By David Luntz
Sprouting like weeds all over the hood. Lemonade stands. Suburban cliché. A cliché of cliché. I loathe them. Which I suppose reflects badly on my character. But I don’t blame the kids. They’re being forced into it. Every time I see one, though, I can’t help but wonder about those children’s hygienic practices, how many flies dipped their feet in those tepid brews, and the quantity of lead in the water that had been used to make them.
But one day I was thirsty, ragingly thirsty. I approached the nearest lemonade stand. Three pleasant blond-haired children manned it. They were clad in the latest designer brand clothing popular with a certain income-level of suburban households. I drank five cups of lemonade without paying. To be honest I had no intention of paying. But I promised those children I would go home and return with their payment.
I placed my empty plastic cups gingerly on their stand. I took a step back. I thought some sort of apology was needed since I wasn’t going to pay. I waved my right hand before them and explained since they were in a business, albeit a small one, and given it was unregulated and they did not pay taxes and that my hand was clearly visible when it had helped itself to their lemonade (in contradistinction to Mr. Smith’s teachings), they should therefore take my drinking of their produce without recompense as an opportunity to learn the difference between extending credit and giving a loan—which, perhaps in the grand scheme of things, like war and politics, as von Clausewitz taught us, may be a meaningless distinction, but, I added, with a disarming smile, that was another discussion for another day.
Yet, for sake of clarity, I told them I was drinking their lemonade on credit, not as a loan. Yes, I know, I know, I said, my “credit” here amounted to my word. But if it’s good enough for the U.S. government, then it should be good enough for you. Trust me children, it’s not lost on me that the mere promise of a few pieces of that specially-inked paper no longer backed by gold, with its all-seeing eye of providence inside of a creepy bisected levitating pyramid, got me those cups of lemonade. And yes, I get I’ve just compounded my legal woes by inadvertently entering into a binding contract with you, for I am painfully aware much to my prior detriment promises are considered ‘consideration’ in contract law and oral contracts are binding and enforceable in courts of law.
Oh sorry, child, did I spill on your precious Brandy Melville dress? No, no don’t fret. Don’t cry. I’m sure the stain will come out. No? …What? No, you cheeky little fucks, I’m not going to leave my two-hundred-year anniversary special edition Phillipe Patek timepiece with you while I go home to fetch your little bit of sweet extortion, nor am I getting skinned for the cost of a whole pitcher of lemonade—you should learn to place it better on your stand!
Look, shit happens, accidents happen, deal with it. But putting all that aside, children, I know what troubles you. I know. I know. So, let’s mix metaphors and talk turkey and get down to brass tacks and address the elephant in the room: you don’t know me from Adam. You fear I will run off and never return with your precious payment. I get it. I get it. I’ve lived it, too, in my own professional life. You fear all your labor, hard work, your investment will have gone to waste, been all for naught. But look! I come with good news! Here’s another chance to learn something very important—what’s known in the parlance of the industry as a “transferrable technology” that you can acquire without any startup costs and sweat equity.
Imagine that! See, now you can learn in real time about write-offs and the cost of doing business, which had you known before, you would have priced into your cups of lemonade without having to learn about Bayesian priors, sunk cost fallacies, double entry book keeping, the utility theory of value and law of diminishing returns. Which you will thank me for later when you don’t end up like King Tarquin who, you might recall, tried to buy all nine of the sybil’s oracles but wouldn’t accept her price, so the sybil kept burning her oracles until King Tarquin caved and ended up purchasing only three oracles for the same price as he could have purchased the set of nine. The point being here to understand the value of what you’re purchasing, because one day you’ll find yourselves on the other side of the lemonade stand, so to speak, and realize that sellers sometimes like markets can afford to remain irrational much longer than you can afford to remain solvent, to paraphrase Mr. Keynes.
What? Why the look? Oh this. No, no, no it’s nothing to be worried about, just 17th century with an ivory handle made from…but this is not what you should be looking at. You need to see the bigger picture. So, pay attention! I’m trying to show you that your lemonade stand is but a tiny pucker on a tentacle of an enormous sprawling octopus of insurance companies, media conglomerates, investment banks, and law firms—no, what’s that, it’s not registering, fine, fine, if such abstraction eludes you, then picture some vast ancient army moving through the night, felling trees, making fortifications, their naphtha-fueled braziers burning along the western shores of the Danube and the Rhine, the tooth-chipped coins clinking in leather pouches strapped to the legs of the weary whores, the clanking pots of the cooks, the surgeons, barbers, and bloodletters with their cloudy jars of leeches and cedar boxes stacked with fleams and catheters, the learned-Greek doctors and stoics, bantam cock spleen readers, prestidigitators, prognosticators, students of the aleatory arts, dice men, procurers, devotees of Astarte, horned moons tattooed on their tongues, spies, interpreters, masseuses, forgers, rhetoricians, rumor-mongers, apiarists, bird catchers, butchers, dowsers, trappers, curers, washerwomen, the whole slow moving slug depositing its slick residue over a wasted land bathed in its own sebaceous glow, for your stand is part of a similar vast dark enterprise and nothing is really still, which is the first illusion you will have to learn to unsee, the illusion of stillness, but the point here is that you can never learn too early, for here, right here is where theory and practice both merge and come apart depending on which side of the cliché—stop screaming you little bitch, I’m not squeezing your arm that hard—depending on which side of the lemonade stand you stand on, for like that other cliché—or is it a trope, I can never get them straight—about the cat in the hat or in the box it all depends where your observation point is, for from where I am standing you’re all basically dead, or rather should I say, doomed, and from where you are standing no doubt you’re looking at some adult you wished had never passed into your perceptual field, but alas in life sometimes we can’t choose what not to see, can’t arrange to sweep these inconveniences under the proverbial rug, just as we never know the exact moment of our deaths, which is perhaps a good thing come to think of it, but let’s not be too maudlin, for when I spoke about death earlier, I meant it mostly in metaphorical terms, so let’s pretend you’re like Adam and you’re getting evicted out of paradise, not for paying your rent late, but because you did the one thing you were told you couldn’t do, and your maker sends down an angel who takes you up to the top of the highest mountain in paradise and from there you see the whole history (which is also your future) your one act caused, and in Adam’s case it was very bad, Hobbesian, chaotic, the general state of affairs that existed before the state contracted to monopolize violence from its subjects, I’m talking untrammeled murder, disease, war, theft, rapine, but in your case I’d say the future’s less gory, though, that said, I am not sanguine either about your prospects because this stand is a kind of gateway beverage to a life of office cubicles poring over grim actuarial statistics that had their origins in Graunt’s Mortality Tables, the sponsoring of derivative securities and other dubious negotiable instruments on the Amsterdam stock exchange that not coincidently came about with the science of probability in the seventeenth century, and the probability for you dear children is sharing cubicle space like penned cattle, of smelly refrigerators stuffed with moldering food cartons left by your coworkers some of whom you will no doubt develop unhealthy thoughts towards that may adversely affect your relationships with those whom you really care about, so you will find yourself coming back to your dingy rental you can barely afford in a packed subway car and wondering, “How did I get here, where did it start?” and then you’ll spit on the name of Mr. David Hume who told you it was impossible to find true effects from causes, you will curse yourself for taking him at his word, for here the effect can be traced down the chain directly to this instance with no other intervening causes—oh please, please don’t look at me like that, this blade hasn’t been sharpened in ages, it’s quite dull in fact, but admire if you will the ivory and jewel-crusted handle, genuine 17th century Ottoman smithing here, beautiful, no?—I mean it happened so quicky, he surprised me, yes, I hate to admit it, I liked it, I know, not nice, but you can trust what I’m saying because before that I shot the fucking albatross, well not the actual one in the poem, let’s say a metaphorical albatross, truly, the details are not important, but what matters is there is no coming back from it, you see, it’s a slippery slope, and nothing’s been the same since, sometimes I can’t help myself—now, now stop shaking dear children, stay calm, besides, we all have dead birds in our lives, so to speak, don’t we, even those we tried to save, so I suppose it doesn’t matter, it all balances out in the long run, but speaking of birds, take to heart and cling to it for all you are worth this sage advice of Mr. Russell’s who warned us that thinking the sun is going to rise tomorrow is like the chicken who thinks the approaching farmer is coming to give him his breakfast (because he’s done it every morning), when in fact the farmer is really coming to wring its neck, so yes, I think you know now what I’ve really been trying to tell you, and no, it’s not that you were never going to get your payment, I think that’s obvious now, sorry, not sorry, but this is where the nightmare begins, this is where it begins, so please children run, run for your fucking lives.
David Luntz. Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david