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Show Acting Alone Page 69 some he'd been always. All at once he understood, between throbs of his nose, the nature of some of the impulses he'd been acting under all these years. He'd been doing things like leaving his gloves at the Pinata Restaurant three times in one month, trying to set it up as a running absent-minded- professor joke with the sullen Indian waitresses, who were not laughing, but just giving him weird looks behind his back. He hadn't been scrutinizing the social behavior of these native Americans in a scholarly or journalistic way (which is what he'd told himself at the time); he'd been trying to get them to be friends with him! (Jesus, his nose hurt.) And what sorts of impulses had he been acting under when he'd called the distant Kansas City jazz station and remonstrated with the manager about signing off at midnight instead of 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., "- like a real jazz station ought -"? The station could only be heard clearly around here when the atmosphere was in a good mood. The signal frequently was chopped into a decelerating wrist pulse by the helicopters at nearby Fort Carson, or squished to nothing between loud local disco stations. It wasn't much to fight for. Still, Sam had been going among his Gordon Lightfoot-loving enemies at the English Department, trying to start a regular crusade on the jazz station. He had even learned to use the mimeograph machine (finally) to run off urgent purple petitions. All simply because it hurt so bad to hear about kilohertz and megawatts and the FCC, and then just bleak white noise. No more Sonny Rollins, no more Carla Bley, so early in the deep and meaningless wet solitary sleepless Kansan night. |