“I seek to displace the heartache I feel inside.”
“Do you live in your parents’ basement?”
“No one lives in my parents’ basement.”
“Does a faint odor of fried chicken emanate from your pores?”
“I’m not sure. That’s one of those things everyone else could say but I would not know. You cannot smell your own.”
When I closed the receiver on the phone sex operator I felt hollow like a fox must feel when it has been chased up a tree and resigned itself to death by slow starvation as an alternative to being ripped apart by dogs.
That night when I went to sleep I had dreams of large women who wafted the mild odor of fried chicken from their axillas.
I woke up drenched in sweet perspiration. The room smelled of ginger bread houses and sour milk. I got up from the bed far too quickly and felt a blood rush; saw spinning. When my head stopped throbbing and the floor stopped moving I walked off-kilter to the window and pushed the glass pane up along the frame, careful not to disturb the thick black curtain shutting out the light of day.
My hair follicles prickled as moisture wicked away from my skin and out into the early morning air. Sensing the dryness of my mouth, I lamented that I was not wearing a stilsuit. I stumbled to the bathroom, bemused by my complete lack of equilibrium, and lapped at the water gushing from the rusty tap.
Schoolyard days. I examined the deep blue veins sticking out of my pale forearms. My widows peak marked my face with the severe look of an unwashed medieval peasant in an execution crowd. It jutted awkwardly down towards a chaotic unabrow.
“Thank God it’s a down arrow,” I chuckled aloud. “There’s not much hair on the top of my skull. Don’t want people looking up there.”
Racing stripes stretching from the frontalis bone thinning greasily toward the occipital region.
Sometimes I have wondered if I should straight razor the thin paint streaks decorating the naked dome of my head. But each time I have shrugged and thought, why subject myself to the cold?
‘The less hair you have the more cold you are, if I could grow a beard I would.’
I stroked at the gray stubble on my face. The eyes examining all of this looked reminiscent of the eyes of a retarded sex offender in a photograph that circulated the internet a few years back.
I rubbed them hoping to dispel the morning glaucoma effect of puffy eyes and a splitting headache. I pissed fragrant brown urine. Got some on the floor where the pubic hairs accumulate. Didn’t flush. Didn’t wash my hands.
I left the bathroom and its corroding mirror in pursuit of a hot pocket.
I found one on the floor in the crevice between the refrigerator and a cupboard.
‘How long has that been there?’
I shrugged and jammed my fleshy hand down the dark crack and groped wildly for it.
‘I think I bruised my thumb.’
The pain made me work harder for my goal.
Finally I made contact with the savory frozen rectangle of food.
I delicately wrapped two fingers around its soggy crust. My mouth became moist with saliva. I could not fail now. Slowly, I raised my arm. The inverted pizza weighed two tons. I felt the pressure on my wrist. I knew, in some private chasm of my soul, that I could not fail. If I failed, I would have to go sit on the toilet and wrap myself in the darkest solipsism I could muster.
Finally it crowned. My mouth watered even more furiously.
And then it was on the counter. And it took a great deal of self-control not to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation on it.
‘Who knows how long it has been there…’ Silence in my mind. I stared into space, unperturbed.
Eat, or don’t eat? The question was suspended in mid-air and I was indifferent. A little ruffle in the fabric of time and space would sway my decision either way.
I scanned the room and caught the glimmer of an ancient toaster oven in the corner of my eye.
‘If you toast it long enough, it will be fine.’
I sat on the fraying plaid couch eating the charred remains of the hot pocket. I had managed to sequester it into a Toaster Strudel. The flavor combinations of salty and sweet, tangy and smooth, nut and tomato flavors, spread across my palate.
I fell asleep watching curry westerns on VHS. ‘They don’t run those things on T.V.’
Again the large women haunted my dreams. I tossed and turned trying to evade the grasp of their fleshy arms. I was disappointed that I could not detect the scent of fried chicken in the chilly October air.
The women drew nearer in a pagan circle, distended abdomens hanging grotesquely over brightly colored under garments. I supposed they wore lingerie but the effect of seduction was lost in the rippling of their distorted forms. Instead, their panties looked like brightly colored harnesses. I imagined the swathes of cloth were part of an elaborate grip hoist dangling from a crane, made to lift massive objects like pianos and the corpulent and take them long distances. I wondered if these creature-women could be lifted up and placed on the communist-issue hi-rise down the street.
Clubs appeared in their hoof like hands. They drew nearer. Some unseen force held my body still and I could not run away. Their clubs turned into shanks of meat, dripping blood down unfurled arms. I could not discern where their chins ended and their necks began.
The first blow hit the softest part of my belly. I wanted to collapse into myself but my body was rigid. I felt the pain ricochet from a central point and run up along my nerves and out through my hands and feet. No matter how hard I screamed they just kept coming towards me, smacking lamb shanks and ham shanks against my stomach.
I woke up gripping my body, curled tightly in the fetal position. The air was acrid with the scent of moist flatulence. I sat up as quickly as my tenderized core would allow me and tried to run to the toilet bowl despite the pain.
***
I stared down at one of only two pairs of pants I owned, holding them sheepishly over the bathtub. I dropped them and heard the heavy damp cloth slap against the porcelain. I got up and washed scat particles from my fingers and shook my head.
‘Fuck.’
Another wave of pain washed over me. I shivered and felt chills run up my spine. Sweat seeped out of my palms. This time the diarrhea did not come as fast, but it did escape the anal sphincter before I could evacuate it into the appropriate channels. It was a sort of half-hearted spurt of feces. I felt it hot, slipping out of my ass crack and down my left leg, finding a plateau somewhere on the thigh. The whole experience was very anticlimactic, despite the initial burst of pain. I was too shocked to feel disgusted by this meaningless act of primitivism on the part of my anal cavity.
‘I’m never going to escape.’
I smashed a jumble of toilet paper into my hands and made to wipe my leg clean. Most of the excreta had found its way to the floor. The paper got stuck to the leg and left little bits of itself plastered uncomfortably to my inner thigh. I cleaned up the mess of the floor and sprayed it with some toxic-excuse for a bathroom cleaner. Napalm Fresh. I opened up the window above the toilet, removed my soiled pants from the bath tub, and hurled them to the street below. They landed in an overgrown bush that had woven itself into a rusty chain link fence. The fence made a shuddering noise as the pants made contact with the shrub.
‘that’s an ugly bush.’
I turned the shower nozzle to hot. Heard the spurt of water coming from the shower head and watched steam fill up the empty space in front of me. I took off my shirt and stepped into the scalding current. I didn’t get out until I felt like my skin was blistering.
I walked into my room, looking for a towel. None to be found. I stood there dripping puddles onto the dirty wooden floor boards and felt the grit of dust and sand clinging to my wet feet. Steam surrounded my body. It was damn cold in the apartment. I interpreted the missing towel as a sign. It meant I should just stand there helplessly and maybe light up a cigarette to bide the time.
3 pm. I looked at the analog clock propped up against the far wall of the studio. The moment I saw its hands moving I became painfully attune to the ticking noise of the seconds going by.
Then I realized I did not have any cigarettes. Heartsickness gushed up to my eyelids and my lips began to tremble.
Stuck in a moment of helplessness. Nothing could nullify this pain. I thought over my usual channels of anesthetization.
No one to touch. No one to touch me. A sad fleshy log, suspended between two legs, lying flaccid and alone.
I looked around at the clothes-strewn floor. An archipelago of unwashed dishes and half-read books dotted the landscape.
‘I need to get out of this place.’
I stared at the stuffed monkey on my bookshelf, brass cymbals poised to strike.
‘Inhabit. We all inhabit spaces in our own ways. My natural habitat is dirt and some fallen logs. Sunlight. By some strange, demented twist of fortune, I sit in a dark cell, dependent on a motorized vehicle, far from the centralized computing system but chained to the oppressive weight of industry and professionalization. An unemployed Atlas carrying the weight of the world.’
My stomach gripped again but nothing could come out of me. I was wasted.
Then I felt the seeping of saliva in my mouth; that feeling of knowing expectance that I was on the brink of vomiting.
‘What if I die?’ The thought scared me and appealed to me all at once. I walked calmly back to the bathroom, opened the toilet lid, bent over delicately, and watched chaos unfurl from my mouth. The juxtaposition of my graceful movements and the violence gushing from my gullet almost made me laugh despite the impossibility of the gesture.
Vomit in my nose. Chunks of puke wedged into the fold where the tongue meets the larynx. Mucous emerging from every orifice on my face. Watery eyes. Unexpectedly, relief.
I started shivering and realized I was still completely naked.
Through the window I heard my neighbor Jose hollering up to me.
<
I waved him away sheepishly and pulled my head back through the window.
