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| (visual by Max Trudolubov via this license) |
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dispatch sixteen
Unclosed Apartments by Brian Edward Bahr
debuted 15 November 2009 | kept 647 times | click to keep
Here comes the ridiculous limping bastard. Walking along like an old man even though he’s just a kid. He can hardly lift his left leg higher than his ankle. There’s no reason he should be walking like that at his age. But that’s not nearly as bad as trying to talk to him; this kid is so trite that here is how conversations go when someone tries to ask him anything: “Did you bring your homework today? Whaddaya mean you didn’t get the chance? This is it. Do you want me to call your mother? Okay? Okay? That’s all you have to say? Go to the principle!” And so on.
Now this kid’s slowing down as he walks along the sidewalk toward what is probably called a house, since it stands alone, but is no bigger than an apartment, where a can of potatoes sits on the front step. This is a sign from mommy: a sign he dreads daily; and one that’s become so common he’s learned to carry a can opener and fork in his backpack. Looketim now: wiping at the grime on the window with his sleeve, winding those bony elbows to get some real strength into his wiping job; but he just makes a translucent smear. And now he’s peeking through it—the little voyeur. He can see socks hanging from the table, a shirt draped down the stove, and a pair of pants on the couch, his bed. And in the background he can see the closed bedroom door. There’s not much else to see in this house: there’s only the living room which blends into the kitchen and a bathroom and bedroom. And sometimes the kid calls the living room a parlor in his head: as if it was a place where they had British sophisticates named Nigel and Rupert over for tea.
Now he’s sitting on the front step. He’s probably waiting for mommy to finish and make him a real dinner. But after a while he notices that a man has passed by three times on the sidewalk in front of the house. And he looks to the corner to see another man standing there. Both men never look at him or at the house, but the kid can see they’re on line. So like a good little boy—and a shriveled lunchbox—the kid takes his can of potatoes and leaves. Can’t have mommy’s clients going away.
There he goes limping again. Just seeing this kid is enough to piss anyone off—with the same stupid t-shirt and frayed jeans he wears everyday and the dirt behind his ears—but hearing the shit that goes through his brain makes you wanna jam a pillow over his head while he sleeps. For example: this kid walks like he’s got shrapnel stapling his ass crack shut but he won’t ride the bus; he heard a story about some psycho spaz who waits for bus drivers to open the doors to their bus and then runs forward and throws a brick at the driver. He doesn’t want his bus driver to get hit by a brick and he thinks if the bus doesn’t have to stop at his corner then there will be less chance of that psycho spaz hitting his bus driver. The little rube seems to like his bus driver—probably because the old man once helped him stop a bloody nose—but maybe he’s just pitching a tent for the old man. The old unrequited love. Yellow bus passion. This is the kind of kid who won’t have a relationship until he’s in his thirties and then he’ll say to the girl, “would it be terribly naughty of me to hold your hand?” and she would say, “perhaps…but we must!” and then they’ll write letters discussing the simply mah-velous feelings aroused by holding hands.
So this kid limps around the side of his house and peeks in his neighbor’s window, because the boy living next door will sometimes kick a soccer ball around with him. The grin on this kid’s face is phenomenal when he plays soccer: it’s like seeing a chimp crack up after he threw his shit onto the glass right in front of some little girl’s face. Watching this kid chase a soccer ball and try to kick it is better than seeing some blader who is grinding fall with a leg on each side of the railing—it takes them twenty minutes to get up after one of those spills. But this kid sees that his neighbor is gone, which he should’ve known since his neighbor’s school lets out later than his.
When it rains, he usually hibernates in this old abandoned apartment building, and even though the sky’s only a little cloudy and it’s not raining yet, it looks like he’s headed in that direction. The doors at ground level are all chained up, but he found a window on the second floor that he could open and crawl through about a year ago. Why this kid decided to climb up to check a second story window, with a leg that never healed properly after it was broken, is a question only a psychoanalyst could answer. Maybe entering a second story window symbolizes intercourse (whereas entering a ground level window symbolizes cornholing) and he goes there when his mommy is fucking other men because he has an Oedipus complex and the rain that is usually falling outside symbolizes his tears. And probably anyone who buys that bullshit should tie a plastic bag over their head. Whatever.
Anyway, the windows on this place are just filthy. They can barely be seen through, but the dirt is only on the outside, so once this kid is inside he can’t clean them to get a better view. And the glass in the windows is so old that it’s the kind that has little ripples in it, so when someone walks by they wobble and look a little like they’re limping. Most of the first floor windows are boarded over since little punks threw rocks through them. He usually stays on the two higher floors since there is quite a bit of glass coating the floor of the first. Right now he’s limping toward the stairs.
This old apartment building actually has a few rooms that are still furnished; the place was probably condemned and locked up before the tenants could move their shit out. Or maybe they just didn’t care about their stuff. Whatever it was, it left a lot of exploring for this bindle stiff to do. So here’s this kid rooting through other people’s drawers, inspecting their things, trying to find secrets. But here’s the hilarious part: one time he found a bunch of nude pictures in the back of someone’s drawer and he wrinkled his nose and shoved them back inside! Then he even took some clothes out of another drawer and piled so many clothes on top of the nudes that he could hardly shut the drawer! This kid’s a total bing—a genuine birdman. And what does he get out of all this—all this rummaging and scrounging? The kid doesn’t try on the women’s clothing and he doesn’t even touch anyone’s underwear, so it can’t be anything like that. And he hasn’t taken any souvenirs. Maybe he’s just a packrat that never had any shit to hoard—fuck it—it doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s thinking about that time he got lost in the mall—he had to lay a steamer and his mom was in the lingerie department where he was forbidden to go (she was probably picking out new panties cause some client had ripped the last pair right off her)—and so he had to just go to the bathroom himself—and he got shit all over the side of his pants—so he left his pants in the bathroom—and the store clerks finally found him an hour later, bunched up and crying, in the middle of one of those circular clothes racks. Maybe this whole abandoned apartment fixation stems from that. Just imagine what a spectacle that was, to find the little mousy curled up in the middle of all those clothes but naked from the waist down like some kind of cartoon character.