Free Typical by Padgett Powell

positive sign.
    Still, he was pretty certain that extracting from the pocket in a somber, proud, ceremonious fashion and confidentially beginning to explain to an innocent bystander that what this cow chip represented was … was ironic. Perhaps he could, for a while, find a substitute for irony. Substitute therapy was common, even if it itself was perhaps a little ironic.
    He had recently witnessed a father and young daughter purchasing some candy for the mother’s birthday. The child, who was allowed to select the candy, decided on chocolate-covered peanuts, and decided that they were “pretend poops.” Indeed, the candies had looked like small, hard turds.
    “But don’t tell Mommy we’re giving her pretend poops,” the father instructed.
    The child grinned wickedly. “It’ll be … pretty surprisy !”
    That, Mr. Irony thought, might be an acceptable substitute for ironic: surprisy. Irony he could quit, but, as methadone to his heroin, he could not quit that which was surprisy.
    “Surprisy it is, then,” he announced, still leaning against the refrigerator, immediately looking less glum. He then crawled out of his own kitchen window and crawled back in. It felt good. He felt fine. Not himself, but all right.
    “All surprising right,” he said, beginning a rubber-legged dance that came to him. He bandied this way through the apartment, saying “Surprise you!” to walls and paintings and furnishings. He told everything to surprise off. “Just get the surprise out of my way,” he said to a pair of boxer shorts, and deftly toed them—through an incredibly long arc—into the clothes hamper. Suddenly, badly, he wanted a uniformed maid working full time in his small apartment, altogether too small for such a servant, and he wanted only new clothes.
    Piling all of his old clothes into a heap, and thinking of how he might safely present himself at the haberdasher’s naked, he paused to congratulate himself: not just any man could kick irony once it had its teeth in him. A lesser man, one less surprisy, would have failed.

The Modern Italian
    M ARIO MOSCALINI PASSED ON his way out the door every morning one of several Michelin guides to Italy that were kept open to his favorite passage about modern Italy. He sometimes glanced at the books, but he had long before memorized the passage:
    Modern Italy.—In this land abounding in every type of beauty, the modern Italian lives and moves with perfect ease. Dark-haired, black-eyed, gesticulating, nimble and passionate, he is all movement and fantasy .
    This overflowing vitality appears in many modern achievements that may surprise the visitor. Improvement of the soil, industrial complexes, nuclear power centres, dams, motorways and skyscrapers, characterize the fantastic economic development which has taken place after World War II, giving Italy a new look and belying the legend of the macaroni-eating, guitar-playing Italian. A new way of life has been created in the country.
    On Mario, one such modern Italian, these words had the calming, assuring effect of a psalm.
    He was thinking specifically of the moving about modern Italy with perfect ease as he whipped his taxi through the customs gates at the port of Livorno to pick up his first fare of the day, a merchant seaman. Mario liked sailors. Unlike regular tourists, they were not finicky about what they wanted to see or do or where they wanted to go. They wanted food, women, to sleep, and they spoke in a direct fashion. With a sailor Mario was free to be himself, a man.
    The sailor this morning was well-fed-looking, and Mario was not surprised to hear him ask for a “puta” right away. He turned to the sailor and said, with a conspiratorial wink, “I have large size.”
    “Not a fat one,” the sailor said.
    “No,” Mario said, “you do not seize my meaning. I have large size.” He held up his arm, flexed, his fist touching the ceiling of the cab.
    “Non capisco Italiano,” the sailor said.
    “You not must