Lenses and Lead

:::listEn:::

thEy turned us away thricE bEforE allowing thE onE with thE blackEst lungs through.  thEy gavE him instructions, thE door crEaked opEn, hE wEnt in, that was that.  sound smashEd into thE sidE of his hEad as hE squEEzed through thE sEvEn-inch crEvicE thEy pErmittEd, and onE of the fEllows who stood by my sidE sworE hE saw a currEnt ignitE the fEllow’s EyEs as he battlEd his way in.

aftEr two more dEnials, thE door crEakEd opEn again, and I stood impatiEntly — likE a young man waiting for his lovE’s lacE undEr garmEnts to bE rEmovEd — listEning for instructions.  this timE, the fEllow chosEn had bEEn unknowingly growing a tumor since a month before his fivE yEar rEunion.

i turnEd to a man on my lEft who lookEd youngEr than mE, and i askEd: “why do we wait?”

hE rEpliEd: “because we need help.”

“what’s inside?”

“life, i suspect.”

“and what do we have out here?”

“imperfection.”

a fEw days bEfore, i had awokEn from having my arm rEmovEd at thE Elbow.  i wandErEd thE city strEEts and had no rEason to bE sad until i was handEd a card by a strangEr wEaring a long coat.  his facE was thE most gEnEric i’d sEEn, but the piEcE of papEr hE slippEd mE was too intriguEing to ignorE.  “you’re scum,” it read.  “for a fair amount of self-degradation, we’ll make you whole again.”

it wasn’t until it was brought to my attEntion that i rEalizEd i was in nEEd of a piEcing togEthEr.  i followEd thE card’s dirEctions and camE to thE door whErE i stood among thE pool of pEoplE for a day and a half bEforE wE EvEn rEcEivEd thE first dEnial.  it took twElvE hours for thE nExt, and sixtEEn morE for thE third.  i was hungry.  i had wEt mysElf.  but i hEld thE card and thE promisE was unrElEnting…

but i had had Enough.  and i turnEd.  and as i did, thE door crEakEd opEn again.  i hEard a voicE calling mE back as my fEEt carriEd my stump and mE towards thE city strEEts i EnjoyEd so much bEforE a strangEr lEt mE know i was impErfEct.

i did not turn back.  i kEpt on.  and i do not rEgrEt thE choicE bEcausE living on my tErms trumps any falsE promisE of what’s to comE…

No one much liked Klaus Gort.

People — mainly ladies — tried, but they just couldn’t.

He was a mixed up fellow, a victim of circumstance kept on the outer rim of society by the impenetrable cultural barrier it would take years in the United States to scale.

He’d walk into any bar in Squawhammer, Alabama, and at least three lonely, straight women would look over their shoulder and squeal with delight, hoping the beefy, talcum powder-toned ox would sidle into a chair next to them so they could waste away the evening complaining about the dearth of available men with their new gay buddy.  The problem was, ol’ Gort was not gay.  Was it wrong for these women to assume Klaus was a homosexual?  Of course not.  The only other men who wore skirts in Squawhammer were the local clan of self-proclaimed Scotsmen — of which, only one had red hair and could boast more than an eighth Scottish blood — whose short, plaid kilts could be identified from miles away by the abhorrent combinations of plaid.  Not to mention the hair on their legs was so thick, they all looked like they were wearing bear pelt leggings under their checkered skirts.  Klaus did not wear a kilt.  He wore legitimate skirts sporting patterns that would cause the ’70s to blush.  His legs were also so smooth and hairless they radiated moonlight after dark, but that was a by-product of his Latvian heritage, not choice.  Needless to say, the odds that a woman might assume Klaus Gort was straight upon first glance was worse than a mouse’s chance against a .600 millimeter round fired at point-blank range from an elephant gun.

Klaus’ fatal flaw was his over enthusiastic ego, which never benefited from the initial doting the victim-to-be slathered him with upon introduction.  His chest would swell and he would reply, “Well, sank yoo bery myuch,” when she commented on the fact that he was one of the few men in Alabama whose pectoral muscles protruded further than his gut.  Sometimes, he would even reach out and help himself to a handful of her breast after she poked his, which was fine with them since he was gay and all.

The woman brave enough to wave him over might start to get suspicious of his heterosexuality when he told stories of Zerba, Veirhausa, and Fran, his wives still in Latvia — waiting by their meager firesides with their seventeen-year-old, blind snow ferrets curled up in their laps, standing eagerly at their mailboxes every afternoon for the hefty American checks he promised to send back once he started making money, but never did — but would squelch the idea once she re-realized that he was, in fact, wearing a skirt.  But as the evening progressed and more alcohol seeped into Klaus’ already half-retarded brain, he would make a pass on the unsuspecting female, causing her to dodge his chapped, plastic-y lips as they careened towards her’s like a pair of dim-witted cows racing towards the only patch of green left in a two-acre pasture.  Without fail, he’d end up the floor, face down in the perpetual thin film of boot dirt and manure.

Q: But why skirts?  Why would a straight man, trying as hard as he could to walk away with his first helping from the endless buffet of American tail, wear female clothing to attract females?

A: On the airplane ride to America from Latvia, NBC streamed from the satellite box onto the modest personal television screens instead of the scheduled cheesy romance.  At one point, Dateline began and half-way through ran a story on modern lesbianism in the United States.  Spicy scenes of Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan smooching on the beaches of Hawaii, and Ellen DeGeneres wrapping her albino arms around Portia de Rossi, danced across the screen.  That was all it took.  Upon landing, Klaus immediately made his way to the closest department store and bought all the feminine attire he could with the meager sixty-three dollars in his wallet.

“Do you remember her?”

“Not very well.  She smelled like warm perfume most of the time, right?”

“Vanilla.  And she had dark hair that tangled around her shoulders.  We’d sit at the Corner and drink fresh juice — she loved lemongrass — and she’d twist her half-chewed pencil in her hair until it got stuck.”

“Nervousness?”

“No, that’s just how she was.  Fidgety.  Like her brain was always juggling seventeen thoughts at once.”

“That must have been obnoxious.  I mean, you keep glancing above my right shoulder and I can barely take it.”

“Sorry.  When my mind wanders, my eyes do too.  Did you know that when she was in skeletal traction she would try to lift her leg out of its harness?”

“Ouch.”

“Tell me about it.  It had to have hurt like hell, but she just couldn’t be held in place like that, strung from the ceiling and strapped to the bed.”

“Hm.”

“She also used to chew spearmint gum.  All the time.  The only time anything happened between us — still one of the best nights I’ve had — we were over at Brandt’s after shooting pool at Kelly’s.  There were a few people inside drinking, but it was too loud, so we slipped outside and shared a cigarette.  I could taste the spearmint on the filter when she passed it to me, and after I pinched the cherry out onto the sidewalk, she put her arms around my neck and pulled me down to her mouth.”

“Hm.”

“We didn’t kiss for long, and after a few seconds, she put her tiny hands on my shoulders and pushed me away.  When I opened my eyes, hers were still closed, but she was smiling and bobbing her head back and forth like she was dancing to a song in her head.  She was drunk, but I like to think she was dancing because she kissed me.”

“Look man, it’s been almost a year since the accident, right?  Every other afternoon we get lunch you bring her up again.  It’s probably time you let go of whatever feelings you’re still brewing for her.”

“Yeah, but you know what the sad thing is?  I shouldn’t have any to begin with.  We were never together, and other than that kiss, she never led me to believe we would be.”

“Exactly.”

“Truth be told, I’m not sure she’d even remember me a year later if I’d been the one caught in that house when the second floor fell into the first.”

It was the first day in months she could wear short sleeves, and Janey Lynn’s toeless sandles made the same scuffing sound against the sandy sidewalk as they had during the colder afternoons she walked home from the teller’s job she held at the bank on the corner of her block.  Earlier that week, she considered lifting her feet a bit higher, bending her knees an inch or so more so the soft drag wouldn’t chase her from the time she stood to the time she sat again, but she shushed that idea within a millisecond of conjuring it.  She enjoyed her shuffle.  It was an aspect of her life she could control.

She suspected a tryst between her husband and the effervescent young secretary with the algae green eyes he’d hand-picked from a pool of hopefuls a pair of months before.  Despite the fact he was busy with his company, contracting the plans for a large memorial in honor of the men and women who served, and were still serving, in the Iraq war, the timeline of the secretary’s presence and his sudden tendency to stay late at the office were uncomfortably coincidental.  Still, without any hard evidence, Janey Lynn went about her life without mustering the courage it would require to leave him should his answer be a resounding yes.

The idea that there was the possibility her husband may have experienced the soft warmth of another woman’s body, after standing before a priest and uttering the words “‘Til death do us part” with the violent sincerity of an honest man, came to Janey Lynn at breakfast the morning after the third evening in a single work week he came home after nine.  The idea crashed into her brain like a meteor as she stirred the slobbery oatmeal she had removed from the microwave fifteen seconds too soon, and she spent the remaining forty-five minutes before work coming to terms with his potential infidelity the way she imagined a cancer patient might when they’re told they have an indeterminate amount of time to live — the fear stormed her consciousness for the better part of the first quarter hour, tunneling her vision and sending panicky impulses through the knotty ropes of her brain, and then settled in her stomach with a passive indignation she could only ignore for three-hour intervals.

But that morning was six weeks in the past, and the lump of fear in her abdomen had been almost eroded away by forced apathy.  The way she saw it, she had no choice.  It was either a.) run the risk of opening her life up to a tumult so fierce, she may lose her husband, and her livelihood in the process, or b.) continue to shuffle through life, enjoying the small parts she still had control over.

So, as she walked up the block to her front door, behind which she would not find her husband as she had for the first twenty-two years and nine months of their marriage, she took extra care to appreciate each gritty scrape the rubber soles of her toeless sandles made against the concrete.  She even allowed the flicker of a smile to grace the corners of her lips as she let her right foot drag for an extra split second, elongating the muffled rasp for none to enjoy but herself.

The pair spent the morning at brunch, eating stacks of pancakes topped with farmer’s market fruit, drinking tar black coffee, and laughing with each other over the frenzied state of a hemorrhaging America.

Between their first and second bites, the Dow Jones dropped another three hundred points.  Between their second and third, two local homeless folks — including the one with the nappy pelt of hair that clung to his cheeks during the summer and looked like it should smell of cooking oil and dirt, but never did — dropped dead, or rather fell asleep amidst their soddy rags without the will to wake.  Between their third and fourth, his parents got into an argument so fierce the neighbors, who were predisposed to overreaction as it was, called the police for fear one or both of the feuders would lose a digit, limb, or life.

As the dumpy waitress, who had served the pair a time or two before, splashed a warm shot of coffee in the man’s cup and refilled the woman’s empty ceramic mug, a furious cloud of acid rain perched atop a deciduous forest in Northern Maine with plans to singe the broad green leaves from their branches and turn the healthy forest skeletal.

He paid with a debit card and she grazed a feather soft kiss across his right cheekbone as they left the restaurant and hung a right, strolling past the post office towards the quaint, dedicated park where he first noticed her a few months before.  As a warm breeze cut the cool noontime air, they looked at each other and smiled, happy temperate weather was on its way.

“Thanks,” she spoke in her signature honey-tinged tone.  “It was wonderful as always.”

“Yeah, it was,” he replied as he stretched his long arm across the curvature of her upper back, taking his time to graze each slight, ropey muscle.  Her bra straps provided tiny speed bumps.  He was happy to take his time rolling over them.  He wrapped his fingers around her opposite shoulder and pulled her under his arm.  She responded by reaching her arms around his ribcage and squeezing just enough to force a little air from his lungs, just enough to remind him he belonged to her.

They passed under an ancient Ginkgo where a baby blue shopping bag dangled from a cluster of branches.

“What do you suppose is in that?” he asked.  Truth be told, he wasn’t concerned with the bag or what its contents might be — his question was just a ploy to coax her tender voice back up from her throat.

They stopped and she looked up, squinting her eyes to keep out a few of the sun’s rays boring into her constricted pupils, keeping her from studying the bag as well as she could.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “Maybe it’s just some trash.  Or maybe someone left it there for another person to find when it falls down.  Like a lazy time capsule.”

He chuckled and gave her shoulder a warm squeeze.  They began to walk again, and she turned her face to his profile and rubbed her nose in the same place she kissed when they left the restaurant.

Between their first and second steps, a small girl across town with a purple lump under her left eye began to cry because the dolly her mother had given her, before packing the vomit green suitcase she purchased at a thrift store once she decided she needed to move out because her husband’s abuse became physical, was not in the high chair where she left it after dinner the evening before.