Monday, March 29, 2010
Al Fresco: A Story You Just Don’t Want To Read
This is one hell of a week, and I need to do whatever I need to do to get through it - to slice and slash, to crush, to dodge, and to exorcise. I wish I could exercise, but there is no time. Exorcism may be the order of the day. In which vein:
Here’s an exorcism essay, one I write to extirpate a wretchedness from my mind. When I am witness to horrors of a certain magnitude, I just can’t live quietly with them in my breast. They keep coming back to me, again and again. They repeat on me something fierce, if you will. And if you won’t, tough. It happens anyway.
These situations arise, more often than not, with regard to something to which I’m exposed for a thankfully brief period of time. People I pass on the sidewalk, or in my car - I see them for such a tiny slice of their lives, yet the unmitigated hideousness of even that minimal exposure is enough to put me into a mental feedback loop from which I cannot extricate myself, much as I wish to, until I actually put the damn thing down in words, flesh out every gruesome aspect of it. There’s something about reducing such experiences to a concrete articulation that robs them of their power over me.
On the other hand, it might just invoke in a reader the same recurring revulsion I felt as a direct observer, that drove me to scratch my scrawls in the first place. To this I say, too bad. I’m writing so I can be rid of something, not so that you can share it with me - but if you want to come along for the ride, due warning and I’m not gonna stop you. But at least I’ll do you this favor: the story is in my extended entry (heh), so you don’t accidentally stumble into it. So if this is the end of your visit today, chag sameach and happy easter, I hope your week is smooth and your nights are quiet. Better me than you, of course, but better somebody than nobody.
I was driving on a fruitless mission to find a grocery store in the southern part of town. I was driving in the wrong direction on the wrong street, and I knew it too, but I was also killing time and seeing the sights, such as they were. I figured, it was a lovely day - I might as well do a little local tourism. When it came time for me to turn around and head back whence I came, I’d probably know it.
So: I’m stopped at a red light; I can see down the side street, along the side of the shop at the corner. Sitting back against the wall of that shop, about forty feet from me, is a large woman. She appears from my admittedly imperfect vantage to be tall, generously proportioned, and extremely expressive. She’s leaning forwards and backwards, rocking, her arms raised up beseechingly, her mouth gaping and clenching like a fish’s. Her abundant hair is various shades of grey, as is the voluminous dress that drapes her voluminous self. Down that sleepy side street out there off Ocean Avenue, she makes a strong visual impression on me as I sit at the stoplight. Something is going on with her. I am hoping the light will last long enough for me to find out what it is.
She rocks back, elbows bent and hands uplifted; then she rocks forward again. Her arms pull in toward her body, her torso curls forward, her chin juts out, her mouth gapes wide - and a large chunk of something shoots out of her maw onto the far side of the sidewalk upon which she sits. This explains a lot for me. She wasn’t emoting, she was regurgitating, with every ounce of power she could bring to the act. I am thinking, perhaps this light has taken too long already - yet I have not averted my gaze, drawn magnetically to the majesty of her emesis. Something tells me, I have not yet seen all that there is to see. And thus, even as the bolus erupts from her bloated, wattley face and describes a soggy arc through the sundrenched morning on a path from heaven to earth like some peristaltic rainbow, she rocks forward again, leaning, reaching, grabbing whatever she’d chucked up back off the footpath, and quickly stuffs it back into her rancid mouth once more for another try.
The light changes; I drive on, but it is already too late. In only a second or two I’d seen much more than I’d wanted to - things better left unseen, if not completely unimagined. But for me, in the blink of an eye, I saw what could not be unseen, and now suddenly I find myself unable to think of anything else. For weeks these recollections returned to me, grotesque and repugnant. I’m hoping I can leave them behind me now that I’ve disgorged them here, with no lurking urge to retrieve and remasticate them yet again. Apparently I didn’t realize at the time when it was time for me to turn back on that drive that particular day, till I’d actually gone too far. Perhaps you, good reader, are feeling likewise just about now. What can I tell you - I know what it’s like.
