Doom
and gloom
Every once in a
while the gang gets into one of those doom and gloom moods, with talk about the
end of the world and what we might do when it happens. For years, Pauly and
Richi and Garrick and Hank planned out the sequence of events in which we would
struggle to find each other when it happened. Today, Columbus Day, we sat over
coffee in Kalico Kitchen, numbed a little by the future which proposed Ronald
Reagan as President.
Pauly said
Carter was an ass, but Reagan? "That's crazy."
I think it
was the prospect that finally sank any hope of our own. Few of us were in the
mood for hope. Pauly stressed technology as the answer, saying people wouldn't
be blowing each other to bits with it around. Richi figured we would polute and
erradiate ourselves, but wouldn't let the soviets have one inch of our precious
soil.
Then, we all
sipped coffee and stared out the windows again, Pauly grumbling about the movie
theater next door and the parking lot full of cars. "Is every goddamn
person in the world going to a movie tonight?" he roared.
Richi laughed
and looked up from his magazine.
"Listen
to this," he said, then quoted from a magazine and the
lastest innovation in defense. Pilots now were required to wear a patch
over one eye. In the event of a thermo-nuclear explosion and blindness, they
are required to switch the patch revealing the good eye and keep on flying.
All of us
were silent after that. Even the restuarant quieted, as if they all expected
the war to come the minute the election was over: Reagan or Carter. Carter or
Reagan. Both predicting doom of a different kind. And Pauly refused to let any
of us talk politics the rest of the way up to Towacco, reciting passages from
movie scripts instead: comedy movies. The ones with the yuks.
And in
Towacco, he built up a crackling flame in the fire place and seemed to hug it,
as if winter had already come upon us, as if now nearly 500 years after