ham fisted theatrics

On my way to the pharmacy on Wednesday, a sushi chef is sitting in front of the not-very-good sushi restaurant near us. Three Caucasian teenage girls are sitting around him. He is inspecting one of their hands with a flashlight. This happened on Wednesday, not Thursday, but it was so strange that I remembered it for two days, and I thought it was worth mentioning.

We shipped all of our stuff here from New York and peoples’ things have been arriving in waves. On Thursday morning Dom and I help Dan bring a bunch of boxes full of Styrofoam packing peanuts downstairs to the garage, where we will load them into Dan’s car, and Dan will then drive around and find a dumpster. How nice it would be if there was a dumpster downstairs, everyone says. When we get all the boxes to the car we realize they won’t all fit. There are some blue recycling bins near the entrance to the parking garage, so we decide to dump the packing peanuts in there, break the boxes down, and then pack the boxes in the car.

I am dragging the first of the boxes over to the recycling bins when it becomes clear I’m leaving a trail of packing peanuts. Then I do a really poor job of pouring the peanuts into the bin and more peanuts fall to the concrete floor of the garage. The first box’s worth fills the bin to the brim so we have to drag the rest around the corner, where there are additional blue recycling bins. In this dragging and pouring process, more peanuts are spilled. The floor is at this point covered in little white peanuts. Our building is full of rich old people who hate us. We just turned the place they park their Bentleys into not-very-good art. Dan goes inside to grab his phone and encounters the building manager, the lady whose job it has been to communicate to us that everyone in the building hates us. She is on her way down to the garage. Dan warns her about what we’ve done and promises we’ll clean it up.

To make good on that promise we spend the next twenty minutes or so bent over, chasing individual packing peanuts around the garage. I am a man who has taken a week-long vow of silence, and I am picking up tiny little white things one by one, and I will never be done. At this point I’m pretty sure my life is not so much my life as it is a story a Zen master in a robe is telling his students on a misty mountaintop somewhere.

Dan is bringing the last of the boxes around the corner to empty them out when a maintenance guy shouts at him: “Bro, there’s a dumpster.” Dan and Dom end up taking the emptied boxes to the dumpster and no one ever has to drive around.

Picking up the last of the peanuts, I get to watch some movers in the alley drop something enormous and wooden out of the back of a moving truck, causing the lady who is overseeing their work to go “WHOA WHOA WHOA!” It’s nice to feel like only the second least competent people in the belly of our building.

Later at the pharmacy I am waiting out the tail end of a two-day doctor/pharmacist back-and-forth. A mom has just dropped off her prescription and is walking away from the counter. Her son, a toddler with long blonde hair, follows her, but not before purposefully smacking a hanging rack of lotion bottles, sending them swinging back and forth. Without really turning around or stopping, the mom says, “Please don’t do that, honey, that’s not nice.” Another boy, someone else’s around the same age, runs up and stops the lotion bottles from swinging, to prove his moral superiority or something.

Walking back from the pharmacy, two kids stopped at a stoplight are playing “Thriller.” We’ve all just found out Michael Jackson is dead. I nod at them emphatically. The guy in the driver’s seat is dancing, wearing sunglasses. The girl in the passenger seat smiles at me. Music is unstoppable. If you told me we were a by-product of music instead of the other way around, that we only existed to make music’s life more pleasant, that would make me very happy.

I’ve always had a fake theory about Michael Jackson, and here it is. It’s not weird that he turned out so weird. It is written into the human genome that any one of us has the potential to make “Off The Wall” and “Thriller” and “Bad,” but once we do it, we will turn into a wizened pedophile elf. It is the sacrifice. The price to be paid. And you might reasonably ask, “Does it have to be those EXACT albums, or could it be three works of art that are equally brilliant?” And I would respond that it could be that it’s just those three albums exactly, and that’s why no other brilliant artist has had that exact transformation except for him. Or it could be that it’s three equally brilliant works, and no three other things have ever been that good.

At dinner, a girl at the table next to us tells her friend the story of when she fell asleep studying Marxist theory and her boyfriend woke her up and she was mumbling something about Marxist theory in her sleep. The way and the amount of times she says the phrase “Marxist theory” tells you that she gets a big kick out of the fact that she studied Marxist theory.

I don’t say anything all day, but once at dinner I slip up and grunt “Yeah” to clarify whose entrée is whose to a very confused food-runner. Dan and Donald have told the waitress about my deal, and at first, she doesn’t believe them, but then when she does believe them, she is very sweet and sympathetic and this is the source of no end of thumbs-ups from Dan and Donald’s side of the table after she walks away.

I am having lots of fun with text-to-speech generators on my laptop and an iPhone app that does basically the same thing. As far as actual mouth-utilizing communication, I’m pretty much limited to tongue clicks and whistles. So I can either be ashamed of you, or communicate that you have the nicest set of gams to walk by my construction site all morning. That’s about it. Not being able to say little incidental “Hi’s” and “Thank yous” to people throughout the day is the hardest part. Behind closed doors I stick close to my speech-generating laptop, and I wear chunky sunglasses to enhance the robot effect. Anything worth doing is worth doing well.