Positive Fruitless Changing Energy

I’ve written 280 letters to Thomas Pynchon. Is that enough?

Pynchon looked at me the other day over coffee at St. Henrietta’s on 73rd Street in Topeka. He told me to stop, and that stop means go, and that one day there would come a bomb for each of us. He kept dribbling volumes of coffee down his trembling lip, onto his rayon tennis jacket. His beverage was way too hot.

Since this was summer and still is, I order an iced coffee. That’s how smart I am. I can deal from the top and bottom of the deck with nary a flinch.

A friend of mine hides in the verbena bushes, taking pictures with his digital camera which he posts immediately via cellular phone to his Reclusive Intellectuals Blog alongside pithy captions. I would list a few of those captions now, but I actually find them quite unpithy.

Pynchon had a rough night of it the night before with a new puppy that insisted on sleeping with her head right beneath his nose. Mouth also covered, Pynchon would drift away and wake up choking. His eyes are clear enough, but I see the lack of sleep there. He looks like a man chased by bombs.

In an early letter, I asked Pynchon to have coffee with me and look at us now. I draw a slurping sip of icy cold and pass him Letter No. 281. He devours it.

Dear Mister Pynchon,

Everyday someone like you reads a letter from someone like me and I don’t really think the world changes that much. How can we make these words matter more, in the end?

Pynchon reiterates a distaste for the temperature of his beverage, wiping at the brown stains spotting the neckline of his fluorescent tennis jacket. There’s a logo for some field hockey team in Springfield, Va. The color contrast is odd for a recluse—pink against yellow and a green like Astroturf. He says things to me that reduce down to nihil. The effort to matter seems to be his point, not the effect of never mattering. Through our mattering desires, the expension of positive fruitless changing energy seems to keep Pynchon from jumping off a cliff, or hiding under a coffee table.

No such luck for me. I’m still full of youth, despite my age, and the mattering matters. I crawl under the table, careful to bring my drink with me. It’s hot even in the shade. Pynchon’s ankles are hairless and sockless, but they look wise. Those ankles could teach you a thing or two.

My first draft of Letter No. 281 went like this:

Dear Mister Pynchon,

I would have bought you your coffee today, but what the fuck?

I almost lick Pynchon’s ankles, just to spark a social reaction. Instead I reach my hand up between his legs and ask for a packet of sugar. The refined kind, I say. Those big brown crystals never seem to dissolve for me.

Rather than pass me the sugar, Pynchon drops it on the ground with an effete flick. Then he shoos it with his shoe even farther away from my outstretched arm.

This is rude behavior and I tell him, straight up. Not so much to his face as to his ankles, but I mince no words. He tells me to get up, sit down, shut up. He tells me to write him another letter.

So I do, mentally. Letter No. 282:

Dear Mister Pynchon,

You are not the point of these letters. You don’t even have to read them. You need not be there to receive these letters for me to write them, and I think you know this, and I think it pisses you off. By writing these letters, I’m denying you the right to read them, aren’t I?

Sometimes it’s worth the sweat and stiff chair, sometimes it’s not. My photobug friend retreats into the shadows of the adjacent alley and gives up the chase. I hear his puttering scooter fade north.

Me: What’s your dog’s name?

Pynchon: Zero.

Cute.

Dear Mister Pynchon,

When we drank coffee together and failed to change the world, did you notice the bubblegum stuck underneath our table? There was a napkin caught around one of the iron legs, and what little breeze made it beyond the alley kept getting lost in the expulsion of cold air from the store’s interior. I stared at you a few times when you weren’t looking and wondered. Did you notice the dog that passed by on a pink leash? I think you ordered an inappropriate drink, and I think you failed to admit your mistake. You chose not to adapt, or give up. I did both. Do you think that somewhere in the next 500 letters we might find an honest beginning, somewhere to start again. Not so much over, but again. With a total absence of everything else, everything that might matter as effort or effect, there is always again. So again I ask you:

Dear Mister Pynchon,

Can we get coffee sometime? I’m buying.