Tickled Pink / Webster

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Tickled Pink / Webster

“Tickled Pink” is a story from a set of related stories under the title What to Do in Case of Fate. Characters named Henry Horse, Percy Baldridge, Olivia Piano, Greta Mann, Alice Doren, and Jack Popcorn – are featured at least once in youth and at least once again at the midpoint of their lives – either as the central character in a particular story or as a minor character in another character’s story. “Tickled Pink” is split it into two parts for submission to BCWW sessions. Part One is below, and the cutoff point is arbitrary.

Tickled Pink

by

Gary Webster

The seamen call it looming… Its principal effect is to make distant objects appear larger, in opposition to the general law of vision, by which they are diminished. I knew an instance, at York town, from whence the water prospect eastwardly is without termination, wherein a canoe with three men, at a great distance, was taken for a ship with its three masts.

- Thomas Jefferson

With discipline and by masquerade, Zach Gotlieb, city editor of the Stone Mountain Post, permitted himself no outward signs of pleasure in his work. In this, he was like his face. Folds of fat concealed good looks. Two decades of stern labor had lent to the fat a texture like gristle, the result of rigid bearing, strenuous judgment, maniacal speed, and a pledge to accuracy. This, he applied over many years to a chain of grindstones that he turned one by one into dust, all while conducting himself in the manner of a taxi cab dispatcher, as opposed to the manager of a literary enterprise. Yet, the drab toil was spiced with a secret, freakish twinkling in his psyche.

There, he cloaked a circling Hollywood spotlight, switched on during his youth, but not turned to the sky. The light lodged in the dark recesses of his body where it never flared out. To his crew of nine reporters and assorted freelancers, he was thorny and biting. That’s the style that made it happen. But at home, knocking back his toddy after sundown, he was Cary Grant, he was Spencer Tracey. Solo, by the red-hot glowing fireplace, he was Jason Robards, he was Lee J. Cobb. He never let the peculiar gleam show. He did not permit even Mrs. Gotlieb to glimpse it. The lambent inner light was his most intimate belonging.

Thus, a disillusioned man preserved the trace of an illusion, tucked away in his heart. It was inextinguishable. It was incorruptible.

At his desk, he affected weariness and boredom. He was a virtuoso of gray monotony, until abruptly he ignited. He was a man who could light a blaze. The trick was in the surprise, in the rarity of the explosions. Anger, tremendous anger, and best when he was actually angry. If the force of something terrible welled up inside, then it took over his otherwise tranquil methods and procedures. Into the sunless newsroom he brought lightening. The city editor’s discharge rejuvenated the place and to a high degree satisfied him.

He whipped off his jacket upon arrival at the office. He got down to work, he got the newspaper out.

But also, he seized his hirelings like the overlord of a totalitarian reeducation farm. He considered transforming young idiots into reporters the main object of his work in providing the isolated county of Stone Mountain with news. That was his deepest secret. He wanted young idiots to say, years later, I owe it all to Zach Gotlieb at the Idaho rag where I started out. Thin gruel, but that’s the way it was with Zach. A simple, heartwarming message from the big time world, borne back to Stone Mountain, perhaps in a note hastily scribbled on pulpy scratch paper. To Dear Old Bullet Eyes – you taught me how to be a reporter. That was what he wanted. The way Rosalind Russell said it to Carey Grant, Rosalind reading the line hardboiled, no purring. Anyone Zach wanted to say it that way would be long gone from the Stone Mountain Post by the time it could be said. He knew very well who it should be – he knew exactly who ought to say, I owe my success to you, Zach. He was getting on, and he realized that he might be long dead when word finally came that he was appreciated. Eighteen years and nothing. Not a single note to that effect. No phone call. No nothing.

Well, fuck it. If you really needed what you needed, then you were a sap.

And then you had to get the story, too. That was the thing – the story. Everyone said that. But the story was only part of it. No one said that. The story gave the business a hard edge, concealing that dreamy shit. The sentimental crap. Bury the crap. Even though the crap was there, and Zach knew it was there. Fuck it.

Zach Gotlieb liked to scold the dreamers. The deluded egomaniacs who wanted to be reporters, rub elbows with the powerful, and make a name for themselves. He liked startling them. He liked using his pencil like a sword to scratch diagonal black lines across two-and-a-half pages out of three pages of copy and demanding a rewrite in the next twenty minutes. He liked badly written copy. It made his day. In a way, he didn’t like good writers. He didn’t much like the kid who could do the job well. Beginner’s luck. They were here and gone, they hardly noticed him. He liked the dreamers who didn’t know what they were in for. He liked to drum them out, or push them on and up. Either way. He liked the slow ones. He liked molding them. He liked making them into reporters. He liked chipping away at their noses until they were misshapen and blistered. Sometimes his gruff magic actually produced a tough-son-of-a-bitch reporter who cared nothing for the dreamy shit. He believed it had happened. Several times. Good enough odds, you’d think, to produce one lousy note. The bastards.

“Hey, Popcorn!”

“Yeah, Zach?”

“You hear of something called darklight?”

“Nope. You mean like strobe light?”

“No. The religion.”

“Uh… no.”

“Take a day, see if you can find something.”

“Uh… the library?”

“That’s a start. Got something to do with Indians. You’re an Indian, aren’t you?”

“My great grandmother, supposedly.”

“What kind was she?”

“Uh… Ohio? Don’t really know. Nothing fancy like an Apache. Dull as corn.”

“Too bad. Well, darklight… Indian religion. Or something. Check it for me, will you? Maybe a story.”

“American Indian, you mean? Not the other one?”

“American. Try the U. of Q. Ask around. Ask the weird people… it’s a cult like. Talk to some Indians.”

Zach Gotlieb pulled the darklight card every couple of years. Not one of his victims fished out a story. And yet, someday something to write about might turn up, because he was given to understand that some half-whimsical darklight religion, covered by Indian feathers, was surely out there, circulating in the interminable distance or some higher places, with the general population, like Zach, lightly tickled by word of it, but heedless and unknowing. It was news – potentially – even though it was like saying, “Go dig up a story on the number three.” Certain scrubs could always come back with something. Many people believe the number three is lucky – but is it? And what is luck, anyway? And so on.

Jack Popcorn, boy reporter, starry-eyed, still waiting to be well kissed, was perfect for the darklight beat. A model victim with a whole day to spare. Zach desired to pummel one of those pretty doe eyes to make the boy walk around with it swollen and blackened for a week. If he could also twist Jack’s leg to cause a lifetime limp… but then, no… that would be going too far. Yet he seethed to stamp his brand on the young idiots, to puncture them with a small, dark, and ineradicable borehole for them to wear through life and ponder.

There was a chance Popcorn would learn something from the darklight beat that would light a fire in his ass, and perhaps, in later years, he’d thank old man Zach in his retirement. For, according to the city editor of the Stone Mountain Post, young idiots were headed for damp, pathetic lives if they couldn’t take a punch.

***

The Mystery of Secret Sacred Places

by

Jack Popcorn

There is one roadblock to writing the truth. The author must deviate from logic without losing contact with logic. Poets daily try to pass magically through the roadblock; philosophers daily try to go around it because, if they attempt to go through the roadblock, it becomes a trap.

Mr. Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle County, Virginia, philosopher extraordinaire, enjoyed navigating a logic system of hidden roadblocks, and seems to have been quite comfortable even when at times he stepped into the camouflaged hole and slid down the chute. Since the fall is simply a breakdown in reasoning, no harm is apparent and the climb back out of the hole is easy, like teleportation. All the philosopher need do is flip a few words around – nothing too hard, nothing dangerous. A philosopher is not obviously like an engineer when making a mathematical error that causes the death of a traveler when the bridge collapses. A philosophical error collapses like a puff of smoke, quickly vanishing. No evidence. Therefore, it’s unwise to blame the philosopher who hurts. A philosopher himself often doesn’t notice the mistake.

For example, Jefferson measured out just the right amount of inferiority in the African soul, if not to justify, then, at least, to explain the fact slavery. This is like first lowering oneself into the hole and then leaping out of the hole in twenty-five easy words.

At the same time, Jefferson diligently searched for a reason to justify the forced separation and encampment of the Indian tribes. If reason could be found, then he never identified it. Moreover, he admitted that it could not be explained by the inferiority of the Indians, the effortless declaration that brought down the Africans. Jefferson loved truth, pursued science, identified virtues, and took pleasure in hard work. His fierce rectitude and trust in his own integrity would not allow him to turn the Indians into savages the way his less philosophical economic imperatives turned Africans into children at his disposal for employment and profit. After much study and consideration of the available evidence, Jefferson reluctantly concluded that Indians were different than but not inferior to Europeans. In that difference, he found justification for his actions. Nevertheless, it disconcerted him that neither he nor anyone else he was willing to recognize as an authority could plainly demonstrate Indian inferiority.

As a result, Jefferson has been accused of a mischievous and false naiveté in lamenting the extinguishment of the Indians because it meant the destruction of the traditions, rituals, way of life and lore, which he declared to have great and equal value. Somehow, in Jefferson’s logic or in his deviation from logic, the actual individuals extinguished in the process were unimportant. For example, to Jefferson it is of no significance that Pyannto or Flaming Bush, warrior tribesman of the Wasappi, died on March 29, 1803, at 3:02 in the afternoon. Neither is it of significance that Alayamagotto or Black Theory, Wasappi medicine man, was created equal on September 2, 1797, at 12:30 in the morning at the instigation of parental lovemaking beneath the moon.

This weak hypothesis entrapped no one, least of all Jefferson. Yet, there it was – and Jefferson was stuck with it because, no matter for what feeble reason, the government was about to separate and encamp the Indians. Discussion hour was over. Jefferson was forced to imply, and sometimes insist, that a single Indian, in all probability, is worth little, yet all Indians taken together are quite something.

Among the Indian extravaganzas he had observed, he marveled most at the Indian homing instinct. He observed small groups of strangers, migrating from who knows where, arriving at precise locations in his county without a map and without ever having been there before. To Jefferson’s lasting wonder, they walked the wild country without consulting the white man for directions to these locations, the burial mounds, where they lingered sadly, and departed after a short while. Out of curiosity, and for the sake of natural philosophy, Jefferson excavated some burial mounds he found on and near his property in Virginia. He discovered no pottery shards or figurines that would open the door to insights on Indian life, of which he was supremely capable, provided he was given even a smidgen of evidence. The mounds revealed only the remains of the dead. “I found nothing,” proclaimed the greatest practical philosopher of liberty, equality, and human rights – nothing of value.

***

Krt-a-brp-krt-krt-brp. At his desk through the night, Jack pounded out the story on a compact Royal portable. He hardly looked at his notes. They seemed be settled not in his brain but along his nerves, flowing toward his fingers as needed. One long paragraph. Then he typed it over again, changing words, sticking in new sentences as they occurred to him, the Royal rattling under the brisk peewee blows of the keys. He came up with new stuff fast, and broke the text into three paragraphs. Then he typed it all over again, changing words. This time slowly. Krt… brp… krp… brt-a-prp. This time four paragraphs. And then the Royal came to rest. When he looked up from the desk, he was surprised to see light in the windows. He read through the story three times, scratching words, inserting words, drawing arrows to show where to move certain phrases. Then, he typed it over again. This time seven paragraphs. He realized that it was only the slightest beginning of the story. He had fancied while bending over mad dancing fingers that he was feeding energy into the bounty of his findings, with the urgency of a man setting out to fill a void in human knowledge. Now, he wasn’t so sure.