BODY PARTS:Chapter 8

K had just come to the awkward conclusion that he was, in all likelihood, a cannibal. Over the years he’d eaten a lot of street meat and once it was covered in all those hot sauces and yoghurt sauces you really never knew. You couldn’t tell what you were digging into as you sat on some filthy stoop hungrily raking it in during a pinched lunch break. Certainly if perfectly nice folks like Helena Bonham Carter chopped people up into mince pies what was to stop all the other perfectly nice folks out there, finding themselves strapped for cash, from doing the same? Well okay Helena was only playing a character, but we all know, all too well, that the line between fiction and fact is thin. One person sees it and says: Woah! That was entertaining but thank goodness it doesn’t really happen in true life, and another responds: The movie is based on a real story you know! And another simply thinks: That is a good idea! I have an old coal-chute in the back of my house! If I select my borders with care I’d have it made! It may be a stretch but only a little one. I read the newspapers. So went K's thoughts. They went in, then out again, leaving only an after taste, a taste for flesh to be precise.

Hungry he decided to try a different vendor, one, he'd noticed, who preferred to set up his cart in a side street away from the throng. Why? K asked himself. What is the man hiding?

I’ll take the lamb with rice. Thanks. The price was certainly right. On the main street he usually paid $4 but here (where was here?) it only cost $3 and for a heaping pile of food. He chose a different stoop from the usual and sat down next to a lady with reddened eyes. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in a while. That or someone close to her had died. Why so sad? K asked. My child is missing, she responded. Oh, pull the other one! He thought but he only nodded in response and then he got down to the business at hand—eating.

As he chowed down his mystery food he pondered the fact that he’d never encountered fingernails or any other such tell tale signs. But then again he’d never found chicken claws in his food either. Meat was meat. The meat he was eating just then was distinctly darker than the usual and made all the more disturbing by the lady staring at his food in horror.

What? K edged away from her but she kept staring. She didn’t respond because she was far away deep in her worst, most inarticulate fears. K continued to eat. He was hungry. When all you’ve been doing is xeroxing legal papers all day one gets hungry. You’d only know if you’d held a similar low wage job.
The lady was staring again.

K looked daggers at her.
Would you stop staring at me!
Oh, I’m sorry! She responded polite as could be, only it reminded me of. . .then her voice trailed off as she sighed a deep sigh.

Of what? Said K a hint of gentleness in his voice.

My son you see he. . .it was. . .he couldn’t have been gone more than. . .I can’t.

Can’t what?

Can’t talk about it, she said and then she got up and walked away.

K looked down at his empty styrofoam container and the two little bits of gristle he’d shoved to the side. Looking down the street he could see the vendor serving up another plateful to some other poor unsuspecting stranger. He got up, tied off the plastic bag, dropped it in the nearest garbage can, and headed back to work.

BODY PARTS:Chapter 7

The Shooting Pains
Late one night Al, our local harmless nut, stood on the street below my window shouting: “Sciatica! Sciatica!” for a full, solid hour. I willingly put up with Al. I generally don't mind his outbursts but this was unusual even for him. We often chat during the day when he is tired and docile. He sometimes offers insights into my own unsightly world, especially when I crank him up by handing him coffee and a Cinnabun and say: “1-2-3-GO, AL!” He likes to be revved up. His shouting all night though wasn’t what kept me up. I’d stretched after an evening run. I’d stood for longer than usual in a hot shower. I'd even taken Advil before turning in but the shooting pains running down the backs of my legs persisted and made it next to impossible for me to sleep. When I awoke I climbed straight into a big mug of black coffee to jump start my day.
Walking to the train I passed a call to my conscience: “Save Darfur!.Org.” What, I asked myself, had I ever done for Darfur? Nothing as far as I could recall. Voices of Public Radio pledge drives echoed within: “For the price of one cup of coffee a day...”
Need. Sacrifice. Luxury. Choice. Selflessness. Focus. Decisiveness. Principals. The option to crawl under a rock.
On the train my legs started shouting again. They wanted my full attention but then my lower back chimed in, and my neck, my upper arms, my spinal chord. I was confronted by a full scale assault, a cacophony of disgruntlement that I was used to solving with pain killers. A tiny voice could barely be detected saying: “Let me help.” I’d never heard it before and even now didn’t care to listen. I’d enough on my plate without taking on another health care provider. I wanted to lock myself in my office but didn’t have one. Just then there was nothing between me and my body. I needed more sustenance. Clearly I was hungry. Surely then my body would quiet down.
Instead of heading immediately to work, I veered off in the direction of a Diner I’d always wondered about, to have another breakfast.
What followed was the direct result of an Internal Revolution. Okay so I brushed my teeth hurriedly. I didn't stretch every day. I admit it. I considered working out and exercise a total drag and my body was mad. Like the French Revolution what began with such high ideals devolved into mayhem. My aches just wouldn’t leave me alone. I wasn’t having any of it. I was in charge. I was the king. I’d stifle the voices that sprung from my meat and bones with a plate full of fried food. I was feeling foolishly vengeful. I would hurl double shots of espresso at the unbearable, persistent hammering. I’d pour it on like hot oil from the battlements until they went away. I stretched! I usually ate pretty well! I wasn’t a smoker! My drinking was moderate for goodness sake! What? WHAT?
A man sat at the counter still wearing his Day-Glo green hard hat, a beacon in the dim light of the Diner. I stared at his back and saw how straight it was compared to mine. “You constantly hunch. You hunch over everything,” said my back. “You embarrass me. You have no respect for us. Why are are you so physically disdainful? You stare at a computer all the time. Your eyes are in pain. They are tired, so tired. You’ve elevated the intellect to an absurd position in your pantheon of importance, your hierarchy of attention worthiness. Your brain doesn’t like it you know. We talk about it all the time—your complete arrogance.”
In their own high pitched way the backs of my legs continued: “Tiger balm, analgesics, sure they help. But what about your hands for crissake? They want to help! They are offering to help! Use you hands! Apply massage. Rub us! We love to be rubbed! Make the effort! Support your own infrastructure you —!”
With that my legs gave out from under me. They’d had enough and I crumpled to the floor. A couple of businessmen leapt from their seats to help but it was really no use. I couldn’t shut out the crescendo of voices. I was tuned in and couldn’t tune out. I couldn’t barricade the doors, couldn’t block them with refrigerators or safes to stop them coming in. The escape hatch I’d always imagined under the carpet wasn’t in any of my rooms just then. Run about the house as I might there was no escape. My imagination had fled and I was alone stuck in a bandwidth of bodily furies. I could clearly hear the knees of my helpers cracking as they tried to sit me back in my chair. I could hear their skin crawling, their teeth demanding immediate attention, and in back a burgeoning root canal quietly whistling a sinister tune, and I fell to the floor again.
When I came to I found myself staring into the dead eyes of one of the businessmen. The waitress sat at a table sobbing as she tried to staunch heavy bleeding at her wrist with a paper towel. The construction worker still sat at the counter but was dead, apparently shot through the neck. People throughout the Diner were screaming in pain, in a mess of blood and smoke. Louder though than all the hysteria was the the furious yelling of the disenfranchised—the feet, the ankles, the toes, the veins, the skin, the bones, the nervous system, hair follicles, scalp, nasal passages, all yelling, yelling, yelling finally, finally we got you all to listen. I heard them all succinctly, if briefly, before passing out from the pain of the bullet wound to my thigh. At last we got you all to listen. My legs cocked their automatics and walked away.

BODY PARTS:Chapter 6

Ducks and Rain (The Sodden Foot)

His first observation of the day, as in “I’ve just made this striking observation” was this: Ducks love the rain. As observations went it was nothing remarkable but it somehow denoted the start of his workday. He’d already had coffee and toast. He’d even organized his paperwork before putting it in his briefcase. He’d showered and brushed his teeth and then he had even found time to be in the thick of his family. He’d laughed heartily at his daughter’s unformed joke, had shared an article in the newspaper with his wife, and had told his son how proud he was of the grades he’d earned in school (even though he never liked to hear it), and how it just went to prove that hard work always paid off. In short he’d had a rich morning already. Somehow though the ducks underlined the passage he was on. They were stand ins for the moment when everything poured out, leaving him empty and vulnerable, though he didn’t know it then. His elf would tell him later, in some subliminal way. His object self—his elf—was watching with the usual wry detachment, a pixie in the rain, holding a waterproof pad upon which to record his observations. Someone had to see what happened next.
The subject climbed out of his car to join the ducks by the pond. Having locked the car he jabbed impatiently at the button on his umbrella hoping it would unfurl without the usual exertion. Might it have been then perhaps that he first noticed the missing shoe? You’d think the feeling of the soggy ground water seeping into his sock and between his toes would be a notable occurrence but he later insisted he had no such memory. Some days passed before he began to slowly reconstruct the events that lead him to being briefly cuffed by an especially zealous cop who momentarily had feared for the public safety. His reconstruction memory lead him back to the car but still left him uncertain that was where it had all begun. Never mind the pixie, the ducks, and the rain. After all was said and done he’d still headed in to work with one missing shoe. More worrying still he suspected that he’d driven down the hill like that pushing on the gas with a shoeless foot.
He’d stood on the platform with one sopping foot and had not thought twice about it. He took out a magazine and read about Bruno Schulz. He took out his notebook and wrote down a couple of things that, in retrospect, offered up no answers. For example he noted people staring but did not for a moment wonder why. His sodden foot was, apparently, in another world. He noted instead the rich smell of someone’s coffee and how, if he’d only had the time, he might’ve bought himself a cup.
On the train the conductor gave him a long hard look before accepting the ticket he’d presented. Then he took it and moved on up the carriage. Obviously he’d seen it all. The man with the sodden foot remained oblivious though he knew enough to get off at his stop and make his connecting subway train as all the while people stared, some startled, some not a little bit concerned. His very normalcy despite the fact that he was walking about shoeless made it all the more worrying. Was he quite possibly psychotic? A huge homeless man who seemed to think so did, with great dexterity, maneuvere his shopping cart through the dense crowd of rush hour commuters to get to the other side of the street and away from the madman with the wet foot. The madman as it happens did observe the homeless man’s massive curly grey beard, draped as it was over all his worldly possessions. That crowd of commuters spewing in to the city as they did every day was more agitated than usual and all because of him. He meanwhile walked the walk he walked every day with his usual demeanor which, on average, was calm. The hot dog man recognized him and tried in vain to get his attention. The newspaper boy simply shoved the Times at him as he always did and the man automatically took it, presented his change and thanked the boy as always. People were not witnessing the onset of Parkinson’s. He wasn’t ill in the least. He was pretty much his usual self…but for the shoe.
Later on many witnesses would describe the sense of being in the presence of an oracle, or a hermit as they recalled such things from the Greek Myths they’d read as kids. Some brought up words like “existential” or “Beckettian” but none were able to satisfactorily put their finger on why it was they felt so completely uncomfortable that their prime objective became to remove themselves from his presence as fast as they could.
The normal man continued on his way to work his head now deep in his paper. There he read of the terrible things that man perpetrates on man and pondered on the nature of dignity in the face of such cruelty and viciousness. He could hardly handle his own indignation for wasn’t that indignation the seed bed of righteousness and so from whence the wrongs in the world were born? Could indignation even encompass empathy? Then he read of a school superintendent wrestling a gunman to the ground, and of an old lady who rescued a cat from a tree and he felt the onset of a little smile, that something he looked for each and every day and, given his disposition, usually found.
Upon arriving at has workplace he was immediately taken aside by front desk security. Unlike the commuters they had no qualms about pointing out to him the fact of his missing shoe. The man, not surprisingly, or surprisingly, was stunned. A candy wrapper was stuck to the big toe of his by now filthy, ragged sock. The offices of Cullen and Mullen stared down at him as he stared down at his foot and tried in vain to recall his morning. The security men were firm but gentle as they lead him to their office, behind the public bathrooms on the ground floor. There he waited, staring at his foot, as phone calls were made. He declined the offer of tea but accepted a small paper cup of water. He sipped and pondered and his mind took him back to ducks and rain. He felt a radiant tranquility which apparently was noted by the guards who mentioned their perception of it later when questioned.
“I had the weirdest thought that if I asked him a question, anything, he might have the answer, would have the answer. Bit ridiculous really now that I think about it.”
The questioning officer called in to summarize the whole unusual episode recalled feeling “very respectful of this character. He wasn’t a threat as far as we could see and had done nothing wrong-although walking around wearing only one shoe is definitely not right.” A psychiatric evaluation was recommended but no charges were pressed. The psychiatrist, albeit one who’d spent the best part of his career at one job in the prosecutor’s department and had thus mostly avoided the hard work of analysis as his jaded views on the criminal mind had long since been set in stone, had this to say: “After speaking with Mr.— I felt sobered up, admonished, even a little ashamed of myself. But I really couldn’t tell you why.” He had few words to describe this “phenomena of the normalest of men”.
“Not that he had anything interesting to say,” the questioning officer later added when interviewed by the one small town paper that covered the incident. The reporter was the first to mention ducks and rain, and it was perhaps this same reporter’s plodding questions that got closest to helping the man recall his strangest of days.
“His mistake perhaps was that he opened the astounding imagination of his daughter over breakfast. He listened to her dream, a dream that she spun with such glorious clarity, as she sat on his lap stirring and stirring his coffee, that he saw himself, briefly, underwater swimming with the fishes.
He would never know for sure but he did recollect the small explosion of his umbrella erupting in to fullness as the rain came down, and a duck quacking loudly, and thoughts of Neptune and mermaid buried treasure.
“I never went near the water but I think my shoe is at the bottom of that pond.” He couldn’t prove it though and had little wish to do so. He had no more to say on the matter. His son, intrigued by the tale, did later investigate by lazily prodding a stick into the water near where his dad usually parked his car. Though the stick was probably about four feet long it didn’t touch bottom and most of it sunk into the thick muck of goose guano and leaf burdened silt that layered the pond.
Some weeks later the man dreamed of a mermaid in a business suit and wearing one shoe, which seemed about right, going to work in her underwater kingdom, briefcase at her side. When she arrived at the offices of Cullen and Mullen security was alerted, the cops were called, and she was arrested for public indecency. He met her in a jail that was dark and full of sorry tales. The old lady was there with her cat attempting to cheer everybody up and on a cot in the corner lay an afghan child covered in dirty blankets. A doctor was attending to her suppurating, amputated arm.
For the final draught of his story the man was paid a handsome sum. His colleagues never gave him a hard time, never mocked him. Lawyers and financiers shared drinks with him in bars and poured out stories of their own, stories they imagined he alone would comprehend. He never did but still was kind enough to listen.

BODY PARTS-Chapter 4

A Head For Business

I was always the first to notice if things were amiss. If they were off somehow I’d see it and, before saying anything or causing any kind of panic, I would produce a graph with a list of statistics, to clearly express the new trend be it for better or worse. I saw the fiscal crisis on its way thirty years ago. I was presenting graphs to anyone who would listen and look and discovered that catching severely negative yet commonly unpredictable market trends pleased nobody. My science was too unique. I thought somebody would take me on board but that never happened.
I no longer live anywhere near K-Street or Wall Street but now live on P Street. That’s right—P Street. I live in an alphabet city. It is a strange and unfamiliar alphabet but I feel perfectly at home. My apartment is comfortable and I lack for nothing, nothing that I need. I cannot plead poverty but insist on wearing rags and have not bought a new suit in forever. I’m frugal. I haven’t been back to The Street in twenty years but despite this I still have a unique head for business. I’m a watcher now. I have a special set of eyes dedicated one hundred per cent to doing just that. They roll around the periphery garbage picking, making mental notes, spotting mutant facts. My problem was never my head, or so I'd always assumed. It was my stomach. I just could not stomach accumulating wealth for its own sake. This was no simple moral revulsion. Physically it began to manifest itself for the first time with the DOT.COM.BOOM-AND-BUST. I had a partner then. We made a good team for a while. He was the only one who ever appreciated my cognitive leaps and bounds but when they began running counter to his own somewhat deviant thinking, and he saw me negating, of necessity, his problematic stance, we both saw the writing on the wall. I presented the facts as objectively and as clearly as I could, and he saw me painting him as a demon. Later I saw it was paranoia pure and simple. He had no stomach for the truth just as I had no stomach for the lies. One day we both up-chucked at exactly the same moment ruining each others’ shoes, and the plan I’d proposed for getting us out of the mess we were in.
Back to P Street, my home. P Street is worthy of its name. It always smells of urine. If you didn’t know better you’d assume you were on the bad side of town. You’d know better than to be caught on its dank cobbles late at night. You’d see the torn posters and broken bottles, the signs of freshly removed graphiti and, sure enough, the homeless guys in their sorry cardboard shelters, next to their shopping carts full of rags and bones. Understandably you’d be alarmed but this is a street in remission. It truly is. The scavengers are of the meek and noble variety. They quietly save the planet every day with their recycling. They are not the violent type. Those who are certainly don’t want to waste their time rolling the bums on our block. During the day it is a hive of activity. The smell of fresh solder hangs in the air and the gas guys, the electric guys, the cable guys are all out digging, laying tarmac and wires for some company or other. The rents if you didn’t buy are beginning to climb. We are getting our house in order. I love P Street and probably watch it more carefully than most. From my perch in the Diner I observe the comings and goings, and with scrupulous care make notes in my everything book. I’ve seen this Diner reflect the street, rusting and neglected and then dust itself off and pull itself together full of new resolve. I sit brooding over my coffee, staring at an old padlock hanging on the door. My head is telling me something is up and the hairs on the backs of my hands stand to attention. The tone of the conversation behind the counter has changed. There’s a new chef—I’m sure of it—and the owner is none too pleased. He catches my eye and then quickly looks away. He is normally a stare downer. I get another coffee and decide to stay a while. Something is definitely off kilter and I have to figure out what. I take out my book and open it to the first blank page. I carefully lay three pens next to it confident it is going to be a busy day, and then I close my eyes to listen. Sitting at that table I hear a nation of poodle lovers with their over indulged pets, hapless spouses with their doting other-halves, who insist on straightening their collars and feeding them with a spoon. If he hadn’t met her he’d be outside on P Street with a cardboard box for a mattress. It occurs to me That marriage is one big animal shelter.
I open my eyes and see some suits walking in who definitely are not familiar and it doesn’t look like a regular business lunch. I order eggs.
Only when the eggs arrive do I see what the problem is. It’s me. It’s been me all along. My arms refuse to budge. A slow fizzing sensation has been traveling up my legs all morning and I’ve paid it no mind. Now it has climbed from my hands to my elbows but because I am so cerebral that is where my problem will end—in my head. The waitress looks concerned.
“Are you okay, Mr. Phillips?”
I don’t respond, not in words. My eyeballs flutter. I try to look at her and smile but my lips won’t move. The muscles at the corner of my mouth have turned to mush. I can move my eyes. The yolks on my plate appear to pulse like little emergency lights. The waitress raises her voice and waves her hands in front of me. “He follows them. Mr. Phillips, help is coming. We’ve called....” My head no longer belongs to my body. A lifetime of paying it no mind and my body has rebelled by developing a mind of its own. A crowd gathers round cell phones all a buzz. I'd always blamed my body if anything went wrong. Quietly my body regains its composure. Paralyzed no more it abruptly stands and then runs out cutting a swathe through the crowd. It's now "it" but I’m still me. Strange. I turn my head and through the periphery of my vision make out its departing form as it disappears past the dumpsters and on into the sunshine. I’d never really appraised my body honestly before but did so now. It wasn’t fit. My head tips bumping against my coffee cup. My ear quickly fills with the warm, brown fluid. I’m underwater. The waitress rescues me, saves me from drowning by efficiently mopping up the mess. She cannot save me from myself and nor can I and much against my will my head drops to the floor with a crunch and rolls erratically out of the door in the direction of that withering sun. The unswept street is brutal on my skin. I can only dream of growing wings.

BODY PARTS-Chapter 5

The Invertebrate

She’s outside, nice night, early spring but warm enough to cavort, or sit and watch, which is what I’m doing. I’m observing and writing. I feel that first inkling of spring, the spring that gives one lift, and it is heartening. The tax returns are in the mail, and the very first, if slightly stunted daffodils, are rearing their baffled heads.
I’m not as fit as my kids. He’s ollieing on his skateboard and she’s screaming with joy, screeching with delight as she puts everything into hurling a rubber ball at her older brother and then running away. If you know my writing you know I will not allow it to stay in such a warm place. The story must turn cold or sour before I’ll let you eat it. I’m not rejecting the sentimental though I may appear to do so in no uncertain terms. More I am compelled to turn this simple delight into a surreal jaunt through the unknown lands. I have to complicate things, take them that one step further, peel back the skin to reveal that hidden thing—perhaps a deeper delight that rarely gets a look in. Maybe there will be nothing there but more blue sky or that which I’d already imagined. Usually though something surprising happens.
My mason’s arm continues to hurt all these months later, and the chronic pain in my back has returned. My plan to run today was demolished by relentless, frustrating calls with credit card companies, and computer specialists, and ISP providers living in New Delhi, most of them polite to a default, and most of them unable to solve my problems, and really, in the end, that is all I want them to do. I was pushy and took no pushing back. I took the high road and stood my ground. In the end I got results. The therapy came through but at a cost. Exhausted I tinkle the ice in my glass and wince as my daughter lets out another ear piercing scream. My spine aches but not as bad. The whisky helps and I’m reminded that I do at least have a spine. Standing up, at the end of the day, requires some major sitting down. I eat a pretzel and gulp my drink. This is all so real. The story resists taking a magical turn. I’m meant to be in the here and now. It occurs to me that the here and now is a very scary place but I'm not permitted to leave, not yet. What if he accidentally rolls over her tiny little digits? What if he slips and smashes his helmet-less head? I hear myself saying for the umpteenth time: “Oh, do be careful!” What if she gets him really mad? Unlikely. He has remarkable patience. What if she falls from her pogo stick?
She cracks her cranium. We head to ER. They stitch her up. We are destroyed as parents all over again.
She swings her head and gives me a magical smile. He looks at me intently: “It’s physics,” he says as he jumps up in the air with his board. He’s so smart. Pride arrives which gives my spine cause to smart again.
He dissected frogs today—they smelt their insides and the classroom went “Oooooh! Groooossss!” He is working on vertebrates all this week and loving it. He should take me in tomorrow. I’m free. I could be the next classroom specimen. I’m big enough they could all gather round and still see what they were doing. Give me the right drugs and I could tell them what parts they are finding, I could give them the anatomy lesson. Naturally my son would be embarrassed. “Yes, it is my dad.”
They lay me next to the bunsen burners and remove my shoes. They take out their scalpels and ponder: What does a dad look like under all that skin and cloth? Does he really have a spine?”

BODY PARTS-Chapter 3

The Nerve of IT

I was boiling. You’d be boiling to if you’d gone through a wrongful arrest, intensive questioning, and physical abuse, including sleep deprivation. Possibly worst of all was the sadistic withdrawal of caffeine. One officer even held a cup of freshly brewed—not your usual police station coffee machine dribble—under my nose, and then drank it slowly, his eyes closed, exaggerating his appreciation of every sip.
I was now making up for the latter by working through a full pot in my new, favorite Diner. When I sat down and asked for a full pot they obliged, no questions asked, no attitude! The waiter, a big guy (from Ecuador I later found out) brought me a warmer for my table—a warmer! Did you ever…? This left me struggling with the contrary emotions of a momentary but full fledged faith in the humanity that surrounded me, and a fury at the injustice of it all.
The police had released me that morning after my hellish night with no more than a: “Sorry! There’s been a slight mix up!” They had the wrong address. The desk sergeant giggled as he handed me a form to address my complaints, and then winked as if to say: “Watch it! You don’t want to get us mad”. Not that I pretend to understand GCPD semaphore.
I put more sugar in my coffee and stared at the paperwork I’d been given, which was hard to read given my swollen eyelid.
I really liked this Diner. Despite my smashed up visage nobody shrank away or avoided proximity. I felt supported. A man rolled in with no legs and Big Guy lifted him up to the counter, gently put him on a stool, and a coffee was poured straight away. It occurred to me that I didn’t stand out at all. I was completely surrounded by freaks. No wonder I felt so at home.
I took out my monocle and tried once again to read the fine print (5 points I guessed). I didn’t want to let it go.
“All complaints may be addressed blah blah however your past, present and future will come under scrutiny before any resolution can be determined. Any history of mental illness or aggressive behavior may adversely affect your case.”
Then the next sentence dropped a point, was written in red and was nigh impossible to read. So I slammed the coffee pot on the table. It didn’t break.
The Ecuadorian came over wiping his hands on his apron, firmly grabbed me by my arm, looked me in the face, took out a knife from his apron with his other hand and stuck it in the table where it quivered ominously. I’d been wondering what had caused all those scars.
“They punched me in the eye!”
“No emotional outbursts here,” he whispered. “We all have our problems. Coffee’s on us”. Then he tossed me out of the Diner —gently.
So there I was on the street once more, an innocent abroad in the big, mean city. A little Cyclops girl walked by, kicking her white stick against the pavement, her sunglass glinting from the sharp morning sunlight.
“What happened to you?” I said.
“Same old same old. Optic nerve. Pollution.” She spoke in a monotone without stopping, and I watched as she continued to trip onward, bumping her way home. Just died, I thought. I stood there shaking my head, scratching under my hat, sweeping the hair off my forehead. Then I headed for the nearest butcher. I needed to look after myself.
“A big fat steak—for this,” and I pointed at my eye. The butcher wordlessly gave me the biggest and most expensive steak he had and charged me accordingly. Then I went to the nearby park to lie down in the warmish beams of that morning sun. All about the last snows were melting and the dripping off branches soothed my frazzled nerves as I closed my eye.
When I woke up I found I wasn’t alone. It must’ve been some kind of epidemic. It was definitely racial profiling and the police were making a ton of mistakes. What we needed was a lawsuit. I was in the company of three other big steaks; each held or placed precariously on the throbbing, swollen eyes of fellow assaultees.
I turned my mind to the authors I’d never really read. An image of John Updike hovered in the periphery as a snow ball slammed into my temple.
“Oh for Crissakes!” I flung the steak at the perpetrator, a four-year-old kid, and stomped out of the park, my eyebrow knit by dried blood to the gash on my lid. My eye was almost swollen shut and was beginning to bleed again. I must’ve looked bad. Everyone had stopped to stare. Then I realized I was being followed by the other—wrongful arrests. We presented quite the Parade, staggering forward as if recently risen from the dead. En masse we set off in the direction of the police station bearing our righteous indignation like a flag. What we would do with it once we confronted the desk sergeant was anyone’s guess.
With gratitude I later reflected on what then occurred. I was prevented from entering Precinct 63 by the strong, long arm of a tendril, a higher law as far as I was concerned and one I could easily respect. In its other arms it held the other three.
“You don’t want to go in there—not a pretty sight.”
Briefly I wondered if he meant in general—the institution green, the no fresh paint in years—it was one of the grimmer police station interiors I’d encountered, but I knew better.
“They’re hashing out some legal technicalities.” I looked for a smirk, or a hint of irony, but saw none. This was how my patch on the earth would be paved from now on: the benign simpaticos, the strong soft hearts, and the brook no nonsense, practical bottom-feeders of the planet, would clean up the cracks in the sidewalk. Patiently but thoroughly they’d sort out the weeds. I looked at the crunched up, now bluing eyes of my new found friends, and by common consent but without a word being exchanged we crossed the street to the Diner. We probably entered like a gang but we just wanted coffee. The Ecuadorian waiter obliged us with three full pots.

BODY PARTS-Chapter 2

The Arbiter of Taste


My wife and I have lately taken to referring to the coffee that resides in abundance in a large tin can in an old and obsolete, too deep, rusting metal cupboard in our convincingly depression era kitchen, as the brown sludge. This coffee is our last resort coffee. When it all goes down we will brew it up and be grateful but until then…we will only drink it when our dear friend, Ima Kid shows up. Ima’s a guy. His name might throw you off. He’s a guy and he is our dearest and oldest buddy. We share him alternating use of his never failing always willing ear. The only thing he asks of us is a good cup of coffee and to his mind the awful stuff, the desperation coffee, is his chosen poison so we have no choice but to oblige. We’ve tried offering him fresh ground, quality cuppas but he always wrinkles up his nose, starts to fidget and suggests he may have to get going. At which point Nell gets up and says: “Oh! I forgot we had this coffee! Please do stay a little.” Ima always does. His eyes twinkle as he gazes on the fulsome can she is holding, and his lips glisten.
“Well alright. Just a quick one.” This usually is the cue for one of us to make ourselves scarce. We can’t both be crying on his shoulder. Nell and I have a good mutual understanding and without needing to say anything one of us usually melts away after a brief shared conversation with laundry to do or bills to pay.

Lately Nell has been in fine fettle. That is how she puts it herself. The one thing she cannot do is solve my problems and so it is with gratitude that she makes the brown sludge and then quietly dumps her cup in the sink before heading off to do errands so leaving me with my therapist. The funny thing is Ima is not wise. He is simply present. Put a coffee, the right coffee, in his hand and he is all yours. I suspect at times that he comes from a different planet. There is a peacefulness about him that has nothing to do with material possessions unless you call ownership of a GAZ grill and his very own coffee pot a fierce example of consumerism run amuck. He lives in a hovel that he loves and has, as far as I can tell, one set of clothes. We’ve known him for as long as we can remember and yet know remarkably little about him. He did make the local papers one time. He was observed lying down in the middle of the High Street late one night and stretching. He was in no danger of being run over because the street is closed off for pedestrian traffic only after a certain hour and the reporter concluded that Ima Kid was simply taking that little freedom and expanding it a notch. I’d enjoyed the report and had actually written to the reporter thanking him for not passing any kind of negative judgment on our friend. As a local reporter he was a familiar face around town and later I was able to thank him again in person. That was when he told me the something he’d chosen not to write.
“I like the guy. He exudes a certain, I dunno, peace! I sat with him once or twice, right here in this diner, bought him coffee that he never drank, and talked. I did all the talking. I’d find myself waking up sort of realizing I’d been talking for perhaps a full fifteen minutes and his attention had not strayed. I’d rather not go into it but once he said something unexciting in response to a rather personal thing I’d brought up…and it was exactly right. So…because I like the guy I didn’t want to mention that I saw him lick the pavement, the cobbles. It was late but some stores were still open or just closing up and people were still milling about. He wasn’t particularly discreet about it. I don’t think it mattered to him one way or the other if anyone saw him do it. Still I think, as chance would have it, I’m the only one who did see him lick the pavement. He licked it slowly and thoughtfully, like a forensics scientist tasting a blood sample?

A week later he warned me about a potential water mains break in that exact spot.”

I remember I shuddered. I knew exactly the spot he meant. It had been all over the news. One person had been killed and a couple injured and the reporter had been feeling guilty ever since because he hadn’t taken Ima seriously.

So now we did. Ima was our personal oracle and we took anything he said to heart, anything.

The last time he came he made a comment about my shirt. In all the time we’d known him he’d never commented on my looks. He said:
“A spotty shirt would be nice.”

Nell and I went shopping that very afternoon and later when I wore the shirt out to a restaurant Nell looked at me in a way she hadn’t in a long, long time.

Ima hasn’t dropped by of late but frankly that is okay by us. Love him as we do we cannot stand that coffee.

BODY PARTS-Chapter 1

The Skeleton Crew

You’ve all heard of the solar plexus no doubt, a nerve plexus in the abdomen that is situated behind the stomach and in front of the aorta and the crura of the diaphragm and containing several ganglia distributing nerve fibers to the viscera? How about the ethmoid? Have you heard of the ethmoid?

I’d been hugging a cup of coffee to keep myself occupied for some twenty minutes when along came this guy, this tall…akin to a …and twice as…ugly isn’t the word and I’m not being nice. It really isn’t the right word. Unusual’ll have to do. I try to be open and try not to shutter any of my instincts. Just then they told me to reach out, shake the guy’s…, and ask him if he’d care to join me for a drink.

When the waitress came over she eyed my new friend warily.
“Orbital lobe,” he said looking up at her warmly. She was clearly immediately charmed.
“What if I tell you he’s from Venus,” I said mischievously.
Shutting me out she addressed my new eating companion. I didn’t mind. I’d been there a while without ordering food and perhaps now was the moment to do so. I sensed today would be a special day.
“We do have a special drink,” she said, “for special customers.” She looked him (her?) over with an appraising eye.
“Scapula. Pre-frontal cortex,” he/she/it mumbled more in the direction of my coffee than at anyone in particular.
Having fully determined it was a he I was now intrigued by his thoughtful demeanor.
“Zygomatic Arch. Lacrimal Gland. Tooth.”
So that was it. From the moment our eyes had become entangled (met doesn’t do it justice) my mind had been racing and not of my own accord. That way he said: Tooth. Huh.

I wasn’t there when the waitress returned. She told me so later.
“You were just sort of all misty. Hard to explain exactly.”
“And the…visitor?”
“She was quite alert!”
“He.”
“She! She is definitely a she.”
We agreed to disagree.
“Alert you say. Friendly?”
The waitress thought about it.
“Yes, definitely. Not a mean bone in her…its body…yeh. Body.”
“That’s it!” I yelled. “Tooth.” Tooth was bone wasn’t it? Or was it ivory? Was ivory bone? I seemed to recall people calling their teeth ivories.
“Do you find marrow in teeth, or tusks?”
The waitress squinted.
“I’ve got work to do.”
I knew I was onto something. I just didn’t know what.

The good thing was my day had gone remarkably well. I hadn’t been required to fill my time with absurdly long thank you letters to people I’d met once who weren’t going to employ me anyway. You can always tell.
Being in a trance was a great space filler.
I wanted to be in a trance again.
The waitress returned.
“What do I owe you?”
“You don’t owe me anything.” The waitress came over all-gooey as she said this.
“The visitor paid for my coffee?”
“Yup!” She said this with the largest smile on her face. Why did I all of a sudden feel jealous?

I decided to return again the next day.

“Sphenoidal Sinus.”
I was surprised to find myself surprised.
“Good morning!” I said. I was once again trying to make the day go away by filling it with coffee hugging and an artificial day dreaming I’d concocted for the first time that morning-the kind where your mind goes nowhere and not in a productive way.
“You’re back,” I said, stupidly.
The waitress was already beside us eager and ready to take our order.
“Eggs,” I said. “You? Care for breakfast?”
The visitor looked up, then up, then up again. He was staring at the ceiling, boring a hole through it. Bits of plasterboard began to drift down onto our table and into my mug. I found myself actually, and rather surprisingly annoyed.
“Would you stop that?”
For the first time I saw the visitor blush. I assumed it was blushing because the place where cheeks would usually be …tarnished.
“Palatum Osseum…” he stuttered. “Oxyntic Cell.”
I had no idea what he was on about but have to say I was heartily inclined to agree. I was also distressed. I was irritable and, even worse, bored. I seriously needed a new occupation. Coffee hugging didn’t cut it, and niether did sitting with a visitor from God knew where. Random hook ups just weren’t doing it-not as I’d experienced them.
“Vomer? Manubrium Sterni? Humerus?”
There was definitely a question in there.

“Get out!”
I woke suddenly to find the waitress, redfaced, glaring at me.
“You’re really distressing our customers.”
I looked at the other tables. Nobody looked at me.
“Do that again and I won’t serve you.”
The contents of the diner were visibly and audibly agitated, everyone talking at once.
“Proximal and Distal End!”
Boy, were they mad.
I’d no idea what I’d done but I sensed now was not the time to ask what had happened. Needless to say the visitor—he/she/it—was no longer there.
I pulled out a dollar bill with some loose change and left it on the table.

As I walked down 31st a deep roaring sound erupted behind me. I looked back to see that beautiful, shiny, slip-streamed, 50’s style diner hovering in the air above me, way above me, above the tallest skyscraper. Then it was gone leaving behind only its steaming, electric sputtering footprint, a marrow of mangled aluminum.