What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Read Online Free Page B

my left nostril and Hank on the other side who completely fails to grasp the mortal danger he's placing both of us in by playfully provoking the cat. It's 3:09 in the morning, and suddenly a deafening cacophony of barking, hissing, and shrieking erupts, with Lady taking a murderous swat at Hank directly across my fluttering eyelids and Mr. Magoo stepping heavily on my slumbering scrotum as all of the animals bolt off the bed simultaneously. This invariably signals the arrival of Dilly, my pet armadillo.
    Dilly has been showing up with the punctuality of a German train in my backyard for years. I feed him cat food, dog food, bacon grease, anything. He is a shy, crepuscular, oddly Christlike creature whose arrival brings a measure of comfort to me at the same time it causes all of the dogs to go into attack mode. It is not really necessary to describe what effect this always has on Lady.
    After I've slipped outside and fed Dilly, I gather the animals about me like little pieces of my soul. I explain to them once

    again that Dilly is an old, spiritual friend of mine who is cursed with living in a state full of loud, brash Texans, and we don't have to make things worse. Somewhere there is a planet, I tell them, paraphrasing the great John D. MacDonald, inhabited principally by sentient armadillos who occasionally carve up dead humans and sell them as baskets by the roadside. Perhaps not surprisingly, the animals seem to relate to this peculiar vision. Then we all go back to bed and dream of fields full of slow-moving rabbits and mice and cowboys and Indians and imaginary childhood friends and tail fins on Cadillacs and girls in the summertime and everything else that time has taken away.

I DON'T

y fairy godmother, Edythe Kruger Friedman, is always telling me I should get married. As the survivor of two happy marriages—the last one to my father— she believes that a man and a woman living together in marital bliss is the only way to find true contentment in life. I believe in a neck without a pain.
    Edythe feels so strongly about the importance of marriage and I feel so strongly about the importance of the freedom to wander in the raw poetry of time that often, when I go to her house for breakfast, we get into contentious little arguments on the subject. The debate sometimes becomes so heated that, if you happened to be listening from another room, you might assume that we were married. We are not, of course. I'll never be married. In fact, whenever I'm in Hawaii or Las Vegas or someplace where I happen to pass by a wedding in progress, I never fail to shout, "Stop before it's too late!"
    It's already too late for me. I tell this to Edythe, but she never listens. I explain to her that I'm too old and set in my ways. I'm fifty-eight, though I read at the sixty-year-old level. And just because I'm fifty-eight and I've never been married, I tell her, does not mean I'm gay. It's only one red flag.
    But don't you ever want to have a family? Edythe asks, pronouncing the word "family" with a soft reverence, as if it's the most wonderful state of being in the world. Have you ever seen American Beauty? I ask her. Families are only acquisition-mergers to create more and more of what there's already more than enough of as it is. It's just a rather narrow, selfish way of creating many little Edythes and many little Kinkys running around taking Ritalin and Prozac, playing video games, saying "awesome," sucking out all the money, energy, and time from your adult life, and growing up with an ever-increasing possibility of becoming the Unabomber. No thanks.
    What I don't tell Edythe is that I already have a family. I have four dogs, four women, and four editors. This may seem like an unconventional arrangement to most people, but it does have at least one advantage over a traditional family. I don't have to find schools for them.
    Speaking of school-age kids, another thing I don't tell Edythe is that I'm not really in the market for a