Headless Read online

  “Don’t go in there,” I said to a bearded stranger walking toward me.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s alive, and it’s coming this way.”

  Clare and I hadn’t seen each other in several years. She was still thin and muscly with bright orange hair. We threw our arms around each other for the big reunion. Then she turned to Heather.

  “Hi, I’m Clear,”

  “Hi Clear,” Heather said, in observance of Clare’s new name. They shook hands.

  We all sat down at a table. Heather and I held giant menus in front our faces, big laminated shields. Clare knew what she wanted to order. I wasn’t against her new name; I just couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  “Nice ring,” Clare said. “Your wedding ring. Very nice,”

  We both dropped our menus.

  “Thank you,” Heather said, genuinely touched by the compliment.

  “How come you don’t have a ring, sailor?” Clare asked.

  “Because I have ugly fingers.”

  “What? No you don’t!” Clare and Heather said in unison, and demanded proof.

  Both beauticians spent 20 seconds extolling the virtues of my fingers (Heather inspecting my right hand, Clare doting on the left), how each digit was either gentle, masculine, or both, each with the proper amount of hair, wrinkles, et cetera. Fascinating stuff.

  While the girls poked their way through delicate lentil salads with endive, goat cheese, and tomato, I lowered my jaw down to the table and swallowed my usual gargantuan portion of three over-easy eggs, home fries, kielbasa, sauerkraut pierogi with apple sauce and sour cream, toast, juice, and coffee. I wanted to show my appreciation for being alive by eating a lot.

  We walked several heroic blocks through the big macho city, striding across the concrete, focused and determined, like the other speed-walkers, with a specific goal in mind, a bookstore. In Manhattan if you don’t walk swiftly, aggressive pedestrians bump you from the left and right, and once you’ve fallen to the ground you are trampled underfoot, and robbed. Another secret to this East Coast streetwalking thing, never doubt your path. Plow straight ahead, do not falter. Once you hesitate you are on the ground, bleeding, a waffle print on your face. Clare, Heather, and I marched up Second Avenue. There was no attempt at conversation. I take that back. The girls spoke but I was oblivious to the content. I had the responsibility of protecting everybody. I concentrated on the ebb and flow of civilians. Clare led us to this gigantic used bookstore called The Strand that had an oniony mildew smell with a little dead body thrown in. I’d never seen so many people in a bookstore at the same time. Every aisle had multiple bodies in it. New Yorkers bought books more aggressively than desperate people in bread lines demanding a loaf. A pile of heavily clothed bodies entered The Strand, checking bags and backpacks, while an exiting dozen were lined up by the register throwing down big bills for armloads of books. Three minutes in, Clare hit me with the question.

  “I have to ask you something inappropriate.” She looked like she’d just peed on a Bible and wanted to do it again for the cameras. Her chin was tucked down and her eyes half rolled back. She smiled like a murderous clown.

  “Really? What?”

  “Never mind.” We were standing between Art History and Holocaust Studies. “I’ll talk to you about it later,” she said. “On the phone. Maybe in a letter. Maybe never.”

  “Tell me now.” Hitler’s Willing Executioners was inches from my blue-ribbon fingers. “You can’t build up to this and then say some other time.”

  “Yes I can.” She liked that she had me.

  I scanned the store for my beloved. A gloomy, disheveled-looking male employee crept through an aisle, pushing a cart of books. Miss Yellopey was out of ear- or eyeshot, hunting for books on gardening. I wanted to hear the inappropriate thing.

  I know I’ll get her exact wording wrong but it went something like this: I’d like to have your child, or, I’d like to have a baby with you, or, I want to have your baby. This was followed by another horrifyingly passionate I-dare-you stare. The delirious smile was gone. Clare was a girl with a sense of humor who never actually said funny things herself. She laughed a lot. At this moment she was as serious as a war monument.

  “You’re blushing,” she said.

  I felt my face. It did feel warm.

  I looked around the store but I couldn’t see anything; a little hysterical blindness in effect—all the books and shelves and people blurred into a brown speckled mass. Then she kissed me on the cheek. Charlie Sperm Bank and his adoring fans. A perverse wave of flattery poured over me. In an ideal world it would’ve been great to say, How many kids do you want? Shouldn’t be a problem. Meet me in the bathroom in five minutes. A cartoon image of two oak barrels creaking from the weight of too much hollandaise flashed in my head.

  “Think about it,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me now. Also, you don’t have to worry about being the father or anything like that. I mean, you don’t have to do anything else. I’ll raise him myself.”

  “What?” I was losing it, fast. “I’m going to browse a little bit, okay?”

  I wandered to the opposite end of the store, into the farthest corner. She’d already picked out a sex. She said him. Miss Yellopey, looking like a lemon tart, sat in a chair reading. The model citizen. I swallowed and then worried she could hear the swallow booming out of my throat. The man with something to hide.

  Clare didn’t ask me to be romantic and go to a hotel with champagne and flowers. Those were ideas generated by the good people at Terrible Imagination, Inc., otherwise known as my sick head, an evil organism that’s all too eager to fill in the blanks, add lots of water and gory details. The second I heard Clare say, your baby, I was the reluctant star in a gigolo movie. Maybe Clare actually said, beaker, test tube, or Petri dish, and I didn’t hear her because I always shut down the system when stricken with fear. Didn’t I just get married? Call me deranged but I think having babies with my wife is a better idea. Making a child via masturbation sounds like trouble.

  “Father, tell me about it. How was I conceived?”

  “Well, son, I rented Cocksmokers 3 and whacked for 30 minutes until the nastiest blowjob in human history came into view. I splashed down somewhere near the slo-mo, hair-pulling sequence.”

  Maybe I’d feel less terrible if she had discussed the proposal with Heather.

  “Yo sista,” Clare says in fantasy #2, late at night, behind the meat-packing plant. “Give me some of that sperm. I want a baby now.” She and Heather are toe to toe, in rival gangs. It’s a very tense situation. “I dream about babies every night. I needs one. I feel it here.” She rubs her torso. “I want an infant to slurp milk from my puppies.”

  “Sorry girlfriend, no sperm-distribution program in my house,” Heather says as she swivels her neck side to side doing the palsied chicken. “Try Brooklyn Cryobank. I hear their donors are put through a rigorous screening process. My husband’s sperm, you hear me, bitch, my HUSBAND’S sperm will never parachute into your twat.”

  Clare had lots of boyfriends—the guy with the target tattooed on the back of his shaved head, for example, Corlis Whitepie—he’d make an excellent father. Clare was 39, newly divorced, a late-blooming recent graduate of Columbia, studying psychology—volunteering at Bellevue, curing the insane. I’m certain she’d be an inspired mother.

  This is how I thought it through if you can call it that, privately, inside my soggy, lackadaisical head. I didn’t want to have this conversation with anyone, not Clare, Heather, nobody. Except maybe the boys at my neighborhood bar.

  “So, how was New York?”

  “Not bad, a runway model cornered me in a bookstore and asked me to inseminate her.”

  “She used the word inseminate? Was she German?”

  “Irish. Billions of freckles. Orange hair. Very hot. Has that ever happened to you?”

  “Hell yes. Chicks are always demanding sperm, and not just for baby-making. All the women at Dean Witter wea
r little vials of it around their necks. They use it as a spirit conduit to communicate with Kurt Cobain and other dead hotties.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell Clare no. I didn’t have it in me to even ask for a little time to think about it. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I wandered the aisles of The Strand and continued to fold in on myself. This had shitty soap opera written all over it.

  When Heather tapped me on the elbow and asked if I was ready to leave I did my best to utter a nonchalant, Black Forest, Ja.

  I don’t want to hand over the goo to an old high school friend so that in 20 years my son will one day seek me out, weapon in hand, and annihilate my face. Maybe that’s an appropriate scenario, something I deserve. In the hospital my son and I have a peaceful reunion, as he apologizes for partially maiming me.

  “Hey, Pop, sorry to cut you up like that. I was pissed. Lost control. No hard feelings, right?”

  “I can’t really talk … too painful,” I try to say. “All these bandages …”

  My felony-craving offspring looks a little like Clare and I with tattoos, multiple piercings, a Fu Manchu growing near his mouth and a lot of scar tissue by the eyes. He’s a bouncer at The Roxy, and he’s taking acting lessons.

  “It was good to meet you, son. Good luck with your life. I’m not pressing charges.”

  Clare, if you’re reading this, sorry to take so long getting back to you, but I’m ready to answer. I’ve slept on it for five years. I cannot have children. Every time I close my eyes, my friendly little mind makes up another terrible story and frightens itself—sorry to not be the donor-gigolo-stud you had in mind. My sperm is best used for spraying on bellies, backbones, and foreheads, for rubbing on rag paper, for finger painting.

  CENTIPEDE

  The bride and I went to a hotel by the beach for traditional romance. We checked in at 2:30 P.M. and didn’t leave until dinnertime. We had a boom box playing the sweetest Mississippi blues while we were flying all over the room like evil astronauts trying to repair that oh so out of reach godhead meltdown button, blasting on and off the bed, tearing each other apart like wolverines and then, a knock on the door. Porn freeze frame. So I say, Yeah, what is it, and a dead male voice comes back with two words, Turn down. I say, What? The cryptic utterance repeats, Turn down. But the music is low and it’s, what, eight o’clock. I say, Turn down the music? and the voice says, Turn down the bed, would you like your bed turned down, sir? No, thank you. We continued fleshslap in vaporlock until the engines of love layed us down to rest, whereupon we staggered around the corner and ate fish at a place we later learned was a Ku Klux Klan restaurant. It was called Whitey’s Sandy Catch. The workers, all in their early 20s, wore flowered uniforms. Lanterns, udders, sails, and oars dominated the walls. The men’s bathroom was wallpapered with life-sized photographs of bikini models posed beside hooded Klansmen holding barbeque tongs and spotty aprons. The combination of sailing, seafood, and lynching was difficult to comprehend but we were starving and we didn’t really put it all together until after we were gone. Anyway, following our waiter Hermann’s suggestion, we started off with a shrimp cocktail. I had a stein of beer and my bride knocked back a shot of tequila—she’s a roughneck, she didn’t want to eat, just booze, and get back to the bronco pit for more lewd thrills. I got one suggestion for all you bachelors out there: Marry a nympho, you’ll be set for life. We both had halibut, cauliflower, and mashed potatoes, with rice pudding for dessert. After a short stroll along the water, we returned to our room for more carnal activity. At some point we fell asleep. I dreamt about Cindy Crawford. My friends were irritated by her presence. Cindy was equally unhappy even though she told me she loved me. Suddenly the smoke alarm went off, not the one in my brain but a real one in the room, but there was no smoke anywhere. My bride leapt to her feet and turned on a light. High above our heads we noticed something crawling in and out of the smoke alarm. It looked like a colony of spiders, but it turned out to be one long and very nimble centipede. I rolled up a newspaper—I’m brave when striking something one-millionth my size—and as it traveled out of one hole and into another, I whacked it, whereupon both the outer shell of the alarm and the centipede flew across the bed and landed on the carpet. My bride called me her hero but she was also disturbed. We searched everywhere and could not find the corpse. The centipede was still alive. I was tired. Poison me, kill me, I don’t care, I needed to know how Cindy really felt about me. So I fell back asleep. In the morning my bride told me to shake my clothes out carefully before putting them on. I did and sure enough the four-inch monster clung to an inside pant leg. I shook him out and scooped him into a coffee cup. I repeated the story to the Klanswomen at the desk who both wore matching flower-print dresses. One younger, sexy one wanted to go up and see the centipede, while the older fatter one pleaded with me to stop the story. I told her I couldn’t stop the telling because I was Jewish, and as wanderers of the world we confront vermin daily and insist on making the most out of it.

  THE FECALITY OF IT ALL

  Reader beware, this is not a pee story in the true sense of Number One. It is without question a Two, but peeing does take place, and without the expulsion of urine none of this would be worth telling. What happened yesterday could only happen to me. The sad events narrated herein speak to the core of who I am. Why this is the case I do not know. By sharing this story with others I will not learn more about myself, but I do it anyway because that’s all I really have: accidents and memories and then a little theatrical show-and-tell for a select audience with whom I can hold my head high in shame.

  I started the morning like any other: staggered out of bed, shuffled down the hall, dog and cat in tow. George, the cat with black and white tuxedo paws, wanted out. He’s small and has remained a kitten. Gina, the dog, craved breakfast. I filled the kettle with Arrowhead, turned on the gas flame, fed Gina lamb-rice pellets in warm water, and brewed coffee. Then I entered the bathroom, not to j.o., just poo. The smell of coffee triggers the movement. I have always been as regular as the sunrise. Thank you very much, but it’s not a talent, it’s a court order. I picked up a catalogue of children’s toys (nephew’s birthday approaching) and let loose a gargantuan log. I screamed as it came out. From the bedroom, my sleeping Bride asked if it was a boy or a girl? Both, I shouted back. Still clothed in T-shirt, pajamas, and white socks, I gulped some coffee, read the morning paper (the new Prime Minister of Israel was once a military assassin who dressed up as a woman and killed three members of the PLO). In one quick motion, the Bride is out of bed, in and out of the shower, driving across town to get her hair cut—all this without a sip of coffee or a single scrap of food. I hunker down in front of the TV and resume the arduous task of dubbing rented porn tapes (three a day, just the good parts). I title the tape, Rhymes with Corn. During each edit I drink deep from a 64 oz. Nalgene bottle of water. After 30 minutes I refill the jug and drink more. Dubbing porn dehydrates me. In 45 minutes I’ve drunk 128 oz. of fresh, mountain spring water. (Many a fool has been attacked in a bathroom after a predator, lying in wait, patiently observes his subject guzzling beer, usually at a neighborhood bar, pool hall, or bowling alley, it can happen anywhere—the bladder fills, the cheerful unsuspecting drinker stumbles into the men’s room whistling dixie, faces the urinal, unzips trou; while the subject releases his full bladder, the perpetrator of pain strolls in and finds his vulnerable, stiff-legged victim, looking down or straight ahead, it doesn’t matter, nothing in the world would make his face turn and look, unless he was under five-foot-eight. Short guys need to be on the defensive, it’s a fulltime job. If the abovementioned thug called out the urinator’s name, he’d continue to stare at the round rubber thing with holes in it that prevents splashing and encourages American males not to use drugs. During this protracted 60 seconds, the attacker, who never had it so easy, strikes the bladder-releaser on the back of the head, and out he goes.) Soon I must urinate. I go to the bathroom and find the aforementioned big poop from an hour earlier still
in the pot. Not in its natural configuration, but roughed up by the previous flushing. I pee on top of it, and then flush. Here is where our story begins: The XXL doesn’t go down. It chooses a different direction. It resists gravity and travels upward, toward heaven. As the water rises to the rim of the toilet I’m thinking the usual: This isn’t possible, not here, not on this street, in this town. But yes, it will happen—your secret, morbid life erupts; the toilet overflows with your soft sculpture. The “mirror phase” and “potty period” and all the other psychological stages that you never quite made it through come to mind because you are not a mature person. Adult in age, not by action or thought. I was calm, enveloped in self-reflection as fecal water poured onto the tile floor. While murky water approached my feet, I hopped onto the counter, took off my socks, rolled up my blue-and-white-striped pajamas, and waited for it to end. A very familiar grape leaf floated by. Just a fragment. Everything up to this point could not have been avoided. Here I made my first mistake. I scooted off the counter, stepped barefoot into the mire, and flushed the toilet a second time (in all fairness to myself, the genius, the plunger was downstairs in my playpen, my office, I had been drawing pictures of it). Several more gallons of water flooded out into the bathroom, down the hall, and into the Bride’s work cubicle. It was time to move into action: green light on rescue operation. A tornado of shit halts your melancholic, porno-dubbing life and slams it to the ground. You grab a bucket and a dry, aging spongemop that practically says, Who me? I can’t do anything, and go at it. You start in the bathroom, where the tragedy began, and work your way out. After two useless minutes, the sponge peels off the frame of the mop so you grab the oldest, least attractive beach towels in the closet and commit them to biohazard. A 90-minute job which included a final rinse of Pine Sol. When the woman you refer to as “The Bride” returns, you are in the kitchen, in a room that has not been damaged, but you are so obsessed with cleaning, with turning around the malicious direction of your life, that you can’t stop yourself. Just by rubbing you can make a stain vanish from the earth. That’s a powerful act. The Bride looks even more beautiful than when she left, especially from the floor, which is where you are, on hands and knees, mouth open, a broken-off piece of sponge in one hand. You are fond of this hapless sponge. It pitched in. It did what it could and stayed with you to the end. Not many sponges would do that. You’d kiss it if you were alone with it.