Hes walking through this old home certainly haunted and seeded with more ghosts every day. It used to be a boarding house for orphans or thats what everyone believes and thats all that really matters is what everyone believes about it. Up a two twist staircase he crests and at the end of a long and broad hallway is the bathroom. The doors ajar and his big father is sitting there on the toilet its lid closed. He has some tattered briefs on but thats it and hes hunched over his leg looking at it awful close. Dad he says. Hey come here he replies. He pads over and with each step the picture makes more and less sense. Looking at his leg. Picking at his leg. Needle tip tweezers dipped in his leg. Blood in a fine long strand webbing down his thigh and calf. Eyes becoming more normal every day. Not less mad not less racing frantic hollow but more expected. More standard. More common. Normal. Dad whatre you doing. Look at this. Hes drawn tissue out of himself. It seems tacky it is yellow flesh colored his eyes are focused for near sight he holds the tips of the wet tool between their eyes. You think this is a tumor. Is he looking at the bloody gob or at the dad holding it. I dont know. The big man goes back down to his leg and his hyper focus. Dad doesnt that hurt. Dad laughs and at the same time responds in one of those spontaneous explosions of breath.
Yeah. A lot.
Around the same time he had been seeing an exotic dancer half is age and half as crazy and twice as generous and he wasnt really very good to her not that he could be very good to anybody like that the way hed stay up for days with pills and slow down his experience of things and maybe chill the burning inside him by drinking ice cold bottles of vodka from the freezer but nonetheless the younger woman would come around the house and his life. She would come in different luxury automobiles from whatever secret life she had and wade through the squalor and be kind to him and his children and help with the dishes and make food sometimes and generally spread a strange warmth until one day she wasnt there. The big man was deep in it and his son inquired something to the effect of where had the young lady gone to. He is digging through his piles of trash and thats really not hyperbole he got to be this kind of hoarder and couldnt stop labeling things in scrawls of permanent felt tipped ink and moving things around all the tvs and furniture on wheels and carts and electricity stolen from a construction site next door wired along the walls a network of painters taped extension cords and power strips and at this point it was long unknown where the madness and chemical intoxicants started or left off and all of him was a crumbling old temple. I mean he is deep in it. He kind of shook his head in that fuggin I dono way to answer the question of his paramours whereabouts and just said maaaaaan. The beat between that and the next words yawns like a chasm and grows in memory every day forward a bit more massive every day longer from when it was said.
Maaaaaan. Women just fall in love with me man.
