Danger almost remembered inscribing the kid’s copy, that glassed over look they all get in their eyes while he’s doing it, ten bucks a pop. What had he’d written in this one’s? He’d been alternating all day between Use great care when playing hopscotch with a unicorn and Never underestimate the negotiating power of good hygiene. Looking at the kid now, he decided it was probably the latter. He thought he caught a whiff. He knew with certainty that he’d written Love, Danger in every one of them. Sometimes, though, he’d omit the comma.
But he let the kid in anyway. Sat him on one of the beds. Even poured him a bourbon, the kid staring at the typewriter on the desk with a glimmer of love. Ah, an aspiring, Danger thought. And he knew exactly how to handle him.
He said, “If you must know, I have arrived here– here in the so to speak sense of the word—here in the advice column after many years. Having written myself into a kind of exquisite obscurity, this column gives me some kind of corridor to the living world. To you, kid. A hand it lends me and a hand I give. In my interview for the job, they asked me why I felt I was uniquely qualified for the position. I said, ‘I am the least complicated of men. I have throttled complexity into small sippings.’”
“They said, ‘tell us more.’”
The kid stared into the tiny whirlpool he was making of the bourbon in his hand. Danger coaxed it up to the kid’s mouth, tilted it. The kid made a face like he was taking down castor oil.
“There you go,” he said, splashing more into the glass.
“So I continued: ‘Decades ago, real men and women built this country with their bare hands. They built the world we talk in. When you drive toward New York City, or any city really, you can feel this condition. You can see what men built. That’s why Truman’s flashy little encore at the end of the war is so hard to shake. A spoonful of hurt we gotta swallow every day. It has little to do with empathy for all those poor bastards, or in the end, anxiety over the commies and their evil ideology, anxiety of having to practice how to hide under rocks going on forty years. You get used to that after a generation, it passes, but the ultimate questioning of the fabric of our reality . . . that hurts, deep down.’”
Danger began undressing saying: “When you lose the stage upon which you speak, kid . . . Hell, the whole act can go terribly wrong, but when the stage can be erased from existence like that,”
Danger, standing with his pants around his ankles, snapped his fingers sharply.
“You’ve got real problems. We can tolerate bullshit, lots of it. In a way, bullshit is comforting,” he said. “I’m being fooled, we think, but that’s okay because we fool people everyday. The shapeshifting counts. The ability to be many people. The ability to hide, to bury the self, to avoid. That’s what we love. Whitman predicted this early on when he celebrated his contradictions. He was a prophet because he predicted a time when the world would be built and people would have the luxury of contradictions. The luxury of shapeshifting. It’s the stage that counts. Remember that.”
He freed himself from his shirt.
“It started in a bar,” he said, “Like so many things did back then. All my life people had been asking me what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. I used to tell my teachers that I wanted to be a crackpot, that I wanted to be homeless. They sent me out for testing, tested me until I graduated. In college, I was mildly occupied. I could basically read what I wanted to, talk about it, fill seminar ears with the starving disco of my sleepless nights. After that ended, I mostly just drank in bars and tried to see about eight minutes into the future. Louie came in to Frank’s one day and he looked a bit disheveled. He sat down and started talking about his ‘overnight guy’ walking. ‘My advice column with a voice just lost its voice,’ he said, ‘And its advice.’ It was crazy talk as far as I was concerned, but he was damn worried, sweating even. He was going to lose his job if he didn’t find someone. He was getting more and more drunk on gin bombs. Finally, in a mood of charitable curiosity, I took a wild stab and asked him: You need someone to talk into a microphone and take some calls? To type out some advice? He seemed to say yes. So I said, I’ll do it. I’ll handle it. After that, we blacked out, probably fought someone, probably tried to score with some girls, probably lost everything we ever owned, throttling and vulgarizing our souls in the process. That was an ordinary Tuesday back then.”
Danger looped the belt through the crisply pressed suit pants that belonged to his best suit, his only suit.
“Two days later I arrived at my new job. I walked through a series of hallways, past cubicles, and at the end there was a small door; a small piece of paper taped to it said, ‘Remy Danger.’ I thought about correcting the spelling (my first name was Lennie and my last name was Dander) but I kind of liked the new name and I decided to use it.
Buttoning up the bone white shirt.
“I walked into the room and flicked on the light switch. It was a simple affair. A small round table. A chair. A microphone on the table. A telephone that had a headpiece that seemed to be connected to the microphone. A small typewriter. I sat for a moment, staring at the microphone, circling it. A woman came in and asked me if I needed anything, and I said “bourbon.” She disappeared and came back in a few minutes with a decanter full of bourbon, a bucket of ice, and an old-fashioned glass. She asked me if I needed anything else and I thought about saying ‘blowjob,’ but I was afraid if I said that she might run off and find some big guy who would take away the bourbon.
“I poured a glass, sat down, turned on the mic, and started talking. It went something like this:
[Click . . . tap, tap]
Danger watched his reflection slap cologne on itself saying, “Hullo world, this is Remy Darger, I mean Danger. Remy Danger. I have a few things to say to you and . . .” I remember the distinct feeling of falling and it brought back a reoccurring dream I used to have when I was younger. In the dream, an old, blue-haired lady was falling and pedaling her feet and she was falling down a bottomless pit and the trick my mind used to play on me was this: the pit was bottomless, which meant she had to keep falling and falling. But, at some point, I knew there was a giant needle that would run right through the woman.”
Danger hadn’t seen himself in the mirror going on ten years. He didn’t see him now. He told whoever it was standing there, “I always woke up right before the needle stuck her, and I would be horrified and screaming but also incredulous, wanting to argue with the dreamwriters . . . how could there be a needle? Where did it begin? Either the pit was bottomless or it had a bottom.”
He took a deep breath. Turned back to the kid. Found his glass back in his hand.
Danger said, “I felt this exact way as I started speaking: Cheated, furious, confused. ‘Danger, Danger, Danger. That’s me. And . . . ta be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing. I feel like I’m pitching hard balls into brick walls, or whacking tomatoes with a fungo bat. Ever get that feeling? I knew nothing about broadcasting, nothing about my audience. So I stopped talking for a few minutes, lit a cigarette, and just waited.’”
The kid hadn’t moved. He was staring at the typewriter again.
Danger continued, “Soon the phone rang and I answered it and told the caller to go fuck himself. Another called and I repeated the same. As I drank more bourbon, my responses became more colorful. I typed out a monologue. Someone came in and picked it up. I threw up on the typewriter. Someone swapped it out. I swear, at one point, some maniac from Kentucky called me and asked me about the Immaculate Conception. I said something about the Mets.”
Danger, finally, sat on the second queen sized directly across from the kid. He could definitely smell him.
“By the end of the show,” he told the kid, “Something had shifted or happened. A monumental turd had splattered all over my life . . . I was a radio personality and, what’s worse, a self help guru. It turns out I didn’t need the typewriter after a while. When the management got tired of replacing it, someone transcribed all the self-help bits and published them weekly in some local rag. One thing led to… well, this.”
Silence happened for a while. He broke it, abruptly.
“Now where were we? The point, kid, is I’m just an average slob like you. Ok, maybe I’m firing on a few more pistons, seems like, but that kind of thing’s negligible in the end. When you wipe out an ant colony with your flip flop, you don’t give a shit which one built the hill and which one engineered it. I’m not who you think I am. The stage made me, that’s the point here. I’m not the Beatle you once thought I was and I’m certainly not the phony you think I am now. Or maybe I am, but I’m a phony phony. Just like you. We cancel ourselves out. No harm. Etcetera. And despite what you might think about it, kid, you haven’t shapeshifted yourself into some electric fence gonna zap kids in one fell swoop, keep them from running out of the rye and off the cliff. And you, kid, you haven’t run off any cliff. Not yet. That’s just the stage talking.”
Danger suddenly remembered a trick he’d once seen in a cartoon. He stuck his pointer finger into the barrel of the gun the kid had been pointing at him since he’d opened the door for him.
He said, “But go ahead, kid. It won’t matter either way now.”
