Cleaning My Teeth with Adam's Wayward Rib

DAY 1:

Everyone knows who I am and everyone falls down when they're around me. In the last month alone three separate pairs of knee caps have crumbled into limp tea-bags; heralding the bodies they ferry overboard like laytex stilts, toppling head and torso, tithing into the cement mattress a singular offering of plummeted flesh. A beautiful dream angel on Michigan Avenue tripped over Invisible shoelaces (double-knotted by the Concourses' gossamer fingertips); a hollow eyed lass named Lorlei fainted holding my hand at the Reserve Desk last week. She had donated blood earlier in the day. My hand reached acrossed my workstation like a chinese bridge and grappled her palm. I asked her if she was going to faint. She looked and me, her eyes rolled up into her yellow sockets like carbonated bubbles from draft beer. Her body then fell and I held her arm, lamenting for my co-worker. And ambulance arrived and they revived her. She was anorexic and donating blood.

Last week Allan fell and we took him to the hospital. Uncle Mike watches Allan on the weekends. Allan is sixty-three with Downs Syndrome. It was a Baha'i convention in Urbana. I was escorting Allan across the road when Uncle Mike told me that Allan is more than capable of walking on his own. Allan took two steps and then, realizing that he was alone in his toddle, capitulated to the whims of gravity. There was a splat. Allan was fine but he needed attention. He locked himself in the bathroom at the Baha'i center and inflicted wounds into his arm with the opposing fingernail. He refused to leave the bathroom and once we got in we sopped up the blood and I had to hoist up Allan's boxers and zip up his pants. We gauzed the wound, but his shirt looked like a Great Lake patterned with blood. When we arrived back at the nusring home ambulances arrived. Allan's blood pressure was fine and he was laughing. He was flanked by beautiful females tightly clad in white garments with visible panty-lines; perhaps Allan thought that he was surrounded by wingless angels.

People know who I am. Everywhere I go I am recognized. They know my first name. They recognize my gait. I pause and smile as I shake hands. I work in a job where I interface with easily 300 students on a daily basis. I smile. I'm charming. I'm known as the crazy librarian who helps out the foreign students, who always has the skidmarks of a smile slapped into his face.

With my hair sliced short I look exactly like how I did ten years ago, when I was seventeen. I had just started writing poetry. My ex-girlfriend Renae Howard phoned me out of the neon blue and invited me her Senior homecoming. Renae and I dated two years prior when I was a freshman and she was a sophomore attending rival high schools. Wearing varsity jackets with out respective graduation dates stitched in the lefthand corners, we would wait until her father's Firebird had completely pulled out of Westlake Parking lot before our opposite hands groped and squeezed. I don't know where people learn to kiss (besides television), but when I was fifteen I never shut my eyelids. Our tongues would tango and our bodies would tinkle and my eyes would remain completely ajar, myopically observing the warm blanket of her forehead, blinking several times like a stuttering stage curtain watching her head fall back into her body, hushing out smiles.

People recognize me. People whom I have never seen before accost me and call me David. A lady walks up to me claiming we had the same french class for all four years in highschool. I squint and I squint and can't recall her face. The name doesn't register. We talk about madame Suhr. She inquires how my siblings are doing. She tells me that she married a friend of mine on teh Track team. I squint. Still, there is nothing. A face that knows my story. A face I swear I have never seen.

A boy with a thick red-beard yells out my name in the parking lot of Jesters. He claims to have had the locker next to mine in high school. Again, I squint. Nothing. We talk about mutual friends. He remembers me always buzzing off of caffeine in the blue-coated hallways of Manual High. I squint. He looks like Leif Erickson, a viking. He claims we used to go to the alley before classes and smoke cigarettes together. I know the alley; it's the alley where I first tasted the scent of burnt nicotine harvested on my tongue in mid-autumn. Still can't place the boy. He tells me that nearly all of the fellow smokers are working dead end jobs, just like 80 percent of my graduated class. That most of the smokers have kids; some have three or four kids. I don't look surprised.

Then last week, I spawn a conversation at work with a girl who claims to have my picture tacked on her wall at home.

"Ohmigod, I knew that was you. Now that you cut your hair I know for certain that it was you."

Apparently I met this girl ten years at a homecoming I went to as a courtesy. My friends cousin needed a date. I voluntered. It was in a little country town called Brimfield. I went outside to have a smoke and was accused of pulling the fire alarm.

I had completely forgotten the girls name, but it turned out to be (geez, go figure) Alicia. She claimed that we had one really nice slow dance together to ("yaak") that damn Whitney Houston song from the Bodyguard soundtarck. Oh well, maybe being diagnosed with mid-twenties alzhiemers can be a blessing when it comes to effacing certain "momentous" events of youth you wished had never occured in the first place.

All the craziness culminated yesterday, inside HOMETOWN buffet. Uncle Mike and I were having dinner. I was actually telling Uncle Mike how everyone seems to know me even though I have no clue who these people are half the time. Mike mentioned that this was what was known as confirmation, that I was doing things right.

I left dinner early to run to Barnes and Noble. As I'm walking out the door I hear my name bellowed very loudly by someone who sounds like he has just monopolized the entire day imbibing cheap beer and watching football.

"DAVID VON BEHREN! I knew that was you! SHIT brother. How you doing?"

I look. I see a middle aged man with a pumpkin-hued face chewing over plates of food. A girl sits next to him. I look back at Uncle Mike, saluting a little wink before engaging in remedial conversation.

"How you doing? Good to see you! I'm sorry you look familiar and you know my name..."

"Sean Art..."

"Yes, Sean, hi...."

Guy I haven't seen in eight years turns out to live exactly three house down from us on Heading Avenue. I offer to catch up and rush to the ATM in Cubs foods and randomly spot my boss from work assaying the aisles. I ignore my boss and rush into Barnes and Noble where I see Sexually Frustrated Gretchen from Theory Class who hates me and takes my order barking a "What do you want!" into my face. After complying her mandate with a "Venti Sumatra" I see Valerie, (who's better hemisphere I devoted an entire blogg to last July, see "Myopic Mara")...even though Valerie is engaged to a trucker who looks like Allan Jackson, Val and I flirt like it's always mid-april and we're on a nude beach. I then turn around and see CHUCK. Chuck was (is) my late-father's best friend. They had a beautiful friendship for like forty years, although Chuck thinks that I'm a drunk and a disgrace to the family name. My father's only son, the proverbial black-sheep financial fuck-up.

What's really intriguing about Chuck is that my Dad helped him get a really good job at this place called ACCELERATED READER which helps gradeschool kids foster a love of reading. CHUCK lives pretty oppulently and he never to my knowledge returned the favor to my old man. I'm surprised CHUCK hates me as much as he does. There REALLY is a social/economic rift between people who write books and the people who market them.

I'm flirting with Val and Chuck is ignoring me even though I just said hello. The Concourse must not of liked me flirting with Val because, after a month of watching people fall down, bam, I inadvertently swatted over my Venti coffee. There were continents of puddles everywhere. When I went to sop it up, Chuck just looked at me and shook his head, although he came over with a stream of paper towels and assited me. I don't think he would have stopped over to my table to acknowledge me otherwise.

I leave Barnes and Noble and who to i run-into but one of my twins. There's four other lads in Peoria who look EXACTLY like me, especially when I had long hair. Matt still has long hair and I actually got arrested b/c the cops thought that I was him four years ago......

So here I am, new blogg. Trying to find that part of me that everyone else knows. I spent the majority of the last two week completely shitfaced. I love drinking and, like every other alcoholic, I'm charming and try to rationalize my sozzled sins.

Last night I decided that the reason I started to drink so much again is because of confirmation. Alcohol is wonderful in making you feel that you're not alone in this world and each round assists in momentarily confirming your rash choices. The confimration I lack from parents, lovers, teachers, academia, I've always found located in little cidery globs in the bottom of a forty.

There was no drunken epiphany. Daniela was very kind to hoist my drunken ass out of the gregarious gutter and to call me the next day at work to make sure I was ok (how many bar flies do you know who actually take the time out to call you the next day after a night of binging)...my tolerance is pretty high but it got to a point where I'm trying to move up; trying not to remain stuck in the curves of some theorized cycle. Trying to find out what I'm here to do and do it to the best of my ability.

Trying to change.

So the new blogg, trying to go forty days without vices....caffeine is FAR worse on my nervous system than booze or smokes, but it's the one that's most "socially acceptable" and the one I abuse the most......

Forty days bashing around....trying to change.....