A Heap of Burning Bunny Rabbits

by Andreas Economakis

Are all children pyromaniacs?  When my brothers and I were kids, man, you just couldn’t keep us away from fire.  We pretty much torched everything in sight.  If quick-dial had existed back then, I think my mom would have had the fire department on number 1 (for us) and the psychiatric ward on 2 (for her).  I’m not sure why we were so attracted to flames.  From hurling homemade napalm on walls to tossing aerosol cans into fires to setting random garbage piles on fire, we were the holy inferno of our entire Athenian neighborhood.

I must have been 6 or 7 years old when my two older brothers dragged an old foam mattress out of the basement and placed it under the big pine tree in our back yard.  My brothers were having an argument about whether the petrol-based mattress would catch fire right away when a match was put to it.  This was an ongoing family debate back then, whether or not petrol catches fire like gasoline.  Well… hmmm… the mattress not only caught fire, it virtually exploded in our faces, the spectacle scattering us in a terror-induced glee.  Huge flames licked upwards through the black smoke and a moment later the tree caught fire.  Luckily, the neighbor was on to us and rushed in with his hose, extinguishing the fire.  I think he also called the police.

I seem to remember the police stopping by our house regularly, be it for pellet gun violations or more often than not because we’d set someone’s garden or whatever on fire.  Most of the time we got away with the mischief.  We were very good at bolting when the shit hit the fan, or at least covering up or extinguishing our tracks before someone paid notice.  One thing is for sure: we were the masters of raising all kinds of hell.  At least my brothers were.  Did my cherubic young age absolve me of all the mayhem we created?  I guess I’ll find out in my next life.

One afternoon I was awakened from my innocent afternoon nap by my frantic brothers.  Something catastrophic had just happened and they needed my help instantly.  Bleary-eyed and struggling to put a skinny leg through my small shorts, I was hustled down into my dad’s study, heart pounding.  This place was strictly off limits to us kids.  My dad was no fool; he knew he lived with three pint-sized terrorists.  The study was a kid-free zone.  Or was it?  Seems that my brothers had put their siesta hour to good use, sneaking into the study to mess around.  My dad kept a huge, industrial fire extinguisher in the little kitchen by his study. I’m not quite sure where he got this thing. Anyway, my two brothers, permanently fighting since childbirth like Cain and Able, got in to some sort of epic brawl in the study.  My oldest brother, always a believer in total, absolute, cataclysmic, terminal retaliation, rushed into the small kitchen.  He emerged struggling, pulling the huge extinguisher, which was as tall as he was.  Like Rambo with a flame-thrower, he opened the valve, and blasted the shit out of his cowering younger sibling.

Shocked by the intensity of his firepower, my eldest brother tried to shut off the valve.  He twisted and twisted.  Nothing.  The jet of powder continued at full force, reducing my other brother into a pathetic, coughing snowman.  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I entered the study.  There was a half-meter of white, sudsy powder on the floor and absolutely everything was coated in white dust.  It looked like Christmas.  I was snapped out of my reverie by my sweating, panicky brothers.  “We’ve got to clean it up before daddy gets home!” they blurted out, almost in unison.  Before I knew it, I was shoveling white powder out the small window in the kitchen while the two of them filled bags and garbage cans and dragged them out to the back yard.  It was only a matter of time before the entire back yard was coated in white powder as well, our German shepherd padding about the snowy landscape like he was walking on needles, a perplexed look on his face.

Legs coated to the knees in white suds, I shoveled and shoveled, but the powder just seemed to multiply.  Pretty soon, all three of us were exhausted.  We realized that this would take much longer than expected.  Plan B.  My middle brother, ever the diplomatic one, suggested that we distract our father when he arrived home.  Perhaps he would not go into his study and we could continue the next day.  Good plan! (How did I get dragged into this mess?)  Well, the old man finally did show up from work and, miraculously, we managed to whisk him away from the door of his study, all three of us begging to be taken to dinner with mom that night.  Luckily my mom had remained oblivious to the whole affair, sleeping through the whole thing.  The plan was working.  My brothers and I behaved like little adorable angels that night, hoping our parents wouldn’t notice that all three of us were wearing sneakers that were dusted white.

In the end, we almost got away with it.  Much to our misfortune, our dad decided to visit his white study in the middle of the night while my guilty brothers and I slept. I remember all hell breaking loose and my dad’s dusty white suede shoes leaving angry white footprints around the house.

“At least we didn’t burn the house this time,” I remember thinking to myself, recollecting the several times we had burned or almost burned our house down.  I think it was my oldest brother who had placed a large pile of firecrackers and candles on the living room carpet and set it ablaze back when we lived in Lausanne.  I was only a toddler then, but I somehow recall the mayhem and smoke and hasty departure.  By comparison, the fire extinguisher tragedy was pretty minor and definitely in the right direction.  Isn’t it better to extinguish a house than to set it alight?  I wondered if my parents saw it that way….  Indeed, we always kept extinguishers around on account of the many fires that seemed to light up our lives.  My dad’s Titanic-sized extinguisher was indicative of the sort of fires he expected from his sons.

Well, like I said, we had a lot of fire extinguishers laying around when I was a kid.  But not always.  The summer after the fire extinguisher incident, my brothers and I found ourselves down in our house in the Peloponnese.  As always, total anarchy ruled here.  If things were relaxed in Athens, here we had virtually unadulterated free reign as my dad was generally absent in Athens and my mom was too busy drinking or avoiding us.  I guess you can call it anarchy, though my eldest brother was the leader of the anarchist group, a group which sought to create as much mayhem and damage as possible.  Our exploits with shotguns and pellet guns and firecrackers and bullhorns and nicked beers are legendary in the village. I think that the local villagers actually feared us.  As for us, we were having a ball.  It was kind of like Fear and Loathing meets Apocalypse Now, only in Greece and with plenty of goats and donkeys and barefoot Greek kids as observers.

I think our incendiary ways must have whooped our dog into quite a state of frenzy because one morning we found all the chickens and bunny rabbits that my mom kept in the old hutch, slaughtered.  The German shepherd must have entered the hutch at night and spread around a little of that holy terror he was so accustomed to seeing every day from his three little masters.  It was quite a sight, bunny and chicken carcasses strewn across the blood-soaked dirt, feathers everywhere, blood and guts stuck on the chicken wire fence.  Botis, the property caretaker, was convinced it our German hound had committed the grievous slaughter (he had fought the Nazis during World War Two and had a deep-rooted distrust of all things Deutsch).  Not helping his case, the pooch was sleeping the sleep of the century in the living room, totally content and full and with a bloody chicken feather stuck to his tail.

We gathered the carcasses into two piles.  Bunny rabbits on the left, chickens on the right.  I think it was my more sensitive middle brother who proposed that we create funeral pyres for the dead animals.  He must have read about them in National Geographic.  Always eager to oblige with fire ideas, the eldest one ran off and returned with a can of some sort of liquid.  He doused the rabbits and produced a box of matches.  The old debate ensued as to whether petrol catches fire when a match is put to it.  I think I sided with my eldest brother, having recalled that petrol takes a while light up, compared to gasoline.  The mattress hadn’t really convinced me as it was made of rubber.

Anyway, the argument raged on and pretty soon I was selected to solve the dispute.  I was handed the matches and pushed toward the mountain of dead, bloody rabbits.  I hesitated, the eyes of the little dead ones throwing me glassy, angry looks.  It was intense, looking into all those dead little faces.  I kneeled down and pulled a match out.  I thought again about the petrol and decided that, mattress aside, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t catch fire easily.  Reassured by my memory, I struck the match and thrust my hand into the heap of dead rabbits.   An explosion ensued.

The rest is kind of a psychedelic blur.  My eyes and skin stinging, I was hustled off by my brothers and Botis.  I remember the heap of bunny rabbits burning and crackling as I was hauled down to the house.  Before I knew it I was stuffed into a bathtub.  One brother turned on the cold water while the other one ran in a panic to find my mother, who must have been down at the beach sleeping off the night before.  I touched my face and my eyelashes and eyebrows crumbled off.  I smelled of burnt hair.  Indeed, even the hair on my head crumbled to my touch.  I sat all flash-charred in the bathtub, crying my eyes out as our agitated German shepherd barked and yelped up a storm by the bathroom door.  Botis, a mountain of man, someone who was not afraid of anything (I had once seen him chop off the head of a huge snake with a shovel, holding the snake down with his bare foot), reappeared, trembling and flustered from anxiety.  He was clutching a bottle of olive oil.  He uncorked it and started to pour it all over me.  I started screaming.  My god, they were planning to cook me up for dinner!  Pretty soon I was calmed by Botis, who reassured me that I wasn’t on the menu that night.

As the heap of burning bunny rabbits crackled and sizzled outside, Botis explained that olive oil would soothe my skin.  Well, the old village remedy didn’t exactly work.  What happened instead, and this I was told after I woke up in the hospital the next day, is that the olive oil clogged my skin pores and my temperature shot up.  Charred and overheated as I already was, my clogged pores sent me over the edge and I passed out from fever.

I awoke to presents and candy at the hospital the next day, feeling much better.  My brothers and mother were beside me.  Luckily, I was only flash burned and there was no permanent damage.  My eyelashes and eyebrows and hair would grow back.  On the way back home, my brothers continued their argument about petrol.  I starred at them without my eyebrows, batting my eyelash-less eyelids and wondering if they were as dumb as they seemed.  I finally intervened, mentioning that I was living proof that petrol catches fire like gasoline.  “Uhmm no, not really…” my eldest brother told me. “I guess I made a mistake. The stuff we poured on the rabbits was gasoline.  I thought it was petrol…”

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Henry the Corpse

by Andreas Economakis

One day when I was a kid I went for a walk in the old abandoned rock quarries by my dad’s house in Athens. I came across a neatly wrapped white package, about the size of a cigarette box. It was so perfectly taped and pristine white that it instantly grabbed my attention. I picked it up and started unwrapping it. I’m not sure what I expected to find. It was certainly something of value, or it wouldn’t have been packaged so carefully, so meticulously.

The inner part of the package was carefully covered in gauze. I felt something solid and at the same time soft on the inside. As the last piece of the gauze came free I found myself holding a slightly decayed severed finger. I stared at it unbelieving. When it finally occurred to me what I was holding, I dropped it the way someone drops a scalding pot they have accidentally picked up. My body shuttered and I felt ill, a deep nausea reeking havoc from my stomach all the way through my neck and up to my eyeballs. I turned and ran as fast as I could. I imagined Satan’s hounds chasing me out of the quarries, sharp, slimy teeth snapping, nipping, slicing at my legs. I barely made it home in one piece.

As the years rolled by I forgot about the finger, though a deep-rooted fear of severed limbs and detached body parts remained imbedded in my subconscious. I avoided thinking about chopped or damaged body parts. That all changed when my girlfriend Lisa started medical school. Lisa’s severed limb and damaged body stories became more and more gruesome as the days and semesters rolled by. At first there were the high trauma cases from the emergency room she frequented, images of dangling limbs, bashed-in faces, small clean bullet holes, overdosed teenagers and prostitutes with needles broken off in their bruised arms. To the wide-eyed crowd that were Lisa’s and my friends, these tales were like gasoline to the imagination, fuel to creativity and opinion, an apotheosis of our general belief that society had gone to hell and we were all scavengers in a right-wing, conservative, out-of-our-control chaos. Okay, maybe that was my opinion back then. Mostly, the stories were gory imagery to image-starved minds. I listened transfixed, a reaction akin to looking at a fresh car wreck on the side of the highway.

None of Lisa’s body part stories was more amazing to me than the one of Henry. Henry was the corpse that was assigned to Lisa and 3 other med students in her anatomy class. I pictured a cold, Stanley Kubrikesque room with 15 or so naked corpses in various states of aposynthesis on chrome metal tables, white and green-clad youngsters hunched over them like curious birds, touching, poking and cutting them open under the pulsating neon light. Black blood tricked down polished metal grooves into clean orange buckets. Everything was geometrical, emotionless. Indeed, I wasn’t too off in my imagination, as Lisa confirmed many of the props in her class.

At the beginning of the term the university provided every four students in the class with a fresh, recently deceased corpse. These cadavers were mostly older in age, the youngest one being about 40 or so. Cold and stiff men and women were laid out on metal tables, under bright neon lights. As the semester progressed, the students cut open, dissected and pulverized the portions of their cadaver that corresponded to the subject they were currently studying in class. They started with the head, sawing open the skull and pulling out the brain, Hamlet-style. The brain was then chopped up into little pieces and examined under a microscope, Freud style. I think all the pieces that were examined were placed into some sort of orange bag or container that was kept along with the remainder of the corpse in the refrigerators that the bodies were stored in during off hours. Not a single piece of the body was left untouched, the hungry scalpels and saws of the eager-beaver students slicing and dicing every inch of the poor cadaver’s body.

Lisa and her 3 classmates named their corpse Henry. Naming corpses is a tradition for med students, kind of like adolescent boys naming their penises. Speaking of Dick Cheney, evidently Henry was hung like Godzilla, something which attracted the envy of all the other students who obviously had to cut open less well endowed stiffs (pun intended). Nary a day went by that I didn’t hear about Henry’s amazing schlong. Indeed, I think I developed some sort of jealous paranoia of Henry. I mean, how could I possibly compete with a dead man’s willie?

I wondered if penises grow after one dies, like nails and hair. Probably not. But then again, what does it matter to someone who’s already hung like John Holmes or Gousgounis (the Greek John Holmes) or Tom Jones. A friend once told me that she had slept with a famously well-endowed celebrity and that he was a lousy lover at best, despite his huge member. I’ve heard this from other folks who’ve been with guys with large johnsons. Did these modern day Dirk Digglers miss the lesson that the motion of the ocean is as important (if not more important) than the size of the ship? (ever notice how guys with small peckers keep using the “it’s not the size of the ship” saying?)

Kidding aside, I know that Henry satisfied Lisa in ways I simply could not. Henry satisfied her scientific curiosity, her medical mind. One thing is certain: there was a lot of penis to cut into when the lesson on genitalia finally came around. The other students looked at Lisa’s stiff with envy. Lisa came home that night all smiles. As usual she had that sickly sweet smell of formaldehyde on her. She sat on the couch and rolled a cigarette, telling me all about her amazing day with Henry’s super-sized dong. I tried to control my jealous feelings.

As I pondered how a morbidly jealous lover should respond to such a barrage, my eyes caught sight of something pinkish-brown and fresh-looking on Lisa’s Doc Marten boot. I leaned in for a better look but could not make out what it was. I pointed at the object and asked Lisa what was on her shoe. She looked down and burst out laughing. “Ha! That’s a piece of Henry’s penis!” I ran to the bathroom all dizzy and nauseous while Lisa picked off the piece with a napkin. Henry had forever invaded my life. My nightmares of severed limbs and dissected penises would haunt me ever more.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

The Mysterious Guest

by Andreas Economakis

The invitation came as a surprise, not so much because I hadn’t heard from my dad’s friend in years, but because the words “Black Tie” were written at the bottom of the card. Promising a cruise around the San Francisco Bay in celebration of his daughter’s wedding, Leon’s invitation both excited and troubled me. I mean, how often do quasi (wannabe)-rebel airport shuttle-driving-black-sheep-of-the-family penniless filmmakers get to go on a fully funded cruise around the bay, around Alcatraz, with an open oyster bar? I love oysters! But Black Tie… Why, for the love of god, would anyone want to party in a hangman’s noose? I didn’t even own a tie, let alone a black one. Buying one, along with a suit, would be a problem with only $233 in my bank account. That was my complete fortune, the by-product of a sluggish ‘80’s economy and a belief adopted in college that this was a world of “us and them,” and I was the “us” on the dark side of the tracks (or maybe the “them,” depending on how you looked at it…) And to cap everything off, I couldn’t even rent a suit. The rental fascists would probably want a credit card…

I ran my dilemma by my girlfriend Marisa. She, possessing the perfect dress, a sense of purpose in this life (she was in grad school), and a desire rivaling mine to be on that boat, did not find my dilemma to be troublesome at all. “Why don’t you go buy a cheap suit at one of those cheap malls?” she asked me. The word “cheap”, offered up twice without a trace of hesitation, seemed an indictment of my ways. Nonetheless, I clung onto that word like a shipwrecked sailor clutches onto a buoy. It was actually a brilliant idea! We calculated that the suit and tie would cost around $50, max. I had an old white button-down shirt from high school (a little small and touch yellow around the collar, but otherwise presentable) and my Doc Martens just needed a shine and a little Super Glue, so… this could work!

I decided to give fuel to my intentions, setting off right away for the mall. Wearing my best pair of shorts and flip-flops (it was summer), I rode my bicycle down the hill, across the train tracks (literally) and into the dilapidated side of town. Here people surely knew the value of the buck. Prices were posted clearly, as if for the blind. (Ever notice how in really expensive stores the price tags are oh so small? Quite the opposite here). I could simply float by and let my eyes do the shopping.

I guess you could call the building I selected for my consumerist outing a “mall.” It was a large, square, brownish building, circa late ‘60’s, when architects must have been so wasted or corrupt that aesthetics were tossed into the wastebasket. I charged into the building, convinced that I would find my suit here. I hate shopping and I was not going to take no for an answer, in this, my first (and hopefully last) shopping foray of the year. Besides, I am a certified agoraphobic. I had to get this experience over with as fast as possible. Swallowing deeply, smacking my cottonmouth lips and hiding behind my slick $5.99 shades, I plunged inward, the image of free oysters in the bay a powerful elixir.

I quickly realized that the problem was of Kafkaesque proportions. There were vendors in every store, lots of them. Perched like vultures, claws at the ready, they waited for fresh meat to stroll on in. I glided by these stores looking at the big banner prices nervously, a trickle of salty sweat gliding down my face, my eyes stinging, heart pounding. Does a bunny rabbit hop into a circle of hungry wolves for a carrot? I think not. Sweaty hands crumpling, kneading, clutching the $73 in cash that I had in my pocket (a fortune!), I started losing hope.

At long last, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Turning the last corner of the mall, a depleted, post-apocalyptic clothing store appeared before me like the cave in Nazareth. Inside the cave, a bored, sleepy vendor swayed at the counter. I paced back and forth in front of the store, pretending to be on route elsewhere, eyes forward. I was casing the joint peripherally, not wanting to betray the slightest interest to the dazed vendor inside. If she even peeped my way I would have left running, my flip-flops flip-flopping down into the distance down the mall’s imitation marble floors. Nothing. The woman was a certified narcoleptic. I took a deep breath and staggered in, feigning apathy. I headed straight to the suit-rack. The woman looked up, nodded and returned to her magazine or whatever she had behind the counter. This woman was the best sales person I have ever come across.

The rack, a bit thin but totally in my price range, offered Italian cut styles in the $50 to $70 range. Excited, I pulled a black suit off the rack and ran my fingers along the fabric. A sharp crease cut like a Rhodesian Ridgeback’s raised hair down the front of the trousers. “Not bad,” I thought to myself, opening the jacket to see the make and quality of this fine garment. Pepe. That’s all it said. Pepe. Cool, I thought. Minimalist. I pictured a fancy Italian designer, girls dripping off his arms, playing blackjack in my suit in Monte Carlo. Pepe. It had a certain flair. I glanced at the sleepy vendor and she pointed to the dressing room. I stepped inside the dimly lit fluorescent white room and dropped my shorts. Before long I was all dolled up. Trousers, tee-shirt, jacket, flip-flops. David Bowie would be jealous. The flip-flops would have to go, but otherwise, not bad!

Excited, I burst out of the dressing room. I found a stiletto thin mod black tie, the kind favored by the Madness crowd and slick gigolos. I stepped up to the counter. Wanting to show a certain sense of class and style, I inquired about the care of the suit and what material it was made of. The woman looked at me like a deer in headlights. “Huh?” is all she said. I inquired again, slowing my speech a touch. She grabbed the suit roughly and found the tag. 100% Polyester. “Plastic. No wrinkle,” she added, sensing my confusion. We both nodded our heads in appreciation. Excellent, I thought. She tallied up the bill. Just under $70. I was on my way!

The day before the celebrated cruise, Marisa and I were invited to our friend Katlin’s house in Marin. Her parents were out of town and Katlin was throwing a wild party, one at which I would probably pass out, most likely in the jacuzzi. Marisa suggested we bring our cruise outfits with us, knowing my predisposition to crash at parties and my paranoia of road-trolling police. Proud of the fact that my Italian suit was wrinkle free I jammed it into a small bag, scoffing at Marisa who thought I was nuts. Unlike me, she went to great lengths to fold and prep her dress, a gift from her rich grandmother. All packed up, we headed over to Katlin’s in our beat-up old Volkswagen, the windows rolled down so as to not asphyxiate from the exhaust leaking in through the vents.

Katlin’s party was a total blast and before long I found myself all dazed and relaxed in the jacuzzi. I vaguely remember gazing hazily at the twinkling bay through the eucalyptus trees, day-dreaming of the cruise and all those oysters. It was late and most of the guests soon left the party, spending hours trying to back down the suicide dead-end road. The rest of us curled up like cats with the spins on some couch or plush carpet in the house. Marisa dragged me out of the jacuzzi and within seconds I was passed out in the guest bedroom, evidently snoring up a storm (so a pissed Marisa bellowed the next early afternoon).

We spent the next day swimming, barbecuing and generally working off the nasty hangover that pounded the inside of our skulls like a jackhammer. Marisa informed me that we had to start getting ready and I sprung to action. I yanked my suit out of the tiny plastic bag and my heart sank. Big problem! My wrinkle-free suit was terribly wrinkled. So wrinkled that a giggling Marisa dragged Katlin into the room and they rolled around the floor laughing, tears streaming down their faces. I was pissed. Worse yet, I was at a loss. How could I go to the cruise like this? I would be the laughing stock of the boat. My dad, an impeccable dresser, would hear the news from Leon and I would be exiled even further from the family, a black sheep with a mangy coat. I pleaded with the laughing twins for assistance. Wiping her eyes, Katlin said she’d help.

She re-appeared with an ironing board and iron, which she handed to me inquiring if I could handle the task. “Hah,” I said haughtily. “Of course I can iron!” Any moron can iron. I grabbed the weird contraptions and spent the next 5 minutes trying to unfold the damn ironing board. Marisa was in the shower, so I was on my own. A naked Marisa found me ironing in my underwear, the very image of genteel manliness. I had already finished with the pants and was now battling the jacket. The wrinkles on the lapel were stubborn. I decided to turn up the heat on the iron and really zap the hell out of those wrinkles. We were running terribly late.

The smell of burning rubber should have been my first clue. By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late. I had burned an exact replica of the iron into the left lapel, the burn mark spilling over onto the main part of the jacket. Pepe’s subtle fabric had melted under my barbaric hand, emitting malodorous fumes and a nasty sizzling sound. I yanked the iron off just in time, that is, just before a hole formed. I crashed down on the chair, clutching my head in despair. My $68 suit was ruined! Sensing my despair and a threat to our carefree cruise around the bay, Marisa came to the rescue. She smoothed the burn mark with her pig’s hairbrush and a wet cloth, pronouncing the problem gone, or at least, subdued. “Everyone’s gonna be drunk and it will be dark anyway,“ she added to console me. Indeed, when she held up the garment you could barely notice the burn mark. Only when she spun the jacket a bit and it caught the light just so could you see my handiwork. I slipped the suit over my too small shirt, leaving the top button of the shirt unbuttoned so as to not strangle myself. I raised the knot of the tie up to my throat, put on my ancient Doc Martens and admired myself in the full-length mirror. From afar, with the lights dimmed, I looked pretty good. I decided that my tactic for the night would be to stay at a good distance from the other guests, quietly slurping oysters in the semi-dark. Mysterious. Yeah, the mysterious guest was my modus operandi for the night.

At the boat entrance Leon and his family welcomed the guests aboard. Marisa and I approached cautiously, my body language turned so as to minimize the impact of the iron tattoo. I couldn’t fool anyone. Leon’s eyes went directly to the burn mark, then drifted up and down Pepe’s creation. “You dressed up!” he said, giving me a kiss on either cheek. Marisa and I clambered on board. Everyone in our age group had dressed casually. Only the fogies were in suits. I ripped my coat off, loosened my tie and sucked down a half dozen oysters. Alcatraz sure looked beautiful that night.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

THE DAY KURT COBAIN BLEW

HIS BRAINS OUT

by Andreas Economakis

Marisa and I arrived at LAX late in the evening and when we finally got home I hit the sack right away. I was due to work on a Japanese Kirin Lager Beer commercial featuring Harrison Ford early the next morning, out at Zuma Beach in Malibu. I had not realized that the time had changed while we were in Kauai. Daylight savings time. This strange horological tradition does not affect Hawaii, and so the morning of my shoot I woke up an hour late. Nothing like the phone ringing and your boss yelling at you before your morning cup of coffee.

I floored it all the way to Malibu, my red 1975 Toyota pick-up truck a blur on the highway, its SR-20 engine humming like a distressed honeybee. I peeled into the Zuma parking lot and dashed to the Production trailer, formulating a profuse sorry on my lips. All was well. Harrison hadn’t arrived yet. I walked down to the set, an overly built Japanese campfire set by the beach. Two small grey whales came near the shoreline, attracted by the large lights we’d set up. My friend Tim and I waded out into the surf and got close to the beautiful creatures. I remember looking into their eyes and sensing recognition. Then, like two bored tourists, the whales dipped into the water and swam off.

I helped carry cases of beer to the set and chilled them in the coolers. Harrison arrived in his rented Black Mercedes SL500 convertible. His bodyguard followed him in a black SUV. A thin Vietnam Vet with hard looks, the bodyguard eyed us all suspiciously before kind of relaxing.

Within the hour, Harrison started his scenes. “Kirin Laga Beeroo Koodasai,” he kept saying. The Japanese applauded each take. What luck to have Indiana Jones sell your beer. What luck and 3 million dollars.

At lunchtime I took a swim and was called out of the water by a lifeguard who said he’d spotted a shark near me. My nerves just a wee bit frazzled, I walked up to the parking lot, all the while thanking my lucky star that I hadn’t become a McNugget to a California Great White. I found Tim hunched over by the bushes, trying to snare lizards with a homemade horse-hair noose. Tim is a quarter Sioux Indian, which I guess explains this odd obsession. I tried to snare a lizard with the contraption, unsuccessfully. Greeks are not good lizard-catchers. Harrison and his tense bodyguard walked by. Harrison smiled at us. The sun was behind him and we were blinded.

Tim told me that he’d talked to the bodyguard and he told Tim that he didn’t carry a gun. “Don’t need one,” the bodyguard had said. I believed him. Tim returned to snaring lizards. “Dude, did you hear the news?” he asked me. “What?” I responded, watching Harrison enter his motor home. “Kurt Cobain blew his brains out.” Harrison Ford slammed the door shut, the snapping sound making me jump. The bodyguard leaned against the motor home, peering out towards the sea like the Marlboro Man. I looked at Tim. “Got one!” he said and lifted a dangling lizard to my face.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Flickr photograph by super-structure.

THE DAY I WENT CRAZY

by Andreas Economakis

I’ve always been a little superstitious.  Okay, I don’t wig out if a black cat crosses my path (maybe because I once read that the Portuguese consider the black cat a sign of good luck), but I do make a point of putting on my left sock first every morning.  I don’t know why I do this, it’s just that I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember.  Call it a part of my routine, call it some kind of DNA signature, this left sock thing has never done me wrong.  I’m alive and kicking to prove it.

I guess you could say I believe in signs.  So you can imagine what was running through my head when my girlfriend Justina mentioned that our 8-year relationship was in trouble on the exact same day that our cat Buddy was run over in the driveway by our idiot neighbor Quentin.  Yup, the meaning of this wasn’t lost on me.  After all, Buddy had been our very first kitten and he was probably the sweetest of our cats.  People need symbols and Buddy became a symbol of our relationship, a symbol of our budding love.  At least for me.  And as anyone who’s ever believed in something will tell you, when a symbol dies, well then the thing that it represents dies as well.

Justina moved out shortly after Buddy’s death, the very day after I celebrated my thirtieth birthday.  It was nice of her not dumping me on my birthday, all in all.  Okay, it sucked that I had to spend the day all alone (Justina had once again feigned a heavy work load at school, leaving me a cupcake and a pink Hallmark card by the key dish), and it also sucked that my free birthday eggs at Denny’s were watery, cold and tasteless, but at least I was still in a relationship.  Or so I believed.  When my girlfriend showed up with a moving van the next day, I worried that this cataclysmic event would influence all of my thirties.  I shivered in dread.

How would the relationship ads read? “30 year old male, shy, not too bald, with nice smile, totally dependent and mono-focused on his ex-girlfriend, is now totally and utterly alone and looking for companionship.  A pretty decent cook, likes animals and enjoys romantic Sunday afternoon hikes up Runyan Canyon.”  “Ugh, just shoot me here and now and get it over with,” I thought to myself.  Ads aside, a bigger dilemma was now at hand: what does one do with oneself when not in a relationship?

Suddenly the accidental bachelor, I hit the streets looking for answers.  All I saw were happy couples and groups of friends, everyone smiling and jocular and together.  The only solitary people I came across were either crazy or passed out from drugs or alcohol or poverty.  That’s when it occurred to me.  Insanity is the quickest way out of a broken heart.  Everyone feels pity for a young man who loses his marbles, even if those marbles were all there but a week before.  And what’s even better is that when one does actually go crazy, nothing is expected of him.  It’s like total freedom.  How cool is that?  I decided to go insane without further ado.  I rushed home all excited, eager to set my new plan in motion.

First off, I would have to get rid of my cats, for a crazy man cannot follow a routine of feeding pets and cleaning up after them.  I loved them dearly and so deliberated a long time before leaving them and the remaining supply of cat food on my girlfriend’s doorstep (I was still having a hard time annunciating the prefix “ex”).  Justina may not love me anymore, but she must surely have a soft spot in her heart for the cats.  Right?  I mean, they’d been with us for so many years and they slept with us every night, albeit on my side of the bed (Justina always insisted that they preferred my side, though I knew she swished and swooshed her feet under the covers to chase them away).  I decided to not leave a note as that would give her an opportunity to return the cats with a reply.

The next step was to clear out of the apartment.  I meticulously gathered all the shreds of my life and bagged them in Smart & Final jumbo garbage bags (“curiously spot on this company name,” I thought as I stuffed my outdated cd collection and utilitarian Ikea cd racks in one of the bags).  I hauled the bags a few blocks away, tossing them in a restaurant dumpster.  Almost like an omen, Fabio, the faux-Italian longhaired model/actor smiled and waved at me as I walked in front of his shiny peach-colored sports car just off of Melrose.  “I’m friends with Fabio?” I wondered as he drove away.  I was now more than ever convinced that my plan must be working, that surely I must be going insane.

I drank my last celebratory beer on the dusty floor of my apartment, staring at the clumps of cat hair that floated about the now empty living room.  As a token to my new found life, I bit down on the can until my mouth started to bleed.  I smeared the sticky blood all over my face, screamed at the top of my lungs and rushed out of the apartment all bleary-eyed but determined, leaving the door wide open.  That was the last time I ever went through that door.  My new life snatched me up and propelled me forward.

I found a safe place to sleep next to a burnt out building on Spaulding.  I dreamt that my girlfriend was trying to wake me up by tickling my eyelashes with her hair.  I kept brushing her hair away, trying to prolong the dream of her tickling my eyelashes.  I woke up shivering after swatting my nose.  A huge cockroach fell off my face and scurried under my jacket.  I jumped up and started ripping my clothes off, trying to find the roach.  I couldn’t find it and so I decided to shuffle off, cursing and trying to rearrange my torn clothes.  I quickly realized that I was barefoot.  Someone had stolen my shoes and my socks while I slept.   The significance of my new predicament didn’t escape me.  Without a left sock to put on first, what did fate have in store for me?

I walked on, vowing to take a straight line down Spaulding, vowing to go straight until I could go straight no longer.  I could not for the life of me fathom making a right or a left.  That would be calamitous.  Two nervous women walked by, stepping on the grass next to the sidewalk so as not to come too close to me (oh, you think I didn’t notice, but I did…).  I decided to mimic them and stepped on the grass as well.  Shit, I inadvertently made a right!   I cringed and quickly shielded my head, expecting a lightning bolt to scream out of the sky and strike me between the eyes.  That’s when I stubbed my toe on a sawed-off tree trunk.  I fell without grace, clutching my injured toe and tipping backwards.  I smacked my head on the edge of the sidewalk, snapping my neck in the process.  I died a couple of minutes later, amused by all the confused voices and sirens competing for space in my increasingly tranquil brain.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

“Winged Domino: Portrait of Valentine” by Roland Penrose, 1938.

INSPIRATION

by Andreas Economakis

Inspiration. How does one get it? Inspiration is such an elusive thing. There are days when you just can’t shut up, shut your mind off. Hyper aware. Hyper expressive. Everything inspires you then. A leaf, the way dust settles on the leaf, your cat’s quivering white whiskers, the way a hunk of cheese falls on the floor, how your cats react to it, how you react to them reacting to the cheese, the fact that you run to the computer to write it down, only to stare at the screen vacantly, your fingers frozen over the keyboard, mind drifting, wondering whether you should check your e-mail first and what should I have for dinner (?) and man, better wash that thought down with a beer, yeah, comfortable again in front of the screen, going online, nope, no messages, sign off, open Microsoft Word and stare at the vacant screen, nothing written yet, boldly typing the title, swig of beer, highlight, hit the bold-underline keys and lean back, INSPIRATION, feet on desk and another swig of beer, better go check on the plants, see if they’ve grown another millimeter, and what are the cats doing now and why is Billy always hungry (?), is it because he has a cancerous lump in his stomach, poor little guy and I can’t really do anything about the lump because he’s almost 15 and one just can’t cut into a cat at that age, but wait, they cut into my old man when he was 69, and, my oh my, my phone number starts with 69 and, oh wait, that’s the sign of the crab and, frankly, a position that’s pretty fun in bed except I don’t really do it all that often, I don’t know why, I should talk to my girlfriend about this and, shit, I should get back to writing about the cats and the cheese and, swig of beer, I’m just not really inspired to write anything today, just inspired in general and you stare at the title on the screen and, hands frozen above the keyboard you write “How does one get it?” Shit if I know, you think, it’s like your cat looking at his plate when he isn’t hungry, or a butterfly landing on your cheek, which is a good metaphor for how love strikes and how beautiful it is, and the moment you try and possess the butterfly it flies off, leaving your cheeks tingling and slightly dusted with butterfly dust, and you sit and stretch your face out into the air, waiting for the next butterfly to land, but it won’t ever land while you’re waiting, no, it will only land when you’ve given up completely and aren’t thinking about it, kind of like when you’re doing something you really like, say like snorkeling, and you aren’t thinking about sex, or the last meal you ate, or how it felt when you got that good luck phone call, or when you fell in love that time, or when that butterfly landed on your cheek earlier, no, it will come while you’re looking at a plate of fried fish, or severed cow heads bobbing slowly up and down in the sea, barely touching the billowing, drifting sand, or when you kick the pebble out of your flip-flop and then voila, the butterfly of inspiration, like the butterfly of love, will land on your cheek and send your heart into palpitations, your mind into alertness, aware, aware that your are staring at your computer screen and your fingers have just finished this story.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

MOUSEHEART

by Andreas Economakis

4:30pm.  I’m standing outside of TK Films, on Cory Avenue.  The day is hot and humid.  The brown litter of a million exhausts sticks to my skin like an itchy Teflon coat.  July in Beverly Hills.  Overhead, a noisy police helicopter competes with the constant drone of Porsches and Land Rovers and other large combustion engines whizzing down Sunset Blvd., a few meters to my left.  Chris’ cigarette smoke wafts over my shoulders, around my sunglasses.  I don’t mind.  My eyes are glued to the spectacle across the street.

Two young women, actress-types, are on their knees, shrieking.  Their long, tanned legs are stretched out on the pavement, their arms swishing underneath a gold-colored Buick with ugly rims that’s parked next to a dumpster.  A squad of frantic green parrots buzzes overhead, raising all kinds of hell.

“Check THAT out!” gurgles Chris, his eyes pinned on the two women.  For a distracted moment, I think he’s talking about the parrots.  I squint directly at sun, following the squawking.  I look at Chris.  Through the dancing sunspots that momentarily cloud my vision, he looks distorted.

“What do you think they’re looking for?” I ask, not really wanting the two women to get up and straighten out their hiked up miniskirts.

“Beats me,” my friend says, patting his beer-belly and letting his mirror Rayban sunglasses slide down his nose, “…but I sure hope they don’t find it!”  He shines a wide tobacco yellow grin my way.

Brian, the discontented receptionist, waddles up next to us.  He lights a cigarette, his eyes locked on the gold-colored Buick.  Those two women must know they are attracting a lot of attention.  In the reflection of a passing van’s windows we look like a bunch of horny frat-boys.  I shudder at the thought but don’t budge.  We’re talking backlit thigh hairs here.

“Damn!” is all Brian says, inhaling deeply from his American Spirit Light.  Chris and I nod together.  Something beeps and I look down at my cell phone.

“The client will be here any moment boys,” I mutter.  I’m hoping Chris will get the drift and get back to work.  I don’t want it to look like we’re all fucking off, which, of course, we are.   Though I’ve personally made sure that all is ready for the pre-production meeting that’s about to take place, I need to warn Chris anyway.  That’s my job.  That’s why they call me a Production Coordinator.  I coordinate people and things.  Well anyway, I act like you do.

The words bounce off of Chris, who’s no less interested in the meeting than if chipmunks mate in springtime or summer.  He pushes his mirror Raybans up his nose, tucks his shirt in and turns his twin mirrors towards me.  For a moment, he reminds me of Jon from CHIPS, only after an all-night bender and with a few years and beers strapped to his frame.  In the mirrors, I kind of look like a freaky Ponch, only with a touch of William Burroughs.  “What keeps mankind alive?” I ponder, staring at this sepia-tinted, receding-hairline hybrid that’s me.  “Bestial acts!”  I clear my throat and look towards the two women.

“I’m going to check it out!” Chris gurgles, snapping me out of my reverie.

“Insolent, this assistant,” I think to myself.

Affecting the other John, John Wayne, Chris swaggers across Cory Ave.

Well, it takes all of 30 seconds before Chris is on all fours as well, swishing his hand under the gold-colored Buick. The girls don’t even pay attention to him, all focused as they are at whoever or whatever is under that ugly hunk of Detroit’s finest.  For a brief moment, Chris is totally stretched out on his stomach, skinny legs poking dangerously into the street.  In a maddeningly quick psychedelic flash, I picture a car rolling over Chris’s legs, his beer belly exploding, me running, people screaming, blood and guts and beer everywhere, mirror Raybans cracked on the street, seven years bad luck.  Fuck!  Are these psychedelic flashes weird tracers from my past?  A friend once told me that eating psychedelic mushrooms more than 7 times makes people legally insane.

Curiosity finally gets the better of me.  Feigning indifference, I stroll over to the circus act, throwing one last glance at my cell phone and an apprehensive look at the window upstairs.  I want to be sure that Eva, my Swedish producer, isn’t looking out of the window at us, wondering why the hell we’re all fucking off.

I approach the spectacle. “What are we looking for?” I ask, knowing exactly what I’m looking for.  My question goes unanswered.  The beautiful legs continue to move and I hear some muffled exclamations.  I have a clear view of both women.  My heart skips a beat.  Deep down, I know that if I too drop on all fours, I will forever be a slave to backlit thighs and peach-colored lace underwear. “Ah, hell!” I drop down to my primitive state and peek under the gold-colored Buick.

I don’t see anything.  The women are swishing their arms wildly and Chris is groaning in an extended reach.

“WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?”  I half-yell.

“Rat!” Chris replies, matter-of-factly.  “They’re trying to catch their rat.”

A moment’s pause.  The reader will notice the diction, the grammar involved here.  “Their rat.”  There’s a rat under the gold car and this rat belongs to the beautiful backlit models.  I flatten out some more and strain to see the elusive quadruped.

“Rat?” I say aloud.

“He’s not going to answer you!  He’s a fucking rat!” Chris chuckles.

“I’m not talking to the beast you idiot,” I reply.

I picture myself catching the rat.  I have a clear shot at becoming a hero if I catch the large mouse.  The headlines will blare:  “Hero-Coordinator saves young woman’s pet mouse!  Couple to wed in April.”

But where is he?  I flatten myself onto the street for a better look, a few feet away from the future mother of my children.   My eyes drift up her back and settle on the base of her neck.  My heart skips another beat.  Something is looking back at me.  “Oh my God!  The rat is on her neck.  Wait!  No!  That’s not a rat,” I think to myself.  I look closer.  “That’s a tattoo.  A tattoo!”  A green snake is coiled around the young woman’s neck, its beady eyes looking directly at me.  The snake’s fangs are biting into a shiny red apple.  Milky white juice rolls down the apple seductively, onto the snake’s scaly green skin.  I’m transfixed, like Adam in the Garden of Eden.

“He’s running out of steam,” the other woman says.  “He’s over-exerted himself.”

“Amateur,” I think to myself.

A brown blur moves in the periphery of my vision.  The rat!  I have a bead on him.  Chris swipes his hand at the blur.  Suddenly, the brown fuzzy one scurries right up to my nose.  “Aaaagh!” I yell and jerk upward.  The metal clunking sound that follows is my cranium smacking the gold-colored Buick’s undercarriage.  Ouch!  This rat is huge.  Well, he looks huge, three inches from my nose.  Did the rodent just laugh at me?  I jump to my feet and back off onto the street cursing, rubbing the almost perverse little bump that’s rising out of my little bald spot.  A convertible Mercedes the color of a metallic prune honks aggressively and nearly runs me over.  The idiot actor/driver glares at me.  I flip him the bird.  He flips me back and mouths the word “jackass” from inside his ugly car.  The small crowd of TK employees gathered across the street laugh and hoot in unison.  I take a deep breath and plunge forward.

I crouch down and once again look under the gold-colored Buick.  My rodent friend looks back at me, beady black eyes trembling in their sockets, nose twitching.  He seems both energized and lethargic at the same time.  Chris’ hand swipes again and the rat dashes off toward one of the girls.  She makes a grab for him but he fakes to the right, bolting by one of her smudged kneecaps.  He banks to the curb and heads for the next parked car, a silver Beetle.

We all take our battle stations around the Beetle.  Outside of the office, more faces and murmurs gather.  A circus-like atmosphere is starting to develop.

Chris makes another swipe at the rat and he moves toward the curb.  I jump up and make for that spot.  I’m not exactly sure what I will do if I corner him.  One doesn’t think about these things when rat hunting.

As soon as I get there, the rodent makes a break for it and zooms past me, ducking around Chris’s blonde palm.  “Los Ratos!”  Chris yells, scrambling underneath the gold Buick again.

Like four seasoned animal wranglers from Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom,” we take our places once again around the Buick.  That’s when things take a surprising turn.

Before I even crouch down, the little brown beast runs up to my like-colored hiking boots and pauses, nose twitching, body shaking like a leaf.  I look at the two women, then down at the rat.  Vortex vision.  The world becomes a slow-motion pinhole, the circle dominated by the rodent.  A rat in the pinhole.  Rattus Norvegicus is all that exists in the world at this moment.  No girls, no backlit thighs, no smoke or squished caterpillars or alarm clocks that don’t go off, no white crust around corroded car-battery terminals.  Just the rat and me.  Primitive hunting instinct.  Focus so pure it’s like sex.  Better.  It’s very primal…

So there I am, floating in this absolute, profound, vortex-induced silence.  I kneel down in slow motion, my right hand poised to grab my prey by the scruff of his neck.  I am two inches away from nirvana.  A predator, coiled, ready to strike.  Our eyes meet for second and for the first time in my life I look into the face of eternity, into creation itself.  I pause.  The rat twitches and springs forward with his muscular rodent legs.  My hand shoots out, faster than lightning but slow as a snail, a bullet against a gray background filmed at a 2000 frames per second, like those government films of a milk drop exploding on a lake of milk.

The bullet isn’t fast enough for a clean hit, but it lands on its mark nonetheless.  I miss the speedy rodent’s neck but my fist closes in on his haunches.  I have the rat by his ass!

I hoist the rat up above my head, half of my fist grasping his rump, the other half wrapped around his long, bony tail.  In a testosterone-filled moment of pure triumph, I bellow: “I’ve got him,” my voice booming, the world suddenly stopping to take note of my fearlessness, of my manliness, of my sheer Scottish-styled bravery.  Mouseheart!  I look over at the two women with a swagger and a sly smile, dripping some sort of manly 007 Venus flytrap aphrodisiac charm like Sean Connery or Timothy Dalton or Daniel Craig.  Definitely one of these Bonds.  Not the other ones.  They were poofters.

Both long-legged beauties are staring at me, mouths agape.  I bet they’ve never seen a man quite like me.  “This is how they make ‘em in Greece, girls” I want to say.  None of this half-caf double latte & a panini, manicure pedicure metro-sexual sensitive “I’m looking for the inner boy in me” bullshit.  Real men don’t flinch!  Real men don’t floss!  Real men don’t feel pain!  We roll up our sleeves and catch fierce jungle animals with our bare hands!

Just then, right then, my world is turned upside down.  My prey suddenly decides to turn Kujo on me.  Like a freaky Chinese contortionist, he does a 180, his toned athletic body folding in half.  I catch a tiny glint of the beast’s white fangs.  Then, the unthinkable happens.  Kujo bites down deep into my right index finger.  I bellow again.  Or is it a shriek?

Almost in response to my shriek, a black Lincoln Towncar pulls up in front of TK Films.  I look over towards the black Lincoln, the very car that houses TK’s big client, Mr. Miller Genuine Draught himself.  Mr. Draught steps out of his car, his mouth wide open, his eyes locked on the squirming rodent in my hands.

In a primitive moment of instinctive survival, I hurl the great beast across the street, yelling: “Aaaagh, get the fuck off of me!”

Kujo flies across the street in cartwheel fashion, a trapeze artist hell-bent on impressing my client.  He lands right by the client’s feet, dazed.  Dear god!  As if on cue, the rodent flops his bony tail across the client’s expensive Italian shoe.  The client shrieks and jumps back into his Lincoln, clunking his head on the car door.

“Why did you throw him?” I hear one of the women scream.  She’s barely audible over the guffawing of the office personnel, over the sheer horror of my breath as I look at my bleeding hand.  Across the street, the stricken rat hesitates and then high-tails it under another dumpster.

“He BIT me!” I snarl at the girl, watching my dreams of Coronas on the beach and sand on the sheets and that sweet, sweet smell on the pillows swirl down the toilet. “Aw hell, your rat bit me…”

“He’s not our rat!  Why did you throw him like that?”

Ten thoughts flash through my mind simultaneously.  One thought involves a violent act; all nine other involve a syringe the size of Baja with a rabies antidote being jammed with force into my tense stomach muscles.  I feel faint.

“Oh shit,” I mutter to myself, clutching my throbbing, bloody hand.  Ironically, it’s my belly that hurts more.

“He’s not your rat?” Chris barely whispers.  The two women shake their heads and look at me, irritably.

“We were just trying to catch him,” one of the women says.  I laugh at myself, trying to laugh at them.

I don’t wait around for the two mini-skirted freaks to justify their outrageous action.  Clutching my bleeding hand like a pistol, I yell “OUT OF MY WAY!” and barrel across the street.  The client steps in front of me and I barrel past him too.  I’m an injured man.  This is an emergency.  I hustle through the office door, screaming past Michael, the Executive Producer.  He’s busy screaming past me to go see what all the commotion is about now that his client has arrived.

“What’s going on here?” I hear Michael yell as I rush to the office bathroom.  Thinking he’s talking to me, I yell back “A fucking rat bit me!”  I kick open the bathroom door and plunge my stricken mitt under tepid water.  I try to catch my breath.  Rabid red water swirls down the drain.  Spots not unlike the earlier sunspots cloud my vision.  I feel dizzy.  Surely this is all a dream.  Rats don’t bite people in Beverly Hills.

Before I know it, Michael is crowding the bathroom door in a visibly perturbed and ominous manner.  Stale cigar smoke wafts directly to my nostrils.   “What the fuck just happened?” he asks.  Then, with a distinctly NY Italian accent, obviously exhumed in a state of crisis, he says: “Why’d you fucking throw a fucking rodent at the client?” He obviously doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his diction or the fact that I’m rabid, slowly dying and a prime candidate for workman’s compensation.

“I thought he was a show rat!” I reply, staring at my finger.  It’s beginning to throb.  The puncture wound is gushing blood in spurts, timed perfectly to my beating heart and brain, my dying heart and brain.  Suddenly, the bathroom feels tiny.

“What?!” Michael yells.  Chris appears behind Michael’s fat shoulders, dancing from foot to foot for a peak at the freak.

“I thought the rat belonged to those two actresses. I was trying to help them catch it,” I breathe.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Michael belts out, sounding more and more Bensonhurst by the minute.  Any moment now he’s going to cut my head off and hold it over his head like a watermelon.  The bathroom gets even smaller.  I shut the water off and turn to Little Italy’s finest with determination.  He’s a big man, twice as wide as me.

“I think I’d better be getting to a hospital,” I manage to choke out, holding my injured finger out front as proof.  Michael glares at me like Tony Soprano.  He doesn’t budge.  His glistening eyes move slowly from my hair to my feet and back up to my face.   Fat Italians are a scary fucking people.  Sure, they lull you in with that mama pizza, let’s all sit at the same table and break bread with the kids crap, but deep down they just want to slit your throat, wrap you up in plastic garbage bags and stuff you into the trunk of a Cadillac, pumping a few 357 slugs into you for good measure.  Hell, I saw “Goodfellas”!

I wrap my hand in toilet paper and make for the door, eyes diverted so that a battle of the wills won’t ensue.  Little Italy rumbles, then moves.  As I glide past Michael, I hear Chris address him in a meek manner:  “This is all my fault.  I feel responsible here.  If I hadn’t gone over to help those two whacked out chicks, this wouldn’t be happening….  I’ll take him to Cedars-Sinai Hospital….”

I make my way back onto the street.  A small crowd has formed. I see someone mimic my rat toss across the street.  Everyone bursts out laughing.

“Chris!” I yell.  “Get your car.  Let’s go!”  Chris hurls his ample frame up Cory Ave.  Before I can spit, a baby blue ‘68 Camaro pulls up and Chris swings the door open.  I pile in and slam the door shut, eyes glued straight ahead.  What the hell, I turn and wave my bloody toilet paper finger to the small, merry crowd.  Chris chirps the tires and leaves the crowd in a cloud of blue-grey smoke.  At long last, we’re on our way.

“It’s all my fault, dude,” Chris says as he speeds down Doheny Ave., on the way to the hospital.  The afternoon lighting is incredible.  Is this all a dream, a bad remake of “Thelma & Louise”?

“No it’s not.” I reply, looking dreamily at the rose colored clouds.  I’m sinking into a dream.  Or is it death?  My hand sits on my lap like some bloody object I picked up accidentally from the street.

I look at Chris.  He’s sweating like a pro-wrestler.  Strange, considering a cool breeze is blowing in through the windows.

“I went across the street willingly, Chris,” I say.

“Still…” he replies, shooting past Beverly Blvd., forgetting to turn towards the hospital.

“You missed the turn, Chris!” I mutter.  I’m slowly coming to.  The urgency of my predicament seems very real all of a sudden.  I can feel the rabies and the plague crawling up my bloodstream, slowly making their way to my heart, to my brain.  If Chris doesn’t hurry, I will start foaming at the mouth.  I become nauseous.

“Shit!  See, you can tell I’m nervous, dude.”  He shoots me a worried glance.  I feel like I’m about to be sick.  “Whoa, dude!  You okay?  You’re not going to hurl, are you?”  He looks at me and then around the interior of his beloved car.

“I’m okay, but hurry up”.

Chris runs through a red light and snaps a Dukes of Hazard u-turn.  My stomach heaves to the right and then settles on the left.  I burp some sulfur and breathe deeply.

“It’s okay to break the law, isn’t it?  I mean, this is an emergency, right?  You’ve been mauled and we’re going to the hospital, right?”  He nervously peers into the rear view mirror for the imaginary cop.  He fumbles for a cigarette.

“Yeah,” I reply.  How far is this fucking hospital?  Seems like I’ve been in the car for weeks.

We pull into the emergency ward of the hospital.  A rather frantic Chris beelines for the ambulance parking space, nearly running over a security guard.  Ignoring the gesticulating guard, he runs around to my side and helps me out.

“Christ, Chris, I’m not a fucking cripple.  I got it!”

Instinctively, I limp into the ward.  An old friend in New York taught me the limping trick.  It was his contention that the more messed up you are, the faster the treatment in these big city hospitals. Actually, upon entering the squeaky clean lobby of Cedars, I notice that not a soul is waiting.  Rich people’s hospitals are such a trip!  The last time I was in a hospital was in NY.  I had to wait for four hours in a carnival-like atmosphere for treatment.  I saw some amazing things in those four hours.  The image of a hobo on a stretcher with the crucifix carved onto his face will be with me forever.

No crucifixes at Cedars-Sinai.  In an absolutely antiseptic and politically correct LA way, the hospital is rabidly non-denominational.

I drag my battered countenance to the front desk.  A young male nurse in clean civvies and a nametag looks up at me. “May I help you?” he asks politely, his fingers not leaving the keyboard of the computer.

“I need to see a doctor,” I reply.

“What’s wrong?” asks the calm nurse at the computer.

“A rat bit me on the finger about a half hour ago.”  I wait for his surprised expression.  There is none.

“Let’s take a look.”

I lift my hand, unwrap the toilet paper and hold my finger before him, like a kid presenting a broken toy to his daddy.  Not in the least bit impressed, the nurse pulls out a clipboard, attaches a form to it and points me to the waiting area.  “Fill this out and we’ll call you as soon as a doctor is available.”

“Do we need to catch the rat?  You know, what if it was rabid?”  Chris blurts from behind me.

“Oh dear me, no!  That won’t be necessary,” the nurse replies.

“I could hit him over the head with a shovel and bring him in, if you want,” Chris interjects.  I can’t figure this guy out.  What courses through Chris’ brain would probably mystify a few shrinks.

“That really won’t be necessary,” says the nurse, knitting his eyebrows in disgust.

“What about rabies, or the plague?  We’re talking a dumpster rat here.  Not the cleanest fella I’ve ever seen.”

The nurse is getting a little uneasy.  Obviously, not too many people like Chris walk into Beverly Hills hospitals.  Chris needs some southern logic to stop him from running back to Cory Avenue and assaulting that poor rat with a shovel or a shotgun.

“Don’t you worry.  Here…” the nurse says, handing me a pen and pointing once again to the waiting area.  A couple of other patients walk in and head for the desk.  I limp over to the couch.

“What’s wrong with your leg, dude?” Chris practically shouts.  He’s definitely in spontaneous combust mode.  The bigger the panic, the louder the Chris.

I sit down and look at the form.  For some unknown reason, Chris’ agitation rubs off and the paper goes out of focus.  The rabies and plague are obviously affecting my vision.  A bead of sweat trickles down my nose, making it twitch.  My eyes feel beady, like they’re going to roll out of their sockets.  I can feel myself trembling.  Dear God, I’m turning into a rat!

A young woman wearing way too many clothes walks up to the couch right next to mine and sits down with her clipboard.  I look over at her.  She clutches her head slowly and freezes, kind of like that “silent scream” painting.

I slowly peel back the tissue and look at the rat bite.  Two deep puncture wounds. The skin around the incisions is turning white.  My whole hand looks ghostly white.  Rabies!  I’m a dying man.

Suddenly, a large explosion issues from the silent-scream woman next to me, shocking the pen out of my fingers.  A deep, guttural, wheezing, wall-shattering cough bursts forth from her quivering lips, sending her into a tense fetal position on the couch.  Chris springs forth from his position like a rocket.  When the momentum catches up with him, he’s on the other side of the waiting room, examining the pastel paintings on the walls.

“Dude!  Check this out,” he half-yells across the fluorescent room, beckoning me over.  The king of subtlety, Chris is not.

“What?” I reply, not budging.  I gather my pen from the floor.

“Dude, seriously, come check this out!”  He’s pointing at a pastel painting not unlike the others.  Done with my test, I hobble over to the painting.  It’s either a flower, a building or a sailboat.  Or maybe it’s a mountain.

Chris whispers in my ear: “You know why I called you over here, right?”

I gaze at the woman and look Chris squarely in the face.  “Why’s that, Chris?” I ask loudly.

“Shhhhh!  Did you hear that woman?  Woah, dude!!  A cough like that has got to be contagious.  I mean, she’s in a hospital emergency room, dude!”

“So are you, Johnson!”  I reply and walk over to the nurse.  He takes the clipboard from me and I sit down by the woman again.  Chris continues to bounce from foot to foot by the surrealist pastel painting.

A few moments later, the nurse points at me and calls me over.  Another nurse is standing beside him.

“Are you our rat bite?” she asks, face wide with hilarity.

“Uh, huh!”

“Follow me.”

We travel down a long corridor, past several rooms with paper-covered beds.  A long, hysterical shriek issues from the depths of the building.  The nurse chuckles and looks at me.  I don’t think it’s funny.  There’s a certain feeling of powerlessness one gets in hospitals.

I’m ushered into a room with a partition in the middle.  A young woman is sitting on the bed on the other side.  A clean-cut fellow with an otherwise enormous Taliban beard is hovering around her.  They talk in whispers.

The nurse asks me to sit down on the bed.  She swivels a TV on an arm right up to my nose and turns it on.  The Food Channel blinks to life an inch away from me.  The nurse switches channels.  The Simpsons come on.  Homer has Bart’s neck in his hands and Bart is choking, his beady eyes almost popping out of their sockets.

“We’ve got cable here,” the nurse says with pride.  “Make yourself comfortable and the doctor will be with you shortly.”

I switch channels.  I once saw a documentary about this tribe in India that considers rats a delicacy.  The children fan out across fields and scare the rats out of holes, chasing them down and grabbing them with their bare hands.  How come the rats don’t bite them?  In the evenings, the tribe cooks the rats by throwing them as they are on a fire.  When the fur is singed off and the skin is nice and roasted, they pick the meat off, like we eat chicken at KFC.  Meanwhile, in New Delhi, one out of every god knows how many rats is rabid.  In the film, this guy pokes a stick at a rabid rat and it leaps four feet into the air, growling and gnashing at the stick.  I wonder if anyone in LA eats rats.  Didn’t someone once find a rabid rat in Griffith Park?  I switch the TV off.

The couple next to me are murmuring.  I think I hear the woman say that she has a brain tumor and is going to die.  The bearded man acts incredulous.  I’m obviously in the terminal ward.

“Are you the one who got bit by Mickey Mouse?” a young Latino man in green scrubs asks me from the door.

“Uh, huh…” I reply.

“Hi, I’m Tomas.  I’m going to irrigate your wound and the doctor will be right with you.”  Where is the doctor anyway?  He’s been “right with me” for hours.  The fucker is probably in the broom closet smoking a joint and getting it on with the nurses.

“How’d this happen?  Why’d Mickey bite you?”  He pulls out a massive syringe from a drawer.  Oh, Jesus, it’s true!  I gulp.  My stomach tenses into a knot.  Is it 30 or 40 shots that they have to pump into your stomach for rabies?  The nurse eyeballs me and chuckles.

“Don’t worry.  I’m only going to use this to irrigate the wound.”

I recount the tale of how I was attacked by the big mouse.  The medic doesn’t look up from the wound but keeps nodding and chuckling.  He sprays the fang bites with a saline solution.  My hand stings and throbs but I can take it.

“Am I your first rat case?” I ask.

“Oh, heavens no.  We see it all here.  Worst case I’ve seen was a dog bite.  A police dog chewed this homeless guy to bits.  He barely made it.  Really horrible.”

My rat bite seems kind of trivial all of a sudden.

“Am I going to get those rabies shots?  How many do I have to take?”

Tomas chuckles.

“What, for this little mouse bite?  There’s no rabies in LA.  You have nothing to worry about.  A couple of stitches and some antibiotics and you’ll be up and running.”  He finishes prepping my wound and waves goodbye.

“Hello Andreas, I’m Doctor Larson.  Are you our rat bite du jour?” a middle age man with a clipboard asks, approaching my bed.  He has squeaky-clean hands and has a touch of pomade in his hair.  I can tell he plays tennis and golf at some posh country club in Beverly Hills.  He probably has an Olympic-size swimming pool at home.  They all do.

“Hi Doc,” I say, feebly.

“How’d this happen?” he asks.  I repeat the story.  He looks at my finger, carefully inspecting the wound.  Doctors have such soft touches.

“Yup, looks like you’ll need a couple of stitches.”  He starts to prep for the operation.

“You get many cases like this, doc?”

“I wouldn’t say many, and none quite like yours.  Most people are trying to run away from or scare away the rat, not grab it.”

“I see…”

“And you have your weird cases too, of course…” he adds.

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, rats and other little furry things used in play, in bed, you know during sex.”

“What?!”

“They tend to freak out at the most inopportune times and bite down where they will.”

“Oh,” I say, wondering if Richard Gere lives nearby.

The smiling doctor finishes up.  He binds my finger in an enormous white bandage, scribbles a prescription on some paper and bids me farewell.  My white finger looks like a lighthouse.  An administrator comes by with a wheelchair and asks me to take a seat.  I’m wheeled out to the reception area.  After filling out a form, I am released into Chris’ custody.  He laughs at the size of my bandage.  We ride back to TK Films in perfect silence.  It’s dark outside.

We pull up to the office.  The rat and the two women are long gone.  I look up to the conference room and can see several heads bobbing up and down.  The meeting is in full swing.  They’re probably all laughing.  I bound up the stairs, my white finger a beacon of embarrassment.

Michael is at the top of the stairs, on his way down.  He shakes his head and stops.

“You okay?  You gonna live?” he asks.

“Yeah, except my ego has been mortally wounded.”

“What the hell were you tossing rats for?” he asks, half-seriously, half-laughing.

“Vortex vision, Michael.  It was me and the rat.”

“It was more than that.  Classic case of thinking with your little head, not your big head.”

“I guess so,” I reply, though I know he’s wrong.  I wouldn’t trade the rat in the pinhole for all the money in the world.  Michael will never know the vortex, the pure focus of creation, of life itself.  Michael will never feel temptation the way I did, the way Adam must have felt it in the Garden of Eden.  Michael will never be Mouseheart.

“Well anyway, the client’s okay,” he says on his way down the stairs, popping a glance at my finger.

“Cool!” I reply.

“Rat-boy!” he yells out and laughs before the door slams shut.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Mine company’s headquarters, Megalo Livadi, Serifos. Panoramio photo by glavind.

“JUMP!”

by Andreas Economakis

Serifos is a beautiful little island, not 3 hours from Athens by boat. Rocky at first glance, one soon realizes that there is quite a bit of greenery hidden here and there, mostly in the craggy gorges and Lilliputian valleys. The island is deceptive. It has a ghostlike quality at times, the majority of visitors being Athenians who come only for the weekends. The real natives, a scant 600 or so, work as construction workers, shop-owners, municipal employees or fishermen. The rest are old folk.

Serifos’ once booming population and economy, both products of the island’s iron ore mining facilities, slowly disintegrated when the mines shut their doors in 1963. In the small village of Megalo Livadi, on the far side of the island, the German mining company’s neo-classical headquarters stand semi-dilapidated amidst a row of palm trees at the end of the seaside village’s only main road, a dirt road. Kind of like a spaceship that landed in the middle of nowhere, the “villa,” as the locals call the building, is too huge for the place and yet beautiful to look at. Chickens peck along the dirt road an the sandy beach in front of two solitary coffee shops, both devoid of customers in this once bustling mining town that must now have no more than 10 permanent inhabitants. Tourists tend to roll in with mouths agape, sensing that they’ve happened upon some sort of landscape conjured up by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or his Greek equivalent.

Next to the crumbling headquarters is a memorial to the four miners killed in a protest strike against the mining company in 1916. The miners died fighting for better work conditions and an 8-hour workday. During the strike, the despised owner George Groman suddenly ordered his thug-like foremen and a small group of gendarmes to open fire on the striking workers in order to get them to return to work. Four miners fell dead and scores more were wounded before bystander wives and workers picked up stones and counter-attacked, killing the armed detachment to a man and throwing all the bodies into the sea. A workers’ commune was proclaimed and set up but it was quickly thrown into disarray by the arrival of a French battleship. The French returned Groman to power on the condition that he accept the 8-hour workday.

When I first visited Serifos I had no idea this village existed, no idea Serifos was a mining island, no idea people had died here fighting for a bit of human decency. There is something mystical about Serifos, something hidden from the eyes. There’s an old sayin in Greece that wherever you dig, you will find the bones of brave ancestors. Serifos is no exception. People died on this island fighting for justice. The dirt and rocks have been soaked with blood. One gets the sense that the land has taken notice of this, that something important is stirring under the earth, deep in the island’s history. Call it a feeling, call it an energy. One definitely senses this energy when visiting Serifos. At least, I did.

A few summers ago, when I first set foot on the island, I wanted to be alone. I needed time to gather my thoughts after a long job and an even longer broken relationship. That desire lasted all of 10 minutes after I set foot on the port. All of a sudden I wanted to be social. Not yet aware of Serifos’ history or powerful energy, I attributed the change in my disposition to the brilliant white buildings, the crystal blue sky, the seagulls, the happy people riding on scooters, everything and everyone so very alive in the clean salty air.

Like most first-time visitors to Serifos, I had been deposited by the ferry on the busy side of the island, near the small hotels and bars and restaurants and boats and noise. I remembered that my cousin Anna had a summerhouse up in the mountain village of Chora.  I called her up on her mobile, wondering if she was nude bathing on the island’s white sand beaches as I’d heard she liked to do.  Anna was happy to hear from me and invited me up to her village for drinks right away.

The epidemy of a social creature, Anna was surrounded by a horde of lively people at the local café.  I took to the new climate and crowd like a fish to water. I met Rachel, an English lawyer specializing in Romani law, with whom I would eventually develop a film on Kosovo Gypsies, a film we never made (if only someone would have given us the money…). I also met a couple from Manchester. He was a musician in a fairly successful band there. She was a teacher.  She was gorgeous, simply stunning.  I spent every minute I could with this English couple.  Simply looking at her in her flowery see-through summer dresses made my heart skip a few beats.

On their last night on Serifos we all went out drinking.  We were down by the port where all the bars are.  Eventually the bars closed and we bought some beers and decided to go back up to Chora and catch the sunrise.  As there were three of us and I was the only one with a bike, I offered to give them a ride, one by one, up to the village. She rode first.  We rushed up the hill, she clinging onto me tightly. I could feel her warm body against my back, her soft thighs pressed against my legs. She rested her head close to my neck to shelter her eyes from the wind.  Her breath sent shivers down my spine.  I swear I could have ridden all night.  I wanted to take her to the abandoned mining headquarters, to swim naked in the phosphorescent sea with her, to gaze at the yellow moon together as it slowly drifted against the pinhole black sky.  At the fork in the road, I made a right and continued to Chora, to our original destination.   Maybe if I’d made a left my life would be different now.  Simple as that: right or left?

When we got to the village, it was all I could do to not kiss her.
But I rode back down for her boyfriend.  Back up in the village we stumbled around the small, cascading white houses, which literally crawl up against each other like a Lego blocks.  We were having fun jumping from one house to the next.  We came across a big divide between two houses.  Perhaps one could leap to the other side, but it would be suicidal.  Especially with all the booze we had consumed. Her boyfriend had developed a macho attitude over the course of the night, perhaps sensing the turbulent chemistry between his girlfriend and me.

He announced that he was going to jump. His girlfriend pleaded with him to not do it. The more she pleaded, the more he wanted to jump. He took a few steps back and prepared himself for the death leap. I watched with baited breath. This musician was going to sacrifice himself at our feet, right there before the altar of our burgeoning love. He would surely die and I would end up in her arms, kissing her wet salty cheeks, sweaty skin and arms entwined, little children laughing, a house in the English countryside, summers in Greece, the trickle of cold ouzo gliding down suntanned skin as frothy blue waves washed over our tingling flesh, alive, together, eternal…

“Don’t do it man,” I yelped at the last moment. Why did I say that? He stopped and looked at me. “You’ll never make it. You’re way too fucked up,” I went on, my lips moving mechanically, some greater force controlling me like a puppet. His girlfriend stroked my arm in thanks and a flash of electricity rushed through me. My other self yelled, silently, desperately: “Jump, you English fuck. Jump!”

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

MY LAST DAY IN HARLEM

by Andreas Economakis

I enter a dirty, run down bathroom.  My hair and blue work clothes are covered in white dust.  The wall is pockmarked with holes, sprayed with messy graffiti and blood.  My steel-toe boots crunch over spent syringes and a bunch of empty crack vials with colorful plastic caps.

Drilling sounds and faint Salsa music can be heard in the background.   A door slams and a couple can be heard arguing and screaming at each other.  Then a baby starts wailing.

I take a leak and approach the cracked bathroom mirror.  I look at myself.  Red eyes, tangled hair, unshaven.  I exit the bathroom and head toward the living room.

“You know, I’m going to miss this place,” I say as I walk down the dark dirty hallway.

“This dump?” Ernesto calls out from the living room.

I enter the living room, which is in the process of renovation.  Tools and building supplies are stacked here and there.  A small radio plays Willie Colon.

Ernesto is on a ladder, swaying his hips to the music as he dismantles a light fixture.  Thin stiletto mustache, angular Puerto Rican features.  He has a V-shaped body-builder’s torso, huge muscular arms and a powerful neck.  Strangely skinny legs in tight jeans, the same blue NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development work shirt as me.  Difference is he’s clean, spotless.

“The City should tear this shit down instead of trying to renovate it.  What’s the fucking use anyway?  This place is going to be trashed the moment we turn it over, right?”

“Depends…” I reply.

“On what?  They should blow up the whole block. Cono!  Filthy crackheads!  How can these people live like this?” Ernesto says, snipping a wire.

“Ernesto, man, it’s the culture of poverty.  Like the reverse Midas touch.”

“The reverse… what?  Did you just smoke a joint, cabron?” he says, looking at me with a quizzical smile.

I pick up a tattered old black and white photo.  An elderly Harlem couple smile arm in arm on the street, circa 1930’s.  They are dressed in their Sunday finest.  A clean, safe, grainy world.  Frozen in time.  At least, frozen in this frame.

“Just as wealth begets wealth, so it goes with poverty,” I say.

“Wealth beget… Shit!  Is that what they teach you crackers in college?” he quips.  “Hand me the crow bar.”

I rummage through Ernesto’s heavy toolbox, looking for the crowbar.

“It’s been planned this way.  They want to keep the people anesthetized and divided.  Racism, sexism… all the “isms” really, they’re just a weapon created by the powers in charge to increase their profits.”

“Cubism too?” Ernesto says, smiling.  I smile back.

“And they don’t even need to wield the ‘ism’ weapon themselves.  It’s a like virus.  They just hand it over to people like you and me and we turn it on each other.  We become self-replicating stereotypes while they provide the junk that destroys us at a profit.  They wait until we chop each other up into little pieces and then they have us for dinner.”

“Shut up, maricon!  You’re making me hungry!”

I finally find the crowbar and pull it out.

“Have you ever wondered why there are so many liquor stores and funeral homes in Harlem?  And why is it easier to buy crack here than pizza?” I say, extending the crowbar toward Ernesto.

“Crackheads don’t eat pizza, bro.  They’re never hungry,” Ernesto replies with laughing eyes.

One hand on the fixture wire, Ernesto grabs the crow bar, sending a jolt of electricity through my body.  I fall on my ass in a cloud of sheetrock dust.  Ernesto bursts out laughing.

“Wake up, dude!”  Ernesto yells.

“Jesus!” is all my shocked lungs are able to squeeze out.  Ernesto steps down off the ladder.

“A full year here and you didn’t learn anything college boy!” he says, helping me up onto my feet.  He tries to dust me off but quickly gives up.

“Ich!  Hopeless,” he says, a disgusted look on his face.  He looks to clean his hands instead.  He then looks at his watch.

“Shit!  Let’s pack it up.  Time to get the fuck out of this rat hole,” he says, excitedly.

Ernesto pulls his shirt off, grabs his bag and dances to the bathroom, in tune with the music.  His muscular back is covered with a huge tattoo of a bald eagle in flight with a bleeding heart in its talons.  The heart has an American flag printed on it.

“I can’t believe it’s your last day, bro!  Fucking blowing this dump!  How does it feel?”

“Like a refreshing bolt of electricity,” I reply.  “Jolting!”

“You know, I’m going to miss your do goody good Leave it to Beaver humor…”

“You’re going to miss electrocuting me!” I say, trying to dust myself off.

“That’s right bro!  Call it the reverse Puerto Rican touch!  Death row revenge!  It’s about time we turned up the juice on you crackers!”

Ernesto stalls in the bathroom, horrified by the filth.

“Oh fuck!” he cringes.

Careful not to touch anything, he starts washing himself by the sink.  I start packing up his tools.

“So, you excited?  All that sun, the chiquitas…” he asks over the trickling bathroom water.

“I’m psyched to see Marisa again,” I reply.

“It was about time, bro!  You’ve been going on like Groucho… Marx and shit!  You get all fucking political when you haven’t gotten laid!”

“You think?”

Ernesto shines me a big sunny smile from the dark bathroom.

“Just listen to you,” he says.  “You’re like a god damn pocket revolution about to go off.  Yeah bro, you’re ripe!  Ready to drop off the tree ripe if you ask me.”

“Ripe and ready to join all the other fruits in Cali-forni-ay, huh?” I smile back.

Ernesto looks pensive.

“You know what I like about California?  It’s clean out there.  Sunny and clean.  That’s why everybody’s got a big ass smile on their face.  Just like in Chips.  Not like this dump!”

Ernesto pauses as he inspects himself in the mirror.  “My man, Eric Estrada,” he adds.  I’m not sure if he’s just mentioned the actor because he’s a symbol of California or if he’s referring to his mirrored self.  Ernesto could easily play in the movies.  He’s got the look.  He’s got all the right angles.  Cameras love guys like Ernesto.  And Eric Estrada.

Transported if ever so briefly to the Golden State, I start humming a Woody Guthrie tune as I finish collecting all the tools.

“California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see.  But believe it or not you won’t find it so hot if you ain’t got the do-re-mi…”

“What, is that from the Bible or something?” Ernesto asks as he starts to brush his teeth.

“You could say that…”

“You know, I never could figure out what a college-educated, Upper West Side boy from fucking Europe and shit is doing over on this side of hell.  I mean, shit, what’s the point of college if you end up in the ghetto?” Ernesto wonders, blue-green toothpaste suds overflowing out of his mouth.

“Depends on what you mean by end up in the ghetto.”

Ernesto spits the toothpaste out.

“I mean end up in the ghetto, bro.  Here.  Rubbing elbows with the living dead.  This is where we are, right?” He wipes his face with a towel.

“How do you mean?” I ask.

Ernesto dries himself, puts on a fresh shirt, combs himself carefully and splashes some cologne on.

“Questions, questions.  But who’s got the answers maricon?”  He emerges from the bathroom, looking fresh.  He smells like springtime in deep winter.

“You got a date or something?” I ask, my nose tingling in the minty chemical breeze.

“What? Just ‘cause I work in the filth means I gotta be filthy?”  He looks at me with a frown on his face.  “I mean, just look at you, bro!  Aaach!   You look like a… god damn… junkie ran over you.”

“I’d get jumped in a second if I walked out of here looking all fresh like you.”

Ernesto laughs.

“Homeboys would be lining up to bust all over your cracker ass!” he says with a wide grin on his face, air fucking just in case I didn’t get it.

“And what if God is black?” I ask.

“Then your ass better be the size of Texas, bro!” Ernesto quips right back, slapping his skinny leg with his muscular hand in full glee.

Some sort of “Dennis Dalton meets the Mahatma Gandhi for drinks in Hailie Selasie’s Ethiopia” thing takes over me and I turn toward V-Man with a skeptical look.

“What if we go to heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the black man as an inferior, and god is there, and we look up and he is not white?  He’s black.  What then is our response?” I ask, quoting Robert Kennedy (how did I remember this?  I mean, I’m from Greece…).  What’s gotten in to me?

Ernesto sizes me up with a glint in his eyes.  He smiles, a small pointy curve of a smile barely visible on the corner of his mouth, like a small and concealed fish-gutting knife.

“There you go again, bro!” he says, preparing himself like the Pro Wrestler of all orators.  He snorts.  I take a step back.

“Well shit, first off I’d ask God to put down the motherfucking crack pipe he’s been sucking on like a titty all these years and explain to me why the fuck he’s been torturing his people so hard.  Shit!  That’s what I would ask the crazy motherfucker!  And I’ve got a million other questions for him too!  Like what’s up with slavery and prostitution and AIDS and poverty and kids dying of hunger and disease and thirst while all the fucking Nazis controlling all the wealth and power party it up in our faces.  If God were black!  Where the fuck do you come up with this stuff, homeboy?”

Not sure if Ernesto is joking or serious, I watch him stomp his way to the door.  He grabs his heavy toolbox like it’s feather light and exits, leaving me all alone in the dusty room.  The familiar sounds of the building breathing with life come back, making me feel all the more alone.  I look around one last time and head for the door.

I slowly exit into the rundown hallway.  Syringes and crack vials, broken walls, filth and blood and graffiti everywhere.  Hard to believe people actually live in this building.

Ernesto steps out of the dark, a shiny American padlock in his hands.  He pulls the chain around the doorframe with force and closes it with the padlock.  He pushes and kicks the door hard to make sure it can’t be forced.

“Don’t know why we fucking bother.  Fucking zombies always get it, right?” he says.  He turns and starts walking down the stairs.

A nearby door is unbolted and a little old lady in her seventies cautiously peeks out into the hallway.  She makes eye contact with me and quickly closes her door in fear.   I turn and follow Ernesto down the stairs, leaving a trail of dusty white boot prints.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

KARMIC CAT PISS

by Andreas Economakis

You wake up to the Doppler–effect roar of a Japanese motorcycle and the neighbor’s muffled TV, the host rattling on like a jackass on steroids.  You try, you try hard to put your first bare foot down on the right side of the bed, not the wrong side.  Call it your little karmic effort every morning, you truly believe that what goes around comes around and if we all tried to be a little more positive the world would be a better place, the sun shining, people always smiling, kids giggling, wars and strife and broken hearts relegated to the dustbin of history.  A new era is dawning and you played your part!

That said and done, you end up kicking your cat in the ribs, it was a mistake, the damn fool always gets tangled up in your feet at the door, he never once calls out that he’s there before you accidentally kick him.  No, he never warns you.  The crying and pestering and hurt attitude begins only once you’ve already committed the violent act of feline football.  And every morning you’re forced to watch his pinkish-brown sphincter hurry down the crumble-strewn hallway toward the kitchen, him throwing you little guilt-inducing looks, trailing a trembling tail behind a trail of trembling pleas, hoping and just knowing you will follow him and get on with this business of canned cat food and fresh water that repeats itself every day, ad nauseam, like groundhog day only worse.

You step over the semi-dried puke by the fridge, congealed kibbles and bits adorned with a lemony blade of grass, smothered in some sort of gluey horse-hoof sauce that obviously isn’t as tasty as the canned expensive stuff you have to purchase from the expensive neighborhood vet.  You glance toward the sink, hoping there’s a roll of kitchen paper for the cat vomit, it sure is easier than toilet paper for kitchen work, maybe that’s why they named it as such, though both papers come from the same dead trees.

As the cat grunts and slobbers over his dish you load your mug with black coffee, pouring the oily black liquid into your vessel over the sink because the damn pot always leaks, stupid made-in-Germany overpriced piece of shit.  What is the point of German engineering if you have to use it over yesterday’s air-dried pasta and basil-spattered tomato-sauce dishes?

Your pour a shot of cold milk into your coffee (after all, you’re not a Turk) and make your way back into your dark bedroom, careful not to wake the baby up because then you won’t be able to lie in the dark sipping your dark coffee, ruminating on the day’s tasks at hand, wondering what clothes you should wear for today’s big meeting.  You sure as hell want to impress them and get the job.  If you get the job you get the cash.  If you get the cash you get the life.  If you get the life, well then…  Hmmm…. Where does it go from there?

Best jump in the shower now, the stupid TV from below is disrupting your thoughts anyway.  How can people watch TV in the morning?  Are they insane?  Who cares what traffic is like and how many degrees it is and whether Paris Hilton is screwing a dim-witted Greek playboy or a short Palm Springs disc jockey or some three-legged porn star with A.D.D., none of this information will change the outcome of your day, it just clogs up your brain and makes you want to scream at people in traffic and give them the obscene finger because you’d rather be on some sunny beach, yes, even if it means next to Paris Hilton.  Yeah, you’d rather be on a beach with Paris Hilton than in your crappy dusty vehicle on your way to your crappy demeaning job, red raindrops from Sahara making a mockery of your recent overpriced trip to car wash.  Why do people wash their cars?  They always end up looking like shit in a couple of days anyway!  (Happiest man you ever saw was this longhaired dude on Sunset Boulevard in a caked car, a cake car, a car so dirty it was like a little mountain of dirt on wheels.  This little rolling mountain had a cave in it with a happy California Neanderthal inside smiling his ass off at all the neurotically shiny cars buzzing down the road.  Not a care in the world, this dirt man. Huh….  What were you saying?)

Oh yeah, best get dressed now because you’ve got to wake up the tot and take her to pre-school before you rush off to your big meeting.  You’re going to get that job, you’re going to impress the shit out of them, they’ll be dazzled by the mere clothes you’ll be wearing, by your snappy duds which will compliment your snappy resume which will compliment your snappy canned confidence.  You will unleash a can of professional woop-ass on them, an American can of woop-ass, and they’ll hire you.  They’ll hire you on the spot.  You probably don’t even need to show up for that stupid interview, you’re so damn right for the job!  It’s all about confidence.  That’s all you need.  Confidence.  Just look at anyone on TV.

“Shoo, shoo, shoo!” you gasp at the cat as you enter your bedroom all naked and dripping, chasing him and his one wet paw off the bed.  Why does he put his right paw in the water bowl when he drinks, what’s that all about?  Is it some sort of primordial getting in touch with his inner fish or something?  We’re all descended from fish, right?  Or is it lizards?  Or is it Adam and Eve?  Didn’t those two have sex after getting kicked out of paradise for partying under an apple tree and pissing God off?  If they did, then that would make us all a bunch of inbred descendents of theirs, still inbreeding and pissing God off.  This inbreeding thing explains a lot of things.  It explains folks like President Kim Jong-il and Imelda Marcos and Idi Amin Dada and the W and everyone at or on the TMZ channel (Paris Hilton included), a good percentage of motorists out there, that rattling idiot on the boob tube down below, one overrated bald-headed British film director from LA with three fax machines in his car (his inbred dysfunctionality cleverly disguised as art), all those clean-cut religious missionaries who wear starched white shirts and ties and nametags (these guys are particularly inbred) and, well, your wet-footed cat who likes to leave a moist monopod path all over your unpronounceable Ikea goose comforter cover.  Linderfootenpath, you think it’s called, with all kinds of umlauts.  You bought it one burpy morning after washing down several homogenized 60-cent hot dogs with a can of tangy red Swedish beer.

You stall at your closet, shocked at the lack of clothes in there that actually fit you right or that you fit in right.  Everything is one size off, the wrong color or made of a fabric that makes your skin crawl like a caterpillar in retreat.  Why don’t clothes hang on you the way they hang on James Dean or Tom Ford or Brad Pitt or even your local grocery-store dude?  Dude’s got a basketball belly, Sponge-Bob legs and horn-rimmed Coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes look like British flying saucers and yet he looks cool.  He looks cool in his duds.  He doesn’t even need to try.  Why is that?

You yank several clothing items off of cheap clinking dry-cleaner hangers, hoping for the best.  It’s no use though.  You always end up looking like some sort of plain tree (brown down below, green up above) or an upside-down blueberry muffin or a skinny effeminate terrorist with a bubble-butt.  Why were you born with no color coordination?  And as for your shoes….  Suffice it to say that only sneakers fit right.  Everything else is simply savage, tearing your poor feet to shreds and making you limp like a gimp, just like at your brother’s wedding in Italy when you had to dress up like a monkey in a suit, a gimpy monkey in a shiny blue Italian suit with too-tight Italian shoes.  Somebody needs to have a serious word with Italian shoe designers.  What they’re doing is criminal.

After several attempts you end up looking like you always do.  You fall back on the one and only outfit that sort of fits: your old 501’s, white t-shirt, Doc Martin shoes (without the stupid yellow thread—what in God’s name were they thinking?).  Hip yet casual.  The necessary touch of seriousness is obvious from the fact that you’ve opted for shoes instead of sneakers.  You twist and turn in front of the full-length mirror, squinting for effect, the way you would squint if George Clooney showed up suddenly at your door with a case of gin.  Come on in pal ‘cause I’m not worried.  It’s an even toss between you and me for the ladies and besides… we could always use the extra booze.  Just leave it on the kitchen counter and make yourself at home, George!

“Babaaaaa!” you hear through the walls and you thank your lucky stars that you actually managed to get dressed before the little one woke up.  Well, sort of.  You rush into your kid’s room holding one Doc Martin in your hands and find your daughter ruffle-headed and standing in her crib, tugging at her explosively large diaper.  “Buongiorno Principessa!” you burst out all bubbly and chirpy and right away she replies “Kaka!”  Didn’t need to say it though, because the scent of poop hits your nostrils like a blasting dive into a steaming river of sewage.  Oh heavens!  You swoop your little girl up and rush into the bathroom, already worried that you’re running late for your big meeting.  “Me!” she says as soon as you pull the offending diaper off her butt, and you watch her struggle to sit on the toilet seat to go pee-pee and wipe herself all by herself, knowing full well that if you try to expedite matters by placing her in the bathtub shower you’ll have a little hysterical she-bomb on your hands.  She’s got to go through the process, you think, it’s just that she’s takes her sweet time about it.  One little smile and you temporarily forget all your angst.  “Done!” she announces and you snatch her up to plop her in the shower, accidentally stepping on some liquid by the toilet with your socked foot.  “What’s this?” you ask, dropping to all fours to sniff and examine the mysterious puddle, quickly realizing that you’ve just stepped in your daughter’s pee-pee.  She missed.  Shit!

“Off we go!” you say with a smile once the baby-butt shower is done, trying to inject a little positive urgency or is it a little urgent positiveness (?) into the situation, into the fact that now you’ve really got to rush.  You hate being late.  Call it the American in you.  It certainly isn’t a Greek trait.  You quickly dress your daughter and send her scurrying to the living room and the TV to amuse herself (drastic times call for drastic measures…), as you must hurry back to your room to change socks and finalize this tiresome business of getting dressed.  You take a step in that direction and instantly realize that you are leaving a monopod trail on the carpet just like your cat, only this time it’s a baby urine trail, not a cat water trail.  Double shit!

New socks on, you’re almost ready to go, if only you could find your other Doc Martin.  Where did it go?  You follow the monopod urine trail (follow the yellow brick road…) hoping it will lead to the errand shoe.  Nothing!  Would it matter if you went to the big meeting with a Doc Martin on one foot and a New Balance sneaker on the other?  Would that be a deal breaker?  I bet that English director could pull it off, the limey fucker!  He’d probably get the job even if he showed up wearing just a sock on his penis, like a Red Hot Chili Pepper.  It all goes back to that thing called confidence.  No, you’d be a hell of a lot more confident if you were wearing two Doc Martin shoes instead of just one.  And that’s definitely better than showing up with just a sock on your penis.   As for the sock, what kind of sock would you choose anyway?  Adidas?  Is that too athletic?

The bedrooms and smelly bathroom exhausted, you hurry into the living room, convinced that the curly-haired culprit on the couch must have your shoe.  Who else would?  You find her staring all zombie-eyed at four bubbly bottle blondes going round and round a stupid-looking spike-haired muscular fellow in a cut-off t-shirt on some kind of morning talk show.  It’s circle jerk time on the morning tele and they are all chattering and laughing non-stop, all the while trying to tear the male model’s shirt off.  “Dear God!” you breathe and quickly turn off the TV, instantly igniting a hysterical wail from the couch, something that scares your dozy wet-footed cat right out the room and onto the balcony.  The good news is that you spot your missing shoe, which your distraught daughter is clutching against her salty wet cheek like a prized Gund bear.  “Give daddy the shoe!” you say all exasperated, sparking a new batch of wailing, one that makes the windows and assorted crystal in the room tinkle ominously.  This time the cat bolts past you with panic written all over his body language, hightailing his way clear out of the house through the back door.

Out of patience and time, you pry the shoe out of your daughter’s surprisingly strong grip.  Oh no… fatal error!  You’ve just committed the fatal error!  Lesson No. 1:  never ever take anything from a child if you don’t have something to replace it with.  Instantly.  Eardrums ready to burst, you hobble-skip your way quickly into her bedroom, somehow managing to get your shoe on your foot.  A Cirque de Soleil performer couldn’t do that as well, you think, as you pluck a small stuffed donkey out of the crib and race back into the screeching living room.  You hand your child the donkey only to receive it back in your face like a Hideo Nomo fastball.  Ouch!  Before you can react, your daughter yells “Pipila!” sending you scurrying into the kitchen looking for her Greek pacifier.  Man, you’re really wasting time now.  You’ve got to get going soon or it’s curtains for you.  No Doc Martins or athletic penis sock or snappy can of American woop-ass is going to help you if you actually miss your big meeting.

You practically jam the pacifier in your tot’s mouth, one hand whisking her up like a pendulum, the other grabbing her school bag (filled with extra clothes, snacks,  diapers, a water bottle and an abused Chinese plastic frog with a perturbed ribbity expression on his face).  You hustle out the door.   All the commotion quiets the baby down, who settles in for the ride down to the street like a little cherubic poker-faced Buddha, knowing full well that she’ll have you back in the palm of her hand the moment you plop her 15 kilos down onto the asphalt and turn in the direction of her school.  Indeed, the moment her little sneakers hit the road she runs to the nearest plant, pointing at it all Google-eyed, jumping impatiently up and down.  “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” she says, meaning the neighbor’s luscious white rose, the one dangling all dewy and heavy and fragrant over the fence like the ultimate forbidden fruit.  You know full well that convincing her otherwise will take at least a couple of minutes (you’ve been dealing with this all week long) and so, with cardinal guilt written all over your hunched and deceptive frame, you quickly snap the forbidden flower off its stalk and hand it to your elated child.   An almost instantaneous booming and angry knocking sound on a window pane alerts you to the fact that your neighbor has caught you red-handed assaulting her priceless flowers and so you bow your head in quick sinful apology and hustle your daughter off before the verbal assault comes.  You know it’s about to come because you can hear the old lady trying to open her window to let you have it.  This must be how Adam and Eve felt when they beat their hasty retreat from the apple tree that fateful day years ago.

Well, not 20 meters down the road your jubilant daughter has completely shredded the immaculate rose (women!), tearing all the pedals off with brisk movements and scattering them in the wind, stepping on the bud for effect like she’s extinguishing a cigarette.  She slap-cleans her hands in a fait-accompli motion, pleased with herself.  “Why did you do that?” you ask, quickly regretting the way you phrased your question.  You should never have used the word “why” in a question.  It’s like opening a kid’s Pandora’s Box and it’s bound to slow you down in this, your hurried journey to depose your little pocket-sized flower-terminator at her pink-colored pre-school, the one with the large and awkwardly drawn Mickey Mouse by the front door.

As expected, you begin a long and arduous “why” conversation as you plod toward school.  And as per usual, your crafty little daughter turns the tables on you almost instantly, forcing you to reply to the whys.  You can never win these arguments.  “Why did I do what?”  “Kill the flower.”  “You gave it to me!”  “You asked me for it.”  “Why?”  “I don’t know, you tell me.”  “Why should I tell you?”  “Because you’re my daughter.”   “Why?”  “Because your mom and I made you.”  “Why?”  “Huh!  Because we wanted a child.”  “Why?”  “Because we did.”  “Why?”  “I don’t know why, it seemed like the thing to do.”  “Why?”  “Because that’s what people do.” “Why?”  “Because if we didn’t do it, none of us would exist.”   “Why?”  “Because you need to exist in order to exist.”  “Why?”  You stall, knitting your brow.  Check mate!  Luckily, you’re saved from the utter humiliation of admitting philosophical defeat to a 2.5 year old by Mickey’s curiously sad smile and scary elephantine legs.  Hallelujah!

A hurried kiss and guilty smile and you turn to avoid the tears welling up in your kid’s eyes as she’s pried out of your hands and led into her obscenely pink school by her cute young teacher, the one with the long jet black hair, braces and sinfully large boobs.  One last pink glance and you hustle your Levis-shacked frame down the cement road, past the olive trees with the dripping black fruit, past the old abandoned cream-colored Zastava with all the bird droppings, past the crazy old lady’s house, where everything she owns is stacked in insane little piles in her 1 by 7 meter yard.  A quick look to the right to check for kamikaze bikers, a skillful dodge to the left around the huffing and panting local bus and you breeze past the pastry shop with the ornate multi-colored cakes in the display, your Doc Martins really sticking to the pavement now as you wheeze your way up the San Francisco-angled street toward your house, sweat beads beading up on your forehead.  Better watch out, you don’t have time for another shower.

Two, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten bounds up the cracked mosaic marble stairs to grab your computer bag and keys and breath.  Better take the motorcycle today, you huff and pant to yourself.  You’re already horrifically behind schedule.  The door slams, shit do I have my keys (?)… yes (!), and you snatch your helmet off the baby stroller by the vestibule door as your tear your way back down the stairs toward your 1952 BMW motorcycle, the one that looks cool but is as slow as a turtle on Quaaludes (you never were a fan of speed…).  No choice though, the Fiesta will take three times longer in traffic.  It’s always rush hour in Athens.  It doesn’t matter what time it is.  Why don’t they just call it traffic?  I mean, why add the rush?  Why do they need to stress us out like this?

“Shoo, shoo, shoo!” you gasp yet again at the large and annoyed-looking mangy cat that’s decided to turn your motorcycle seat into his very own personal Red Vic armchair.  He doesn’t budge.  “Get your own seat, you wanker,” you yell, swiping your black fabric computer bag in his direction, hoping he’ll have the common sense to heed your advice and bolt.  You sure as hell are not ready to go mano-a-mano with a large male stray cat from the ‘hood.   Last time you decided to tango with a street cat was in NYC, in your back yard on 116^th and First in East Harlem, when you had the brilliant idea of tearing a large grunting male cat off of the back of your horny yet sweet little kitty cat Kaya.  This hasty little bit of coitus interruptus cost you four large fang holes in the right index finger, an exhausting trip to St. Luke’s and a dehydrating tendonitis-causing antibiotic therapy for a month.   No, better not lay a hand on Red Vic.  He’ll tear you to shreds before you can say Rapunzel.

Luckily, the lazy beast gets the message and slowly descends off the bike.  He sure takes his sweet time about it, all the while staring at you with a spine-tingling mixture of mockery and murder.  You make a mental note to avoid this particular male cat in the future.  He’s not well.  He’s not stable at all.  He must be seriously inbred.

You spend the next three and a half minutes cranking away at your motorcycle’s ignition pedal like a deranged River Dancer, working up a serious sweat and bad attitude, cursing the fact that you didn’t take the damn geriatric motorcycle in for service when you had all that free time last week.  Shit.  You end up pushing the bike down the street toward the downhill, almost dropping it on your legs because once again you’re trying to multi-task (who was it that said that men cannot multi-task?), simultaneously swinging your computer bag back on your back while trying to open your jacket to let some air in.  If you don’t let some air in quick you will drown in your own sweat or have a massive heart attack right on the spot, dropping to the pavement in a quivering sweaty pile very near your daughter’s shredded rose pedals.  It would be a strangely poetic finale to a stressful morning.  Damn these big meetings!

The bike chuga-chuga-chugs to life with a bang and burp, leaving behind a small grey puff of petrol smoke like an Indian sending up a smoke signal.  Make way!  We’re on the road now!  Can of Woop-Ass is on his way to the big meeting!  You’re going to knock them off their blocks, stupid amateur Athenian advertisers.  You’ll show them how it’s done, how real directors are supposed to direct.  You’re going to provide all the necessary brilliance needed to lift Greek television out of the hopeless middle ages, where everything is on display as if the public is as dumb as doornail.  You will show them what subtlety means, how you don’t really need to show the product in order to sell it.  Huh, isn’t that what the W did to sell his invasion policy?  He never once showed the weapons of mass destruction.  No one ever found them!  They probably don’t even exist.  And yet, the W managed to convince practically the whole world that they were there.  Yeah, you don’t need product to sell something.  All you need is confidence.  Just look at the W.  If he could sell a war so easily to the world, you sure as hell can sell your splendid can of American woop-ass to these dimwitted advertising folks.  Yeah, nothing can stop you now!

“Hey, watch it you old nut!” you yell at the crazy old-timer with the plastic bags in his hands who jumps out in front of you on the street, causing you to swerve dangerously and almost drop your bike.  The old timer points to the green walking man signal and gives you the Greek finger (well, actually it’s a hand), sending you straight to Hades’ hell, don’t pass go, don’t collect 200 drachmas.  The nerve of the old coot, running across the street like he owns the place!  Can’t he tell you’re in a serious rush?  Can’t he see that you are Greece’s last great hope for television, the guy who will save him and millions of others from sheer pixilated idiocy and ennui?  You seriously think about getting off your bike and setting grandpa straight, but your light turns green, forcing you take off.

You screech into the parking lot (a sidewalk that the advertising company has blatantly and illegally taken possession of, forcing all pedestrians onto the road) and you hustle in through the glass doors, a whirl of determination and attitude.  You check your cell phone watch.   Right on time!  You are seriously bad ass!

The cute receptionist points you to the meeting room and asks if you want a coffee or something because you are the first one here.  “Everyone is running a little late,” she says, smiling.  Of course they are, the Cro-Magnons!  How do these people actually manage to get anything done?  This is why Greece is forever stuck in the mud, you think to yourself.  Nothing works right, or if it does, it’s a day late and a euro short (or several billion euros short).  No organization, no one in charge.  Probably better for you, you realize.  They’ll take one good look at you and be dazzled by your structured methodology and methodical structure and hierarchical thought process.  You’ll have them doing back flips in your hand, you smile all cherubically, like a little poker-faced Buddha in cool 501’s and pair of slick Doc Martin shoes.  Yeah!   You’re hot stuff today!  Sizzling!

“Phew!  What’s that smell?” you think to yourself, scanning the glistening, almost kitschy black vinyl and chrome meeting room.  “Don’t they mop in here?  Place smells like a god damn cat orgy or something,” you cringe, trying to regain your winning mind frame.  Your double cappuccino shows up on a tray held by a Slavic-looking woman who could be anywhere between 18 and 55 years old.  Hard to tell how old she is.  Trying to figure it out it is like trying to figure out if Mona Lisa is smiling or smirking at you.  You’re losing your train of thought.  All this money and chrome and kitsch and they can’t afford someone to mop the place up with some bleach?  How can they stand the smell?   You get up to investigate.  You don’t want anything disrupting your winning flow, your kick ass attitude.  No, you don’t want some hideous odor from below scattering people’s brains as you pitch your stellar ideas and personality, as you unleash your can of woop-ass on them.  Can of woop-ass needs a clean environment to prosper.  Can of woop-ass needs order and structure.

“They’ll be here in a couple of minutes,” the receptionist announces from the door, a strange expression plastered all over her face.  You look at her with your mouth agape.  Yeah, your mouth is dangling open like a village idiot because you’ve just made a horrific discovery, a catastrophic revelation.  You’ve just realized that the smell of cat urine that is permeating the room, that is singing your nostrils, that is making you nauseous, is coming from your very own butt.  It’s coming straight from your not so snappy anymore 501’s.   You must have sat in Red Vic’s urine.  That stray cat pissed on your motorcycle seat and you sat right in it like a hasty fool.  You now smell like tangy, nose-curdling, run-for-the-hills cat piss.  Horny, street-fighting, territory-marking, in-your-face cat piss!  Oh, this is going to be one long and painful meeting…

You wither into your stinky 501’s, a mere shadow of your former self.  And to make matters worse, there’s a new sound at the door.  No, it isn’t the sound of your personal can of woop-ass rolling out the door (well, maybe it is…).  It’s the sound of people arriving for your big meeting.  A moment of heavy panting on your part and you realize that you had it coming.  You had it coming all right.  If all it takes to fall from grace is snapping one little apple off of a tree, then what should your fate be if in the course of just one morning you kick your cat in the ribs, stress your daughter out for no good reason, steal a flower, have several obscene thoughts, assault a stray cat, nearly kill an old man as you try and run a red light and develop an attitude about yourself that would make Nietzsche blush?  What should your fate be then?  Good for the cats!  At least they realized that what goes around comes around.  Serves you right to be covered in karmic cat piss.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.