“Do you think it the least bit odd,” Fitzwater begins. “That this is perhaps the only town in the country to have a milkman?”
“Not in the least.” Reggie smiles a rotted smile, handing Fitzwater the milk and staggering back to his truck. Fitzwater pours the fresh milk into his cereal. He puts the stopper into the sink. After pouring the other half of the milk into the sink, he tosses the cat in.
Before eating his cereal, he opens the first package in the series of three. There is a letter enclosed with it. He reads the letter and then says aloud: “Excellent. My soul has finally arrived. I’ve been waiting for this.”
He decides to finish his cereal before trying on his soul. Once finished with his cereal, he takes the bowl over to the counter and gently places it down.
Now, fully opening the package, he pulls the first part of his soul out and puts it on.
“Slightly ill-fitting,” he grunts to himself.
He then opens the second package and puts this part of his soul on. After opening the third package, the usually sluggish cat becomes very excited and leaps out of the sink. Fitzwater has just pulled the contents of the third package out and has time to think, “Oh, a nice pair of boots,” when he has to chase after the cat, boots in hand.
“Get back in the sink, you little shit.” He grabs the cat with one hand and walks it over to the sink. As he starts to toss it in, the cat scratches him and he drops the boots into the milk instead.
“Ruined now,” he says to the cat. “Better set them out for the Trashman.”
He ties the cat to his ankle and goes outside, into the blazing heat of the desert, and places the boots on the curb. It is not the usual day for the Trashman. He will have to go inside and call one.
The Joke
As a joke, a man’s wife serves him with divorce papers. She has them sent, already signed by her, to his place of work. Understanding dawns on him as he reads through the papers. He still doesn’t get the joke so he assumes his wife wants a divorce.
“Oh boy,” he says, placing his forehead against the smooth wood of his desk. The man’s name is John, but everyone calls him Foot because of his condition. He remains with his head down, gently tapping his forehead against the wood. This is completely out of the blue. Just last week, he and his wife took a vacation to the remote island of Gonop. How could she? Why would she? He just doesn’t understand...
Later that day a coworker comes by his office and sees him still in the head down position. “What’s wrong, Foot?” the coworker says.
“It’s my wife,” Foot says, not raising his head.
“I’m sorry. Is something the matter with her?”
Foot raises his head. His eyes are red and watery. “She wants a divorce.”
“Welcome to the club,” the coworker says, raising a fist of solidarity and strolling back into the office.
Throughout the day, Foot’s anger builds. She has no right to do this, he thinks. Not without any explanation whatsoever. That kind of thing just isn’t done. By the time he gets home, he is ready to tell her all of this. He is ready to throw the papers across the room and tell her they are meaningless but, upon opening the door to his house, Foot is once again shocked.
Taking the joke one step further, his wife has decided to sleep with another man. She and her lover are actually in the act when Foot walks through the door. They are on the couch. The man wears a buckskin coat and nothing else as his hips dive vigorously between Foot’s wife’s legs.
“Oh,” his wife says between moans. “You’re home.”
The man continues to pound away.
Foot, still holding the divorce papers in his hands, brandishes them at his wife. “Jesus Christ!” he shouts, strolling across the room to grab the buckskinned man by the shoulder. “Get the hell off my wife!” He jerks the man away. His wife makes no attempt to cover herself. The man only looks emptily at him, absently toying with his huge penis.
His wife looks surprised. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset, Footy.”
“You serve me with divorce papers and then I come home to find you fucking another man. You don’t understand why I’m upset?”
“It was... just a joke,” she says, giggling.
“A joke!” he shouts.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just a joke. Pretty good one, huh?”
The buckskinned man laughs. His laugh is very deep. The laugh of a simpleton, Foot thinks.
Still, a sense of relief washes over him. Sitting down on the couch beside his wife he says, “You mean, you don’t really want a divorce?”
“Of course not,” she says. “I told you, it was just a joke.”
“A joke, huh?” Foot puts the divorce papers on the coffee table. The buckskinned man is edging toward the front door, still naked except for the coat. “What about him?” Foot says.
“Oh, he was part of the joke. That’s Norman. He works at the hardware store on the corner.”
“I thought he looked familiar,” Foot says.
“You just need to lighten up,” his wife says, swiping his arm with her hand. “You’re such a stick in the mud.”
“Yeah,” Foot says. “I guess I can be.”
Norman leaves through the front door and, looking at his wife sitting complacently on the couch, Foot finally gets it.
Shoes
I pull all the shoes from the closet, pair by pair. They are all ridiculously large. I have to leave for work any minute and these fancifully huge shoes are no good. My coworkers will surely notice them as they pick me apart with their predatory stares. Perhaps if I worked with the blind or with clowns... But even clowns didn’t wear those big shoes when they went home at night.
I choose a black pair, hoping they’ll look smaller. Before putting on the shoes, I change into the largest pair of pants I have, thinking maybe the extra diameter of the hems will also make the shoes look smaller. We’ll see, I think. Leaving the room, I try to open the door but accidentally ram it into the shoes. Immediately, I realize things will not be as easy as they once were.
Walking down the stairs, I lose my footing on the third step, tumbling the rest of the way down. I have trouble breathing and my vision is slightly blurred but I must get to work.
Being strapped for time, I choose to go through the park. The morning is clear and the grass smells good but I can’t enjoy it. I have to concentrate just to walk, digging my toes into the bottoms of the shoes so I don’t step right out of them. My attention is momentarily captured by a man’s moaning. The moaning suggests that someone is in great pain.
I see the moaner leaning against a tree. He is a huge man, nearly a giant. Not at all the type of person you would expect to see moaning with pain. I move closer to him, but not too close. My shoes will look smaller from a distance, I think.
“Are you okay?” I call out.
“God no.”
This is not at all what I expect him to say and I am at a loss.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Not likely.”
This man is very gruff and I think about abandoning his case altogether, being strapped for time and all. He must be in a great deal of pain. He doesn’t even look up, just stays bent into the tree, his back heaving with sobs.
“Are you sure I can’t help you?”
“My shoes!” he cries out.
I move in closer. Elated, I see that his shoes are tiny. Or, rather, they look tiny on him.
Now he’s looking at me and, aware of the feverish excitement in my eyes, he takes a couple of steps toward me but his feet, undoubtedly numb, drag the ground and he tumbles down into the grass. I rush over to his side, using my shoes more like skis, sliding them along the dew-slicked grass.
“Too small,” he grunts through clenched teeth, trying to stand up. “Painfully so.”
“I think I can help you.” I lift a leg and dangle the foot over his head. The shoe falls off and clunks down on his mottled nose. Under any other circumstances this would have been wickedly inappropriate,
but the man is overjoyed.
“Yes!” he shouts. “It has happened to you too!”
“Maybe we could swap!” I shout back.
The man hurries to sit up and folds himself over his feet.
“You know,” he says, hurrying with the knot. “I think they were starting to cut off all the circulation.”
“Yes,” I say, kicking the other shoe off into the grass. “I had to flex my calf muscles just to keep them on. Exhausting work.”
I sit down beside him and put the new pair of shoes on. They are stylish as well as correctly sized. We both stand up and walk around, as though we are trying on new shoes at a store, like there are any other choices.
“Yeah, these feel good,” he says.
“Nice,” I bounce up and down a little. “Well, I better be off.”
Anthropology
On a whim, I become an anthropologist. First thing, I go to a primitive tropical island. I get to know the locals, using my newly invented universal dialogue. They seem to be a sublime lot, blissed out by what they call the “Orchestra of the Gods.” This orchestra, the island folk explain, plays weekly in a sort of parade.
The rest of the week, I sleep fitfully and fear that I am coming down with the plague. Finally, the day of the parade arrives. The islanders line the island’s one dirt road and I plow my way to the front, my heart thumping with anticipation. An electric murmur runs through the crowd and I know the orchestra must be coming. Upon seeing them, I am automatically disappointed and enraged. They are a stick orchestra, making no noise whatsoever other than the clicking and clacking of the goddamn sticks. But they act as though they are playing real instruments—blowing into the sticks, strumming the sticks, beating the sticks against the air.
The crowd oohs and aahs.
I want to tell everyone there that this is a farce. But I can’t. I’m an anthropologist. An objective observer. A cultural chameleon. In an attempt to fit in, I unthinkingly hold up a lighter. It is the islanders’ assumption that their pathetic orchestra brought this canister of fire to them. After that, I become a god.
CTN
My girlfriend sits on the couch and begs me come and watch the Craig T. Nelson movie. “He plays a free spirit!” she calls, naked, eating a giant hamburger. Glops of mayonnaise tumble out onto her breasts, slowly sliding downward before dripping from her nipples.
And I am somewhere very far away, fixing a television with a butter knife, slathering love upon a hateful world. Thinking of nothing else to say, I call out: “Just a minute! I have to tie my shoes!”
The movie is a drag, five hours long and all of the dinner scenes are drawn out in painful detail. I go to sleep that night, dreaming of Craig T. Nelson as a sexual shaman, giving my girlfriend lessons in love.
Vampire
Yesterday, I discovered that a vampire lives next door. His name is Bernard Watkins. He wears a host of garish sweaters and a thick, neatly trimmed mustache. I wouldn’t have taken him for a vampire upon meeting him.
I’ve broken up most of the furniture in the house and am upstairs grinding stakes on the lathe. I don’t know how many people in the town he’s already turned into vampires. After grinding all the stakes, I figure I’ll lie in wait, forming the perfect game plan.
Mother calls up the stairs for me to come down and meet the new neighbor. Instinctively, I know she has unwittingly invited the vampire into the house. I pick up a stake and head downstairs.
The Inconsequential Man
Adjusting my ascot and staring outside, I notice a man sprawled face down in the middle of the road. I adjust the ascot all wrong and make a high bleating noise of despair. The maid comes over to help me. Her hair smells like oranges as her deft fingers manipulate the ascot into the perfect shape.
“There there,” she says, trying to stop my bleating.
I gesture outside and say, “Did you notice...”
“The guy out there?” she says. “Yeah, I seen him.”
“Should we do something about it?”
“I don’t see how it’s our responsibility.”
I shrug. She has a point, I guess.
“I’m gonna go clean all them jars,” she says.
I nod. We did indeed go through a lot of jars last night. I can’t take my eyes off the man out there in the road. What could possibly be wrong with him? Was he dead? Did he pass out? Was he drunk? Beaten?
A loud car with flames painted on the side, driven by a guy with a mullet, comes roaring down the road, running over the man. The car does not stop or turn around. I pull up a chair and continue to stare out the window. I bellow at the maid to bring me a sandwich. She brings the sandwich and I tell her I don’t have time, just shove it in my mouth. She goes about it with a bit more brutality than I appreciate and I tell her she’s this close to being let go, holding my thumb very close to my forefinger. She looks over my shoulder at the now pulped man out in the road. “Still out there, huh?” she says.
“It’s fascinating,” I say.
“I gotta get back to them jars.”
I wait for one of the passing cars to stop. None of them do. I wait for someone to show up. No one does. Again, I bellow at the maid, this time for a phone. I tell her to dial emergency. She does this with fingers puckered from cleaning and hands the phone to me. “I ain’t talkin to no cop,” she says.
“Are you aware of the situation on C Road?” I ask.
“What!?” a gruff man shouts.
“There’s a man out on the road...”
“Is this a prank!?”
“No. I’m afraid it’s fairly serious. There’s a man...”
“You got the wrong line buddy!”
“Is this the police?”
“You got that right.”
“Then I have an emergency I need to report.”
“We don’t have time to deal with that!”
“I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”
“Jesus, would you leave us alone!? Take your business elsewhere!”
Then he hangs up the phone. I continue to watch the man. Sometime during the night, the maid tells me she’s pregnant and leaves. She doesn’t come back.
The man stays in the road for days. Eventually two burly old men in t-shirts and sweatpants come outside and gather around the pulpy lump in the road. One of them complains about the stink. The other one tells him he’ll take care of it. Both men depart. One of them comes back about a half hour later with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. He scrapes the man up off the road and carts him away. I wipe the sweat from my brow and call the maid service, looking for a replacement.
Genitalia
I wake up from a twelve day inhalant bender. My room has been redecorated, a giant poster of Kirk Cameron taped to the ceiling above the bed. I have to piss.
I pull the leaves of wilted lettuce off the toilet seat and discard them in the trashcan. I pull down my underwear, the sight astonishing me. My genitals have become a dry, lumpy mass, something only resembling a penis protruding from the mire. I reach down to seize it delicately between two fingers and it tumbles off into the toilet, a spray of urine shooting everywhere.
I decide I never should have rolled out of bed. Reaching under the sink, I grab a can of spray paint, anxious to huff my way back to sleep.
The Death of Eric
Every day, Eric strolls proudly out of his house with a cadre of invisible but beautiful women. Every now and then he sneaks them into a public bathroom stall and makes glorious love to one or more of them while the others watch. He performs all voices with near channel-like perfection, often alarming men in the other stalls. Some of them find themselves enlightened by Eric’s new height of masturbatory zeal.
He takes the women to jewelry stores and asks them what they want, forcing the commission-hungry workers to address their particular coordinates in the air.
When Eric finally dies of a heart attack (he weighed over 400 pounds and everyone saw it coming) no one attends his funeral. The priest blesses him, completely unaware
of all the beautiful women standing around him, aroused by his stoic celibacy, each of them looking for something to fill the void.
Frogs
Three white thugs are playing leap frog on the sidewalk in front of my house. It is very late, nearly four in the morning. Throwing on my most intimidating robe, I wander out onto the porch. One of the thugs stares impishly at the two engaged in the game. The one in the black backward baseball hat expertly jumps over the one in the oversized basketball jersey. The one watching grabs his crotch and says, “Oh, man, you fucking rocked that one.” Then he hops up and down and says, very rapidly, “I wanna play! I wanna play! I wanna play!”
“Hey!” I shout from the porch, pulling my robe tightly around my neck. “Can you guys keep it down? I’m trying to sleep.”
The two playing the game continue to leap over one another. The third wheel hikes up his pants and glides over to the porch. “Hey, motherfucker,” he says. “Wanna come down and play some fuckin leap frog with us?”
“No thanks,” I say.
“Hey motherfucker I din’t say you had a fuckin choice.”
“Just keep it down,” I say.
But he is already coming up the walk, approaching me. It doesn’t look so good. “C’mon man, don’ be such a fuckin honkey motherfucker. Me and my homies got us a good game goin, dawg. ‘Sides, if ya don’t, I’m gonna bust yer ass.” He brandishes a shiny gun, held in one of his oversize pants pockets. I guess I don’t really have much of a choice. The other two have leaped nearly to the end of the sidewalk, giggling wildly with each leap and shouting “Fuck!” a whole lot. “Name’s G-spot,” the one in front of me says, grabbing my arm and rushing me down to the sidewalk. I shake my arm away from him.
The Overwhelming Urge Page 5