they were making champagne.
• • •
So I had Beatrice Keedsler say to Rabo Karabekian there at the piano bar, “This is a dreadful confession, but I don’t even know who Saint Anthony was. Who was he, and why should anybody have wanted to tempt him?”
“I don’t know, and I would hate to find out,” said Karabekian.
“You have no use for truth?” said Beatrice.
“You know what truth is?” said Karabekian. “It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah—ain’t it the truth?’”
• • •
I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.
Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
• • •
Adapting to chaos there in the cocktail lounge, I now had Bonnie MacMahon, who was exactly as important as anybody else in the Universe, bring more yeast excrement to Beatrice Keedsler and Karabekian. Karabekian’s drink was a Beefeater’s dry martini with a twist of lemon peel, so Bonnie said to him, “Breakfast of Champions.”
“That’s what you said when you brought me my first martini,” said Karabekian.
“I say it every time I give anybody a martini,” said Bonnie.
“Doesn’t that get tiresome?” said Karabekian. “Or maybe that’s why people found cities in Godforsaken places like this—so they can make the same jokes over and over again, until the Bright Angel of Death stops their mouths with ashes.”
“I just try to cheer people up,” said Bonnie. “If that’s a crime, I never heard about it till now. I’ll stop saying it from now on. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to give offense.”
Bonnie detested Karabekian, but she was as sweet as pie to him. She had a policy of never showing her anger about anything there in the cocktail lounge. The largest part of her income by far came from tips, and the way to get big tips was to smile, smile, smile, no matter what. Bonnie had only two goals in life now. She meant to recoup all the money her husband had lost in the car wash in Shepherdstown, and she ached to have steel-belted radial tires for the front wheels of her automobile.
Her husband, meanwhile, was at home watching professional golfers on television, and getting smashed on yeast excrement.
• • •
Saint Anthony, incidentally, was an Egyptian who founded the very first monastery, which was a place where men could live simple lives and pray often to the Creator of the Universe, without the distractions of ambition and sex and yeast excrement. Saint Anthony himself sold everything he had when he was young, and