He was a world champion alcoholic.
Moving slowly.
Leaving a grey muceousy trail
That had the whole house
Smelling of piss.
Incoherently gifted.
Shuttered.
Shuffling.
Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.
He forgot about the coffee
Boiling on the orange coils
In a banged up aluminum
Stove-top percolator
For twenty-three minutes.
He finally drank it anyway
Without raising an eyebrow
Pouring and gulping
The scalding sludge
Like a caveman.
He was dead inside.
He offered me some
Of the thick burnt tar
Grunting
In a true gesture
Of momentary neanderthal hospitality.
“No thank you.”
I told him.
“I’ll pass.”
He was living
The not so simple life
Not so simply
Simply.
The cartography
Of his daily movement
Was a small map
Worn into the pile
Of faded carribean blue
Wall-to-wall carpet.
An occassional trip outside
To check the mailbox.
Entrapped in his own mephitic flesh
Walking like a misplaced spirit
Between the recliner on the first floor
Of the split level rancher
To the covered back porch
Where he would smoke
His generic brown leaf wrapper
Septic smelling
Cigarettes
Purchased at a Trenton bodega.
The recliner was his bed.
One of the only pieces of furniture that he owned
Besides the dining room table and sole chair
Which serviced as the podium
For his best working typewriter
Of the forty or so
He had collected
And had lined up
Against the yellowed peeling
Flor-de-lis wallpaper
Of the dining room.
He was compulsive about collecting things.
The garage was full
Of useless bike frames he had pulled out of the trash.
The desk lamp next to the typewriter
Was turned on the whole time
I was there.
I asked him about it.
We were on the porch and he was smoking.
It reeked of piss.
“What are you working on?”
I asked him.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
He slurred through coffee breath
Browned and missing teeth
Ochre eyes moving slowly
In their pus-filled sockets.
“The typewriter in the other room.”
I nudged.
“I’ve been working on a book.”
He acknowledged.
“It’s a struggle. My whole life is a struggle.”
“What in the fuck is that?!!!”
I exclaimed
Catching a filthy half-filled urinal bottle
To the left of his feet
Under the table
Next to the sofa.
“It’s a piss bottle!”
He jumped at me defensively.
“I got them all over the house.”
“Sometimes I can’t make it to the john or I can’t get up and I just piss into one of these.”
He picked it up showing me.
I felt nauseous.
It was the kind you see in a hospital.
He swirled around
A deep brown-yellow concoction
From a sick liver
In a dirty frosted plastic bottle
With a once white cap.
“From the smell of this place I would have to conclude that you miss the bottle a lot.”
I said
Putting my forearm in front of my nose
To keep from retching.
He snubbed out his smoke
In the overflowing ashtray
And put the bottle back down.
“Jesus, you’re fucked!”
I told him.
“You really are a fucked-up sonuvabitch!”
“Thanks for the news-flash asshole!
He replied.
“You think that it’s easy to maintain this image of beauty?”
“I couldn’t do it.”
I said.
We smoked more cigarettes
And talked
But he never told me
What he was writing about.
When I got up to leave
I stopped in the half-bathroom
By the front door
To take a leak.
It was the one that he used
Obviously.
The toilet was caked with hard urine
As well as the tiles around it.
The wall to the left of the toilet
And the wall in back
Had large patches of smudges
Where his black greasy hands
Repeatedly tried to steady
His poisoned body
While he took a leak.
I noticed an old school shaving set
On top of the feculent sink.
The brush was worn down
Stiff from never being cleaned.
There were several rusted steel double-edge blades
Strewn over the stained porcelain.
I got out of there without touching anything
And left thinking
“What a fucked-up-shit-hole mess.”
The evidence was all there.
But I never saw him drink
I never saw him use the piss bottle
And I never saw him at the typewriter.
