Sorry, But We’re Bags of Water

At the McDonald’s on 29^th Street, Geezer T underwent an epiphany.

“Holy shit!  It’s all coming clear, Mouth!”

Mouth blinked calmly back at him.  “What is?”

“Us,” said Geezer T.  “Homo sapiens.  We’re bags of water, old friend.  Can you grasp it?  We’re liquid – end of story.  Let freedom ring throughout this great land.”

Mouth didn’t reply for a few seconds.  His mouth hung slackly open.  Then he frowned.  “Do you think you might need a medication, Geezer T?”

The older man bristled.  “I’ve never felt more lucid in my life.  If you’d only listen, you could learn something.  Here’s your quiz for today: what is the percentage of water – ordinary H2O – in the human body?”

Mouth took a sip of his Big Mac Mocha Java.  “Say what again?”

“How much of us is water, Mouth?”

“Ahh . . .”

“Try seventy percent.”

Mouth ruminated on this factoid for a while.  He was a small, round-faced man with bulging green eyes and a short ponytail secured with a red rubber band from KMart.

“That’s a lot of water, Geezer T.”

“You’re goddam right it is,” growled the big man in the thick black glasses and the droopy maroon sweater.  “Everything you see on TV?  The CBS Evening News?  That asshole on NBC?  It’s total horseshit, old buddy.  It’s fantasy, pure and simple.  The reality is water.  Grasp that one simple fact and watch your world begin to change.  Huh?  Are you really with me here, or are you just pretending to go along for the sake of politeness?”

Mouth hesitated.  The green eyes bulged and vibrated, then sank back toward normal.  “I’m listening . . . but I really need to hit the can.”

***

Marge was leafing through the latest edition of House Beautiful when Geezer T rose from his easy chair.  Now he loomed above her, a colossus in a droopy maroon sweater.

“Fuck death!” roared Geezer T.

She breathed rapidly.

“Do you know what death can do, Marge?”
She gaped at him, open-mouthed.
“Death can kiss my hairy Irish ass!”
“Honey?”  Marge’s mouth had begun to quiver a little on one side. “Sweetheart?”

***

The two of them huddled.  The problem was, they still wanted to be something.  All their lives they’d been nothing and now time was running out.

“Do we have the balls to stick up a bank?” said Geezer T.  “Just asking, my man.”

Mouth reached back with one hand and smoothed his little pony tail.  “Naw,” he said thoughtfully.  “We’re way too timid for that.”

“You total puss.”

“Just being honest,” said Mouth.

“What if we were to run down to the National Aquarium, you know, bust the glass on the main tank?”

Mouth considered it.  “Okay.  Maybe.  But how would that help us?”

The older man glared at his sidekick.  “Think, goddamit!  The Aquarium is less than a block from the edge of the Inner Harbor.  If we bust the tank, a few of the escaping fish might make it all the way back to the ocean.  They’d be free, Mouth.  Where the fuck is your imagination?”

Mouth scrunched up his little face.  “Doing the best I can, Geezer T.”  Then he brightened.  “Say, do you think we could get us a drink of gin?”

The Geezer’s tangled eyebrows flared dramatically.  “Gin?  It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”

Mouth sighed.  “Yeah, but we’re old, right?  Can’t we do what we want, if we’re old?”

“You’ll end up in a goddam de-tox somewhere, barking shit from Ecclesiastes.  Sometimes I wonder about you, Mouth.”

***

Geezer T had worked for 25 years as a salesman at Liberty & Fidelity.  He had seen many people destroyed during his time on 17^th Street.  Most of them had fought desperately to survive and protect those they loved, but The Machine had gradually killed them, regardless of their courage and their busy, complicated efforts.

Well, that was the world, wasn’t it?

He often thought about the Anglo-Saxon settlements along the eastern coast of England during the Viking raids of the 9^th Century.  He could so easily imagine those big mother-fuckers from the Danelands – those hairy turds crouched in their long boats, axes at the ready, dreaming of all the pussy they were about to score.  Really, weren’t the scumbags from Norway & Sweden just as bad as the scumbags from Liberty & Fidelity?

Wasn’t Crabtown Capitalism, as practiced in the early years of the 21^st Century, just as bad as the Viking raids of the 9^th?

Calm down, Geezer T often told himself.  It isn’t personal.

 ***

They walked half a mile up Charles Street to the Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art and looked at a modern sculpture – a woman from Imlay City, Michigan had nailed some bloody chicken claws to the wall of Gallery Seven.  The artist’s name was simply BLOK.  She’d been featured in Vanity Fair a while back, and her breathless magazine profile was also attached to the wall, about four feet to the right of the amputated claws.

According to the article, BLOK was “full of womanly rage”.

“I don’t know,” growled Geezer T.  “To be honest with you, Mouth, I don’t know what the fuck I’m looking at.”

“You’re thinking too much,” said Mouth.  “Why not just enjoy it?”

The older man was wiping down his bottle-thick lenses with a paper napkin he’d swiped from the Café d’Art, ten minutes earlier.  “Enjoy what?” he asked his companion.  “Is she protesting Colonel Sanders, or what?”

Mouth closed his eyes and compressed his lips, as if he were a serious art critic.  “Maybe she isn’t protesting anything,” he said.  “Maybe she just woke up on morning and said: okay, I need to put some claws on a wall.”

He turned to confront his elderly pal.  “Has it occurred to you that you might be over-thinking this stuff, Geezer T?”

The man in the blocky glasses considered his suggestion for a bit.  “This modern art – it’s all bullshit, Mouth.  I read about one guy, Christo.  You ever heard of him? Christo?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“He wrapped one of the Florida Keys in Saran Wrap.  I’m not shitting you: the entire Key.”

Mouth ruminated. “And your point?”

“That’s art?  He made a movie, Pelican Key Wrap, and the goddam thing earned him a million bucks.”

Mouth snickered.  “Okay . . . so the guy made a bundle with some plastic wrap.  Is that your problem here?  He had the nerve to . . . what, you’re jealous of the guy?  Am I on it?”

Geezer T scowled.  A scribble of light flashed in his lenses.  “The movie showed him, like, pulling the Saran Wrap off a giant roller and then laying it flat on the ground.  Fuck you, Mouth.”

***

Geezer T had learned about human wetness from a documentary on the assassination of JFK.  As part of the documentary, a ballistics expert had crafted a couple of manikins from water-soaked sponge and plastic.

The manikins were stand-ins for the two guys who’d been shot in the limousine, Kennedy and Connally.

The logic was clear: because the density of the wet sponge inside the manikins closely matched the density of human flesh, the ballistics team could accurately gauge the impact of the Dallas bullets on the president and the governor . . . simply by shooting the dummies with the same high-powered rifle the assassin had used and then studying the damage caused by the rounds.

While describing his savvy ballistics tests, the documentary-maker had noted that “human bodies are essentially just bags of water.”

And that blunt statement of fact had nearly floored Geezer T.

“Marge,” he’d yapped from his end of the sofa, “don’t you see how this changes everything?”

She kept her eyes on the screen.  “Okay, honey.  Whatever.”

“Hey, I’m not farting around here, sweetheart.  I assume you know that we all came out of the ocean, way back?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Human blood is nothing more than seawater, princess.  Chemically speaking, it’s as if the ocean crawled up onto the land and started walking around.”  He looked at her carefully.  “I hope you understand that Homo sapiens are descended from sea worms?”

“Is descended,” said Marge.  “Singular, if you’re describing the species.  Do you mind?  I’m trying to watch this documentary.”

***

On the following Wednesday, they learned from the Morning Sun that Christo would soon be giving a free public lecture on his oeuvre as part of The Johns Hopkins University Humanities Institute Fall Series.  The lecture would be held at the Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art.

“We’re going,” said Geezer T.

“We are?”  Mouth was nibbling on a Big Mac Sausage Biscuit.

“You’re goddam right,” said Geezer T.  “I’ve got some major questions for that freelance shyster.  For starters, I want to ask him why he’s dicking around with Saran Wrap when half the human race is either starving to death or bleeding to death in front of our goddam eyes.”

Mouth regarded him calmly.  “That’s ridiculous, Geezer.  I don’t deny that there have been some problems in Rwanda and the Sudan . . . but for crying out loud, no more than a quarter of the human race is starving to death or bleeding to death at any one time.”

Geezer T snorted.  “There are people right on this goddam block eating cat food for dinner so they can pay for their goddam prescriptions!  Those goddam pharmaceutical corporations – somebody ought to go after them with a goddam flamethrower.  We’re neck deep in alligator shit and that goddam Christo is wrapping Florida islands in sandwich wrap!”
Mouth sighed.  “I’ll go with you to the lecture, Geezer, but if you start in on your anti-capitalist rant, I’ll vamoose in a heartbeat.  I do not want to get thrown out of an auditorium!”

“I’m going to ask him why he built Running Fence.”

Mouth stared at him.  “How’s that again?”

“He erected a plastic fence that bisected the State of California.”

“Damn,” said Mouth.  “What could that mean?”

Geezer T snorted angrily.  “I can give you his answer right now.  ‘It means what it is, Mouth.  It means itself.’” He groaned loudly.  “Shit, that con artist is making tons of money from pure bullshit.  Why don’t we build something useless and get rich?”

Mouth took a bite of his Sausage Biscuit.  “I thought you were against capitalism.”

***

Christo wore a mustard-colored blazer and a fuzzy little chin-beard that looked as if it had been dabbed on with a Magik Marker.
Geezer T whispered from behind his hand: “He’s Bulgarian, Mouth.   That beard looks like something you’d find on a Bulgarian troll.  I can’t say I’m surprised.  How did this guy ever become famous, anyway?”
“Would you please button it,” said Mouth.  “I want to hear this.”
“What you must know about me – my verks all vanish,” boomed Christo from the BMCA stage.  “They vanish!”  He held up a green-plastic cube and pushed at it with one finger: click.

On the movie screen above his head a white-plastic fence now rippled against a gentle summer breeze.

“Where is Running Fence today?” asked Christo. His voice was nasal, high-pitched, a crybaby’s twanging plaint.  Click: now the Humanities Institute crowd was eyeballing a gorgeous photo of Running Fence being lapped by creamy Pacific surf.  A subtitle proclaimed: Redondo Beach: The Fence Reaches the Sea.  “Ooooohh,” sang the Baltimore art lovers, at least half of whom were loaded on the $6-a-glass white wine they’d thrown down at the museum reception an hour before.

“Der is no more Running Fence!” wailed the sculptor.  “We took it down, my dear friends; we took it all down.”

He gazed mournfully at his spellbound audience.  “Do you know that my artworks . . . they all go away when they’re finished?  I don’t have any artworks, my dears – they no longer exist!  I believe it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.”

Transfixed, Mouth was shaking his head.  The pony tail quivered.  “Goddam . . . that’s interesting.”

Geezer T couldn’t believe it.  “Are you shitting me, Mouth?  Don’t tell me you’re buying into this claptrap.”

But now a white-haired woman in a bluebell-patterned peasant blouse was leaning toward them: “Do you two mind if I listen to this lecture?  Thank you very much.”

Christo clicked.  “Here is . . . what?  Here is the Reichstag, wrapped in a fabric!  Top to bottom, all wrapped.  And if you ask me: ‘Christo, what will become of this verk?’  If you ask me: ‘What will this verk mean in fifty years?’  Ahh . . . then I will simply have no answer for you!”

Geezer T had seen enough.  His right hand was up.

A murmur of astonishment rolled over the audience.

“Sir!” the trembling old gaffer shouted while the luminescence from the recessed overhead lighting shivered in his bottle-thick lenses, “sir, may I interject?”

Nonplussed, Christo sent him a cordial grin.  “Absolutely,” trilled the renowned performance artist.  “This is wonderful . . . an interjection!”

“Sir, you point out that your works all vanish.  But have you ever reflected on the fact that you yourself will vanish?”

The famed sculptor frowned thoughtfully.  “This is interesting,” he crooned after a bit.  “You are interesting.  Baltimore is interesting.  Can you say any more, my good friend?”

“I sure can!” thundered Geezer T.  “For starters, I can say what you haven’t said . . . and what everybody in this goddam room needs to hear – which is the one-hundred-percent-accurate, no-bullshit fact that we’re all more than two-thirds water!  And we will vanish, each one of us.  Also: People are being cut to pieces in the Sudan as we speak.  Anybody heard about the blood-soaked struggle that went on in Algeria?  Plus, Romania is a hellish place to try and make a living, these days.  And there’s more, sir: are you aware of the fact that the esteemed Johns Hopkins University is doing tons of Defense Department-funded research on nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

“Sir, I ask you:  what are you doing to stop all this carnage?  Why are you are wrapping Florida islands in plastic wrap? Where will it end, sir?  Where will it all end?”

Mouth wasn’t pleased by his buddy’s outburst, however.  The pony tail waggled angrily.  “Will you knock it off?” he hissed at the Geezer.  “Shut down the rant or I’m out of here.”

Meanwhile, a nasty buzz of disapproval had begun among the padded Hopkins seats.  It swelled.  It surged.  Like gathering surf, it rolled toward the legendary artist who pranced at the front of the lecture hall.

“Sir,” wailed the bemused lecturer, “please help me to get this straight.  Is your take-home message that because we’re all nothing but water, life itself is simply a transient illusion?”

“You got it!” roared Geezer T.  “The human body is a bag of H2O, sucker!  Don’t be fooled by those chicken claws that wacky dame installed down the hall.  The only thing that matters is that the ocean came ashore . . . the sea is living through us!”

There was a moment of perfect rapture, a silence that seemed to tremble with delight.  Then the woman in the peasant blouse snapped loudly: “Sit down, you old bore!  Somebody needs to call Security!”

But Christo was loving it.  Half the unkempt hairs on his chin were standing up straight now, as if charged with a powerful voltage.

“He makes my point,” sang Christo.  His joy was palpable.  “This fine gentleman . . . I am truly amazed, my dears.

“I came here to tell you, it will all vanish . . . and this fine gentleman makes my point!”

###

Stukov In Love

Stukov had fallen in love. Her name was Melanie, and she taught third grade at Holy Redeemer. She dropped by Stukov’s deli a couple of times a week, always with a friend or two, and she usually asked for the Cheesy Bagel and a Coke. He lifted his paper chef’s cap and waved it at her. “The usual, Miz Melanie?” “You bet!”
Stukov lit up. “Comin’ right at you!”
He glanced at her from time to time, she and her friends. They usually sat at the same table near the kitchen door. She was always laughing. One of her friends would ask: “So how’s your class clown today?”
Her smile was electric. Her blue eyes flashed with gathering laughter. “The usual. He came to class today wearing his Frankenstein mask and I threatened to call the principal on him. Then I confiscated the mask until the end of the school day. What a rascal!” Stukov yearned for her, but he was 65 years old and he knew it was hopeless. She was in her late 20s, 30 at the most. So he just stood behind the counter with his heart racing and his palms gone sweaty. Perry Como was singing a classic on the stereo system:
“Yes, I know … How lonely nights can be. The shadows follow me . . .” Then one afternoon he got lucky. She dropped her cell phone and he was near her table and he bent over and grabbed it and handed it to her.
“Here you are, my lady! “
She glowed. “Thank you, sir!”
He went back to the counter.
How he yearned for her.
/////////

I Got Isolated Down in Florida

I got isolated down in Florida wearing a pair of green Pumas I’d found in Room 221 of the EconoLodge, and I wound up in this bar in Punta Gorda, the Hibiscus, telling an alcoholic woman named Cindy (tho I suspected an alias) that the recent invasion of the fire ants was no goddam joking matter, okay, hon?

“Who are you, mister?  Are you for real?”

Good question.

“Here’s another distortion,” I told Cindy.  “Those big purple land crabs down here, throwing dirt – have you eyeballed those suckers?”

She gave me a cold stare.  “Who are you?”

I told her my world had been “transmogrified” (a word I like) up in South Baltimore due to the ongoing cognitive dissonance, and that my goal now was to put together a lounge act – leaning into the mike, one hand stroking the keys, I’m like, Many a tear has to fall, but it’s all . . . and then she pulls a big chunk of lime out of her Samoan Fog Cutter and chomps down on it and squirts my nose with the juice and says: “What’s your story, bub?”

I said to her: “I like that yellow streak running through your hair and the way you’ve kind of chopped it off in the back, okay?”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

“My main theme is sort of the demise of the Neanderthals,” I told her.  “They did their best and they had one hell of a run – 300,000 years, give or take twenty – but in the end they just couldn’t deal with the ice.”

She was peering.  Her eyes were a nice green – almost as vivid as the limes down here.  “Are you crying, or what?”

“Naw,” I said.  “I’m fine.”

She thought for a minute.  “I cut hair over in Sarasota,” she said.  “I’ve been on my own four years now.  It’s a good life if you don’t let the bastards cut you with their claws.”

“I’m hearing you,” I said.

She reached over with one hand and put her red-painted nails on my knuckles and squeezed down hard and she hurt me some – nearly drew blood, if you want the lowdown.

“What’s this?” I said.

She smiled.  “That’s just so you know I’m here.”

“All right,” I said.  “I get the point.  I read in USA Today they were smart, you know?  Their brains were actually a little bigger than our brains.  But they weren’t creative.  They kept doing the same old shit . . . you know, beat the saber-tooth to death with these big rocks?  They never even developed a throwing spear, for shit’s sake.  At the end of the day: ka-put.”

She thought for a few seconds.

“Why do you want to put together a lounge act?”

“Simple,” I told her.  “I’ve got the mike in one hand, you know?  And I’m bending the words a little:  all in the wunnaful game . . . and then I give it a little flourish on the keys, maybe, I make a few sounds that aren’t even words: waah-uhhh, hooh and some such, and that way I don’t feel so chained up like in South Baltimore, you know, one of those big head-chains putting all this stress on your neck?

“I’m like: uhhhh, oooh, your heart can rise above –”

She nodded.  “I need another Fog Cutter.”

I’m reaching for my wallet.  “It would be my pleasure.”

###

The Mummy Awakens

Ever had a mummy’s eye roll open on you?

It happened to me in the Egyptian Room of the KalamazooArt Museum, three summers ago.

Candy had gone ahead; she wanted to “feel the colors” in a Cezanne still life:  Three Lemons.  After promising “I’ll catch up with you in a bit,” I was sitting on a padded bench and staring at the blackened, dried-up little woman in the glass-covered case.  Princess Hohotep didn’t look to be more than three feet tall, and her face had shriveled way, way down.  Her nose was a pinched pencil eraser, and eyes were no larger than raisins.  I tried to imagine her 3,000 years before . . . tried to picture a much younger Princess Hohotep brushing her teeth, or petting a palace cat, or maybe dancing alone on a moonlit terrace.  It was hard to believe that this leathery object in the case had been alive once.  To think she’d probably stirred camel cream into her coffee, way back!

Maybe I dozed on my bench?

All I know is, the mummy’s left eyelid quivered a couple of times and then pulled open.  It slid back real slow and oily, like the eyelid on an awakening crocodile – and there was the eyeball, all wet and shiny.  And now it was locked on my eyeball!  What the hell?  I jerked straight up . . . and at the same moment, I felt the temperature in the Egyptian Room drop.  The air had gone frosty on me, and now I could feel it flickering with a strange, electrical energy.

I wanted to run, but she had me.  That eye was cutting into my soul like a power drill.  A round black pupil . . . glistening with the power of a desert pyramid . . . and all at once I could feel her brain sending messages into my brain.  The words came wiggling into my consciousness, each one more terrifying than the last.

I am Hohotep, Princess of the Nile.

Mind racing, I tried to shape an adequate reply.  “Welcome, noble lady,” I finally managed to tell her, mentally.  “I greet you in the name of all Michiganders today.  I do hope you are feeling at home in greater Kalamazoo.”

Crocodile spirit at dusk, moving on the river.

“Okay.  That’s fine, too.  Whatever you think will get the job done.”

Then I felt something move beside me.  Candy had returned.  “Randall?” she was breathing in my ear, not wanting to break the cathedral-like silence of the gallery.  “Are you okay?  You look strange.”

The gila monster twists on his coppery rock.

“Candy,” I said, not taking my eyes off the glass case, “this little lady has just awakened after 30 centuries of dreamless sleep.”

Candy thought for a few seconds.  She frowned.  Then: “Did you smoke another fatty while I was gone?”

“She’s alive, Candy.  Look at her left eye, for shit’s sake!”

As if on command, however, the bulging eyeball had already retreated behind its desiccated lid.

Now Candy took a step toward the glass case.  Reacting, the museum guard stiffened at his post on the other side of the gallery.  “Her eye?  It moved?  What the hell are you talking about, Randall?  I don’t see anything.  She’s a mummy, dipstick.  I think you had another fatty hidden in the car.”

The museum guard was on the move now.  He was a tall man, and obviously undernourished; his brown uniform swung loosely from his narrow bones.  “Candy, I need you to believe me.  That mummy came alive while you were off feeling Cezanne.  She spoke to me.  Inwardly, I mean.”

“I’m leaving you,” said Candy.  “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Excuse me,” said the guard.  His starved visage floated high above us.  “I’m sure you know we don’t talk in the gallery.  Why not visit the snack bar on the Third Level, if you need to talk?”

“That mummy woke up,” I told him, “and now she’s leaving me.”

“It’s actually way overdue,” said Candy.

The guard sent up a weary, cadaverous sigh.  “Sir, please don’t make me call security.”

“Wait a minute.  I thought you were security.”

***

Candy and I parted soon after that.

And then my new life began.

These days, you’ll often find me resting on my padded bench in the Egyptian Room.  The guard watches me intently.  He knows something strange is going on, but he cannot read our thoughts.

I’m back, sweetheart.

            Princess Hohotep has been very alone.

            It’s all right. I’m here now. 

            The cranes are flying above the rooftops at Shah-al-Kazeer.

            I know, darling.  I know.  

                                                ####

I Am the Summer Wind

Something happened on this river, about 11 years ago.

A girl got carried away.  Well, it was more like driven under.  The river was swollen, spring melt, and she tried to raft it on a green-plastic raft, and things went terribly wrong.  She got pinned in a deep spot, and the raft got hung up against a stack of logs with her caught underneath, and the current held everything there for a few minutes, just long enough to take her from us.

There used to be a wooden sign at the river’s edge:  We love you, Patti!

But the years have been passing, of late.  They’re like the river – they just keep on going by you, slow and steady and fast, all at the same time.

She is, she was, she isn’t anymore.  Many of the people who knew her then have moved on, too.  Her older sister Belle . . . she lives down in Texas now.  She married a guy who works in an oil company office outside Houston.  Last I heard, they had a couple of kids already in school.

I ate lunch with her at the high school, Kenmore Heights, during our junior year.

She told us how she was really hot for Brad Pitt.  But of course, that was back when Brad was younger.  (I heard a rumor the other day that he’s balding now and wearing a hairpiece.  Can you believe that shit – Brad Pitt balding?)

She worked down at the Wendy’s, too, after school.  You’d pull up to the drive-in window and there she’d be, big as life and wearing a great big Smile! Button and taking your order on the speaker-phone:

“Hello!  Welcome to Wendy’s!  Have you tried our new Chicken Jubilee Fresh Fruit Salad?  Please place your order when ready!”

It’s strange.  The months turn into years and the river keeps on running through town.  The porch light goes on . . . and a big old spackled moth starts bumping his head against the yellow bulb.  A flurry of leaves rises from the pavement, blows through your headlights.

That time Patti was among us – I want to know where that time is now.  Does it still exist somewhere?  Is there a place where she’s still chattering away on Wendy’s speaker-phone?

I dreamed of her raft one time.  This must have been a year or so after she died.  I dreamed the green plastic, like a great big puffed-up plastic doughnut, and she was stretched out on it and wearing these enormous red sunglasses, and the raft drifted past me on the riverbank, and her soft blonde hair rippled against the breeze –

I tried to call out to her:

“Patti!”

“Patti!”

But no sound emerged.  Nothing but air rushed from between my lips, and try as I might, I could not give that air a voice.

So I stayed behind.

The raft disappeared around the next bend.  I was alone.  I watched the leaves on the weeping willow go rustling away from my breath, and for a moment I understood: I am the summer wind.     

One Is Necessary, One Is a Piece of Fate

 

Brown’s father, dying, struggles to lift his head from the pillow.  “You were always a good kid.  I love you, Frankie. . . .”

Brown’s wiping tears.

Outside the hospital, a windy summer night.  The leaves twist, writhe like tortured snakes. Then a quick patter of rain gleams against the black skins of the oaks.  We’re walking toward the parking lot, Baltimore General.

“Fuck,” says Brown.  “You know . . . he worked his guts out at Beth Steel.”

“I know, Frank.”

“Worked on the Number Two Blast Furnace.  Sometimes . . . more than once – the fucking guy’s hair caught fire.”

“I hear you.”

“I need a drink.”

But he sits motionless behind the wheel.  The rain trickles along the windshield.  This is late July in Crabtown.  “You know what he did, Jerry?”

“What’s that?”

“A couple of weeks before I started the first grade, he takes me down in the basement.  We were living in one of those tiny rowhouses in Dundalk, you know.  Argyle Avenue?  But we had a little basement.  The furnace . . . he takes me down there one night, he says: ‘Okay, you’re starting school – so you gotta learn how to fight.’  He’d hung a heavy punching bag from a rafter.  So he ties the gloves on my hands.  They’re too big, but he ties ’em on as best he can.  He says: ‘Okay.  Hit the bag.’

“I take a swing.  Not much muscle behind it . . . I’m only six years old. He says, ‘Come on, hit it.  That’s the bully on the school parking lot.  Knock his block off, kid!’”

“I take another swing.  Still not much there.  I’m new at this.  He shows me how to throw a punch, a right cross.  ‘You set him up with your left, Frankie – hook him!  Hook him!’  He’s jabbing the air, trying to show me.  Then he comes in with the right cross – the bag jumps: POW!”

Frank sighs.  “My pop.”  He sticks the key in the ignition.  “Now he’s dying.”

What can I say to him?

“He cared about you, Frank.”

He nods.  “His hair burned, Jerry.  That’s how hot it was around the Number Two Blast Furnace.”

*

 

So we drove down to East Baltimore Street, went into the Circus Show Bar.  They had some green and purple strobe lights going in there; the lights broke your face up into patches of sliding color.  The sound system crackled and spat:

 

Daddy was a rollin’ stone;

                        Wherever he laid his hat was his home. . . .

 

A drum rolled somewhere in the back of the club, but not very loud.  “Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the luscious Kitty Kat!”

A tall blonde stepped onto the tiny stage.  She wore silver panties and what looked like two pint-sized fly swatters over her nipples.  She moved to the music some, but she seemed pretty listless for the most part.  There were only four or five guys in the joint, hunched over their $6 draft beers.

Brown was wiping tears again.

We drank a couple of beers.  The next morning Frank learned that his dad had died while we were sitting in the Circus Show Bar.  Around one a.m., the doctor said.

I kept thinking of that punching bag, of Frank’s tiny six-year-old fists going into the bag.  “Come on, slug him!  Knock him on his ass, Frankie!”

Crabtown.  You ever watched a crab scuttle around the bottom of a bucket?  Eyes bulging on their stalks . . . and that big fighting claw twitching and quivering.  That’s the real story, isn’t it?  Isn’t that the name of the game?  That naked claw . . .  quivering?

 

Our Invisible World

This morning around ten-fifteen, I told Dr. Horn that I no longer know what anything is.  That’s how I expressed it.  I said: “Dr. Horn, if you want the truth, I don’t know what anything is.”

He looked at me for a few seconds.  Then he scribbled something on his yellow legal pad.  “That’s interesting,” he said.  “Can you elaborate?”

“All right,” I said.  “Wall Street has melted down.  Am I correct?”

“Well …”

“The economy is in the toilet, and the planet is heating up.  The Wall Street vampires are drinking our blood.  Yesterday we lost a piece of ice the size of Connecticut.  The goddam thing fell off the Arctic Rim, or whatever.  The oceans are rising; we could lose Hong Kong any day.  Plus, I feel a new weirdness in my spine.  My vertebrae aren’t meshing properly.  Yesterday, without meaning to, I suddenly hopped.  I was walking down Jefferson Street, an ordinary morning, and all at once I hopped.  It was involuntary, I assure you.  And there’s more.  When I turn on the TV these days, I have trouble knowing what they mean.  Oh, and I read in USA Today that human beings are actually on fire.  Like, when you eat a sandwich – bologna, lettuce, pickle, a little mustard – what actually happens is, you ignite that sandwich.  Huh? There’s no flame, as such . . . but way down there at the molecular level, oxidation is the order of the day.  And that’s fire.  Oxidation is simply fire.  Remember tenth-grade chemistry lab?  Oxidation.  Anyway, I also read that we’re swarming with bacteria.  We think we’re pretty elevated creatures . . . you know, homo erectus and all that. But the fact is that we’re actually carrying ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells.  We’re bacteria dumps, Dr. Horn.  We’re absolutely groaning under the load.  And that’s pretty humbling, don’t you think?  We’re laboring under these enormous continents of leaky bacterial slush – goddamit, they’ve got us hauling them around town all day!  I’m exhausted just thinking about it, and then I saw this plastic model of a human spine – it’s just a series of hinged plates, you bend over and the plates all readjust like something on an automated assembly line, and you ask yourself: What really happens when I brush my teeth?  If you slosh some mouthwash around in there, do entire cities of bacteria start screaming and dying?  Or would it be better not to think about the bacteria sneaking along your gum line?  You see, it’s pretty damn strange . . . the way we’re told that most of our world is invisible.  Huh?  Huh?  It’s invisible, and the atoms and the various quarks, the top quarks and the bottom quarks, the bosons and the muons – they’re all invisible.  And then the molecules keep jiggering through the Brownian motion – did you have the Brownian motion in the tenth grade?  Here are the molecules, they’re all quivering and twitching and whatnot, and that’s the Brownian motion.  Am I making any sense at all, Dr. Horn?”

Dr. Horn looked at me for a few seconds.  Then he scribbled something on his yellow pad.  He said: “Do you feel anxious, Mr. Doyle?”

I nodded.  “I do.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“Okay,” I told him.  “I hope I can get this across.  It’s like . . . in our invisible world, nothing has any time for itself.  Okay?  Like, I watched this chipmunk the other day.  Just a little guy.  He ran up the side of the bird-feeder, and he looked inside.  Then he darted inside.  He was eating the birdseed – I saw a few husks go flying.  But then he darted back outside and took a look around.  Huh?  He took a look… then he zipped back inside.  Husks flying.  Huh?

“So I asked myself: What’s going on here?  And after a while, I figured it out.  He was eating birdseed . . . but he was also afraid of being eaten.  Any minute, a red-tailed hawk could drop out of the sky, nail his tiny ass, devour him in a New York minute.  So he couldn’t eat for long.  See what I mean?  Quick little bites . . . husks flying.  He had no time for himself, no time at all.  I watched him darting in and out of the bird-feeder, and I thought: If only I could send that little guy on a Bahamas cruise!”

“I see,” said Dr. Horn.  He scribbled something on his yellow pad.  Then he said: “I’m sorry, but I think our time is up.  Please pay the cashier on the way out.”

 

Sisyphus Loves The Rock

 

goddam price of gasoline –

and I’ve got this spastic colon-thing going, these blue pills I take?  The blue  chemical “tricks” the gut muscles into relaxing for a few minutes.  I blame Father Horstnagel.  Down on the molecular level, it would be nice to know what’s happening –

Ever looked closely at a Walking Stick?  Horrifying!  I mean, the goddam thing is alive, okay?  Knobby-headed, and a tiny pair of emerald-hued eyes hanging off the stick?  One eye hanging off each side of the stick?  You’d swear you were looking at a stick, and then the fucking thing moves on you, and you realize: “That’s no stick – that’s a Walking Stick!  That’s an insect programmed to look like a stick!” –

Father Horstnagel wore a black gown, I’m sure it had a name.  He also wore a dorky little three-cornered hat: the biretta.  He hopped around town, collecting money under various pretexts.

Scary?  Hey, the woods are full of weirdness.  Everywhere you look, it’s so strange you want to dial 911.  Call in the Marines!  And then I pick up the USA Today – what do I find?  All these toads are exploding in Belgian ponds.  This is no joking matter.  Thousands of brown-spotted toads, and they’re spontaneously inflating in Belgium, some sort of inner gaseous event, ka-plooey, toad guts in your face.  I totally blame Father Horstnagel, not just for World War I, but also for the general kinkiness, the fruitcake episodes, nobody has a clue, with entire Chinese empires collapsing, toads detonating in every direction, and what do they tell us by way of explanation?  “It’s a flaw in the DNA.”  All right.  Ask yourself: Does that satisfy you?  Does “a flaw in the DNA” satisfy you?  I mean, is it all electrical, or what?  These molecules – I assume we’re talking about electrons zipping in and out of different holding patterns?  Forming ions, and what not?  And that causes the violence?  The insane killing everywhere – and the soft yellow moon on a summer night?  Is there an architect’s rendering we can eyeball, maybe?

Before he came hopping into our town, Father Horstnagel had been a U.S. Army chaplain in the Pacific.  He’d blessed men on ships, men who were about to ride the landing boats onto Japanese-held islands.  While they died, Father Horstnagel went down to the Captain’s table and ate the flapjacks with the Aunt Jemima Molasses.  God hovered in the ventilation shaft, only four feet from the priest’s bobbing head.  Father Horstnagel’s large yellow teeth sank into the flapjacks.  Good syrup.  Sweet, but a tart after-taste.  Full-bodied.  Good syrup.  The first shells landed among the boats, ripping through the young boys in the steel helmets.

It’s not clear how the hominids evolved down through the Holocene to finally culminate in Father Horstnagel.  But they got there.  All those Precious Blood Fathers – a pack of starved Germans – all those lean guys with the fearsome body odor.  Wild, wild, how the hominids somehow evolved all the way to the priest in the black gown and the funny hat.  Don’t ask me to unravel it.  You’ll start my spastic colon going again.

 

 

Waiting for The Call

Epp sat in his cubicle drinking a cup of Awake and waiting for the call.

He looked down: his fingers were quivering a little.

He noticed a spot of yellow sunshine glowing against the dull brown carpet.  About the size of a dime.  The sun was an immense ball of flaming gases, nine million miles distant, and the bright spot consisted of trillions of photons that had been generated within its nuclear furnace.

Epp knew these facts.  They were objectively true, but difficult to believe.    Sunlight.  How strange it seemed.  He remembered a comment by Edward Hopper, the American artist: “All I wanted was to paint the drama of sunlight on a wall.”

The phone rang, and he sat up straight.  Was this it?

“Got your coffee?” asked a bright voice on the other end.  It was only Green, the District Manager.  “Sales meeting in five minutes,” said Green.  “Conference Room B.”

“Okay,” said Epp.

Maybe they’d tell him at the meeting?

No . . . everyone else had been told on the phone.  They’d all gotten calls from Bronson.  “Hi, Carl.  This is Skip Bronson, up in Schenectady?  I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Look at me, Epp told himself.  I’m sick with fear.

            What would a real man do?  That was easy: a real man would lock and load.  He’d fight back.  He’d wander the halls at Corporate, picking off the execs one by one.

Epp took a sip of his Awake.

Three days before, he’d driven around a crushed squirrel on I-28.  The creature had been reduced to a lump of mangled red meat, and nothing more.  That was the reality.  And the sun . . . the sun was a nuclear reactor, that’s all.  A monster furnace floating in space.  And the people in his office . . . they were like ants creeping back and forth across the sand, hunting food.  Hunting red meat from a mangled squirrel.

The phone rang.  He sat up straight in his swivel-chair.  But it was only Marge calling from home.  “Hon,” she said.  “Don’t forget, we’ve got Lindsay’s Honor Assembly tonight.  It’s at six-thirty in the Main Auditorium.”

“I’m on it,” said Epp.  “No problem.”

“Any news yet?”

“Nothing,” said Epp.  “I guess they’re gonna wait until after the sales meeting.”

“Maybe they won’t call you.”

“No,” said Epp.  “They’ll call.  You know the score, Marge.  It’s a done deal.  Sales were down 30 percent last quarter, and I’m near the bottom of the totem pole.”

She sighed.  “Okay.  Good luck, hon.”

He hung up.  Took a last sip of his Awake.  Rose to his feet.  For a fleeting moment, he remembered his father sitting in the wheelchair at Westminster Acres.  Scowling.  “You didn’t get here in time – now it’s too late for ice cream!”

“Sorry, dad.  Traffic backup . . . an accident on I-28.”

“I wanted ice cream!”

He put his hand on the door of the cubicle, and the phone rang.

He was due at the sales meeting . . . should he pick it up or let it go?

He grabbed it.  “Good morning.  Epp here.”

Silence for a moment.  The little dime-sized spot of sunlight had vanished from the carpet.  Then a voice said: “This is Skip Bronson, up in Schenectady.”

“Hey, Skip.  How you doing?”

“Going good, thanks.  But I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

 

20 Questions for Modern Man

 

1.  If he was so smart, why did Sigmund Freud snort up all that cocaine?

2.  We know that ants communicate via chemical odors . . . but do they translate those odors into ant “thoughts” – or only into ant “feelings”?

3.  How should we picture quarks, if we want to get a realistic picture of quantum mechanics?

4.  Does the fact that no future civilization has ever traveled back through time to help us solve our problems prove that our species will vanish before such a civilization can be born . . . or does it simply prove that time-travel is impossible?

5. Whatever happened to the joy people once felt when they pressed Silly Putty against comic strips and then lifted the cartoon images from the page . . . before bending and stretching them grotesquely by pulling on the Putty?

6.  When our ancestors painted wild animals on the walls of caves 25,000 years ago, did they get to erase and “redo” animals they got wrong . . . or were they only given a single shot at each cave painting?

7.  Are today’s birds actually dinosaurs . . . or are they simply a new kind of animal that the dinosaurs became over millions of past years?

8.  Whatever became of Alan Ladd?

9.  Do antibiotics kill germs by depriving them of oxygen . . . or simply by cutting them up with specially designed, extremely sharp molecules?

10.  Could atomic escaping radiation actually produce giant ants powerful enough to take over the New York Citysubway system?

11.  Is our world merely a holographic projection on a “cosmic soap bubble” . . . or is the jury still out on that theory?

12.  If the 1950s radio program The Great Gildersleeve is eventually listened to by sentient beings in a distant galaxy, what will the listeners make of Gildersleeve’s troublesome nephew, Leroy?

13.  Do tropical leaf-cutter ants know they’re actually farmers?

14.  Now that former U.S. President Gerald Ford has gone to his final reward, should we feel remorseful about all those times when we joked that he “couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time?”

15.  If we actually do find the Higgs Boson, do you think the discovery will change your daily routine?

16.  Are historical events (Booth shoots Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, for example) over forever once they’ve taken place . . . or do they continue to occur again and again, but only in their own time?

17.  Did Julius Caesar really say “Et tu, Brute?” when he was stabbed . . . or did somebody make that up later because it was a sound bite?

18.  If squirrels didn’t have cute, fuzzy tails, wouldn’t every public park in America be crawling with hideous-looking rodents?

19.  Isn’t money simply the basic tool we use to push each other around?

20.  If Freud was high on coke day after day, how come everybody now believes in the reality of the human unconscious?