Doctor Turdingston, I Presume

I spent the day here at home. Chiara and her sister and the car went shopping. At midday, while watering the plants, I spent about half an hour investigating a strange and terrible smell outside my front door.

My first thought was that someone (a hobo?) had thrown a human turd onto my porch early in the morning and it had been sitting in the sun all day. I peered expectantly under the stairs that lead to our front door, behind the potted plants, even beneath the doormat. I went to the bottom of the landing and searched in the bushes with a long stick I broke off of a tree just for the occasion.

I never found anything. But the acrid, wet smell was in my nostrils and I convinced myself I could smell it in the house. I went out on the balcony on the far side of the flat and found it waiting for me. I put my face close to the seam between window and wall and found it sneaking in through the open and uncloseable space.

By this time I was sure it was no turd on the doorstep (on the roof?). Perhaps some kind of sewer concern? I looked expectantly at the faces of passersby outside the apartment, but I found nothing - not a trace - of the horrible expressions one expects to see on a person who has, while out for a pleasant stroll, just come across a human turd (or its attendant stench) in a public place.

Eventually I closed all the windows - despite the heat - and tried to read a book or watch the game on television. Every once in a while, like a dog that hears someone at the door, I would perk up and sniff at the air because I thought the smell had snuck up behind me while I was unguarded. Sometimes I was sure that I could smell it on my skin.

Later, when Chiara came home, she said she couldn’t smell anything.

The Summer of Archimedes

If you give me a long enough spatula, I will flip any burger in the world.

The Endless Breakfast

At yet another in that long, unbroken series of latenight meals with Chris and Eric that marked that great lost period of our lives, Chris had removed his shoes and would periodically (for emphasis or for the pleasure of the sound itself) bang them down on the tabletop. When other patrons glanced in our direction with curiosity or pity, frustration or amusement, Chris would respond with some typically understated bon mot. My favorite was “What? That’s the way I do it!” but the frequent ejaculatory and self-congratulatory shouts of “Comedy Gold!” were also welcome.

When the waitress came to insist that we be quiet lest she be forced to ask us to leave, Chris assented readily to her request and even promised a generous tip for her trouble. As she walked away, he turned to us and said - at a volume impossible for her not to overhear - “Just because she’s heavyset doesn’t mean we have to listen to her.”

Eric, perhaps aware of the awkwardness of the situation even through his inebriated haze, slid under the table and out the other side. He stumbled to the restroom, where, if he is to be believed, he peed in the sink, but vomited in the urinal.

Another time, Eric had a plate of hashbrowns sent to another table where two rather homely girls were sitting. After asking the obvious question of the waiter, they followed the answering index finger and looked over at our table. I smiled sheepishly. Eric sat drunk and stony-faced, unable to focus his gaze, and Chris raised his fork in salute and smiled broadly.

Later, when Eric (more sober now) noticed that the girls had never touched his gifted hashbrowns, he arose huffily and walked over to their table, snatched the plate from them with a snort and returned to our booth, where he ravenously devoured the unwanted and now cold hashed browns.

There were other nights and other diners and other pancakes and other friends. Those days have become, for me, the watered down and unproductive reflections of echoes of the Lost Generation’s café nights – a moveable feast that I barely registered passing by.

Had I known, I would have paid more attention.

The Heavy Head

Two nights ago I dreamed of Steve and his wife Nichole. They had a baby, a girl. She had an enormous head - far too big for her tiny body - and it was heavy like a bowling ball.

I remember distinctly from the dream that the baby’s head was difficult to hold or support with only one hand because of its great weight and one was fearful of allowing the poor thing to slip from your arms and go crashing through the floor and into a lower room.

The baby spent most of her time in bed, propped up against multiple pillows carefully arranged to prevent lateral movement, watching television.

The giant watermelon-sized head itself was remarkable because, although it was perfectly formed, the baby’s face occupied only a small area in the center of the thing. The face was normal, more or less, though tiny in the extreme and the right eyelid drooped lazily.

In this dream, I conversed with the baby, sat with her on the bed, and found her to be in every way a delightful child. Her intelligence was undimmed by her condition and she was well behaved. I was fondly disposed towards the girl - the heavy head - in the dream.

But, my god, the weight of that head.

It left an imprint on me like the imprint of a shotput on a pile of freshly folded underwear.

The Steve McQueen of the Uniform Commercial Code

Three years of law school, thirty some odd exams, untold thousands of dollars, immeasurable vats of hate, and it is only now that I realize I should have been digging a tunnel out of here all along.

Now I must escape an exam or two and then my (ill-fated) motorcycle jump over the fence.

I’ll be damned if those fuckers are gonna take me alive (or in a gown and tam).

So screw graduation.

I’m going to go sit in my room, throw a baseball against the Goddamned wall, and prepare a series of mnemonic devices to help me remember the remedies available to a seller involved with a breaching buyer in a sale of goods when both parties are merchants specializing (or holding themselves out as experts) in the field of said goods.

Cue the fucking theme music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYjnMfgzgcM

Maybe He Ate Pennies

Chiara, Nicoli, and I went with Nathan and his brother Dan to see their apartment.

It was the sort of apartment building in the sort of neighborhood where no one sees or wants to see their neighbors, but they hear every footfall creaking on the old crunchy carpet upstairs as they come home at four in the morning. It was the sort of place about which jokes are made about cooking smells though no one is cooking. I don’t know that it was so, but in my memory everything was brown or tan colored inside.

We were told on the landing outside the door that Dan’s vicious yet independently minded lovebird, Dothead, had been accidentally left outside of his cage over the long Christmas and New Year’s Holiday and Dan had no idea how he had fared.

On this somewhat ominous note, Dan turned the key in the door and we entered into the anticipation of Dothead’s demise. Would Dan react with anger? Sadness? Bemusement? Would he chuckle?

However, the question was, thankfully, unanswered and unnecessary, as, after a moment’s inspection, little Dothead was found, no worse for wear, on top of the television.

He was retrieved (easily done since he loves to sit on any part of a person if they offer it to him and are sure not to expose any flesh - which will drive him into a murderous and bloody frenzy) and placed back in his wire cage, where he seemed content.

“Maybe he ate pennies,” remarked Dan with a sweeping gesture towards the dining table, strewn with loose change in uneven piles. It was the scene of some boozy power game from the old year - playing cards stuck together with beer, an oldish box of Uncle Ben’s, wads of soiled paper napkins, and a small bowl of ceramic shards collected during Dan’s studies abroad.

The irony may have struck Dothead while alone that, while he enjoyed unprecedented freedom unmolested in the apartment and could, say, masturbate in front of the television or discuss his to do list with himself in a southern accent, he could not get to his water or food as the only source of both remained inside his cage. And though the door to the cage was slightly ajar, it looked undisturbed.

I asked Nathan for a soda.

“Coffee or Booze,” he said, the beginnings of a shiteating grin playing around his face.

I asked for water, then.

“Coffee or Booze!” came the reply.

I felt like neither; so we played poker.

Later, after Dan was at the bottom of a bottle of Greg Norman label Shiraz, he tried to explain to me the origins of his ceramic collection: “This one is Roman, This one I found in the Thames, This one is Nabatean.”

Perhaps sensing that we weren’t as interested as we really ought to have been, he left for his bedroom in a hurry with a bottle of bourbon under his arm. For some minutes we didn’t see him and continued our game, betting frivolously with the sticky pile of other people’s pennies.

Nicoli, though technically more skilled at the game, lost miserably to Chiara, who (she said) had never played.

When Dan finally returned, he had a sheaf of his poetry in his hand and he sat down to read them to us, one by one.

Somewhat to my surprise, his poems were intensely maudlin. Personal recitations of pain and fear, peppered with epithets and conventional rhymes, but expressing (awkwardly for a mixed crowd of friends) a real anguish and even anxiety. The trope of a deceitful woman was hard to miss, as was the charming aphasia with which he (purposefully?) misspelled commonplace words to the point of rendering them almost meaningless. His tongue, swollen and made slothful by wine, often refused to cooperate with him.

If anyone saw these poems (he pronounced them “pomes”) printed out on paper, they would expect a sort of coffee-house, angst-ridden, weepy-eyed affair if they were to be read aloud. But instead, Dan seemed to find the entire enterprise of pouring out his human soul to us hilarious. He was practically rolling on the floor when he read to us about his trammeled heart and withered ability to love (like those time-travelers he once described to me).

At Nathan’s suggestion, Chiara was handed the pile of poems and read the remainder to us in her lilting accent, misplaced stresses, and phonetic renderings of unfamiliar words.

This, all agreed, really crystallized the experience.

Nicoli eventually left, and Chiara and I felt the inexorable pull toward the end of the evening. On the way home I asked Chiara what she thought of Dan’s poetry. In that way she has which I usually ascribe to the language barrier, but may in fact be an expression of her (to me) asymmetric mind, she answered my rhetorical question with another:

“What do they eat?”

I expected this was a reference to the Webber family’s notorious gassiness – an arch reference to the cacophony of flatulence always attendant to a Webbernacht, but it turned out to be literally meant. She was perplexed by their apparent lack of foodstuffs.

“Maybe they are the ones who are eating pennies,” she offered.

I complimented her on her gerund and fiddled with the radio. In his apartment, Dan threw up.

In Praise of Dr. Megavolt

Dr. Megavolt is a guy who wears a sort of tin-foil suit of armor and a birdcage for a helmet. He stands on top of what looks like an ice cream truck with an enormous Tesla coil on top. They turn on the Tesla coil and Dr. Megavolt wrassles the lightning. The ambient electricity is strong enough to raise the hairs on your scalp and to cause an unconnected fluorescent light tube (held aloft by a schlub assistant) to incandesce. You can feel the fillings in your head.

When I saw him at Burning Man in 1999, he fought the lightning from the coil for a few minutes and then shuffled to the side of the truck where he leaned over the edge and said to one of his technicians:

“Hey guys . . . I can still feel it.”

This moment of whiny humanity produced in me an abiding love for the idiotic stunt of Dr. Megavolting.

I saw the poor sap yesterday at the Coachella festival. He looked no worse for wear, but who knows? Inside those metal bars and iron cage, maybe there is a middle-aged guy struggling with his divorce or with worries about his receding hairline and expanding middle. Maybe the electricity has fundamentally altered the way he sees himself or how he feels about things. Who would he be if he weren't Dr. Megavolt?

In any case, Megavolt answers the call of the bell. He straps on that birdcage, climbs awkwardly on top of his ice cream truck and throws down with the great talons of hair-raising electricity that arc from the buzzing and screaching Tesla coil. If that ain’t a man, I dunno what is.

Gary Cooper for the new millennium: Dr. Megavolt.