If you’re looking for real life –whatever that is– I’m afraid you’ll have to go somewhere else. This is all in my head. There’s nothing real here. These are merely the words that roll down my fingers in the middle of the night as I wait for the light to come fetch me.
Some of these words have been dictated to me by a hamburger with a pipe in its mouth. A hamburger with a mouth and a nose, and beady eyes and glasses. A hamburger with a little red hat on its head. A hamburger with legs and feet and hands. A hamburger with no ears.
This hamburger talks to me when there’s no one else around. It –he?– has a voice like a cartoon bullfrog. This is a hamburger that has lived a long life, much of it spent standing in one place with its arms extended in an empty embrace. This is a hamburger that has lived a long time alone; it has known –or so I gather from its occasional monologues– sorrow and despair. It can frequently be foul-mouthed and petulant, and despises much of the music I play, music which it nonetheless cannot avoid, paralyzed as it has been for so many years directly next to one of the stereo speakers.
Captain Beefheart or Pere Ubu, or even Husker Du, can drive the hamburger to fits of fevered lamentations. More than once it has pitched itself from its position on the shelf down to the floor, only to discover that, tragically, it is indestructible. It is an immortal hamburger.
It is not as difficult as you might imagine to tie yourself to a tree. It’s more difficult, of course, to shoot yourself full of arrows.
The moon can still, after all these years, damn near paralyze you. It could probably kill you if you were hungry enough.
Black birds huddle together in the tree out back, bitching about the winter and waiting for something dead to turn up, which is when things will get ugly.
Across the way an old man makes his wife a peanut butter sandwich, begs her to swallow her pills.
The sunlight moves slowly across the carpet, then just as slowly recedes, a dark tide rolling back out, dragging with it whatever the day might have been.
One evening, as dusk folded into darkness, when you were still a young man without any real disappointment in your heart, you sat drinking beer on a railroad trestle and watched the lantern from an Amish hay wagon swaying slowly across the fields.
Sometimes at night, when you’re driving in the country with your windows down and music blasting from the speakers, you’ll catch a whiff of that memory, clear and unmistakable. It will come back to you exactly as it was, and for an instant your heart will feel swept clean.
A moment later, of course, you will wonder where all that time has gone, and how you have managed to become a man with so many memories, and so many of them almost unbearably happy.
And in such moments you will have no choice but to conclude that you have been blessed, blessed beyond all possible explanation, blessed beyond all deserving.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply