Ellen used to be a thing, he said, barely intelligible, blurbing and slurping at his own fingertips as if the were penny candies. Bubble brain. I'll just see what stupid he says, I thought to myself, listening with a kind of malevolent glee.
Thoughts, dove-tailing, tangling in the stew mesh wash pot of what passed for thinkgood, was this Massachussetts or Dover, or where, anyway, and did it matter: a fruit cup, sitting on the corner of his desk, accusatory, looking small and innocent, but really, perhaps a bit defensive, and his claws, he could bust through the foil rubberized cover on the thing and it with bear hands, the fruit gore, and have sticky fingers, if he ever really touched anything anyway.
"Want some Werther's?"
I wondered when in the 1990's he had put that in the nightstand, and I didn't even bother declining the thing, wondering if his melon ever had a unicorn horn, or if he had just head butted a wall, or had a secret hobby of MMA: looked what God Himself had to that man: a pulverized brain that was just like that fruit gore, and he could do hellos and goodbyes and all, but he wouldn't just shut the f*ck up and let me get out the door before he said something else, and politely, he forgot the Werther's three seconds after he said and went to scrolling through television channels that he had paid extra for in his room--tv was extra, a phone was extra, and private room was an extraordinary cost, leaving one to simply misbehave in hopes of getting a single room by necessity and not paying extra--such as it was, this was how miscreants were honored with the wealthy, the private room, spitting at the wall, talking about ellen, and he gummed raisins and picked at crook of his groin, between the crotch and the thigh, and the CNA's thought it was some kind of retarded masturbation, and me, I didn't want to know, and just put a blanked over his dried-up old arms.
Was he old, you say? Ellen had been in the ground decades. He had probably been almost enlistment age in WWI, maybe even voted, even half-stupid at such a young age, for the Progressive Woodrow Q. Wilson, with the Q standing for Qfern. In answer to that question, I asked did he come by his pension honestly? Did he speak up for the management good at all?
It reminded me of Doug sitting outside the Athletic Club Adult Entertainment Hall, watching that one stripper's car, and then he figured out which car I drove, and I was gonna pick a chunk of brick or something and clock him in the mellon.
But this guy--the old turkey wing assisted living Batman(Loving Hands Retirement Center), hero to the dumb old garden club set, a Werther's original dissolving in his cake whole, giving his tired old breathing an almost whistling effect.
And I drove his own truck to come see him, saving my gas, and all.
He thought it was 1923, at the early stretches of the Industrial Age, and all, and he thought I was one of his uncles, he an uncle and I thought to be one of his uncles. And one grand time, he thought I was deputy. Me in a Fruit of the Loom tee shirt and blue jeans, he thought was a deputy, and you know, you don't bust a flower when the honey is free, and him, sh*tting out lemon pudding, it was like pollen or something all over the bed, God only knows what form of life came from him, that room, that place, where so many were inevitably deposited into the ether for all posterity to contend with.
So I drove his truck to come visit him, the senile Asgardian curse on the hall of his assisted living residence, and I kept up his website, where I basically train-wrecked my way through leaving messages for his kids and grandkids, not much better, the lot, not much better, and certainly younger, but the same kind of skid mark as their forebear.
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