I’m reading a non-fiction piece by a cable TV tech
who says she told a customer that she needs
to get into the basement to run a line, and the customer
says, “You can’t go in the basement—it’s a mess,”
and the cable TV tech says, “Look, I’ve seen it all,
so unless you’ve got a kid in a cage down there,
nothing will bother me,” and the customer pauses
for a beat and says, “Not a kid.” Just then
the phone rings, and it’s a friend who tells me
he’s thinking about taking up fox hunting
but hesitates when I ask him if there are foxes
where he lives. I tell him to go ahead, though:
this way, he’ll have all the fun of fox hunting
and none of the barbarism, presuming some other
prey appears, of course, like geese or skateboarders.
Or your own thoughts: isn’t being startled
by some idea or feeling that you never knew
you had in the first place just the best? Think how
smart you feel when you’re crossing the street
or walking through the woods and suddenly you see
how the coadjutant power of an atom is determined
by the number of hydrogen atoms that it combines with
or what Kant meant by the categorical imperative
or why your mom stayed with your dad even after
he kept getting arrested, especially that one time.
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room
for other occupations,” says Emily Dickinson,
and surely that’s how people felt at Elvis’s first
stage show, because here was a kid who wasn’t
playing country, said producer Sam Phillips,
and he wasn’t playing rhythm ‘n’ blues, and he
looked “a little greasy,” and the venue was “just
a joint,” and the audience was a bunch of
hard-drinking folks who weren’t about to settle for
a tepid performance, but they didn’t have to,
because their reaction, said Phillips, was “just
incredible.” I’m so happy that those people
had that experience. It must have been
the best surprise. I think probably the worst
surprise is to have a heart attack during a game
of charades, because either people will think
you’re mimicking someone having a heart attack
or else you’re doing an absolutely terrible job
of acting out the scenario you’re supposed to be
acting out, such as transcribing a Beethoven
sonata but in a different key from the original
or knitting a muffler to give your granny for
Christmas or Hanukkah, if she’s Jewish.
This one woman said her biggest surprise
was when she woke up after an unsuccessful
suicide attempt: she’d checked into a motel,
put a plastic sheet on the bed, lain down,
and swallowed what she thought would be
an overdose of pills only to be found by
the housekeeper the next morning and wake up
a few days later in a psychiatric ward. “I was
very upset I had failed,” she said. Not me,
I say. Kill yourself and you miss out on
the eight million little surprises that happen
every day, such as the time last week when a tiny
slip of a student came to my office to drop off
some work, and we chatted for a minute,
and it turns out she’s a German major,
and when I say why German, she says, “I want
to be a butcher, and the best butchery schools
are in Germany.” Take that, you village explainers
who say that humanities degrees are worthless!
Lucky student. She’ll be in Germany for a year,
and after that, who knows where? Anthony
Bourdain says, “Travel changes you. As you
move through this life and this world, you change
things slightly, you leave marks behind,
however small. And in return, life and travel
leave marks on you.” Bourdain is also the guy
who said, “Your body is not a temple, it’s an
amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” Someone
who always enjoys the ride is Percy, the neighbor’s
cat, who comes over every day to bite me.
There I am, having coffee on the deck
and reading the newspapers, and Percy settles
down between my feet and looks at them as
though he’s studying the menu board at
a McFriendly’s and trying to decide whether
he wants the Chocolate Chili Cheese Dog
or the Big Bubba Bacon Bomb. When my friend
who wants to take up foxhunting gets off
the phone, I start reading again, which is when
I learn that the cable TV tech goes down into
the customer’s basement and finds, not a kid
in a cage, but a man, and actually a happy man
at that, if “happy” is the word you’d use to
describe someone who is paying the householder
to lock him up and starve him and beat him
regularly or whatever it is that a sex worker
does to someone who takes delight in
a leisure-time activity that wouldn’t exactly
make my heart leap up with joy, but then
there you have it. Oh, go ahead and bite me,
Percy. You’ll only surprise me if you don’t.