Traveling Sprinkler

Six

I’M SITTING in a very small park in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I live. There are two branches that face each other across a square of mulch and a weeping fruit tree in the middle. I have a corncob pipe between my middle molars. It has a yellow plastic stem and it was made in Missouri. The tobacco came from Turkey — it was a special kind of tobacco, said the tobacconist at Federal Cigar, who was apportioning it into plastic bags with zip tops. The reason it’s so special is that it was dried over a smoky fire. In other words, it’s smoked tobacco that you smoke. One bag cost eight dollars, and the corncob pipe cost five dollars. The only thing I don’t like about the pipe is that I can taste the yellow plastic of the stem, which has a flavor of Bic pens, and if I’m going to be chewing on something I’d rather be chewing on wood. The smoke itself seems to be turning my tongue into a pink tranche of smoked salmon.

There’s a protest outside the North Church today — high school kids with a big sign that says “Occupy,” and what they’re protesting is global warming. What a hopeless cause. The earth has been warming and cooling for a billion years and they want it to stop. Why not protest actions that we can easily end, like the intentional killing of people with missiles in foreign countries? Start small.

One thing that interests me is how long it takes to smoke a pipe. I’m stoned out of my brain stem right now, and there still seems to be a lot of smoked turkey left in the cob. Fortunately there’s a strong sideways wind.

• • •

THIS MORNING I read some articles on how to get better posture. The best advice I found was to imagine your nipples and then imagine your way four inches down on your rib cage below them and then imagine that two large steel hooks had hooked under two ribs and were pulling you diagonally up toward the sky. When you do this you immediately sit with better posture. And you really have to imagine your own nipples only once, thank God.

I want to improve myself in a dozen ways. But my fingers are trembling because of the pipe tobacco and I feel a little queasy.

I should be standing outside one of President Obama’s campaign offices with a sign that says “Our President Is Killing People.” The next day my sign would be: “Abolish the CIA.” And the next day the sign would be: “Drones Are Bad News for Civilization.” My friend Tim goes to marches and carries signs, and he says it feels good. He got arrested once.

A bird has dropped a half-eaten berry on my keyboard. It landed on the tilde key. Maybe it was not half eaten but fully shat. I put my corncob pipe down and blew on the dark fragment of berry and it hopped away onto the mulch next to the metal bench. I imagined the two hooks winching me up, lifting my slouching corpse skyward.

A man walked past, smoking a cigarette, wearing a black stoner T-shirt. “How are you doing?” I said, waving my new pipe at him. “Not bad, and you?” He walked away across the parking lot.

• • •

TODAY IS A CLOUDY DAY. I woke up and I was amazed by how completely roasted and smoked my tongue felt. It’s been many hours since I smoked a pipe, and my tongue is still recovering. It was a piece of meat in my mouth that didn’t want to be steak or corned beef, it wanted still to be my own tongue. My very own talker, my slipper and slapper of mysteries.

I could be on the elliptical trainer at Planet Fitness listening to pumping music right now. The slogan of Planet Fitness is that it’s the “Judgment Free Zone.” You can be fat or thin, old or young, and they want you there exercising. I try to go every other, every third, day.

The problem with the corncob pipe, aside from the fact that it bothers my jaw and roasts my tongue, is that I feel as if I’m impersonating Vannevar Bush. Bush was a famous war scientist who helped create the atomic bomb, and he also was a great pipe smoker and a great carver of pipes. He made presents of his handmade pipes to his cold-warrior friends. He gave a pipe to James Conant, the head of Harvard University and purger of Communists, and he gave a pipe to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. “I trust,” Bush wrote to Dulles, “that the pressure of the administration will not be so intense that you cannot find the time occasionally to put your feet on the desk, smoke the old pipe, and puzzle out the course of affairs in the queer world we live in.”

Dulles replied on CIA letterhead — an eagle poised on a shield bearing a strange crystal star. “As I write these lines I am smoking with contentment, and no little pride, the pipe which bears your initials and which I know is your own handiwork,” he said.

Perhaps Allen Dulles smoked Vannevar Bush’s pipe as he mulled over the CIA’s coup in Iran and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.