The Book of the Wounded Healers (A Study in Perception) – Chapter 9 – “The Intersection of Loosely Wound Toilet Paper and Wadded Socks”

The Book of the Wounded Healers (A Study in Perception) – Chapter 9 – “The Intersection of Loosely Wound Toilet Paper and Wadded Socks”

 
Take the A train. But only to Fulton Street, at East New York and Broadway. A white haired, lightly tanned white man, his hair swept back and looking like it cost more to comb than this train is worth, sits wrapped in a black greatcoat. It serves a vivid contrast, like vanilla rum ice cream frosting on Devil’s food cake. It is hot and muggy down here. You can tell the one because everyone is sweating and the other because steam from the track cleaners hangs like an early morning mist around a fish trawler, flies and stench serving as gulls and fish tripe.

The man is barefoot. His toes are manicured. Despite the filth around them, his feet look healthy. The arches are strong. The great coat stops mid-calf and his muscle tone is obvious. He plays racquetball three times a week. He plays before daylight, before the courts are in demand, charging himself for the day before his competition arises. He plays to win. He opens his coat wide every time someone walks past. Underneath he is immaculately dressed. His pants are tailored and hemmed to stop just above the end of his coat. It is a great coat, and every time he spreads its black, devil’s food wings, people turn away in disgust, then out of the corner of their eye look back, and he catches them, and he laughs.

Cetaf is absorbed by the people and their reaction to the racquetball-playing man. Some are oblivious. Some show open interest until the game is played. Some show disgust before the serve then disappointment when racquetball-playing man fails to return their volley.

The train halts and the man rises. He stops in front of us, smiles, opens his coat. Cetaf, Beriah, and Jenreel smile and applaud, something they learned by watching others on the streets. The man bows and leaves.

Another man, a dirty man in a dirty gray rain coat, unwashed long black hair stringing over unwashed ruddy face, grease stained jeans and black hightop Keds, rises from the back of the train and walks over to us. He smells like he’s bathed in the track cleaners’ steam. “I’ve been watching you for the past three stops,” he says in a crisp academic accent. “You people are sick. You applaud that man’s depravity.”

He opens his rain coat and holds it open as if putting his hands in pants pockets. Only he has no pants pockets. He has no pants. No shirt except for a collar and highly cut tie. His jeans are only pantleg trunks running from just above the knee down, suspended by garters which cinch his thighs, pinching hairs as they band beside his groin. The tie’s color matches the stains on the pants. He begins to pace, a professor explaining the notes upon his board or some speaker removing the barrier of a lectern between himself and his audience. “I don’t know about the world you creatures come from, but that kind of behavior isn’t tolerated here.”

He turns from us and walks to the front of the car. There he stops and places a leg on a bench, resting his elbow on his knee and looking like some ancient mariner standing upon the bow searching some far distant shore, works his penis like a proud tiller as he rows for home.

Aye, laddies, there’s a man fer ya.

The masturbating sea captain fascinated Jenreel. “Our reality is as fragile as our lives. It can be destroyed, distorted, or enlarged by so many things.”

Cetaf follows his gaze. “Yes.” He closes his eyes and reads from a book he won’t touch for several days yet. “A spaceship landing, the death of someone by whom we gauge our own mortality, a shaman writhing and sweating over a twisted child to align the child’s colors into the four directions, a surgery performed without needles or knives,” he turns to me, “or three beings being, walking on unseen sand.”

Jenreel nods. “How we handle our changing realities determines who we are. If there is no room in us for these things, their existence destroys us.”

Certain things can catch you off guard at the strangest times. Consider a few sheets of toilet paper rolled less tightly than all the rest. You tug on the end, the toilet paper spins on its spindle, then all of a sudden the sheets spun less tightly jump up as if to get your attention. Usually it’s something like, “Hey, you missed one little turd down at the bottom of your crack.” Other times it’s “Well, I got some good news and some bad news. The good news is you’re about to receive the best blow job of your life. It will be performed by someone with no other sex partners and no history of venereal disease. It will change you in ways you can’t presently comprehend. The bad news is it will be performed by an as yet unprobed monster from Stephen King’s id.”

Other times, it’s a wad of sock bunched up in the toe of your shoe.


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