Bum

By Joseph Harry Silber

Honda H. Honda lost three precious things and must must must must get them every one back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781300203063

Book preview

log(epic)

Chapter 1.

Tantrums

1.1

Blame the bum. Yesterday in Dolores Park, I was lying in the sun, it licking warm my face like a happy puppy tongue, when I felt the cold shadow of a stranger leaning over my nose. And smelled him. Ack. The pure poison of his chemical presence must have passed me out; I came to some sticky-mouthed consciousness some time later, vaguely aware I had slept, sensible to the fact of those lost hours only by the lowered angle of the sun, or the abrupt incrementation of fog, or some inner nervous clock, or the late afternoon gurbabble of nearby children on swings. My bag was gone.

My name is Honda Honda and my bag contains three nonessential things I must have back: (1) my wallet – credit cards, identification, selected fortune cookie fortunes, yes – and also my only old photo of my only ever love, my first cat, Franklin, who died when I was twelve; (2) a bottle of Egyptian scent – a certain perfume or cologne, the only that seems to fit me, and can be found nowhere but Egypt, if even there either, anymore; (3) the marriage diary of my dear dead mother – the digest of her first year of marriage, of which I have read the first seven pages, and must read more.

Who are these dirty folk? rhetorically, I say; Who? Does anyone really want to know or think one ought to want to know? Not I, not me, not little Honda Honda lapping Papa Honda’s knee; not big Honda Honda has a house in the city; ugh, Mister Mayor, put your stinkers somewhere else. Honda Honda Honda’s bag be stole from Honda’s self. What’s this dumb dirty bum done with Honda’s bag? And what with my things inside, you stinker, filthy-fingered?

Horrors. I’ve seen these characters’ fingernails, noticed them in passing. Seen them? Noticed? Could not not. Oughf; I’ll puke. Three of ten fingers, fungal-ripe, knobbled and pussed and cracked; three-of-ten more, diesel-wiped, greased and snot and blacked; one finger bent; one in twitch; one laid open ableed; the tenth be from its body hacked, trash-glass-hunting-master freed. Ten? Nine? That normal, even? The one with my bag might have had eleven.

I see eleven finger nails; eleven long razor rims caked brown round the crescents – caked with what? Oughf, I say; I’ll puke.

I can feel those dirty fingers twitcheling over the zippered lip, down into the orifice, skimming the inner nylon walls. Did you kidnap my bag to some secluded spot, anonymous alley off Mission Street, there afoul to penetrate it, helpless? Bum? Or were you more audacious? Scurried but one hundred yards to the stairwell at 19th and Sanchez, there half-hidden behind its concrete rail, performed your begerminous intrusion? Or was it an intrusion? Did your fingers filthy tickle inside, probing the container like eleven ants, nimble blind-and-seek? Or did instead you split the seam, turn its insides inside-out, poured my bag its guts the street? Yes? That impatient? No, I think you took one’s time; handled my things, one at a time, carefully all-befouling.

First the wallet, money – yes – and then the photo of Franklin. Fingered it, you fingered it, freak, and thought of Franklin nothing. Did you know, Bum, it is the only old photo of my only ever love? Could you possibly read where I wrote that fact on the back? I mean, can you read? Perhaps. Could you appreciate its meaning? I mean, I doubt you will. You won’t, you won’t, oh ah ar nn you awful thing do not not not not! throw that picture away. Gah!

Franklin had an optimistic attitude unlike other cats, who mostly don’t give a damn. Other cats lick themselves, cough up fur, and pay no attention but to scratch and bite your houseguests. Franklin was an acrobat, or would-be acrobat – he often crashed – ; a showman, anyway, loving of his audience. I’d hear him practicing for an hour in the next room; then he’d come to me purring, rub my leg to say hello, and wrap his tail around my ankle, which meant the performance was polished and ready. Alright, Franklin, let’s see the newest one, I said; and he’d lead me perhaps to the kitchen. His favorite trick he practiced constantly was a stunning leap from the kitchen stove to the breakfast table, an aerial distance some three Franklengths long (four or five feet) in the horizontal. Four or five feet – stove to edge of table – if you saw his photo you’d see he had no lower lip left, since his chin hit the sharp edge every time. Franklin had all manner of crashes: he might decide, one day, the plastic back of a folding chair were his natural and righted landing pad, his paws evolved for just such purpose; or he might realize – if he would to maximize his triple jump – he must launch himself off the purposeful lid of the ketchup bottle; or some day saw him a-somersault the toaster oven, Fosbury Flopping it over and over, breaking his back every try. What a spirit! What sport! – Inventive, too; I never could figure how he put his head once through the spokes of my tricycle, he meowing in the garage, for stuck. Dad had to snip the rods with a garden shear to get him out. Franklin, my dear daredevil never lost his enthusiasm; and I kept his photo.

If you travel to Egypt there is a certain orange sunlight, yellower at noon, which enters the buildings and hangs tiny dust bits in the air. The floor is linoleum, peeling slightly at the corner, the ceiling is low, the walls are sheetrock and the whole of it smells of dryness and clean, of mint, or more, of tarragon. I have – I had – such magic stored in a bottle, ready aready, snug in my bag. Rrrr, Stinker, there’s two possibilities: (1) that you sniffed the perfume, this Egyptian cologne, this rare essence – and then sniffed yourself, rare, raw and foul – and thought, somehow, by the bottle’s delicate vapors to overlacquer your body’s atmospheric stench, sealing it in; and wasted, of course, all my precious liquid, it serving no purpose amix your own emanations, buffered against good by your bodily evil, like powder of azurite in a slurry of mud. (2) That you sampled the bottle, but, your stink being in some way perversely natural to you, all-hours resident of your own waste and filth, imagined inversely it were the poor sweet bottle that smelled unright or unfit, not you, and shattered it to the curb. (3) But I may still hope against all reason, against the deformation of your olfactory senses or the innate human ambition to smell ever better than one previously did, may hope that whether you liked or not the bottled content, you yet escrowed it back into the bag, intact and relatively full, recognizing at least its potential value, if not to yourself, then to some less ambiguously human human.

Honda Honda misses Mother, hugs and kisses all acover; wants her back and wants her now, wants back her diary’s love and vow. Bum, you must have had a mom; else where else from where’d you come? Give it back, the book, the book; dirty devious thievy crook.

Honda’s mother’s marriage diary has clamshells and corn kernels sewn in the cover. It’s the digest of her first year of marriage, and she said on her honeymoon she would keep one thing from each meal; dry it; preserve it; and at the end sew them all to the cover; which she did; and showed me so before she died. From each meal she kept one thing, one thing she could dry and preserve – a clamshell, a corn kernel, a marshmallow and such; slice of banana, peppermint; a chicken bone, a macaroni; toothpick, a table cracker, a lilac from the hotel’s restaurant’s vase. Dad cast the cracker in resin so it wouldn’t ever crumble for her, epoxified. He had three coffee straws arranged around the cracker through the wet resin’s thickness, and when it hardened snipped the straws flush; so she had six clean holes in the plastic disk to thread which through her threads, and sew it on. The clamshell she thread through the foot’s natural hole, the macaroni through its; the chicken bone she thread-wrapped like a fishing pole, in the marshmallow she embedded a tiny eye-hook; and for each such item of her diary’s cover she achieved some equally ingenious device of embroideration. The lilac she pressed three weeks between the pages (you can still see the pollen’s ink on page three), then krazy-glued it to the cover, snug beneath a baseball card sleeve. Did you, dumb bum, nibble at my mother’s stale marshmallow, or gnaw at her diary’s chicken bone? I’ve seen you root the garbage can; you’ll taste or eat or try to eat most anything. Did you lick the old clamshell? Did you crack enamel on the dry banana? Pick with the pick? Dead-lilac salad? Or, idiot, attempt the plasticked table cracker?

Honda’s mother’s marriage diary’s filled with creamy paper. The creamy paper has no lines but’s filled with the script of her hand’s heart’s content, trailing ever upward and to the right. Her heart’s contentment upward and right, fast writ and uneven spaced fills the cream-white thick stock, both sides, and smooth. Oh Bum, when you toilet on the street tonight, Honda Honda begs you – finger-wipe as usual; no clever ideas for her silky-soft pages; leave them in the binding, and clean, okay? Neither steal out the poor binding’s silk thread, even if you’ve a hole in your fungally sock, or thought to floss out your lilac dinner, or fashion a clamshell necklace. Just leave it all be, the precious book, back, I say back, in the bag.

Honda Honda does dare prayer? Prays, then: the picture, the bottle, the book, precious things, be kept into and safe the bag; for some bums keep everything; – some throw it all out – yet if so out then yet, hopes Honda, yet would the finders find and keep; I must, therefore, still find my bag; I must, now now, some sleep.

1.2

Today is Saturday, have not to go to work. Not wake up or get up or anything up. I stay down in bed, under the cover, drifting and dreaming and thinking of Mother. It pains me great, her gone diary. Wonder a moment, electric, was it really in the bag? Or maybe did I leave it at home, lucky accident that day, lying under a towel or old mail? But no, awakening, it’s gone. Roll humid under the blankets, retuck beneath my chin, reasleepening, asks me my mother, Honda, little Honda, did you find my book? It’s where I live these days, you know. Please, will you find it? I’m in there, please, okay?

My sunny Saturday bedroom dry impounds me under the covers, dark but overhot, such that I must to roll out one quarter hour later. Wash myself and dress, oatmeal cookie for my breakfast. Thirsty thirsty achy throat, must water along with my tea.

Now awakening full, now awake. I stared at the stove forty seconds or an hour, Franklin-reminiscing. I sniffed my soap scent self, thinking of Egypt. Then, again, my missing mother.

Anyway. I needed groceries, for which money, for which the bank, for which ID. Hence the passport search, old passport, unused since Egypt, – unhh. Dirty bum. – But found the passport, thankfully, eventually, in the closeted backpack’s upper pocket. And went to the bank, sneaker-squeaking, where little H.H. has eight thousand dollars. Passport, story, signature, presto, little H.H. has three hundred dollars now in the Hondan hand, new money cards in the mail, pleasant memory of the teller’s smile and everything settle-accounted. Except, of course, three things; you know.

Honda Honda gone to the grocery; vegetables, juice, and rice. Got black beans, string beans, toilet paper, soap; got garlic oil, eggs, chocolate, and marshmallows. Frozen snap peas, frozen yogurt, frozen quiche and cheddar cheese; ice cream, sour cream, salsa, and chips; onions and sprouts and tomatoes and tarts, peppermint patties and artichoke hearts. Watched the clerk clerk them into the