my father took the car outside the city. The station with the flying red horse. You want the car? I can give you car details down to the last little option.”
“These are the things they don’t teach,” Lasher said. “Bowls with no seats. Pissing in sinks. The culture of public toilets. All those great diners, movie houses, gas stations. The whole ethos of the road. I’ve pissed in sinks all through the American West. I’ve slipped across the border to piss in sinks in Manitoba and Alberta. This is what it’s all about. The great western skies. The Best Western motels. The diners and drive-ins. The poetry of the road, the plains, the desert. The filthy stinking toilets. I pissed in a sink in Utah when it was twenty-two below. That’s the coldest I’ve ever pissed in a sink in.”
Alfonse Stompanato looked hard at Lasher.
“Where were you when James Dean died?” he said in a threatening voice.
“In my wife’s parents’ house before we were married, listening to ‘Make Believe Ballroom’ on the old Emerson table model. The Motorola with the glowing dial was already a thing of the past.”
“You spent a lot of time in your wife’s parents’ house, it seems, screwing,” Alfonse said.
“We were kids. It was too early in the cultural matrix for actual screwing.”
“What were you doing?”
“She’s my wife, Alfonse. You want me to tell a crowded table?”
“James Dean is dead and you’re groping some twelve-year-old.”
Alfonse glared at Dimitrios Cotsakis.
“Where were you when James Dean died?”
“In the back of my uncle’s restaurant in Astoria, Queens, vacuuming with the Hoover.”
Alfonse looked at Grappa.
“Where the hell were you?” he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him that the actor’s death was not complete without some record of Grappa’s whereabouts.