Edisto by Padgett Powell

Author:Padgett Powell [Powell, Padgett]
Language: spa
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788433931573
Amazon: 8433931571
Publisher: Anagrama
Published: 1989-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

A Time Like Sweet Potatoes

THERE’S BEEN ONE POSITIVE positive about all this going-to-be-a-writer bull-hockey, and that is what our most famous playwright helped me get away with. Researching Habits and Methods for me the Doctor discovers that he gets up at three o’clock and makes coffee and plays rock and roll and writes, still writes plays. Well, a master sets a precedent and it is available for all the trials of posterity. And I am posterity.

It gets outlawed on school nights is the only thing. And I modify two ingredients at least. Three a.m. is perfect—he got that right. The house is kind of horror-movie still, settling itself for the night yet, and the wicker furniture is silently crisp; the Doctor is retired from the labors of lion’s Kool-Aid and snoring on her side when I pull her door shut. Wind is whistling the sand, and surf chomping like a roaring crowd, but it is somehow very quiet all the same.

Coffee I change to this recipe: I put just enough instant coffee in to give an adult look to milk and drink that. I think it’s the smell of coffee people like anyway, which you get, this way.

And rock and roll. A big thing has happened there. The dramatist meant something like Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis on those Tennessee Sun records when it was really black music in white hands or something—he can’t mean The Strawberry Alarm Clock. Old Presley the truck jockey in his leather jacket and natural sneer violating teenage girls within range of his voice—something like that helps him write. Not “Time” poems by a spoken voice in a group called The Moody Blues. Maybe the closest thing going to what he meant was this Jim Morrison cat, who a very correct know-it-all at school with all these appointments to play his clarinet at ladies’ parties told us was arrested in Miami for “masticating” on stage.

“Tobacco?” I said.

“No-o. Masticating,” he said, like I was a dunce. Well, I was and I wasn’t, because if you look it up, “chewing” is about as close to meaning something as “manipulating.” And when you’ve had one of these mayonnaise questionnaires backfire on you, masticating will suffice. So I have no real idea what Morrison did, even though I know the word, but anyway, he’s dead.

So I skip it, the rock and roll, and tune in one of these weather-farm-fishing shows where the guy sounds like a very young grandfather, and in two hours you know whether to cut tobacco or go fishing or stay in bed, and you have this cozy feeling because a grandfather like that is free, and useful to all of us. He talks about Russians and crime and rain, and his voice never changes. Someone calls in that 139 Soviet spies are registered in D.C. and the F.B.I, does nothing about it, and someone else calls and says 139 channel bass were landed at Botany Bay, and it’s still 5:35 a.m. in WQUE country, and Pop’s very charming and full-sounding.

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