Bin Laden's Bald Spot: & Other Stories

22. The Greyhound Bus is Your Mother & Father

113 the greyhound Bus is your mother & father My friend Denny was born in 1954 on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, so he was, as he liked to say, born mobile & destined to be restless, which was true, as he never paid rent or mortgage, never had a mailing address, & was, as he liked to say, a verbacious man, transitory & travelacious, a man whom, after passing from this existence to whatever is next, would certainly still be a relentless voyager among the endless & impatient stars. This was how he talked, all metaphysics & ampersands, & he made a little swirl in the air with his fingers when indicating an ampersand, which is not the same as the thing people do when they make quotation marks in the air, which that drove him insane, to the point where he was always talking about carrying a ruler & waiting for people to make quotation marks in the air & then cracking them over the knuckles with the ruler while explaining that he was a teacher & his actions were required as condition of the renewal of his licensure by the state. I dissuaded him of this, but he kept dreaming of it, because, as he said, people just totally glaze over when you use words like licensure , which is one of those words, like embezzlement & hermeneutics & amortization, that are instant soporifics, they squat in the air like toads, no one really has the slightest idea what they mean, like the word hermeneutics, he would say, you could look it 114 | Bin Laden’s Bald Spot up twenty times a day & it just doesn’t stick in the old brain pan, you know? The theory of the interpretation & understanding of a text on the basis of the text itself, what in heaven’s name does that mean? When a word like hermeneutics goes by in a conversation, he would say, the poor overwrought thing laboring through the air like a zeppelin, there’s a respectful pause as everyone watches it groan past, & then the conversation gets back to beer & tires or whatever. Such moments of pause & puzzlement, he would say, are the countries in which we are most truly ourselves, because then we are admittedly & openly uncertain, we shuck the usual confident mask, we achieve a brief & temporary selflessness in which paradoxically we approach honesty as nakedly as planets & comets behold the yearning & awesome sun. We are verbs, he would say, we are migratory, we are neither nor, we are Heisenberg’s principle, we are immeasurable, we contain multitudes, we are the very incarnation of uncertainty, we are Max Planck’s inconstancy, you know what I mean? f Some facts about Denny: He was physically slight but intense & weirdly strong, that kind of mad wiry strong that little skinny guys are sometimes, you know? Thin hair, sort of reddish. Quick wit, widely read, but not erudite-arrogant, not the kind of person anxious to show off how he knows more than you. A very good listener, which I think was maybe the key to his character. Decent athlete in solo sports, swimming & running & such. Terrible at every team sport. Complicated romantic life. Countless friends, male & female, old & young, human & animal, all of whom he kept until the end; he had an endless capacity for new friends. In business, an entrepreneur. He started all sorts of businesses & every one did shockingly well. They were all a certain kind of business, if you look at them as a pattern—subtle, almost obscure, enterprises: rubber bands for vegetables, cardboard inner rolls for toilet paper, bus shelters, nail clippers for mice & hamsters & fer- Brian Doyle | 115 rets & such, shoelaces in all shapes & sizes & colors & even flavors, the tiny screws & screwdrivers with which people repair their eyeglasses , newspaper kiosks, ice scrapers for cars, wire cages for new tomato plants, combs & brushes for left-handed people, a tool for scraping off bumper stickers, beanpoles for climbing beans, socks, dental floss in a hundred flavors, teapots, scissors in a hundred colors , ear-hair trimmers, measuring cups, coffee filters, things like that. The necessary ephemera, as he said. His companies, in toto, made him theoretically wealthy, if ever the assets had been allowed to accumulate; but his habit was to keep the money flowing from one company to the next, so as soon as one company employed ten people & went over a million in gross sales he sold it to the employees & poured the proceeds into the next company making twist-ties, or soap-on-a-rope that smelled like...