Detachable Legs

People are squalid creatures. We live in microscopic filth and dead skin and nail shavings and tiny flecks of excrement and flatulent stinks and nose dribblings and vicious effluvia. Think of what lies on a bus seat: particles of human squalor, billions and billions of them. And here I sit, wallowing.

It is not being a very good day. It is not being a very good year. I am not getting much done. I do not feel like getting much done. I do not feel like much of anything. I stare blankly out the window, wishing I weren’t here, wishing I weren’t anywhere. It has recently become apparent that work is losing interest in me. A young—naturally—newbie has been promoted around me, and some of the key people aren’t speaking to me much. Like they’re fading me out, willing me to disappear. Don’t they stop to consider what that does to a person’s self-respect?

The bus stops. Trash covers the sidewalk in front of the bus shelter. Now, too, I notice that my clothes carry leftover deep-fryer stink from the donut-shop. I hate that—you’d think they’d be required to have proper ventilation. We’re losing our grip as a society. The bus starts, the squalor is left behind but the stink remains.

A man occupies the seat across from mine. I think he was there when I got on, but I’m not sure. He may have gotten on after me. You kind of lose track. He is almost unreasonably large and wears green nylon pants with legs that detach at the knee so you can turn the pants into shorts. The seams between the lower and upper legs are open, revealing strips of white flesh and dark hair. He must have unzipped the legs after he got on the bus, otherwise the legs would have fallen down around his feet. So, for some reason, he has unzipped them after he took his seat. To cool off, maybe. People like to exercise this need to be health-conscious, even if it means making odd spectacles of ourselves.

Downtown the other day there was a masked woman at a bus stop. It’s mid-August and a pungent orange haze from forest fires hangs over the city, making it eerie and noir-ish. People wear masks of various kinds, and this woman wore a dress in a lurid red floral pattern, and a white respirator mask. The protuberant respirator was a hideous proboscis that hinted at some future mutation of the human face. As she waited for her bus she strode back and forth in her gaudy dress and terrible mask, as if to invite comment and, possibly, erotic reaction. She was tall and buxom, her dark hair was wavy, her stance was bold, she was an odd spectacle but an imposing one. For a moment I wanted to see inside her mind, and then see inside her dress, but then I became repulsed at the idea. I don’t care to see inside anyone else’s mind—the fountainhead of squalor—let alone other intimate places. That’s a little too much like this bus seat.

I was ten years old when I took my first solo bus ride. It was 1962, the age of analysis, and my mother, being under analysis herself, determined that I, too, needed analyzing. I regret never asking her later why she felt this was necessary, but I suspect it was because 1962 was the year of my worm phase. In school I made worm-creatures with the sleeve of my sweaters and had them talk in squeaky worm-voices and chased the girls with them. I also drew ink sketches of striped worm-creatures living in great, futuristic worm-cities. I imagine the concerned teacher ratted on me to my horrified mother (why couldn’t he be a normal boy who liked sports?), who of course saw the Freudian implications of my little fantasy world.

And so, once a week for a solid year, I was obliged to draw my worm-cities and share various thoughts with Dr. Elbert Ford. Mom drove me (and my sister, who was also under analysis—and I can’t imagine what having no fewer than three family members on psychiatrists’ couches must have cost) to the clinic on First Hill, and we parted to undergo our treatment with separate analysts. Then, we rode the bus home, for much of the year in the dark. Here we were, children, alone in the city, at night! You could do things like that back then—at least, Mom thought we could. Funny; in other matters she was usually quite cautious. I wonder if she (subconsciously, of course) wanted rid of us.

But I didn’t worry about it. I loved the adventure of being out and riding the rattle-bang old trolley coaches and the feeling of being part of a larger mystery stretching back to the early years of the century, and running down the dark lanes from the bus stop to our house, where dinner would be waiting, or sometimes not. And here’s another funny thing: In my memory, which admittedly may be faulty, Mom never seemed all that glad to see us. She was more like, Oh, here you are. I supposed she treasured her two hours’ peace and quiet, and was naturally resentful when the slamming of the door signaled its abrupt end.

Resentments aside, it was a good time. The Century 21 World’s Fair had everybody excited about the future, and analysis seemed to go hand-in-hand with it in offering hope of better things to come. I hope my folks got their money’s worth. Now, times aren’t so good. The charm has gone out of buses and there are many people in need of analysis, and much more, on the streets, without nice homes and dinners to come home to. The squalor seems to be growing deeper and deeper, and Earth careening faster and faster toward an ugly demise.

The bus stops beside a church and I see a body lying in an alcove, wrapped in a white blanket. Sticking out of the blanket is the head of a large white pit bull, and parked beside them is shopping cart full of stuff, and perched atop it all, as if standing guard, is a little brown teddy bear. As spectacles go, it’s a pathetic one. How do people end up like this, and what can be done for them?

A little way on we pass a vacant shopfront stuffed with a jumble of blankets and sleeping bags and refuse. A Styrofoam food container yawns open, spilling out food—Thai, it looks like. It’s a sickening sight, and I wonder how a homeless person can afford to be so wasteful. The squalor of humanity continues to gnaw at me. Cracks and creases, flaps and folds, farts and grunts and foot thumps: how do we ever find one another attractive?

I glance over at the man and see the light hitting the gaps in his pant-legs, oscillating light-dark, light-dark, white flesh-dark-white flesh-dark. The man’s size and the flashing light of his white leg flesh make me feel faintly nauseous. I wish the bus would get to my stop.

What is making me so uncomfortable right now? Is it all these external things, or is it really old regrets and buried resentments, sharpened now by the bony hand of time? I feel a clammy blanket of foreboding settling on me. I move my shoulders and shake my head to try to dislodge it, but it won’t budge. I hope something can help me out of this. I wonder how much I really got from Dr. Ford. I feel as if I may be backsliding.

The man has begun to thump his foot on the floor, thump, thump, thump. I think, Is there a disco inside your head?I glance his way and see that he wears one of those old-fashioned wool caps with the pinched-down duckbill front that accentuates the bulbousness of the head. It’s a look that baffles me. His skin is pale, his hair is black and stringy. He gives off an aura of excess energy, even desperation, and I wonder if, by showing little bits of flesh and thumping his foot, he’s hitting on me. Sexual barriers are down all over nowadays, and a man hitting on another man is not only no longer strange, but something to be expected. I’m just not interested. He may simply be untethered. There are a lot of untethered people around these days.

But here is a woman and a dog on a leash. The woman wears pink sandals and the dog wears pink booties, making me wonder what kind of life such a person has. Has she been successful or just lucky, or is she a victim of a failed relationship, who lavishes all her love on the dog? They are both tethered to each other, and I think it’s probably a happy relationship. It’s an amusing sight, one that restores a little of my youthful sense of wonder. I wish the feeling would never leave. Maybe little moments like this are all we need.

Three years after analysis and the worm-creatures, I was about to enter junior high when an envelope arrived in the mail. It was an invitation to the Saltmarsh dance class. The class was by invitation only, and only the children of the Seattle elite received them: white, Protestant, private school children. The young men were to wear jackets and ties, the young women dresses; fruit punch and cookies would be served. “The Saltmarsh dance class!” Mom cooed, elated at this sign of social acceptance, something she always craved. At that moment she probably felt that the investment in my year of analysis was money well-spent, even though she would have to drive me five miles into town, drive back home, then drive back into town two hours later to collect me after class. Talk about insanity! As for me: What else did I have to do?

I happily attended the Saltmarshes, not thinking it was wimpy or stupid, like some boys would have, but an opening to a wider world offering excitement and, just possibly, assignation. It was another moment of high hope. Ultimately, however, hope became part of a larger trend in my life, one that I did not see at first but for which I may have felt incipient hints: failure. I attended the class for three successive autumn seasons, and in those three years I never got beyond basic box step, and I never consummated an assignation. A bust. That should have tipped me off. The memory of it all, and the essential idiocy of dancing, makes me want to laugh. Even in failure, I am saved.

All that effort I expended at the Saltmarsh dance class and in school and in between, all that energy pushing and straining in hopes of producing something more than thought fragments, is palpable in the city now, this eerie pre-apocalyptic city engorged with people and their foaming, frothing, mental energy, floundering, flailing, and, all too often, failing. So much of it ending in squalor. The rancid air is filled with foreboding, the human force has tipped the balance and is becoming overwhelming. The end result may be that this city and all its people are one day tipped into Puget Sound, leaving future generations to wonder at the haunted underwater ruins.

He’s still thumping his foot, and I think it’s getting louder. If he’s trying to get my attention, he is both succeeding and, in a broader context, failing. I hate him. One reason I hate him is, I want a woman. But God or somebody keeps throwing guys at me. He could just as well set across from me a reasonably attractive woman with an easy smile and no particular place to go. But no, I get Harvey foot-banger. Story of my life. It mystifies me. Virtually my only dating experience involved a woman who told me she didn’t trust a man who ate salad. Where the hell do people get these ideas—from God?

I turn my thoughts to a dream I had last night. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but this one is still vividly clear. I drove (though I do not own an automobile) through a strange and dimly-lit landscape along a pocked and pitted street lined with sad frame houses all weathered dark, dingy gray. Sawhorses and smudge pots, wooden sawhorses. The street was torn up, the way was dark and gray and littered with refuse. Mine was the only auto on the street, and I sensed rather than felt eyes watching me. The pocks and pits grew deeper and closer together, and I knew I had to get out of there. I turned the car and started back in the opposite direction. The gradient increased and I entered an enclosed area and drove up a rocky scarp. Were the eyes following me—and what was their intent? I tried moving faster (I may have been pulling the car by this time), but it was slow going on the rocks. At last, I reached the top. It was dark, and the road turned sharply into a large room. The floor was smooth, the windows large—a parking ramp. I began easing slowly down the incline—down? No, wait—wouldn’t that take me right back to the bottom, where I began? Back toward the vague but no less menacing danger? Strange figures and shapes danced in my eyes, like Chinese characters, oscillating around and around. Then, dream over.

Analyzing my dream—take that, Dr. Ford!—I realize that it symbolizes the impossibility of escape. No exit. I look out the window and see desolate lots and a row of empty shopfronts and I feel we are entering the dream landscape. The blurring of lines becomes the flashing flickers of light and shadow through the bus windows, and the white flesh glimmering between the man’s dark green pant legs.

I try not to look at the pant legs and the exposed flesh, but I can’t seem to keep my eyes away, and I feel like I’m slowly being turned inside-out, that all my previous existence is being challenged and threatened. Maybe this man with the removable legs will save me—maybe he’s been placed here for a reason, a sign. This might bear closer analysis.

Nonetheless, the sight of the chalk-white flesh is making me nauseous. I feel the bile welling up, souring in my gullet, I want to throw up, violently. I must stifle the urge; if I throw up here, I could get in serious trouble. This guy might beat me up, the bus driver might call the police. I look over and expect to see him staring at me in disgust, or leering like Woody Allen in that movie. But he’s only staring out the window. I find myself vaguely disappointed.

I distract myself by thinking about legs and the things we ask them to do. Like dancing, an odd ritual, one that makes me think of a show I saw once about large birds, storks, I think, performing a mating dance. It seems strange that human beings should have anything in common with them, and then I think of a woman from the 1940s, wearing a lurid dress like the woman at the bus stop, and a ludicrous hat, prancing and whirling about to ridiculous music, and the thought almost makes me laugh. But amusement gives way, as it must, to the omnipresent realization that all my inner longings and attempts to gratify those longings and better myself have failed.

The fact that I have been banished to the margins at work, an object of silent scorn, gnaws at me. I suspect it started a couple of years ago when I failed to attend the boss’s daughter’s wedding reception. Everybody else went, or so they say, but I saw no point in it. I’m not my boss’s “friend,” I’m not his daughter’s “friend,” why should I intrude myself? But stupid office politics dictates such idiocy, and I realize that my failure to play the game has cost me—that, when push comes to shove, I learned nothing from Dr. Ford or the Saltmarshes.

The thought makes my righteous anger swell up. And really, isn’t this part of what being a man is all about? Anger, righteous anger. How in hell would we have had the fiber to build the Pyramids, the transcontinental railroad, the Panama Canal—without the rich, vitriolic sap of male anger? I immediately feel justified, validated: perhaps what I need most is violence. For the thumping is now almost deafening, drowning out my thoughts, my own needs, the other sounds of the day. I am starting to consider asking him to stop.

He is now moving his finger along one of the leg-openings. I think he might be putting his finger into the opening, but have no intention of looking any closer.

I feel an escalating fear that I will soon commit an act of violence.

For if we Americans learn one thing, it’s not the box step, it is that violence is never far beneath the surface

He is thumping faster, louder.

He has sensed my weakness.

Does he have a knife or a gun?

Is he working himself up to do me bodily harm?

Should I act pre-emptively to head him off?

But what form would that action take? I have no weapon, only my meager physical being, a being I sense is dwindling. Just ask the people at work. Chances are if I were to throw myself at him, he would only laugh scornfully and throw me into the aisle. I sense things are getting out of control here, and force myself to direct my thoughts to other things, such as:

The dog with the pink booties.

The teddy bear standing guard.

The rape of the earth and its avoidable death.

The three wasted years of the Saltmarsh dance class.

My dream and what it means, and why I can’t escape myself.

We pass another homeless man occupying his own filth, sitting on a small piece of cardboard. It’s probably his “anything helps” sign. Still, he strains to maintain a modicum of cleanliness, a thin cardboard barrier between “civilization,” however much waning, and chaos. Life is short, crude, and cruel. There are so many now, living on the streets, how many will there be in a hundred years? The thought is painful, and the odds are growing that we will exterminate ourselves before then. Not to mention every other living thing. Every day, we creep closer to the edge, each day we lose patience, we lose stamina, we barely tolerate each other. Love is becoming an endangered species.

The thumping has stopped. His foot is still, motionless. I don’t understand the sudden stoppage of human rhythm. Something seems missing. Has he lost interest? Was he hoping I would say something, maybe an excuse to engage me in a fight—or an assignation? I feel like the air has suddenly gone out of the afternoon, like a deflating balloon.

He has pulled the bell cord for the next stop. I find myself hoping he’ll forget to zip his pant legs and that, when he stands up to leave, they’ll fall down around his ankles. But even this amusement is denied me, he zips up quickly, efficiently, as if he’s done it often, stands quickly, and exits through the rear door. The bus sighs and moves on, the seat now empty. (I do not look at the seat.) I will probably never see him again. I think about the pants with detachable legs, and wonder what it would be like to detach the legs themselves and let the body float free. I can’t imagine much good would come of that, except to give us new ways to create squalor. And then I realize: Why should I think that? Isn’t that just making squalor inevitable? A dead end, a precipice I—we—must not fall into. I must devise new ways of thought. Elevated thought. I must accept that:

I will not kill anybody.

I will bless somebody.

I will give something to somebody.

I will bestow an act of compassion on somebody.

Resolved: that I will not become a squalor-generator. I will become a compassion-generator, I will use the kernels of hope planted in me by Dr. Ford and Century 21 and the Saltmarshes and everybody else who has been kind to me, even the bus driver who smiled when I got on, and envision a world in which we have the option of detaching ourselves from our legs and from the ground, and floating free into the sweet blue air, bumping into one another and laughing and creating a new, loving, joy-filled world. But I will not forsake legs. No, I hereby retain the option of rejoining them as needed. I love my legs, and would never leave them permanently. The vision first repels then thrills me. It’s almost real.

Several hours later I lie in bed and see a vision of my bus, now driven by a different driver. The bus passes a church, and in an alcove a figure lies wrapped in a brown blanket, a large brown dog beside it. The dog is just closing its eyes when it sees the bus. The dog raises its head, its legs quivering with the instinct to give chase, but the bus disappears and the dog sighs softly and goes back to sleep. The dog has sense and a great will to live.  

I wake up and know that my years of failure and desolation are over. Today, I will return to the church with the homeless person and the pit bull and the teddy bear and make sure they’re okay. Today, I will say hello.