COME AN’ SEE (The Last 200 Feet, roll 2)  video transcript, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uncanny is when you recognize your own nose on the face of a middle aged geek with meat

in his teeth.

 

I might have just seen him exercising at the Time Out Chicken, where a box of bones is one dollar. Or, saw him in Food Town, escaping the heat of last August, waiting for a serene moment under the radar in which to pocket a cured ham the size of his fist.

 

“This we have to see.”, said Emma, my long sweet love. My very first.

 

It was autumn, just before the sun dipped low, resigning as protector of a crowd that packed into the greased canvas tent, eager for one more dose of punishment.

The event lasted 26 seconds.

But first, the crowd pressed forward. I exploited the move by shifting my unruly teenage boner against Emma’s backside, clasping her hips, resting my nose on the back of her head, absorbing her body whole and breathing in her citrus shampoo. I peered through her quaff of hair at the man on stage; and it was him that smelled like grapefruits.

 

I knew this man, and the nagging familiarity had me worried that maybe he, grimacing and clammy, was some distant cousin, woefully addicted to methadone, his generous showman’s eyes holding back a string of shared childhood memories that I had lost and that he had choked off behind a reflection of faces, anxiously waiting, smeared with closed grins.

I only heard him bite down. Seconds earlier, my eyes had drifted to a fabric sign pasted to the tent wall.  It read:

 

 This is a temporary structure.

 Good for livestock

 or twelve souls

 maximum

 By order of

 Hollywood, Florida fire marshal,

 

                     James Petigrew Krull

 

Before I could derive any meaning from the sign, the front row groaned with immediate sorrow. The spectacle had apparently come and gone with a snap, and all I knew of it was the rapid two feet of distance that Emma had put between us matched by her stunned smile. Might as well have been two hundred feet, because she bit her lip with firmness that spelled lust as she tracked the geeks eyes, breathing with him as he sucked for air. I was stunned with hurt and at the strange symmetry of the moment. Like the two of them had known it would come to this. Like they had counted on me being there, horny and distracted enough to unwittingly and ceremoniously hand Emma off. Like the familiarity of the geek’s face that I recognized as my own, was really theirs. What could’ve been, just like that, got away from me. Floated off, as light as a thought.