| A half cashew, split length ways, lying flat against the brick tile in the corner by the first urinal (first from the entrance) in the men's room in Barnes & Noble, Portsmouth NH. I see it only after I've sidled up and begun my work at the porcelain. In the corner. Under no circumstances, no normal circumstances, would I ever consider eating the thing. Of course. It looks like it was placed there intentionally: a question made nut-flesh, like a living rebus, or perhaps the first step in some public humiliation procedure, a social experiment from the school of Funt, the cruel set-up for a high school joke, and the next day everyone in town knows you as "Piss Nut."
I wouldn't want to eat it, wouldn't entertain the idea even, except that seeing it sitting there - not a meal, not even a snack - I sense that someone has placed it there, deliberately, a temptation, a question of where your boundaries lie, that someone, somewhere wants me, or wants someone, to eat this nut, to consider eating this nut on the floor of the corner of the bathroom, wants someone to be at least tempted by the question of eating it.
And I was in Philly, in the subway, with my girlfriend Saturday. It was pretty empty, maybe cause it was Saturday, but I got the impression that very few people use the Philly subways - they looked abandoned, Escape From New York'd. This one dude, wasted, street type individual, could've been 30 could've been 60, staggered over to the bench where my girlfriend and me and a fellow passenger, middle-aged African-American woman, sat waiting for a north-bound train. "Look what I'm drinking," he says, and holds out his bottle of mouth wash. "I'm fucked up," he says. "My father beat me. I'm gonna go find him and beat him back." Swings his limbs. No real physical threat, right, too looped, uncoordinated. But still. And we're frozen. Black woman says: "Why don't you go do that, then." He doesn't hear. Says: "My father told me - " racial slur something something - makes a lame fist and jerks it just a little in the direction of the black woman. She doesn't flinch - it's too far, too small - what is the nature of this threat? Is this a threat?
[Read The Rest Below The Fold...] |
| He locks onto my girlfriend, and isn't saying anything, just staring hard. She's still. I'm still. Black woman leaves the bench. We wait. Is this going to end. What am I supposed to be doing. We wait. For what?
"We gotta go," I say, and we walk away. Behind us, down the concrete of the empty subway platform, "Take care of her. You take care of her or I will." We move to the far end of the platform. The black woman from our bench is upstairs reporting the guy. Nothing'll happen though. I hear him at the other end of the platform: "What? WHAT?" Looking for reiteration, clarification of a response no one has given him.
When the train comes, we get on. I look out the window as we roll past the platform, but I can't see if he's still there.
On the bus back to New York I re-play the scene, indulging in the weak adolescent satisfaction and conclusiveness of imaginary violence.
Imagine a national defense system in the form of Tai Chi.
I've been listening to the greatest hits of The Lovin' Spoonful which are pretty great, if kind of pervy in retrospect ("...a younger girl keeps floating cross my mind...") and also I've been listening to Groovie Goolies, which was maybe one of the first LPs I ever had, and which I sometimes listened to before going to bed, and which if you don't know was a kid's cartoon from the 70s with a goofy Dracula and a goofy Frankenstein and a goofy Werewolf playing in a band kinda like the Archies, but actually better, I think. I would have liked to have lived in a time in which the pop music contained codes and slang that I could decipher, even if those codes only referred to getting high. Still. To feel on the inside of something like that.
(Was I supposed to HIT him? Is that what he wanted me to do? Is that what she wanted me to do? Is that what I should have done?)
But there's no way I'm eating that cashew in the corner. |
