BODY--Chapter 1

BODY Chapter 1

 The carrot which walks 
Small halfmen you can hold
in your hand
with all the business that belongs
below their waste, their elegant fluted legs
the rumpled rump, but mostly
the delicate hint of a dick,
and, if only to prove its meaningfulness,
it is headless, shoulderless, breathless,
decapitated, so that nothing is happening
on top, above,
nothing at all.
                          J G-M

       Have you seen those carrots, maybe online, that are shaped like a man, at least the lower half of a man? With their long pointed ballerina legs and a stubby genitalia, almost obscene, if they weren’t so ludicrous. Sometimes they have them on YouTube, where they show this and that potato or parsnip or carrot; they are almost always tubers, things that grow under the ground. And they are shaped in uncanny ways, like an old ugly man, or some person with a nose and chin and squinty eyes, all swollen, something that looks like a boxer whose face has been pounded until it is finally only a peculiar memory of what was once human. But mostly something sexual, you can almost hear them snickering.
       In my dream this carrot, of course, reminds me of the creature in the original movie, The Thing, where it comes from space & it crashes into the arctic. They find it. They make a giant circle around it like they are going to hold hands, until they see that it is a flying saucer, then they try to get it out of the ice with gelignite or something, and it accidentally is destroyed. I am not sure how it can be so completely destroyed, but it is—for the purposes of the film. However, they do find the body of a spaceman, and it is the guy from Gunsmoke, who is trapped in the ice. They somehow chop him out and they bring back this loaf of ice with a giant man floating inside of it to the arctic research station where they live. Then they accidentally melt the man out and he comes alive after being buried in ice for maybe centuries, … No, that’s not right—he had just arrived on earth; he just crashed. So he has been in the ice, fast frozen, for only a few days or weeks or whatever. He should have been dead, but he wasn’t. Some of them think he will be glad to meet them. He is wiser than we are, one scientist says. But the carrot man is not intelligent and kind; he is intelligent and bloodthirsty, literally. The creature starts to drink their blood and suck dry their sled dogs and such. Well, they decide he cannot be killed because he is some kind of giant carrot. I think those are the exact words, a giant carrot. The bullets they shoot him with just lodge in the body like they are being fired into some kind of dead matter, wood, vegetable matter, cellulose, like a carrot that was alive.
       In my dream, it was very athletic, strong, like a man, only it was a vicious vegetable and decapitated. And I shot it with my M-16. I shot it and the bullet just became embedded in the flesh, or cellulose, and did not harm it at all. The thing like a zombie just kept coming, and well I could not shoot it in the head because it did not have a head per se. It was only a body, a carrot body. It could walk, but it did not think or have a face or any distinguishing characteristics, … only I knew it was Afghanistani.
      He woke up with a jolt; the dream evaporated. But he could recall that it was full of anxiety and maybe violence or threat of violence. He was relieved to be awake; his body, once so tense, now melted into a more pliable state. He decided that if the dream came back, if he remembered it, he would tell it to Keiko.
      He got up and dressed in a hurry, as if he were late for something, but he was not at all late. He was just used to being quick and efficient in this way. He read somewhere that Zen monks in the dormitory of a monastery, when they heard the wake up knock, just jumped from the floor and rolled up their sleeping mats without missing a beat in one continuous motion, In fact, he saw it in a film somewhere. It impressed him with the utter beauty of the thoughtlessness of it. That and being in the military for so long seems to have made him start every day with an almost involuntary jolt into action. No time to linger.
       It was not the first thing. It should have been the first thing, he thought to himself. Now it seemed silly a futile effort. He opened his notebook, a dream journal. It was virtually blank. Keiko told him he should keep it, so he did it. He obeyed. He wrote the date June 14, 2013 on the top of a page and then the word ‘anxious’ and the word ‘violence’ & the word ‘carrot’ and closed the journal. Other pages he saw, as he riffled through, were virtually empty as well. He took a deep breath. The room was full of the effulgent but cold air of morning. The city was magically calm, stillness, for a moment, just a breath. Perhaps, he imagined, this was the calmness, the attention, the mindfulness. Then the clock alarm sounded explosively. He sprang to hit the off button. It was 5:30am.
      Merc was still asleep. Jack moved from his miniature bedroom into the hall and crossed in three steps into the kitchen. It was battered but well kept. In fact, Merc had somehow managed to install a new kitchen with granite counters, an expensive stainless steel stove and a refrigerator with a glass door. It shows too much! Jack mumbled to himself. He often moved his lips when he thought. He opened the refrigerator door and took out the Miso paste and a bag of carrots, broccoli and cauliflower florets. After he threw the bags on the counter, he filled a small saucepan with water and threw a handful of the mixed vegetables into it. When it boiled, he poured a cup of the water into a mug to make his tea and then he put a tablespoon of miso into the water in the saucepan and let it melt. It would be ready in a few minutes so he turned it down to simmer.
      He then disappeared like Houdini, with a kind of stage movement disappearing from the kitchen across the hallway to the bathroom to take his magical three-minute shower. As he started he regretted not going to the toilet. So he almost looked around himself for spies. Was he being watched? No. So he pissed shamelessly and with great satisfaction in the shower. Something about not getting caught made him pause to enjoy this moment of flagrantly unethical behavior. He thought about what it meant and came up with nothing. But, as a result, he was a beat too late returning from his disappearing act to the cooking. He suddenly remembered and ran back to catch the soup before it boiled over the pan. He just got there in time.
      He carefully poured the miso soup and vegetables into a pottery bowl. Rustic, he said moving his lips. Then he stood on the balcony to eat it, staring at the sleeping two-story houses across from his. Most of these houses in the Sunset District, and in the Richmond as well, he figured, were built in the nineteen-forties and -fifties, after the Second World War, for returning soldiers and their families. They knew how to treat those soldiers, he thought. They got a good education benefits and medical, no waiting for processing that never happened. What do they have a whole office building full of files with applications in them for benefits? So much that the weight of the files is making the floors of the buildings unstable, in danger of collapsing. The weight of our responsibility seems to be measurable in actual pounds, he whispered. But for WWII vets there was no bullshit, at lest he didn’t think so. Then he thought: Well, who really knows? Maybe they got fucked just like everyone else. The houses built for the returning GI’s were small for modern families, with their efficiently identical or sometimes reversed floor plans, sturdy row houses with not a breath between them and with very small yards, only barely large enough for a small barbecue and a postage stamp lawn or garden, maybe a clothesline. Now, at 60 years old, however, these scruffy houses could cost upwards of a million dollars.
      Jack was lucky to have a place to rent. The house on 43rd Avenue had three tenants. The first floor was half taken up by a slim, almost useless garage. But the house did have a small unit where an old man lived, or so they said. Jack, in six months, had never seen him. Upstairs Jack lived with and paid rent to Merc, too expensive but better than most. He wondered if he would ever be able to buy a house. But he had decided that renting might be a better bargain. Of course this kind of rationalization had no downside for him. The house was not convenient to work, but he had moved in when it was. When he moved in, he had a job that he hated at a Radio Shack nearby. He changed jobs after he moved in. Why? He was not really sure. But it changed his commute from fifteen minutes to fifty.
     When he walked into the Sunset, to the streetcar, the weather was cold, about 50 degrees, air conditioned by the coastal clouds that collided with Ocean Beach, every morning it seemed but especially in the summer. The clammy cloud fingers lay low to the ground and reached like a horror movie fog up the alleys and the avenues of San Francisco west of 19th Avenue, below Golden Gate Park. The day would get warm, crystal clear and perfect by midday probably, especially where he worked on Market Street, on the bay side of San Francisco, where it was not as cold, maybe ten degrees warmer than the Ocean side of the that odd peninsula, the funny glans shape of SF, with its meatus spewing happy commuters upon Marin.
      The general stereotype of the neighborhood was pretty suburban and staid. But, to him, something about the Sunset District, its history, its native coldness and essential character, was wilder than the downtown. It had always been looser, built on sand dunes, the home of the extinct San Francisco Tule Elk and other creatures, like the Grizzlies that now are absent from the beaches, where they would hunt the Elephant Seals. Can you imagine a seven-foot tall Grizzly attacking a 15-foot long, 5,000-pound Elephant Seal Bull? That was before 1870, when few people traveled to the western edge of San Francisco. It was a wilderness of blood and savagery. You took your life in your hands walking to the Cliff House as Jack London once said. Of course he was talking about his predictions of 2013. And he was right!—if you look at what a walk across town can be like these days and especially these nights. 
       He knew the weather would be not much different than yesterday, if anything, a little better, according to the weather widget on his phone. It was in the low fifties and would climb into the mid 70’s, the warmest day of the month so far. Just in time for the weekend. Of course Jack worked, at Yellow Dick’s, Friday Saturday, and Sunday, as he did almost every weekend. These were crucial days to get the walking traffic in the city. And June was a good season for shoppers, local and tourists. He got to the rail stop at 43rd and Judah, the N Judah line. The SFMT would get him across town in about fifty minutes. But he would stop on the way, as he did most mornings at the Zendo.