the drunk mink--

I.

I remember the old man from work. His hearty bushel of white across the upper lip, his tanned skin, his heavy glasses. The curious thing looked quite like a walrus.

The old man from work used to stalk me. Between the rows and rows of books and magazine stands, he'd suddenly appear not unlike a Cheshire cat. He'd stop dead in his tracks, deliver a wink, and then pull back his lips slowly into grin. Quite disconcerting to a vulnerable young morsel such as I, you know. He'd ask if I had found a girl yet. He always asks if I had found a girl yet. Innocent bystanders would be forgiven if they thought he were running a rather public girl-trafficking operation. And there he was, collecting his quota from an anxious, impoverished small-timer who hadn't caught any today or yesterday. Quite unacceptable, sir!

The explanation for all this is rather innocuous. Disappointingly so, perhaps. You see, the old man, let us call him Walrus, was quite bemused with my state of affairs. First time Walrus and I met was at the children's section. I was busy piling bargain items on some wooden platforms. These items can only be succinctly described as large, bright-colored contraptions parents would offer as sacrifices to their small, atavistic children. Walrus, who was attending to his duties nearby, caught sight of me, strolled over, and introduced himself in his thereafter signature fashion.

Walrus asked me many questions. My name, my age, how long I had worked there, where I was from, what I had studied, and whether I had a girlfriend. My answer to the last was inestimably devastating to his weave of consciousness.

What?? No girlfriend?? No female to smooch in the dark and between the covers? A boy at your age? No, it's quite impossible! You jest with me, boy!

No, I'm not kidding. Nope. Nada. Nyet. No second degree burns on my johnson, I kid you not.

Thus began his animated crusade to goad me into attaching a female to myself. Whenever he saw me, he'd pounce his girl question on me. Sometimes he'd just unfurl his hands, his palms and say, "So?" It was understood. There was an unsaid understanding between him and I that he was a sort of extortionist, perhaps a bully with a heart of gold, and I was to produce a girl, somehow, lest my moral and existential standing in the world be permanently diminished.

At first, I played the part of extortionee reluctantly, as you'd imagine, but then with some enthusiasm. I'd parry the metaphorical ball back into his court by coyly insisting he find a girl for me instead. Predictably, he'd laugh it off and suggest I prey upon the many young bachelorettes who enter the store each day (Nevermind the fact that they'd fire my ass if I tried). Soon there was a second unsaid understanding between us - that he was a sort of laissez faire-ist with a strong aversion to intervention lest everyone be looking for handouts. A bit like God, he'd likely say.

But Walrus gradually endeared himself to me. To be sure, his pestering was annoying. The sort of thing they should hang once-a-year-seen aunts and uncles for. Still, I was secretly appreciative that Walrus, blest with his mad animal mind, seemed to believe that I could have a girl-love of my own. Wracked with innumerable insecurities and having the heart of a small rodent, I hadn't dream to dare. But Walrus believed and believed vigorously.

Walrus never had a trace of irony in his voice.

Perhaps I'm projecting.

But I don't think walruses are capable of irony.



II.

One day, I was haphazardly assigned to the information desk. An intimidating place where many questions are asked like, where's a section? where's a book? may I book a book? And if the hapless individual behind the desk doesn't faint under the weight of all this Guantanamo-like interrogation and is fully knowledgeable in the arcane mysteries of bookery, all. goes. well. Supposedly. I found it exhilarating in an absolutely terrifying sort of way. The sort of blood-curdling exhilaration one gets from watching a horror film, taking a ride on a roller coaster, or being chased a mile by a crazed man with a fire axe.

I digress.

Because my mind is such a shameless beast.

There was a girl who approached the counter. Voice like little bells. Inquired about "Gypsy Morph" by a Terry Brooks. So I tippity-tapped-tapped the computer, read the location of the book, and went off for it. Fetched it back. She didn't want it, she said. Not this cover. She was quite apologetic for all my trouble. It was then only that I got a good look at her. And those little bells sang like a choir of animated fairies in my ear.

I was quite smitten. Swooningly so.

She was slightly diminutive, some inches less than me. Twenty-ish, I would guess. She had apple-red elf cheeks, their color warmly accentuated by the smile she drew. She gently pushed the book back. It's okay then, she said. She sang those words! Pretty prettier prettiest bells. They chortled like wind chimes against a gentle breeze. Champagne glasses clinking amongst themselves, compelling its liquids giggle and claw at the walls. Of my chest. Bloated, ready to burst out like a horrid seppuku experiment.

I was taken aback. Taken hostage by boyish catatonia. I, frothing at the mouth, you could see it in my eyes. I wrung my hands and wrung them and wrung them. Below the desk, out of sight. I wrung them like the stubborn syllables of to-mor-row. They wouldn't go away, they couldn't make themselves useful.

She, let us call her Belle, could sense that I was troubled. Terrified to the 't'. I wasn't the proverbial deer caught in her headlights, retinas slowly melting away to a nice vanilla glaze. I was something smaller. A beaver, perhaps. Or a ferret. And she backed away as if painfully aware that she had frightened the little thing. As if she knew if she stayed or pressed the issue, I'd immediately descend into spontaneous cardiac arrest. Probably true. Got a weak heart, you see. Too little fat, too much young, foolish blood.

So she left. Or began to leave, as her pace slowed considerably in my dreadfully faux movie mind. I then noticed two individuals who were her escorts. First, an intimidatingly tall man-creature who had clumsy hands molest her bare shoulders and neck. She had a tattoo of a skeletal wing perched high on her back. Not particularly impressive (or original for that matter) but still I swooned like the forgotten fool who discovers crayon could be applied to skin.

Belle had another companion, an elderly woman of similar height. Had an almost perfectly round head of brilliantly white cotton, the sort young children are goaded to stick on paper as 'clouds'. One imagines her either to be Belle's grandmother or a cleverly disguised cauliflower. It didn't help that such a fluffy manifestation brought memories of Barbara fucking Bush. That dazed woman who shat out a President who shat on the world and himself.

Suddenly the three were gone. And I swear I could've heard poor, bitter Walrus sneering behind a rack of fishing manuals that I let another one go. Another oyster, gone! Escaped! Poof! If he ever asks, I wouldn't say that Belle's man-creature companion terrified me. No, certainly not. Not his impressive athletic build, likely put to tearing into young ferrets for their tender meat. Or strangling elderly beavers, then stripping their hides for use as a sort of ritualistic underwear for alpha males. Nope.

I'd tell Walrus that Barbara Bush was the issue. Genes, I'd say. The little bastards that make you and I and your eminent bushel of white. Suppose Belle and I had a litter of human-lings and they surreptitiously came to say things like "nu-cu-lar". They'd never be respectable physicists like their papa wants them to. That just wouldn't do. Just wouldn't. Walrus would of course scoff at first, scrunching his 'tache like a disapproving wizard. But Walrus would understand.

His animal instincts would eventually overwhelm him, you see. And he'd be back, behind every rack and magazine stand, waiting to pounce on any hapless bachelor boy. This is the essential, unchangeable nature of walruses.

The old woman down the street, second house from the end, thinks I'm a drug addict. She told my aunt that she saw me smiling to myself as I swung my cigarette about near the street end.

I don't deny it, really.

The crazed smiling, I mean. I'm afraid illicit substances are out of my financial league right now. But I'm sure old-woman-down-the-street is quite horrified that a questionable boy of mere twenty-three, only a man-ling, living just up the road has powerful magic powder stashed away somewhere.

Perhaps somewhere unhygienic. Like his underwear. A square packet pressed against his crotch. Gives new meaning to those perennial words, "I did some blow back in college."

Surely it must violently perturb old-woman-down-the-street's gossamer-knitted mind. Now in her dreams, puffy sheep that dutifully dole out Social Security checks are strangled to death by teenage juveniles high on glue and flour. Hence, society collapses, its backbone of little old ladies having succumbed to strange boys who smoke out on the street.

But I do smile to myself, I do I do. A difficult thing to suppress when one has a trillion-mile mind. A thing with long showgirl legs crowned by frou frou skirts. A thing that chortles a la-la-la with every skip. A thing that hatches a butterfly into a fish into a Persian rug.

A wonderful thing that one could marry.

I tell everyone I love that I want to marry their head. That I wish to keep their uprooted brains with me all the time, in candy-colored jars filled with maple syrup. Something depravedly endearing like that.

But as I was saying, my mind has a mind of its own. It expands in any and every direction of its own volition. Or rather it has no volition, but expands regardless. Kind of like the amoeba that goes two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on and so forth. Kind of like the grotesquely fertile maiden who spreads her legs, resigned to the fact that her progeny will eject forth to devour her and then the world.

This is my mind. Mind you, I can't change it even if I wanted to. It eats and eats and eats, swells into a buxom cat obliviously high on its own nauseous binging.

Here's how it works. For example... My aunt, an oft-petrified mole of a person, warns me gravely of Indian robbers on bikes. Hapless Sebastian, a regular street smoker, must surely be vulnerable to the wheeled thugs. Very amusing, I think. I picture Apu (from The Simpsons) charging at gray-haired ladies with his bicycle. The rudimentary light of his two-wheeled contraption triggers a sudden arthritis attack that paralyzes the said geriatric, unable to defend herself with her two-ton bag filled with flagrantly abused prescription medication.

And my mind, quite unsatiated, continues...

What did Indian robbers use back when they didn't have bicycles? Say, three-hundred years ago. Elephants, I suppose. I think of tremendously irked pachyderms ridden by a robber (and perhaps his merry band of men) swatting aside terrified grandmothers with their trunks and then reaching for dropped purses (or harvested produce, if one is to be contextually sound).

Old women would often run back to their villages, screaming about being mugged by elephantine outlaws. Career elephant slayers would step forth - gruff, humorless mercenary men of questionable character. They would scour the vast Indian jungles for the perpetrators, armed with only spears and a cage of starved, voracious mice (a horrible cliche as an elephant, one to never forget, would tell you).

But my mind, MY MIND! What a curious thing. It goes on and on as a plummeting feather does. It makes speaking quite impossible. The other day, when I wished to say "re-ha-bi-li-ta-tion" to my father, I said "re-ha-bi-li-LE-ta-tion" instead. Even when I tried to correct myself, I kept saying it over and over.

Re-ha-bi-li-LE-ta-tion!

It's as if my mind quite unsatisfied with the number of syllables in thing, instinctively ties a ton of butchered meat to that cow before letting it go. Thus so, my mind decides it is pretty. Like a cat with a tiny bell around its neck. Everyone else, however, thinks it's a gruesome trick hatched by the sadist living in the abattoir.

No doubt the way I enunciate disturbs more than a few people, feeding the perception that I'm hooked on an array of exotic chemicals. "Yes, ma'am! Weedkiller cocktails with those cute little umbrellas stuck in them," said Sebastian to future inquirers.

My AHs and EEs, my NIs and OOHs - they terrify the common folk. My vowels, my pretty marbles of air, forcibly squeeze themselves between their fellow consonants like filthy mobs of rapists jostling to get a piece of the action. Onlookers, like literate Peter and Jane, can only gawk and gasp.

"See Sebastian contort himself into a babbling witch doctor. See him bite a bat's head off."

When I told a friend that my internship supervisor didn't like the way I spoke, she noted that this was simply a matter of race. "You are the weasel that scares the rabbits," she said.

Fair enough.

I want to go through life as if I were a small, crazed rodent.

"I bite and claw, hop and more,"
my resume would say.

For winter, I'd burrow into the navel of a pale-skinned goddess and feed on her silvery lint. A solid plan, no?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/fashion/shows/07DIARY.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc

"Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt."

Fuck. Yeah.

Love,

Urchin.

You know what would be a good name for a nightclub? The Labia. You know what would be a good name for a rock band? The Labia. Just sayin'.

I'm growing dreadfully thin. Everyone thinks I'd just get stuck between their teeth. Why bother? I'm a filament. The sort of nose hair that germinates exclusively in an oversized light bulb.

Also, also...

The sky is naked tonight. I can see freckles planted across her back. Am I content? More than I should be. Perhaps that's all there is to it. Perhaps that's all that's there.

So this is how it went.

Lamb cutlets, turkey chunks, pepperoni slices, scoops of pasta, a bowl of creamiest mushroom soup-

I was a ridiculous glutton that night. A change from the usual lustful, prideful, envying creature that I am. (I'm quite convinced my veins are a sickly green.) But that night, I thought I'd eat away my malignant heart. How heavy and monstrous a beast it had become. An obese worm.

I said to myself, "Just you wait, monsieur! I'll swallow a gallon of fat tonight and thus pad myself forever against misfortunes!"

A daft thing to say. All that only made my stomach sick. The wine, however, worked splendidly.

Glorious, glorious red to placate my filthy green. They didn't have white or champagne. But I forgive them that mortal error; have to be magnanimous this season, you know. Red will do will do will do. Makes your brain into a fluttering mush for all the fruit flies to love.

As usual, there were many predictable questions thrown my way. Small talk from small people:

Why are you so skinny?

"Oh, my kind madame, how thoughtful of you to ask. It was a dreadfully spare month at the orphanage. Poor Marcel was dying from tuberculosis. Day after day, all we had was Marcel for breakfast, lunch, and supper. We are saving his thighs for New Year's. He was a good runner, you know. But anyway, I will have to have Christmas here." Wish I'd said.

What do you plan to do after you graduate?

"To do a bit of slutty porn, my good madame. Do not look so surprised. There is a huge market for me, for us, you know. Us skinny, starved orphans. We would press our small, frail bodies against large, rotund women on camera. The mind-shattering contrast would incur a highly charged explosion of forbidden eroticism. Imagine, madame. Imagine the subversive political implications. The First World fucking the Third." Should've said.

Instead, I answered courteously, rolled my eyes as theirs wandered away, and quietly sipped on my whiskey. They had whiskey, oh my sweet fishes. Whiskey. Bless their souls and curse their palates. McCachlan, it was called. I think. Likely a Scottish bum grazing about the highlands without his underwear. The host raved about the bottle. Wonderful wonderful wonderful. His little eyes bounced with the blunt cadence of his adjectives.

The drink itself had the taste of dish-washing liquid, neat from greasy factory pipes. Every sip a nauseous wince for each time your tongue died. Still, it was powerful magic. To steady myself, I dug spread-out fingers into the couch as if maniacally squeezing a pair of fleshy buttcheeks. Of course I'm fine. Of course I'm awake. Of course this conversation is fucking fascinating.

"Do you see it? You see it, don't you? How everything is moving towards the end-times. The bible says Israel will sign a pact with many. The bible says with many," said the host, a squinty-eyed man married to my cousin.

"Yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. The Anti-Christ will make it all happen. He will bring peace to the world. And everyone, the world, will believe him..." replied Dad. I reckon he hadn't had that much fun since sixteen-sixty-six AD.

I got up many times from my seat to get some food or some booze, or both. Each time, I dreadfully feared toppling over, under the influence of woozy McCachlan, and finding myself on the lap of some hag of a relative, my fingers excitedly appraising her heavily powdered cheeks. "Oh, what a ravishing apple you have, ma cherie!" An apple thrice glazed with a thick, suffocating layer of formaldehyde that is the McCachlan swimming in my brain. Observe! my fellow necrophiliacs - a wonderful lubricant for the dead.

A miracle-worker, Lady
Lazarus.

Fortunately, I avoided any incident involving apples, metaphorical or otherwise. But after awhile, after drowning myself in an ocean of red, all I wanted to do was to murmur "Mmmm-mmmm-mmmm." Loudly. Audibly. As if I could call down a plague of droning insects on the assembled guests. Instead, I sat on the stairs, away from everyone, making make-believe calls to make-believe persons. Cellphone pressed against ear, I said...

Um. Uhuh. Yup. Sure. No worries. Thank you, Bob. John. Nick. Jen. Lynn. Faye. Hillary? Course I know her! We go waaay back to Wellesley! Bama? My man, Bama. My man, my man. I think there should be a mass culling of mooses since it's proven that they contribute to global warming. Though I strongly believe Chuck Norris would look good in antlers.

"No one must know about the insectoid affliction that rages within my mental cavities." Last thing urgently whispered into the phone.

When we reached home, I ran down the street and sat on the sidewalk of the main road. I blew loud, sticky kisses at the passing cars. Shouted at the top of my lungs, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" to each one. Happiness is possible, I realized. I just need the fruit flies to talk to me.

Alas

a piece of peace. Not to be.

Something's always wrong with him, that limp monsieur. Something crept up into his ear this time. A bug. A woman with secrets to whisper as tiny stilettos. She takes up self-styled residence in his aural cavity, and slowly etches her onomatopoeic name on his eardrum. A coy mistress as afflictions come.

Sebastian stands out on the street and draws a cigarette. Oh that wonderful panacea for the chic and the dying. He sucks in the gray and expels the gray. It floats away like a twisted corpse, his own no less, with vine-strangled limbs and wings. His eyes spy at the corners, half-expecting a demon to leap forth and drag it away. Where are the dogs? he thinks. They'd love to see this. A supernatural marvel appealing to their most basic canine instincts.

He mutters an apprehensive "la vie est jolie" under his breath, afraid that they might steal it away from him. He's been doing it all month. He does it to the mirror in the shower too. He cracks odd smiles at it, flashes a full grin sometimes. He's sure the person on the other side of the looking glass is quite terrified but obliges for that very same reason. He's a complete loon. Half-delirious and half-expecting a flea to murder him with a kiss on the scalp. "Too weird to live, too rare to die," the Duke might say.

On nights like this, Sebastian ponders about the state of things. An obsession. A little habit of counting to make sure one counts in life. Does he? Will he ever?

Stay tuned. He won't make it to the second season.

TONIGHT as dawn creeps in like a warm-bearded giant, Sebastian clutches his belly, picks it up and rocks it in his arms. He coos at it, blows a 'shh' and another and yet another. He runs his fingers through its minute grass-hair, caresses its head as if appraising a tender fruit - to say, Ah! The apple of my womb!

Hush now, hush now and rest... our protagonist, our pregnant MOTHER (blessed-is-the-fruit-of-her-womb) pleads.

To no avail. Our restless baby, our PREMATURE fruit, squirms and flips about like beached fish. Fish, also like fruit, definitely perishable. Question is

when.

So it is. Sebastian is up. Or down, depending how you look at it - this perennial question of fruit and fish. Sebastian listens to the Goldberg variations for a lullaby. He hears a dead man go mmm-mmm-mmm with the keys, as if smothering his fat, stubbly chin in blood-stained silk. Ladies and gentlemen, a high-strung TRAGEDY of a razor in a bathroom. Hum now, Humbert.

Hum now.