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Derrick Thorn
businesses • helping persons • solving problems
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please be calling at ”
A telephone number was hand-printed on the other side of the card.
Well, I thought, not a misspelled word in the lot. Not that it made any sense. I tossed the card in the nightstand's drawer, where it would lie with other business cards, many of unknown provenance.
I got dressed, regarded myself in the bathroom mirror, said, "If no one has told you they love you today, there's a good reason for that," and left my apartment. Evil Ed was in the hall, a garbage bag on his shoulder, heading to the stairs that led to the dumpster out back. He nodded to me and I nodded back, neither of us compelled to smile or speak.
It was snowing, slow dizzy wet flakes that turned black in the gutters. Aside from a couple of homeless people hunkered in doorways and a skeletal dog that was tearing apart a black plastic trash bag, spilling empty beer cans into the street, it was quiet the way Sunday mornings are in my neighborhood. The God of Church has either got you, swept you up and dragged you into some storefront salvation shop, or you are lying low, hardly breathing, feeling the oppressive holiness of the day coming for you like a hearse.
We were in the holiday season, almost Thanksgiving, and I could already feel Christmas bearing down on me, a black cloud of obligations and money-draining events. My bank account was no longer being fed by a salary-BC Graphics had fired me three weeks ago for excellent reasons that have no part in this narrative-and I hadn't informed Victoria of this reversal in my fortunes. I couldn't imagine her saying anything helpful.
Victoria, my ex, has never entirely approved of me. She married me, I suspect, because her father
despised me. In marrying me against his wishes, she was getting back at him for being a distant, aloof parent during her formative years. As time went by, the old man warmed to me. I turned out to be his ally in a sea of women-five daughters, no sons, a harridan of a wife!-and Victoria felt betrayed.
I married Victoria because I loved her, and, in the fullness of time, that love disappeared as though a magician had snapped his fingers.
Behold this shiny love. Keep your eyes on it, ladies and gentlemen. Are you watching? Voila! Gone in a flash of smoke, vanished in a whoop, and before I could catch my breath, there it was again, transformed, love sauntering in from offstage, gri
He was five now, and I was on my way into the heart of the suburbs to pick him up and take him to the zoo in West Orange.
"Can we stop at MacDonald's?" he asked, looking out the car's passenger window at the falling snow.
"If you don't tell your mother," I said. This was a Sunday tradition, covert MacDonald's, a small father-son conspiracy against a powerful regime that could crush us without raising a sweat.
"I won't tell," Da
"Because she'd slap us so hard our spines would fly out our butts!" I said.
Da
"She'd stomp us so hard we'd pop like bugs on a griddle."
My son laughed, leaning forward.
"She'd knock us all the way into next year. She'd whack us till our tongues jumped out of our heads. And once a tongue gets away, it burrows down into the earth, quick as a snake, and you have to get a spade and dig like crazy, and by the time you catch it and put it back in your mouth… well, it doesn't taste very good, I can tell you that."
A stand-up comic is only as good as his audience. My audience was small but enthusiastic, giggling and hooting, his knees bouncing, his nose ru
"She'd shake us until we were so dizzy we couldn't tell up from down, and we would fall right into the sky and keep on falling until our asses hit the moon!"
In the MacDonald's we both ordered Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and chocolate shakes, the major food groups.
"When we go to the zoo, can we see the snakes?" Da
"This isn't a really big zoo or anything. I don't know if they have snakes."
"They do! Mom went on the Internet and showed me a picture. They have a Reptile House."
"Okay," I said. "Sure." Secretly, I was a little miffed. What was Victoria doing, prematurely unwrapping my gift to Da
my zoo? Oh, how petty are the skirmishes of the heart.
From the parking lot, the zoo didn't look very imposing. There were two round towers from which flags fluttered, suggesting one of those Renaissance fair events in which one is harried by costumed jugglers, street musicians, and mimes. Once we got our tickets and got through the gate, jostled by a group of elderly women wearing identical bowling league jackets (
Queen of the Lanes emblazoned on the backs), we consulted the signs and settled on a plan: monkeys to big cats to otters to hippos and rhinos to giraffes to birds and, saving the most anticipated for last, to reptiles. The Reptile House was near the gate and a logical last stop before leaving the zoo.
These things never go as pla
"Dad! What are those monkeys doing?" Da
"Fornicating," I said.
"What's that?"
"It's like fighting," I said.
A tall guy next to me, obviously another divorced, weekend-dad with two small, identical girls, each clinging to a hand, nodded his head. "You can say that again."
There were lots of small, fidgety monkeys that seemed completely baffled by their cages, as though they had been caught earlier that day and were still thinking, "What the hell? I'm trapped! I'm getting the hell out of… what's this? I can't get out this way either!
What's going on here?"
In a large cage with black bars, a reddish-brown orangutan slumped in the crook of a tree. His boredom was palpable and made me ashamed of my scrutiny. Forget spying on people having sex or practicing some special perversion. What is sadder, more dismal, than witnessing another person's boredom, the slow, dim-witted crotch-scratching lethargy that is often the existential lot of a person alone? You might note that orangutans are apes, not people, but that didn't keep me from hurrying Da
And on we went: to the zany otters, the bloated hippos, the absent rhinos (on vacation? escaped? indisposed? deceased?), the really tall giraffes, and into the raucous bird house. As a father and font-of-all-knowledge, I read out-loud the various plaques that described the animals, their habits, their character, their troubles, and Da
We came to a great, curving arc of glass, a vista which promised a view of-yes!-penguins. I had much to say about these amazing birds, the saga of their days fresh in my mind, and was dismayed to find myself gazing at brown concrete curves, blackened and desolate, an emptiness as unwelcoming as some demolished urban block. A sign a