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My Fool

By Jeff Nowak
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If I had enough money, I would buy me a fool. I would let him wander around the neighborhood whenever I didn't need him, but he would always have to be with me at breakfast and at dinner. There is a table waiting for him, just a little smaller than mine. He is allowed to eat as much as he pleases. After dinner, I have him brush his teeth, and then he goes to bed in my closet, which I have arranged with all the amenities to keep him comfortable - it is a very large and accommodating closet, complete with its own television and large enough for two people, but of course it will always be a closet, because that is what I call it. Upon waking, I head to the closet door, unlock it, and cheerfully order my fool to "get out of my closet, you old scamp! And have a hearty breakfast while you're at it!" but it would be understood that he could take his time in the bathroom to get ready for the day's activities. Within those boundaries, I recognize that there must be room for variation.

But the moment for my fool to shine - the moment I bought him for - are the parties I've always held. Before anyone knows what I own, I shoved my fool away into a real closet connected to my living room. He swore at me, and, being of the appropriate height, threatened to bite me in the crotch, but I rapped his knuckles with a ruler until he acquiesced. I arranged things, waiting for the guests to arrive, while bumps and giggles floated from the closet, where my fool was most likely urinating in the pockets of my sports jacket. "You'll get yours, old friend!" one of us said. Then the doorbell rang.

Michael and May came in. Michael wore a suit carried over from work, and May wore a skirt designed to show off her voluptuously flabby thighs. Robert followed, who always had the smartest things to say. May crossed and uncrossed her legs in enthusiasm as Michael drank, and Robert welcomed (with a quip) Joe and Mariam, who were devoutly interested both in each other and the newspapers. They made the party complete. "You make our party complete," Robert said.

"Did you hear about Russia? It's scary," Joe or Mariam said.

Michael drank. "Oh yes," May said. "What a world . . ."

"What do you think we should do?"

"Oh . . . what a world . . ."

"I think," Robert responded, "that it's not worth the thought. I have perfect faith that our politicians will manage to mess it up."

"Very true," I said, "very true."

"At work today," Michael interrupted, but with purpose. "I got to fire someone, a good kid, optimistic little brat."

"How was it?"

"It was fun." Michael drank.

This continued for an hour or so, and became noticeably dull. I decided then to take the whistle out of my pocket - I had demanded that my fool come with a whistle - and blew it as hard as I could. Startled by the noise, everyone turned to me, only to be taken by the greater surprise of my closet door smashing against the wall to reveal my fool, accompanied by the pungent smell of urine. Bells adorned his colorful cap, but instead of jingling his head, he stood quietly with his hands behind his back, waiting for us to settle down.

"Oh you have a fool!" Mariam said. "Where do they come from? How much do they cost? Do you treat him well? Does he do everything you say?"

"He's adorable!" Michael sputtered. Everyone agreed.

"I operate . . ."

"He talks!"

"Of course he talks. That's what they do. They're jesters."

"I operated . . ." We waited for his tirade.

"Does he throw pies?"

"Why would he throw pies?"

"He does much better things. Fools don't come cheap. It's a riot, you'll see."

"I operate . . ." We couldn't help but giggle, he was so tiny. Michael tried to give him his drink, but he kept on talking, gurgling through the scotch, and that made us laugh even more. "I've lived my whole life under the philosophy that gurglgurglgurglgurgl . . . excuse me, thank you. I have always prided myself on my politeness. I like not to be noticed and to do my job, because that is what I have promised to do, but I have sat in that closet for over an hour. I have been forced to listen to you speak. Now I have something to say."

"Uh-oh, NOW we're in for it." Michael guffawed. Apparently he had been through one of these before and had greatly enjoyed it. He threw a grape at my fool, which amazed me because I don't buy grapes.

"The man with the drink has volunteered to go first. I will not begrudge you your pleasure . . . I've seen your kind before. In a different era you would have belonged to three social clubs, and in each meeting you would've had your drinks, had your meal, had your drinks, and preached about the dangers of inefficiency and communism, which, you like to joke, amount to the same thing."

"Oh, he's got my number!" Michael laughed even harder than before and managed, with a massive effort, to counter with a fart.

"As of right now, however, I don't know what you are. You're anachronistic - a workaholic who would've taken a mistress but who's too fat to be able to come home to anything but his supportive, cheating wife. You measure your life in mortgage payments, and when you've paid it all off, when you've retired and discovered that you can't remember what it was you had wanted to do in the first place, you'll tell your kids (assuming that they're yours) that you're done with this rat race. And you'll fall asleep - if there's a way to be both bloated and shrunken, you'll find it - crumpled in the corner of an Arizona cage. I can smell your future carcass from here."

"HOOORAAAAY! You got yourself a good one, Ray, a smart little prick."

"As for your wife . . ."

"Now do my wife, you'll love this honey."

"You were young once, and you were able to wear that skirt once. Whenever a reporter came into a bar looking to do a story on the sexual habits of college students, you were always the first one, even when you were 27 and 8 years out of college you offered yourself up and talked provocatively about how men don't know how to please a woman, you know what I mean."

"That's such a cute voice!"

"I wish he'd say more big words, he sounds like a squirrel giving a commencement address."

"You had no dreams. You might've been a nihilist - "

"Hee-hee-hee."

" - but at least nihilists believe in their nothing. You just don't believe. Whenever someone asked you your opinion on anything, you smiled, flipped your hair back, and muttered something about how awful or wonderful it was, and when they asked you (sometimes seriously) what it was that you wanted to do, you said, quite proud of yourself, 'All you devoted people scare me. Why should I want to DO anything?' And one time you answered - and this was the proudest moment of your life - 'I want to do THIS, just this, forever and ever.' And this is exactly what you are doing, so that everyone in this room has had to see at least once tonight that ugly, floppy thing between your legs."

We had tried to keep quiet enough to listen to all his fun, but the second he said "floppy thing" we fell all over each other. If he had come right out and said it, I suppose the speech would've worked just as well, but since he tried so hard to stay technically polite by using euphemisms, we couldn't help but laugh at his politeness.

"And you…."

"I think it's talking to me," Robert said.

"The one lording it over everyone with your smart comments and impeccable grammar… you had wanted to be big… you would've settled on being a nameless tycoon if you'd known anything but business, but you wanted to be an actor, a director, a celebrity, an author, a renowned professor who knows everything about that one fascinating topic… anything as long as you could have had, once in your life, your very own opportunity on a talk show, in front of a crowd, so you could tell them off with a bottle in one hand and your genius in the other. But you couldn't afford a camera, and you decided against acting when you realized you would eventually have to touch someone. You sent manuscripts to magazines, but you could never find a way to get paid for it. The colleges told you that you couldn't get anywhere until you learned how to stick to a thesis. The most you could do with a canvas was take a dump on it, and that only takes you so far. You're ashamed that you can't be anywhere as big as you want to be, but you make up for it by making fools out of fools at parties… I don't believe you've ever told anyone in this room what your job really is.

"And you two, the two I can't quite tell apart: you two met in a coffee shop where you both discovered that you were both buying coffee made from beans cultivated by thoroughly unexploited Guatemalans. You could be librarians or bank tellers, but I'm sure that you work hard at what you do, because you can't stand to have a second go by without having done something or learned something of little or no consequence. When you breathe, you test the air for factoids you can tell your friends, and at night, you climb on top of each other to compare notes. The starving are anecdotes to you, at most something to protest. The worst part is, you know that's the best you can do, and you don't care."

Wiping the tears from our eyes, a few of us were doubled up on the floor with laughter, while the rest leaned back in our chairs and gurgled on our own amusement. My fool turned back to me as we waited in expectation.

"And my master, who has arranged this event, is little more than a lonely sap who has no family and too much disposable income, so he spends his money on toys which he think amount to real relationships. I've heard him grab himself out of loneliness and fear at all hours of the day. He might've made a decent politician, but he's neither charming nor attractive enough to convince any man, woman, or corporation to give him money. And thank God for that. If he had the money or the power, this place would be six stories tall and overflowing with abducted little boys, because he has nothing to do but dinner parties and no one to talk to but guests, and he's convinced that somewhere in the world there's a lost childhood, and if he could just find it somebody would talk to him and mean it, because everyone feels for children, especially the lonely ones."

At that, he began an extended diatribe against our group as a whole, claiming that we talk too much because we have nothing to say, that we are human only in name and in body, and that whatever was left of our souls has already been spent in department stores. It was difficult to hear what he said through all the cheers and the giggles, but he ended with, "You are wastes unto yourselves and you mean nothing to me." He made a sharp gesture of disgust with his arm and his body, which caused his bells to jingle, and then we lost control. We tittered and cackled as we tackled him to the floor, jamming food down his throat out of pure glee. Someone brought a blanket from my bedroom, and we grabbed the ends, threw him on the stretched blanket, and tossed him up and down while yelling, "Huzzah!" at the tops of our voices. He hit the ceiling a number of times, and we stopped once he missed the blanket and landed on the floor, and our energy was spent by then. "You have a wonderful fool," they all said as they left. "How do you keep him under control?"

"It's easy. I just threaten to feed him to the hobo I keep chained in the backyard."

The evening is over. I pat my fool on the head, who, though battered and bruised, remains proud. I express to him my thanks and reiterate what a pleasurable and enlightening experience was had by all. "Because you see," I intone, quoting an old saying, "a good fool can remind everyone of how big a joke they really are."

"Quite, but I believe it's the other way around."

I wouldn't quibble, and in payment for his services, I'd give my fool a tiny hallucinogen to match his tiny frame. He, in turn, would caper about his closet for the duration of the night. In this way, I assume, we would live a happy and painless existence until the end of our well-worn lives.

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Jeff Nowak shelves children's books at a library on the north side of Chicago. When he's not handling Juvenile Fiction, he's organizing Easy Reading, which is a little easier than Juvenile Fiction, and when he's not doing that, he's doing the Readers, which are a little easier than Easy Reading. He likes his books as he likes his women: neatly categorized and arranged on a shelf.