“Sir,” I say, “if you’ll just give me one moment. I have …” He’s a purchasing agent, a seneschal of commerce: favor-granter, commission-builder, lord, oh. “X-Pando Pipe Joint Compound expands while . . . see . . . the test tube . . .” His head is anywhere else. It’d be easier to make eye contact with a mole. “Two thousand degrees Fahrenheit . . . 10,000 psi for all . . . it can withstand . . .” He will listen as children listen on their way out-of-doors: uh-huh, uh-huh, sure, okay. Slam. “Freon and ammonia . . . even dilute acid . . .” He moves. My voice is higher; I entreat. I sound like an innocent man being booked for murder in some foreign police station. “Use on broken . . . hard to reach . . . even where . . .” Glass is blown up/ around me. We are in the same place, yet a trick of time-warping has altered our relationship: I speak from five minutes hence or ago. “Price . . . just let me show you … an introductory . . .” Once, about 15 years back, I all but drowned. Mid-lake, my calf muscles went into torrid cramp, sewn briskly stiff with hot wire. Children dug sand on shore, women were basted with Solarcaine, and, for them, I was the two legs of Breughel’s Icarus. Gone; no, not gone: never there. Ahhhhmmmm, water sang a long sleep to me, going down, pearls that were my eyes. I remember it now: this is my tenth death today. I’m a salesman.
AT the two-day Mid-Atlantic Plumbing, Heating, and Cooling Exposition in —Kee-rist!—Pennsauken, NJ. I mean, try not to appear too absurd while you stand alongside three or four toilets in New Jersey. Yet there is an ascetic note; reverence and protocol such as secret brotherhoods affect. “Children under 16 will not be admitted at any time.” “The use of sideshow tactics, ‘cheesecake,’ undignified methods, or other activities considered . . . to be objectionable are expressly prohibited.” It’s austere, this P-H-C game: think of that next time you shower. And passionate: overnight at one trade exposition several years ago the cast-iron-pipe people commando-raided the plastic-pipe exhibit with blow torches. Next day the plastic-pipe booth was a middle-period Dali, flaccid arterial aneurysm after flaccid arterial aneurysm. Pipe does strange things to men: it can make them rich. Plumbing is houses. Houses are the systole and diastole of an economy. But more than that: not since Tiberias’ empire has defecation been so ennobled. The bathroom-as-garden concept is quintessentially American. A natural outcome, you might say, of convenience food. The body has been excused from our presence. We construct euphemisms of porcelain and formica and metal. The throne, indeed.
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