Chapters 1-3: (for a full copy, please contact author at robotvox@yahoo.com)
Chapter one
The first thing I noticed was the smell. Sour, sweet and ammoniated, like a cross between a litter box and a lollipop. At first I thought I must have spilled something in the apartment. I meandered around the place with my nose pointing the way, sniffing around behind couches, down on the carpet, in the corners, next to the fridge, anywhere I could think of. When my search lead nowhere, and I had basically smelled every square inch of the apartment, (and found some pretty disgusting things along the way) I began to suspect that the scent must be on my clothes, so I took them all off, put a towel around my waist and headed to the laundry room, smelling my shirt and pants vigorously before tossing them into the washer. I walked back to my bedroom and threw on some new clothes and BAM! the scent hit me, hard this time.
Whatever it was was definitely in the room. I began scanning for any objects that might be the culprit. I sniffed around my dirty clothes hamper, then began probing deeper, holding a pair of dirty socks under my nose and inhaling deeply.
Nothing.
Still it was coming from somewhere. But where?
I smelled the bed. I smelled the pillows. I smelled the mattress. I looked under the bed. I pulled all of my books off my bookcase. Then I moved the furniture that was against walls into the middle of the room. I emptied the drawers of my dresser onto the bed, and rifled through the endless amounts of stuff that I had allowed to accumulate one the cabinets and shelves. I overturned my room in such a manner for over an hour before finally giving up. I stood back and looked at my room. The mess looked like the handiworks of thugs giving a friendly reminder of an outstanding gambling debt. The aroma still hung hauntingly in the air, intangible and yet undeniably there, somewhere, but where, I did not know.
I tried to read a book, but the scent continued to taunt me. Sometimes I felt like I was on the verge of identifying it, then it would fade away, and I would slam my book down, sitting there trying to remember the scent. Then it would return, but I still couldn’t place it. One thing became certain, if I didn’t find out where it came from soon, I was sure to go insane. In an attempt to preserve my sanity I decided to go for a walk. I was desperate to get away from the smell. I first moved the clothes from washer to drier, giving them an investigative sniff before dropping them in, and then I was out the door.
I walked down my street and around the corner, catching myself from trying to walk to fast. There is only a couple of minutes of walking time from my house to the edge of the residential neighborhood, where the street turns commercial and there is a lot of traffic, so I tried to stroll slowly through the neighborhood, taking my time to look up at the trees and generally enjoying my surroundings.
It was a pleasant summer day. I live in Sacramento, CA, where a pleasant day in the summer is rare. The weather is usually intolerably hot, not that crippling dry desert heat, or the moist, dripping heat such as you have down south, but that preheated oven heat, just right to bake your skull. Which is why most people live in air-conditioned universes here, practically sprinting to their car, then to the air-conditioned store or wherever it is they are going. But I don’t have a car, so I am used to being in the blaring sun.
One time a friend of mine warned me that I could get brain damage if I stayed in the sun too long. I have blonde hair and blue eyes, and so I burn really easily. I thought he was kidding but he said no, too much exposure to the sun could give me a stroke and even kill me. Then he told me I should at least wear sunscreen but I hate that stuff so I just brave the sun. (I don’t feel brain damaged.)
Anyway, like I was saying… it was not cooking outside that day, so I quickly fell into a pleasant sort of trance as I walked, forgetting about the scent entirely. I soon got to the main road and realized I had no destination in mind so I decided to turn around to walk in the residential area some more.
I barely took two steps when it hit me. I stopped dead in my tracks, my nose poised in the air curiously. The dreaded smell. There was a very light breeze, the kind that is so slight that you can’t tell which direction it’s coming from, so I did a few turns in place, facing each direction to try to divine the source. What the hell was that scent? It was musty, and acrid like a rat’s nest. It was slightly fruity, but fermented, and maddeningly distinctive, just on the verge of being recognizable, not unlike déjà vu for the nose. But all my twisting and turning produced no clue.
I suddenly came to a moment of self awareness, realizing that I might appear mad standing on the corner like that, so I continued my walk, back towards the neighborhood, slowly and carefully smelling as I went. I could definitely smell it now, but it was subtle and seemed to rise and fall in waves. My attention started to drift inward as my mind kept spinning, trying to think of what the scent could be, and my frustration was so acute that I walked for about six blocks and into a dead end cul-de-sac, lost in my thoughts. I turned around, and decided that if it was everywhere I might as well go home.
I got to the apartment and set out to clean the mess I made of my room. Once I had it back to a reasonable disorder I did a sweep through the apartment, looking for clues. I realized with some irritation that I didn’t even know what sort of clue I was supposed to be looking for. The smell was outside, after all, so what could I possibly expect to find in here? I turned on the tv, looking for the news to see if there was a toxic spill in the area or something. There was no news on, except for CNN, but that was all national news about the president and war and blah blah.
I switched off the tv. I sat for a moment, rather zenlike, letting my surroundings seep in, then suddenly, in one of those flashes of inspiration that spring up immediately out of nowhere, I pulled my shirt collar out, stuck my head down towards my torso and took a whiff. Laughing out loud, I took a second whiff from my armpit area of my shirt sleeve, and had another good laugh.
It was me. The last place you look, of course. I ran through my last twenty four hours or so in my head, trying to determine what I ate, sticking my head back in my shirt to jog my memory. But this just recreated the déjà vu feeling like before; the recognition of the scent right on the tip of my nose.
I went through my entire menu from the day before. No breakfast. Coffee. An apple. Homemade bean burrito for lunch. Sandwich a little later. Pasta dinner. And then this morning’s coffee.
Nothing unusual. I took another sniff at myself. My initial instinct to go wash myself in the shower was being usurped by an insatiable curiosity. There was something in it that was almost attractive. Perhaps it was the complexity. There was a kind of strength in it, musky and dark brown, almost intimidating, and very masculine, yet there was a ripeness to it as well, slightly sweet, that made it also seem fragile. The recognition of the scent seemed always on the tip of my tongue, or should I say on the tip of my nose. But still I couldn’t quite grasp it. I sat and pondered and searched and probed my olfactory memory banks, procrastinating the shower that I figured I really should be having, and used my nose in ways I never thought imaginable, and the morning soon become afternoon. Not that I noticed. I just kept sniffing and riddling away.
As it happens I had recently lost my job, and had been planning on enjoying a little extended vacation between employments. I was in no hurry to go back to work. I figured I had enough to get by for about six months, or even longer if I moved out and found a place with roommates. But I know myself, and I know that I would rather get off my ass and get another job than live with roommates.
What can I say, I like my privacy. I guess that is not a very common trait for young people (I’m 22). Most people my age are living in shared housing, partying every night, and generally living like there’s no tomorrow (and they are right, there is no tomorrow). I don’t disapprove of the normal lifestyle of my peers, and it’s not that I dislike people, but when you live with them you always have to put up with their presence and their silly annoying habits. I don’t like the feeling of obligation to be social with people, especially first thing in the morning before my coffee. There are numerous other forms of petty inconveniences when you live with people, like when I go to the bathroom, for instance, I enjoy the fact that I don’t have to smell anyone else’s shit but my own.
The way I look at it, I am paying good money for rent, so I deserve to have some space of my own, since something like fifty percent of my income is drained directly into the landlord’s grubby waiting hands. So my fate had been more or less decided for the next six months: to find and maintain the happy medium between penny pinching and enjoying some time off from work.
Even still, unemployed as I was, accustomed as I had become to having no schedule, it was unusual for me to be spending a few hours on end in thoughtful meditation. Hours passed and I just sat there quite lost in my thoughts and vaguely trying to figure out what the scent was. Each time that I started to recognize it, I would feel closer than ever to discovering what it was, and then it would kind of fade away again, leaving me grasping at straws, brainstorming in vain, driving myself insane trying to identify what the hell it was. It was so familiar that it could have been the smell of a girlfriend or something, yet so maddeningly mysterious. By evening, I realized I had skipped lunch and had been thinking the whole time. I took another whiff.
Then a strange idea occurred to me. Maybe I would recognize the taste of it. Since the scent was strongest from the armpit, I leaned over and discovered that it is possible to lick your own armpit. I did not feel at all silly doing this, engrossed as I was at solving this baffling puzzle. As I licked, I felt a light sting on the tip of my tongue, like the dull electricity of a dead battery. Other than that it didn’t taste like much, besides armpit. Ok, I thought, I must be hungry, since I am sitting here tasting myself. (I am vegetarian, so normally eating myself would be against the rules.) I went to the kitchen and whipped something up, and when I finished eating I ended up curling up on the couch and falling asleep.
When I woke up it was dark, and since I do not normally take naps, I was a bit disoriented. I trudged off the couch and looked at the time. It was 10:30 pm, which meant I had slept for about four hours. Then the smell came back to me, causing me to say out loud, “Alright then, I’ll take a shower.” I got in and scrubbed myself extra hard, and when I was done I washed from head to toe a second time.
Goodbye whatever you are.
I dried myself off, and then stood in my room, trying to decide if I was getting up or going to bed. It seemed logical that I would not be tired after a four hour nap, but my body seemed to be saying otherwise, so I finally climbed into bed and soon I was asleep again.
Chapter two
I woke up in the middle of the night (the exact middle of the night, for those that don’t know is 2:37 in the morning). I could still make out a faint presence of the smell, and told myself that I would have to clean the sheets.
I didn’t jump up out of bed, for when you wake up in the middle of the night feeling well rested, you have plenty of time to lay there in the dark and think about what you might like to do. At moments like those, the normal morning routine feels decidedly out of place, everything is closed, there’s nowhere to go, you are like a hostage in your own dark bedroom, waiting for the sun to come and negotiate your freedom.
And so I just stayed in bed with the lights off, smelling a hint of that mysterious musk that had plagued me all day. Strangely, I was no longer bothered by the scent. I guess I had given up trying to understand it anymore, subconsciously admitting to myself that I would never know from where this strange odor had come, or why. I cannot say for sure if it was that, or if I was simply getting accustomed to it, but whatever the reason, it was no longer bothering me as I lay there looking at my ceiling in the dark, and with a calm contented feeling I drifted off to sleep once again.
The next time I woke up was at the first light of sunrise. I felt groggy with oversleep. My muscles felt bunched up and tangled. With a stretch I dragged myself out of bed and headed for the refrigerator. I was out of milk, and the only thing there was to eat for breakfast was cereal, so I grabbed my shoes and headed off for the store.
There is a convenience store right near my house, and the milk there is expensive compared to a grocery store, but that is why they call it a convenience store. You are paying for the convenience of not needing to go all the way to the grocery store, walk all the way to the back of the store where milk is, wait in line, etc. So I didn’t grumble that the store was charging me a little extra for milk. In fact, I felt good supporting my neighborhood corner store, it made me feel like I was doing my part to support a real community rather than a world of corporate monopoly.
I don’t feel right in those big supermarkets. The sterility of the atmosphere is oppressive and depressive. Their philosophy is volume, not inherent value. The fluorescent lighting eerily illuminates the fake colors of the products, it makes you feel that you are living in a Stepford nightmare… the employees greet you with an unreal, undead smile, and “enthusiastically” wish you a nice day or offer to help you find anything, but you always feel like someone is watching them and if they could speak freely they would scream, “Help me!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please!!!!!! Get me out of here!!!!!!!!!!!” and generally go completely hysterical like a lab rat on way too much cocaine. And the looks on the faces of the customers is the worst part of all. They all look like invasion of the body snatcher’s victims… their souls snatched away—maybe still alive elsewhere, being tormented in an even worse hell —and replaced with good consumer habits; their eyes with the brilliant, blank look of marbles, until they see the item they were looking for that matches the coupon in their hand, at which moment you see their eyes percolate spookily for a moment while they compare product and coupon, and then set the item into their shopping cart. As happy as clams.
So I was happy to pay an extra fifty cents to go to the convenience store. I am a regular customer at the store near my house, so I know the cashier and the cashier knows me. I guess he must be the owner, because I never see anyone else working there. He is a very old Chinese man who stands about five feet tall, and he is always smiling. When I first met him he told me his name is Bob, but somehow I doubt that that is his real name. When he sees me come in the store he greets me the same way every time, with the exact same wording, saying, “Welcome to you, my friend” “Thank you, Bob.”
“You are up so early?”
“I had a long nap yesterday.”
“That’s good!” he said, excited. “Nap good for you. Chinese people take a nap for health. America run around, run around, all day.”
“I don’t fall victim to that philosophy myself,” I said.
He chuckled. “You are no victim.”
I returned home with my milk and enjoyed a nice, big bowl of cereal, after which I took all the sheets, blankets and pillowcases off my bed, and took them to the laundry room.
I realized that I forgot my clothes the night before. They were in a pile on top of the dryer. The three washing machines were all in use. I was thwarted. I was holding the contaminated bedding, ready to leave when my neighbor Nancy walked in, wearing a pair of flesh colored short shorts and matching tank top. It seemed to me that she was always wearing that same outfit. Her shorts seemed to hug her shape in all the right places, and made her legs look very delicious.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at the washer dial. It was almost at the end of the cycle, so she just turned them to off, moving her laundry out of the way for me. She’s a sweet girl. I don’t know why she has such a bad reputation. I’ve heard her referred to as a slut. I don’t see what people’s problem is. She’s a nice girl. So she likes to have sex, so what?
I thanked her and told her I could have waited for the cycle to finish. She gave me a sweet smile, with her eyes locked on me with a look of intrigue. And all the time she was wearing those tiny, skin tone shorts. After she moved her laundry out of the way she stayed around, watching me load the blanket and bedding into the washers, and I kept wondering if she was going to say something, so I stayed quiet. After she watched me load the stuff she said “See you,” and darted away.
I went back to my room, and dragged the mattress and pillows onto the balcony to air out.
I was going to defeat this smell, whatever it would take.
I felt a proud satisfaction, something like what a man feels after he surveys some project that he has completed, like a fence that he has built himself. I was confident that the aroma, whatever it was and wherever it came from, was about to experience its last dying gasp of air.
I went back inside and took a shower, scrubbing even harder and more thoroughly than the night before, not afraid to remove a layer or two of skin in the process. It took quite a while, because I wanted to really get rid of the scent so I just kept washing and rewashing. Then I got out of the shower, dried myself and then smelled the towel before I hung it up on the rack. Then I went to my room, put on fresh clothes and dug up a box of incense that had been sitting unused for years—a gift that a friend brought back from India but I never used because I don’t really like the smell of incense. But these were extenuating circumstances, so I lit up a bundle of three sticks and made a procession through the apartment, walking slowly as I went. I pretended I was a catholic priest as I did this, mumbling in fake Latin and making the sign of the cross wherever I turned, moving the bundle of incense in small circles, chanting, “domine veritus absconditus pluribus unum,” and thinking to myself, “I’ll exorcise you yet, thee demon fragrance!”
After finishing this little ritual, I put the incense back at the bottom of the drawer where I found it, where it would hopefully remain for another few years. Then I strutted around the apartment victoriously, acutely feeling that ‘I just finished building a fence’ male pride. I walked over to my stereo and put on one of my favorite records: Lawrence Welk Classics.
Now the reader must be saying to himself, “How old is this guy, again?” I will admit that my music collection would mislead the observer to assume I am elderly. But the truth is, I just love that old time music. It really takes me somewhere when I listen to it, like everything around me could be going nuts and I can put on some classic tunes and then I am far away. There is something real about that kind of music, which you just don’t hear in modern music. I guess there could be some good new stuff out there, but who has the time to listen to all the garbage to find it? No, back in the old days, music had something special about it, something that spoke of the soul of the person making the sound, and spoke to the soul of the listener. I am no musician so I don’t know what that sound is, or why it is, but I know it when I hear it come melting out of a set of speakers.
The old music reminds me of my grandpa, who used to always listen to Cable 960 on his AM radio, KABL (a station which unfortunately is now six feet under, if that metaphor can be used to describe a radio station). While he was listening, no matter what song came on he would shout out, “Oh gravy, I remember that one! They don’t make music like that any more, my boy!” And he ALWAYS knew who the artist was. As a young boy I was always astounded by his musical knowledge and memory. These were songs written fifty, seventy, or even a hundred years ago, but in my grandpa’s mind it was as if it had happened yesterday. To see him reminisce, to see the life sparkle in his eyes with each new song, made feel both happy and sad for him at the same time. You could tell when you looked at him that those times where long gone.
Of course back then, when he was alive I didn’t really like that kind of music, which sounded like a bunch of hokey cheese to me, as it would to any normal teenager. But when he died, I began to tune in to KABL, and listening to it became like a way for me to hang out with him, or at least with his memory. And nowadays I almost never listen to new music. There something about the music of those old days that has so much more substance; the emotion of the string sections, the beautiful melodies, the lyrics.
And the singers, who’s velvet voices came gliding over the dancefloor, with the ability to melt your heart in an instant. I wish the standards were like that today. But sadly today there is no more KABL, except on the internet. For some inexplicable reason, AM radio dropped its most valued gem: “beautiful music”, as KABL used to call it. Now when you tune in the AM dial you can hear sports, news, and talk talk and more talk. Sad. So now that grandpa is gone, at least I can appreciate “the good old days” almost as if they had been my old days, through his music collection.
And that is just what I did. Lawrence Welk and his Orchestra played, (no more criticism from the audience, please. All you nay-sayers and squareness judgers should only know that there was not a single non-genius musician sitting in that 1942 orchestra,) and I sat back and enjoyed the sweet, sweet melodies like you wont find now or ever again.
This type of music has the ability to take me away, and as the music played my mind drifted to thoughts of my grandpa, recalling a story he told me when I was 15 that has stuck in my memory ever since. He had always claimed that he was a rich and successful con-man back in the Thirties and Forties, and this story dealt with the famous con known as the wire, popularized in the movie The Sting. This is how my grandpa told the story:
“So I was in Chicago… after the war was over the economy was pretty bad, and so we grifters had to get creative to keep food on the plate. There just wasn’t much money around to be conned anymore. You couldn’t live off of small cons anymore. Then the depression came and economically things got even worse, but I owe my success to the great depression, because that is when I realized that the only way that I was going to survive was to go after the really rich. So I set out to catch me a big fish, working as a roper for the store we were operating, and for an entire year I combed cruiseships and first class trains, not that I could afford those things yet. Most ropers would actually ride the trains and ships, but I was still an up and comer, so I had to wait down at the docks or the train platforms and when everyone was disembarking I would mingle in with the crowd, to appear as if I had been a passenger. I did this for months, but I just couldn’t find the high roller I was looking for. I tried a golf club as well, posing as a dentist. “Dr. James Halloway” I called myself.
The day came that I finally found my mark while I was at the gas station, of all places. We got to talking, he was the son of an oil tycoon and invested his inheritance in war bonds, and generally followed the good advice of his broker and so came out on top when most of the country was losing their shirts. After I got to know him a little more and determined him to be a suitable mark, and gained his confidence, I pitched him the idea, explaining that I had a buddy who managed a Western Union office that receives and broadcasts the results of all the horse races coming in over the wire. All my buddy had to do was stall the transmission for a couple of minutes, just long enough to make a phone call to tell me the winning results and for me to place the bet.
Of course, none of this was real. The Western Union office and the bookie joint were fake, but would be filled with professional con-men acting their various roles., The only thing real is the mark’s money, but our job is to make sure that he believes that a real Western Union official is giving us the tip, and that we are betting in a legitimate gambling office. So I took him down to our “Western Union office” to meet our man, Four Finger Frank. Of course during the con I didn’t call him by such a coarse nickname. In the con he was Frank Welling. The mark seemed to be swallowing everything, so we invited him for a test run, in other words, we set up the time to receive the phone call and went down to the “bookie” to place a small bet, just to prove that the scheme would work. We had a respectable looking lounge, nothing fancy or glamorous because hardcore gamblers know there is nothing glamorous about gambling. We had a crew of 12 men acting as cashiers and gamblers, and we used counterfeit bills as well as real money so we could make it look like people were making huge bets, a hundred-thousand dollars and larger. The mark just ate it up. He agreed to finance a big bet on the following day. He was anxious but seemed to trust us, and I was starting to get that itch, that feeling that a big chunk of dough was soon going to be in my hands. We ironed out the details of percentages and made a handshake and an appointment for the next day.
I was dancing in my shoes, for he was going to put up 40,000 dollars, ten times bigger than anything I had ever conned. All I had to do was wait till tomorrow and I’d be able to take a bath in hundred dollar bills! Once we had the mark’s money, the twist of the con is simple. The results of the race go like this: our horse and another are neck in neck, and our horse is announced as the winner… but wait, that is not the official call, it is a photo finish, and a few moment later it is revealed that our horse is not the winner after all. Our inside man at the Western Union must not have paid attention to the whole broadcast, being in such a hurry to call us with the results. That is the mark’s cue to crumble, emotionally and financially. If he goes back to the Western Union at that point of course our inside man is long gone. I pulled this con a dozen times before, for much less cash of course, but I felt strangely confident, even though I was dealing with such large numbers, that everything would go as smooth as a baby’s bottom.
One thing I could have never counted on, however, is what I saw in the mark’s hands the next day when we met near the bookie office. Keep in mind that transistor radios—the portable kind that are small enough that you can carry them around with you—had not been invented yet. In fact they would not hit the market until, oh, about 1960, a good thirty years later. If such a thing existed, the whole wire con would be impossible, because a mark could simply bring his radio along with him and listen to the sports announcements himself, and then he would find out that our results and our whole operation was just a bunch of baloney.
So imagine my surprise to see my mark standing on the street corner in 1932 holding a little miniature radio up to his ear, listening to the sports program. I’ll tell you something, in all my years of the trade, I never felt so close to losing my cool. I did my best to conceal my panic, trying to disguise it as wonder and admiration for this little device. I asked him where on earth he got such a thing.
“My brother is an inventor, a wiz at electronics; he made it for me.” He handed me the device to admire.
Now was the time to think fast, my boy.
The thing was too big for a pocket, so I wouldn’t be able to pickpocket it from him. I fiddled with the buttons, hoping I might be able to break one off “accidentally”, but it was built solid. Then I had an idea, but I needed some time by myself to pull it off. I looked at my watch. The pay phone would ring in three minutes. So I said, “I have to go to the bathroom. Why don’t you take the call for me, and I’ll go use the toilet at the lounge and meet you there in a couple minutes. Just answer the phone when it rings and he’ll give you the horses name. Simple as that.”
He agreed and I rushed back into the gambling lounge. “Joey, give me a revolver from back there.”
I grabbed one of our gamblers off the floor and handed him the gun. “This is important,” I say. “Listen carefully. I got a new job for you. There is a guy in blue suit either on or near the phone outside. Go hold him up for his wallet, but most importantly, he has a radio, a little one that he is carrying. You have to get that radio from him, no matter what. But just make it look like a routine mugging. If nobody is at the phone you have to find the guy with the radio. He’ll be heading this way. Hurry up! Meet back here in thirty minutes.”
So my mark showed up a couple minutes later, with a story of how he just got robbed. “Good thing he asked me for my wallet, and not my cash,” he smiled, pulling out the envelope full money, giving it a satisfied pat.
And that is how I narrowly averted disaster in the second largest con I ever pulled.”
What a cool grandpa. Most people think of grandparents as hopelessly square, while mine used to fleece people for thousands of dollars. I wish he was still alive, I would ask him to tell me more about his life.
Oh well, at least I have his vinyl.
Chapter three
When the album side ended, I considered flipping it over, but then I thought it would be good to take advantage of the early morning while it was still nice out, so I grabbed my wallet and went for a walk. When I stepped outside verything was bright and blurry, painfully so. I shielded my face with my hands and squinted my eyes, but it was all in vain, I felt blind. Wherever I looked I could only see bright white, with some vague darker shapes. After a few moments my eyes were still having a hard time adjusting, so carefully, blindly, I made my way to the ninety-ninecent store and pick up some sunglasses. This may make me sound really cheap, but the thing is I always lose my sunglasses. Every pair I have ever owned has been left behind, sat on, or simply vanished, so I know better than to invest any real money in a pair.
I started to hum “Calcutta” in a hurried tempo as I walked, which made my pace quicken. When I approached the busy intersection near my home I had a pretty solid gate going, and the momentum of the song was trying to propel me forward, but I was suddenly stopped dead in my tracks by a dog—a german shepherd on a leash—who at the moment he saw me began barking furiously, lunging against his leash towards me. Suddenly my vision became amazingly sharp. I looked at the owner, who was doing all he could to hold the dog back. He gave me an annoyed yet apologetic look while he struggled with his dog. I took a few steps back and tried to smile unaggressively at the dog and owner. The dog became somewhat calmer, but maintained a continuous thick growl, all the while keeping its eyes glued on me with a look of pure malice.
“I am so sorry about that. I don’t know what is wrong with him, he’s usually a sweetheart.”
“No problem,” I said and proceeded to the other side of the street. The dog began to bark again, with renewed enthusiasm, and just as I was stepping on to the sidewalk across the street, the dog managed to get loose from his owner and darted after me. I heard the man shout, “Cliff!”
That must have been the dog’s name. I quickly looked around me for some kind of weapon of defense. Seeing nothing bigger than a pebble, I did what my instinct told me to do, and ran. I was glad to have the advantage of legs that were longer than the dogs, and after running for about a block and a half I looked behind me. He was still in pursuit, his body language in perfect harmony with his clear intent: he was going to catch me.
Just as I had turned to look I saw him running into the intersection, at the same moment a pickup truck was coming unavoidably dead ahead, and in the time it takes to blink an eye the truck hit the dog square on, without even a moment to swerve. The driver immediately pulled over in a panic, while the dog’s owner ran into the street, crouching over the still body, and mumbling/sobbing his name. He made a physically awkward attempt to embrace the dog, and then it seemed to suddenly hit him that he was dead. He stood up, hanging his head in a broken way and staring down at the dog.
He leaned down again and picked the dog up in his arms, and carried it over to the side of the road, and carefully set him down on the sidewalk. He then went over to the man who was now standing outside his truck, and apologized, trying to assure the driver that it was not his fault. The driver returned an apology, and the dog’s owner insisted that there nothing the driver could have done. He asked if there was any damage to the vehicle, and the driver said no without even looking at his truck. The dog’s owner had blood all over the front of his shirt, the sight of which really seemed to intensified the driver’s sympathy.
I was still across the street, just frozen to my spot in a sort of shock, feeling utterly to blame yet innocent at the same time. Essentially I was an innocent bystander who had been victimized, coerced by random circumstance into the role of indirectly causing the poor dogs death.
The whole scene from the original confrontation with the dog to the actual accident had all taken place in the time of about thirty seconds. It had happened so fast, and now the scene replayed in my mind, and as I relived the moment of the dog racing towards me, I felt acute regret for choosing to flee. But what choice did I have? It was obvious that the dog’s intent was to attack me, so running was my only real option. And how could I have known that he would get off his leash? Then I painfully realized that if only I would have ran back towards the neighborhood rather than into traffic the dog would still be alive, but like I said it all happened so fast. I didn’t have a time to think and at the moment it was happening the dog’s safety was the last thing on my mind. Well, no point in regretting my actions, I told myself, unconvinced. Besides, I argued, it was the owner’s responsibility to keep the dog on the leash.
The man who had been driving the pickup got back in his truck and drove off. The man with the bloody shirt walked back over to his dog. He stood there looking down at the dog in bewilderment, apparently unsure of what to do next. As I saw him standing there, I felt like I was reading his thoughts, I saw him imagining himself carrying the dog all the way home, trailing blood the whole way. At last my conscience got the better of me, I couldn’t stand on the sidelines anymore, so I walked over to him. My reluctance mounted and grew with each step closer to the man. Up to that point he did not appear to notice me standing across the street, perhaps he thought I was still running away even after the accident. When he saw me approaching, he glared at me coldly, accusation all over his grief stricken face. I shook my head regretfully, and opened my mouth, about to tell him how very sorry I was about what happened.
“Why did you run?” he practically screamed at me.
“Because your dog was attacking me.”
“So you run into the road?”
“Look,” I said, “I came over here to apologize to you, but you are obviously not thinking straight, because there is no way that this was my fault.” I paused for a moment, but his face was still cold. “Look, I didn’t do anything to taunt your dog. When he started to attack I did the only thing I could think of which was to get away. If I had not run you would be answering to an assault charge right now.”
“And my dog would be alive,” he added.
At this point I was too angry about his accusations to say sorry.
“If you kept a hold of his leash he would still be alive, too.” As soon as this left my lips I felt bad for saying it. I am not an asshole. I wasn’t trying to blame the guy, but the way he was trying to put the blame on me had pushed me into a corner.
He must have found some truth in what I was saying, for he stopped himself from whatever it was he was about to say and turned away from me. His face a mix of anger and melancholy, he scooped the dead dog off the sidewalk, cradling it in both arms like limp oversized baby and took his leave.
What an ass, I thought. I was going to offer my help dealing with the body, like to keep watch over the dog while he fetched (sorry) a vehicle. But he wanted to go the hard way, I guess. As I watched him walking away, I felt a peculiar combination of pity and contempt for him. Some people don’t deal well with trauma, and they fly off in a rage against whoever might be around to receive it. Of course the driver was spared his aggression, perhaps he figured the driver had already suffered enough. But what about me? I could understand him being upset, carrying his dead dog home and all, but he didn’t have to be such a prick. My mind bounced and conflicted between feelings of remorse and sorrow and the defensiveness I felt at that man’s callous behavior.
I really felt like sharing this incident with somebody, so I decided to go over to my friend Greg’s house. But first I needed sunglasses. I continued on my way to the ninety-ninecent store. I ended up in the checkout line behind this woman who was buying like fifty or sixty of those little miniature wine bottles. Her shopping cart was piled nearly to the top with mini wines. Of course as luck would have it each individual bottle of wine had to be scanned separately. For some messed up reason the cash register system at the ninety-nine cent store will not let you punch a transaction into the machine such as, say: fifty bottles of mini red wines @ 99 cents, instead each item had to be scanned individually. Either that or the cashier just didn’t know any better. Or it is possible that she gets a twisted enjoyment out of making customers lives go very slowly at her register. Either way, it made my shopping trip for one item seem to last infinitely longer than would seem reasonable. The cashier made small talk with the woman as he scanned the bottles. **BEEP** “Somebody likes red wine…” **BEEP** “My mother likes red wine too…” **BEEP, BEEP** “Do you ever drink Two-Buck Chuck?” **BEEP**
(I bet her mother doesn’t really like red wine. But that’s what working in our capitalist society does to you. You will make up stories about your own mother just to be polite.)
Eventually, finally, the most anticipated moment arrived. The customer in front of me was well on her way to becoming a wino, and it was my turn. I pulled the glasses off of my head and handed them to the cashier. She scanned them and said, “Would you like a bag for that?”
Huh? Is she paying attention? Did she not just witness the handy application I already had for my new purchase? “No, thanks, I am going to wear them right now,” I said, smiling. She seemed genuinely reluctant to not give me a bag for a moment, then shrugged off her bewilderment and went on to her next transaction.
I made my way to Greg’s. He is older, in his thirties, but I like him. Being out of a job lately has given me more opportunity to get to know him, since all my other friends are usually at work or school.
Greg is already retired. He designed some software that was bought by Microsoft, which apparently provided well enough that he could quit working. But I should warn you that he is kind of weird. Like for instance he doesn’t smoke pot but he always has a bunch of it around, not for sale, but just to smoke people out with, and pipes and bongs laying around everywhere. He reads really weird books. He’s usually reading three or four books at a time, so he will have a sci-fi novel, and then some obscure Russian philosopher, then maybe some insane book of complex mathematics, and finally a non-fiction book about cyborg technology.
He never really goes out, in fact it was from hanging out with him that I learned any and all restaurants will deliver food to your door if you offer them enough incentive. He is really small and skinny, giving him the appearance of some kind of twisted elf, but with a disproportionately large, round head, making him look more like an alien. His hair and eyes are very dark, and sometimes when he looks at you it’s like your are looking into the eyes of a reptile.
His voice is squeaky.
I don’t think he has ever had much luck with girls, I’ve never seen him with one or heard him mention anything about girls. I don’t think he is gay either though. More like asexual.
I showed up at his doorstep eager to unload the story of my crazy morning. There was no answer at his door. I looked at my watch and realized that it was only eight in the morning! With all the excitement of the dog thing I totally forgot that I woke up so early.
I retreated guiltily from his porch, hoping I didn’t wake him. I went to the café instead, and the barista asked me what I was doing up already. It smelled like burnt bagels. I mumbled something about falling asleep early and then went to my usual corner of the café.
I didn’t have my book with me, which is usually an indispensable part of my morning coffee, but that was ok because I was still a little bit shook up from the accident and I don’t think I would have been able to stay focused on a book if I had one. The dog incident was still on my thoughts like a parasite, and I started to really feel bad for the guy. I kept questioning my own guilt, then tried to justify myself, citing the fact that the dog had barked at me, while I walked away calmly. He chased me, and I ran.
It was not my fault, I told myself. He was an aggressive dog. End of story. But then like a photo in my head I would see the guy’s bloody shirt and start to feel awful again.
That’s why I don’t have pets. I don’t handle loss well, and pets are pretty much guaranteed to die on you, unless something totally unexpected intervenes. That’s also why I don’t like to get too involved with girls. It’s not that I have anything against girls. But I know better than to let myself care about them. Girls are guaranteed to leave you a lot sooner than pets, and they know it. Therefore I will not let it progress to anything beyond shallow and insignificant. I still respect them and all, but don’t expect me to go on a limb for one. It’s not worth the heartache.
The café, where I suppose I could be considered a regular, is called Liquid Pill. It is an eclectic place. There are a lot of office spaces nearby, but with a rare absence of Starbucks in the neighborhood, bringing in a lot of professionals wearing suits and ties, or yuppies. But the other half of the regular customers are YUPS, or young urban professional slackers. They came in various shapes, sizes and dress codes; facial piercings, different colored hair every week, artists who are generally obsessed with the decline of western civilization, nerdy emo kids, college dropouts, pot dealers, skaters, angst-ridden poet girls who will talk your ear off if you let them, long haired neo-bohemians with acoustic guitars, and goth girls with ghostly face make-up and dyed black dreadlocks. In short, anyone who has not been rejected by society so much as has chosen to reject society.
For instance, a common phrase you might overhear at the Pill would go something like this: “I don’t vote… the only thing voting does nowadays is placate the voters into thinking that they have a voice in things, some influence on the government process, when in reality they are really just a bunch of sheep allowed to make a choice between the crook behind door number one and the crook behind door number two.”
I probably hear this statement in one form or another at least once a week, but it doesn’t faze me—except to the degree that I am fazed by how I always seem to hear the same conversation. I never enter into such discussions, since they are almost sure to lead nowhere, except leaving you feeling frustrated and powerless.
Not that I have great faith in our voting system, the lesser of two evils usually equates to the evil of two lessers, as Michael Moore once put it. But I just don’t see how sitting around a café all day bitching about the system, and justifying one’s inaction as a form of imposed tyranny has any value or purpose. Why don’t all these people who are so incensed with the way things are become Senators or something? Is there a government conspiracy that somehow prohibits a progressive thinker from entering into politics? No. I am sorry to say but there simply is no such conspiracy. If you got off of your ass and got involved in politics maybe I would have a real candidate to vote for, for once.
I sat back and watched the customers come and go. I involuntarily eavesdropped on a ridiculous conversation that a young high school girl was having loudly on her cell phone at a table right in front of me. It was apparently about a party, or something. “Yeah, I couldn’t believe how crazy it was last night… I know, there were so many cute guys there… Can you believe that Shelly showed up with him? Oh my god, I know… Whatever, she can have him… I’m glad he hooked up with that bitch… Oh nothing, maybe go to the river… What are you going to wear on Saturday?”
I changed seats in frantic annoyance.
I had two cups of coffee and ended up being at the café for a couple of hours. I thought about dogs and girls and death and lazy politics until the caffeine propelled me on.
Ten o’clock might still be a little early for Greg, I thought. It is weird being up so early. I feel like I should be eating breakfast or something, but I already did that. And it’s too early for lunch. Maybe just a little snack in the meantime. I headed home and my little snack ended up being lunch. After I ate I wandered around the apartment for a while, pacing in a deliberate yet distracted way, sitting down now and then and getting back up again, sometimes stopping in mid-pace for no apparent reason. I carried on like that for the longest time. At some point the thought occurred to me that I was actually starting to get bet bored with not having a job.
I took a short nap. That was two days in a row that I had a nap, highly unusual for me. After the nap I realized that I was feeling refreshed, and thought about Bob’s words of wisdom. “Chinese people take a nap for health.” I was never a nap person, but I started to think maybe I had been missing out on something. After all, I love to sleep. I love the feeling just after I wake up, lying in bed. I like to stretch and yawn and cuddle up with my blanket. I like to enjoy my bed and the experience of sleepiness while I’m waking up. But naps always seemed a little too indulgent, perhaps precisely because I enjoy sleep so much I am afraid of becoming hooked on naps, dozing my day away, and not having a job makes this concern even more valid. I could easily slip into the habit of dreaming away most of my life.
I looked at the time, and called Greg, saying that there was something I wanted to tell him. He told me to come over, and don’t forget the coffee. I walked to the Pill and ordered another coffee for myself and one for Greg. When I showed up a few minutes later at Greg’s door with my new, cheap, fake Ray-bans on, holding a cup of coffee in each hand, he apparently thought it would be funny to give me a great big hug. I tried frantically to steady the cups and not lose the lids. The lids remained on the cups. He released me from his insect like limbs and led me inside.
“What’s new?” I asked.
“I got a new toy. It’s an alarm clock,” he said, disappearing into his bedroom and returning a moment later with a cheap plastic bust of a black man with a goatee and a mean look on his face, and a little LED display screen on his chest.
“Is that Samuel L. Jackson?” I asked.
He looked at me and grinned, a mischievous look in his eyes which seemed to imply a slight nod of the head. He set the clock down on the kitchen table in front of us, plugged it in the wall and set the alarm to go off a minute later. We both sat there quietly staring at the display screen, which read 11:38, and waited for the minute to change. Greg’s expression was frozen in amusement, while his eyes moved back and forth with mechanical timing from me to the clock.
The minute changed, and a sample of Samuel L. Jackson’s voice looped through the lo-fi speaker. “Get up, muthafucka… Get up, muthafucka… Get up muthafucka… Get….” Greg’s face unfolded into pure boyish ecstasy, like he had just robbed a candy store. He switched off the alarm.
“That is too cool. But when do you ever use and alarm clock? You get out of bed when you feel like it.”
“You never know. What, are you jealous? We are in the same boat, aren’t we?”
“I would hardly call our situations ‘the same boat’. More like I’m in a rowboat and you are in a cruise ship. Even if my life expectancy was only supposed to be 30 years old it would still be too early for me to retire. I’m just trying to live off my humble savings for the next few months, but it is a far cry from retirement.”
“Ok, you can be jealous. Anyway I still have to wake up on a schedule from time to time, like when I need to be at the airport or something like that.” He got up and we relocated to the living room.
“So what’s new with you?” he asked in his typical hyper tone. “You said you had some news to tell me?”
I told him the story of the dog and the pickup and the dog’s asshole owner. When I got to the end, with the guy angrily walking away with the pooch in his arms, Greg could no longer hold himself back and began cackling with that unique laugh of his, which sounds like a cross between a crow cawing and a mouse squeeking.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still smiling fiendishly. “The whole thing must have been pretty traumatic, huh?”
“Seeing the dog get smacked down like that by the truck was, but then the guy’s reaction clouded over the whole event, so by the time it was all over I was more disturbed at having been blamed for the accident than anything else.”
“Don’t blame yourself. That guy just has his head up his rear. If you went around worrying about every guy who had his head up there you wouldn’t have time go to the bathroom. People in this world will always be there to bring you down, in life you can count on that. The trick is not to let them.”
“Do you think that’s true of everybody?” I asked, but what I really was thinking was: “Do you think I am bound to fuck you over some day too?”
“Better to count on it and be pleasantly surprised by the ones who prove you wrong.”
I didn’t want to buy in to Greg’s brand of pessimism. I would like to think that people are generally good hearted, and that being an asshole is a learned behavior arising from a combination of negative circumstances.
“You think so?” I said, looking at him doubtfully. He looked a little surprised at my protest. “You don’t think that is a bleak outlook?“
“I think in life the best policy is to be prepared for the worst case scenario.”
“I prefer to give human nature the benefit of the doubt,” I said.
“Then you have to be prepared to be let down.” The way he said this, the tone of his voice and general demeanor did not actually sound grave or pessimistic. He said it as if he were speaking a simple fact, one without any sort of emotional ramifications. I wondered if I would feel that way when I was his age. I tried to picture myself in my thirties, explaining to some kid that life is no bowl of cherries, and how you shouldn’t trust anyone and all that. I couldn’t picture myself in those shoes.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be let down. My grandpa was a con man. He was let down (financially, at least) if someone turned out to be a genuine good person. He relied on people’s innate dishonesty to make a living. He was basically enticing his victims to cheat someone else out of money, so that when they got swindled it was like their own karma coming back to them.” He looked at me skeptically, agnostically, at having used the word karma. But I could tell he knew what I was saying. I went on. “The con game is neat like that, it has a sort of self-contained morality of its own. It’s almost justified in an underworld sort of way. It’s like they say: you can’t cheat an honest man. But my grandpa of all people was the first to admit that people in general are not fundamentally dishonest. According to him, most people are not susceptible to the con because they are naturally inclined to a certain ethical code of behavior, a sort of automatic moral sense of conscience that in fact rules their day to day conduct. His weapon against that conscience was their own greed, and only with years of experience was he able to predict with a reasonable amount of accuracy by looking at a person whether or not their greed would outweigh their ethics. He said that determining that was at least as important as gaining their confidence, because in the preparation of a bigger swindle one would end up spending a substantial amount of money and time on the person to gain their trust, and you don’t want to waste all that valuable energy on someone who is going to back out for moral reasons. Of course, as my grandpa used to say, it’s never the ones you would suspect. He has conned clergymen, and been dismissed by bootleggers and even shadier criminals.”
“I would totally agree with your grandpa—rest his soul—but we are not discussing people’s fundamental honesty, but rather, whether or not they are pricks.”
“Well, I just hope I am not a bitter old man like you someday,” I said, simultaneously jesting and serious.
Greg got up and went to the stereo. Soon a loud, atonal, distorted mayhem of sound was assaulting us.
“What is this?” I shouted.
“The Sodomy Spiders.”
Sheets of aggressive noise poured from the speakers.
“What is this?” I grabbed a book called The Quantum Bang from the coffee table. I was hoping I could draw him in to a conversation so he would turn the music down. My plan worked. He reduced the volume until the music was only a dull screeching mess, and came back over to the couch.
“This is a great book. It’s about physics, astronomy and quantum mechanics.” It was obvious that he was passionate about the subject. He was giddy with excitement as he spoke, bouncing slightly up and down in his seat, and with that frantic tone of voice that he always acquired when talking about something he was interested in. “The author talks a lot about black holes. You know they can apparently swallow up whole galaxies, planets and everything, even whole universes, according to this guys theory.” He smiled at me in a sinister way.
“Don’t look so happy,” I said. “An event like that would have a negative effect on your savings account.”
“I don’t want the world to implode. I just find it amazing to think of the immensity of such a mammoth force in the universe capable of utter destruction, and that that force is gravity, a force that all of life and energy are dependent on to some degree.”
“The universe is a powerful place,” I said somewhat lamely.
“But see how perfect of a design it is? The universe having this latent force, with a potential of complete destruction, and then you have mankind, and the immanent threat—or should we say, potential—of nuclear annihilation. The whole thing is like a perfect mirror, the microcosm and the macrocosm sharing this potentially utterly destructive nature. It’s like we are ants; crawling around helplessly with no real ability to change our destiny, because we are preprogrammed to be a reflection of the universe, to be actors in this cosmic drama whether we want to or not, and whether or not we are even aware of it.”
“Can you reconcile that with the whole free will thing?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” He slowly drawled, at once nasal and boisterous. “Like I said, in a way we are like ants, but we still do have a remarkable amount of personal freedom of choice. The predetermined aspect could perhaps be better described as a medium of expression for the arts, like an artist who basically is confined within the inherent limitations of that medium.”
“That’s one thing I love about visiting you. I always get to live vicariously through the books you read without having to read them myself, getting these wonderful little condensed synopses.”
I grabbed another book from the coffee table and looked at the title: The Hundredth Ape, read the title. “What’s this one?”
“That was a great book. I just finished reading it last night. It’s a sci-fi novel, sort of, about how these scientists are doing all kinds of genetic tests on apes, and they start manipulating their DNA, splicing in certain human genes to make the apes smarter, to try and understand more about human genetics. A lot of weird shit goes down within that sub-plot, but eventually they create a breed of apes that they can communicate with verbally, eventually teaching them to speak English. So they come to find that they are actually smarter than humans, and the apes come to tell the scientists their whole history, how they had at one time lived a more domestic way of life; inside houses, making tools, etc. They lived like this for thousands of years in relative peace, and then genetic mutation occurred, producing a repulsive looking offspring, born with no hair and with grotesquely disfigured heads and feet.
“At first the phenomenon was thought to be a random mutation, but over the years these mutants began to reproduce and expand, altering the gene pool until eventually the genetic probability of having one of these freak hairless offspring was one in four.
“Once the hairless apes represented approximately a quarter of the society’s population, they began to splinter from the rest of the apes. They set up a colony on the outskirts of their native area. This was not the result of a sense of exclusiveness or elitism, but these new apes had problems specific to their own kind, such as the need for clothing to help insulate them and protect their exposed and highly sensitive skin. So the new apes, referred to as skinwalkers by the regular apes, slowly began to evolve their own society. There were disagreements amongst them, often stemming from the increased need of shelter for survival, and many of these new apes had rather violent tendencies and a hostile nature, and their society was becoming increasingly savage, with physical attacks being a common occurrence. And so a leader soon grew to power. Attempting to create some order, he tried to find a common ground among these creatures, but as soon as peace was in sight some new conflict would arise, dividing these beasts once again.
“That is when this leader came up with the idea of stirring up a war against their ancestors. He reasoned that the only way to unify them was to create a common enemy. So he began waging propaganda around the original apes, which he named Animals. The Animals, he convinced them, were dark hearted creatures who held all hairless apes in contempt. They were not to be trusted; in fact, there was every reason to suspect that they were planning an attack on their defenseless village. And so the new apes, who had given themselves the name Human, meaning non-Animal, began to prepare for a battle with the Animals. They stockpiled stones as ammunition, and began to develop training operations in which they practiced the art of fighting.
“When they had gained a degree of skill at fighting, and when the idea began to dawn on them that there was no immanent attack, the leader convinced them that they should attack the Animals before they had a chance to attack them. So they began to train anew, studying the habits of the Animals, planning various strategies for attacking and retreating, surveying the terrain, etc, and finally the leader led them in an attack of their old home.
“It was a slaughter. The apes had never heard of such a thing as war, and never had to face an army of attackers. To them violence was a simple survival instinct necessary for living in the jungle. They were defenseless, and when they saw these crazed, hairless apes charging at them by the hundreds, they were scared witless, and scattered into the jungle. The new apes settled in the abandoned homes, and with the intent of keeping the peace among his subjects, the leader would now and then organize an offensive mission into the jungle. But the apes who retreated were smart, and so out of fear of being discovered they avoided building new houses but instead began living in trees. They were spread out and hidden enough that the skinwalkers could not achieve any real victory over them. “So for survival the original apes continued to live in small groups, in trees, and completely abandoned their old way of lives. They lost their ability to have a social network; the entire concept of community was necessarily abandoned. They also had to sacrifice all their knowledge of technology, because they knew that if they continued to produce a bunch of stuff it would be like leaving a trail making it easier for the skinwalkers to find them. They camouflaged themselves in the jungle, becoming animals, basically; simplifying their lives to such and extant that they were virtually invisible to their evil cousins, and thus they became what we know as apes today. And of course we know what happened to the skinwalkers.”
“So then what happens?” I say, expectantly.
“What’s that?”
“What do the scientists do when the apes tell them all that stuff? How does the book end?”
“You want me to tell you the whole story? You know you should try reading a book yourself sometime.”
“Oh, c’mon, why do you gotta be like that?”
“That’s enough talk,” he said as he handed me the pipe, “…it’s taking up too much page space.”
He was always saying off the wall things like that, implying that we were living in a novel, or something. I began to think about that, how weird it would be if our entire existence as we know it were somehow just in the imagination of a novelist. He would be able to write people in and out of existence with a wave of the pen (or computer keyboard, more likely). He could will anything into existence that he wanted, and there would be no such thing as an impossibility. I would love to have that kind of power over reality.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” Greg asked.
“No, I should really get going.”
I was still feeling somewhat unproductive with myself, having taken a nap so early in the day. I felt like I needed to motivate. Not that I was likely to do anything productive as a result of leaving.
Though I did have my painting.
There was this painting that I had been working on for about six months. I started working on it before I lost my job. I had been neglecting it as of late, having become frustrated with the newest addition to the painting. The painting is a jungle scene, with lots of trees, vines, leaves, flowers and such at varying depths and shades of green. I never really painted before, but I started this one and really got into it as a therapeutic exercise. I would spend days at a time painting a single branch, getting totally lost in the fine details, then move on to another branch, partially overlapping the last one, with all the leaves, and then another, and it kept feeding itself. It became a joyous obsession, taking up a good deal of my time. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the simple act of painting. I loved coming up with new, lushly green shades of green paint, and each leaf was a universe while I concentrated on it. My paintbrush became the Creator’s Hand, somehow I understood why each leaf stood exactly where it was supposed to, each branch twisted and turned in its particular pattern to complement the whole. The painting seemed to take on a life of its own, and I was happy. It was hard to believe that I had created this, since painting was so new to me, and I immensely enjoyed being able to take part in its wonderful unfolding. This was not a feeling of accomplishment. It wasn’t the result or end product that I was proud of, in fact I felt no pride regarding the painting. It was more a feeling of being a portion, like a pawn, in this miraculous phenomenon of life and being. Seeing the branches come swimming into existence from behind the brush created a sort of awe, and a new appreciation for the subtle details in nature. The work of art took on a of life of its own.
The jungle painting put me in touch with all these feelings. Then I lost my job, and I stopped painting for a while. Actually I had stopped painting the jungle, and a little while later I decided I wanted to add a cat to the painting. So I started to paint the cat, but soon I realized that sadly, I was not very skilled at painting cats. I just couldn’t get it to look right. It was horrible. It didn’t even look like a cat, or any other animal that I’ve ever seen.
I consulted books with photos of cats; I searched the internet, trying to find a cat in the perfect pose that I could fit into my jungle scene somewhere. So now I was left with a bunch of photos of cats, and a once beautiful painting of a jungle with what looks kind of like a crippled kangaroo perched in one of the trees. At times I get so frustrated with the thing I feel like taking a big gob of black paint and scribbling on top of that cursed feline. Other times I considered putting the blade of a knife through the painting. Or burning it.
But enough about my painting. I took my leave of Greg and headed back to my apartment.
