I am not so deceitful in my serious habits. It was a brown
September day, beforehand, and the night’s speckled frown had been sizing up
the situation for quite a while. The party was moseying on to the next level. I
had cauliflower in my teeth, and so had retreated to the bathroom in search for
floss. With the lights off it seemed cooler, and more livable to be doing what
I was doing. There were no ants on hand to witness the events. Perhaps I was a
cricket anyway, for the time. It seemed likely.
Causes? They were out of my realm. I couldn’t influence a
thing. My famous socks were showing a bit too much. I wanted slow trickling
grounders to third and merchant-marine wholesalers on my doorstep. What I was
getting was a room filled with floating gesticulations of un-showered
weatherman. What I was getting was retaliation’s boom mic crushed to the
carpet. A few horrible grinding thoughts escaped into the fuzzy blankness of
the TV screen. I was suddenly okay.
“You’re nothing more than somebody else’s dream.”
Right near being good at nothing, in a role-playing disgust,
I was in the midst of scrambling around for a cigarette. I thought, ‘Suddenly
this is all not so smart.’ The mirror agreed with me. I said to it, “Concur,
ass. Just concur already.”
“Once is as close to never as you’ll ever get.”
And then there she was: 23 chromosomes and a bottle of cheap
perfume. She marched decorously through the sludge of me. Swerved and somehow
inclined to be alive with moss-and-gin breath. I took some steps, but they were
just of the fungo sort. Sleepy legs. Slipper eyes. I couldn’t fathom why a
doorknob might exist. I forgot doors could close. In the slap dancing I
realized I couldn’t listen to music at all. I could be prepared and wink out in
a fit of panic anyway. Shinier and funnier things were happening. I stowed a
bit of regret in my armpit and ambled away.
Somebody was giving a speech to some folks squashed together
on the couch. “He’d stopped a few with his hard heart and all. It was the
running from whatever it was he’d been artfully dodging that got him into
trouble. There was a cat. There was a man with his feet up. Nobody moved when
the cops splashed in like blue ruin and took control of the situation.”
To get away I smiled my way through and out to the street, a
place where I knew a bus would be coming along soon.
While I was waiting for the bus I looked up and saw a plane
scratch some smoke into the pale sky. The limits of being outside didn’t seem
like much. ‘Surmountable,’ I thought. ‘This is just a hobby. Really. Really.
Really. This is just of use, or it is chemical-- on the outside, that is.’ A
Sikh man was smoking a cigar, toeing the curb slyly a few yards away. This Sikh
man was holding a wilted daffodil in his left hand. It was just dangling there
from his hand. There was no reason to smile, at him or anything.
I don’t want to die like Sherwood Anderson, choking on a
toothpick after a party; or have my dead body transported in a rail car marked
“Fresh Oysters” like Anton Chekhov. These were the things I was
contemplating.
“Have a drink with your executioner. You know, a little St.
John’s Blessing for you. You are a member of the Drink Yourself To Sleep Club,
correct? Well, there you stop, and there you take it. Just not so much that it keeps
you up, okay?”
“The objective of this correlation with madness is
two-timing what you know with what you won’t. Me? I keep death close by. Not
like any enemy, mind you. But more like a half-eaten piece of toast, or the
crumbs from a jelly donut smashed into the carpet. I know its odor, its casual
graces by heart. I can tell its creep and sudden shiver. I listen to it rattle
in the drainpipes, or when the refrigerator squeals. Night is run by death’s
machines. I hold it close and hum.”
It was apparent to me that speaking out loud was no longer
an option. There were so many stops that weren’t mine, and the bothersome
aspects of sitting either facing a stranger or standing with my lower half in a
stranger’s line of sight were becoming more than a bit too much for me to
handle. I caved. I cowered. I licked my lips and made a dash for the sidewalk
at a stop that was not my own. It was shower time in dirty town, and I was the
mayor’s ugly cousin.
Some lousy things to do with air. I pushed my way through. Crowds
that wouldn’t amass to a crowd. Leaves that forever fell. Slips were
silver-laced. The gutter summoned the wounded to perish from the earth. The
archangels perhaps sang, but not to me.
Foreboding mourning, as it were, I’d clipped my toenails
recently, and to be sure of it I rubbed a dull thumb over them. They were
behaving decently. Inventory: two socks, one shoe. This was bad. I should’ve
been hobbling. Instead one of my socks was in worse shape than ever. Holes and
damp. I needed help. I began to trod and heave my way back from where I’d came.
I thought about how Mary Shelley kept P.B.’s heart, that for some reason didn’t
burn in his funeral pyre, and she wrapped it in his poem Adonais, and buried it
with their only son Percy in 1889. My toes hurt on the foot with no shoe.
On arrival in the kitchen I cornered a suspect. My eyes drew
battle lines in the wainscoting. Soon I was alert with begging, and then I was
just plain mean about it.
“Notice. Notice. Notice. Damn it. Notice. Will you?”
“Cruel? No. No. Wait. Cool. Real cool.”
“I do not want to feel the earth against my feet. I do not
want to have wet socks to deal with tomorrow. I could get a splinter. I might
be able to see all of this from outer space with a good enough telescope. Would
that matter, or make any of this matter more? All there is is hate.”
“Chance it.”
“I’m telling.”
“I’m not.”
“Where, for the like of hats and glasses and all that is
wilderness, is my…?”
“Shoe?”
“I knew it!”
It turns out a party girl had taken my shoe. She had hid it
in the kitchen. I told her that I do not like wet socks. I made up some things
about purpose and the conniving nature of reality. She grit her teeth during
the exchange. She gave my shoe back. I put it on over my wet sock. I was
happier than I’d been for quite some time.
Now? It’s being frugal with allowing my personality to be
rented out that keeps me well shod. And then, possibly, some happiness follows.
But there are just different ways of knowing here, and one can never be sure,
now can one?
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