Write me a Letter

required to touch two others. I couldn’t. He could. He said there was a town wit who snuck out late at night and rearranged the letters on the movie marquee into something dirty: his latest effort was to change paris , texas into sex is a trap. He said the local branch of the D.A.R. hung a banner across Mt. Diablo Boulevard , reading, ” Lafayette says no to drugs.” Underneath, some wit, perhaps the same one, had added, ” Lafayette says no to everything.”
    Mike wanted to know if I could discover the one lightweight bag of nine bags of coke, in only two weighings. That one I figured out finally. He said, ”Two traveling salesmen were born on the same day of the same month in the same year and both died at the same time in their fiftieth year. So how come one lived a hundred days longer than the other?”
    He said, ”When the same two guys were drafted, they gave their names as Jim Riley and John Riley, the only children of the same parents, and as we know, they were born on the same day of the same month in the same year. So why weren’t they twins?”
    ”You got me, Mike,” I said.
    Then he laid out five matches like this, I I I I I, and wanted me to move any two to make an all-day sucker. I couldn’t. Then he asked me if I knew how to pour a whole pint of beer into a half-pint mug. I didn’t.
    I strolled back to the hotel trying to figure out the last stinker he laid on me just before I left. It seems there were these three guys in a cathouse. In came five ladies, three with bright red lipstick on, two with pale pink. The lights go out. Each guy gets kissed on the forehead. Lights on. The first guy who figures out what color lipstick is on his dome gets a freebie. After a while, one guy says, ”I know,” and he does. Given that there is no trickery with mirrors or some of the ladies having kissed all their lipstick off, how does he know?
    The outside door of the hotel was locked but I had a key and let myself in. I went upstairs and paused in front of Uncle Theo’s door for a minute; all seemed tranquil. I wondered if Uncle Theo was dreaming, and if so, of what. I’d enjoyed the brief respite offered by the Round-Up Saloon, but I couldn’t help thinking it was but the calm before the storm, these last few minutes in the trenches before going over the top. And, amigos, I am not noted for my ability to foretell the future; I have trouble sometimes foretelling the past.
    I hit the hay after doing what a lot of us keep-fit fanatics do—drink a lot of water as an antihangover precaution. I wondered why there were so many languages in my life I couldn’t speak all of a sudden, my ignorance was getting to be a nuisance even to me. I had just about figured out the solution to those lipstick traces when I fell asleep.

14

    Came the dawning of the new day.
    Several hours later, I arose.
    A while after that, after having partaken of breakfast at a counter joint up the road from us, Uncle Theo and I hit the road. I turned the wrong way out of the hotel’s parking lot and had to take a small, winding lane to get back to the freeway entrance. On the way I spied a Red Indian up in a tree menacing us with a bow and arrow! I refused to panic, however, as the fearless hunter’s mother was standing at the foot of the tree telling him to climb down immediately before he fell and hurt himself, or else. Then I spied a horse being silly in a field, and after that a fencepost-hole digger at work. A hawk that had been following us to see, I surmised, if we spooked any field mice or whatever that it could snag for its breakfast swooped down one more time and then disappeared. I even thought I glimpsed a Symphoricarpos albus, or snowberry, but I could have been mistaken.
    We did see a goat farm just after picking up the east-bound freeway and I wondered vaguely what anyone wanted with so many of the hairy critters, turn them into goat-hair throw rugs? Who knew.
    After another while we passed through Alamo, then Danville . About then I pulled over to check the map I’d purchased from Mrs. Martel, Stationer, the previous day, then on we continued toward San Ramon, finally leaving the hills behind us. Uncle Theo sat quietly beside me. From time to time he pointed out some feature of particular interest, like a gang of naked to the waist asphalt layers who were resurfacing a stretch of the highway. It was Benny, I think, who once told me that what those guys did, first thing in the morning, was to wrap up a couple of