This thing... like all of us.

This thing… like human

To begin, there is a man and he carries in his pocket a small, doll made out of golden foil. Although, truth be told, it’s not so much of a doll, not really but in our words there is nothing else for what it is, so unfortunately it is a doll. The man is not exactly sure why he has the doll. It belonged to someone he cared for, sure but even more, it makes him feel this thing that makes his hands shake just a little and his back tighten up and straighten out.
Now to those that knew him, he was not much of a man. Not much of one at all. A child, yes. A brilliant one, for sure and had the city had the mind to measure him as such, he would have been one for the ages. They would have filled themselves with stories of him, some true, some false and all of them just slightly stretched, as are any good stories of children. They’d have added a word he said, here or taken one away. Or maybe a look of awareness that wasn’t really there at all, that would have made his thoughts less self-centered or his offenses a tad more innocent. But alas, he was not a child. Not even close and so when they thought of him, it had to be of only as a man and again, he was not much of one.
And even more, he had in him none of those things that could have ever made him one of any real significance. No desires, nor abilities to rule or reign. No thoughts of collecting for himself (or for anyone, for that matter) an alternate reality filled with shiny, powder chromed tools, winter suits and beveled timepieces. And even worse, when he spoke, it was never with the irony or apathy of a man. And it was never, ever with a measured cadence or in a strong and steady tone. For better or worse, his words were ones of wonder and hope and almost always in earnest but they were never ever clever or really even interesting to anyone but him alone and the pitch of his voice bounced up and down like fingers tapping out a silent song.
This is, however, not to say that he was without friends. Again, not at all. In fact, had you asked those around him, first off, you’d have been told of just how many friends he had. The man was beloved by almost everyone. Yes, yes, that is the perfect word for what he was, beloved.
Within moments, everyone he met felt that inside of him was a perfect understanding of they, themselves and so they surrounded themselves with him, much in the same way that smokers always know each other, long before they’ve lit up and at some point in the evening, they casually turn to one another with a confident, surety and ask, “smoke.” And soon, they’re standing in the dark, with their hands cocked back and continuing their conversation without ever realizing that the odds of meeting a non-smoker are four times greater than running into a tar-stained peer. And of those that did not count themselves a friend, of those that smirked when he came round or turned their backs, it was only because he had in him no ability, none whatsoever, to create a hierarchy in his mind of all the people that he knew. Our man treated everyone the same, as a closest friend, no matter how long they had known him and no matter how close to him they really were. And this, coupled with his overall outlandish outlook on life itself, produced in them a feeling of being slightly slighted, somehow ignored and overlooked and in the worst of cases, all but forgotten.
So it is safe to say that this man, Christopher North, was by no means friendless but also, that in no way was he any bit of a man. Rather, he was like a mascot somewhat for the small community. A pet, so to speak, but one capable of incredibly thoughtful dialogue and the most sincere commonality.
In the small town, if you knew Christopher North, you knew him from the one of the 4 or 5 local bars that he, each night, attended. Yes, that is also said correct. Christopher North, did not just go to bars, he attended them. For him, the city’s bars were like a Church and in the drinking, the shared glances, the occasional brushes of skin on skin, he celebrated mass. Each service ending with the bellowing a-a-a-m-e-e-e-n, of the bartender’s l-a-a-a-a-s-t c-a-a-a-l-l-l-l.
Unfortunately, to everyone that knew him these nightly ventures out were also greatly misunderstood. He never went to see someone, never just to drink, although the drinking did bring him a secret pleasure as great as nearly everything else in his tiny life. He never went to be in the scene and never, ever just to go where he knew that people knew his name. No, his reasoning was much more simple. His attendance, only an act of silent worship of something resembling something purely human.
Understand, this search for something purely human was his great passion. This act of being alive and only what he was. That’s it, more than anything he loved being what he was. This thing awash with feelings and inflamed by flesh. At times, he would touch his skin and marvel at the pressure that he felt push back. He would ask great questions, never anticipating answers but rather fascinated by just the thoughts themselves. The way the words strung together. He treasured the way a woman’s shirt rose and the feeling in his stomach when he stared too long. He loved the way it made him feel to make another laugh and the quiet joy he found in occasionally brutally saying, “no.” (This detail of pleasure in the occasional defiant, “no” to someone in trouble or in need, is included so that the reader does not think he was a good or a simple man.) Understand, he was neither of those. Not even close. But remember, he also was not a bad man. Not by any stretch.
Shortly, after his thirtieth birthday, he had left his work and decided that his was just to experience all of what he was and to find new ways to experience those tiny moments that he found in bars. Finding new flesh to press against, original conversations to overhear. New ways to make people laugh and be made to laugh. And so, our man dropped out of normal life like the hopeless addict drops out of his, all in search of that next hit. Christopher North, mainlined living.
To him, there was a spirit, a daemon of sorts, found only in the bars and it climbed onto the backs of everyone who entered and it made their skin invisible and their words just slightly more clear. And so almost each and every night, he would sit in a corner by himself while people stopped by occasionally for a hello or a quick hug and they would talk and catch up and compare thoughts on the war or the book that they were reading and then the people would drift away, caught up in something else or another. And by himself again, he would look around and watch and listen and feel this wave of awe and wonder at the flesh and bones that moved throughout the room and left in their wake only the purest essence of what it meant to be a beating heart, a probing mind and all these pleasures and pains, jumbled and mashed together.
The owner of his favorite bar, “High Art,” it was called, was nearly his age. He was tall and thin with this translucent skin and had you seen him anywhere but there, you would have sworn that he was on a break from a local theatre that was doing a revival of a 19th century melodrama. And this man, the owner, was the villain and his stretched out, forever smile seemed painted on. Something about him, his behavior and attire, be sure, (he wore ridiculous jackets and tight black pants) but something else, something in his eyes made all of his actions seem exaggerated and overblown. A wave of his hand stretched all the way across the bar and a flick of his wrist felt as though it could knock you over. The patrons all loved him and when he poured a drink that hit the bottom of the bottle, (imagine this), it was yours for free.
Nevertheless, it was commonly assumed that he had some tragedy that loomed heavy over him. Maybe he was left at the altar or touched as a child or maybe he had a twin sister that had died at four, everyone grabbed on to anything that might explain this man’s constant vigor. But he didn’t.
Each night, after closing the bar, he would circle the building and collect the thrown down silver and gold foil from the tops of cigarette packs. At the weeks end, he would fashion the foil into a little person (or people, depending on how much he could collect) who he would then take to his little rental unit and place on a giant sheet of plywood that he had bought from another patron, for this specific purpose. The board housed old men with top hats and canes and young women with dogs. Children played by a cavalry statue and commuters stepped from the metro-rail. It was a wonderful diorama, really, and it flashed bright beneath his kitchen light. When walking by it, slow or quick, the shiny foil off the bulb made it look like it was moving and he could almost hear the city’s screams.
In the center of the little town was the first figure that he had made. It was a little him and he had fashioned it so that its arms stood wide and outstretched like he was conducting an orchestra. Sometimes he made little clothes for himself out of the white, blank backs of the foil and with this, his replica alone, stood out amongst the others.
At forty-one the man, was diagnosed with a tumor on his back and by forty-two, he was dead. It came to be the bar managers task to clear his loft. And so using a key that he had been given years before, the manager and Christopher North, went to the place, found the mocked up city and sat down in front of it and cried. They remembered the man and all of his eccentricities. They thought about how he was always, at great expense to himself, making others cry with laughter and how he had been the only one, to think to give Stephy Witt a card, when the cocktail girl’s mother had died.
Of the two men, North, noticed the little figure in the center first and for a reason he didn’t fully understand at the time, he put it in his pocket before the other man had time to see it. While they sat there, staring at the board, they each explained the man’s crude interpretation of the city to themselves. Here was a soul that wanted to fashion a world for just him alone, or here was one who created reproductions of people that he knew because he had problems with real relationships. For years each of them, would tell others of what they found that night and those people would also create these sad, little incomplete stories that tried to find a reason for the thing itself. And it came to be that the great and only ever tragedy of the tall man’s life, was that not one of those two men and not one of the ones that they would surely tell, was ever even close to anything that resembled why it was.



This thing… like sadness
Chelsea Wilde worked at, High Art on Thursday and Saturday nights. She was petite yet still curiously wide, with a beautiful face and a full, enhanced chest. She wore tight, low cut shirts and you never saw her without seeing just enough of the side of a breast to think that at any moment she might turn and show you more but somehow, she never did. Her shirts always held tight and her best parts remained just out of sight.
Chelsea was madly in love with another bartender, the charming, handsome, young Brian Bates. The two had slept together once but for Brian it was nothing serious, just something to do after a shift. For Chelsea however, it was what one does when you love someone and in this, she was right. It is what one does when you love someone. Unfortunately, for Chelsea however, Brian, was also correct. It really is just something to do and they found themselves in one of those bizarre and completely human experiences where both were doing the right thing for themselves and for the other and yet it made one happy and it made the other terribly run-down.
For the first fourteen years of her life, Chelsea and her parents had lived together in a two-room, converted basement. Her father had lost his job at the local bottling plant and he had decided that after twenty-one years of machining parts for machines that crafted bottle he was not about to learn a new trade and fuck ’em if they thought he was going to earn less than he was used to. That night he got drunk and swore that he would move into his mother-in-laws basement before he would ever work again and so, less than one year later, they did.
Chelsea enjoyed living with her grandma and even more she loved all the little curios and knick-knacks that the old woman had filled her house with. Every inch of every shelf , ever horizontal plank, the top of the television, the window sills, the back of the couch, held something painted and wooden or ceramic and sculpted or crafted and soft and she would take down them down, turn them over in her hands and imagine where they might had come from and what they were. And she would imagine, her grandmother’s face when she had received it. Had she been disappointed or overjoyed? Was it a coming or a going gift?
Her father enjoyed living there as well. At last freed from the grind of daily work and from the upkeep and the mortgage of the home that they had lost, he had actually began to enjoy his life and this stranger that Chelsea had never known began to involve himself in her every day. He walked her to school and back each day and winked at her teacher when he dropped her off. He made up these wonderful games that they would play after school and had names like, “pony-tail surprise,” and “secret-granny.”
They were indeed very poor but Chelsea never knew it. She loved the macaroni and cheese or the eggs for dinner and when Christmas came, her grandma wrapped up her favorite of the curios and Chelsea opened them and pretended to be surprised. With this Chelsea grew to be sweet and loving and she had in her this never-ending longing for all that would come next. When she slid down the slide, she was already fantasizing about swinging on the swings and walking home with her father she was already choosing the book that he would read to her that evening when he tucked her in. For a child, the simple pleasure in all that was to come resulted in an awesome enthusiasm and a perpetually, pleasant disposition.
Still though, with all of this, deep inside of her was a question, or two, to be exact, that once and a while, when she was quiet or alone would ache at her mind and drip down onto her heart. It was a question composed only of a single why and an isolated how. Why, she wondered, did certain other people that she knew, not everyone but some, both children and adults, seem painted over as with a layer of this thing like sadness. And it covered over them even when they told a joke or sang along with the radio in the car. She wondered what this thing was and she felt that she had to know, just how it had come to cover over them in the first place.
Her mother had this thing covering over her, but funny, her father did not. A brother and sister she knew in school had it but she could not understand where it could have come from because neither of their parents did.
As she grew older the pastimes that once so entertained her faded away and she began to long for new experiences that never seemed to come and in the idleness, more and more she thought about this thing. And she noticed that those who had it covering over them seemed to somehow have more credibility in the world. People befriended them easier and they trusted them more. It was assumed, she learned, that those who had it had somehow had deeper thoughts and better ideas. That they understood something about how the world was, that the others didn’t know.
More than anything, Chelsea often wondered if this thing would ever come and cover over her. By then the wondering had turned (as it often does) to desire and even more she wanted the privileges it came with. But it never came. She went through all of high school without it. After school, she got a job as a waitress at a local Pizza house because it seemed that all the girls there had this thing. The customers were always pulling the girls onto their laps and slapping at their ass and laughing but no one seemed to notice her. She started going out with the girls after work and smoking and drinking throughout the night but still, it just never came. She got breast implants and suffered through two weeks of bandages and pain but when she came back to work, she quickly learned that all that had changed was the size of her bras and she was still without this thing, that certain other people that she respected had.
Finally, in an act of desperation, she took a year off from her Early Childhood Education studies and enrolled in a bartending course at the local vocational college. She had noticed that every bartender that she knew had this thing and she knew that while it wouldn’t come with the certification, it might come along as a result of it.
As an attractive, full-figured, young woman, she was hired on the spot by the first bar she interviewed at, High Art. The next day she met Brian. At first, Chelsea thrived at the bar. She was the new face and everyone wanted to get to know her. They asked her questions about her life and they always invited her out. Slowly, as they got to know her though, her new friends noticed strange things about her. Once, at a pool party she spilled a drink and began to cry. A girl, she didn’t know took her into the bathroom and cleaned her up but for the rest of the night Chelsea sat by herself and wouldn’t smile. Another time, when the group went up to the mountains to see a meteor shower, Chelsea wore a sweater with Winnie the Pooh on it and the other girls laughed at her behind her back. Weeks later, the group had an end of the Summer bonfire and some of the girls got drunk and sang and danced around the fire but Chelsea sat by herself and pretended to read the messages on her phone. When they invited her over, she refused and just said, “I don’t dance to this kind of music.” Slowly, the invitations were fewer and further between and Chelsea, sensing them withdraw from her, began to work even harder at becoming one of them.
Now, she went to far and was written up for flashing her tits one evening while she was working. She tried the harder things they did and slept with a few of the regulars, an act that might have changed things had she done it earlier but now, just pushed the other staff, further and further away.
The customers at the bar slowly picked up on all of this and for a reason that many of them didn’t quite understand, several stopped coming in. It was on one of these mysteriously slow nights that she first slept with Brian. She had been in love with him from the moment that they met but since they rarely worked together, she had to settle for seeing him when he came in on the nights she worked or when she went in on the nights he was there. On this evening, she had traded shifts with another girl just to get to work beside him.
That night the bar was dead slow so they closed down early and decided to hit a few local spots to see how the others in the area were doing. First they went to “Austin,” a bar a block away. It was crowded and they had a drink and a shot of whiskey with the bartender. After, they jumped over to, “La Silla,” also down the street. Its trademark was a long solid oak bar, cut from a single piece of wood and tonight it was also filled with patrons. It was rumored around the local industry, that the bar alone had cost the new owner over a million dollars and people came and drank just to stand over it. Brian was a favorite around the area and within five minutes some friends of his that were also there, bought them another round. Three drinks in and Chelsea was starting to feel quite comfortable. Two hours and two more drinks later, she felt Brian’s hand casually slip around her waist. Surprised, she turned into him and he mistook the move for seduction and dropped his head so their lips could meet.
They kissed for a few seconds and then they made their way out to his car. An hour later, she was straightening her skirt and he was fumbling for a cigarette.
“Jesus,” Brian said. “Did that really just happen?”
Although, those were not quite the words Chelsea would have most wanted to hear, she was still high from the hormones firing adrenaline into her central cortex so she laughed and said, “you know it did, silly.” Brian had never been called, “silly,” by someone his own age and he made a promise right then and there, to never sleep with her again. He dropped her off back at her car and she went home, ate a cupcake her grandmother had baked earlier in the day and fell asleep.
Christopher North did not get to know Chelsea in the same way that the others had. He had gotten to know her, slowly, over time and she grew to regard him as one regards a certificate hanging over an office desk or a trophy in their bedroom. An object that makes one feel better about themselves. When he sat at her bar, she had the feelings that she had growing up. She was excited for tomorrow and she felt able to plan for what she might do with her life. It wasn’t so much what he said or how he said the things he said, rather it was the way he sat. He always turned the stool so that it was perpendicular to the bar and he could look down behind it at her and out in front of it and all the way across the tiny, darkened room. He picked at the tiny hairs on his chin and he drank his drink, in long slow sips. Most often, he had this look on his face. It wasn’t quite a smile but it wasn’t stoic, either. Mostly, it just seemed very interested. She liked that everyone seemed to know him and stop by and say hello and she loved the fact that most of the people kept on moving and he didn’t seem to mind at all. He had a confidence about him and she felt proud to know him as well as she did. They had kissed one night when he had drank a few too many and he had had waited for her to close up and take him home. After that, running into him wasn’t odd at all and when she broached the subject he laughed and called it, “high school stuff.”
After the night with Brian, Chelsea waited for him to call. When he finally did, it was to ask if she wanted to pick up his shift that night and two weeks would go by before they spoke again.
He came in on a night that she was working. He came around the bar, like he owned the place and reached out for a hug. When they pulled away, she gave him a quizzical look.
“What,” he said, innocently laughing and shrugging his shoulders.
The bar had gone sort of quiet and while he stood there under her smile that was also at least half a glare, everyone around them could feel that something in the room had changed. They turned to the two of them, standing awkwardly in front of the bottles backlit by lights and waited for the moment to pass. A few more moments went by and suddenly Chelsea felt this weight crawl onto her neck and wrap around her shoulders and it painted over her with a layer of this thing like sadness and it never was to leave.








This thing… like Marble (with Ivory tusks)
Christopher North lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Costa Mesa, a small suburb located almost in the center of Orange County, California. He had moved there from Los Angeles, some eleven years earlier at twenty-one and once he arrived, he swore that he would never leave. It was to be one of the only two promises he was ever able to keep.
At 32, Christopher had already done and seen many things. He had watched an old man die, sold cars at a low-end dealership, tended bars and worked for some time at a homeless shelter. He had also swum with wild dolphins, suffered two nervous breakdowns, fallen in and out and into love again and once, he had even slept with his best friends wife. Now, he spent his days simply, writing stories at a local café. He had never sold one, never attempted to sell one, in fact but it gave him a quiet pleasure unlike any he had ever known. He convinced some people that he knew, to let him write copy and grants for their organizations and he did so between writing his stories. And with this and an occasional labor job that he could pick up here and there, each month he made his way, although there was never room for anymore than that. Fortunately, for Christopher that was fine, even better actually. In his mind, it made sense.
North was never one for organizing or collecting or preserving, so he found the very act of not attaining quite comfortable and to him, it was the only way that he could keep his mind clear. Once, on a family trip he had purchased for himself a small, marble walrus. It sat on a very polished piece of slate and it had ivory tusks. It was a fine piece and he greatly enjoyed looking at it and he enjoyed the smoothness of it in his hands even more.
At seventeen, when he had moved away from his parents, he rolled the walrus in a sheet of newspaper and packed it in between his sheets. Once settled in his new place, he laid it on one of the sheets on the floor (as this occurred before he had a bed), stared at the ceiling and though about where he would display it. The choice was obvious as he had only one flat, elevated surface in his entire room, the dresser. (The tiny shelf above the hanger rod in the closet not withstanding as it was out of view.)
That night, Christopher put the Walrus on the dresser and lay back down. He thought about other places he would go and other little statues he might see. Maybe he would see a teak Giraffe in Ghana or a plaster otter somewhere up the coast. He knew that you could purchase a wax elephant that a machine made when you put a dollar into it at the zoo and once at a local theme park he had seen someone blowing a fantastically colored dragon out of glass. Soon he was picturing his tiny room covered in animals and the he found that the thought caused him this great anxiety inside. People would come in and have nowhere to place a drink or rest their hands. The dust would gather on the statues and soon the walrus would look rough and worn and not at all smooth and shiny, like it did now.
For a while he considered that he could rotate the statues and store away the ones he wasn’t displaying at the time. But after giving this idea a little more thought, he realized the time that it would take and he considered all of the space for the boxes of animals and what would happen when he moved? He would have to rent a truck and stack the boxes on a dolly and at the time, Christopher knew of know one with a dolly. And who would help him? His friends had broken one of the legs on the dresser when they moved it in and he dreaded what they would do to a wonderfully colored, glass dragon.
Some hours passed and Christopher came to see that for him, there was only one choice left. In the dark of the night, he rose, walked past the paneled walls and to the corner of his room. He reached up onto the dresser and took the Walrus into his hands. Thankfully, it still felt smooth and he smiled thinking of his father who had laughed at him, when he had purchased it. Carrying it delicately on an open palm, he left his room, went down the hall, past the roommates playing a game on the television, went through the kitchen and out the screen door. The house they had rented was actually a smaller house behind a larger one and the backyard was covered over in weeds and brush. Off to his right was an old Ford Truck and to his left was a garage where the owner spent his days. From the back porch, he walked over to the trashcans, quietly lifted the lid and gently placed his walrus on top of the box of empty beer cans the roommates had celebrated with earlier that night. The walrus’s ivory tusk glowed bright from the light of the moon.
Christopher walked back into the house, through the kitchen and past the roommates. One of them, moving the controller in his hands furiously back and forth and up and down, called over his shoulder to him.
“Whatcha’ doing out there?”
Christopher waited to respond. “But, I was just a boy,” he finally announced and walked back to his room and fell asleep.