David Kirby

FAT IMPOTENT DRUNK

Martha and I have a dinner date with John and Victoria
but then John has a health issue, so we make a date
with Phyllis and Eddie instead, only Martha gets an email
saying the deadline on her project has been moved back,
meaning that it’s just Phyllis and Eddie and me now,
though at one point Eddie says I was going to ask Carol
to join us but didn’t because she’s “nasty to waiters,”
and as I ask myself what kind of person is uncivil to
the server who is bringing them their hamachi crudo
or summer herb agnolotti or duck confit with miso
white beans and broccolini, I remember that English essayist
William Hazlitt said, “Without the aid of prejudice
and custom, I should not be able to find my way
across the room,” meaning that each of us is, if not
an axe murderer or death-camp commandant living under
an assumed name on a farm in Bolivia, a complicated
and even flawed individual who is struggling every
minute with their warring impulses, including the choice
between nice and nasty, and just then I get a text
from Martha saying that if the stores are still open
on my way home, would I get some sandwich things
or lunch tomorrow including chips that are “healthy
but not too healthy.” Look at it this way: most of us
are at war with no more than a single additional self,
making the majority a whole lot better off than multiple
personality world record holder Robert Oxnam,
who had eleven distinct personalities in his obviously
very capacious brain, of which he said in an interview,
“It can get really noisy in there,” because if one personality
was about to do something destructive, at least one other
and maybe more were likely to say, “That’s not okay,”
a problem Oxnam was able to solve with the aid of therapy
by reducing eleven personalities to a more manageable
three. O that each of us had within a team, squad, cadre,
cartel, or committee along the lines of the one you see
in almost every action movie: there’s the leader who
appears first as a hero but has a dark past; the geek
who mans the laptop; the lovable psycho who can’t be
controlled but shouldn’t be because every team needs
a psycho to do the things no ordinary team member
in his or her right mind would do; the babe who is actually
the most efficient team member but is icy; the assistant babe
who is warm and self-sacrificing, so everybody ignores her;
and, finally, the dead team member the others talk about
constantly, and I mean constantly. Together, aren’t they
really you? Even the dead guy, the one who was too good
for this world and so had to depart it and leave as his legacy
a standard of professional and personal behavior so high
that no one could ever hope to equal it even though they’ll try,
the point being that we need other people even if they blabber
and nag us and tool us around and just generally drive us
three-state-killing-spree crazy: sure, life would be easier
if other people didn’t show us how to hold our cutlery
and remind us to take the trash out and keep our lawns
in good order, but that’d be about as exciting as a football
game where the other team is kind and helpful and not
as brutal and intent on victory as yours: instead of trying
to flatten your linemen and sack your quarterback,
how enjoyable would it be if the other guys shouted,
“Come this way!” and waved the runner through or told
the tight end, “Oh, go ahead and catch this one—I’m just
here to have fun”? Answer: not very. When I’m driving
my car, I hate cyclists. And when I’m on my bicycle, I hate
drivers, though they don’t know that. Doesn’t make sense,
but what does. So when your server is grumpy and you think
what the hell, no tip for you, missy, instead why not ask
yourself if there’s something going on that you might not
be aware of, which is when you realize that her facial
piercings are too new and that she’s probably a very sweet
person or will be as soon as the pain wears off and she’s
not spilling your soup, refilling your glass with the wrong
brand of soda pop, and, when you ask if you can have
another packet of hot sauce, bringing a double handful
and raining them down on the table like an avenging Fury
in a soiled blue apron and a little paper cap, at which
point you say to yourself, what the hell, double tip for you,
missy. Studies show that the easiest way to spot an idiot
is to look for someone who’s cruel. Here’s how that works:
it just makes sense to disdain, disfavor, disapprove of,
disesteem, disrelish, and despise or at least distrust those
who don’t look, sound, act, eat, dress, love, and live like us.
Who are those people who just stepped out of the forest,
and why do they wear leopard skins and have green hair
instead of tiger skins and blue hair like normal people,
like us? GET THEM! Wait, let’s not. Empathy and compassion
are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity
to step beyond our most primal urges. It’s important
to be nice in the big ways like not locking people up
just because they come to our country to seek a better life
the way our ancestors did and in the little ways as well,
like tipping your server generously and, when someone
at another table starts to sing the birthday song, to sing along:
you don’t know who you’re singing to, but you pause for
just a second after the other table says “Dear” and then
you shout, “Buh-NORRMAAN!” or “Dah-ALLLIICE!”
Martha meets her deadline easily, so we make a date
with John and Victoria for the next week even though John
still isn’t feeling tiptop, which is why he might have had
one more drink than he should have, and it gets late,
and the evening starts to get away from us, and at one point
John says, “Let’s face it, I’m just a fat, impotent drunk,”
and Victoria says, “Oh, John, you’re not fat.”

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and which was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him “a literary treasure of our state.”