Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Prison Shower Buddy

Let’s start with the reference section.  Saturday night is the beginning of Purim, the holiday that asks the question, “Are you drunk enough?” For anyone who’s not been bludgeoned by my magnum opus on the subject, Rashamontashen, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up.  Preview: read the biblical Book of Esther.  I rewrote it from the perspective of each of the four main characters.  Rash your graggers!  Turn it into a drinking game!  Or don’t!  It’s all up to you, my friend.  As are so many of life’s rich offerings. 

NOW THEN.  Let’s get into the meat of today’s offering, or today’s offering of meat.  This time, it works both ways.  And that’s the way I like it. 

Feb 11:

My previous prison shower buddy relationship started a couple of months ago. It ended this morning, when I dumped him for a new prison shower buddy. I’d better fill in some intermediate details here. I wouldn’t want y’all thinking I’m some kind of prison shower slut. I’m not even fickle. I just used the first one up, and there was nothing left to do but replace him.

A couple of months ago, when our story begins, I was in the market for shaving lotion. As a dude with a hirsute face and a clean-shorn head, shave lotion is an unguent of great significance for me. A good one makes my personal destubblification process far quicker and less onerous. A bad one, on the other hand (or head), will leave me bleeding, with patchy unshaved areas and an overall disheveled appearance. I tend to slice myself up pretty badly while shaving - a consequence of the classic combination of a rough beard, a tender delicate babyface, and a shaving style which might be referred to as “comatose hackery”: I basically go after the whiskers the way zombies go after brains, making up in enthusiasm what I lack in delicacy. So it’s not so unusual for me to finish up a shave looking like something from a slasher flick.

In my ongoing efforts to staunch the gouts of my own blood, I’ve become quite particular about my shaving products and process. First, I need to do the deed in the shower, not at a sink, for maximum humidity and hydration; also, it’s easier to clean up the gory aftermess that way. I have a decent electric shaver for dry usage, but it takes too long to get the job done and does not shave as closely; sometimes it even yanks a hair clear out of its follicle just for spite. No, it’s steel blades for me. I tend to prefer triple-blade action, if not quad - doubles dull up too fast. I like a nice heavy razor handle; it moves with more authority and gives me better control. And of course, selection of a topical unguent is always a matter of numerous complex considerations. Standard commercial foams do nothing for me but clog my razor and obscure my view of the action. Foam-up gels are no better, though they are admittedly a bit more fun. I even got a fancy specialty shavecream once; it not only clogged my razor, it also clung so tenaciously to my face I had trouble shaving it off.

No, for maximum efficiency and effectiveness, my choice, after years of painful trial and humiliating error, was hair conditioner, and specifically, the pale blue stuff that comes in a giant CostCo storebrand 2-pack. It goes on quickly with even coverage, it adequately softens the steel wool emerging from my face, and it washes off pretty easily. Okay, it also clogs the razor, but not as badly as some other products do. Cheap and almost unscented, that was the standby stuff for quite a few years.

The only drawback was that you could only get it at CostCo, which doesn’t always have everything I’m looking for every time I go there, which isn’t even that often anyway. I only needed to get the stuff once a year or so, but when I needed it I really needed it. And, not so long ago, I did, in fact, really need it. So when Kel came back from a diapers-and-seltzer run without the hefty twinpack of cool blue goo I’d requested, I was in a depilatory pickle. I had to resort to using Kel’s hair conditioner, which may be fine for her mane but wasn’t doing my skin any favors. I was shredding flesh and exsanguinating something fierce with every shave session. I was officially in the market for something new and smooth. It is thus, after all, that I roll.

In this way I found myself one morning at the jumbo downtown apothecaritopia that sits near where I de-bus on my way to work. I figured they’d have a decent selection of razoring accouterments, and I was right. A profuse and well-stocked display awaited my bleary browsing eye, with more creams, foams, lotions and facial lubes than I’d ever be able to try. After having so painstakingly identified the best shaving lotion option already, I felt that overthinking this choice wouldn’t help me make it. Every product says it’s great; most of them probably aren’t, at least not for ol’ Bloodyjowls here. I just needed to grab something that met my basic criteria and then get out before I froze up under the onslaught of commercial proliferation. All I knew for sure was that I wanted nothing I’d already tried and rejected, it should be basically odorless and low-suds, and if there was some reason to think it would treat my dome right, that would be alright with me.

Given these parameters, I chose as efficiently as I could - a tube of goo for “Bald Guyz,” per the product title. I didn’t know how good it was but the tube wasn’t so big that I’d wind up living with my mistake, if I’d made one, for too terribly long.

The next morning, I cracked open the tube and slapped a handful on my shower-soaked scalp and face. First impressions were favorable: barely scented, clear, slick without being goopy, and a good viscosity that spread quickly and smoothly without getting too thick to be effective. Subsequent impressions bore out the initial ones - shaving was easy, the blade didn’t stick or divot, and the stubble rinsed right off the blades exceptionally quickly. I was mostly sure I had found a winner, except for one thing: I didn’t like the way it was looking at me.

The tube is a vibrant blue color which I associate with police cruisers in Philadelphia. The product title is boldly emblazoned in white lettering across the top of the package, the lower portion of which depicts what I can only imagine the manufacturer considers to be an iconic user of this product: He’s a beefy, thick-necked, broadshouldered white dude, head bereft of all hair save eyebrows, reedy mustache, and a chincap goatee. He’s shown from mid-chest up in a grey t-shirt that strains to contain his turgid bulk, and he’s grinning out at the world with toothy enthusiasm. Superimposed over the bottom of this image, in black numbers, is the volume of the tube, depicted in both metric and English measurements that spread across his massive pectorals. It had reminded me of something when I picked it out in the store, but in my efficiency I hadn’t dwelt on what. Once I was standing in my shower, though, stark naked, dripping wet, and clutching my blades, I figured it out.

In my shower we have a soap caddy stuck to the wall for push-button dispensation of soap and shampoo (for those who use such stuff). My razor sits atop the caddy together with a small mirror wherewith I can see how badly I am cutting myself up. My new tube of shavegoo went there too. It’s high enough on the wall to leave the gootube product model just a little above my eye level.

So, I look up in the shower and see a big guy in a grey t-shirt with numbers on it, bald and leering at me.  Hmm.  I think I remember this from Escape from Alcatraz, and in that movie it didn’t turn out well. If I were Clint Eastwood I’d have been forced to jam a bar of soap down his throat. But - brace yourself - I’m not Clint, nor any other sort of Eastwood. I didn’t feel like picking a fight with my tube of shaving gel. I just delicately turned him to face the wall and tried to ignore him. But I really couldn’t. I knew he was there, smirking at the steamy tiles. Often enough I’d forget to put him back properly oriented away from me, so I’d see the corner of his eye out the corner of mine.  That was almost worse. It instilled a paranoia, as if he were just waiting for me to turn around to loofah my glutes or something, so he could pounce on me like some overaffectionate inmate looking for a special bathtime friend. That is to say, he wanted to be my prison shower buddy, and I could be his prison shower bitch.

But weeks passed without untoward bathtime incident. Eventually I grew inured to his hungry smile and biker-gang styling choices. Every time I got into the shower he was there waiting for me; every time I left the bathroom I knew I was turning the lights off on him, leaving him leering vapidly into the darkness. He was a creepy guy but he was two-dimensional, and anyway the shaving gel was a good product.

As slowly as I worked my way through the tube of goo, so also did I slowly come to an accommodation with my prison shower buddy. He stopped making me think I was one dropped bar of soap away from a fearful rogering. I got used to him hanging around. I never grew to like him much, but I did learn to view him with mitigated anxiety.

My reconciliation with the burly bald bomber in my shower pretty much tracked my gradual exhaustion of the lotion I was squeezing out of his lower end. By the time I’d emptied the whole tube, I felt fairly committed to the product, and I’d also learned to ignore the grin of my prison shower buddy as easily as I ignored the alarm when I hit the snooze button upon awakening - as something that was there but not meaningful, a deferrable reality. When it came time for me to toss the empty tube, his broad smile held no dread for me as it beamed up impotently from the garbage bucket. When I went to replace it, I didn’t think twice before getting another identical tube, with an identical shower buddy smiling out at me from it. He’s up on my soap caddy even now, waiting patiently for me with his carnivorous smirk. So now when I take that tube in hand at the time and place of my own choosing, I can’t help but ask him, only semi-rhetorically: Who’s the bitch now, Bitchy McBitcherstein? But of course I say it only to myself. I wouldn’t want to antagonize anybody.  I am a bleeder, after all. 

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Back to Reality: The Red Fedora

It has been a longish time since I last posted.  I wanted to say something last week but with the rush of returning to work on a crutch and in a big velcro boot after a month of full-bore relaxation, well, I ran out of time, energy, and enthusiasm.  So sue me.  I thought I’d throw down some little blurb about what it’s like to return to the land of the worker bee, but I was too busy making the honey.  You know how that can be.  Walking has been challenging; my work really piled up in my absence; I’m not used to carrying stuff anymore.  I tell you, the drama and stress were almost more than I could bear. 

Then last weekend I got a phone message that put things into perspective for me, somewhat.  It was a cousin of mine, or his wife, more accurately.  I’d never heard from her before, but her husband had called me shortly after I moved to this city, having discovered a new entry in the telephone book with the same last name as his.  It’s an unusual name and he called to find out what I was doing with it.  We spoke for a few somewhat stilted moments and then hung up, and I never heard from him again - till very recently.  After a pause of nearly 20 years, cousin Ken contacted me via Facebook, of all things.  Though he was in his 70s and not exactly an “early adopter” type of cybernerd, he’d come up with a facebook page and used it to hunt me down.  I didn’t really explore his page when I got a message from him suggesting a meet-up - rather, I just let him know I was going in for foot surgery and would contact him when I could get around again.  He told me that he’d had some health problems but we’d meet when I could visit.  That was early January. 

When his wife Elizabeth called, it was to let me know that Ken had passed away.  I don’t know the details but it sounds like it was hard for him and for everybody involved.  Elizabeth and I spoke for a few minutes and then I let her get on with her paperwork and grieving, feeling like I’d missed an opportunity like I’d never missed one before.  I just visited Ken’s FB page; I was one of five friends he accumulated.  I’m sure he had many friends, but on facebook I was one of a very select few and I can’t help but think that I squandered that special status.  Ken was a good man and I never got to meet him.  Getting back out into the world has become more of an imperative than ever, in my book.  Hence, the following recollection about getting out and getting something out of it:

On Mondays I start work at 1 pm.  A few weeks back I was on my way up the block to the bus stop early one Monday afternoon when I met the Red Fedora.  From my first glance at him I could sense that he and I would wind up in conversation, whether I wanted to or not.  As it happened, I didn’t really want to, but it seemed inevitable. 

Why wouldn’t I have wanted to engage in social intercourse with a neighbor, a co-commuter, a kindred spirit?  The hat was the first thing that put me off.  It was an exceptionally cheap felt hat, a broadbrimmed fedora in a shade of robin-red that men just don’t wear on their heads.  The man wearing it was sort of short, but the hat was tall and jaunty.  It would be hard for any outfit to keep up with it.  This guy’s duds, though, seemed to have given up before he’d even put them on.  They really put the “dud” in “duds.”

His jacket was lightweight blue canvas with numerous pockets, all very well-used; beneath it, his t-shirt was worn-out and tired. His trousers were not visibly filthy but certainly gave no impression of excessive cleanliness either, and they fit poorly, bunched at the waistband and around his ankles.  His shoes were featureless white sneaks in decent repair but of no recent vintage.  Noting about him seemed new or well-maintained - his self, most of all.  His hair was long and shaggy, boyishly thick and casually swept to the side.  His face was like a piece of leather, pale eyes watery in the midday sun, nose roasted by the elements, lips chapped and deeply cracked to the point I’d have expected them to be bleeding.

His hands, though, told the story most eloquently of all: they were covered with lacerations, up and down all his fingers, maybe a quarter of an inch deep and a ruddy carmine color on the inside, which was clearly visible where his skin parted and pulled apart the gashes.  The first thing I thought was razor wire, but it probably wasn’t deep enough for that.  It just looked painful.  In contrast, the man upon whom these wounds had been inflicted smiled benignly as I approached.

I got this very good look at him because he was standing, adjusting his clothes and possessions, at the corner where I was obliged to walk right past him.  That is to say, I would have walked right past him except that somewhere it had been decreed that he and I would interact.  I knew it when I first saw him up at the corner, so at least I had some time to get used to the idea.

I approached the corner (and by extension, the fedora) and stepped off the curb just ahead of him, turning and crossing and maintaining what semblance of a street-face I could.  The effort was spectacularly unavailing. 

“Got the time?” It’s a common gambit of the underclass, a totally inoccuous question that initiates conversation and enables engagement with anyone.  It’s even fairly low impact since, if you are okay with ignoring another human being’s existence altogether, you don’t even have to respond.  But as regular Chucklehut readers know, that’s not my style.  Plus, fate wouldn’t have had it any other way.

This was in fact my thought as I answered him automatically, “Twelve-forty.” That was all it would take, I knew.  I had said it friendly-like. I’d made a social acknowledgment.  He’d do the rest, I was sure. 

“Yeah, just trying to make it to my dialysis appointment,” he shared conversationally with me as he swung into step by my side, his hideous fedora bobbing ludicrously along at my eye level.  “...And I just missed the bus, but I had to go to the shop, right?” He nodded over his shoulder and his eyes twinkled sidelong at me, disconcertingly clear and blue in his scarred, grizzled face.  The shop: he meant the medical pot place around the corner from my house.  “Man, I can’t go through that without getting high first.” With the guileless trust of an age-old friend, he flashed me his pot-user’s ID.  Three thin joints were strapped to it with a rubber band. “It’s tough to just sit there and take the treatment, but it’s sure better than the alternative, right?” He laughed convivially.

I mentioned some people who’d given up on dialysis when their hours on exceeded their hours off, and their bodies had no chance to recover enough strength to make life’s pleasures meaningful to them anymore. But we decided those were anomolous cases, not to be treated as generally typical. Typically, we do what we must to cling to life.  He told me about his dialysis nurse, a woman he called a saint, who had been bringing comfort to the sick for thirty years.  He considered hers a spiritual office. It brought to his mind the examples of some local preachers - not the ones in my own neighborhood, they apparently hadn’t much salt to speak of, but one down on 19th, south of the park, a Baptist fellow with a good friendly message; he serves breakfast and you don’t have to stay for the service but you want to, you want to, because he’s just that good, and he got a grant of $500 and he went out and got sleeping bags for the folk sleeping outside and he just went to the park and passed them out.  Now that’s spiritual. 

Red Fedora was taking a local bus; I was waiting on a limited.  A local came and he climbed on board, waving goodbye to me jauntily.  As the bus pulled away it was easy to see him inside, his red fedora vibrant amid the dull browns and greys of the transit crowd on the other side of the big smeary windows.  When I saw that hat, it cheered me up even though I hadn’t actually been down.  It’s not a look I’d choose for myself, but now I can see, there truly is a time and a place for the Red Fedora, and I was lucky enough to catch it between engagements. 

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Marlon: RIP

It is now well past midnight’s threshold on the day of my vaunted return to reality, and I am staring wide awake down both barrels of my future.  In my dream last night I imagined myself already back at work, focused singlemindedly on how a form had been filled out.  I’m gearing up to bring lunches I won’t need to heat (too hard to carry back from the microwave to my desk with all the doors and crutches involved).  I’ve completed several tasks I’d set for myself during my recuperation, and made my peace with a few others that will remain undone.  Much has been accomplished, of which a large part has been the counter-intuitive accomplishment of doing nothing at all.  That’s been a tough one, forcing myself to commit full energy to lying still and knitting my bones.  I’m not inclined, generally, to unitasking - I like to do two, three, four things at once.  For the last month, though, I’ve been keeping myself to fractional tasking at best.  I’ll read with half a mind, between naps.  I’ll make a cup of tea but abandon it to go cold in the kitchen, since it’s too hard to drag it back to the bedroom where I prefer to be ensconced.  Things have barely been getting done, and I’ve been forcing myself to be okay with it. 

I’m naturally resistant to inactivity.  When I’m not grading highways, I’m grading term papers; when I’m not scaling mountains I’m scaling fishes, or perhaps teeth.  If it’s not one thing it’s another.  But over the past several weeks I’ve been forced into quietude, and I’m not now ashamed to say that I’ve developed a taste for it.  I’m used now to staying abed while the world gets up around me, to living in my loungewear and watching a dvd and marking it as a productive lifestyle.  It’s taken a while for my gnarled fingers to relax their death-grip on my over-zealous Type-A-ism.  Now that I’ve re-trained them, I fear they may rebel against reverting to my old same ways.  Well, I’d better limber them up now, because in four hours or so the alarm goes off and I return to the world I left a month ago and that seems much farther away than that today. 

And let’s give the disability its due - it hasn’t all been isolated indolence for me.  At most I’d only get three days at home alone in any week - the rest of the time Kel was around keeping the house from crumbling to dust, and the kids were home trying to dustcrumble everything as quickly as possible.  I got to see everybody in the family a lot more than I usually do, sharing late afternoons and early evenings and all day Fridays for a change.  I got to read long stories to Zach and to hold Jesse in my lap for those fleeting moments he chose to be still.  The days have been idyllic and more joyful than typical.  I will miss my being left alone, but I will also miss my being left with my family. 

It bears recalling at this time, with rain pouring from the heavens to sully the sidewalks on which I will be crutchhobbling to work so painfully soon, how many really good things I have to cherish from these four weeks at home:

* That I got really good medical care
* That I got even better support from family and friends
* That my disability and sick leave covered my absence without any out-of-pocket costs
* That I even have a job, to say nothing of a good one with good people, to which I can return
* That I’ve been downgraded to “no ace bandage and just one crutch” along with my invariable massive velcro-strap boot
* Marlon

That’s right, this is one of the very few surviving images of Marlon taken in the wild.  It’s typical of my exposure to him - brief but a little fuzzy, candid and crowded in the frame, as if startled at a watering hole or while sunning under the baobabs.  A dashing, manly mustache, lithe and full of life, the sort that says, I may be recuperating in fuzzy pants, but I’m still a warrior in my heart.  But then again, there’s the Marlon that the rest of the world saw:

This is the quizzical Marlon, the mustache that asked, Why bother and What matter?  Wherefore and Whom with?  Howitzer and Which hazel?  A mustache that got lost on its way from my nose to my lip, and decided to make camp for a few weeks.  This, too, was Marlon - not too proud to be straggly; too straggly to be proud.

And of course, there’s the version of Marlon that Kel tired of almost as soon as it appeared on the book of my flesh:

This guy really had to go, and he did.  And so do I, so I will.  Back to work tomorrow.  Damn, I mean today.  Join the millions wishing me luck!

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Two Headlines and some pulpy filler - because you’re not ready for an essay

I’m sitting here wondering what to put up here today.  I’ve got the red fedora thing, but there’s also all this random update stuff and a few chucklenuggets that feel a bit more time-sensitive, assuming that anything connected to this site has any bearing on anything whatsoever, regardless how timely or stale.  But it sort of feels as if the red fedora could use a bit of a breather so I’m going to do a little backfill and bring the entire interborg up to date on everything.

Cousin Justin has just sent us a kind note and a fistful of disks, and a funkier, groovier mix could not be imagined - Jimmy Smith (20 minute track “The Sermon” aptly named) and Keith Richards and Ron Wood (whose track “Crotch Music” actually turns out to be fantastic), and some good ol’ Isaac Hayes.  I’ve never before heard Hayes’ song “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” (typing the name helped me to pronounce it but I’ve not quite got it yet - and the backup singers have to SING it) but I’ve listened to it about six times since yesterday and like it better each time.  Plus, most of what he sent was recorded off vinyl through a USB turntable, so there really is a richness to the sound (as well as the occasional pop or thrush, which actually sounds kind of cool here).  So, upshot: great new tunes on board - IN ADDITION TO the huge influx I got from Andrew a few weeks ago.  If funk has curative powers, I am on a fast track to recovery. 

Sharing the headline with CHUCKLES BATHES IN FUNK is my review of Avatar.  No, some people hadn’t seen it yet, and I was one of them, and all of us went to the theater together on Monday morning and caught up.  My excuse was BONE SURGERY.  I can’t vouch for any of the rest of them.  But anyway now I’ve seen Avatar, and I’m getting these vibes: Land of the Lost, filmed at a Spencer’s, designed by Roger Dean; Horton Takes Peyote and Hears a Hoo; basically the same as Running Man but with Giovanni Ribisi as Richard Dawson, which just seems right, doesn’t it?  Can’t you see him doing Match Game?  Anyway, it was fun and I would recommend it on a big screen theater; I am not sure how well it translates to smaller screens since the detail was so much of the movie.  Then again I just saw LOTR on TEEVEE and it was still great - but that was also a much bigger story.  Titanic, when I saw it on an airplane without sound, was not that impressive.  Then again, neither was Greenland. 

Other movies seen recently: Rize (amazing!), Gangs of New York (also amazing!), Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (actually quite good), Julie and Julia (half was pretty good and half was pretty not).  I also finished Team of Rivals and the History of the American Stomach, and my short story is now just awaiting some technical input but I am done with it.  I’ve started writing other things again, too.  I am a fountain of artistic input and output.  Well, maybe more of a sump pump, but the principle is generally similar. 

updated, with extras: History of Violence, 300 (I’m watching all the stuff in which Kel has expressed the least interest), Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” which is pretty interesting and a very fast read; and as of last night, James and the Giant Peach.  That’s some efficient enculturation, there, boy.

Nugget of wisdom, learned at the school of Jesse: When you live with a monkey, sometimes some poo’s just gonna get flung.  For this moral, I just dare you to compose the accompanying fable. 

And that puts me in mind of a conversation I recently had with my boy’s remote-controlled talking R2D2.  I thought I’d share it with you because my self-esteem was getting dangerously inflated. 

Zach approached me with his plastic toy as I lay sprawled in exquisite repose across the sofa, watching ultimate fighting or the golf network or something equally engrossing.  “Dad,” he endearingly whined, “do you want to have a talk with R2?”

“Of course I do, son.  Let me hoist my bulk marginally upright and we can get started.”

(...)

“Hey R2, how’s it going?”

“BEEPbeepbepbit HONKblat.”

“Yeah me too.  What ya gonna do about it.”

“DeedleBEEPHONK HONKblatBLATwhistletweet!”

“Oh thanks for asking, she’s fine.  She asks after you.”

“SweEEKdibblewhistle honkBLATplurp.”

“Right, and I’d had no idea you’d even met before. Really, that woman’s amazing, she knows everybody.”

“WHISTLEhonkBLAT.”

“Right, right.  So how’s your mom?”

(...)

“Bippybippy chu-chukka wee-fizzzz.”

“Of course.  Of course.  Right.  That was insensitive of me.”

“Honk beepWHISTLE blatt.”

“No it won’t.  I apologize.”

MORAL: If you’re talking to a robot, don’t ask about it’s mother. 

That should be enough of all this for now.  I guess my prior intimation of coherency was inapt.  Next time, for sure.  Heh.