The Big Question

I'd been walking a long ways. It was cold out and I was weary, but I was finally underground again, and was looking forward to sitting down on a bench for a spell. As I approached the unoccupied wooden bench, however, I couldn't help but notice that most of the seats were covered with newspapers, sheets of looseleaf, a red notebook and a haggard-looking orange. Nobody else was around, nobody was making any obvious claim to this bounty, but I still didn't touch it. It seemed obvious that it all belonged to someone, a person who had arranged it very carefully across the seats, so I moved down to the far end of the bench, to the only spot that remained open, and sat down. It was nice. I rubbed my numb hands together, trying to get the blood flowing again, waiting for the chattering of my teeth to stop (my teeth really do chatter uncontrollably when I get chilly. You get frostbitten too many times as a youngster and these things happen).

I wasn't there too long before I noticed an old man shuffling my way. Stocking cap, battered long coat, scarf. He looked like an old queen I used to know named Aberdeen, who had hung out at the bookstore I worked at in Philly. This wasn't Aberdeen, though. Aberdeen was what you'd call roly-poly. This guy was much taller. Too bad?Aberdeen was a nice guy. Gave me a sweater once. I haven't seen him in more than 10 years?and my guess is that he's probably dead.

Of course that's my guess for most everything.

It was immediately obvious, for some reason, that everything on the bench belonged to him. Yards away, you could just tell. And he walked with the casual air of someone who knew he didn't have to worry about his papers and his orange?he knew damn well they'd be there, exactly where he'd left them, whenever he got back from wherever it was that he went.

I squinted at his approach, then looked back toward the floor. I heard the rustle as he sat down on top of the papers. He wriggled around a bit, made himself comfortable, then sat quietly. A few minutes later, as we sat there, four seats apart, he spoke.

"Where you from?" he asked.

I looked up and squinted at him again, not sure whether he was talking to me or not. He was looking straight ahead.

"Where you from?" he repeated, after I gave him no answer.

This was always a tricky question for me, no matter how simple it might seem on the surface. I never know how to answer it. Did he mean what part of the city did I live in? Where was I born? Where did I grow up? And how do I figure in the fact that the town I was born in doesn't exist anymore, and that the town I grew up in hardly existed in the first place?

"Eh?!" he pressed.

In a panic?albeit a mild one, all those possibilities swirling about, I finally answered, "I guess I don't know, really."

That seemed to satisfy him, and we both fell into silence again.

Some time later, the two of us still sitting there, he asked another question.

"Wha'd you need?"

Again, I was stumped. This time, though, I was stumped because I wasn't sure exactly what his question was?was it, "What did you need?" or "What do you need?" Two very different questions. Kind of a moot point, I guess, since again I had no idea how to answer either one.

"Wha'd you need?" he repeated.

A drink? A smoke? A warmer coat? Maybe a pair of gloves? Some general purpose? Some driving force? The knowledge I used to have? What the hell?

Eh?!" he barked again.

"Honestly, sir, I just don't know," I told him.

He seemed to accept that answer too, and returned to his own reverie. Soon, he picked up one of the sheets of looseleaf paper from the seat next to him, stood, crossed in front of me, and dropped it into the trash can. He returned to his seat, picked up another sheet of paper and walked it to the trash can. He did this five more times, leaving the orange and the newspaper and the notebook untouched. Then he sat down again.

That was my cue to keep moving. Well, it wasn't exactly a "cue"?it was just time for me to move on. As I was walking away, I heard his voice behind me.

"Where you from?" he asked no one at all. It was like a lost Beckett routine.

It had been a week full of similarly mild public conflicts that I was sort of a part of, but not really, feeding into the idea I'd been harboring lately?that I'm slowly fading into nothingness. First the mind, then the body.

Went into the neighborhood barbershop for my annual haircut. It was early on Saturday morning, and I was the only customer in the place when I walked in. One customer against four Italian barbers, who also, it turns out, happened to be brothers.

"Whatcha want done?" the one who'd be cutting my hair asked as he strapped me into the chair.

"Oh, take about four inches off, maybe," I told him.

"Yeah, more like four feet," one of his brothers muttered behind me.

As my barber got started, the four of them fell back into discussing Sinatra minutiae, which they've done every time I've been in there. That was cool. Once I even added something, and everyone seemed happy. Everybody likes talking about Sinatra. At least in that neighborhood they do.

But then one of the brothers, who was reading bits of that morning's Post aloud, came across an article about?as he was known then?"Cuban Boy" (this was before he was simply "Elian," or "The New Moses").

"A boy should be with his father," one of them commented.

"In a place like Cuba?" another countered, "Why, so he could grow up on a work farm?"

Oh, that was it. Soon, all four were at it, making loud pronouncements about Cuban Boy, then changing their minds. He should stay here and have a good life. He should go to Cuba and be with his father. No, he?

The man who was cutting my hair stopped working completely, left me sitting there, half-shorn, while he went to the rear of the shop to make a few points of his own.

Again, I was tempted to add a little something to the discussion myself. But realizing that I would be alone in my opinion, strapped in a chair wearing a big apron, pitted against four grown and increasingly angry men wielding scissors and straight razors, I decided to keep my big yap shut. What should've been a 15-minute haircut took close to an hour. By the time I left, they had calmed down some and returned to their seats after one of the brothers brought up Elvis.

Over the next few days, I saw bums screaming at each other, doctors screaming at patients and adult children screaming at their parents on Midtown sidewalks. And through it all, I was able to avoid any major conflicts of my own, strolling silently and invisibly among them...

Until I tried to do my laundry.

I get a little obsessive about my laundry. Not the clothes themselves, or even the cleaning of the clothes themselves?just the process involved, the "doing laundry." The laundromat next door is an okay place. The people who run it speak little English, but they're always pleasant. But so many people in the neighborhood do their laundry on weekend mornings?that just makes sense?that if I'm not waiting outside before the front gate goes up at 7 a.m. sharp, I forget about the whole idea until the next weekend.

I was on time this week, first one in when the door opened. I dragged my bag to the back, closely trailed by the laundromat's two cats. Good cats, they are, who take turns sitting in my lap, kneading the meat of my arms while I wait for various wash cycles to pass.

The younger of the two had taken her place while my clothes were in the dryer. Stomping across me this way, then that. We were both, it seemed, content with the arrangement.

During one pass, however, she stopped, leaned up, and began sniffing at my face. This didn't seem peculiar, but without my noticing, she had very slowly opened her mouth, placed her upper fangs on my upper lip, and her lower fangs on my lower lip. Then she bit down hard.

"Ermmmmmp!" I said (or something close to that), but nobody else in the by-now crowded laundromat noticed my predicament or my flapping arms.

There didn't seem to be anything vicious in the attack (that would come a few minutes later, when the same cat decided to go after my newly cut hair), and I was eventually able to pry her little jaws open and remove her teeth from my flesh. It was unsuspected, unprovoked and odd. I moved the cat to the seat next to me, and kept a careful eye on her. There wasn't any blood drawn and the cat wasn't rabid, but I still had no idea why she'd sunk her fangs into my mouth in the first place.

It was like when I was a kid, and would do the same sort of thing to myself with the staple remover in my dad's office. Hell, the things were designed to look like snakes or monsters or something with big fangs?of course you're going to hang them off your lips! (I was talking with Morgan about this after the incident with the cat, and we agreed that hanging staple removers off your lips was, in fact, their second stated purpose). I guess I did a lot of things like that when I was young. My old "shooting the industrial staple gun into my head" routine cost me more than one babysitting job.

But anyway.

As I held the demons at bay and waited for my clothes to dry, I passed the time thinking about all the questions of late I hadn't been able to answer, and why I hadn't been able to answer them. And, as is becoming more and more common lately, I wasn't able to figure out why that is.