Misarine
I became like Ellie Windows and visited Flint at least once a week, sometimes more. She came for the extra-marital sex, but I came because at that point in my life everything seemed pointless like Zeno’s Paradox, a hare chasing a tortoise it would never catch.
I didn’t know why either. We were in college studying literature and crap but really, what did Beowulf have to do with what was going in the world? Who cared about Grendel and Grendel's mother? Or Hamlet and his uncle? It was all Anglo-Saxon make-believe brewed in the fog and mist of ancient forests. Maybe I shoulda quit school and worked in the factory full time. I thought about that. Join the union, get a spot on the assembly line and make car batteries for the rest of my life. At least I'd know for sure what I'd be doing. That prospect made me just as gloomy as having to write a paper on Hamlet. I came to see Flint because I was global, that’s what the therapist, this beautiful South African lady with long dark hair and a sexy accent, Dr. Haley Wells called it. All or nothing.
“Sounds like you need some Misarine,” Flint advised.
Misarine was a drug in “The Void,” a novel he was writing.
“I'll take a Tequila instead.”
He went to the cupboard and poured me a tumbler of Tequila minus the sunrise and Misarine.
“How’s the novel going?” I asked.
“I work on it every night. Sometimes I’m drunk and stoned and don’t remember what I write. It’s free form - similar to "On the Road" by Kerouac,” Flint said. "Except it's about plumbing."
I knew all about Kerouac. I knew all about car batteries. Dry cell. Wet cell. Not much about plumbing, except that it was helpful to be short with apelike arms and be able to get into small spaces. I had never taken a class on plumbing, but I had taken a class on Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. I had gone to a poetry reading by Ginsberg and he recited his poems while he beat on a little drum like a shaman except that he was Jewish and had written “Howl” which is a great word and “Kaddish.” Someone shook a tambourine.
“After I finish “The Void,” I want to lay up in the Florida Keys and lead the life of a novelist. Write more novels. Smoke good reefer. Maybe do some smuggling. That’s what I want,” Flint said. “And to fuck Ellie. She says she’ll leave her husband for me.”
At least he had some goals, some blueprint of what his life and future might be. I had too many which meant I had none. Blank. Void. My thoughts at times were a tower of Babel that crumbled to rocks that Sisyphus pushed up a mountain ruled by Zeno’s Paradox. I didn't know what I wanted even after talking with Flint. But at least he listened and shared his tequila and weed.
~
I did go to a photography exhibit he had seen with Ellie before they had, no doubt, returned to his apartment where they lashed each other to themselves to ride out a storm of passion.
The exhibit was in the Student Services Building. Outside the building, a white satellite dish tipped on its side collected strips of electronic confetti floating by or bouncing off clouds. A bearded guy holding a Bible outside the entrance tried to impress passersby with his quoting prowess from chapters and verses like the latitude and longitude of a favorite fishing hole. John 3:16. Psalms 13:1. The Moonies had staked out the University Center. A Scientologist with big knockers hustled students in front of the library. They were all looking for people like me in search of something that would add meaning to their lives. I listened for a few minutes but when the bearded guy propositioned some chick in third person I left.
"Would the young lady like to come back to my dormitory room?"
At the photography exhibit, a student with frizzy, auburn hair huddled over a desk. She appeared to be sleeping or studying but a clicker sounded like the ones used by nuns in Catholic schools when you’re supposed to kneel or heel.
On the beige walls were grainy, gray photos. Young men and women with somber, bleak faces. I couldn't figure out why Flint wanted me to see this garbage. Maybe he thought I should have been up there too, brooding about existence, wondering what it was all about. It was anything but cheerful. Maybe it was a turn-on for Ellie. The cadaverous impressions hiked her already heightened sexual appetite for Flint and her husband, Frank. Maybe others that I didn’t know about. Maybe when Flint tired of her, he would pass her on to me. The faces in the photos, a medieval reminder, of the transitory nature of all things, of poor Yorick in the graveyard.
Next to those pictures hung black and white nudist camp photos of middle-aged men and women. Nothing you’d want to whack off to either like Flint who, despite Ellie’s frequent visits, always had a handy roll of toilet paper nearby, next to his copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, to tear off a few twists. The stares reminded me of World War II concentration camp photos I had seen in high school history class before they stacked the bones and pushed them into mass graves, only the people in these photos had flesh, but the same blank, empty stares. It was the Emptiness again. The Void that Flint was always talking about, what he was writing his novel about. That's why he wanted me to see it, I guess. It was a dose of Misarine, the drug that imitates reality. Victor the plumber from Baltimore was addicted to it - and fixing pipes.
“These people are victims of anxiety and ennui. Existential displacement. They're disconnected from their roots," a guy who sounded like a docent said to his girlfriend.
I strolled to a corner of the gallery and saw this chick I used to talk to during breaks in a modern lit class. It dawned on me that I should have asked her out back then, but I never did. I was still hung up on Zenobia, the last in a long string of beautiful abstractions that I could never have no matter how hard I tried.
She was wearing blue jeans and stood to one side, her hands clasped behind her as she contemplated the sad pictures. Turquoise-beaded earrings sparkled against her long, dark-brown hair. She was sexy and beautiful - especially in this village of the forlorn. I had forgotten her name.
“We took that modern lit class together,” I said.
I re-introduced myself. Billy Spinnaker. Anti-hero of my own life. I left off the second part. Her name was Sharon Levinson she reminded me.
“I studied for the class, but, being a women’s study major, I was never interested, especially with that asshole in the back of the class always talking louder than the professor,” she said.
The asshole she was talking about was Flint who took the same class. I looked over her shoulder at more pictures.
“A friend of mine who’s writing a novel suggested this to me. I would have never come here on my own,” but secretly I was glad that I had met up with her in this graveyard of the living.
“This is my second time. The pictures are thought provoking into realities not normally accepted. Wait till you see the other side of the room," she said.
She spoke with precision and inflection in her voice like she was talking to a child or a pet. I suppose I fit one of those categories because I hadn’t gone type A caveman when I first met her in modern lit.
“What’s over there?”
“You’ll see. I don’t want to spoil it for you. It's unreal.”
We walked to the other side of the display, peering at the odd, pitiful pictures of people captured in murky twilight. I glanced at her hands in the back pockets of her jeans grabbing her own ass like women do so comfortably. This was the oddest place to get a hard-on at, but that’s what happened to my poor Yorick.
“I wanted to ask you out when we took that class,” I said when we got to the other side of the exhibition.
She looked at me like I was a stray dog with sad, pleading eyes and the next step was the needle. Euthanasia.
“We’ve all been hurt, one way or the other. Look at the people in these pictures. They're all broken toys with jagged edges. What are your jagged edges from?" Sharon asked.
I thought about it for a moment. I was still hung up on Zenobia, but I didn't have a lot to complain about except working part time in a battery factory turning lead into gold – with the help of sulfuric acid. I hadn’t been through Great Depression or World War II like my parents. I missed Vietnam because I had a high draft number. There was the Void though. This unexplainable nonverbal emptiness I carried around with me. Maybe I was part of Flint’s novel and didn’t even know it. My beautiful South African therapist worried when I talked like that. I remembered what I had just heard when I walked into the exhibit.
"My jagged edges are from anxiety and ennui."
Sharon nodded as if I had said magic words like spaghetti and meatballs that opened a secret passageway into her world. We turned and walked hand in hand to the next sequence of party scenes with old men and women with puffy lips and swollen necks. The people in the pictures wore party glasses topped with shiny, jeweled butterflies and other insects that Frank Windows, Ellie's husband, might find appealing for one of his prized insect paintings inspired by purple mushrooms from a nearby pasture. Yes, it was a party scene, but not the tribal parties with bonfires that Frank and Ellie hosted. These people radiated more emptiness, more void, and more displacement than I cared to look at. It made sense to me finally. That's why Flint had recommended this trip to entropy isles. A few tequilas hadn’t worked. One needed to come face to face with the worm in the bottle.
"I can’t tell whether they’re male or female," I said.
I looked to see if any of them were holding cigarettes: men one way with the thumb and index fingers, women with the index and middle fingers, but that didn't help. None were smoking though the pictures were yellowed, jaundiced like they'd been in a smoker’s house for years.
“Their faces are melted like wax, like Icarus when he flew too close to the sun.”
“There are more transvestites over on that wall,” Sharon pointed out.
We toured the rest of the gallery viewing pictures of men in evening dresses and silk gloves. There were other pictures of giants, dwarfs, and faces of various, undetermined sexes. I remembered from the modern lit class that in "Slaughterhouse-Five," there were eight sexes on the planet Tralmalfadore. That's about what there was in this exhibition.
“It’s like a highway accident that you can't stop looking at. It's a goddam freak show."
Provocative was the word Sharon used, enunciating every syllable.
After the last picture we walked toward the glass doors at the gallery entrance. On the wall was a black and white plastic sign that said:
DIANE ARBUS: ABOUT THE ARTIST
I read her biographical sketch that said she committed suicide. Duh. I was shocked but not surprised.
We walked out of the gallery past the student with the clicker who remained slumped in her chair like she was part of the exhibit. The garden on the other side of the glass doors had steps leading to the lower tier. Bushes sculpted into rectangular solids separated the levels. We sat on a concrete bench in the lowest tier.
She briefly explained women’s studies, one of the newest majors offered, and the patriarchal system that we lived under, and how women had been screwed out of everything, literally and figuratively. I tried to make up for it all.
“I’m in awe of women. It's hard to explain. I'm a women's studies major too,” I proclaimed which sounded stupid and patriarchal after I said it. It was something Victor, the plumber, might say at someone’s house, just trying to make conversation. Maybe I was a child or a pet. Maybe I was Victor, a transvestite, a plumber. Maybe I had had too many tequilas without sunrise.
It got worse.
"Something happens when I see a beautiful woman like you."
My face must have gone blank and expressionless like the satellite dish on the other side of the wall collecting moon bounce from great distances.
I looked away, then back at Sharon and her dazzling turquoise earrings. I looked away again, but I thought I better say something quickly, or I was going to strike out like the bearded, third-person soothsayer.
”You doing anything Friday night? We can do something if you want to?”
She closed her hazel eyes for a moment and thought about it.
“My car is getting fixed Friday. There’s something always wrong with it. The check from my father comes on Thursday. I should have enough left over after the rent, and the car repairs are paid,” she said.
“What are you talking about? I can pay,” I said.
Working at the battery factory with the stench of sulfuric acid in the air ruined my clothes, tiny lesions appearing out of nowhere, turning me to a leper, but gave me plenty of spending money for tuition and weed. Of course, I hated the job. Especially since I was part of the patriarchal system she railed about.
“How about Saturday night?” she asked. “There are some good movies on campus. ’A Clockwork Orange’ and Wilhelm Reich and ‘Mystery of the Organism,’” she said.
Sharon took out a piece of paper from her knapsack and drew a map to her house.
"Gotta go to class. We're discussing Hecate today."
I watched her ascend the steps. Flint could have been writing this as I watched. Maybe he was. Nature abhorred a vacuum. The photography exhibit was excellent. Not the photos, not Diane Arbus and her suicide, not the anxiety and ennui she captured, not the transvestites and the dwarfs, not the emptiness, but Sharon Levinson and the way she filled out her jeans. Billy Spinnaker felt like Victor the plumber after a hit of Misarine. For once the emptiness was gone.
Bio: Tom Fillion is a graduate of the University of South Florida. He teaches mathematics and coaches golf and tennis at a Tampa public high school. His short stories have appeared in many online publications. For a complete list please visit: http://dreammechanic.blogspot.com/ His story Chrysalis was nominated for the Million Writers Award at Storysouth.