Kent English 8.27.06

Why I want my money back

These shoes are, in fact, too comfortable.
They fit me too well and give too much support.

I have worn them in overly air-conditioned office settings
and the frightful heat of Death Valley.

They were on my feet when I traversed
the full length of the Great Wall,
and when I sat through a marathon performance
of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Not once have I had a blister
or even so much as an itch.
No pebbles or grass seeds have found
their way inside, and I have so far failed
to step anywhere near sticky wads of pink bubblegum
or malodorous piles of dog shit.

In short, my feet have never been happier,
and I can stand it no longer.

They are missing out on all that I am experiencing,
locked away, as they are, in their well-crafted euphoria:
they have been cheated of the discomfort that
makes a Good Shoe Day so rewarding.

I think that in view of what my feet have not been through,
I am entitled to a full refund or at least an exchange
for a pair less pleasing to the instep, one that chafes
my little toes or causes cramping after six hours of wear.

Surely it is not too much to ask; after all,
I have but one set of feet, and I would like to feel
that we are walking along the same bumpy road.



GALATEA

Chapter 2

The moment of Galatea's conception took place months earlier, when I came across a rack of red silk shirts in a second-hand clothing store downtown.

Red is not usually my colour: I'm more of a blue or green kind of person (I'd estimate a good 87% of my wardrobe could be classified under those two trusty headings). But there was something alive about those shirts, an immediacy and vitality that demanded my attention. As I examined the multitude of shades, the colour bled from everything else in the room, and it was as if I had suddenly been transported into a Chagall painting: just like his bouquets, the hues were not confined to the shirts themselves, but like scents could drift up into the surrounding air, creating a soft aura that grazed my fingers with its warmth.

I'm not sure how long I stood enthralled, but the enchantment came to an abrupt end when a feral and apparently myopic five-year-old ran headfirst into my ass, knocking me into the rack, which, mercifully, did not topple. Once I had recovered my balance and what remained of my dignity, I took out my wallet to see how many shirts I could immediately afford. It turned out that I had enough for seven of them (actually I only had enough for six—they were each three dollars and I only had two tens in my wallet—but the cashier kindly took pity on me and my poor arithmetic skills), so I selected a range of shades: terracotta, cerise, cardinal, crimson, alizarin, carmine, and burgundy. At home I laid them out on the sofa—four along the back, three on the seat—and for a long time just sat staring at them, hoping to discern some meaning or feel the cattle prod of inspiration. None was forthcoming, though, and ultimately I had to fold them and find a space for them in the warm-colours drawer of my dresser.

Following that night of seemingly vain contemplation, the wisp of something beguiling began floating through the back corridors of my mind, growing in persistence by the day, but refusing to take on the weight of an idea or image. When I closed my eyes this nascent form would tease me with its presence, allowing itself to be sensed without ever coming into focus. It remained veiled behind curtains of gossamer, and each curtain I managed to pull back only established the existence of more curtains. A week went by and I was becoming agitated by its undue modesty when without warning or the travails of labour, its gestation abruptly ended and out popped Galatea in her larval stage.

What induced this birth was the sad sight of a squirrel that had met its end under someone's unswerving tires. I normally try to avoid looking at such things—they engender a nauseatingly strong compulsion to wash my hands—but the colours spilling from the poor creature's torn belly gave sudden substance to the wisp that had been eluding me: entrails—that's what lay behind those curtains, that's what was drifting ghostlike through my thoughts—a shimmering pile of red entrails. I must have said entrails aloud and with some volume because the pair of women approaching me and my muse, the squirrel, gave little gasps of disgust and quickly moved to the opposite side of the street, looking at me as if I were poking the thing with a stick instead of standing a respectable five feet from it, with my hands clasped tightly behind my back. I admit I was likely displaying a madman's grin that even their reaction couldn't diminish. I felt like I had just found a Rosetta stone for the intractable hieroglyphics in my head. So where normally I would have had embarrassment descend on me like a five-hundred pound hawk, my glee was such that the hawk passed me over, and I was all the more elated as a result.

Any free time I had during the next few days was spent with a notebook on whose cover I had carefully inscribed Entrails in my best approximation of calligraphic script. On its vellum pages (I am rather particular about the notebooks I use) I sketched, brainstormed, theorized, speculated, doodled and entered anything that I thought relevant to the project I had suddenly found myself undertaking. (At the time it did not occur to me to ponder why I was suddenly so obsessed with red silk shirts and entrails. I was too preoccupied with the temporary freedom it afforded me from the anxious thoughts that normally paraded through my skull—distracting and paining me with their apocalyptic fanfare—to bring my motives into question. Good thing, too, for had I given the germ of suspicion the chance to sprout, it would undoubtedly have ensnared me in its vines and kept me from accomplishing as much as I did in that week of scribbling. I have an unnaturally strong inclination towards procrastination that it is generally triggered by precisely that kind of self-doubt.)

What eventually emerged from those pages was a rough plan for a patchwork coil of silken entrails, the seams of which would be sewn with long strands of dried grass. Dried grass would also serve as stuffing to give girth to the intestinal loops—I could hardly have allowed my entrails (for they were not yet her entrails) to appear deflated. Looking back I cannot say with certainty what gave rise to the grass idea. However, in the margin on the third page of my notebook there is a rather out-of-place drawing of the wishful trio from The Wizard of Oz, and I suspect the Scarecrow may have had something to do with it. All scarecrows are creatures of pretence: feigned humanity in a farmer's field, feigned harmlessness in B-grade horror movies, feigned Hippocratic integrity in the Batman series, feigned ignorance—or so I believe—on Dorothy's adventures. It would not be too much of a stretch to add feigned irrelevance in a discreet corner of my Entrails notebook. I of course cannot be sure that he served as the inspiration, but I think it's a fair assumption.

It was late summer when all of this took place, so there was long grass to be found if one looked in the right places. I began gathering a few stalks here and there—next to a phone booth in the A&P parking lot, hiding in a churchyard hedge, poking up through the cracked cement at around the side of my building—and hung my paltry sheaves to dry the way I had seen others dry roses (in retrospect there was no need for me to have hung them upside down, it's not as if there were delicate petals to be preserved). It was a slow process as so much of the grass I found was coated in a film of filth too thick to be acceptable, so it seemed like I would have to go out of the city if I wanted to collect enough grass before winter set in. Fate decided to intervene on my behalf, though, and plant in my head the unorthodox idea of taking a different route home from work. (At that point I had a part-time job in a specialty food store, stocking shelves and operating the cash register. I quit after a few months because a) the carrying of large boxes of lentils and fair-trade coffee beans was giving me unbearable lumbago, and b) the building was old enough that I feared its thick walls contained asbestos, which, with my suspected lung condition, I obviously did not need to be inhaling.) After about a week at a new job I have usually determined the optimal way to get there and back, choosing of course the shortest path which avoids any potential hazards (overly busy intersections, areas under construction, old trees that appear ready to fall, et cetera) and keeps me in the shade as much as possible, as I am quite fair and have a number of suspicious moles. In the first week of September, on a particularly beautiful evening—perfect windbreaker weather: slight breeze, the sky a deepening cerulean—I felt an urge for adventure and decided to go home by a circuitous and previously untravelled route, in spite of the risks involved in entering unknown residential areas. After a pleasant but not overly exciting journey, I ended up a few blocks south of my apartment building. I had been to that part of the street before, just not recently. As I strode home, I happened upon a construction site that didn't look any different than it had months earlier, as if the project had been put on hold or perhaps abandoned completely. A two-meter high chain-link fence surrounded a roughly gravelled area the size of three standard lots. There was nothing to indicate for what manner of building the site was intended; apart from two piles of gravel and a pile of what looked like clay, there was nothing behind the fence but weeds—weeds and long grass. The grass had sprouted up in patches where the layer of gravel was thin or negligible and also grew all along the length of the fence. I was so excited I believe I may have clapped my hands or clicked my heels: I certainly did something that drew strange looks from yet another pair of passers-by. (Am I really the only person whose thoughts occasionally exceed the mind's escape velocity and manifest themselves outwardly?).

At the time I had no way of knowing how much use I would ultimately make of that abandoned construction site, all I knew was that I had inadvertently discovered the mother lode of urban long grass. I hesitated, unsure whether I should take an armful home with me right away or come back when I was more properly attired for the task at hand: I was still in my work clothes and carrying a bag of groceries. It seemed fitting, however, that I should take a token of my discovery with me, so I walked along one side of the fence to select a few of the choicest strands—tall, straight, unblemished by disease or excessive grime—and found that choosing the best would be far from easy: it was all marvellously well suited to what I had in mind, or at least thought I had in mind (if such as distinction is possible). Again I likely let out a yip of glee. Almost at random I picked ten plants, taking care not to damage them in any way; I had not yet determined how I was going to sew with grass, so I wanted to keep my supply in the best shape possible. I had begun carrying around a small pair of scissors for just that reason; trying to pull it out by hand resulted in a) a damaged specimen, b) my hands being cut, or c) both, which was by far the most likely outcome. I snipped them off just above the root, low enough to keep all of the slender leaves, but not so low as to get any of the root structure and its entourage of top soil.

With my little bundle I began walking home, pleased with myself for what I chose to view as my resourcefulness (although that one nagging part of me of course found it necessary to point out that I was just damn lucky). I checked my sprightly step, though, as I came within a block of my building: ahead of me, dressed in his habitual bomber jacket and formless cap, I recognized the shuffling form of Jesse. Jesse was a well-meaning but rather slow reformed junky who lived on the first floor of my building and was inordinately proud of the needle scars on his arms and his hot-plate cuisine. He was utterly harmless, but I did my best to avoid getting into conversation with him—it was too much like having déjà vu.

I slowed almost to a standstill, hoping to give him enough time to get to his apartment before reaching the front door myself. It seemed as though my ploy had worked: he went through the door and shut it behind him without turning around, and I heard a second door open and close inside before I slipped my key into the lock. However, whoever it was that had closed a door, it had not been Jesse. He stood by the mailboxes, where he had been intently reading a Wal-Mart flyer. He was now gaping at me as if I had materialized out of nowhere clad in nothing more than a pair of Mickey Mouse ears and a hot pink Speedo. I smiled and made a poorly disguised dash for the stairs, but recognition dawned on him before I could get there.

"Hey, third-floor guy!" he exclaimed with a wide grin that emphasized his missing incisors. He had not yet figured out my name and I was disinclined to enlighten him.

I stopped and turned to face him, trying to smile pleasantly (I could not bring myself to be rude to him). "That's me, all right. How are you?"

"Good! Hey, you still living on the third floor?"

"That I am," I responded, nodding and looking around for a means of escape. Our conversations always followed the same pattern and this one had so far been like the twenty or so others we had already had.

"Why're you carrying that grass?" he asked. I was about to provide my usual response ("Yeah, actually, you did.") to his usual third question ("Hey, did I ever show you the scars on my arms?") when he reached out to touch my acquisition, jarring me from my search for excuses to leave. As I deftly moved the grass just out of his reach, I realized that we had entered new conversational territory, and I was unsure how best to traverse it.

"Um, this? Why am I carrying this? It's, uh—it's, um—it's for decoration! Yeah, I'm—making a wreath! For Christmas. I mean—for Thanksgiving." I beamed in relief, proud of my clever response (which, in hindsight, no longer seems quite so clever).

Jesse nodded, chewing this over. "Huh. A wreath. That's cool—I guess." He stared at me blankly for a moment before his eyes lit up again. "Hey, you know I got a hot plate in my room there. If you come over some time I'll cook some burgers and we can have some beers."

Ah, back on familiar ground. Attempting to place my voice in the no-man's-land between hesitancy and enthusiasm, I replied, "Wow. That sounds pretty good. Tell you what. Why don't I let you know when I've got some free time?" I actually had a great deal of free time—I was only working three days a week—but there was no way I was going to risk exposure to the salmonella-coated utensils and carcinogenic char that I imagined were part and parcel of dining on Jesse's hot-plate burgers. "I've been pretty busy recently with work and stuff."

"Yeah, sure, whatever, you know. I'm usually around, so, you know, whenever's fine." He pondered this for a moment, and then, glancing to the side, asked in a conspiratorial whisper, "Hey, did I ever show you my arms?"

I couldn't help but smile as I assured him that he had: his consistency was not without a certain ingenuous charm. We took leave of each other, and I checked my mailbox, which contained only a Wal-Mart flyer, and then began my slow trudge up the stairs.