RODAK

SOLITUDE

A STORY

1.

        An organ-grinding wop with a dancing monkey on a length of brightly colored leash, passed slowly beneath my window, shattering my concentration as I sat quietly on the sill, staring at the blue curtains hanging in a fifth-floor window of the building across the street.

Could it be that the curtains in that window were the exact same shade of blue as the Brooklyn sky? Sky, curtains. Sky, curtains. In vain I tried to focus simultaneously on the curtains and the sky. It was physically impossible. And, in any case, aesthetic exactitude aside, having been distracted by the exotic pair passing below, I was no longer able to maintain the psychic discipline necessary for the continued performance of these ocular gymnastics.

Still, an organ-grinding wop is a rare sight in my neighborhood, let alone a dancing monkey.

I got up to find a pencil. I intended to take some notes on the behavior of the organ grinder and, time permitting, the antics of the monkey as well.

Behind me, across the room, in front of the sleeping alcove, to the left of the hallway leading to the bathroom and kitchen, stood a small cardboard chest of drawers such as one might purchase at Woolworth’s. It was kind of green, or mostly yellow, depending on the light. But at this moment the dresser appeared to be a murky shade of olive.

Was this apparent olive tone a mere consequence of my having been staring so long at the blue sky and the equally, although perhaps not quite equivalently, blue curtains? If I waited for this hypothetical visual effect to resolve itself I would surely miss my chance to jot down a few observations concerning the monkey.

The chest of drawers contained four drawers in all. There were two smaller drawers at the top, side by side, and two larger drawers beneath, each having the width of the entire dresser. In the left-hand of the upper two smaller drawers, my wife, who was currently absent, was apt to keep a variety of objects of the type one of which might well be a pencil.

In rummaging through this promising drawer, I quickly discovered several Christmas tree lights of various colors, a pair of pliers, several lengths of butcher’s twine, an eight-foot extension cord, several AA batteries, a very old, light blue Kodak snapshot camera, and a plastic case containing a contraceptive diaphragm.

I opened this plastic case, removed the diaphragm, and examined it visually for any traces of organic residue.

Finding none, I held the object up close beneath my nostrils and inhaled slowly and deeply. My palate received only a faint, bland, and strangely inert, synthetic aroma.

Investigating further, I licked the concave and then the convex surfaces of the diaphragm thoroughly, discovering again only a disappointing, inorganic flavor.

I replaced the item in its plastic case and, turning my attention back to the open drawer, almost immediately discovered a pencil near the back. It was a yellow number two pencil manufactured by FaberCastell. It was a new pencil, by which I mean that it had never been sharpened. It had, however, quite probably resided, purely potential, in this very drawer for many years.

I was not in the least dismayed by the fact that the pencil had, as yet, no point, for among the other items in the drawer I had noticed a small penknife with an imitation mother-of-pearl handle.

The knife had been a gift from my father.

As befits its name, the penknife was of a handy size for sharpening a pencil, and I immediately resolved to employ it for that purpose.

Somewhat reluctantly, I closed the drawer of the small cardboard dresser. I would have enjoyed lingering for a while longer in the inspections of its contents.

I retraced my path across the room and again took up my position on the sill of the front window. As I commenced with the task of sharpening the yellow number two pencil, I found the penknife to be quite suitable for the job, if somewhat dull of blade.

I wondered at the reason for this dullness. Had the knife been frequently employed for a purpose, or perhaps even multiple purposes, long since forgotten, which had blunted an originally keen edge?

Shifting my attention away from the blade and the pencil, the utility of which had now been greatly augmented by the painstaking exposure of its sharply tipped central graphite shaft, I looked down two stories to the sidewalk beneath my vantage on the windowsill and found that the wop and his monkey had passed from sight.

Perhaps they had proceeded to the end of the block and had turned the corner, entering the street that intersected the one upon which my building was located (this being a corner lot) and that offered continued passage to the west, past the nunnery, or alternatively, as it was a two-way thoroughfare, to the east toward the towers of the projects that loomed like government officials over the humble and generally five-story neighborhood tenements.

Which direction would an organ grinder (for it was assumed that he, rather than the monkey, served as the bellwether of their expedition) have chosen?

I soon abandoned as futile all speculation in this direction and began contemplating whether, perhaps, the organ grinder and his monkey had gotten onto a city bus that had arrived and departed during the interval in which I had been preoccupied with finding the pencil.

Had it been the time expended in the lingual inspection of my absent wife’s contraceptive diaphragm that had cost me the opportunity to jot down a few observational notes on the behavior of the wop and his monkey?

Does there exist an inevitable antagonism between meticulousness and promptness, which it becomes our common and constant task to reconcile if a full life is to be had?

Or did the fault lie in my failure to have kept a sharpened pencil handy near the window, ready in the event that an opportunity for observational jottings might arise? (For how else could I justify my sitting there, apparently employed to no useful purpose?)

No sooner had I begun working through these speculations, than it occurred to me that I had also neglected to locate my notebook. Thus, even if I had returned more promptly to my vantage on the windowsill, I would have been at a loss for a place in which to enter any real-time notes that it may have occurred to me to take.

Had I opted for the use of a ballpoint pen I might have made a few jottings on the palm of my left hand, continuing such hypothetical notes on my left forearm, should my palm have proved insufficiently broad to contain the wealth of information imparted by the observation of a pair of subjects so rich in esoteric data as an organ grinding wop accompanied by a leashed and energetically terpsichorean monkey.

Being of an exacting nature in the matter of note-taking, however, I much prefer the utilization of a pencil, which provides for the possibility of making swift, and relatively neat and effortless, revisions to any jottings that should immediately disclose themselves to be less than precise. A pencil, of course, requires paper, rather than skin, for an effective (and painless) writing surface.

I resolved, then and there, henceforth to keep both pencil and notebook ready in the vicinity of the window, on the sill of which I remained perched, although now once more without specific purpose.

Still regretting the lost opportunity to have made some, perhaps gravid, observations on the behavior of those two remarkable visitors to my familiar, if somewhat garbage-strewn, neighborhood, I placed the useless pencil next to me on the windowsill.

Almost immediately I found it necessary to exert considerable mental effort to resist the temptation to return my attention to the curtains hanging in the window of the building across the street. Had the window been located on the uppermost floor, rather than on the penultimate story, it might have proved possible for me to focus simultaneously on the curtains and the sky. But, as this was not the case, I stiffly resisted the urge to fall once again into the fruitless and frustrating speculations that had occupied me earlier concerning the relative tones of blue manifested in those disparate locations.

Instead (for it was immediately obvious in any case that, in the interim, either the sky or the curtains or both had radically changed color) I began to wonder what sort of person or persons occupied the room to which the blue curtains denied the world at large visual access. If I were to wait until nightfall, maintaining my position upon the sill of my window, now in darkness, would I then be able to see the shadow, or shadows, a darker shade of blue, of a person, or perhaps several persons, passing across the curtains? Would the backlighting in that room prove to be sufficiently bright to allow for such a shadow, or shadows, to be clearly discerned, despite the street light located directly below the window, which would be casting a dim wash of light on the exterior surface of the blue curtains through the probably grimy window pane? If the light from the street were no obstacle, would the material of which the curtains were made prove sheer enough to allow the shadow of a person, or persons, passing before the window to soak through and be visible from without? And, supposing that I were able to see such a shadow, or shadows, would they be of the type that convey information? Would they present a distinct set of silhouettes of the person or group in the room? Or would such shadows as one could make out be indistinct, fleeting, and perhaps distorted due to the fact that the curtains, not having been properly weighted along the bottom hem, did not hang in any semblance of a perfect plane? Should the latter prove to be the case, I might very well be unable, even if the shadows were visible despite the ambient light of the street lamp, to determine by viewing them whether, for instance, the person whose shadow I was watching at any given moment was male or female, young or old, fat or rather thin, tall or short, excited or calm, naked or fully clothed. Surely naked was a possibility. Female, young, not too tall, nor yet too fat, excited as well as naked, and therefore very prime as the object of extensive and meticulously rendered notations.

But, in all probability, due to the distortion caused by the imperfect plane of the curtains’ surface, I would not be able even to make out, for instance, should the silhouette present itself in profile, the contour of a breast, perhaps naked, which would indicate the gender of the person within the room, or the precise configuration of the nose, which might provide a clue as to the race of the individual.

Would the caster of the intriguing shadow be Caucasian, like myself? Black, as were the majority of the denizens of my neighborhood? Or perhaps belong to some more exotic minority? Native American, perhaps, or Pacific Islander?

But, was race even a relevant factor in this project, given that the shadow would be, in any event, blue?

Sadly, no.

Even allowing that the possibility of determining the gender of the observed shadow would be of paramount concern, the potential frustration arising from the inability to make an exact racial identification began to make shadow watching seem a less than completely rewarding experience. One could not honestly dignify the notes made on the basis of such a shadow with the word “meticulous.”

2.

        I glanced down at the yellow number two pencil still lying beside me on the windowsill, sharpened and unused. Would my patience be rewarded if I were to commence a careful observation of the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk below, on the chance that the organ grinder, perhaps still accompanied by the dancing monkey, having completed some unknown task and now returning to an original point of departure via the identical route that I had earlier seen them taking, should debus at the stop in front of my building, or again round the corner on foot, this time moving in the opposite direction?

No. The incidence of organ grinding wops with dancing monkeys was statistically insignificant in this part of Brooklyn. Probability stood firmly against it.

Already I had begun to doubt the reality of their physical existence.

Left now at a loss for a project through the efforts involved with which to carry the remainder of the day on to a swift and productive conclusion, I began to grow restive.

As I began to fidget, I soon detected a slight pressure, accompanied by a faintly audible rushing of blood behind my eardrums. Not a good sign.

By carefully applying the index and middle fingers of my right hand to my left wrist, I was able to locate and concentrate on my arterial pulse.

After an indeterminate period of time, a definite and terrifying pattern began to emerge: my heart was skipping beats.

In the first series, one in three hundred and fifty beats failed to occur, resulting in a minute, but cumulatively deadly (I had no doubt), deprivation of oxygen to the brain.

In a second carefully counted series, my heart failed to answer the call once in only three hundred and twenty-seven beats.

Lifting my knees carefully, so as to avoid any unnecessary cardiac strain, I pulled my feet back in through the window and swiveled on the sill, so that I was again facing the room.

In a semi-swoon of acute anxiety, I realized how narrowly I had avoided losing consciousness due to lack of brain-nourishing oxygen and slipping off the windowsill.

With dread, I counted out a third series of heartbeats: three hundred and fourteen. The situation was becoming desperate.

My trembling fingers fumbled for the yellow number two pencil that still lay beside me on the windowsill, sharpened for the first, and perhaps last, time, as my eyes scanned the room in search of my forgotten notebook. By making a few simple mathematical calculations, I could determine how much time I had left before my heart shut down completely.

The danger of my current situation actually aided in the recovery of the notebook, for my adrenaline-enhanced senses, super-alert now and hyper-focused, almost immediately achieved a visual location of the notebook, lying on the floor next to the bed, in the dimly lit sleeping alcove at the far end of the room, behind the mostly green, or predominately yellow, chest of drawers to the left of the hallway.

I eased myself down from the windowsill and, to avoid any sudden loss of blood to the brain, dropped to all fours. As I slowly crawled across the room, I considered how devastating it was to have struggled so long, to have come so far, only to be robbed in the waning hours of life of so fundamentally human a characteristic as bipedalism. I felt myself to be inferior now even to the phantasmagoric wop’s equally chimerical monkey, whose intermittent bipedal abilities mocked and hideously underscored my current posture.

Nevertheless, by laboriously traversing the room in this dogged and ignominious manner, I was ultimately able to attain my goal, finally grasping with a quaking hand my treasured notebook.

Fortuitously, I had also had the presence of mind to bring with me the yellow number two pencil, which I had carried in my teeth to facilitate the act of crawling, much as a dog might transport of slender yellow bone, for no sooner had I taken the notebook in hand than, in a flash of inspiration, my putative final entry presented itself to my feverish consciousness like a sudden snake on a jungle path.

I opened the notebook to the first blank page and, in painstakingly rendered Palmer script, inscribed the words: “At the ontological tether’s end of the cognitively meticulous individual the gravity of existence is such that simple boredom soon festers into abject panic.”

Having at last brought the yellow number two pencil into play calmed me somewhat. This day’s long struggle had, at last, borne written fruit.

Although soaked in the sweat of effort, I felt myself nevertheless cleansed of the vile stench of futility. I again applied index and middle fingers to the pulse of my left wrist and began counting.

In this series, the sum of three hundred and seventy-seven good, steady heartbeats had accumulated before any indication of cardiac stress was detected. Moreover, the three hundred and seventy-eighth beat was not skipped completely, but merely fluttered somewhat tentatively beneath the anxiously monitoring pressure of my fingertips, before giving way to a three hundred and seventy-ninth pulsation that was reassuringly orthodox in both force and meter.

My condition, to put an optimistic prognosis to it, was stabilizing nicely. By factoring in the as yet neglected element of elapsed time, I should now be able to mathematically calculate, rather than the span of time remaining to me before the onset of cardiac arrest and death, that period required for the restoration of full vitality.

Unfortunately, the whereabouts of my Timex watch had been, for some time now, unknown. And, in any event, that watch had no second hand, making it useless in the implementation of such an undertaking.

I had formerly been in possession of a small electric alarm clock that would have been suitable for this task, having been equipped with a fully functional second hand, but at some point during the absence of my wife I had submerged that timepiece in the toilet bowl in an attempt to electrocute a cigar butt sized insect of the kind known to the locals as “water bugs”, but which in reality are not water bugs at all, but rather some species of hyperpituitary cockroach with a thirst for dilute urine.

Although the clock had begun to sputter, pop, and steam dramatically upon contact with the water, the attempt to terminate the “water bug” in this manner proved a miserable failure when, after taking a few minutes to get its shit together, so to speak, the insect once again commenced its enthusiastic natations around the circumference of the stained and redolent porcelain bowl.

In the end, the bug was simply flushed, which recourse I should clearly have taken from the outset, despite the uncertainty of the ultimate fate of the roach in the utilization of that expedience. The now dysfunctional alarm clock had been angrily discarded.

I was not, however, stymied in my intentions for want of a chronometer, as I was still in possession of a telephone, and thus the option of procuring a measurement of elapsed time by merely calling the Time Lady was available to me.

Resorting to the Time Lady, however, was an act that I could now perform only with the most powerful of mixed emotions. She brought back to me childhood memories of many nights during which I had lain in my little bed, sleepless, perhaps afraid, having awakened from a Sunday School engendered nightmare of the Apocalypse and the End of Time.

I would then creep out of my childhood cot, shivering in the predawn chill of the old, frame house, and silently pad down the stairs to the family telephone, as solid on its wooden pedestal as a basalt sculpture of a Nubian toad. And I would call the Time Lady.

My mother, when she arose from her chronically insufficient rest, would find me curled up on the throw rug, the receiver of the phone cradled in my arms like a black doll, lulled back into the deepest somnolence by the steady cadence of the Time Lady’s confident and matronly voice.

It was the voice of Mother Nature herself, wife of the Supreme Deity, offering metrical and perpetual reassurance, ten seconds at a time, that God the Father remained in His heaven where He belonged, and had not descended in the night to rip asunder with His awful hands that childhood world that my immature soul longed to believe was eternal.

When I was somewhat older, though still too young to have yet been the recipient of the small penknife with the imitation mother-of-pearl handle as a gift from my father, the Time Lady took on a more human aspect. I then imagined her sitting, primly clad, as my spinster aunt Rose would dress for her clerical job at the local ball bearing factory, in a small cubicle lit by a single naked bulb, deep in the bowels of the Bell Telephone Building, reciting into the mouthpiece of her headset the litany of passing time, the captive of an endless twenty-four hour shift.

Rather than on a chair, I reasoned, she must be seated on a toilet, so that the call of nature would not necessitate an interruption of her essential and unrelenting task.

I wondered, too, at her ability to enunciate so clearly when her food was brought to her and she was forced to hold each bite in her mouth, out of the way of her tongue, as she listed the minutes, able to chew and swallow only during the short respites of the “tones.”

That she might perish for lack of sleep never entered my mind, for I was so often awake in the dead of night myself.

Slow to mature in the sheltered, non-sophisticating environment of the small Midwestern college town in which we lived, I had for some time been whispering into the Time Lady’s always accessible ear the moist and engorged desires of my awakened adolescence, when the day finally arrived on which I had to admit to myself that the ever receptive object of my urgently hydraulic passion was nothing more than a loop of prerecorded tape, winding itself slowly around the plastic spools of a soulless machine. This unwanted knowledge carried an emotional impact equivalent to that of the combined deaths of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Jack Frost, and the Sand Man combined, for in those days all the world had, by heart, the Time Lady’s number.

How firmly held in the spell of a Kafkaesque nightmare I felt when upon my arrival in Brooklyn I found that precious phone number to be one of New York City’s most carefully guarded secrets. I became a study of existential nausea, poring through a directory with the dense dimensions of a Rockefeller family bible, frantically searching, always in vain, for a listing of that reverenced sequence of seven digits.

That magic number at long last procured, after an agony of effort that was swiftly repressed beyond the reach of memory’s viciously recurrent lashings, my greatest fear became the possibility that through some nefariously gratuitous act of Machiavellian bureaucratic extravagance, the telephone company might change the Time Lady’s number, leaving me once again bereft.

For, although that erstwhile so comforting voice had become a mechanical, inhuman series of syllabic shards, spliced together within the silicon soul of the Great Computer that dictates the very courses of our lives, it remained a constant in a universe where all that is organic continues to surrender heat in an inexorable, meticulous, decomposition into the elemental minerality of eternal oblivion.

No sooner had I finished hacking my way through this dense undergrowth of memory, than a new terror wrapped its tendrils around the frail cage of my chest. The telephone: had my wife at some point prior to her absence thought to pay the phone bill? How long had she been absent? When had I last made the steep descent down to the building’s fragrant lobby to check the box for mail?

Surely, it must have been a considerable span of time, for memory held no trace of it.

The telephone sat silently across the room, dun colored and inert in its customary place on the floor, to the right of the front window. My personal heart failure forgotten, I could think now only of the electronic circulation of that neglected, but essential, instrument.

If I were to put the receiver to my ear, would I hear the comforting flat line drone of a healthy machine, or the horrifying deep-sea silence of the void?

Flogged by these fears toward the threshold of hyperventilation, I sprang to my feet, intent upon lunging across the room to where the telephone so ominously resided.

But, at the instant in which I reached my full stature, a hideous buzzing equivalent to the tangled dial tones of a thousand phones, filled my head. Black motes did aerial combat with swarming sparks, and my mouth filled to overflowing with a bilious, acidic liquid that spewed past my teeth to flow down my chin.

As gathering hoards of white pixels flooded my field of vision, triumphantly devouring my universe, I felt myself falling helplessly to my former position on the floor, swamped and unlegged by an overwhelming tsunami of Nothingness.

3.

How long I sat slumped in this enervated condition I cannot say, for elapsed time was no longer mine to measure. It could still have been the same day, the day when the organ-grinding wop with the dancing monkey had passed beneath my window. I had no way of knowing.

For an indeterminate period I had rested, nearly comatose, drifting in and out of a foggy, semiconscious mode. But eventually, to my horror, I perceived that the near cessation of all cognitive function was giving rise to a vague, but unshakable sensation that I was slowly, barely perceptively, sinking into the worn and splintery floorboards of the sleeping alcove.

I had begun to merge with the very ground onto which I had been so ignominiously thrown by the indifferent force of cosmic gravity.

Though I scarcely felt up to it, I had the urgent intuition that motor activity in a generally vertical direction was my only hope of salvation. I resolved to test this theory at once, for the feeling of consolidation with my immediate physical environment was becoming uncanny.

I would start slowly, as befit my present physiological condition, by attempting to lift my right hand to the level of my eyes. If this effort proved successful, I would make a fist, or snap my fingers, as a sign of regenerating physical competence.

As I busied myself with the elaboration of this plan of action, I once more acutely felt the absence of my wife, who, if present, would easily have been able to set me in motion, as she had so often in similar situations (frequently induced by excessive consumption of alcohol and/or other strong intoxicants) by employing only strident verbal exhortation.

But, even as I began the process of switching my train of thought onto a track confluent with my right hand, fate again intervened, and, in typically fickle fashion, this time on my behalf, for I suddenly became intensely aware of an unpleasant, sour odor emanating from my chin whiskers.

The shock of this disturbing olfactory datum reflexively activated a swift digital examination of my chin and belly, disclosing there a slimy dampness, beginning at mid-sternum and extending downwards in an irregular rivulet to the elastic waistband of my nylon gym shorts, which save for a pair of predominately aquamarine argyle socks, were my sole garment in concession to the humid heat of the day.

Thus remobilized, I reluctantly admitted the pressing need for, at the very least, a spit bath. I was befouled with swoon-begotten vomitus and, until this radically distracting effluvium was completely eradicated, no further meaningful cognitive activity would be possible: stinking precludes thinking.

I was hopeful that the malodorous substance could be eliminated without the necessity of total immersion in bath water. An unconscionable squandering of elapsed time would be required for the filling of a bathtub to a level sufficient for a full body lavage.

With the expenditure of the greater part of my newly replenished reservoir of physical energy, I managed to struggle out of the nylon gym shorts. I left the predominately aquamarine argyle socks on my feet, however, in anticipation of the soon to be undertaken walk to the bathroom. For, since childhood, I have had to endure both a loathing for the sight of my naked toes and an abhorrence of ambulating with my bare feet in direct contact with the pitiless ground.

As I lay on the floor, recovering from the effort of stripping off my shorts, I slowly came to the realization that, in the absence of my wife, I had for some time been deprived of any objective barometer of my overall body odor. And, since I could conjure up no memory of my last bath, it was quite possible that I was, in a word, ripe.

Reluctantly I conceded that this possibility dictated the implementation of an empirical investigation. This I initiated by lifting up my left arm and turning my head to inhale deeply, with my nostrils immediately adjacent to the left armpit.

Upon doing so, however, I immediately discovered that the noxious odor that I had first perceived emanating from my chin whiskers so contaminated the information being received from the armpit that no determination concerning the overall acceptability of my body odor could be made based upon this initial test.

As armpit-specific fragrance proved to be practically unobtainable, I had no recourse but to design and implement a secondary, and more elaborate, phase of inquiry. In this task I was undaunted, for I considered myself to be no less than a master when it came to the sniffing out of offensive body odors. I decided to move on immediately to Plan B: the Standard Crotch Test (SCT).

In times when I had with greater frequency ventured out into the world of social intercourse, and attention to body odor had thus been of more immediate concern, the SCT had proved invaluable to me in quieting those insecurities that often seeped into consciousness with regard to personal fragrance.

Although I had realized that crotch odor, particularly in males, was commonly considered to be of secondary, or even tertiary importance, since the nature of workaday human interaction was such that one’s casual acquaintances, co-workers, passers-by on the street, and persons thrust into one’s immediate vicinity by the crush of public transportation, and so on, came with much greater frequency into immediate proximity with one’s armpits than they did with one’s crotch, I still considered crotch odor to be the ultimate touchstone of social security. For, even when factoring out normal behavioral considerations, as well as the role played by the generally closed design of men’s clothing in the containment of detectable crotch odor, I had to satisfy myself first of all.

I would, at all times, be aware of how my crotch smelt, albeit John Q. Citizen might not be thus privileged.

In terms of absolute precision, moreover, the SCT had an advantage over the armpit-sniff method in that, since it had become routine in recent years to apply an antiperspirant to the underarm area, there often pertained to the armpit a funky, perfume-like residual odor of gradually decomposing deodorant that, offensive in itself, must necessarily be factored into one’s decision concerning whether or not the contingent necessity of a full-body lavage had indeed arisen.

As it is the strictest of dictums, when utilizing the empirical method, that the object of investigation be reduced to the simplest possible model prior to the actual tasks of observation and data collection, the SCT reveals its superiority in the fact that, since the male crotch is normally deodorized by mere application of soap and water, the contaminating factor of corrupted deodorizing agents is absent in the investigation.

On the downside, however, there remained the fact that, while it is possible to examine the armpit directly by simply turning the head so as to position the nose in immediate proximity to the area being sniffed, such direct olfactory perusal of the crotch is anatomically denied to all but the occasional contortionist, adept yogi, or anorexic female gymnast.

In conducting the SCT then, it was first necessary to fix firmly in mind the exact fragrance of the index finger and middle fingers of the dominant hand. This fragrance having been established as a constant, the two fingers can then be applied directly to the crotch, swabbed, and swiftly brought up to the nose to determine the relative aroma of the crotch.

If, however, through a total breakdown of one’s normal regimen of personal hygiene, the fingers of the dominate hand should prove to be more redolent than one’s armpits, the superiority of the SCT is, of course, effectively nullified.

It must also be admitted that while it is quite possible for a perspicacious individual to spot others snatching a furtive snort of their armpits on the boulevard, given the prevalent standards of social decorum it is a matter of extreme difficulty to utilize the SCT in a public place. People tend to stare and it is never prudent to draw to oneself the attention of the others.

This is unfortunate, for it is among the universal laws that nature abhors the expungement of body odor. No sooner has one meticulously cleansed and deodorized a body part than millions of surviving microbes enthusiastically pitch in with the task of multiplying, and rebefouling the sanitized area with their noxious waste products: one is constantly being shat upon by orgiastic legions of invisible adversaries.

I stink, therefore I am, beyond being a rather facile and obvious philosophical pun, is an axiom that defies containment by mere Cartesian logic. It is original sin made manifest. It is stark and simple proof that human existence is, at its very foundation, a cruel and vicious hoax perpetrated on intelligence by matter.

As I realized that these philosophical observations were deserving of preservation in the form of extensive and meticulous notes, it became a matter of some urgency to get on with the SCT.

I clamped my left hand, palm inward, tightly over my chin and mouth, in order thereby to momentarily prevent the odor absorbed in my chin whiskers from reaching the nostrils, while simultaneously sniffing the extended index and middle fingers of my right hand, so as to fix in my mind the exact odor of those two all-important digits.

Luck was with me, for I found the fragrance of the instrumental fingers to be effectively neutral, betraying only a slight trace odor of yellow number two pencil, the wispy presence of which would be no obstacle to the implementation of stage two of the SCT.

Stage one then completed, left hand still in place over my chin, I leaned back for comfort against the side of the bed, drawing my knees up towards my chest, while reaching down to position the pre-tested index and middle fingers of my right hand in the area of the groin beneath the scrotum.

This action caused the slight displacement of the right testicle, exciting a tiny shiver of pleasure that radiated outward from its epicenter, raising gooseflesh on the surface of my thighs, and sending the affected gonad rolling slowly towards the safety of the underbelly.

Due to a concomitant sympathetic spasm of the prostate, I may have emitted a tiny, involuntary moan at this point, but did not let myself be distracted from the business at hand. For it was most crucial that, in positioning the fingers, the tips should rest directly adjacent to, but have no direct contact with, the anus.

The anus is the supreme monarch of the body’s apertures: it is the very Omphalos of physical being. As such, there pertains to the anus a unique range of odors that are not given to man for contemplation. Hard experience had long since instructed me that, in order to maintain a grip, be it ever so tenuous, on sanity, it was strictly forbidden, ever, to allow the slightest preoccupation with the aroma of the anus. A man on the street lost in the mental probing of that Plutonian orifice is a soul condemned to suffer unspeakable horrors.

But I had already gone too far. Inadvertently, I had strayed too near the crushing gravitational pull of that merciless black hole. For I heard a voice, a soft, barely audible, whisper of a voice, distinctly female, though disembodied, that said quite clearly, “Want to smell something funky?” And simultaneously I saw, wavering before my mind’s eye, the vision of a lovely, ghostly little hand; a hand that had slipped through the tiniest crack in the ramparts of memory; a hand that extended an index finger freshly withdrawn from the very fundament of my physical being to emerge redolent of the forbidden aroma of erotic misconduct.

I nearly swooned anew as an overpowering wave of superheated, nostalgic guilt hit me at hurricane force. The memory that I had ever allowed another, a separate and external fleshly entity, to penetrate so deeply into the fortified perimeter of my meticulously defined being, to know my physical self with such biblically abominated intimacy, was so unbearable as to cause me to moan and writhe on the floor like the sacrificial victim of a divinely ordered holocaust.

In agony I remembered how gladly I would have choked the life out of that lithesome girl’s toothsome, softly moaning body, for the desperate love of which I had fecklessly exposed a blindly lunging animal instinct that should have remained caged. How gladly, once having discharged the jetting spume of my fanged and shaggy mammalian passion into the sucking submarine cavities of her moiling, mud bank hips, I would have gone on to actuate that shrieking charade of violent death by crushing her hot, throbbing throat in the adrenaline fortified grip of my slime sullied paws, until the last reflexive shudder of her clutching limbs had passed, her flesh had relinquished its terminal secrets, and all was still at last.

Yes, I had loved her so much that I might have killed her there and then, releasing her blameless soul from all shame, had it not been for the hideous prospect of then finding myself left alone in the presence of her corpse. For what could be more unseemly than to be dead? To have died and left behind a fetid weight of cold, seeping meat, voided bowels, and lightless, staring eyes for others to cope with?

Death is the ultimate shame, the supreme faux pas. It is a malicious prank; the obscene punch line of an infinitely dirty joke.

I snatched my gym shorts from the floor and did what I could to employ them as a sop, attempting to wipe the still reeking residue of vomit from my chest and abdomen in lieu of any more extensive grooming. In this process I was further horrified to discover that my male organ was engorged and lunging against its venous roots like a chained and furious Doberman.

I was flushed and perspiring, nauseated down to the very foundation of my being. Yet, the temptation to immediately and violently engage in an uncontrolled frenzy of auto-eroticism was so overpowering that, to forestall such an occurrence, I was forced to thrust both hands beneath the weight of my buttocks.

Thus positioned, I tightly shut my eyes and endeavored to make my mind a blank, while at the same time initiating a meditative breathing technique that I had gleaned from a book on Korean martial arts.

When I had thus achieved a slight measure of calm, I caused myself to picture a lump of coal, gleaming, black, and hard. I tried by force of will to make this mental artifact descend from its place of origin within the brightly lit confines of immediate consciousness, slowly, slowly down through the obscure, layered depths of forgetfulness, as though sinking through the very bowels of the dark insulated belly of Being Itself.

The soothing effects of this restorative meditation were nearly aborted when, upon having descended beyond the midpoint of the thoracic cavity, brushing lightly against my still softly whimpering heart, the lump of coal nearly morphed into the image of that massive black telephone of my Midwestern youth, the very instrument through which I had spent so many hours of lubricious communion with the Time Lady.

But this potential setback I was able to fight off through meticulous attention to the rhythm of my controlled breathing. And, finally, the coal completed its descent, firmly lodging itself in the inky bung of my rhythmically mouthing psyche.

4.

        Gratified at having so masterfully repaired that nearly disastrous breach in the walls of self-consciousness; secure once more within the protective womb of controlled cogitation, I was doubly pleased to find that my generative organ had resumed its recumbent state and was languishing inconspicuously upon its matted bed.

It must not be supposed that I am one given to the blanket denunciation of all onanistic practices, for nothing could be further from the truth. I, in fact, consider myself to be an artist, a veritable maestro, of autoeroticism.

It was for this very reason that I had nearly lost my wits when assaulted from without by vulgar and debased memories which threatened to precipitate the act under unseemly and uncontrolled circumstances.

In the lengthy absence of my wife, I have been fortunate to be able to avail myself of an autoerotic ritual, tested and perfected with time and solemn practice, to take her place as the depository of my libidinal strivings.

The act should always be a supreme demonstration of the loving duality of the Self, a communion and a sacrament. Never must it be initiated by, or focused upon, externals (such as she of the funky finger) that have forced themselves upon consciousness from without.

It must occur in the present, never in memory. It must be, always, an act of self-control, never an outward projection in which the will is taken over by an imagined other.

While it is certainly necessary that it be given an object of devotion, this must be an object carefully selected to focus one’s present mood, and then ritually prepared and consecrated for participation (not utilization!) in the act itself.

The object must be a token, such as might be carried by a pure and devoted knight in honor of his chaste and never-to-be-ravished ladylove, at the outset of a great quest.

Had I been confident that the person, or persons, residing behind the blue curtains of the fifth floor window of the building across the street had taken proper care to weight the bottom hem of that curtain, so that a series of undistorted silhouettes of the person, or persons, in the room might have been projected on the curtains’ surface, and visible despite the ambient light of the street lamp, for instance, I might soon have been able to begin taking a series of extensive and meticulous notes, thus coming into possession of a written record of the shadows of a young, well-proportioned, possibly naked, and probably excited, female Asian or Pacific Islander, which might have been distilled, purified and elevated to the level of an Ideal, and thus rendered suitable as the consecrated object of an auto-erotic ritual act.

But, no. As was usually the case, I had been unable to place my trust in the others. I had been able to take no such notes.

Still, the vision of the funky finger had delivered a clear enough message: pressures had been allowed to build that must soon be released. A token, therefore, was urgently needed.

As I had seen clearly enough “the writing on the wall”, I resolved that the token selected should be an item chosen from within the consecrated boundaries of the connubial estate. It should be an item revelatory of the purified essence of my absent wife that, once selected, should serve as the ritual object of a written dedication to the autoerotic project.

Almost anything pertaining to her person might be suitable as such a token. Any inert body part—a nail clipping, for instance, or a few strands of her hair. I considered briefly the contraceptive diaphragm that I had discovered earlier. But, as that object had betrayed no evidence of uxorial use upon examination, I decided that it was insufficiently infused with my wife’s essential nature to make a suitable token. How perfect it would have been had it retained even the faintest trace of pudendal fragrance, or been adorned by just a single short and slightly kinky hair! But it had conjured up only sterile images of the clinic and the pharmacy.

I had at one time been in possession of a photograph that would have been ideal: my future wife in profile, age fourteen, her virginal shoulders draped with the black, V-neck garment favored by photographers of year book portraits; innocent eyes focused softly upon some lovely vision of the future that hovered like a tinted cloud above an ideal horizon; the faintest hint of a confident smile teasing the line of her as yet undefiled lips.

Unfortunately, that wallet-sized portrait had been crushed, masticated and swallowed in the aftermath of some long-forgotten domestic event, an object available now for nostalgic mental remorse only.

I little relished the prospect of combing the rug and floorboard cracks for nail clippings, or inspecting the nooks, crannies and corners of the room for strands of fallen hair that would, in any case, be sullied and contaminated by the accumulated dust and detritus resultant of long periods of indifferent housekeeping, and might, moreover, be my own.

From my vantage on the floor by the bed, I allowed my gaze to sweep the room, hopeful that some object associated with my absent wife would manifest itself; something that I was so accustomed to seeing that I never saw it at all.

But nothing caught my eye. All wifely objects, it seemed, had vanished along with my wife, and with her existed only in a state of absence.

Through the front window the descending sun was projecting a shaft of reddish late afternoon light in which motes of bus-blasted diesel dust sailed and eddied like living things.

As I stared at that light, transfixed on the beam like an insect on a pin, my right hand groped blindly for my notebook and yellow number two pencil. The beauty of that dying light was worthy of notation.

My searching fingers soon encountered the notebook and deposited it on my lap. The pencil, however, was nowhere to be found.

Still staring towards the window, I was able to exert sufficient effort to twist and stretch so that my arm could reach behind me and under the bed in quest of the missing writing implement. My hand perused the darkness beneath like a sightless crab foraging in a submarine cavern, scuffing along until it bumped up against the wall at the head of the bed.

There my hand encountered an object that immediately registered as non-pencil, but was nonetheless instantly grasped and snatched like captured prey from the sub-crustacean end of the food chain and hauled into the light.

Although tearing my eyes away from that lovely light was as painful as ripping an adhesive bandage from a hairy limb, I looked down to see what it was that my hand had extracted from the obscurity of the hitherto unspelunked cave beneath the box spring.

It was a tiny slipper. A wifely slipper. A remembered slipper. A slipper that had, in the company of its mate (currently not in evidence), long ago been brought home in a box from Macy’s, to be lovingly wrapped, labeled, beribboned, and placed beneath the glittering tree of some wrenchingly recalled Christmas past.

I held the scuffed and worn item in my hand with reverence, as though it were a most fragile object of greatest antiquity. The slipper was sort of yellow, or kind of green, as if it had been selected specifically for its tendency to harmonize with the hues of the cardboard dresser at the foot of the bed.

Had my wife’s foot been so small?

Holding the slipper in my left hand, I attempted to fit the right into the space where my wife’s dainty foot had so often slid upon rising from the conjugal bed. But my hand was far too broad.

By excluding the thumb and pinky, however, I was able to fit the remaining three digits of my right hand into the venerated mule and to discover the textures deep within.

It was lined with a felt-like material, which, in wearing, had pilled up like the surface of an old sweater. How deeply moved I was by the tactile communion with each little bump and worn spot that my probing fingers encountered within.

When at last my fingertips penetrated the well-worn toe of the slipper, they found there five small depressions, one for each little toe of my wife’s tiny foot. As I attempted to fit my fingertips into those five small concavities, I knew that I had found my token.

When finally I could bring myself to withdraw my fingers from the slipper, I made a concerted effort to find the yellow number two pencil, which was soon located beneath my left thigh. I snatched my notebook from my lap, replacing it with the beloved slipper, and opened it to the page inscribed with my last entry.

I recommenced my Korean breathing, allowing my agitated thoughts to drift and settle, softly, like fallen petals to the surface of still water, or motes of diesel dust to the threadbare carpet of a Brooklyn room, preparing myself mentally for the act of composition. Having found my token, the auto-erotic ritual now lacked only the written dedication to the revered object, and that, I was confident, would come to me soon.

The remaining ritual items were readily accessible and could be put in place with swift facility. These included incense sticks, of which a goodly supply could be seen scattered on surfaces throughout the room; candles, which, thrust into the green necks of empty Chianti bottles, fairly littered the place; a silk kimono—a gift from my wife—that would be my only ceremonial vestment; and finally, the musical accompaniment.

Among my most revered relics was a meticulously prepared audio cassette consisting of seven different renditions of the magisterial Duke Ellington’s hauntingly sensual classic standard “Solitude”, repeated in sequence to fill both sides of a sixty-minute tape.

The first rendition was an instrumental Ellington big band version, recorded in the 1940s. This was followed by a Billie Holiday vocal, recorded with a studio orchestra of 1950s vintage. The earthiness of the latter day voice of Miss Holiday contrasted poignantly with the next selection, an almost ethereally beautiful Sarah Vaughan vocal, backed by Ellington’s orchestra in a live performance. The fourth track was another instrumental version, performed by the trio of Ellington on piano, with a rhythm section of Max Roach on drums and Charles Mingus on bass. This was a funkier, more impressionistic version, well suited to a temperate stirring of those juices that had been set steeping by the dusky throats of the Misses Holiday and Vaughan.

No sooner had the final plinking note of the Duke’s piano faded to silence, than Miss Holiday once again took the stage, this time backed by a small band that included the keyboard mastery of Teddy Wilson and the mellow tenor sax of Lester Young, which stroked and enticed the liquid precision of a younger, more tender, Lady Day’s exquisitely seductive phrasing.

These five renditions would be repeated in sequence until the end of side B was nigh, by which time I would be so deep into the auto-erotic trance brought on by contemplation of the written dedication to the ritual token that I would be well prepared for the coup de grace, a nasty, whorehouse styling by the incomparably Negroid Miss Nina Simone. This was an interpretation evocative of wet, meaty lips and spongy, probing tongue, redolent of musky sweat, grasping thighs and slowly gyrating hips. In short, the ultimate musical prelude to the climax of the autoerotic endeavor.

The seventh song? The seventh song was silence: the very essence of solitude. Six seemingly endless minutes of softly hissing blank tape at the end of the second side, during which sibilant interval I would inhale deeply of the sandalwood atmosphere, solemnly comprehend the layered message of the written dedication, open my kimono and, having applied a small dab of Tiger Balm to each nipple, watch the flickering flames of my several candles as I mentally moved my chosen token across the electrically potential, seemingly boundless expanse of my naked flesh, until without ever having physically manipulated my bone hard generative organ, the auto-erotic ritual would reach its seismographic consummation with such force that I sometimes feared that the meat would be torn from my straining thighs and my molars be crushed to screaming pulp by the strength of the spasm.

As I finished thus rehearsing the ritual in my mind, I was amused to look down and observe my stridently rigid member, standing at the angle of a skier flying down the jump slope and wearing the token slipper like a hooded cape. At that instant I picked up my notebook and yellow number two pencil and composed the dedication that had come to me in the form of a haiku:

Absent wife’s slipper

Bearing empty toe imprints;

Motes in dying light.

Thus I now knew how this day would end. I had only to wait for darkness to fill the room, so that I could arrange and light my candles and incense, slide the cassette into the player, don my kimono, and crawl onto the conjugal bed to begin the ritual.

As I sat in the deepening twilight, I wondered if it were possible, ever, to completely transcend one’s mammalian nature? If my wife were here, I thought, perhaps she could tell me. But my wife, to my eternal shame, had long since gone the way of the organ-grinding wop and the dancing monkey.