A Tiger on Two Legs

It was when I became all too familiar with washing machines-- a point reached during my period of social detention where I had to wash all the orange jumpsuits from the penitentiary just outside the city as community service, when my stomach started tumbling in their circadian rhythms and I began to imagine my small intestine as a clothesline --that I realized I hadn’t found the passion that people, more often the adults in my life, talked about. The kind of thing that drove people to kill for Klondikes. I was serving out my time in laundromats, stuffing the machines full and watching the jumpsuits rumble in their wombs. I also spent time hanging and folding. Folding and hanging. In its repetitive nature, this was supposed to teach me the art of being gentle.

I was hungry. But not for the food my mother cooked or the satisfaction of watching perennials unfurl in the garden or some other Americana like more yield signs in the neighborhood. No. I was hungry for something new. For things like albacore and hollandaise and the bone marrow of peking duck, for a moment a la the ending of The Graduate, for something to scoop me up like how a mother dog does to her pups, firm but gentle, and plant me where I need to go. Unmuddy. Uncemented. Unstuck. Even so, I felt I was in the compromising position of wanting to work with my hands, but not wanting to get them dirty. I eventually decided for small changes when I swapped my detergent.

My hunger coincided with the week a tiger escaped from the local zoo and caused mass hysteria. People saw the tiger everywhere, or what they thought was the tiger, but actually were shrubs and playground equipment. People claimed they saw the tiger eating their neighbor’s hedges, on the football field, grooming himself down by the reservoir and staring at his own reflection. The only thing people knew about the tiger was that it was born in captivity, that it was named Merengue, like after the dance. Nevertheless, everybody checked over their shoulders twice, believing the tiger was always right behind them.

I learned about Merengue the tiger from my meetings with a woman named Ms. Lombardi on my walk to school. We always managed to meet at the same time, at a public water fountain. She was the type to grapple the faucet with her whole mouth.

“You should be careful,” she said. “All alone. You’ve heard about the cat haven’t you? The big one?”

“I think I’ll be fine. It’s not a long route to school. What about you?”

“Oh I’ve got him.” she said. She had a dog by her feet whose tongue loitered outside of its mouth. He didn’t seem to have quite a good grasp of his surroundings. I came to learn the dog, of unimportant breed, was named Rasputin. Rasputin was a former airport dog Ms. Lombardi adopted. Commissioned in the anti-Soviet era to sniff out nuclear activity in the security line, Rasputin, in his seventh year of employment, accidentally bit into a glass thermometer and got mercury poisoning. He was let go after half his face ended up paralyzed. I thought Ms. Lombardi vaguely resembled Rasputin, which meant as dreadful as a slack-jawed dog could look. She was nice though, and it was at this time I was asking myself the central question: “Isn’t that all that really matters?” and so, “Isn’t that all that really matters?”

And it was during that week of the tiger escape I felt positively sloppy. At loose ends. So sloppy I decided to graffiti every cathedral in the city with eggs. I was up to mischief because I had the luxury of being bored. See, I’d been placed in social detention in the first place for putting a chainsaw to the light pole outside of my house to spite the anti noise-pollution demonstrations outside city hall.  I thought they had missed the irony that the age of the peaceful rally had long passed away in war. It had been my job to educate them. My father was away in Shanghai on business, my mother was planning my sister’s wedding, and so all I was up to was whatever I thought was fun, which could fall into a documentary about the morally depraved. In other words, or, in my mother’s words, I was on the loose.

On a Tuesday I was sent down to the principal's office for smooching a cardboard cutout --I planted a big one on his mouth-- of Saddam Hussein in math class. I did it for the dual purpose of celebrating his new matrimony with Samira Shahbandar and to rile up the kids in my class. Push past devil’s advocate to devil’s friend. That kind of thing. I had to reassure the principle I knew Saddam was a bad guy. I knew. I knew. Trust, me, Mr. Lieberman, I know. I was still sent home early that day and so Wallace Wallace, my sister’s fiance, picked me up in his used VW Vanagon. Wallace sold fabric softener. He also had two of the same first names. I liked to imagine that even after years of stringently mediocre and aggressively average adult life, Wallace still harbored resentment towards his mother for this slight. I realized I should check the guestlist for the wedding.

“I once dated a girl besides your sister,” Wallace said. We were on the road. I doubted many things Wallace said. “Funny story she wanted me to get all my hair removed. All of it. My beard. My hair. My, well.”

“And you did it?”

“Well, yeah, I mean what else was I supposed to do? She wanted what she wanted. It was her thing. She used to call me her shiny sand dollar”

“Okay.” I said.

“That’s not even the funny part. Listen to this. She ends up marrying the guy she dates after me. Get this. The guy has alopecia. And they’ve been married for five years, happily in the tri-state area.”

Wallace decided to take me for my eye examination because there was not much else to do. He didn’t seem angry about my intimacy with Saddam. When sitting in Dr. Ziev’s office I could not determine if he was an actual doctor as I could not see his medical licenses from where I sat. I probably should have taken this as an indication about the overall health of my eyes, but instead I got into a verbal altercation with him.

“You need glasses,” Dr. Ziev said. “Look, you’re so blind you wouldn’t be able to see the tiger that’s roaming around if it was on top of you already.”

The altercation turned into a physical one when I tore down the sight chart and broke a jar of contact fluid against a doorknob. I was asked politely to leave. I wished then for the rest of Dr. Ziev’s life to be sexually unfulfilling and for his car door to squeak.

I looked mighty good for the wedding. I wore something I ironed myself. Only the best for me. I was not best man. I was not a ring bearer. I was not a flower boy. I was security detail and explicitly asked to guard the door. So I did so with a fire poker and my right hand. I only realized later after the type of introspection only security guards can do, that this was meant to be a punishment, but I thought that if my sister ever came and apologized, I would tell her I knew and that I did it because I loved her. I was telling the truth.

The whole affair went well until the cake. Oh, the cake my mother obsessed over. The cake she flew in from Belgium. I was the first one to see it, but what really shocked me was my mother crying. Along the back of the cake were claw marks and canyons from where incisors mapped their way across chocolate and lemon zest, right down to the gold-plated, cake rinds. She was on the floor on her knees.

“The LeMont!” she screamed. She dry-heaved as if she had just lost a newborn. My father even put his hand over his heart. The guests went home early.

The car ride home was excruciating. The kind that made me not wear a seat belt. Hold on to the handle to make Wallace feel like a bad driver. We passed the lumber yards on the way back into town. We past fields of lillies as well. The days were turning Spring, the April showers brought on May flowers, yadda yadda, my mom continued to left-hand the wheel and right hand on about  .

The next morning when I met Mrs. Lombardi she greeted me with the news that Rasputin had been murdered. She had found his picked-clean skeleton on her patio the night before. It sparkled so much it looked power washed. She showed me the pictures she was taking to the police station.

“By that cat no less,” she told me. She more coughed it out. “I just thought you should know,” she said, “I can’t meet you here anymore. Not without Rasputin. It doesn’t feel right. This will be the last time I see you. Goodbye.” I felt like I had lost a lover.

After the events of the past two days I felt absolutely sloppy again. Sapped. I felt like I needed to do more laundry and although it was late, I headed down to the laundromat in the downtown to offer my services to those in need. My parents and siblings were MIA after the cake incident. Maybe they just didn’t want to talk to me. Maybe the tiger did them in.

At the bus stop, I was with two mormons, a man in an orange jumpsuit, and a girl, who would have been the most beautiful girl I had even seen if I was living in a city like Boston. She was wearing paisley, which is a real pain to wash, and the two mormons were way more utilitarian in their dress. They had put their bikes in tow, which they were planning to pin to the nose of the bus. From where I was standing I couldn’t tell if the orange jumpsuit the man was wearing was the kind I washed from the penitentiary. I didn’t want to get close to him to find out. I imagined he was an escaped convict and he came to the city bus because he, too, was lost. It was dark and it was only getting darker. The bus was late. The Mormons let go of their bikes and sat down, the woman smoothed out the pleats in her dress. Across the city I could hear the police sirens: all the search parties looking for the tiger. Merengue had made it on national news. It was an embarrassment the city police hadn’t found the tiger, the channels said. They reported that the two, the tiger and the law enforcement, were dancing around each other in large circles.

¨What if the tiger came right now?” the beautiful woman said. ¨Wouldn't that be terrifying?” As a former security guard, I volunteered to keep watch at the bus stop. However, for lack of light and lack of eyesight, I could never know if the tiger was really coming.  I wondered if the tiger was sitting just outside of view and waiting to wrap its mouth around my head. If he, too, was going to board the city bus and be carried out of sight. I imagined that on the bus Merengue would head to the laundromat and would fold and learn to be gentle.  It was confusing. To feel terrified and calm at the same time. I wondered if Merengue felt confused by his new surroundings. He was alone in a foreign place and wandering. Me and Merengue and our orange skins and all that primal anger geysering up. If I ever saw the tiger I liked to think I would be gentle with it. As gentle with it as I was with clothes. More gentle than I was with people. Even respectful. I would touch the tiger’s head and forgive him for walking around without purpose, even for hurting people and killing a sick dog and destroying the wedding cake. And I would take his paw and me and Merengue would dance the merengue even though I don’t know how to dance. I imagined, behind me, the Mormons would guide the man dressed like a convict and the pretty woman’s hands into a prayer position and they would bless Merengue, uncertain on two legs, and I while we swayed, gently, balancing on each other in the lamplight.

And, standing there, I realized that this was all we ever could do: wait for it.