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Stereopathic on Hypem
Jul
29
When I was seventeen Mary and I went to the fairgrounds looking for the carnie bones Jimmy Ploutz told us about. As we walked she put her arm around my shoulder, and I put my hand in the back pocket of her jeans, in the manner of a drunk couple I once saw dancing to a Springsteen tribute band, who also taught me that drunkeness and love respect no censors.
We found the booth immediately, buried under a pile of greasy popcorn bags and carnie bones. Something (perhaps the sheer volume of carnie bones?), told me we should leave, but the booth drew me in. It was a Crippled Principal brand fortune-teller booth, popular at career-fairs in the mid-nineties. I put in a quarter. The thing creaked to life. The principal shook his head. “Mooooore fundiiing,” the recorded voice said. I put in another quarter. His decrepit head threatened to fall off with the shaking. “You can’t put a price-tag on your fuuuu-ture.” I looked at Mary. She shrugged. I put in two more quarters.
He stood, hobbled by his bad leg, a chart in one hand, pencil in the other. and asked his question: “What do you want to beeeeeee when you grow up?” I looked at Mary, who was struggling to find a spot of ground not occupied by carnie bones, in her graceful way. I answered in my head, “Exactly who I am right now.”
It made sense. I was young, without real concerns. I had Mary. She let me put my hand in her back pocket.
At first, I didn’t notice anything. I couldn’t have noticed anything. Nothing changed. However, when I got to my eighteenth birthday three months later, Jimmy and I were sitting around drinking Milwaukee’s Beast after my parents had gone to bed, and when we hit twelve AM, I found myself standing in front of the Crippled Principal again, Mary trying not to step on the bones of carnies past.
The rest of my life has only been those three months over and over again. I haven’t been able to figure out any way out of the loop. I have no idea if these notebooks make their way out of whatever reality I exist in, and into whatever might be the real world out there. If so, my parents must have found them and probably feel like my disappearance (I imagine that I just disappear in their world, but I have no confirmation) has been brought on by some hidden malady of my psyche, expressed just too late, in this hypergraphia. I don’t know how many times I’ve written this out.
Those three months are an unfortunate period of time. Mary breaks up with me six weeks after the fairgrounds, and there’s nothing I’ve been able to do to stop it. I’ve extended, by a single day, the time she stays with me by breaking up with her in the fairgrounds and then apologizing two days later, but the net loss of that one day isn’t worth it. The day after the fairground is the first day that she kisses me without reserve, holding nothing back.
I’ve endured over two-hundred iterations of these three months, which comes out to around 50 years, so I’m approaching seventy. Whatever my soul is, it’s approaching seventy. The fact of aging shows in me only slightly, but I feel it much deeper. Mary feels it too. The older I get, the earlier she begins to pull away from me.
My existence has been mostly torturous, I won’t deny it. Every three months the day that Mary tells me it’s over rolls around. She never explains. I think she’s just the kind of person who leaves. But she comes back after my birthday, and I’m always so happy to see her.
I know death is approaching, which is a merciful fact. The irony is that I’m not at all who I was. Even within this curse, that’s unavoidable. But, however I change, even when I’m depressed after she dumps me again, I still look forward to that moment when she kisses me without regard for anything else.
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MP3: Atlas Sound ft. Noah Lennox - “Walkabout”
- Sven Gull claims he found this passage in the basement of his new house, in one book from a pile of notebooks he says number well into the hundreds. He lives outside of Philadelphia, PA with his wife Alma.
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2 Responses to “Song in Plaster: Atlas Sound ft. Noah Lennox, “Walkabout””
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Nicely done, Sven. I look forward to seeing you again at this year’s Stereopathic Writers’ Convention.
oooh, there’s a writer’s convention?