Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Time Monkeys

69 Time Monkeys Back in the twentieth century I was a catalog writer for one of America’s biggest office-supplies companies.The work was easy, the pay adequate, the offices huge and bright. The cafeteria was subsidized, and I spent entire days there drinking coffee and reading literature instead of composing ads at my desk upstairs. In short, everything was great, and I disliked Plume Corp. the way you’d dislike drinking a big cup of warm spit. There were signs that others felt the same. My boss, who looked exactly like smilin’ Joe Garagiola, sat down one day to tell me a funny story. An elderly neighbor had given him a pair of beautiful spindle-backed chairs, and he’d taken them apart to refinish them. He laughed as he described replacing two back spindles in their holes while six others popped loose.He chuckled when he said he’d had to have a drink to calm down. His face swelled as he told of returning to the wooden spindles waggling like evil fingers, and of having no control over events in his life: the chairs thwarted him, as did his former business partner, his ex-wife, his kids, his dog,and everyone in the Plume head office.He spoke so long that the earth tilted away from the sun, and winter came. When he finally found his way back to the punch line, he admitted he drank six more double gins and smashed the old woman’s chairs to flinders with a maul. Crazy Larry worked at Plume then too and invented time monkeys to explain the anguish of the place, how someone could sit down to chat and you’d suffer months of bitterness in a single afternoon. Larry said the 70 time monkeys monkeys are smiling and fanged.They wear fezzes.They chatter incessantly and pick at your clothes, creating all sorts of distractions and distortions: good times become brief, and dental work eternal. Essentially, they work against hope. If you think you’re going to “just get through today”and then the rest of the week will be fine, if you’re sure that your $1,000-a-head weekend at Club Med will feel like summers did when you were a schoolchild , rest assured: the monkeys are on their way. r Another fall semester began, marking my anniversary as a columnist with McSweeney’s. To celebrate, McSweeney’s and I renewed our vows in a quiet ceremony in Malibu,then flew to Saint-Tropez.You know how those forced milestones go. I wanted a salad; McSweeney’s ordered the duck. I said we should drive over to Johnny Depp’s and surprise him; McSweeney’s insisted we find a phone and call first. By the time we flew home, McSweeney’s had started smoking again and was giving me those looks like,You got something you want to say to me? Because you look like you’re feeling froggy. If you’re feeling froggy, go ahead and jump. r The process of writing about something—even your own life—breaks up and re-forms your sense of it. Rereading my writing disorients me, especially since I’ve never been a lecturer at a big state university at all; I’m a head in a jar on a shelf in the McSweeney’s basement. I know rationally that what I perceive as the world is just editor John Warner showing film strips to all us heads, but when fellow columnist Roy Kesey’s head, in the jar next to mine, mutters in its sleep about mad pursuits and wild ecstasies, I long for the imagined life I’ve written, like some amniotic Pinocchio. r We all fall victim to time’s monkeyshines, once we’re old enough to have compartmented pasts.The faces in my memory now include those of childhood and hometown, other towns and cities, family, army, various schools, friendships, relationships, and workplaces, including the two thousand or so students I’ve taught at three universities. I’ll sometimes see people I time monkeys 71 know across the quad, but reason puts them down, one by one, explaining to me that that person would have graduated years ago; that other person lived in Oxnard, California, and likely would have no reason to be here; I’d better hope that third one isn’t who I think it is, or there...