Humor Is Not a Mood

On a starless night in October, Satchel Paige and I ate take-out kosher Chinese on the couch downstairs, hooting at the television in voices clogged with rice and General Tso’s chicken. Satchel is the cat, and the hooting was for George W. Bush, who had delayed the start of Game Seven of the National League Championship Series to talk up war with Iraq on Fox. I told Satchel not to worry, that a real war would be carried on the real networks. He balanced on my chest, casually picking his teeth with a claw. When I smiled at him, Satchel, who loves duck sauce beyond reason, stuck his kitty tongue deep into my mouth. I jumped and swore, and he burned a path up my face. Blood pooled at the tip of my nose.

The game was starting when I was done cleaning myself up, but Satchel and I didn’t go back downstairs. We arranged ourselves in front of the little TV in my bedroom: a shot glass of hydrogen peroxide and a fortune cookie for me, and two packets of duck sauce in a Depression glass bowl for him. I’d already watched the Atlanta Braves play 162 regular-season games—imagine Remembrance of Things Past with the infield fly rule—but tonight, for a game that would send a team to the World Series, I couldn’t sit still.

In the bottom of the first, my guys were batting, if you could call it that, when I noticed the state of the bedroom bookshelves. Books were two and three deep to a shelf, some upside down, others facing the wrong way. Everywhere I looked, there were good books in questionable neighborhoods: a waterlogged hardback of Nixon Agonistes cozied up to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; The Autobiography of Malcolm X straddling three “true crime” accounts of the Branch Davidians’ last days in Waco; Spike Milligan trapped inside Ha Jin’s Waiting.

I missed a visit to the mound and a couple of long fly balls, all because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the shelves. By the fifth inning, hundreds of books were stacked on my bed, on the dresser, and in four teetering columns on the floor that, when I squinted, looked like a one-car garage attached to the Parthenon.

I was rubbing the bare bookshelves with coconut-scented polish when it occurred to me I wasn’t sure where I’d hidden my spare house keys. Day to day, I operate on the principle that I will find things eventually—the house is rich in hiding places, my version of a Catskill magician’s tricks cabinet—but I couldn’t stop thinking about the keys. I found three of them, and a twenty-dollar bill folded into an origami giraffe, but looking for the fourth and final key, I switched to wondering where I’d put the paperwork to renew my car tags. I was digging in a stack of files when it came to me that the missing key might be in a pocket upstairs. Both hands were deep in a winter blazer when I decided to start a clothing bag for Goodwill. I stuffed a Guatemalan vest, a Guatemalan shirt, and what looked like Guatemalan earmuffs into a trash bag, which made me think of Mennonite missionaries, and dairy farms, and former Wisconsin governor Tony Earle’s suggestion of a new state motto: Eat Cheese or Die. I did my impression of Gov. Earle for Satchel, who looked at me for a long moment and scooted under the bed. Dragging my two bags full of clothes to the door, I noticed a perfect crime-scene fingerprint above the light switch. I went for soap and water to clean the wall, which put me in the hallway when my baseball season ended. The TV was off before the losing Braves left the field.

My skin was hot, slick to the touch, and something fluttered in me, gathering beneath my heart. I cleaned the wall, wishing I could find Dorinda Pressman from Baptist church camp in eighth grade to...