THE THING
I don't really need the briefs down below since my thing ain't there no more. It's more for show to let the folks know I was once a guy. A scrap of cloth for the modesty of the citizens craning their necks to take a gander at me. They can't get past the orangey crust of skin. It's something all right. Little do they know I am all hanging out there for anybody to see. My Johnson, or what I take to be my Johnson (Johnsons really — I don't know since there is no other thing like me, as far as I can tell, to let me try out these doohickeys of wadded callous and thingamabobs of oozing mucus) is plopped there in front of their collective noses. Just more eruptions and rashes on the sliding plates of my scaly surface. The Doc explained it to me, showed me the Tinkertoy models of your typical twisted normal gene, and then how mine's been tripled, another worm squirming around that ladder of goofy golf balls. It's simple for everybody but me. Male and female. Male and female down to everybody's bones but me. No bones for me. No in and out. No on and off. A whole other dimension to nookie. What I have become needs a couple other things to reproduce, I guess, not just one other. Sex, as near as I can figure, is like nothing you can dream of since those dirty pictures your brain's pumping out are made up of, you got it, those same twin strands caught wrapped up in each other. Well, I am another other. And I am on the lookout for other others like me. Meantime, when I'm alone (but this could be in the middle of Times-freaking-Square, a public spectacle where the public can't begin to see the me that's me) I make myself have this nameless thing, feel this Thing thing I have no words, no more, for.
Four Brief Lives
CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE
Michael Martone published his first book, Big Words, in graduate school. The children's book could only use thirty age-appropriate words taken from the Dolch Word List. A kind of poetry.
CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE
Michael Martone grew up in Fort Wayne. Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television, was his neighbor. Martone spied on Farnsworth. He watched the inventor watch the local stations sign off.
CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE
Michael Martone grew up in Fort Wayne. Each August, his mother took him downtown to shop for new underwear (briefs). Always August meant underwear. Later, married, Martone switched to boxers.
CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE
Michael Martone worked for the Fort Wayne newspapers, where he wrote the obituaries and maintained the morgue. Everyday he would add details to his own obit he kept on file.
2
“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood…“
Dutch Boy
32-V
SOAP OPERA
32-V-1
If you ask him, her husband finds it strange that she paints and repaints so often the living room of their house. If you ask her, and he never does, she would not tell you the real reason she paints and repaints the living room of their house. She paints and repaints the living room when she believes she will, finally, break it off with her lover of long standing, a man she has slept with, off and on, for a dozen years now. Sometimes she paints after she has told him it is over, painting as a distraction, or painting as a reward, or painting as a dramatization that she has moved on, but, by the time she finishes, she has called him or he has called her. Inhaling the heady odor of the drying paint, she weeps into the phone to say she wants to meet again. At other times, she begins to paint to build up momentum to tell him it is over, the painting a kind of mental conditioning, a signal for her to signal her lover that their affair must come to an end. It is perhaps the thick rich smell of the paint, the vapor of its evaporation, that is the trigger — canned inspiration. That perfume's endnote is the endnote of the affair. Or, perhaps, the end is signaled by the visual stimuli of blur, the blur the paint-mixer makes at the paint store as it mixes the cans — the cans vice-locked in place with the thumbscrews, plates, and springs. The electric motor whirs, the slurring glug of the liquid inside the cloud of can, that metallic blubbering blurring. Or there is the folding and the unfolding of the paint-splattered drop cloth with its sloppy archeological record of the past paintings, the drips and smears in stark contrast to the pristine walls whose color never really has time to age or dull or even fade. Sometimes the paint hasn't had time to dry, has barely even dried before she begins to mask out the window sills and doorjambs with the blue, blue masking tape whose sound, that long zipped ripping, also contributes to this ritual of change — the whole elaborate complex of her particular compulsion that the larger project, consciously and unconsciously, conspicuously represents. To mask. It is complicated. It has never been easy for her, the affair, and the energy expended in meeting, the anxiety of discovery, and the persistence of guilt — all of it goes into the walls regularly. Painting draws this thing to a close, and painting promises a new beginning. Clean slate. Eggshell finish, of course. And painting, the sheer act of painting, is a soothing contemplative repetitive exercise, an applied yoga of application, that allows her to meditate on the course of the affair, its ups and downs, her marriage, its lefts and rights. As she paints she eyes the various shades of aching grief, the tint of ecstatic pleasure. She paints with brush and roller. She stirs and stirs, watches the paint slide down the stick, drip, like paint, into the soup of this occasion's color. The drips drip, disturb the surface tension on the surface of the paint in the can. She knows, now, these four walls intimately. Here the slight buckle of the load-bearing, there a water stain that she never quite seals or covers. She's spackled again, patched the holes made by the picture hanging. The wall opposite the window warms differently than the wall with the window. Painting the four walls again brings her face to face with memories of painting these four walls before. In that corner she thought this, or along the floorboard, there, she thought that, and when she gets to those places again with this new paint she will remember what she was thinking two or three coats ago and remember remembering, just a coat before, what she was thinking and remembering about her thinking now all mapped on the wall, a location that coordinates with the wiring in the gray matter of her brain. Here around this outlet she thought of her thinking, thinking about her gray brain. She loads the brush — always a new brush — to begin again to paint the living room. The furniture pushed to the center of the room covered by the dappled drop cloths that form a kind of scale model of an idealized mountain range, its glacial folds falling to the floor covered by the new unspoiled ice-blue tarp.