"The War Hero"

            Orson Hayes smiles twice at the readied camera as the production assistant gives the thirty seconds sign.  Silly Sally sells sea shells, ink pink blink, cognitive gymnastics.  Across the desk to one side sits a clean cut young man in an immaculate set of dress greens, a few dozen multicolored ribbons arranged over his heart.  He sits with folded hands resting on the knee of his crossed leg, the placid and quite photogenic war hero, a sort of latter-day Ollie North.  Orson can feel the glow of patriotic greatness emanating upon him; if he could but touch the hem of his Silver Star-

            Three, two, one, “And we’re back, tonight’s guest freshly returned from his triumphant tour of duty overseas, Private First Class John Bollard.”  The audience roars approval; every red-blood loves PFC Bollard.  “Proud to have you with us, John,” smilingly wresting back the spotlight, the gracious late-night host.

            “Pleasure to be here, Mister Hayes,” Bollard smirks saccharinely.  Orson doesn’t appreciate the formality, and casts a wary eye at his guest.  Perhaps he doesn’t care for the spotlight?  A touch of PTSD, maybe?

            “As many of you know, John here was the hero of last month’s harrowing Haiftatabad siege, in which over a hundred militants had his squad surrounded in an abandoned hospital.  Completely out of contact and beyond support, isn’t that right?”

            “The ruins of a hospital, but yes, you’ve got the facts correct.”  Orson doesn’t much care for Bollard’s tone, or his sarcastic smile.  If the little shit doesn’t want to be on television, why come at all?  Just play ball, dammit.

            “Surrounded and outnumbered, your fellow warriors injured and spent, you courageously volunteered to infiltrate enemy lines in order to cause a distraction that would allow your squad to escape.  Not only did they escape, but he single-handedly neutralized more than fifty insurgents, completely breaking their ranks!  How do you like that, folks?  A modern-day Audie Murphy!”  And suddenly Hayes feels old- would people even remember who Murphy was?  “A real John McCain-style maverick,” he adds, still a little out of touch.  But who else in this day and age comes close?  Team Six, maybe, but none of them have names or recognizable faces.  He looks at Bollard with an almost real feeling of admiration, “You display the true American spirit, young man.  If only the current administration could better honor heroes such as yourself and the other men and women in uniform with better support.”

            And then his guest laughs, actually has the balls to snicker during Orson’s oratory to the American people.  But he’s not laughing; John looks scathingly upon him, a frighteningly sneery expression of disdain clouding his heroic visage.  “Hero?” he scoffs.  “You keep saying hero, but really you’re only dancing around the glaring reality that I’m a mass murderer in a uniform.  Hero,” he spits.  “Honestly, how can anyone in this day and age condone the things we do, much less applaud my actions?  Standing me up to be some sort of role model, so that when I’m old and spent and working a civvie contract job you can send today’s sons and daughters-” and the private scoffs again, “sons, send people’s sons to become murderers of their own, to fight and die or grow old and land more civvie jobs to enable more young people to fight and die.  Of course,” he continues matter-of-factly, sitting back in his seat, “it’ll be mechanized by then, all drones and robots and IEDs blowing up other IEDs and whatever civilians get in the way.”

            Orson is appalled, looking to the set director for guidance.  Keep it going, she mouths back at him.  Hayes struggles to find an opening, struggles to rally his riled feelings of public betrayal and ire.  “Do- do you mean to say you don’t support the war?  That you don’t support our troops?”  A few people in the audience boo, shouting commie and coward.  But John has obviously seen worse; he simply laughs at them.

            “Support our troops?  Have you spent any time with our troops, Orson?  They’re all either poor or fools or monsters, or fools waiting to become monsters so you people can idolize them.  Sending them off to fight wars for things you don’t really understand, simply to attach yourselves to a feeling like remoras on a shark.  You’re leeches, every last one of you.”  The stage lighting is bringing out the dark shadows around the eyes, bringing out the exhaustion in Bollard’s features.  Orson shakes his head reprovingly; the boy’s obviously delusional, speaking ill of his country and his fellow warriors this way.  And the crowd is getting ugly, inflammatory.

            “People, please,” he tells them in a soothing hush, trying to be his own sort of hero now.  “Post-traumatic stress is a very serious condition, affecting tens of thousands of our-”

            “Do you know why they get that way, Mister Hayes?  Because war is an unnatural thing incompatible with modern society, especially with a functioning democracy that believes in human rights and the sanctity of life.  We get sent off to see and do terrible things, get told we’re doing good, and then have to wrap our little minds around it all for the next thirty, forty, or however many years it takes before finally dying.  And it’s painful, so eventually everybody adopts the same language of lying, heroes and neutralizing and all that sanitized garbage people like you spread around.  For your ratings and your public image.  So yes, I do support the troops.  Fire them all, or else keep them home,” John trails off, tired and by now drowned out by the awful voices raining down upon him.  “Do something.”

            Security has been dispatched to keep a few audience members back from the stage.  Orson stands, feeling a bit like Springer as he looks to camera 3.  “Well that’s all the time we have for now.  Stay tuned for our next guest as we discuss the wolf problem in the mountain states.”  The On Air sign blackens and he looks around for Bollard, but the soldier is gone.  “Coward,” Hayes mutters, and begins trying to settle the tumultuous crowd back into their seats.

"Community Watch"

Eve sits behind the nursery on an air conditioning unit, smoking her Parliament 100s and thumbing through a magazine.  The weather has been getting progressively colder and the day’s breeze is starting to tear the first golden-brown leaves from their branches and shake the withering rose buds from their bushes. Eve wishes she’d worn something warmer when she notices a mopey old man pacing across the street.  She’d seen him before when she’d started her smoke break – green sweater, khaki trousers, portly and bald – grandfatherly looking, and not at all noticeable. 

Yet here he was again, pacing and watching the nursery.  He makes to cross the road, but balks and resumes his nervous back-and-forth.  This old man makes Eve uneasy, his nervousness somehow rubbing off onto her.  Only last week in Michigan there was something in the news… she puts out her cigarette and heads back around for the door. 

            “Excuse me, miss?  I say, miss!”  Spying her, the old man hurries across the street with labored steps and a nervous smile on his face.  Eve pauses at the door as he approaches, tittering and breathless.  “Hello miss, I’m sure you don’t remember me at all,” and he pauses hopefully a bit as he searches for some bit of recognition in her face.  Finding none, he continues “I had donated some things here a few years ago.  Toys, they were-  I was wondering if I could come in and have a quick look around?”

            “I really don’t think so, sir,” Eve tells him, torn between her duty and a common sense of courtesy.  On the one hand, what could be the harm?  But then on the other, beneath the baggy-saggy exterior and elderly charm might lurk a monster, a potential danger to the children in her charge.  It really isn’t worth the risk, and Eve cannot see how the scenario would end well.  Even if he really was after toys and even if they had been his toys at some point, the nursery couldn’t simply give them back, or even really sell any if he offered to buy them.

“Those toys used to be mine, actually.”  He leans around her and stands on tip-toes as he peers in through the window.  “I mean look, there’s my old Spirograph!  And -oh!- my jump rope and Raggedy Andy and the-  where’s my Etch-a-Sketch gone to?”

“The Etch-a-Sketch?  We used to have one, but I think that was broken a while ago.”

“Oh.  Oh yes, I see.  And the jacks?”

“I’m afraid you need to go, sir.  You really have no business here.”  The old man’s doleful expression is starting to bum her out, and besides it really wasn’t proper for him to be here like this.  Already children are coming to the window to see what’s been going on, while other caregiver Sara steps out with a militant air.

“Is there a problem here?” she asks Eve with a malicious glance toward the old man.  They both try to explain the situation to Sara, Eve in even tones and the old man with a frantic urgency, but she shakes her head sharply.  “No, no, I’m afraid that’s impossible and if you don’t leave these premises immediately I’m going to call the cops.”

            Tearfully the old man tries to push past them, but is soundly rebuffed by a much larger Sara.  “I never had any children, you know!” he shouts at them as he stands at the end of the walk.  “I-” he begins but suddenly breaks off and limps his way down the street again as Sara begins dialing the police on her mobile.  Eve can’t help but feel sorry for him, the loping old man against a backdrop of falling leaves.  Suddenly she wishes she’d worn something warmer and, rubbing her arms for warmth, heads back inside.

"The Throes"

Marianne sits weeping to herself in the corner.  Poor Marianne.  The kids (but they aren’t kids anymore, are they?) are on their way, and Walter struggles against what may well be the last sleep.  The immobile frailty of his limbs, the tinny taste in his mouth, the drug-dimmed bowel pain turned to terrible numbness; unpleasant omens all, in his opinion.

This is it, Walter thinks to himself.  I’m dying, the jig is up, the farm has been cashed, bucket kicked.  He lies helplessly in his uncomfortable hospice cot in the hellishly sanitary mint green room.  An assortment of important looking machines blip softly, rhythmically.  Rubber lifelines and plastic tubes and electric cables connect Walter variously to medications and oxygen, to plasma; to the wall socket like some sort of appliance.

How best to sum up a life? he wonders.  Knowing the time is at hand, what can one really say before stepping off life’s magnificent stage?  How much his wife and kids and friends all meant?  How a lifetime of useless work has been tragically cut short before reaching retirement?  How his only vice ended up being the instrument of his demise?  How is Walter to be remembered at his deathbed?

Therein lies the rub.  Having been a fairly well-read person in his youth, Walter can think back to the wonderful deathbed expressions that make for such fine retelling.  Either these curtains go or I do.  Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing.  Jefferson still survives.  Drink to me.  It’s my turn to take a leap into the darkness.  That sort of thing.

The kids arrive.  Thomas and Bobby and Carol and their wives and husband Walter never particularly cared for.  Carol and Bobby are crying and Thomas might be too were it possible.  Marianne leaves quietly, having been sitting there in her corner most of the morning.  The kids are all talking, at him or to him, it doesn’t make much sense.  Walter’s eyesight is starting to loop in and out and in, and their words are all sounding foreign to his ears.  The tinny taste is terrible but fast fading, and Walter feels as though he is getting immeasurably lighter. 

“Is this death, then?” he thinks he says as he fades out for the last-

           He hopes that those aren’t his final words to his children.  But brightness soon follows, as the room returns.  The kids are all looking at Walter nervously, Bobby with a hand on his shoulder.  He must only have faded out for a moment, and the tinny taste returns with his loathing of the room he lies in. 

“Thought my number was up,” he chuckles weakly, buying for time. 

Sum up a life, package it all up… should he say something political, something soppy, something endearing?  A piece of advice or timeless wisdom?  Should he make something up, a fantastic treasure or the like?  Should he express any regrets?  Walter doesn’t feel any, but perhaps it’s the medication making him all euphoric and indifferent.  Nurse?  Nurse?  Carol is asking if she should fetch a nurse?

“I think I’ll be resplundage,” Walter slurs, thoughts muddling.

And everything again fades out rather suddenly, and a fear grips at his chest.  Ye gods, this is it, sure as a day, ended on a daft note.  And as he tumbles into the dismal blackness he is brought just as quickly back with a jolt; a literal, painful jolt as a mint green clad doctor takes the defibu-whatsits from off Walter’s wheezing, panicked chest.

They’ve got an oxygen mask over his mouth and he knows this is it, third time going down fire for the count and all.  Walter would wrest it off and away if he could but lift his arms, tell them he loves them without being able to remember who they are particularly.  Something, anything.  His lips are moving, he attempts to speak something, anything.  It is Thomas who comes forward and pulls back the death mask from his face.  Sum up a life, a happy life with time running short-

“I’ve eaten a lot of good food,” Walter says feebly, and dies promptly thereafter.

"Self-Actualization"

The line stretches on, an endless mumbling stream of people waiting for their turn to buy tickets from the teller at the kiosk.  But the line hasn’t lurched forward in five minutes or more, and Gerald is starting to feel aggravated.  For one thing, the line keeps absorbing the odd person like a human sponge.  Teenagers and assorted mallrats, mothers and children returned from the bathroom, clever fat men from the Wall Drug with cheap candy and soda hidden in their pockets.  One by one in twos and threes, approaching, subverting, and melting into the expanding bloating line.

It is quite infuriating, and Gerald wonders what’s in a line?  If not they, why me, he thinks to himself.  For of course a line is a human construct, a device of politeness and civility and order.  Once respect for the line is gone there is no order, no line at all.  It becomes a rabble, a riot, another fucking day in Baghdad.

Gerald clenches his fists which make that rubbing sound, like two pieces of leather each squelching against the other.  He cannot help but chuckle, and the tension eases up.  What’s in a line then, if everybody ends up at the same place, same time?  If not they, why not he?  The same rules apply to pot and pauper.  Gerald is a big guy, a veteran of the world; he asks himself why he feels held back by an ineffectual little queue.  He considers his options, resisting every urge to the contrary that holds him back at the line – by now a bloated trapezoid – ‘s end.

He lurches forward with a terse “Pardon me,” though in fact he means it earnestly as his actions trample his ingrained sense of courtesy.  But soon he’s ahead, he’s moving forward! and no man is his obstacle.  “Excuse me, pardon me.  Watch it, you.  Pardon- Excuse-” down and along the line it goes, every excuse become a meaningless mumble, a haughty mockery of the empty action.  Gerald is enjoying this as he physically draws back a tangle of stupid-looking mall brats.  He at last reaches the ticket kiosk, hardened to the meek complaints and directionless whingeing going on behind him.

“Horrible Bosses, please,” he says to the freckled girl who looks far too old to be wearing braces.  She stands there behind her smudged glass divide, indecisively frozen and looking like a blank-eyed carp.  Gerald has his wallet in his hand, waiting.  Waiting, thinking about the money he’s about to pay out, wondering why we even use it.  Money and lines, mere frontage for the affable construction we’ve set about ourselves, like walls around a cell. 

Gerald is a big guy, a veteran of the world, the conqueror of piddling lines and such.  Pocketing his wallet he sidesteps the kiosk and heads into the greasy tacky lobby with the vaulted ceilings and too many movie posters.  There’s a life size cutout of the Green Lantern, asking folk to purchase refreshments at the snack bar.  Nuts to that, Gerald thinks to himself.  What’s in a bag of theater popcorn, if not the industrialized mimicry of what popcorn should be?  Certainly not seven dollars’ worth of anything.  No, first rule of survival.  Secure a source of water.

The theater lacking a water fountain, Gerald steps into the men’s room and wonders why they’ve even made the distinction of men and women’s lavatories.  It’s all just piss and shit, in the end.  He steps up to the sink and runs some cold, cold water from the tap.  He puts his head in and sucks from the stream, like a deer lapping from a cool brook.  This is freedom, this is self-actualization! Gerald exults to himself.  He drinks to saturation and, thinking ahead, decides to go ahead and have a piss before the show.

A mighty eyebrow is raised at the piddling urinals evenly strung across the wall.  Lines, money, and urinals, the deceptive trappings of a society of morons.  He positions himself at the far wall between the urinals and stalls and lets forth a torrent of urine and adjectives and expressions, leaving behind a dripping stinking puddle in his wake.  “This place is mine,” he declares with a laugh.  Not that he’d actually spend any time here, being dingy and urine-sodden. 

Relieved, released, quenched and ready to be entertained, Gerald bursts back into the lobby.  Some of the people from the line are giving him looks; let them look, he thinks.  They look upon a free man, a writer of his own destiny.  Veteran of the world, of Iraq and lines and mountains.  A super-man, if one were so inclined to say.  He paces up to the maze of velvet cord and brass stanchions and humors it, zigging and zagging his way to its cheese, in this case a spotty fat slug in a burgundy vest precariously propped up on a high stool.  “Tickets, please,” the great wheezy turd tells him. 

What gall!  Gerald shakes his head.  “Fraid not,” he informs the turd, though he actually fears nothing.  “Tickets are a misconception.  Now let me pass.”  But the turd does not.  Instead, he unperches himself and stands - in defiance! – of Gerald’s way.  Glowering, he knows conflict is imminent.  The peon does not know what he’s interfered in.  With a hearty shove, the fat attendant flumps down onto the stain-resistant bristly carpeting.  More attendants are approaching from behind, and one is already sputtering something into a walkie-talkie.  Baghdad, chaos, conflict.

Tearing a cord from its stanchion Gerald wields the dreadful bronze phallus above him.  They want to fight, so be it.  “I am the Ubermensch!” he bellows, and that stops them back a bit as he waves his makeshift weapon about his head in threatening circles.  Some people head out but most gape on as mall cops rush into the lobby, armed with their silly tazers and wearing their daft plastic badges.  No man can remain free if he is unwilling to fight for it, Gerald grimaces to himself.

“I am the Ubermensch!!” he roars, “Fucking fear me!!”  And he could see they very much did as he charged at them despite the velvet corded maze .  Perhaps they weren’t so moronic after all.

"A Change of Pace"

The salad is perfect:  crisp shredded romaine.  A small handful of organic white corn kernels and a few garbanzos.  A gauze-thin slice of onion, every layer pulled to shreds and evenly spread.  A twice-diced grade-A boiled egg, sprinkled liberally.  Five croutons, a thin coat of light ranch dressing, and capped with a dusting of white pepper and finely shredded parmesan.

Pair this with a four-minute cup of Darjeeling, and Greg’s after-work snack is complete.  Every weekday at five-thirtyish central standard time, without fail.  Perfect in every way.  Every weekday.  Five-thirtyish.

Greg looks at his miserable little salad, this perfectly balanced, delicately flavored, sickeningly wholesome dish of his.  Every day, perfection for the mouth and body, for eight years running.  As he takes the bowl and mug to table, Greg wonders how much cubic space his lettuce, corn, and croutons of eight years’ accumulated salad would take up.  How many bags of onions the gauze-thin whispings would comprise.  How many tea trees have had their top two taken to brew his 2,085 mugsful.

He takes a forkful and puts it into his mouth.  Despicably delightful, the same as every other day.  Crunchy, cool, with just a hint of pepper, green onion, and sour cream.  Vomitous.  Greg puts the fork down and reflects on a lifetime of good decisions, made each and every day by his damnably sound reasoning.  “To hell with this!” he declares to his salad, pushing it away gently so not to send it off the table.  “I’m making myself a snack!”

Rising to his feet, to this end he proceeds to search the cupboards and pantry, to scour the freezer and very depths of the fridge.  Greg finds nothing but a healthy stock of ingredients and carefully sealed leftovers.  “Rat farts!” he shouts angrily, after he remembers the kids are away at their afterschool crap.  It feels good to shout; different, and satisfyingly irrational.  He checks his watch.  Bonnie shouldn’t be home for another half hour yet, time enough to visit the Kroger.  Grabbing his keys, with a laugh he is out the door.

*          *          *

“God’s cock,” Greg exclaims as he wheels his Taurus into the driveway.  The Caravan is back, already parked in the garage.  He parks alongside it, then grabs a white bag from the passenger’s seat and heads over to the workbench.

Inside, Bonnie continues fixing supper when she hears the car pull in.  It isn’t usual for Greg to be gone yet, less so that he would leave an uneaten salad on the kitchen table.  Seconds tick to minutes, and still he has not come in.  Strange behavior, and Bonnie begins to feel nervous.  Setting aside her chopping, she ventures out to the garage.  She begins calling, “Greg, honey, where did you go?  You left a salad on-” when she stops short at the bizarre spectacle of her husband leering about in the garage’s far corner.  

Hearing her gasp and realizing he is no longer alone, Greg stiffens nervously.  Clearing his throat, he tells her “I’ll be inside in a second, just a minute.”

But his mouth sounds full of something, and with a suspicious leer of her own Bonnie approaches her husband.  “Greg, what is that?  What are you doing?!”  To her horror, Greg appears to be eating Spam, cold from the can, with a putty knife.  Like some ravenous beast!

“I’m eating Spam!” he explains to her emphatically.  “Can’t a man have Spam once in a while?”

“Put it down, hon!  Think of your arteries!!”  She advances cautiously, as though the can were full of trans fatty contagions.  “Put down the putty knife, hon.”  She tries to grab for the tin, despite his protests and defensive shuffles backward.  At last, she loses patience with this childishness.  “Give it here!”

“Never!”  Loading up on another mouthful Greg dashes for the door, Bonnie close behind.  He savors the greasy, salty, faintly porky flavor and distinctly foamy texture of the meat as it squelches between his teeth.  He feels exuberant.  “This is different!  This is madness!  This is life!!” he thinks to himself as he rounds the corner, and breaks a sprint across the back yard for the tree line. 

Bonnie cannot keep up; nearly a decade of salads have kept him fit and surprisingly spry.  She gives up around the middle of the yard.  “You’ll spoil your appetite!” Bonnie shouts after her fool of a husband, but to no avail.  He calls something back between mouthfuls about living, she thinks, and the snapping branches and crunching leaves fade distantly into silence.

"A Boy And His Cat"

Sean drowsily ascends the staircase with his hands slung in the tattered pockets of his blue terry.  Clump-clump-clump, each step making him feel a bit more obsolescent, like a lumbering dinosaur.  He steps into the kitchen and grabs a mug from off the wall caddy, noting the cuckoo clock with a sour disdain.  Horrible thing, cluttering up the wall for three weeks now.  He ought to leave it out in the bin, or maybe drop in a box someplace.  He knows he can’t, but he ought.

The kitchen is gathering filth.  Not a lot, he notes, but thereabout the makings of an unassailable mess in future.  He has all the time in the world now at his disposal.  But why bother?  He sets his mug on the counter and gives the kettle a lift, to feel how much water’s in it.  Half-full {or maybe half-empty}, he returns it to the stove and starts a flame.  Sean props open the icebox and ruts about for ingredients.  Bit of beef, block of cheddar, jar of horseradish, half an onion…

“Meow,” says the cat, who’s just come in from the bedroom with an air of sluggish contentment.  He always has a knack for appearing with the food. 

“Mornin’ cat,” Sean grumbles as he drops his things on the chop block.  It doesn’t seem at all right, the cat sleeping on his bed when he’s dropped off in the den again.  Where’s the loyalty?  He starts hacking up the onion, separating the rings from the skin and ends.  “Only the best things now, cat,” he begins saying.  “Life’s too short for chaff and scraps, eh?”  Sean feels a bit feisty this morning; it’s an odd, unpleasant sort of feeling, and one he can only attribute to the recliner downstairs acting up on his back.

The beef is still a bit frozen from the night before, so Sean cuts off a bit of cheese instead and puts the block back in the box.  “Might leave it sit a bit,” he says, and remembers the cat prowling about at his feet.  First the bed; his lunch will be next.  “Don’t even think about it,” he says to the cat in his sternest, most inconceivable voice.  The voice he uses with the neighbor’s kids when they play too close to the car.  It ends without punctuation, leaving it all rather open with an unsaid or I tagging not far behind.

Sean decides to take a fast shower before the kettle’s up.  As he lumbers {that word again} toward the bathroom, he wonders what he’d do if the cat did, in fact, made a go of his beef.  There’s not much he could do, really.  He wouldn’t kill the cat.  He couldn’t strike it, either; not only might he kill it, but he couldn’t be sure if it’d even hurt.  The cat certainly wouldn’t learn a lesson out of it, besides.  They’re shifty, unteachable things, cats.  It would only be his loss.  Anything more’d be shouting at the sky, with Sean feeling bad and ridiculous.

He breezes into the shower without so much as a glance at the mirror.  Sean can’t enjoy seeing himself naked anymore.  It only serves to remind what was, twenty or thirty years ago.  Like the cuckoo clock.  Like the half-empty bedroom, in a sense.  “Yes,” he ruminates as he enjoys the hot water off his shoulders, “chaff and scraps.”  Last vestiges of a life.

He isn’t surprised to find the beef where he’d left it, next to the kettle mutely spewing steam for want of a whistle.  He fixes up a sandwich on the stove and, mug in hand, joins the cat outside on the patio.  “You’re not a bad thing,” Sean tells him as he takes his seat at the table.  It’s a cool day out, but the sun above feels good and warm.  In a couple weeks the garden will need tending, and there’ll be projects about the house that will need doing.  He takes a bite into the warm juicy greasy beefstuff, savoring every bit of it.  Hearthy, wholesome good flavors and a goddamn cat hair in his mouth!

Sandwich spoilt, Sean rises to kick at the cat but the shifty bugger is gone.

"Der Schmutzen"

"Mind the minors, plea-uzz!"

Bear in mind that Gordon is an unseemly clean individual.  One might go so far as to say he is ‘O.C.D.’ about things, but a more pejorative {and thereby more accurate} description would be ‘anally retentive.’  Nomenclature aside, he wears gloves to do the dishes, irons his jeans, owns a feather duster, and carries hand sanitizer with him in his jacket pocket.  He is a model tenant at the Walton Arms apartment complex, and had he any friends they would likely agree his apartment is kept in a perfect, probably fashionable order.  Well-groomed and orderly as Gordon may be, and as clean-cut a mid-level manager as the Fred Meyer has ever had, for all intents and purposes the man leads a thoroughly miserable personal life.  No sex, you see.  Whether this is the cause or an effect of Gordon’s aforementioned cleanliness is anyone’s guess.  What is certain is that, thirty-four and unbedded, unhappy Gordon’s life takes a drastic turn the day he misses his morning shower. 

The day is a Tuesday, mid-February.  Naked down to his immaculate ¾ inch sideburns, a routine turn of the spigot produces an unexpected absence of water.  There is a slight befuddled pause, then an absent minded and equally unfruitful twist of the second spigot.  Confusion transforms to concern; the time is now 7.21.  In thirty-seven minutes Gordon should be at the corner bus stop, or else be late for work.  He rushes about the tidy, conservatively sized apartment checking the taps {which are likewise dry} and {braving the winter snow in his bathrobe} the hose outside.  No water.  He phones the water company {#8 on his speed dial}, but the lines are busy.  7.39.  Time is running short.  He smells himself, but finds only a faint odor of skin.  He is unshaven, but not noticeably so.  It will have to do, he sighs to himself as he brushes his teeth using a bottle of water from the fridge.  He doffs his neatly pressed business casuals and jets out the door in a state of mild discomfort and mental disorder. 

The dull blue bus with the large dirty windows pulls in on time, unusually filled with morning people.  Our hero winces as he grabs hold of a hand-rail, squished against these unsanitary strangers.  He notes with distaste a vagranty-looking old man sitting in Gordon’s usual seat at the front, doubtlessly farting it up good.  The bus lurches forward and Gordon jostles backward, bumping into the girl behind him.  He has seen her many times on this bus, and has never found a reason to talk to her.  Plain of face and bosomy, possibly married.  “Pardon me,” he tells her off-handedly with the merest turn of his head.  From the corner of his eye he thinks she may have smiled at him.  They graze limbs and bump bodies several more times, he apologizing and she at last assuring him that “It’s no problem.”  He leaves the bus in a curiously giddy mood, temporarily forgetting his unwashed state.  The spacious Fred Meyer lot is full of cars and trucks and the various vehicular dinosaurs that rule the earth, with streams of unkempt folk rushing in or lumbering out with cases of water.  Inside he hears the dreadful news:  a blown water main may not be fixable for a week or more, leaving the entire town high and dry.

Only able to buy one case of spring water amid the chaos, Gordon faces the unhappy fact that showers are hereafter impossible for the time being.  He sleeps uneasily the night, the feeling of crawling uncleanliness covering him.  Nightmares and vague visions of filth and decay rollick his evening, and by morning he is too tired to really care about his scent, much less brush his teeth.  He catches the once-again typically half-filled bus and, remembering the incontinent old man from the day before, looks for a new seat.  There are few to choose from however, but the bosom-woman sits alone on the side-bench.  He drops beside her and his heartbeat quickens at the prickening sensation of two fleshes in near proximity.  She smiles at him again and he possibly says good morning, mumbling nervously.  The bus pulls ahead and now she brushes into him.  “We can’t stop bumping into each other,” she says to him pleasantly.  “I don’t mind,” he replies in all honesty and immediately feels stupid; unclean and self-conscious.  Gordon can hear her sniffing, and remembers that he hasn’t showered in two days.  He must reek to high heaven!  Sniffing up his odor and probably judging his lame remarks; he wishes he hadn’t sat here, but the crusty old man and his bean gas… “My name is Sue,” Sue tells him, in what manner?  More than pleasantly in the ordinary run of things, he knows.  But in what way, he cannot quite figure out.  He tells her his name, and they get to talking about things he will not remember when he disembarks.  When Gordon steps into the Fred Meyer his only thought is that they have a coffee date later that afternoon. 

That night, for the first time in his life Gordon has sex with another person, a bosomy plain-faced woman named Sue.  He does not quite remember how it all ‘went down’ {as his employees at the Meyer would often say when recounting their own exploits} but when he wakes up with her next to him in bed, he feels dirty.  A good, pleasant kind of dirty, like one might feel after a hard day’s toil in the garden.  For the first time in his life, Gordon feels like a manly man, or something thereabouts.  They have sex again when she awakes, then board the bus together.  The hefty driver raises his eyebrows and grins afterwards with all three chins as they sit down.  Yes, Gordie {she had called him Gordie in the night} feels like a man.  “I fucked her rotten,” his smile announces to the world.  And the raunchy smile widens as the sex escalates thereafter throughout the week.  Dirty, sweaty stuff; things Gordie used to ponder over as a younger man {or older boy, as he recollects it}.  Tit-fucking.  Ass-ramming.  Italian chandeliering.  Sixty-nining {a term he still cannot figure out}.  At work he quietly asks some of his cashiers for ‘moves,’ which they are more than happy to divulge with a nasty relish.  And Gordie notices the women eyeing him, in the good sort of way.  “They know it, too,” he tells himself.  And he begins to eye them back as well.

And then the water returns.  Having not washed in six days, Gordie feels slightly out of place in the shower.  For one thing, Sue is in it with him, letting him play with her rubbery wet tits as she lathers his hair.  But the hot water feels grand and the sweet smells of soap and shampoo are refreshing.  And as the two lovers towel each other off a funny thing happens.  Sue has to go rather abruptly, and catches the 2.28 bus home.  Gordie thinks nothing of it {after all, she had been there most of the past week!}, but the next day Sue has ‘things to do,’ with an unpleasant, abstracted look on her face.  The women stop eyeing him as well, and once again Gordon’s life takes an unhappy turn.  Worse yet than before, he has what he can only call the Hunger.  His bed has never felt so empty, the apartment never so lifeless and small.  He goes over it in his mind, again and again to no avail.  Life reverts to emptiness in a way he recognizes as his own, but had never before noticed.  Shower.  Bus.  Work.  Bus.  Eat.  Sleep. Shower.  Days drag by, and his heightened interest in women only serves to make their passing the more painful. 

It is during one of his introspective morning showers that the idea hits him:  the showers!  The fastidious cleanliness is the only factor that differentiated Gordon’s lifetime from the halcyon week of the Gordie.  It makes no sense, but in his spiritual desperation it is the only explanation he can think of.  In a fantastical sort of way he seems faced with a crisis of existence; either he gives up washing or he lives out his life with the sexless Hunger, unfulfilled and clean.  The decision is made in the stale fluorescent lighting of his tiny bathroom, sealed in the basement with a wrench as Gordon permanently shuts off the water flow to his apartment.  A vow is made, to never wash again and to live the life of pleasure that it might afford.  Just as before, the transition is almost exponential.  The Hunger becomes filled, simply vanishes.  If there were any doubts before, Gordie finds an inverse relationship between his hygiene and his inexplicable appeal to the opposite sex.  More than just a full-time gig, sex and filth become a sort of spiritual pairing that propels him onward with an unforeseen self-confidence.  The sheer quantity of women in need of this newfound spiritual fellowship demands Gordie’s complete preoccupation.  There are plenty of them about; ones with prettier faces, bigger {or adversely, smaller} tits, nicer asses, and heartier appetites than he had known with Sue.  Life becomes a celebration of the physical and the raunchy, a glorification of all the schmutz he'd been warned against.

The metamorphosis is complete and all-encompassing.  Not for want of presentability, but for sheer lack of presence the Fred Meyer stops calling for him, with the eventuality that his rent goes unpaid.  The inevitable loss of his apartment does not bother Gordie.  It was a miserable, overkempt pit of sadness, as far as he can recall.  “Possessions are empty comforts,” he might have proclaimed had he the time or presence of mind to ruminate such things.  In any case the matter is moot; he finds himself shacking up for a day or two here and there, living and shagging where he may by want of necessity.  Everywhere; in the backs of cars, motel rooms, park shrubbery, stairwells, playgrounds, laundry rooms, sidewalks, and public lavatories.  Rampant and non-stop, like some sort of living, breathing, fucking Axe commercial.  He has come beyond the edge of the commonplace, an irresistible insatiable fucking machine; a sexual demi-god of urban mythology.   And for once and forever, he is happy.