Strange Thinkings

Strange Thinkings

Short Pieces

by

Hank Gross

Published by Hank Gross at Smashwords 2010

© 2010 Hank Gross All Rights Reserved

http://www.hankgross.com

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Contents

Stories

Dueling Toilets

Playing the Comedia

Blood – The Soft Drink

The Boy Who Ate New York

Humor

Multiplexing in Daily Life

The Billion-Yard Dash

Advice to an Aspiring Author

Why is the Sky Blue?

Celebrity Sexual Pecadillos

Poetry

Higher Palette

Am I a Poet?

Time Came Marching Down the Street

First Black Newscaster, 1975

God

Images

Sonia

Fragment

My Mind

Rape Wagon

Science Fiction Novelette

Fun

Autobiographical

The Egg and I

Ollie

Philosophy

In Search of the Bluebird of Happenstance

Stories

Dueling Toilets

Something truly weird has been going on lately in my bathroom. Every time I enter it, the toilet in the bathroom of my neighbors' apartment immediately flushes, as if, preposterously, my entry is somehow wedded to their plunger. Since, as far as I know, lavatory science has yet to perfect the telepathic toilet flusher, and as this unwelcome correlation has occurred with a regularity and precision too clocklike to dismiss as coincidence, I must assume some sentient intent behind it. But what? And by whom?

My initial take on the matter was fairly benign. As it defied logic that the tenants in the abutting commode were serendipitously experiencing their calls of nature precisely in sync with my own, I drew the charitable conclusion that this simultaneity of disposal was just their way of being neighborly, of gaily announcing, Hi, we're the Joneses. A little winky, even kinky, perhaps, but certainly more novel than the hackneyed borrow-a-bowl of sugar approach. Maybe they were nice folks. So, the first few times I, well, flushed back at them. Hi, my toilet replied with a breathless gurgle, great to meet you. And then I ran the hot water in the sink to invite them over for coffee.

Needless to say, they stiffed the offer, preferring to match me flawlessly flush for flush, grabbing me boldly by the bowl and vortexing us down our back-to-back chamber pots like a craphouse Astaire and Rogers, leaving me perplexed, etiquette-wise, as to how to respond to these awkward congruities that ensued every time I visited my john. It felt deeply inappropriate, as if these potty-fixated strangers and myself were becoming annealed on some scatologically symbolic level. Moreover, after a few days I sensed a certain banality creeping into our watery discourse; it began to take on a strained, stilted quality, become mired in opening-gambit platitudes, comfort-station small talk, without ever really deepening into the epistemological affluence of which even toilet-talk, uttered mindfully, is capable. Just flush and burble, splush and gasp, metronomically matched to my own.

Initially indulgent to my neighbors' offbeat overtures, I now began to feel estranged. I found myself trying to avoid toilet contact altogether, adopting rabbity stratagems, such as holding it in in closely guarded patterns known only to myself -- not that I routinely, if you'll pardon the construction, leaked such information to the press, anyway -- and distributing my numbers one and two in what were surely unguessable arrangements, encrypted fugues of personal refuse, then sidling up to my bathroom door pretending to be thinking of something else before bolting inside and attempting to do my business at breakneck, even hemorrhagic, speed. Once I tripped and drove my middle finger against the sink, only to be met instantly by a smirky flush from the other side, causing said digit to revert to the use for which, no doubt, it evolved as part of man's hand in the first place. Oooo, these people were tricky! Plainly, they'd played this game before!

But to what purpose? Were they deriving some jolly Freudian jolt from this lavatorial banter? Were they college pranksters pledging a fraternity, cruelly mocking me as I ducked and dodged their rheumy iterations? Were they attempting, like wolves, to establish territory?

Frankly losing it, I began flushing back at them as fast as my float mechanism would recycle. I bought pulleys and rigged a cat's-cradle of cable to my flusher so I could, from a distance, snatch tempo in what had clearly become an all-out war, a flush to the death. I vowed to out-irrigate these interlopers if I had to stay up day and night to do it. I'd show these water closet cranks I could give as good as I got!

And then, dissolving abruptly into chagrin, I thought, my God, here I am pumping the handle of my toilet with martial glee, flushing with pride and fury and no longer giving a damn about the niceties of the situation, if ever there'd been any, when, for all I knew, the synchronized lavage on the other side was not the dissolute handiwork of some cross-eyed drooler with a sprung bathrobe but a trapped mute child, by now close to starvation, desperately calling out for help in the only way he or she could. Or possibly it was an enfeebled elder, glued miserably to the seat with a pulverized hip and laryngitis. Flush twice if you need help! I bellowed through the wall. No answer. Do you want me to call an ambulance? I shouted. Silence. Was this a snub or a signal they'd died? I turned away in consternation, only to be blindsided by a flush of such sinister synchronicity, such mean-spirited élan and joy, that any benefit of doubt I'd awarded these crafty four (and more) flushers was immediately withdrawn. To hell with them. Let the emaciated little brat starve! Let the old hag's hip reset in a jumble of shards that would torture her for the rest of her pathetic life!

The cease-fire was over. Back I went to sparring in earnest, pirouetting in and about my bathroom as if its tiles were ablaze, feinting at my flusher, feigning regularity where none there was, then storming my throne as if trying to overthrow it. Truly, there could be no graceful explanation as to why, with a global cohort of 427 languages to choose from, these debauched individuals next door would elect to speak to me in toilet.

Suddenly, a chilling answer presented itself: my pissoir pen pals weren't earthlings at all but beings from a galactic orifice whose moral coefficient was inversely proportional to its mind-boggling mass, a diabolic race of Toilet People who had invaded my planet and, quite understandably after such a long trip, had headed for the nearest bathroom, unfortunately the one abutting mine, there to set up a communications center, staffed in shifts by nasty little shit-colored sergeants with pull-chain earlobes and toroidal, porcelain heads, sending maddening aqueous messages to innocents such as myself. A farfetched hypothesis? I don't think so. How do we know that beings from other galaxies don't routinely shoot the breeze in this hydrokinetic tongue? Can any cosmologist assert with certainty that interplanetary teenagers, instead of picking up the phone to call a friend, don't pick up their toilet seats instead? Who says deep-space telephony has to have rings? Well, okay, Saturn has rings, but that's my point.

Am I being disgustingly egocentric or downright paranoid here? I doubt it. Extraterrestrial or otherwise, the creeps in the outhouse next to mine were plainly no more innocently motivated than the nocturnal malcontents who regularly install (and nightly relocate) sensor panels in my sidewalk to alert the transit system to dispatch a bus to my corner just seconds before I can reach it. I'm not naive; harassment of the ilk goes on all the time, and believe me, I've considered going to the authorities on the matter of my heavy flusher, having put off prosecution partly out of misplaced decorum and partly because I can't decide whether authority in this case would be a police officer or a plumber. Clearly, the situation calls for a professional; and indeed, many people to whom I've mentioned my predicament agree that I need professional help.

Certainly, I'd like to resolve this freakish bathroom buddyship as expeditiously as possible. Yet, like a medieval philosopher who'd rather tally angels on pinheads mentally than get right down there and yank wings, I find myself unable to simply march next door and accuse my neighbors of wantonly aping my flushes. What ultimately paralyzes me, I think, is this nagging boson of doubt: that maybe coincidence truly is the culprit behind their incomprehensible troop to their altar on a timetable that exactly parallels my own, that maybe probability can be stretched to the size off a football field without snapping, after all; indeed, isn't probability's very plasticity the reason it's called probability, instead of certainty or, say, Henrietta? Could it be that, while I hysterically conjure foul-minded neighbors, disabled miscreants, and piddle-tongued spacemen, chance is merely taking an impish frolic in my crapper?

Let it be known to all, therefore, that I am unilaterally renouncing participation in the Great Bathroom Skirmish. Let my neighbors' flushes coincide with my own till the very last drop; I will not retaliate. Let their indelicate cascades, bearing God knows what else besides water and data, continue till our municipal reservoirs are reduced to mud; I shall no longer lunge for my plunge like some craven laboratory rat. At this point, it's no less than a matter of survival. Paradoxically, you see, I've come to the point where my only hope for sanity is this: that somehow, miraculously, blessedly, it's simply all in my head.

Playing the Comedia

Carnegie Hall, with its chandeliered lobby, princely seating, and tiers of ornate balconies undulating around its perimeter, was abuzz with anticipation, as two thousand theatergoers and myself, the show’s backer, waited for the concert to begin. Gazing up from my orchestra seat, I saw, upon the bare stage, a monster console that looked like a cross between the organ at Lourdes and something that might be used to run the New York subway system. It had eight nested keyboards capped by a crescent of controls that could probably have landed a 747 in a playground. Twelve pedals hung from its underside, and it had a stenciled music rack to hold the sheets of schtick that computer wizard Peter Keene would soon be playing on his fantastic synthesizer.

It was truly a first – a machine that played comedy – and the crowd was duly impressed. Yet who in that gay gathering of theatergoers could have foreseen that the great performance palace that had begun its illustrious history in 1891 with Peter Tchaikovsky of the Moscow Conservatory would be marking its grand finale this evening with Peter Keene of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or that the masks of comedy and tragedy could ever be so intimately intertwined? As the Post would later headline, "They Laughed So Hard They Could Have Died –