Wednesday, March 26, 2008

• tap dancing on Sundays

  A HOMELESS MAN once taught me how to tightrope walk.  The knowledge of balancing on a precipitously small surface area did not prove to be as practical as I had originally hoped for until yesterday, when I stood in limbo on the window sill.  I had gorged myself on so much spaghetti for lunch that after finishing, I was struck with an immediate sense of guilt and shame inconceivable to the limits of human emotion, a sort of biblical self-disgust capable of humiliating even the largest of binge eaters, so coming to terms with my narcissistic gluttony, I stood at the open window, shivered some in my underwear at the cold, and duly jumped out and fell seventeen stories to the ground below with hopes of ending my overindulgent tendencies but landed instead with a disappointing ever-slight thud whereupon I was promptly attacked by a pack of awaiting coyotes a tad too brutish for my tastes.  When I had recovered my limbs and other missing appendages from the beasts, I called my mother and told her of my exploits.  She said that’s nice, that’s pleasant, jumping out the window on a slow Sunday afternoon, now what would you like to have for dinner tonight?  So I told her mother mother I am no longer four years old but forty and threw the phone down to get my crayons and a juice box and sat with my legs splayed out and drooled and googooed over toy blocks and trains on the carpet. 
  

  After the playthings were thoroughly varnished with saliva, I ran to the mother’s for Sunday dinner.  Little Robby was there crying for sweetened treats.  Narcoleptic cousin Jolyn was there on the sofa falling in and out of sleep on command.  Your condition is nothing to be laughed at, they said as she woke up.  Your Coke-bottle glasses are everlastingly fashionable, they said when she had fallen back asleep.  Uncle Howard was still forever slapping his wife's ass, always under the pretense of checking for a mosquito, and she still calling him a beslubbering git, that there existed no such insect on her voluminous buttocks, how dare he.  So he checked and slapped and slapped and checked and said neener-neener as I walked in with my nose in the air, decidedly abrasive to the intimate ruffians who made it a habit of invading my mother’s house on weekends.  We scuttled to the table as dinner was announced, crowding for space with fidgety elbows, those failing at the impulsive game of musical chairs forced to the end, those dozens failing more forced in a line leading up to it, the extents of which reached out the front door where passersby inevitably mistook it for a queue at a spontaneous soup kitchen. 
  

  So when everyone had been seated, both kin and non-kin alike, they talked.  They chirped and chatted and chattered and prattled about this and that, here and there.  And when that was over, I watched the festivities.  I chronicled it in a journal, all ho-hum in the corner by myself with the evasiveness of a remote village.  I worked under the assumption that I had been born to be a recorder of events, that I had ejected from the womb with a nice pen and a shiny leather-bound notebook, scribbling how it was like floating around inside breathing without gills and being fed regularly through my bellybutton.  So I wrote what I saw.  I watched them tap dance on the hardwood floor in acts of pedal prestidigitation, most of them not fitting in the confines of an indoor living space, spewing out into the streets instead. They tap danced even when they were too tired to go on, even when the policemen arrived for a round-up, the time by which their minds were already too far aflutter to worry about noise pollution and disorderly conduct and handcuffs.  So they danced.  They went at it until their shoes just plain broke, as it so often happened late into the night on Sundays.
  
  

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