Play
Characters: Me, them
Setting: City streets, rush hour, rain
Look at all these fabulous glamorous V-I-People. I wonder what they all think, where do they stink? How do they make money, how do they make love, how do they make hate? What is the soundtrack to of their fate?
I wish I could un-mute their thoughts and hear their inner-voices all at once. Wish granted. Thought-catching takes practice, and especially a strong stomach.
It’s still early morning. How early? I can’t really tell. I haven’t worn a watch since my back-alley scuffle with Rupert the blind raccoon. But that’s a different story. I can tell it’s early because the skies are stubbornly clinging to a dark hue of blue, because the few people walking past me are puffy around the eyes and their lips are angled downwards, and because hidden birds won't stop chirplaining.
Grumpy overgrown commuting babies. Waaah! I don’t want to go to work! Waaahh! Where’s my coffee? Waahhh! I forgot to feed my walrus!
C’mon that’s a legitimate concern. You might not think it is at first, because you’re lazy. Think about it. There are roughly 80,000 walruses in captivity around the world. I’m sure that out of the thousands of people lucky enough to have a pet walrus, a select few, at some point in their lives, have forgotten to feed them before going to work.
If you think hard enough, any situation is plausible and most likely has or will happen sooner or later.
The streets are spewing heavy loads of grumpy commuters. Executives, interns, killers, secretaries, messengers, mid-level managers, rapists, virgins, foreigners, Canadians, bank-tellers, accountants, receptionists, strippers, clerks. All of them diligently obeying their streetlight overlords. Stop Mr. Chief Financial Officer. He stops. Go one-legged stripper-of-the week. She goes.
What is she thinking? Yeah that one. The one with lavish brown down to her shoulders. What are her thoughts? Let me pause for a second, let me see her face, her eyes, let me see her thoughts. This takes time and practice. But I’ll get it right, I have tons of practice, and a very strong stomach.
She’s wearing checkered designer rain-boots. She has terribly bad skin, but a pretty enough face. She wears tight thigh turquoise tights and a silver suede sweater jacket over a white wrinkled flannel t-shirt. She looks like an intergalactic piñata. I instantly fall in love with her. Then it’s gone. She is holding her cell phone with her three middle fingers, her thumb pointing to the sky, and her pinky extended outwards. Like a kid mimicking an adult talking to his hand-phone, like 18th century French royalty drinking tea.
Will the Tech Revolution that is to come guillotine people’s hands off?
She has just the right amount of make-up. No make-up would otherwise show her eyes hiding behind a layer of 21st century facial fat. She’s almost cute. she doesn't know how incredibly succulent she looks!
But what is she thinking about? Don’t be shy. Tell me all about it.
Yes. I see it clearly. She’s thinking, nay, she’s composing a song that will make all plastic pink-flamingos take flight. She is doing this while walking, while talking, while phoning, while fatting. Being fat is now a verb: fatting. He fats, I fat, we fat, I fatted. Her flamingo song is at once devastatingly beautiful and overwhelmingly horrible. She is thinking about how happy the song will make the plastic birds, and how they’ll show their gratitude with every stroke of their plastic wings. She’ll make the song louder, and louder, and louder until they fly into outer space. That is exactly what this human-piñata is thinking about on her way to work. Outer-space plastic flamingos.
Damn I’m good.
A few feet away from flamingo-chubby chub-chick is another masterpiece of modern society. A homeless man lighting a wet cigarette. He sits arrogantly on the steps of what seems to be a reputable office building; his legs sprawled out in front of him. His head is bobbing to unknown rhythms in the wind. He doesn’t care, realize, or understand that his smelly presence and ragged disposition is unwelcome in this metropolitan context. Yet he fits-in all too well; no one seems to notice. They rush in and out of a nameless office building upon which steps an invisible bum has decided to make his breakfast table.
This man has a story and I plan to draw it out of him. With my eyes. He has thoughts, dreams, hates, fears, anguishes; he shits, pees, breathes, and stinks like the rest of us. I am, naturally, forced to imagine his entire existence in but a few moments. He doesn’t notice the string of half spit / half puke that is clinging to his shaggy unkempt beard, he's just trying to light his breakfast cigarette. So what is he thinking at this precise moment? What is he listening to inside that frail musical human mind of his? Teenage dreams gone awry, old radio broadcasts, Martian space signals, the humming of pink birds' wings against solar winds? Radio ga-ga, goo-goo? Bla-bla? What’s new?
He is thinking about a kitten. Yes a kitten. When he was 7 or 8 years old he ran into a group of boys on the tracks. He knew all to well to stay away from them, but something stopped him from walking away this time. He heard the cries of a small animal that where coming from a yellow-orange-gold tabby with heterochromia. The group of bullies was enjoying the animal’s suffering, poking at it with sticks and stones and insecurities from broken homes. Enough was enough, he would make things right.
Nuclear boom! The future founders of PETA never saw it coming. He lunged at them with the fury of a thousand tigers: scratching, poking, tearing, biting, and hacking at the shapeless, faceless, globs of disgusting murderous human children. When he was done with them he was covered in blood, his and theirs. He held a handful of hair in one hand and the dignity of universal justice restored in the other.
He never saw his parents, the boys, the tracks, or the kitten again.
That is what the homeless man on the steps of that building was thinking about for sure. No doubt in my mind, or I am a Soviet submarine Captain.
I can see 15 other commuters at the moment. Of these, I immediately generate imaginary life-blurbs for six. I was creating a seventh, a prescription-drug peddling nurse that had once had a promising career as an Opera singer in Plano, Texas, until she suffered an…. And that’s where I lost track of her life. She disappeared forever and I would never see or invent her life’s story again. What a waste, real or imaginary. The other seven would have to wait their turn.
When I get these episodes of heightened awareness, where all makes perfect sense and no sense at all, when my head and thoughts spin in abrupt tetrahedral gut-clenching spurts, I thank the heavens that I’m alive and that zee Germans never made it to Mexico. I would hate to have all these thoughts in German. No offense to das Bundesrepublik Deutschland, but the sound of the German language makes me think of beet stew dipped in horseradish and wasabe.
Pause!
Play!
Play the funkiest most vicious massively addicting funk-a-dellic song you can think of.
You got it? Think KC and the Sunshine Band meets Barry White under a Disco Ball funk-off between the Jackson Five and Stevie Wonder. Prince is the judge.
Play it loud, play it like you want it bad, play it like you want the whole world to explode in dance. They are all dancing. Stripper piñata chubs is moving her hips in wide circles from side to side, bum throw-up kitty-saving dude is swinging his arms back and forth with closed fists, executive-guy with dirty shoes is twisting and turning like only white people know how to dance, red-headed homosexual heiress is getting down with the rhythm, even Opera-singing nurse gal is getting her boogie on. They’re all dancing in the rain. It’s an epic early commute dance-a-thon with a million contestants.
Actually, only one of us is dancing.
Me.
The Universe Remains.
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