Fortune, Fate, God, Kipling, Robert Crumb, A Broken Radio, and the Father of My Friend Who Tortured Turtles

Literary Review, Fall, 1998 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Commentary on "What Does God Care About Your Dignity, Victor Travesti?"

"What Does God Care About Your Dignity, Victor Travesti?" came to me in two phases.

In the first phase, riding home from the office on a bus one evening, gazing out the window, I must have observed some untoward behavior on the part of somebody, because a voice of judgment began to speak in my mind: "You were so much greater than the monkeys. I had such hopes for you. The monkeys were so stupid. All they ever did was fiddle with themselves and giggle and throw their crap at each other. But you! You had advantages. You had capacities never before seen. Then I ask myself what was it all for? You question your motives. Who or what was it for? I admit, I liked the sport. I liked to see them with spears running naked through the forest going after the tigers, shouting my praises ..."

I had been nodding. This was almost a dream. I slipped the notepad from my shirt and wrote it down and the voice had the feel to it of a voice that was going to tell me an entire story. When I got home I waited anxiously to finish dinner, to sit on the sofa amidst my family, the kids playing on the floor, my wife reading a book, the television running, and me with a pad on my knee--my favorite place to write in those days.

I had the sheet from the bus before me, and I tried to get more life from it, to get it to continue or, backing up, to start at some earlier phase, but there was nothing, nothing. A mere scrap of a voice. Before I went to bed that night I pitched that scrap of paper with the scrap of voice on the heap of similar scraps to one side of the desk in my little work room. The history of such scraps of paper was well known to me. When it got too tall to stay upright without beginning to slide down over the edge of the desk, I would take the bottom-most layer and shove it into a manila envelope which would go into a carton in top of the closet. When that carton at the top of the closet was full, it would go down into the ugly room in the basement from which few notes ever find their way out again.

So the voice speaking about the monkeys--fairly clearly to me the voice of some sort of god, perhaps of God Himself--was now in the scrap pile.

Perhaps a month later, one rainy Saturday, I stood at the bus stop across the submerged highway from our house, waiting for a bus to take me somewhere I no longer can recall. I stood in a raincoat two steps out of the bus shelter, while on the bench beneath the shelter overhang sat two elderly ladies discussing the rain.

"It's sad for all the little boys who wanted to play ball today," one of the old ladies said.

Such treacly sentiment seemed to want to bring out the worst in me, the most malicious cynicism. LET THEM DROWN, I thought.

"And think of all the families who wanted to go on picnics," the other woman said.

Let them eat their grief, thought I, suddenly realizing that this was the voice of a fictional character, sparked off by the sticky-sweet sentiment of these two probably perfectly decent elderly ladies.

Who is speaking? I wondered, without allowing the question even to find words in my mind; the thing was to let that trickle grow to a flow. Then I was on the bus, pad and pen in hand, and the bus--which in fact was driving from the north Copenhagen suburb of Hellerup to Norreport station, perhaps fifteen minutes away--suddenly was driving in my imagination through my old neighborhood in north Queens, Long Island, moving through the shabby neighborhoods of Corona, Jackson Heights, Woodside, Sunnyside. And observing the passing shabbiness was a man whose name I came to understand was Victor Travesti, a man whose bitterness (LET THEM EAT THEIR GRIEF) I came to understand was the result of the fact that he had been stripped of everything in his life. He was a proud Calibrese and his wife had run off with an Irishman. A Jewish judge had awarded his wife and her Irish fornicator custody of Victor's children. In distress, he had lost his business, his car, so that he had to ride on buses. In short, Victor Travesti had been stripped of his dignity, and he was now on his way to visit his sons in the house where his wife slept with the Irish fornicator.

Now I did not know where this journey would actually lead him, I only knew that something was going to happen. On the bus, despite his secret scorn, Victor behaves gallantly to the elderly ladies. He charms them--somewhat hypocritically, in a bid to salvage his injured dignity--and when getting off the bus he pauses to help one of the ladies who has been thrown off balance. This moment's delay decides the fate of the remainder of his life.

I did not know that this would be the case other than that one of the old ladies, attempting to flirt with Victor, mentions that her astrology column today had said she would meet a tall, dark stranger. The old lady was hinting to me in this way that some fateful event was about to occur.

And what can be more fateful than being shit on by a bird? Supposedly, this--like stepping in dog dirt--should signal good fortune, but immediately I could see this would be a reversal of that tradition. In Victor's world, getting shit on is nothing more nor less than getting shit on. My suspicion was confirmed when suddenly two thug-like men standing in front of a truck laugh at Victor's misfortune. These men, I realized, were straight from hell and come to take Victor off with them and when I saw what was written on the side of their truck--KIPLING KARPET KO--I quickly, as in the light of a flare, intuited a great deal more about my story which I labored not to allow myself to KNOW, lest it be lost in the light like an overexposed photo. (Perhaps I might also mention here that when one of the carpet men points at Victor in his distress and says, "I want to sing like the boidies do, tweet tweet tweet," this is a kind of tribute to R. Crumb, one of his "Pete the Plumber" stories from Hytone Comix, in which a plumber is accidentally flushed down the toilet and ends up in a kind of salle d'attente amidst the pipes where people covered in shit engage in philosophical debate until finally the plumber escapes and out in the fresh air marches down the middle of the avenue singing, "I want to sing like the boidies do ..." I have always admired Crumb as an artist of the unconscious and as you will see when, if, you read on, the idea of the plumber is not foreign to where this story was leading me either.)