He was the kind of guy who borrowed things with no intention of giving them back. See that book on the top of a pile of other books? The minute each one entered his house and a single dead skin cell of his fell, like a graceful autumn leaf, on the shiny paperback cover, the VAULT was sealed. This tupperware, this hat, that sweatshirt, the external hard drive, that bootleg recording of Tom Waits, the magazine with that hard-to-find Stiv Bators interview; that lamp with the lampshade covered in plastic roses—ALL HIS, eternally. He saw it like this: Once you breathe on it, there is no giving back! Giving back was for gutless apologists, the sort who would give back their used toilet paper, spit up their meals, scrape the tar off their tongues if they thought it would impress whoever was boss of the room. Jesus, he thought, if these idiots really cared about their shit, they should have never let it out of their sight! Every object in his life was like a phantom limb; a body part that increased his mass and psychic well-being. The notion of returning anything would be as unusual as asking him to remove his earlobe, or pinky finger. On certain days, he extended the size of his body to include entire record stores, the contents of a city bus, racks of men’s jeans, and every pair of paratrooper boots in the army-navy surplus bin. His body swallowed bicycles, or at least their seats, on a daily basis. His body was omnivorous for laptops, hand-woven Tibetan throw rugs, goose-feather pillows, and peppermint-flavored toothpicks. He removed juniper branches from the altars of witch-friends. He claimed scented oils and Tom Ford cologne from party-house boudoirs, because he knew, with what appeared to be a divinely-inspired prescience, that HE was the only one equipped with the psychological chops to appreciate the harmony of each resin, bark, and seed pod painstakingly crushed and distilled by meek brown hands in sweatshop perfumeries. He was the refrigerator-reaper; the pied-piper of hubcaps, wallets, socks. He felt like an angel sent to this planet on some days, an angel with an encyclopedic vocation: It was his duty to devour and encode the entirety of human existence in his DNA. Simply put, no one else was up for the job.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 02:52:53 +0000
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