The Water-Method Man

I met her in the language lab. She takes freshman German, but little else has touched her. She approached me yesterday, chirping, 'Mr Thumper, are there no tapes with songs? I mean, I know the conversation. Aren't there any German ballads, or even opera?'

I stalled her; I browsed through the files with her bemoaning the lack of music in the language lab, and life in general. She's as shy as a cat underfoot; she fears her skirt might brush against your knee.

Lydia Kindle wants German ballads whispered in her ear. Or even opera, Couth!

I harbor no such musical illusion for my new job, my most degrading employment to date. I sell buttons and pennants and cowbells at the Iowa football games. I lug a large plywood board from gate to gate around the stadium. The board is wide and tippy with an easel-type stand; the wind blows it down; tiny gold footballs are scratched, buttons chip, pennants wrinkle and smudge. I get a commission: 10% of what I sell.

'Just one dollar for this Hawkeye pennant! A bell for two bucks! Big badges only seventy-five cents! It's a dollar, madam, for the pins with the little gold footballs attached. The kids love them; the footballs are just small enough for the wee ones to swallow. No, sir, this bell is not broken! It is simply a little bent. These bells are unbreakable. They'll dong forever.'

I get to see the game for free, but I hate football. And I have to wear this bright-yellow apron with a fat change-pocket. A large, shiny badge on my coat says: HAWKEYE ENTERPRISES - GO HAWKS! Every badge is numbered too; we communicate around the stadium by numbers. Competition is fierce for the best stand. On Saturday Number 368 said to me, 'This is my post, 510. Lug off, will you?' He wore a tie with red footballs on it; he sold many more pennants and buttons and cowbells than I did. I cleared just enough for a three-month packet of birth-control pills for Biggie.

Root for Iowa, Couth. Next game I might clear enough to have myself sterilized.

I was told that if Iowa ever won a football game, we would all sell many more things. The psychology of the fans was outlined to us in our Warm-up Meeting by the concession sales head of Hawkeye Enterprises, Mr Fred Paff, who told us that Iowans were proud folks, in need of a winner before they'd adorn their aerials and sprout badges and pins on their coats. 'Nobody likes to be associated with a loser,' Paff said, and to me he said, 'Well, we're both Freds, you know. How about that?'

'I know another Fred in Spokane, Washington,' I told him. 'Perhaps we should try to get something going.'

'A sense of humor!' Fred Paff cried. 'You'll do well here. A sense of humor is essential with the fans.'

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Let it be known, Couth, that you have more loyal and constant fans than these Iowans. Biggie and I appreciated your photographs almost as much as your money. Biggie especially liked your 'Self-Portrait w/Seaweed.' I frankly suspect it's illegal to send such photographs through the mail, and I don't mean to insult your body, but I preferred 'Dead Gull No. 8.'

Please dip into your darkroom and print one like that for me; in fact, make it of me. Make me prone and sort of sallow; fold my hands in the appropriate fashion and place the ready coffin near my figure; crack the casket's lid ajar, waiting for Fred Bogus Trumper, who at any moment now could easily be tempted by that plush velvet liner. Destroy the negative. Print only one 8 x 10. Superimposed, include the faces of my family: Biggie solid grief, but not bitter, and Colm at play with the casket's ornate handle. Please underexpose my father and mother. Move my father's mouth; in fact, blur it. He orates over the dead. The caption reads: 'A professional man must suffer his training ...' Then seal it in a black mat-board and mail the whole thing to the University of Iowa Business Office, with a curt note of apology for the failure of the deceased to pay his tuition. Which has been raised again, by vote of the trustees, to include an additional recreation fee. To pay, no doubt, for new gold football cleats and a Homecoming Day parade float: millions of yellow roses, shaped to form a giant ear of corn.

You're lucky to have a darkroom, Couth. I see you naked in your eerie safelight, awash in chemicals, developing, enlarging; you print yourself on a clean white sheet. Sometime, if there ever is time, you must teach me photography. The control of it amazes me. I remember watching you bathe your prints; I saw the images emerging and defining underwater; it was more than I could stand! As if so many ameboid things swam into place and made a man.

I think of this while translating the eighty-third stanza of Akthelt and Gunnel. It's the last word that bothers me: Klegwoerum. My thesis chairman thinks it should be 'fertile'. I say 'fecund'. My friend Ralph Packer suggests 'rank'. And Biggie says it doesn't really matter. There is a hurtful ton of truth in Biggie.

I think she's cracking, though. It's not like her, but she's taking it personally that some octogenarian in the hospital gooses her when she empties his bedpan. But do you know, Biggie never cries. Do you know what she does do, though? She finds a hangnail and tugs it slowly down her finger; I've seen her tease one past the first joint. Biggie bleeds, but she never cries.

Couth, I have felt close to you ever since I caught your clap from Elsbeth Malkas. Or we both caught and shared what Elsbeth had to start with. The details of who began it have never seemed to me essential for our friendship.

Once more, flush all seventeen of the johns for me. It would do my heart good to know that somewhere there are toilets which are not clogged with jockstraps. Choose a foggy night, open all the windows - sound bounces best off water in the fog - and flush away! I will hear you and rejoice.

Biggie sends her love. She's in the kitchen peeling her fingers. She's pretty busy, otherwise I'd ask her for a hangnail to enclose, a shred of her Trumpering fortitude boldly traveling from Iowa to Maine.

Love,

Bogus

7

Ralph Packer Films, Inc. 109 Christopher Street New York, New York 10014

TULPEN AND ME at work. She does the editing; actually, Ralph is his own editor, but Tulpen assists him. She also does some darkroom work, but Ralph is his own developer too. I don't know anything about developing and not much about editing. I'm the sound tracker; I tape in the music; if there's sync-sound, I get it right; if there's a voice-over, I lay it in; if there's offstage noise, I make some; when there's a narrator, I often do the talking. I have a nice big voice.

The film is nearly finished by the time it's brought to me, with most of the unusable footage cut out, and the sequence of shots pretty much the way Ralph wants it, at least rough-spliced - more or less the way Ralph will finally edit it. Ralph is very close to a one-man band, with some technical help from Tulpen and me. It's always Ralph's script and his camera-work; it's his movie. But Tulpen and I have great technique, and there's a Ralph Packer Fan Club kid named Kent who runs errands.

Tulpen and I are not members in The Ralph Packer Fan Club. The kid named Kent is a one-man band at that. I don't mean to suggest that Ralph Packer's films are unknown. His first film, The Group Thing, won first prize in the National Student Film Festival. My nice big voice is in that film; Ralph made it when he was a graduate student in the Cinematography Workshop at Iowa.

I met him in the language lab. In a lull between lab-sections, I was editing tapes for freshman German when this shuffling man of hair came in. Possibly twenty, or forty; possibly student or faculty, Trotskyite or Amish farmer, human or animal; a thief lumbering out of a camera shop, laden with lenses and light meters; a bear who after a terrible and violent struggle ate a photographer. This beast approached me.

I was still doing my translation of Akthelt and Gunnel then. I felt myself confronted by Akthelt's father, Old Thak. As he came closer a musk moved with him. One hundred glints of fluorescent light, off his lenses, buckles and polished parts.

'You Trumper?' he said.

A wise man, I thought, would confess it all now. Admit the translation was a fraud. Hope Old Thak goes back to the grave.