Between Prufrock and a Hard Place

Earl Fowler

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of the night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone I’m not.

Reedy, shaky voice — could have been a patient etherized upon a table for all I know — asked for “Mr. Pêche.” I’m always up for a gag, sister, so I played along.

Said he’d be at my office the next day. I downed the rest of my Jim Beam Black the way the bucket of pig’s blood doused the prom in Carrie.

By the time I came to, it was getting dark again. When you’ve been in my line of business long enough, there is no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. I wake and feel the fall of dark, not day.

The rain was coming down in sheets, like it always does in this godforsaken city, turning the half-deserted streets into rivers and the gutters into perilous, quicksand-like pools of despair. The yellow fog was rubbing its back upon the window panes. If it had come in on little cat feet and sat overlooking the harbour and the city on silent haunches, well, that would have been one thing, but this was a whole different scene. It wasn’t moving on and there was not a possibility of taking a walk that day to Grumpys on Bishop Street.

Nobody ever takes anything small into a bar. My office — well that, too, is a whole nother story.

He shuffled in like a man who’d spent too long sitting still, his shoulders hunched, his eyes searching for something in the corners of the room — maybe some answers, maybe just a way out. His clothes weren’t expensive, but they were too neat for a man who looked like he didn’t belong in his own skin. There was a hesitation in his step, like he was afraid the ground would open up and swallow him whole. It was a foggy cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, lingered upon the pools that stood in drains, let fall upon its back the soot that fell from chimneys, slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, and seeing that it was one of those soft October nights known to mistakenly manifest themselves in the cruellest month from time to time, curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

Squandering my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, I leaned back in my chair and lit what was left of my cigar. Here at the intersection of 9th and Hennepin, I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train. The ashtray on my desk was overflowing with broken fence posts like the bones of a wrecked ship.

Think Audrey Hepburn sitting on a gilt throne, posing with a cigarette holder, achingly polished, forever soignée. Think the ladies at your parents’ posh parties when you were a kid, wearing their Chanel suits and flashing David Webb bracelets while holding champagne flutes.

I’m the opposite of that. Think bored Maytag repairman with an old stogie I have found. Short, but not too big around. And the broken umbrellas like dead birds. The steam coming out of the grill like the whole goddamned town is ready to blow.

“Can I help you, buddy?” I asked, exhaling the smoke and watching it curl gracefully into the dim light. “And don’t give me any of that David Copperfield intertextuality kind of crap.”

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.

The man swallowed hard, his fingers twitching at the edge of his coat sleeve. We sat for a long while before either of us spoke again. Silent as stone gargoyles on facing skyscrapers. Mute as the two mismatched shoes discovered by Robinson Crusoe on an island off the coast of South America. Circumspect as the dog that does not bark in a Sherlock Holmes story.

He cleared his throat:

“I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker. And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.”

His eyes flickered like votive candles on the sills of big living room windows as he tacked on this little finial to his Edwardian funhouse of mumbly tag: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

“That so?” I said. “I’ve been known to get involved in some ugly stuff, but I’m not sure I’m the right guy to help you find your missing carapace. Or any six-foot invisible pookas with whom you might be communing as we speak. Can I direct you to Dr. Chumley? The Merck Manual maybe?”

Not sure he even heard me. And he was off:

“To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet, there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate. Time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions. And for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea.”

I figured I was beginning to understand what he was on about. That bit about preparing a face to meet an apparition of petals on a wet, black bough? It reminded me of The Case of Eleanor Rigby and the jar that crazy old thornback kept by the door.

My mad client had taken me by the lapel by now: “And indeed there will be time to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’ Time to turn back and descend the stair, with a bald spot in the middle of my hair — they will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’, my morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, my necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin — they will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’ Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

Oh, this guy was a peach, all right. For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Think of the way Othello dies, the way Trump will die, having learned nothing, apologizing for nothing, praising himself outrageously.

This nervous wretch was the opposite of that. Cultivating self-awareness, apologizing for everything, reproving himself mercilessly. Like a fella once said, ain’t that a kick in the head? A line from Robert Frost popped into my head: “A liberal is too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

So maybe that was it. Relying on the natural reserve, decency and lethargic inertia of others — that innate unwillingness to engage, the dithering, the withering of faith in democratic principles and institutions — was how the grasping galaxy of grotesque and preposterous crooks and clowns, the paladins of the Trump administration and their likeminded simulacrums the world over, had managed to persuade working men and women that a fascist tyranny like the one now running the United States would use its energies in their interest.

Of course, the complete opposite is true. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. I grow old ... I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

Unless we move beyond merely shaking our heads and tut-tutting about the Fog of Whores comprising Trump’s agents of ACHTUNG — that coterie of “good German” acolytes on Fox News, filthy podcast henchmen like Joe Rogan and Theo Von (self-appointed deans of the manosphere), and a cabinet of rapine billionaires busily enriching themselves while tearing the world order apart in an “everything must go” Sturm und Drang orgy of legalized lawlessness — we are all Prufrock, measuring out our dwindling lives with coffee spoons.

You needed to read no further than the headline and subhed on an essay in The Atlantic back in 2018 by Adam Serwer to understand the essence of what’s happening: “The Cruelty Is the Point: President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.”

The cruelty is the point.

And unless we actively resist the intensifying American appetite for ignorance, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, vengefulness, misogyny, philistinism and anti-intellectualism (under the guise of fighting antisemitism), violence and tribal sadism — whose crisp echoes have been heard here at home during the federal election campaign from the baying right wing of the Conservative Party as well as being the core mission of the People’s Party of Canada — we are all left fretfully wondering whether it would have been worthwhile if one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, and turning toward the window, should say: “That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.”

Shall I say that I, too, have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of newscasts? Let us go then, you and I. Remember Voltaire’s warning: Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Écrasez l’infâme!

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.

And yet we do not move. At least, not enough of us. The penal colony swells.

“I have lingered,” said the man, “in the chambers of the sea by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us, and we drown.”