PORKY WAS SITTING in one of the wooden booths, flipping through some papers that I took to be bills of lading. I took them to be bills of lading not because I had any firsthand experience with bills of lading, but because I had encountered the term in my ramble through the unshelved books in the library, liked the sound of it, and welcomed an opportunity to use it, almost as much as I did splines, the need for which almost never came up, though the word had begun to make me giggle inwardly whenever I thought of it, since it inevitably brought with it, bound to it as if by a force as mysterious and strong as the forces that bind the diminutive components of all the stuff we are or know, the anticipation of the day when Raskol and I would change the combinations of the locks and baffle our chums.
“Bills of lading, huh?” I said, taking a seat opposite Porky.
“What?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“I—um—I thought those might be bills of lading.”
“These? These are just the sheets that come with all the stuff I get shipped to me here—ketchup, tartar sauce, potatoes, that kind of thing. They always give you these sheets that list everything they deliver to you. I figure if they go to that trouble I ought to read through them, you know?”
“Sure,” I said, happy that Porky seemed not to have noticed my ignorance. “That makes sense.”
“What—did you find that in a dictionary or something—bills of lading?”
“A book,” I said. “Not a dictionary, just a book.”
“Peter,” said Porky, “you want to be careful about using a term that you don’t really know well enough. You can make a fool of yourself.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
“Some terms are much more dangerous than others,” he said. “You fling them around when you really don’t know what you’re doing and people can spot you as a faker right away.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “Like epistemology.”
“Well, yes,” said Porky. “I guess so.”
“And ontology.”
“Sure,” said Porky.
“A lot of people get those confused,” I said.
I had no idea whether this was true or not, but I loved throwing those two words around.
“And fuck,” Porky said. “That’s another one you have to watch out for. But anything, even something as apparently straightforward as bills of lading, can demonstrate that you’re a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about—if you are a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“How’s business?” I asked, eager to get off the subject of my ignorance. “Are we making the big money yet?”
“Well—”
I took my notepad out of my back pocket. “Let me get the figures down,” I said. “How many dozen fried clams last week?”
“I’m not sure,” said Porky. “I—”
“Stuffed?”
“I haven’t got those figures—”
“Gallons of chowder?”
“Say, Peter,” he said with sudden interest, “how’s school? New school year! Unfamiliar surroundings! Strange faces! Surprising things! Tell me all about it.”
[to be continued]
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