With the only news from the farm being nine tiny newborn piglets and a field of undersown legumes ready for mowing, I figured over the next few posts I’d share some stories from my past. I’ve scoured my list of personal tales jotted down over time and picked a couple deemed worthy of sharing. I don’t know if the writing can do them justice, so hopefully they can sail on the strength of their bizarre content alone. Between the ‘Kal Krawl’ – a night when a dozen of my friends wore my nude portrait on sweatshirts out to the bars, crashing for the night in an RV on a Native American reservation while hitchhiking through Montana, hunting for fungus filled caterpillars in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, or receiving an award in front of the entire high school swim team plus families related to auto-erotic asphyxiation, there were some tough contenders. Here’s one of my recent favorites.
I moved back to Madison, WI for a year a short time after graduating. I had the chance to live in one of the the hipper areas, Willy Street, and spent most of my free time reading Marx in coffee shops to attract the eye of socialist leaning baristas and browsing the backroom bookshelves of the thrift store down the street. It was in these cramped back shelves that a drama played out which still confounds me to this day.
I’d come straight from a coffee shop and was sailing high on caffeine and flavonoids, an intense state of mind for anyone out there as sensitive to caffeine as I am, and tittered around the shelves looking for old Turgenev translations or at least a tattered Autobahn Society Field Guide. Perusing down the racks in the ‘Nautical and Sea Navigation’ section I caught out of the corner of my eye a young man of pale complexion bent over, peering at books a few feet away at my side. I surreptitiously glanced to get his profile. He looked prim. He wore a suit over a button up, which I’d describe as tweed if I actually knew what tweed was, buttoned to the top, tucked into dark slacks over shined shoes. Boardingschool-esque. He was younger than me by several years and a head shorter. None of this stood out. What did stand out was the perfect bowl cut of his flat black hair, shaved underneath and all. He could have stood in for one of the three stooges if the need arose.
With this registering in my mind, which was still bouncing from the legally imbibed stimulant, I went back to browsing. Turning in the opposite direction, away from the man, I almost bumped directly into him on my other side. In my surprise I took an unprepared quick half step back and continued to swing full circle. And found myself facing him once more. Completely dumbfounded, my mind reeling faster than my body, I came to realize it was identical twins, both dressed identically, with an identical interest in dilapidated nautical literature. Both with the same incredible, straight lined bowl cut. It must be a joke they play on life. Once this fully registered, I chuckled inwardly at the effort they put into crafting this beguilement and edged my way behind them out to the isle.
Now a bowl cut on anyone takes some audacity and to pair it with a stiff suit takes even more. If it ended at this point the story would be relegated to a anecdote and lost to history. Maybe leaving me with and inspired confidence in practical joking and hairstyle anarchy. But when I turned out of the isle and saw this young man duplicated once more, hand raised to a shelf fingering the spine of a softcover fiction novel, I lost my composure. Down to my knees, fingers stretched raised to the temples trying to decipher what coding error caused this glitch in the simulation running my life, I stared at the ground wide eyed. I feigned interest in the bottom row as my mind, still grasping outward, filled with military rows of well dressed, black haired men, disembodied scissors moving through the regiment churning out line perfect snips and the men in their proletariat obedience being whisked off to the nearest used book emporium to induce a mental break in every poor sap who’s luck it is to first stumble upon them.
I tried to regain composure as the developed outward situation wasn’t as serious as my developing inward one, and managed to straighten up and look around. I wasn’t mistaken. There were three, all of which I made sure to count together in my field of vision at one time. They tittered together in what had to be a language spoken nowhere else on earth.
Upon leaving I immediately called my partner and shared the strange waking dream I’d just experienced, with their surprise hardly matching the emotion I continued to experience for the next several hours. Stay tuned next week for an account of my foray into the Montanan illegal underground raw goat milk trade.
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