After lunch before Confession on Saturdays, sitting on the curb in front of a house not his, he curled his tongue back, held it in place with two left hand fingers and quickly whistled tunes from the previous weeks’ Hit Parade. No matter how fast he whistled, he was regularly interrupted by a sole peddler wailing "I cash clothes, I cash clothes" as his weeping wheeled cart pulled him along the middle of the heat exhausted Brooklyn street. Overhead crows circled. Forgetting to whistle, he watched the peddler. An angry worn Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, demanding plea from the apartment house across from where he sat silent holding his tongue in place, halted the peddler. He sniffed at the air. His cart dragged him to the far curb. Draped in a man's coal black winter top coat collared in faded felt and wallowing in a man's blinding black shoes unlaced, a doughy woman suddenly appeared shuffling to curbside, a bundle of her finally dead man's clothes neatly cradled in her arms. The peddler snatched examined each piece of the offering. Possessing the bundle entirely, the peddler shouted a price at the neighborhood that the woman still in dead man's coat and shoes agreed with her eyes was more than she knew her dead man was worth alive. The peddler flung the clothes onto the slouching cart, turned and reached at the black topcoat the woman held closed against her hanging flowered house dress. Her eyes resisted. The peddler threw her dead man's clothes at her feet a piece at a time. She opened her coat. The peddler grabbed it and the shoes leaving her paper white lumpy feet naked. He had everything. He paid in damp wrinkled bills, dull coins and a gummed lecherous grin.
Whenever he wondered definition, and he often did did often during the past year more than ever about man about woman, Saturday blazed a New Testament parable flashing from stained glass church windows leaded especially after Lent. Momentarily fixed blind, believing the peddler and the woman embodied the essentials of a mature responsible man woman each or both, he regularly dismissed Saturday as a meaningless infantile memory rather than a literary invention of his doubtful late maturity or both or most likely the former. Attributed however, Saturday would not be dismissed finally, persisting with a will of its own in his present past future each and all like a blood type.
He changed his mind, reminding himself that dada was an accidental appellation the result of a random Tzara knife thrust into a French dictionary possibly German in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire probably. And he considered according to new old reports formerly beer bloated belching farting Sweeney again once fashionably a mythical magical Irish seer poet madman wrapped around him self and the highest branches of highway trees above accidental deer blood smeared purple every morning Sunday. Not quite as pathetic as Ahasuerus, nonetheless similar enough to trail each other wandering and screeching or vice versa out of his imagination shimmering like tear drops on morning grass until burned barren by broad daylight.
--Explain yourself explain explain, ran in his hairy ears as if he she it could ever. Things just were, he said.
--Explain! Hell, he said aloud. I owe no one an explanation. Who the f--- explains his self her self its self to me as if they could ever. No one you’re f---ing A.
--What's this non sense? What what what is it please tell us tell us please please please, they say.
--I don't know. It just is, he says.
--You're being difficult. No candy for you smirking unanswering. You'll be a failure failure failure any way you slice it, they say. He wondered por que yo slumping into the empty tooth yellow tub that received several generations of Irish asses tinkers thinkers. No difference according to him merely nomenclature. It's like calling a rifle a rifle or gun or fire arm. Marines, he knew, of course never call a rifle a gun or they'll sleep with it until the gun becomes a rifle.
--"This is my rifle. This," grabbing his nuts exaggeratedly, "is my gun. This is to kill with. This," grabbing his nuts exaggeratedly, "is to have fun," he recited remembering the confusion it caused so many of life's recruits whose hands got tangled somewhere betwixt and between killing and fun. It wasn't easy he thought, as some thought, to distinguish after awhile men women children one and all blurred into an even grayness like a blind and dumb TV screen fearfully empty, and there was always that smell like cavities.
He changed his mind again. He watched the water first hot then cold drip drip out of the well hung faucet to trickle down the stopper chain splashing off his upturned well nailed horned toes. It was painful on his face. His toes didn't know the drops were as big as jelly beans, hard as gravel, supporting dry well pipes or simply grabs of unrolled Johnson and Johnson. Perhaps all three or none. Hell, he thought, when man wanted to imitate walking, deKostrowitzky, more notably Apollinaire, noted man created the wheel looking no thing like a human or inhuman leg. It was therefore his decision alone whether or not the water was hot or cold or both or neither. He decided it was as dry as morning cut hay at sunset soft as cotton balls in plastic bags that didn't resemble balls as they resembled thirsty spit. He knew them well using them by the handful wet instead of toilet paper leaves or rocks feeling European American with his half bidet regretting that American ponies were not as small as advertised. Hell, he recalled, cows in Ireland were so big he couldn't see around them. In any event, he refused to sh--dump defecate crap drop a log where toilet paper only was available only no matter cows as large as panel trucks with pies the size of charcoal grills.