1. Melissa reminds me of Sonia when I was nineteen and an unconfident sophomore at Michigan State. It’s more than their mutual raspberry scent or their fine butts. Sonia was a hippie graduate student in history and we met at the bookstore when we started talking about the failure of the White Russian Army. We had coffee and then agreed to meet now and then and talk about Russian history about which she was obsessed far beyond me. She was a genuine kook and wore orange and black clothing because she believed in evil and her favorite holiday was Halloween. Sad to say I only met her in May a few weeks before the end of the school year after which she was going to Leningrad for the summer on a travel scholarship. She spoke fluent Russian because her parents were refugees from World War II when they lived in Kiev. They were Jews but not religious so it was easy to understand why her belief in evil was so firm. 2. When I was six my mother slapped me real hard. I haven’t remembered this for years as if it were a small visual splotch. (This was a time when schoolteachers were still allowed corporal punishment.) I was in the first grade and having trouble learning to read. I was sitting with Mom in an easy chair while she read aloud to me from a story called The Water Babies from the Book House and I was attempting to follow the text with a forefinger. I was upset because I thought the story was a big lie. I had fished brook trout with my dad and there was no way that a group of human babies could live underwater in a river swimming around through water weeds without coming up for air. Meanwhile Berenice was prancing back and forth through the room yelling “dumby” at me. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and Mom smelled like the rhubarb wine a neighbor made every year. Berenice came too close and I grabbed her by a pigtail and called her a “bitch.” Mom reared back and slapped me very hard. I had no idea what the word “bitch” meant. 3. This area reminds me of the collection of DVDs called The Blue Planet Diane gave me for a birthday. Much of the underwater life was alien with no possible human reference point. Some of it was troublesome and repellent. There were clusters of two-inch-wide, six-foot-long worms living a mile deep in perfect darkness. I certainly didn’t want to go there. 4. An image of Melissa’s ass in the broad daylight of the estuary. There should be a legion of pollsters asking all the men in the world what an ass means to them. 5. I keep thinking of a photo in an old Life magazine of monkeys bathing in a hot spring in northern Japan. It’s snowing but they’re quite warm though wet. How do they get out and dry off without freezing their asses off? That’s the question.
He undressed totally for his nap trying to dismiss the power of his negative thinking. After forty years as a janitor trying to clean up the culture’s dirt, here he was in a decidedly alien locale trying to chase down someone who had committed no readily provable crime. He had been stoned by mostly female preteens or so he thought from the few glances before trying to shield his eyes. This seemed to be causing a murderous edge back there in his mind. He perforce had an edge he had developed in order to function at his job but then the edge had become an organic part of his character. A goodly number of people, some unconsciously, sensed this edge and avoided any more than nominal contact with him. It reminded him of the way people in social contact with a doctor would wedge in a medical question, usually ineptly. With Sunderson the brave ones would ask a peripheral question about law enforcement because it was the rare male who hadn’t committed a felony, unwittingly or consciously. In bars and on social occasions Sunderson tended to be reassuring saying that strictly speaking the entire population of the United States should be imprisoned but then who would take care of the innocent children? Law enforcement was merely the manhole cover on the human sewer. People within earshot would laugh a bit nervously.
He napped solidly for three hours by grace of an Oxycontin and a gulp of vodka, dreaming of church bells on wintry Sunday mornings in Munising. The bells turned out to be his cell phone with Mona on the other end.
“I’ve called five times. Where the fuck were you?”
“Taking a health nap. I’ve had a gout attack.”
“You’re always having gout attacks, darling.”
“I can’t seem to learn from experience. What’s up?”
“I had dinner with Carla and my therapist and found out some nifty stuff. First of all they fed me this cheap California chardonnay that tasted like rancid butter. Then they wanted to rub my body with Apache lotion, can you believe it?”
“I wasn’t aware that Apaches were into cosmetics.”
“Carla gave me the bottle. It was made in Boulder, Colorado. Well, we smoked a joint and I got a little drunk and dozed off on the sofa and the next thing you know when I opened my eyes Carla was taking a raised skirt photo of me.”
“Pardon?”
