609: “Peter, Peter, Peter,” ...
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 19
“PETER, PETER, PETER,” said Porky as soon as I walked through the door of Captain White’s. “Your timing is perfect. Sit down, my friend, sit down, sit down. We’re going to have a taste test.”
“Taste test?” I climbed onto a stool at the counter. Porky wiped the spot in front of me with his sleeve.
“Yep,” he said. “The Captain’s Shandy. I’ve got to figure out the right ratio of beer to lemonade, and you’re going to help me.”
“I am?”
“Sure, sure, sure. You’re my only investor. Except my father. So you’re my favorite investor, anyway.”
“I want to tell you something,” I said.
“Sure, go ahead. I’m listening.”
He wasn’t, I thought. There were customers in three or four of the booths, and he kept an eye on them to make sure they were enjoying what they were eating; he poked his head into the kitchen now and then to see how things were going there; and he assembled the necessities for the taste test. I went ahead and told him about my visit to Marvin’s anyway, and my parents’ reactions to it. Maybe it was easier for me to talk about it when he didn’t seem to be listening. In fact, for certain kinds of things that we want to get off our chests, or for things that we want to work through by thinking aloud, the best listener may be one who isn’t listening at all but has the good manners to make a listener’s grunts from time to time, just enough of a response so that we’re encouraged to think that our words, and so our thoughts, are significant. I spoke, on and on, exploring my ideas, while Porky grunted and went on working.
He lined up a number of beer glasses along the counter. He set a big jug of lemonade at the left end of the line of glasses and a couple of quart bottles of beer at the right.
“Well, Peter,” he said, “I’ll tell you what it is.”
He began pouring lemonade into the glasses. Working from left to right, he filled the first glass, then poured a little less into the next glass, a little less into the next, and so on, working his way toward the right end of the line.
“Your parents are—” he began, and then stopped. “Hey,” he said. “You’re not going to get upset if I tell you what I think, are you?”
“No,” I said, though it was a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
“Okay.” He had reached the glass nearest the beer bottles. He left that one empty. “Your parents are participating in a process of cumulative error.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You know what that is?”
“No,” I said.
He began filling the glasses with beer, working from right to left.
“Say you’re going to build a doghouse.”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to need a whole bunch of boards for the sides, and of course they all have to be the same length, right?”
“Right.”
He added beer to each glass, filling them to the same height, crouching behind the counter and closing one eye to be sure that they were even as he worked along the line.
“You measure the first board with a ruler, mark it, and cut it.”
“Okay.”
“Then, instead of using the ruler for the next board, you just lay the first one on it and mark the length.”
“Yeah.”
“Try this,” he said. He pushed the leftmost glass toward me, the one that was all lemonade. I drank some.
“Good,” I said.
Porky took a swallow and made a face. “Tastes like lemonade,” he said. He pushed the next glass toward me. “What happens when you mark the second board is that the pencil mark is going to be a little off. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.” I did, from experience. I hoped the source of my understanding didn’t show in the way I answered.
Porky pushed another glass toward me. “Hey, don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “Experience is the best teacher.” We sampled the glass. “Still tastes too much like lemonade,” he said. “Anyway, you go on to the third board, and instead of using the ruler, you lay the second board down on it, mark it, and cut it, and then you go on marking and cutting the boards like that, each time measuring with the last board you cut, and then when you’ve got all the lumber cut, you’re going to start putting the doghouse together, right?”
“Right.”
We moved on to the next glass.
“But nothing fits. The way you measured them, the boards all came out different lengths. You don’t have a doghouse. All you’ve got is a pile of scrap.” He took a swallow of shandy. “It’s starting to get a little bite to it, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” I said.
It was beginning to taste a little funny. I didn’t have much experience with beer. The swallows I’d had from time to time hadn’t persuaded me that it was any better than, say, brussels sprouts.
Porky said, “Well, people are like that, you see. Most of them get their ideas and what they think are facts from the last board down the line. It might be the jerk next door; it might be one of those preachers who are always whining and shouting on the radio; it might be one of those little booklets that hasn’t got anybody’s name on it.”
We had moved a few glasses to the right.
“But you know what they don’t do?” Porky asked.
“What?”
It felt kind of interesting to say “What?” The w made my lips feel like rubber. I said it again, just for the fun of it. “What?”
Porky raised the next glass in a toast to the wisdom of his next remark. “They never have the good sense to go back to the ruler,” he said. I didn’t quite get it, but I didn’t want Porky to know that, so I took the glass from him, raised it as he had, and drained it off.
“They never go back to the ruler,” I said.
“Right,” said Porky. “You’ve got it. They never measure the things they hear—the dumb ideas in the air around them, the whining of the jerk next door—against their own common sense. They never check to see if what they’re doing still makes any sense. Are you following me?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, taking the next glass Porky passed me and waggling it to underscore my understanding.
“So, my point is this,” said Porky. “Your parents—well, I don’t want you to think I’ve got anything against them or anything like that—but they’re—” He stopped. “Gee, Peter,” he said. “I’m not sure how to say this to you.”
I reached for the next glass on my own. I was pretty sure that Porky was going to say my parents were full of shit, or something along those lines, and I didn’t want to have to hear him say that. I didn’t want him to have to say it. I didn’t want to have to decide whether I believed it. I decided to beat him to it, say something that would make it unnecessary for Porky to speak. I didn’t know what I was going to say until I began to talk, but as the words came out of me I was surprised to find that they were the right ones, and I was surprised to find how closely I’d been listening to Porky, how well I’d understood what he’d been saying.
“They’re a couple of boards too far down the line,” I said.
“That’s it, Peter,” said Porky.
“Heading toward a pile of scrap.”
“Right.”
“This is getting a nice bite to it,” I said, regarding the glass I held in my hand.
“Yeah, it is,” he said, smacking his lips. “But it’s not shandy anymore.”
“Huh?”
“This is the end of the line,” he pointed out. “It’s all beer.”
[to be continued]
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