Authors: Joshua Cody
[sic]: A Memoir (21 page)
When my brother and I were children, he’d write us these marvelous stories. Here’s part of one of them.
The Adventures of
Little Dee (d) & KintoChapter 22:
Little Dee (d) Misplaces His TubaLittle Dee (d) has misplaced his tuba, and thus cannot play in the marching band in the football game.
Kinto plays the finger cymbals and has not lost those, so he can play.
However, a marching band without a tuba is no band at all, or not much of one, and so it is essential that Little Dee (d) find his tuba. He has looked everywhere for it and cannot seem to find it. Kinto wonders how Little Dee (d) can lose his tuba. A tuba is a mighty big thing to lose; you’d think if you looked around for it you’d see it somewhere. If you saw it, you’d notice it immediately.
“I don’t know,” Little Dee (d) said fretfully, irritated at Kinto for chiding him, and also at himself, for losing it, and also at the tuba, for getting lost. “I’ve looked everywhere for it.”
“Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere?” Kinto said, emphasizing the word everywhere.
“Well, I haven’t looked in my underwear,” Little Dee (d) said irascibly.
“Have you looked in Siam?” Kinto said, thinking of all the places it might be where Little Dee (d) possibly—indeed, most likely—hadn’t looked. Kinto looked thoughtful again.
“I knew you were going to say something as foolish as that,” Little Dee (d) said. “I knew you were going to say something as far out as that. That is really far out.”
“Siam is far out,” Kinto responded, agreeably. “That’s why I suggested it. That’s why I thought of it. I was trying to think of far off places where you hadn’t looked. I thought you would already have looked around here.”
“I did look around a little,” Little Dee (d) said. “I haven’t looked in Siam.”
“Well, why don’t you look in Siam?” Kinto said.
It would be easy for Little Dee (d) to look in Siam. Little Dee (d) could whee.
Wheeing is the ability to go someplace very fast. It is not to be confused with wheezing, which is what you do when you get an asthma attack, or what you might do after running very hard—say, in a race. Wheezing is the sound of air rushing through the bronchial tubes, when they are constricted. Wheeing does sound a bit like wheezing, though. Anyway, Little Dee (d) can whee, so he could get to Siam and back in time. It wouldn’t be any trouble.
“Why don’t you whee to Siam and see if your tuba is there?” Kinto said, suggesting Little Dee (d) go to Siam by whee.
“How could my tuba be there if I never took it there?” Little Dee (d) said. “I’ve never been in Siam.”
“I thought you told me you’ve been everywhere,” Kinto said, amazed.
Little Dee (d) was exasperated with the whole thing—the conversation he was having with Kinto, and with Kinto in particular—so he ended it and that was the end of the Siam adventure.
A note to the reader
Chapter 22 is fairly late in the story, so you have some catching up to do.
First of all, who is Little Dee (d), and why is there always this (d) behind his name? And who is Kinto?
Little Dee (d) and Kinto have already been introduced in the story, and yet they haven’t been properly introduced. This seems to violate certain canons, of storytelling, for children. First you should introduce your characters.
To each other?
No, not to each other! I assume they have been introduced to each other.
Chapter 23:
The Difficulty Of Fitting Little Dee (d)Finding clothes to fit Little Dee (d) is difficult, because he is so small. He is less than a quark in size. He is about the size of a subquark, but because a subquark can’t be seen (and hence measured), it is hard to know how big Little Dee (d) is or his dimensions. So it’s hard to find clothes for him. It’s hard to find him. Therefore Little Dee (d) is allowed to run around in his altogether. Or it is thought he does.
A quark is so small it can hardly be seen with the most powerful microscope—one so powerful that your eye, seen from the other way, looks like the sky—and a subquark is smaller than that! A subquark is so small it can only be theorized. And Little Dee (d) was smaller than that!
Nevertheless, Little Dee (d) existed. Of course, he was difficult to find. Difficult to see. There was no point in looking for him, since you couldn’t see him anyway.
Relative to Little Dee (d), Kinto was quite large. But of course, anything would be. (Relative to Little Dee (d), even a subquark was large.)
However, Little Dee (d) packs a wallop. Just ask Kinto.
Little Dee (d) lived with Kinto, and that was why he always returned to Kinto. No matter how bad Kinto was—how stupid, how bumbling, how dull—he was loyal, and most of all, he was a known quantity, and, most of all, safe. Kinto was home. Little Dee (d) may not have had anything else, but at least he had Kinto, & that was something.
Little Dee (d) observed that there were many people in the world. He & Kinto were just two. There was no need for them—Little Dee (d) observed that; there were plenty of people (if that was what was wanted), and plenty to do whatever there was to be done. So there was no real need for them at all. Nevertheless, they existed, and so they had to make do as best they could, carving out a life for themselves, and such pleasures as they could find, or create, within that life; and trying to stay out of trouble.
Little Dee (d) liked to make trouble now & then, deliberately. Kinto made trouble accidentally.
•
SO YOU CAN
see how fun it was for my brother and me to grow up with my parents in that house that used to be on a farm owned by a brewer named Pabst; and my mom would sometimes become exasperated with my father, and it was still fun.
My father would write for fun. He had other jobs. I gave him the
Waste Land
book in 1992, and then I finished high school, and went to college, and his marriage dissolved; and he moved to the desert, and I moved to Paris, and then I came back and he died. My brother and I went through the stuff, and one interesting thing we found (among the stuff that we had time to go through, there’s tens of thousands of pages) is this, a very funny little thing he put together when I’d given him the
Waste Land
book. It’s basically a folder in which he filed junk mail, but he added commentary—so obviously it’s a parody of Eliot, as can be seen from the cover, with Wyndham Lewis’s famous portrait of the poet framed in the tacky notebook window. Old Possum does not look happy, that’s for sure.
The thing begins with almost random jottings—is talk cheap?
I am not a Shaw fan:
It goes on in this lighthearted vein for about a dozen or so pages, and then the tone begins to change. Notes on Shelley’s madness; notes on the linkage between writing and guilt, between writing and obscenity (that Byron, “too, like me, + most good, genuine writers” wrote “dirty”).
Now: I am not a poet. I is nothing—yet the I remains of interest.
To think that this whole time I was reading and asking him about literature, everything I read I’d ask him about—I talked to him for weeks about my frustration with Wallace Stevens before he finally admitted he couldn’t stand him either, and I was so relieved—and to learn that he’d destroyed a 350-page novel: