(for Valerie L)
Couldn’t have been a more beautiful late morning in Mona McCluskey Park out by Old Preese Elementary school; partially cloudy, sun shining full noon radiance in a sky of deep Dodger blue, maybe seventy-six-point-seven degrees outside because that’s how I remember it. I got dressed for a stroll in my brand-new reflective green windbreaker, casual-fit gray sweatpants and my favorite orange Adidas sneaks. Eager for loveliness, I headed out. Was the park full of people like school children and parents and children and dogs and parents who didn’t have children also? It sure seemed like they were all there. I made a shortcut to downtown through a closed-off section of the park when a parent tumescent with genuine Dad arrogance was suddenly breathing, heavy in my personal space. Don’t cut through there - you need to walk around; use the sidewalk. He looked to be around forty-one-and-two-thirds years old. He grabbed me by the hem of my elbow. Huge mistake. A quick shift in my stance put him off balance and right in front of his adoring son I gave him an epic, completely silent roundhouse kick to his zygomatic bone and he crumpled on the grass, asleep before he met the ground. Keep moving. Downtown Ithaca was hopping, asses-to-elbows busy on each corner. The crowd crossing Cayuga Street jostled me like a ball and then somebody shoved me from behind. You have to wonder who could be like that right in the middle of the city’s yearly and fragrant Strawberries-and-Oranges festival. I acted on instinct, whirling around, my limbs a handsome blur to deliver a powerful roundhouse kick to the front of the guy’s nose. His blood made a little Rorschach-shaped cloud in the air and I guess I did more damage that I intended because he fell to his knees and started sneezing up some bone. Keep moving. I broke from the crowd, cut through a few back yards and re-entered the downtown area right by the Fire Department. They had an official Dalmatian out there lying on the warm driveway, but the word on the street was that the Dalmatian had been caught using steroids, as evidenced by his notable and marvelous bouts of anger. Use caution. I tried to sneak past him there but the dog snapped loose from the chain in seconds and leaped for my exposed, vulnerable and admittedly beautiful throat. It’s true: parts of me are breathtaking. Muscle memory took control; I rolled up into position for an Ezekiel choke, absorbing all the dog’s momentum, steadied myself, and deterred him with a roundhouse bite to his hindquarter. He yelled uncle and loped on back to the fire station. I was reminded from all this that I was hungry, and down the block there lived a McDonald’s. When the worker told me in the drive-thru that I needed to be in a car to get served, I felt a little hurt by the massive, unbearable and suicide-causing injustice of it all and delivered an all-time prize-winning roundhouse middle finger right to his window and walked off. It doesn’t matter about my hunger. Minutes later, I walked into Coupland’s Music, even though it had been closed for at least two years due to the year it is now, and the young woman behind the cashier’s desk started crying because at last there was another human face. Didn’t she realize that they had long gone out of business, that she didn’t even have a job there anymore? I approached her to give her a hug and words of comfort. She insulted my offer and accused me of a pejorative expletive, and I don’t take that from anybody. Faster than anybody could please, I wheeled around and came at her with a roundhouse human rights protest against her offensive and bandwagon face piercings. The bricks and lights came down on us and I walked away with only an urgent, traumatic injury to my stigmata artery. Keep moving. The bleeding continued like the minutes like to do, so I jogged the six blocks to the emergency room. The nurse, buxom and third-shift, didn’t care for my dialect and the doctor, I swear, kept trying to seduce me with his honest love while he patched me up. The pretty and ample nurse, smarter than me because she was medical, tried to inflict a fee on me for service, but I found the amount I owed to be very threatening and/or triggering. In self-defense, I got her in a headlock so hard and profound that she started farting and crying at the same time. She must have been holding all that in for a while. I got the urgent care fee down to under twenty dollars. Next, I grabbed the lecherous, desperate doctor by his lapels and gave him a vicious, roundhouse kiss on the lips before ambling off to look for a drink. Ramlow’s was packed and in the deafening Allman-Brothers-hits-of-the-seventies of it all I made it through the crush to the bar and asked for a Redheaded Slut; I love that potent girl. A biker couple within earshot started making fun of me for not ordering something more masculine. It didn't take long for their comments to turn into intimidation, implied threats and then real ones. Things boiled over and they both made for me with a goal of murder. I gave them both the wisdom of my dojo years with dual reverse collar chops and finished them both off with a roundhouse hot three-way on the bar. How often in the hours that make up our days, do we give a thought, even absently, to our mortality, to our dying, to the end? I limped the twenty blocks or so to the cemetery. My mother and father are buried there, my mother and Dad, my Mom and father - however you want to say it. It was well past starting to get dark. The night came dressed in a smoky cobalt number that forced me to fantasize about consent against my will. The Moon, polite to a fault, was suddenly up there in all that and full of all that. The cemetery held its breath. Stop moving. I knelt by their headstones and told them how much I missed them. I tried not to cry even a little bit but failed, and as I wiped the tears away with some weakness tissue I had in my pocket, a ghost leaning up out of his grave nearby glared at me loudly and told me to suck it up. Everyone dies, you pussy. Shake it off and get out of my house. I balled my hands and feet into fists and charged at him, ready with a roundhouse exorcism right to the face and a kick to his foggy, ethereal crotch. Disrespect is something I won’t tolerate.
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