Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

cocaine, the use of cocaine as a chemical means of transportation from somewhere boring to somewhere else, and I see that some of my little pals were already, in the realm of desire if not in actuality, on the road from inhaling to snorting.)

We found Babbington boring. I say “we,” I include myself in the group, because for a while I was in the group; I found Babbington boring, or claimed to find Babbington boring. Looking back, I think that I never actually did find the town boring. I was faking my boredom, showing that I could pronounce the shibboleths of my tribe, the disaffected youth of suburbia. Albertine is fond of saying that people who are bored are boring, and I’m sure we were, I was, but it was the fashion to find Babbington boring; in fact, it was the fashion to find life itself — the local, quotidian life as lived by boys and girls in Babbington with little opportunity to go anywhere else — boring, and to want to be taken away from it. We were living in a town that was in the process of losing its identity as a town and becoming just a patch of a pale, monochromatic wash on the map of the country’s socioeconomic bands: the suburbs. We were teaching one another to believe that anywhere but here would be better, would have a more interesting culture, a more vital life for the soul (the yearning gas bag within us). How lazy we were! We didn’t want to leave this unsatisfactory place or to run away from it; we didn’t want to have to get ourselves up and go; we didn’t want “get up and go” to enter the picture at all. We wanted to be taken away. We wanted an agent who would not only pick the destination (that somewhere that was anywhere but here) but also arrange the journey and get the tickets, and then, with those welcome words, “let me take you away from all this,” stick a tube sharpened at one end into a certain part of us and blow into us something transporting.

What great admiration and deep affection we felt for the people who could or might blow us up, the pumps, the gas tanks, the inflators, the dispensers of lifting gas. The highest praise for such a one was to say, “Man, you are mad.” By mad, a reference to the ultimate inflator, the Madman of Seville, we meant “having the capacity for doing such a surpassingly good job of inflation that one could even inflate a dog, give it a couple of pats and send it on a dizzying flight to somewhere else.”

And what deep affection and desire we felt for that transporting something that the pumps filled us with, whatever it might be, however it might be administered, anything that, beyond simply inflating us, gave us lift and buoyancy and allowed us to make the trip from here to somewhere else, anywhere, nowhere. We sometimes called that magical stuff “gas,” which could be specified as “helium” (an inert gas, suggesting a detachment in one’s elation, a noble aloofness in one’s elevation) or “hydrogen” (the heavy-lifting gas of dirigibles, capable of carrying one very far away, but dangerous, explosive), and sometimes “hot air,” a term that carried with it the most exalted compliment to the inflator, because hot air was just air, common and unremarkable, transformed by the arts of the inflator, someone who was “hot,” into a lifting agent, a means of transportation, like those sizzlin’ hot Montgolfier brothers, Joseph Michel and Jacques Étienne, who in September of 1783, before the eyes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, lofted a duck, a rooster, and a sheep into the skies above Paris, suspended in a basket below a balloon full of nothing but hot air.

There were already among us a few adepts who managed to achieve a kind of transcendental state of inflation. Those who had the ability seemed to be able to get blown up by even the most mundane experience, to find the gas in the commonest things. We called these lucky ones “balloonists.” They did not blow themselves up in the calculating way that suckers or inflationalists did, but in an ingenuous way that we called “just breathing.” There were few balloonists, but there were many aspirants to the balloonist state. Balloonists had a certain way about them, a blissful knowingness that came from having said yes to everything, to life in general, even to boring Babbington; having found the hot air that was right in their own back yard, they had no need to travel. I wanted to be a balloonist when I grew up, but also a cynic, if such a synthesis could be achieved.

Chapter 27

A Quiet Family Dinner, on the Eve

ON THE EVE of our taking possession of Arcinella, a few minutes before my father was likely to arrive home from work, I was upstairs in my room, idly jotting lines for potential doo-wop songs, trying for ones that rhymed with Patti (drives me batty, is no fatty, sure ain’t catty, dresses natty), when I smelled smoke. I went downstairs. My mother was in the kitchen, trying to make dinner.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, Peter, ” she said, “I’m a wreck. Look at this mess.” In the cast-iron frying pan on the stove there were some crab cakes. From the top, they didn’t look bad, but then Arcinella didn’t look bad from the top either, and I was just about eighteen hours away from discovering that a boat, like a crab cake, could look just fine from the top and be damaged beyond repair on the bottom. My mother forced a spatula under one of the cakes, struggling to free it from the pan, pushing, pushing, in stuttering thrusts, to get the blade beneath the cake, and when she had it loose at last she raised it gingerly, like a poor dead thing. The undercrust was thick and