All thirty or so people freeze as one. I begin to melt them as the heat from my empty words sear their nearly naked bodies.
“I see new friends. And you are all my friends, aren’t you? Say yes, nod in agreement, say yes if it is yes, give your nose a wriggle no, if it’s no. Shake your heads no. From where I stand the ayes have it and that is how it should be. Now hear what I have to say. You’ve stood here long this day and you have listened. You have heard. You have heard my words. You have seen. You have seen me demonstrate the quality of these products. Perhaps you have imbibed the mystery of life. I call you together for the express purpose of allowing all of you to return home with a touch of my bottled sunshine. Many years ago, on this very day I may add, I came across a man on his deathbed. He was an old man, a shriveled man, but a gentle man, once a virile man. He was a stern man. He was a scrupulous man. A fearless man. He was addicted to, of all things, as you are, I am sure, of all things to life. He was the true precious jewel to all he touched. Life. Yes. But he was an addict. He could never get enough life so he tried to invent some of his own. He sowed and he reaped and never regretted anything he had ever done. This is not his eulogy. This is not a eulogy for his followers of which there are many. This is just an expression of thanks. He knew no wilderness. He never wore a hair shirt. Some of you may think this is blasphemy. He was not a Christian. He was not a Jew. He did not embrace Buddhism or Hinduism. He was not a Moslem. He was a man who lived and he died a man wanting to continue living, embracing everything that came his way. He died because he neglected his own discovery.”
I pause to let my sermon sink in. Some older people mumble. They look puzzled. The younger ones wear smiles of amusement, perhaps cynicism on their untested faces. The women anticipate. The men look bored and only mildly curious. A cool breeze rises leisurely from the ocean. It is getting late in the afternoon. The tide has already changed, forcing the water higher onto the beach. My body is drying and caking with salt. I am chilly, dirty, in need of a shower. I wish I could retire someplace quiet and empty where I can be alone. My act has to go on if I am to make any money. They have come for shampoo but they are getting something unexpected. The ‘tip,’ my unyielding front rows, are now the firm root of my audience. People are in place, one row pushing into another. No one can move on their own. They have to wait it out to see where it, where I am going.
“My friends,” I say. “My friends. You shall have the benefit of that discovery because I’m in a magnanimous mood. Yes. I want to do something for you that will make you remember me for the rest of your natural days. And even some of your unnatural ones. I want to make you happy. I want you to leave here as happy as you have ever been. I want you to be happy. I want to relieve your sadness. I want you to walk the eternal green valley before you reach heaven. I want you to experience harps and angels and floating clouds before the real thing comes to sadly interrupt your lives. I want you to share my secret. I see a man in the back shaking his head in disbelief. (There is no man.) Believe me, sir, I’m not going to give you the formula. That would make me a fool in this great free enterprise system we have in America. I don’t own the patent on my product. No one yet can reproduce it. Some of its elements have a habit of changing and once changed, the formula is never the same again. All I intend allowing you to do is to go home with a little of my bottled sunshine. It is harmless. It is delicious. It smells sweet. It is safe for children of all ages. It relieves your aches and pains. No leading health agency sanctions it because the Feds are afraid to touch it. It has great restorative powers. The government is afraid it might put their favorite companies out of business. Step in a little closer. Good. That’s it. Better to hear me. After talking to you and many of your friends so much during the day, my voice is starting to slip away just as that decent, kind and gentle old man’s voice did so many years ago in the moments before his death. Can you see it now? Me, so young, he, so old. He beckons me to bring my ear to his mouth. Oh, it was a sad sight, indeed. I bent my head down and he whispered the magic formula in my already jaded ear. I rose as if Lazarus from the dead and knew that I have been the recipient of a great and wondrous gift. That is correct. That is right. Move in closer.”
They are in the palm of my hands. I reach behind me for a bottle of the hair lotion. It is getting close to when the spot is almost complete, when they will pay me with money instead of applause. They are in my pocket, zippered and sealed, buttoned. They wait for me to pluck them, dice them, roast them. I can feel it.
I continue with my pitch. I have to use it before I lose it, before I lose them—my people, standing patiently in awe in front of me. I am tired. I’m losing my concentration. But I need their money. I have to defeat the withering, yellow, newly calloused thumb of a god unknown—my personal devil driving me to a place foreseen only by “it.” It is a place predetermined before my time, a place of destiny, perhaps that will eventually make me see my time at its end. There is that negative aspect of my being. And damn it, I start smiling. A great big grin washes over my tense face. My uncurled lips seek their mirror in the eyes of the people in front of me. My eyes become less dull. Even my hair begins to shine as if dipped in oil. I receive the strength to go on with my many lies. I’ll take their money and then I’ll go and think. I’ll think and drink and relive something of what I have left behind. I’ll sniff the airs beguiling stench for solace. And I will love it.
I’m in pieces. I have nothing of lasting duration to tie me together. Is my past enough? I’m too young to have nothing so soon. Is my suffering different in intensity and depth than any other individual? Am I different from any other person out of all the millions who are also lost and wandering? Can I seek after myself in limited time and come up with part of an answer? Part of an answer. I am not greedy. Or is it for me to head forward, deny the past and leap boldly into the future by taking a hot iron and cauterizing my festering wounds that refuse healing from the lack of compassion I feel for myself?
Men and women talk on the edge of the crowd. They are loose cannons, mouths in motion. I have to get them back. There is work to do.
“That guy must be nuts,” says an old man wearing a red handkerchief around a balding head covered in liver spots and moles.
“Yeah,” answers his young companion. “I been here all day. Only once I took a break, a break for a frank. I like them franks with the pickles and onion, sweet relish all over. Only once I left.”
“Did you buy anything from him?”
“Not yet. Maybe this time. Just look at him. Sweating like hell. Like a horse. Pouring out of him like piss.”
“Yeah, a real character, that one,” says a skinny, middle-age woman dressed in faded black cotton and wearing black heavy silk stockings.
“Character ain’t the word. An actor, maybe. But a character, no,” says the old man.
“What’s he selling, anyhow?” asks a teenager, a high school-kid with grease in his hair. Pimples dot his unlined face.
“Shhhh,” says his girl friend. “You’ll disturb him, Jerry. You shouldn’t disturb him. He won’t like it.” “Crap,” says her boy friend.
“Right. If you disturb him, he’ll shut up and start staring like he is blind or something,” whispers another young man with a pencil-thin mustache and long sideburns. Two-toned white and black shoes covered his big feet. The shirt he wears is white on white with, of all things, a tie also white on white. Dazzling.
“He’s in his third one after lunch. I think he did three this morning. I lost count when I got tired standing here,” says a skinny black woman on the side. “I always carry lunch in my pocketbook when I come to the boardwalk looking for a show. After I ate, I lost count. I always sit when I eat my sandwich.”
“You live around here?” says the old man to the skinny woman. He can hardly believe his eyes, the way she looks, but she excites him in spite of himself.
“During the summer, only. In his third one, he stopped and looked at the sky. He got dizzy and someone got him a glass water.”
“It’s still sitting there,” says the teenaged girl. Her timely poodle haircut is frizzled from too much sun and sand. Her red bathing suit is too tight as it stretches across her blooming body.
“Shh . . .” says her boy friend. Whenever he looks at her, he jumps, startled with what he sees.
“I think I’ll buy something this time.”
“Me too. Son-of-a-bitch works like hell.”
“What’s he selling? I forgot.”
“Does it matter?”
“Who cares? He puts on a show.”
“Some show . . . ”
“I’d still like to know what he’s selling.”
“Lady, for a buck, you can’t go wrong.”
“For a dollar, I can eat two days. Here two days. At home, three days.”
“Don’t bother me with your trouble.”
“A dollar? Is that all it costs?”
“A buck. To the track, I almost went today. A better show and for cheaper, I’m getting here.” A smile.
“Shush,” says the skinny, middle-aged woman with lunch for two days in her pocketbook and a room in a bungalow by the ocean for the summer.
“Look. He’s laughing,” says the girl with the poodle cut.
“What’s he laughing at? I want to know.”
“Go ask him, wise guy.”
“I think he’s laughing at us,” say a pompous, pregnant woman in her late thirties. She wears a spanking new maternity swim suit, the best money can buy, the best that an overjoyed husband will buy. She is new to the crowd. The oversized pregnant woman has an expression on her face that says, she never wanted the damned child anyway, so she’ll take her pampered husband for everything he has.
“We’re going to pay him! Why should he laugh at us?” says the old man.
“Well, he at least looks human when he smiles,” offers the pregnant woman, an erotic sneer streaking across her pouting lips.
“Kind of cute,” says the teenaged girl.
“What do you mean, kind of cute?” says her shocked boyfriend.
“Cute. Cute. Don’t worry, he’s too old for me.” She pats his hand, grins prettily like a child, but the blood beats faster than usual between her legs. She likes him for the moment. She likes all men and boys for the moment.
“He better be too old,” says her boyfriend and that ends that.
“Cute she calls him. Are we here for cute?” says the pregnant woman. “He looks so sad, so sad and so out of it. I never saw such a sad face on such a young man. He’s not too old for me.”
“But he works hard, no?” says the old man.
“Yeah. Maybe. That hard, I would never work. Ain’t worth it.”
“But what’s he selling? Someone please tell me what’s he selling.”
“Oh shut up and eat your lunch,” says a new voice to the audience, and that ended that.
My silent laughter done, I go loudly back to work. Reality floods over me, signaling me it’s time to feed the vulture again. I’ll make them squirm first.
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