Chapter Seventeen: It Will Never Work

“You should enter the pie eating contest,” Art said to me. “I know you would win.”

“I’m on a diet,” I said.

He was always imagining Herculean conquests from me at ridiculous pursuits. I should have been offended at these subconscious efforts to trivialize me, but I rarely was. Truth be told, I did excel at oddball adventure. I had once jumped off a two story building for the mere amusement of scaring him. It stung like I imagined a lightning bolt might from my heels to my head. All my bones ringed and zinged like the Liberty Bell before it cracked. I filed away the knowledge: Don’t do that again, fool.

“What a cute little fair,” Teresa said. She was eyeballing the arts and crafts booths spread around the park.

“There’s no rides,” I groused.

“You’ll have to make do with the Children’s Corner,” she teased. “There’s a slide there. And a Jungle Gym.”

Margaret was off keeping up with Leonard, who was older now and getting much better at ditching her supervision. We were all attending the annual Gravenstein Apple Fair at Ragel Ranch on the west end of Sebastopol.

It was “The Sweetest Little Fair in Sonoma County.” A must see event. Incredibly, hordes of people from the Bay area did in fact actually drive all the way up here to attend. Gilroy had garlic. Iowa had corn. Napa had grapes. Castroville had artichokes. China had rice. Sebastopol had apples.

Monterey had jazz. You could buy the other stuff at the grocery store.

Teresa could read my thoughts.

“Don’t get all bah, humbug on me,” she said.

She put her arm inside mine and nuzzled against me. All the grouse whooshed out of me in a second. It didn’t take much to remind me how nuts I was about her. She could play me like a Stradivarius violin in the hands of old Stradavari himself. Strumming my strings high and low, however she wanted me to sound.

Art didn’t care much for schmaltz. He liked Teresa, but not particularly the change she’d made in me. “You guys make me sick,” he said. “I need a beer.”

“I’ll pass,” Teresa said. “Why don’t you boys run along. I want to check out the arts and crafts.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“No way. You never like anything. All you see is the price tag. If it’s cheap, you say it’s junk. If it’s expensive, you say it’s overpriced.”

“I bought an artsy ashtray once.”

“Right. It was a woman’s butt.”

“No it wasn’t. It was a truck driver’s butt.”

“How could you tell?”

“It had a twenty-two speed gear box on the side for resting your cigarette.”

“I wondered what that was.”

Art and I got a cup of beer and found a seat on the grass in the shade of an oak tree. There were no apple trees here. They were off in the surrounding hills. There were pictures of the orchards you could buy at a booth.

We watched the world go by, most of it waddling. America was turning into chunk city. Triple E shoes and Double D bras and size two hundred belts. And no wonder. Corn dogs, caramel apples, barbecued meat, cotton candy, ice cream bars, hamburgers, fries, pickled elephant toes.

The standard fare at every fair. And every mall. And every everywhere. Good finger-licking crapola. They were greasing up the world as fast as you could show somebody a hamburger. You could yap about calories and fat all you wanted. But the crapola just out-tasted the healthy cuisine. There was one yogurt type stand at the fair. It never had a line forming.

“Lot of fatsos out there,” I mentioned to Art.

“Calorie absorbing mechanisms,” he said.

“Right. Lot of butts that don’t fit on the toilet no more.”

“Handicapped citizens.”

“Right. Lot of guts squeezing over the table tops.”

“Appetite disordered individuals.”

“Right. Lot of shoes busting out the seams.”

“Walking disabled citizens.”

“Right. Lot of boobs spooshing out of their bras.”

“Good wholesome mammaries.”

“I’ve been thinking about marketing my translation programs.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Brain impaired.”

“Fucking screwball.”

“I think I could sell them.”

He twitched nervously. His body parts were the only way you could get a read on his feelings. His mouth was hidden under a mustache that looked like a weed patch at the edge of town. His eyes were magnified behind his coke bottle glasses and always looked the same. A dinosaur egg sunny side up. The yolk part was light blue.

“How would you do that?” he asked.

“I’d put all my translation programs onto one floppy disk, with a main menu User Interface where you could select the particular translation you wanted to run. If you had a WordPerfect file, you’d select WordPerfect from the menu.”

“Who would want to buy it?”

“Typesetters like us.”

“You’d be killing our market. Why give away our secret to competitors?”

He didn’t mention that “our secret” was my work, not his. He was always he. I was always us. “They wouldn’t be competitors. They’d be clients.”

“There wouldn’t be enough of them. There’s only twenty or so in the area.”

“I know. It would have to be national.”

“How the hell are we going to do that? We don’t have any capital.”

See what I mean. He was already we-ing himself into my idea. It was okay. I’d need some sort of idiot to handle marketing and sales.

“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far. Get phone books of all the major cities and do a mailing to all the typesetters. Some stupid ass thing like that.”

“Blue, you’re a dreamer. Hey Mr. Chicago typesetter guy. You don’t know me from Jack Diddly Squat, but send me your money and I’ll send you a disk.”

“They sell brides that way.”

“You can see a picture of what you’re getting, though.”

“So, we’ll take a picture of a disk with our name on it.”

“It’ll never work.”

Art didn’t like it when I thought of dreams that would never work. That was his job. At least, it had been. Not so much since we’d moved, though.

Nevada City had been a lot more significant for him to swim in a small pond and float on his back. There wasn’t much competition there for typesetting and brain size.

He had a small home now, with two bedrooms. The office was a separate place three blocks away. He didn’t have to drive to Sacramento every night. Leonard was going to school instead of day care.

It was too sane for him. He had filled a lot of his time with crazy shit that distinguished him from normal living. You could see it made him nervous for his old comfortable chaos.

And mostly, I spent my time with Teresa now, instead of him. He spent his with Margaret. And Mindy didn’t live below him to look down her halter top.

Our worlds had changed.

To be continued . . .