Pysma (pys’-ma): The asking of multiple questions successively (which would together require a complex reply). A rhetorical use of the question.
What is worth more than anything else? What is the most valuable thing in the universe? Is there anything in your life that eclipses everything else as a repository of value? Can these questions be answered and settled once and for all by society, by scientists, or by what they call our “gut instincts”—by the pleasurable twinges somewhere down inside?
When it comes to “worth’s” trajectory, my life has taken Pauline twists and turns. Like Paul said: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” When I was a child, I didn’t talk until I was six, but I loved my little plastic cowboys. I had a whole town with plastic corals, plastic cows, plastic bunkhouses, plastic buckboards, a plastic sheriff, 25 plastic bad men, and a plastic damsel in distress too. I had saved my money and had bought the set from an ad in the back of one of my “Lone Ranger” comic books. Even though there were cows, buckboards, houses, and one woman, I called the entire ensemble my little men. So much happened on my bedroom floor. Gunfights. Fistfights. Cattle rustling. Arrests. Saving the damsel. I barely got my homework done. I hardly ever went outside. I wished I could be a plastic man, but I knew I never would be. Then, I decided to run away from home and hitch-hike to Wyoming—I had seen their license plates with a bucking bronco. So, I packed my things in my Uncle Harry’s briefcase that he had given me when he had quit his job on Wall Street and become a Good Humor man.
I stood on the Garden State Parkway’s entrance 33 with a sign saying “Wyoming.” I was nine years old. It was New Jersey, so I got picked up by a mobster. When he asked me why I was going all the way to Wyoming, I told him I wanted to be a cowboy and that’s where they lived. He laughed and asked me where I lived. I told him and he took me home and dropped me off without meeting my parents. He gave me a card and told me to look him up when I was a man. As I became a man, I forgot about my little men and my sensibilities shifted and new desires took precedence over everything else. I called Mr. Dominick and told him I was a man. I told him all I wanted was to get laid day and night, night and day. He told me it was normal at my age to set sex at center stage, obsess over it, but never get it. I yelled: “Tell me something new Mr. Dominick, Goddamnit!” He told me to calm down—that we could kill two birds with one stone. His office was in a vacant warehouse in Old Bridge, New Jersey. I jumped my motorcycle—my iron steed. I got there in about an hour. Mr. Dominick looked older. We got right down to business. He said, “Here, put on this cowboy suit and sign these papers and you’ll be a movie star.” I only had one line: “Howdy cowgirl, you look like a spring bluebell bloom’n on the prairie.” Well, it turned out to be a dirty movie. It was called “Carnal Cowboy” in the credits and the movie took place in Wyoming. Given my impulses—what I valued more than anything—I had found my calling. I took the name Bronco Bucker and specialized in dirty movies set out West, even though they were shot in Old Bridge.
My movies have achieved acclaim as moral sensibilities have shifted in the 21st Century. My most famous movie, “Bronco Bucker Rides a Herd,” grossed $19,000,000 worldwide. So again, when I became a man, I put behind childish things and became a professional pornstar.
My little men are in a cardboard box in my basement. They are my Rosebud.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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