Issue 6, Spring/Summer 2008

All You Need Is Love by Ricky Garni

QUESTIONS I SHOULD HAVE ANSWERED IN 1968 BUT I KEPT PUTTING IT OFF UNTIL I ‘HAD THE TIME’ TO ANSWER THEM, WHICH, IN RETROSPECT, WAS PROBABLY A MISTAKE

How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?
It’s funny that you should ask. It really doesn’t feel as good as you might think. Nice restaurants that serve exotic dishes are usually drenched with oil or salted butter and then, with all the drinking, you tend to feel fairly queazy later on, and then even though you are sleepy (alcohol is a depressant, after all) your sleep tends to be restless and not very fulfilling. And then, just imagine thirty years of this. Actually, you get to feel pretty bad. Did I mention that I am also pretty deep in debt? I mean, even if you are beautiful, you try to be more beautiful, and then someone tries to be more beautiful than that, and the next thing you know, you can’t afford to be more beautiful than that, but you are not about to admit that. Not to anyone but Citibank, a urologist, etc. Oh yeah, that’s the other thing. Venereal disease.

Now that you know who you are, what do you want to be?
First of all, I don’t know you I am. I like to think of myself as Superman, flying across the heavens, but I can’t get the image out of my head of George Reeves lying on a springboard with a fan blowing on his face and with back lit clouds behind him filmed in rotoscope. Also hard to forget that he was born in Woodstock, Iowa.

And have you travelled very far?
Once I went to Woodstock, Iowa.

How often have you been there?
Once.

What did you see when you were there?
OK. So I really haven’t ever been to Woodstock, Iowa. I haven’t been anywhere. But you can be beautiful and never go anywhere. Did the Bronte sisters go anywhere? No. But they wrote elegant, beautiful immortal works of literature.

(Unintelligible question)
You’re right. Charlotte Bronte was kind of a porker.

Now that you found another key, what are you going to play?
I have always thought that the best thing to do when you find another key is to play the same old song again in a different key. Kind of like, if you will let me mention Superman once more, that great episode called THE HUMAN BOMB when he jumped out the window with a stick of dynamite. And then every time for the next seven years that he jumped out the window it seemed like he had that same stick of dynamite in his hand. “Yep,” he sighed I think, “one more goddamn window, one more goddamn stick of dynamite.” To tell you the truth, being beautiful is no fun at all.