Seriously, Norman!, page 9
“Bombers, dear!”
“Don’t think of them as bombers, honey. They’re just nice, shiny airplanes, pretty as a picture, pretty as a picture on black velvet, airplanes that you can drop things out of. You could probably drop waffles or umbrellas or even pizzas out of them. That’s probably what people use them for, I don’t know, maybe folks use them for pizza delivery. Gosh, I’ll bet that’s what everybody’s using them for.” Orman poured himself some cola, drank, and after a rather well-sustained belch said, “Except that nobody is buying my bombers! Darn it!”
“Dear,” said Norma.
Norman took a bite of his pizza and said, with his mouth full (Norman could use a little civilizing himself, let’s face it), “Dad, why don’t you try selling something else, like toothbrushes, or shopping centers or something?”
“Son, I got to tell you, and it’s time I told you, as part of a good education, that, boy, there is nothing like selling bombers to make your small fortune. Hooooeeee! When you’re selling bombers and certain foreign ministers are buying bombers—” Orman Normann’s face took on a dreamy look, not unlike his son’s when his son looked at clouds. “Did I mention the hats they wear? Weird. Tall and pointy and covered in fur. Anyhoozle. When you’re selling and they’re buying, the cash just flows like a house afire.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Dad,” said Norman. “How can it flow like a house afire?”
“Son, pay attention! What I’m telling you is this. Since there have been people on this earth running around with the dinosaurs—”
“Not the dinosaurs, Dad.”
“Whatever. Since the cavemen, then, people have dropped things on other people’s heads, probably before they had toothbrushes, and certainly before they had shopping centers. Yes, son, the cavemen started with dropping things on other people’s heads, and then after a little while folks threw spears and shot arrows, then it was cannonballs. Then it was exploding cannonballs. And now it’s bombs. Progress, son, I’m talking about progress!”
“I got it, Dad. Progress.”
“So long as there are people on this earth, they’re going to want to drop bombs on each other’s heads. And so long as people want—”
“Dear!” said Norma.
“Honey, don’t interfere. This is an important father-and-son-type moment. Now, I never mentioned bombers before because I know how you don’t like anything that explodes, though if you think about it, exploding is a kind of progress, too. You go from one big thing, a building, say, to lots of small things—say, a pile of bricks. Progress, see? Anyhoozle, so long as people want the kind of progress that only dropping bombs can get them, they’re going to need—they’re going to need what, son?”
“What, Dad?”
“What are they going to need, son?”
“Bombers, Dad?”
“Bombers, son! That’s it, bombers! And that’s where we come in,” said Orman Normann, thumping the table with each invocation of the word “bombers,” softly at first, loudly at the last, a crescendo that sent the plastic forks jumping in the air and caused half a glass of cola beverage to land in Norman’s plate.
“Dad, there’s something I don’t understand.”
“Wuzzat?”
“Where do you get the bombers?”
“Son, that’s another inneresting story. I have this friend, my friend, and he gets me the bombers from someplace, call it someplace number one, and then I sell them someplace, call it someplace letter B, and here’s the beauty of the thing. After I’ve sold the bombers from one to B, what am I left with?”
“A guilty conscience?”
“Cash, son! Heaps and heaps of the do-re-mi.”
Orman smiled a thousand-dollar smile, took a gargantuan bite of pepperoni pizza, and pushed himself into the back of his chair with the air of a Roman senator who has just made an irrefutable case for sacking the Phoenicians.
Norman gnawed on a pizza crust. “But I thought only countries had bombers.”
Orman shifted in his chair. “Well, sure, right. But sometimes one country might get tired of its bombers, you know, might want to spruce up the place with new bombers, so my friend buys the old bombers cheap, and we paint them up nice, put a few cool decals like skulls or shark teeth on them, stuff like that, and then sell them for loads and loads and loads of dinero.”
Norman was beginning to wonder if this friend of his father’s might be missing a couple of digits, the particular digits for which human beings were so widely admired by the rest of the animal kingdom.
Orman pushed a napkin across his glistening chin, and his eyes rose up to the ceiling, indicating that Orman Normann was having a beautiful vision; that is, piles and piles of cash.
Norma, who of course knew this look well, nevertheless, or perhaps because of this—acting in her capacity as civilizing influence—broke into his reverie, saying, “Orman, I know how much you like to talk about money, and I don’t mean to disturb you and I really don’t mind a bit anymore about the bombers, since you explained all that about progress and pizza delivery and so on. But it will be summer vacation soon, and I know we haven’t discussed any plans yet, but Sarah Piquant has invited us to meet her and Leonard for a few weeks in Europe, dear.”
“Hot dog!” said Norman.
“Europe, eh?” said Orman, his eyes shifting down and to the left, eyeing the saltshaker.
“Yes, dear, Europe.”
“I might be able to slip that into my travel plans. My special friend was mentioning something about Europe just the other day. Lotta countries there. Old countries. What I like to call little-old-lady countries. Countries that only flew their bombers on Sundays to church.”
“They’d like to meet us in Vienna, dear.”
“Hot dog with sauerkraut!” said Norman.
“Vienna!” said Orman. “Did you just say ‘Vienna’?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Vienna!” said Orman, pounding the table again. “Not only are there bunches of little-old-lady countries in Europe, but I happen to know that there’s gonna be a conference of Polynesian states in Vienna, which means that quite possibly a certain Alfurnian foreign minister is gonna be there, too, heh heh. In Vienna!”
“Yes, dear.”
Orman raised his glass to his lips, sipped, burped, and said, “Where is Vienna?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“Son, where is Vienna?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Dad, can I ask you just one more question?”
“Son, I’m your father and commander in chief and you can ask me anything, and I’ll tell you or I won’t. Shoot, son. Is it about bombers?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, what is it?”
“What does this mean to you? A dozen eggs. A loaf of bread. A bottle of seltzer water. Three oranges. A can of mushroom soup?”
“Son, is this another one of your tutor’s fruity ideas?”
“Not really. Does it mean anything to you?”
“Son, do I look like a pastry chef?”
“Kinda.”
“Very funny, Norman. No, that grocery list means nothing to me, and I suppose it probably means nothing to any other sane person except the pastry chef what wrote it. Say, listen, maybe there’s pastry chefs in Vienna. If there is, there’ll be pastries. But we’ll never know unless we first find out where in tarnation Vienna is. So come on, come on, come on! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
“Where are we going, Dad?”
“To the Mega Bookstore! They’ll know where Vienna is!”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, at the Mega Bookstore, Norman left his parents seated at a café table, up to their elbows in travel guides and more cola beverages, and wandered over to the humor section, discovering there, sprawled like two long cats before a fire, Anna and Emma, each with an enormous volume of collected comic strips on the floor beneath her nose.
“Hiyaaaaaa!” said Norman.
“Hi ya, yourself,” said Anna, “What’s up?”
“The cumulus clouds. My mom and dad are in the café reading about some place called Vienna. My dad wants to go there and see an old lady about her bombers.”
“He’s still selling bombers?” said Emma. “That is so last century. Nobody needs bombers anymore. It’s totally uncool.”
“Try telling that to my dad. What are you doing this summer?”
“We’re going to camp,” said Anna. “We’re going to Camp Ess-Ay-Tee, the camp for intellectually superior boys and girls.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Norman.
“Not on me, you’re not, unless you want an intellectually superior kick in your intellectually inferior posterior,” said Emma.
“Think they’ll allow comic books at this camp?” Norman gibed, pulling out a volume and sitting down beside them.
“We’ve already got a plan on how to smuggle them in. We’re going to cut out all the pages, then hide them in a secret compartment in our suitcases, then take them out one at a time, hidden in our books. The pages will be rationed like water on a desert island.”
“Brilliant,” said Norman. “I bow before your intellectual superiority. That reminds me. I’m going to need some reading material for the trip.” Norman began pulling out volumes of his favorite comics and became engaged in that most pleasant of tasks, perusing each volume slowly, in order to choose just exactly the right one.
let us consider watson
“Vienna!” said Balthazar Birdsong.
Norman and Leonard sat once again with Mr. B. on his terrace, sipping on the one hand a cup of coffee, on the other two hot chocolates, and contemplating the clouds. Watson, the rat, and Crick, the crow, sat in their separate cages, sipping, on either hand, water. Norman, as perhaps you have surmised, had just broached his and Leonard’s summer travel plans.
“Vienna!” Mr. B. went on. “This is a bit of a how-do-you-do, is it not? Or is it more of a fine kettle of fish? Hard to say, hard to say. In fact, it is neither. It is in my estimation etwas ganz anders, something completely different.”
Mr. B. beamed at the boys.
“Vienna, well,” he said again, jumping from his chair to lean upon the terrace railing. “This simply means we shall have to compress our lessons, swallow them by the pitcher instead of sipping them by the glass. In a word, we shall guzzle our lessons.” He looked at the boys, then looked out over the rooftops at the sky, and finally his gaze came to rest on his rat. He said, “Let us consider Watson, imaginatively.”
Reaching into Watson’s cage, he lifted him out gently and, sitting down again, placed him in his lap.
“Observe his wrinkled nose, his dirty brown tail, and here and there a lump beneath his fur. You can see that he is an old rat. A dear old friend who has shared his life with me. We humans owe much to rats. Millions daily give of their comfort and even their lives to assist us to new knowledge, new medicines, new psychological insights. Think of the miles and miles of mazes they have run! To be sure, millions more eat our grain and rummage in our garbage, now and then bringing with them a plague or two. Still, on the whole, the rat has been a great friend to the human. And this rat has been a great friend to me. But now his life is coming to an end. He and I know this, but see, observe. Is his eye downcast? Never. It sparkles still.” Mr. B. stroked Watson’s nose.
“They’re red like blood,” said Leonard.
“They lack melanin merely. But they do not lack sparkle. Nor do the whiskers of his nose lack vim. I think they are especially full of vim. Perhaps they are vimful. Is there such a word as ‘vimful,’ Norman?”
“I haven’t gotten to the Vs yet.”
“Ah, of course,” said Mr. B., scratching Watson under the chin.
Norman held out a piece of peanut-butter cookie to the rat, who took it in his mouth and then, transferring it to his paws, nibbled it thoughtfully.
“Thank you, Norman,” said Mr. B. “I mention Watson as an appropriate object for our consideration, for perhaps, if we observe him and his life properly—how his eyes sparkle!—perhaps we’ll find something there. Perhaps the ideas we seek about life are all there within Watson.”
“He’s got a piece of cookie on his chin,” said Leonard.
“Precisely!” said Mr. B. “Forget all the philosophers, starting with dear old Plato, who say objects are on one side of a great divide, ideas are on the other, and don’t let objects sully our pure ideas. Life is good, or life is misery, life is a blessing or life is a curse. No! Ideas belong to objects like souls belong to bodies. Everything we need to know about the universe is right there in the morsel of peanut-butter cookie on this rat’s chin!”
“He ate it,” said Leonard.
“Exactly!” said Mr. B. “Which reminds me, there are a few things you need to know about Vienna, if in fact you are really going to Vienna and not merely conspiring in some kind of boyish ruse to slip the cords of your tutorial lessons, hmm?”
“No, we’re definitely going,” said Norman. “We’ve bought guidebooks. We even know what kind of money they use.”
“Wunderbar,” said Mr. B. “Now pay attention, this is terribly important. When you are seated at your café table in the old city, or perhaps in one of the gardens of the palace, and the waiter asks you what you will have, you shall respond this way: Einen grossen Braunen, bitte.”
“Eeeeyaaaa, what’s that?” said Leonard.
“Only the best coffee in the non-Mediterranean world,” said Mr. B. smugly.
“But we don’t drink coffee!”
“Heaven’s sake, I keep forgetting. Difficult, difficult, you boys will insist on not drinking coffee. Well. Then in that case you are to order a hot chocolate with the following phrase: Mit Schlag.”
“Midd shlawg?” said Norman.
“Mit Schlag,” said Mr. B.
“Midt shlahgk?” said Leonard.
“Mit Schlag,” said Mr. B.
“Mit Schlag,” said both boys.
“Very good,” said Mr. B. “It means ‘with whipped cream.’”
his father’s karma
Norman sat tucked into seat 34K on a ViennAir jumbo jet, his tray table open, his dinner upon it. Beside him, in seats 34H and J, sat his parents. Leonard and his mother, having departed a week before, would meet them in Vienna when they arrived.
Carefully, Norman folded back the hot tinfoil on the small casserole dish to discover something he had never imagined before: a mini–Wiener schnitzel.
Norman forked a fraction of a firlot and pulled out the entertainment controller from the armrest and pushed Power On.
“Norman,” said his mother, “you’ve got to get some sleep. You’ll feel miserable tomorrow otherwise, and tomorrow, according to your father, is going to be arriving sooner than you think.”
“Okay, Mom,” said Norman, now scrolling down the menu displayed. “Let’s see. Arcade games.”
“What’s that, dear?”
“I wonder if I could get another ginger ale.”
Twenty minutes later, a couple of top scores under his belt (which was fastened), his mother snoring softly beside him, Norman opened his Ingmeister’s Compact International Dictionary, as he had dutifully promised Mr. B. to do, and read.
jaunt n : a quick trip
jaunty adj : stylish
jaw n : the upper and lower bones in the head of an animal or human being that form the mouth
jaywalk vb : to cross the street in a careless or prohibited manner
Jazyges n : a group of people whose ancestors came from the Black Sea
jazz n : American classical music, now practiced worldwide, originating in sacred and secular songs, the blues, ragtime, and marching-band music, often syncopated, always swinging, with contrapuntal or solo playing, usually featuring more or less improvisation, originally considered dance music, now principally heard in concert halls and smaller music venues
jazzbow n : a ready-made bow tie
jazzily adv : with real style
jazzist n : a lover of jazz
Norman skipped forward into the Ks.
karma n : the force generated by a person’s acts, which creates that person’s destiny
katipo n : a small deadly spider of New Zealand
Katong Luang n : a nomadic small people of the mountains of Southeast Asia
katsup n var. of catsup or ketchup : a sauce, usually tomato, of many varieties, beloved of children and presidents
katuka n : Russell’s viper, a snake
katydid n : a long-horned grasshopper
katzenjammer n : a hangover; that is, the ill feeling caused by drinking too much alcohol
Norman closed the dictionary and looked at his parents; his mother slept with her chin on her chest, his father snored contented snores, still with a piece of mini–Wiener schnitzel clinging to his stubbly chin. Norman observed the Wiener schnitzel. His father heaved and grunted, but the Wiener schnitzel remained stuck. Would his father’s eyes be as sparkly as Watson’s when he reached Watson’s age in human years? Would he still be full of vim? Or would his father’s eyes slowly turn cloudy, permanently misted over by his constant dreaming of piles of cash, red-rimmed and watery like the eyes of a pig that has spent too much time rooting in slop?
Norman shivered. On the one hand, he wanted to learn all about his father, next to his mother the most important person in his life. On the other hand, he was not so sure he liked what he was learning. He couldn’t shake the feeling that his own father’s karma could use a sharp kick in the shins.
Norman, reaching up, switched off the light. He soon fell into a fitful sleep, unsettled by dreams of epollicate pastry chefs trying in vain to squeeze red whipped cream from golden tubes.
vienna katzenjammer
Early in the afternoon of the day after their arrival in Vienna, Norman and his mother strolled along one of the city’s wide boulevards. The disorientation of the day before had somewhat abated. Indeed, Norman’s wise mother had been correct in saying that Norman would feel miserable if he did not sleep on the airplane; on their arrival, Norman had felt as miserable as he’d ever felt, but not so miserable that he was unable to ask his father, “Dad, is this what a katzenjammer feels like?” To which his father, also feeling a bit shy of top notch, and no doubt anxious as to the fruits of his imminent labors with diverse customers, his little old ladies, had replied, rather peevishly, “Go practice your native lingo on some other Indian,” which had not been very nice of him, not to Norman, not to the natives of Vienna, and not to the Indians either. But if Norman can overlook these failings in his father, as he can, then so, after all, should we.
