By
J Brown (copyrighted 2000)
Warm humidity is love to my world. Sweat between the legs of city walkers revitalized my blood and makes me stand tall. It’s gray and the religious buildings smell of death and age as you walk by. There is no shade; the city’s largest buildings are shrouded in the slow rain clouds. Plummet lower than your mind normally flows, next to you in the grass and you will find the mushrooms.
For the longest time, like the
time in early childhood, you may forget about us. You would find us in fields behind your house and you’d want to
eat us and your mom told you we were poisonous. It took you thirteen years to get over that and it wasn’t until
college you were exposed to people who ate mushrooms, both kinds. Nobody ate poisonous mushrooms you found and
soon you would eat us sautéed or in chef’s salads. It doesn’t too bad and then you start ordering mushrooms on your
hamburgers and then May came and you wanted the other kind.
A damp dorm room, rushing with
adrenaline but it’s quiet like library sex.
You can barely hear yourself breath and everybody else’s faces relax and
sag into cradles the neck has become.
Laughter is religious, it is death to the negativity that normally
motivates you and for once, you’re content to do nothing but exist. Choice is arbitrary because your body weighs
six tons and you’re amazed in an Einstein sort of way that the bean bag you’ve
sunk into hasn’t burst yet.
Birds sing outside against a
background of rain that slaps on the wide drooping leaves of oaks and maple
leaf trees. Your parents are paying for
this. The thought of ordering a pizza
and that time you found the largest piece of shit saved in a toilet down the
hall flash around. Rolling powdered
donuts on the blue carpet of your hallway and watching the white sugar fly off
like rats from a sinking shop make you laugh and laugh. Someone suggests a black light and Pink
Floyd and not one minute later you’re in a space ship that is made for fairies
and nineteen-year old college students.
Laugh, blurry eyes from happy crying, and the stomach is a wash cycle of
emotion. You all go outside when the
fourth and final person (you) can stand up.
You have ten dollars that seems like a king’s ransom when you walk into
the 7-11. A plastic football, fig
newtons, chocolate milk and a losing lottery ticket make it onto the street car
with you. The operator smirks and
shakes his head. His parents never had
money fro him to ride on street cars for no reason but he is a happy man; he
sees happiness and it rubs on him like the humidity. He actually says hi to the old layd who gets on at the next
street. You wonder who the street car
driver is. His black skin is contained
in his blue uniform like sausage casing and it scares you to think he has had a
completely different life than you have.
Completely different. He looks
happy though, singing a song you can barely here and then says goodbye when you
and three other crazed young kids get off deeper downtown.
It is still light out but it’s
pink Impressionist gray lighting.
People in suits and watches continually tilted toward their faces walk
by as if on a fast-moving conveyor belt and you stand back against a building
one hundred ties your size and it has nothing to say to you. Nothing downtown says anything. You yearn for little girls on a see-saw or
even a recess bell but it is only shuffling feet, Dopler-effected music from
cars moving slower than they’d like, and you.
Your mind is a megaphoned central processing unit and biology screams at
you. Nerve endings from throughout your
body are making comments on long thin red telephone wires connected to your
gray mass. The operator is overwhelmed. Nobody is making emergency calls; they are
all just calling to say hi. Your forearm
felt cool for a moment, sweat layering it like pastry fillings.
Your friends are nowhere. More bald heads, briefcases and women in
drab-colored suits swish by and your back is against the tall building. Time is against you. This will be you soon, your back against a
different kind of wall that only moves forward. You will wear nearly the same thing every day and your choices
are limited to what kind of cheese you want on your sandwich.
“You want to play catch?”
someone asks you from amidst the walkers.
You’re startled. You scream, “No!” you think and chocolate
milk drops and you run somewhere, everywhere from people who aren’t alive. The chocolate milk makes the gutter and it’s
hard to tell what it was a minute earlier.
Breathing, doubled over because
you’re about to collapse, your heart is here.
Listening bent over it is beating and you imagine its rhythmic albeit
jerky contractions. “That’s what is
keeping me alive!” you wonder and you’re running again. You’re out of the immediate downtown but the
buildings are still too tall and no one knows who you are. No one can validate your existence. You can’t tell if that’s a good or a bad
thing and it makes you laugh. You scoot
down against a different building from the weight of your life. No one is around you. It’s dark and you’re hungry. It’s dark and you’re lost. You buy a hot dog and some water from a
vendor and everything comes back to you.
You live a hundred kilometers from home. You realize a few hours of your life has transpired and death is
a long way away. You ate poisonous
mushrooms and your blood is still pumping some of it through your young
veins. You saw the world in an instant
and it moved too fast and people could move too far from home. It is all right to travel somewhere but
there is a reason it’s called home.
The hot dog is a vestige of
heaven itself. You tell the vendor how
much you liked it and he nods for fear he will say something you don’t
understand. He is very far from home
too but for a much different reason. You
wonder if he knows the streetcar operator but the other blood in your body that
isn’t tainted reminds you that that is ridiculous. You still have the football and it is sweaty from how you’ve had
it nestled in your arm.
You resolve yourself to call your
mom and tell her you love her. She’s
been good to you and you’re a sprung monkey shrieking wildly at skirts and the
moments of freedom. It’s been natural
for you, an impulse that has got you this far.
“Maybe mushrooms aren’t so bad
after all,” you say to no one. When you
get home, or to the place where you sleep, you plan to call your mom. Tell her
you like the mushrooms in the city, that’s all I ask.