Saturday, May 16, 2009

These days, people are psychologically armed to the teeth. Be kind to them and to yourself. 6:20:36 PM    comment []

THE WATERFIGHT      We were in the bed of Daryl’s ratty pick up laying waste to the Southern Comfort.  We eased our backs against his big metal toolbox while almost a whole bottle of SC went down our throats like warm honey.       Daryl needed to get me drunk so he could indulge his perversions on my inert body, which is usually taut with hostility toward him.   I needed to get him drunk so he would fall asleep.  Show me a human being who is without needs and I’ll show you a body in a piney box.      Unmet needs are the reason I was swigging SC on a hot summer day with a man I loathe and despise. One of my needs is not to confront my needs, if you get the drift.  SC helps me deny that I am in denial.      Daryl took a big mouthful and the walnut lodged in his stringy throat went up and down like a yoyo.      The man had stretched out his legs all the way to the tailgate.  His ravaged jeans were worn thin as Kleenex ©, and his bare toes looked like pink worms.  His yellowed toenails were so long they curled under like those of the old ladies at the Home where I freelance when the felons who run it can flush me out.         They knew I was subversive, but hired me anyway, when desperate.  They knew I told my ladies to spit out the Haldol after the pill passer left.    Hotshot doctors and their familiars will tell you that they can spot an Alz by his gait.  Oh really, Doctor dear?   Did they walk funny before they took the Haldol?  What that drug does to a person is beyond disgust. A Haldol victim can’t tell where he ends and the world begins so he walks on eggs, careful to tippy toe around, and it’s called the typical Alz walk by fat old doctors who walk like ducks to leave more room for their enlarged prostates.      Daryl, envisioning a hard-on in his future, suggested we cool off in the house.  This meant going to his quarters in a basement that was not just cool,  but damp as death.  His accoutrements amounted to a weary futon, rigged up shower, and porta-potty.   There were a few books stacked on planks supported by bricks, I’ll give him that.  A tattered red velvet curtain Daryl had salvaged from our decaying movie house, separated his quarters from the washer and dryer and some desultory garden equipment.  Oh yes, I’d been there before, and drunk before, too, but would never forget his décor.       We staggered in, and I went into a fake swoon on the futon, but choked out, “No sex. No sex. Your aura is muddy.”        The next thing I knew I was hit in the face with a vicious stream of water from the garden hose.  “When I said ‘cool off’ I meant cool off,” Daryl bellowed, cackling as he ran from me.         I am stronger than Daryl--drunk or sober--from hoisting the old ladies, so I grabbed him and stuffed his scrawny body in the toploader, carefully winding his legs around the agitator blades, like a rug, so it wouldn’t go off balance. I turned on the cold water, dribbled in a little detergent, and turned the dial to “regular wash.”          When he got out of the hospital, Daryl walked with only a slight limp that the doctor said would no doubt always be with him.  And the left side of his head was disturbingly flat from where they put in the steel plate.           When Daryl asked me to marry him I said o.k. .                2:52:43 PM    comment []

M.E. Daley                                                           SLUDGE     He oozed into my life like sludge.  Slipping under the door…sliding over the windowsill.  I couldn’t rid myself of his loathsome presence.  Hot soap and water, gallons of pure bleach, wire kitchen scrapers. Nothing worked.  He oozed back.    Metaphorically speaking, to be sure.  Actually, he was a rather stocky, but nice looking man who lived in my apartment house and meant me no harm except to appear with alarming regularity at my door, clutching a handful of weary  flowers, proffering a box of candy, and wanting to take me out for coffee. But when I sent him back to his own apartment, a day or two later he would re-appear on my doorstep.  He was like that end-of- winter-sludge that accumulates on the walkways and in the streets and up against the curbs because it could never be removed entirely until the ice thawed. So I nicknamed him “Sludge” and when I called him that to his face he laughed. I liked his laugh and grew to look forward to his drop by’s.  Inevitably, I took him in. We became lovers, and it ended up with him dragging me like a steamer trunk around the Mideast. He had his reasons for going there and they sounded sane enough so I went along on his accursed jaunt. I thought of it as penance for being mean to him in the beginning Sludge, a compulsive reader of books, had decided that he wanted to be a much sought after linguist, specializing in Muslim which, he assured me was soon to be Numero Uno on the planet. And that he would get it right because he would learn it at the source and that is why we were on his hateful safari.To ease my boredom, I went naked under my chador. Little did he notice my small rebellion. Once when we were walking down a street and he wasn’t         looking, I lifted the heavy garment and flashed my crotch.  An old man with a long beard and the headgear of a eunuch ran off wailing and rending his garments. Those were my best days, my memorable days when, with a quick show of genitalia I was able to terrorize an arrogant old fart in some testosterone-ridden corner of the earth. . So while Sludge sat, cross-legged on a frayed mat, day after day, and tried to learn an archaic, convoluted language from a local, I sat comatose in a dark corner. When tea was served I was remembered and given a glass. It was always cold. The old men held a cube of sugar between their front teeth and sucked the tea through it.  The young ones stirred in the dissolved sugar and sipped it. I got no sugar.  I had ceased to exist. ***      I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, “I’m not about to read one more novel about the abused women of the Middle East. Life is hard enough here in Scranton.”      Well into my usual five pages of yet another hopeless meander-- soon to be rejected by a faceless child from Smith--I heaved it atop   the clutter on my desk. Which is a half circle of walnut with a caramel colored leather top that you will never see while I am still generating paper.  It was once a round partner’s desk that could be easily divided.  My husband decided that seeing me face to face every day for hours was not conducive, and left it at that. Conducive to what? Who knows?  It was his habit to leave words wafting in the air.        I had stopped working on the beginning of a good woman’s misery and eventual salvation to go pee.  My husband, who has taken to calling me The Urinator,  remarked that my prose should flow as easily.       In my latest regrettable piece of shit, I was modeling “Sludge” after my husband who was the physical opposite of what the name suggests.      My real-life Sludge was fair skinned, blonde, and with the watchful all-seeing blue eyes of a Swedish sea captain. Or that picture of Jesus on the wall. He was so tall my head barely reached his chest, which, I am sorry to report, was ever so slightly concave. I thought he had brought it on himself hunched over books day and night. I nicknamed him Sludge when it came to me that he moved only when driven.  He never exercised. Never went to a gym, wouldn’t even walk the dog who sat at his feet—ever hopeful—while he read.  The dog never gave up his dream of a walk with Sludge until the day he died. Unfortunately, when Sludge located his leash and bent over him to let him know his big day had come, the dog was stone cold. Like so many of us, he died, still longing for a bit of attention.  Poor forlorn dog.  “Attention must be paid.” Isn’t that something that life, sooner or later, teaches us?  Here’s a thought: in my new immortal work, this could be the lesson “Sludge” learns.  It could be the whole plot!  But what did I know about needing attention? I was one of those people who didn’t give a damn.  I lived inside my own mind, and rarely ventured out, happy with the knowledge that I had a man other women wanted. Once I was published, Sludge would snap out of his vegetative state and start paying the attention I don’t want or need, and that was when I would really ignore his ass. When he asked, “What’s for dinner?” I would be pulling on my black wool beret and walking toward the front door. I’d fuss with my hair a bit in the hall mirror as I answered, “I don’t know, you tell me.” And out the door I’d go, shot from guns. Men expect women to be always available-- like their mothers--in the kitchen, cooking, doing the wash, plumping pillows, even to the very end when a husband would insist on an open casket.  But the nasty little trick here is that if you are available, you are a bag of stale Fritos.      I was still trying to think of a subplot for my novel about a girl who brought cruel men in cruel countries to their knees out of sheer fright after viewing a swatch of pubic hair on a mons veneris, and veiled women dripping around in sheets from head to toe, when it occurred to me that all men fear women. And that men act it out in certain arid, dusty countries, by keeping their women in houses behind ten-foot concrete walls that face the street. They keep them busy cooking and sweeping out the sand that blows back in their faces. Like men everywhere, they fear women because they possess the one thing that men want most in this world, and that’s a sweet, velvety orifice; after a few juicy plunges of his engorged organ into this willing, comforting darkness, a man can banish his demons until the next time.   Of course, the feeling doesn’t last forever. But he can do it as often as he wants if he can hold onto the woman for his personal use.  Even in a shack made of old railroad ties and torn down billboards a rusted-out man with a nearby and compliant vagina can be a man of consequence. So he hides her like gold poached from another’s claim, but he still fears his woman for he fears her loss, and that’s the power she has over him and I’ll be damned if oppressed women know it. It’s Lysistrata time, girls!   Cast off those shrouds!  Rise up!      Ah, but that’s not the novel I wanted to write. I wanted to become famous as an intellectual and perhaps slightly twisted novelist, one who airs previously unthought of thoughts and makes unexpected connections, and sets them down on paper like Michel Houellebecq, over in France.  Or just be able to deliver a straight message like Simone de Beauvoir, or hit spiritual heights with a book about God, or, in the end, if my small talent failed me, settle for a boy meets girl novel, heavily laced with sex.       I could never write a novel because I could never get past the first five or ten pages. When I had an idea I wanted to get it down on paper fast and I’d go like hellfire on the computer until I hit the wall.  What exactly was the plot? Where were the words that were swirling around in my head a minute ago? I drew a blank. One day, after hitting the wall again, I decided to send a literary magazine nine on ten pages of something or other as if it were a sample of a larger piece of work. They actually bought it “as is”. I got a modest check and a letter complimenting me on my style, and on the restraint I had shown by not tying everything up with a ribbon, and leaving something to the reader’s imagination.  They wanted to see more stories like it. So I sent more truncated novels and they bought them, all but one where I tried to resolve matters.  The day came when I realized that short stories were my métier, and I couldn’t get past the wall because I had already said what I had to say. And listen to this—the editor said I had a nice following and that they would arrange for a collection to be published. I hadn’t exactly arrived, but I was en route as a writer of short stories.      In the early days, Sludge read the magazine stories with some interest. Put another way, he didn’t set it aside “for later,” and even smiled occasionally as he read my words. When the book came out, he asked for one of my copies and kept it in his desk.       Hundreds of years later, we pushed the two sides of our round partner’s desk back together again. I asked him why we had separated them in the first place and he said that he wasted too much time watching me mouth the words I was writing, and that I was still doing it, but he was used to my little tics.          12:29:28 PM    comment []

AGING UNGRACEFULLY   When the guy at the market check stand said, "Thank you, Young Lady," I replied, "You're welcome, Old Man."   No matter whether he's young or old, my answer to the above epithet is always the same. Reactions vary, going from stunned silence to apologetic gibberish.  I hate myself for it, but when I'm in a bitchy mood, (which I always am when shopping for groceries) I'll add, "If I'm an honorary Young Lady, then you are an honorary Old Man."  And stalk off, ignoring the tittering line of shoppers.   I understand that any man calling a woman of seventy-eight, a "Young Woman" is only trying to be friendly and, in his way, thinking to give her a compliment. As it turns out, though, it is an insult.   Obviously I am not a young lady, and I deeply resent being called one, as if still being young was, to the minds of women, the Holy Grail.  Plus it calls unneeded attention to my decaying self.   My husband caught hell from a waitress when he called her "Dearie."  That's nothing compared to an old dame being referred to as "young" in front of a host of giggling people.   You know you are old when people--men and women--start patting you on the shoulder, like Old Dog Tray.  This happens to me all the time now, and sometimes they come up behind me to pat ever-so-gently as if I might crumble to dust before their very eyes.  Which startles me, given that I don't like to be touched from behind by someone I can't see.  Do you?   At the country swap meet I attend almost every Sunday, which involves a couple of miles of walking around and fingering detritus, shards and road kill, a woman I know came up to me and said, "I see you're out." As if I had been confined somewhere.  Then she gave me the obligatory pat on the shoulder and said, "Good for you."    I like to drive fast mainly to get my errands out of the way before I collapse. But I can be going 75 in the slow lane, and will be tailgated by men and young girls.  That's because they see my little white head bobbing at the wheel and, by God, they will not follow an old lady driver, and they want me out of the way, if not off the planet entirely.   A couple of years ago, when still half full of beans, I would let the tailgater pass and then get behind him or her and tailgate them mercilessly.  But today I am older and wiser and know there are more cops in our area, and that I could kill or be killed.  But it took three-quarters of a century to figure that out.   But then, again, I was in my Sixties before it occurred that I should part my hair with the fine end of the comb.               10:12:32 AM    comment []