Let Me Be Frank With You Read Free

the Launch Pad coffee hut (he’s clearly a Mexican), a red, printed-cardboard sign resting against his knee. COFFEE GIVES YOU COURAGE. FELIZ NAVIDAD . I wave, but he only stares back, as if I might be giving him the finger. Farther on, the Free At Last Bail Bonds has only a single car parked in front, as do a couple of boxy, asbestos-sided bars set back in the gravel lots. Days were—before The Shore got re-discovered and prices went nuts—you could drive over from Pottstown, take the kids and your honeybee for a weekend, and get away for a couple hundred. All that’s a dream now, even after the storm. A bigsign—part of its message torn off by the winds—advertises the Glen Campbell Good-bye Tour. Half of Glen’s smiling, too-handsome face remains, a photo from the ’60s—before Tanya and the boozing and the cocaine. A paper placard in front of one of the bars—stolen off someone’s lawn after the election—has been re-purposed and instead of “Obama-Biden” now announces, “We’re Back. So Fuck You, Sandy.”
    Driving, I’ve got Copland’s Fanfare filling the interior space at ten thirty. I bought the whole oeuvre online. As always, I’m stirred by the opening oboes giving ground to the strings then the kettle drums and the double basses. It’s a high-sky morning in Wyoming. Joel McCrea’s galloping across a windy prairie. Barbara Britton, fresh from Vermont, stands out front of their sodbuster cabin. Why is he so late? Is there trouble? What can I do, a woman alone? I’ve worn out three disks this fall. Almost any Copland (today it’s the Pittsburgh Symphony conducted by some Israeli) can persuade me on almost any given day that I’m not just any old man doing something old men do: driving to the grocery for soy milk, visiting the periodontist, motoring to the airport to greet young soldiers—sometimes against their wills. It doesn’t take much to change my perspective on a given day—or a given moment, or a given anything. Sally slipped a Copland in my Christmas stocking a year ago ( Billy theKid ), and it’s had positive effects. I bought The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven’t made much progress there—though I need to.
    I haven’t had time to look up Arnie Urquhart’s home-sale paperwork from ’04—whether he financed, if he took a balloon, or just peeled bills off a fat wad. I, of course, ought to remember the transaction, since it was my house, and I pocketed the dough—used to finance our house in Haddam, with plenty left over. Though like a lot of things I should do, I often don’t. It’s not true that as you get older things slide away like molasses off a table top. What is true is I don’t remember some things that well, owing to the fact that I don’t care all that much. I now wear a cheap Swatch watch, but I do sometimes lose the handle on the day of the month, especially near the end and the beginning, when I get off-track about “thirty days hath September . . .” This, I believe, is normal and doesn’t worry me. It’s not as if I put my trousers on backwards every morning, tie my shoelaces together, and can’t find my way to the mailbox. My only persistent bother is an occasionally painful subluxation (a keeper word) in my C-3 and C-4. It causes me to feel “Rice Krispies” in my neck, plus an ache when I twist back and forth, so that I don’t do that as much. I fear it may be restricting signals to my brain. My orthopedist at Haddam Medical, Dr. Zippee (a Pakistani and a prime asshole), asked if I wanted him to order up “some blood work” tofind out if I’m a candidate for Alzheimer’s. (It made him gleeful to suggest this.) “Thanks, but I guess not,” I said, standing in his tiny green cubicle in a freezing-ass, flower-print examination gown.