A Tiger on Two Legs

If I was going to be completely honest, it was boredom that was striking me and I was not handling it gracefully, nor taking it in stride.

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 jumpsuits from the penitentiary outside of the city, serving out my community service time in laundromats, stuffing the machines full and watching the orange garments and sweat and soap suds rumble in their wombs--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 spent time hanging and folding. Folding and hanging. In its repetitive nature, this was supposed to teach me the art of being gentle. 

Days at the dinner table were spent banging my forks against my knives and the spoons against the tables.

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 to one that gave me contact hives.

Truth be told, I was feeling quite radical.

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 and the shadow of passing cars waltzing through their windows. People claimed they saw the tiger eating their neighbor’s hedges, on the football field, dumpster diving outside of the supermarket, and grooming himself down by the reservoir and staring at his own reflection. Some people were saying: have you ever seen such a thing so full of splendor? Others said: I hope that thing doesn’t go nowhere near my kids. Even fewer said: Yes, I bought a gun. What is there to do? It’s still only such a thing!

The only thing people knew about the tiger was that it was born in captivity, that it was named Merengue, like after the dance. At first it was a circus tiger and taught to perform with traditional Dominican accompaniment of long dresses and accordion and tambor. Most of all he missed the marimba, people theorized. He sat in front of a Bobby Hutcher special in the windows of a television show for the hour and a half it was on. Nevertheless, everybody checked over their shoulders twice, believing the Merengue was always right behind them. Nevertheless, everyone in the town was advised not to listen to the marimba. This instruction was followed perfectly.

I learned about Merengue 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,” Ms. Lombardi said. “All alone. You’ve heard about the cat haven’t you? The big one?”

“I think I’ll be fine. I don’t walk too far.”

“It’s a tiger.”

“It’s gotta have a good sense of humor.”

I was kidding around, but she was serious—unnerved, fascinated, Mrs. Lombardi came quite close to my face.

“What, you think it takes just a song and a dance to escape death?”

“What I really think,” I said, “Is that death may just be a song and a dance away from life.”

“They teach you that one in school?”

“All they teach me in school is to see problems, look at them a bit, and then say, yup, that’s an elephant death. But I know that man can get trunk-skin grafted onto their aorta if they so choose and that it ain’t super helpful.”

“You mean if the doctors so chose,” said Ms. Lombardi. 

“It ended in paraplegia, at least what I read about.”

“When someone dies in the hospital,” said Ms. Lombardi, “I think the doctors close their eyes, did you know that? I didn’t even get to close the eyes of my damn husband. The doctor did it. He told me he did it too.”

“And you couldn’t believe it?” I said.

“The problem was I had to believe it,” said Ms Lombardi. “I just kept rubbing his cheek.”

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked.

“What with the tiger?” said Ms Lombardi, but she changed the conversation quickly. “Oh, I’ve got him.” she said. Ms. Lombardi 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, but he was a solid airport dog because, in fact, he was never neutered. Half of his face ended up paralyzed and Rasputan was let go from Tweed Airport in New Haven after shaking and shivering, throwing up in a woman’s carry-on. 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?” 

“Pass me a cigarette,” I said and Mrs. Lombardi did.

I sold it at school for a chocolate chip cookie.

But I think I could have had sex with Ms. Lombardi if not for Rasputin.

During that week of the tiger escape I felt positively sloppy. At loose ends. My shoelaces could never be tight enough and at many points in many places I walked without shoes at all. I was so sloppy I decided to graffiti every cathedral in the city with eggs. Slobbering but somber about it, I was up to mischief because I had the luxury of being bored. I spat onto the display case of a cupcake shop. 

And that was just the icing on the cake.

I had a dream of seducing Peggy Guggenheim and burning her art by accident. I was sitting in a rotten chair eating a ratty plum--ratty because I had eaten it in possibly the weirdest way--just random bites all over. And I was trying to evaluate whether she was a lesbian. I mean a girl in that much denim at Tribeca could be. She could be. It was more than less possible, I believed. I was thinking about whether a comment about that new Senate fellow Strom Thurmond with the funny name from South Carolina would make her smile--I mean I’m not opposed to playing liberal, or realer liberal--but eventually I decided on going over and likening my plum to a Pollock and look I don’t know how it happened but I wasn’t complaining that she was practically licking my face five minutes later. And then I knocked over a candle into a trashcan and poof!

I wasn’t even sure I wanted all this, that was the worst part.

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.

I wasn’t sure whether I was on the loose just to be on the loose--I wasn’t escaping no noose at that age, no way--or whether it was because of something.

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--or said I did it-- for the dual purpose of celebrating his anniversary of his  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 fiancé, picked me up in his used VW Vanagon. Wallace sold fabric softener. Door to door that is he 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. To see if she was attending, of course, then prepare a set of difficult questions in an order than indicated to her how much of a pussy her son is.

“The marine layer is coming in,” said Wallace Wallace.

“What’re the marine layer?”

“The fog.”

“So you mean the fog is coming in?”

“Well its really the same thing, but I was trying to be scientific.”

“What is scientific about this conversation?”

“Bonnie asked me to take you to your eye exam.”

“After I got kicked out of school?”

“There doesn’t seem like a better time to get your vision examined.”

“What are you trying to suggest to me?”

“It may have,” Wallace Wallace stuttered, “It--uhh--It--uhmuhm--may-it-may-have something to do with foresight.”

“I got foresight but that doesn’t imply, if you, Wallace, wish to be scientific, I hypothesize that you’re suggesting something about my decision making.”

“Well, well, you uh, well look at it like in uh this frame. Let’s frame storm.”

“I frame storm a framed question--palm wood by the way--of your decision making. And I’ll give you a palm if you say no.”

“Hey,” said Wallace Wallace, “I’m dating your Bonnie, I don’t think I’m doing terribly at all.”

“Exactly,” I said. 

“You’re,” I said.

“Dating,” I said.

“My sister,” I said.

“You see,” said Wallace Wallace, “I don’t think you understand. I’ve only been with one other girl long term. And every guy, every guy tells me they could never imagine me getting with a chick. They all say I’m too much of a goofball to ever imagine, you know, well, uh, well, uh, you know and so, but, I mean I seem to always be pulling chicks way out of my league. Last girl I was with, I was saying, she was a nutback, a nut back then by the way, way back when, and your sister in comparison is, she’s amazing. Splendid. Funny story this girl before Bonnie wanted me to get all my hair removed. All of it. My beard. My hair. My, well.”

“And you did it? How's life post bald?”

“I can’t say it’s better because it wasn’t much worse, or I was tricked into thinking so, yes, but 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 and rub my head like she used her first wish to get more wishes.”

“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.”

“So you’re not interested in my intimacy with Saddam?”

“The new Iraqi president? I mean it’s a weird choice but nothing wrong with expressing your homosexuality. What’s wrong with Saddem Hussein.”

Then, he was very wrong about the situation and I wanted to kill him. This has been a continued feeling.

When sitting in Dr. Ziev’s office for the eye exam, I was getting rowdier and rowdier cause Wallace Wallace was talking to the receptionist about some shit in the paper that was probably just shit in the paper and his insinuations in the car of an exact science of his social autopsies had got me riled up to a return at no point.

In his office, I could not determine if Dr Ziev was an actual doctor as I could not see his medical licenses from where I sat. I had to give a take on this.

“Hey are you sure you’re an actual doctor cause I want to see you test the reflexes on your own knee.”

“Medical school,” said Dr. Ziev as he flipped some papers over a clipboard. “Medical school says I think I’m an actual doctor.”

“I can’t see your diplomas though.”

“That’s because 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.”
“And if it was on top of me would it be so bad?”

“I mean you’d probably be dead. I don’t see your argument here.”

“That man out there--you see him? He has two of the same first names and he’s marrying my sister in two days. That man thinks I’m gay, he said so in the car. Now, I don’t take offense to the gay part but I take offense to the fact I think he’s the genius of the goddamn world, you feel me doctor?”

“Well I don’t think I’ve actually touched you. Optometrists don’t actually do that I don’t think.”

“Doctor,” I said, “But you have touched me. I’ve been such a bad boy and your statements on my vision, doctor, they’re teaching and telling me a lot about foresight.”

I tore down Dr. Ziev’s sight chart.

“And if my vision is bad I have to think a lot about how I’m looking at my future going forward. Vision of foresight, that kind of thing. I would appreciate if you did not tell my sister’s little bitch boy about what happened in here because, well,” I said. I stalled. “Because, because!”

“I think you should leave,” said Dr. Ziev.

I broke a jar of contact fluid against the doorknob.

“I wish for the rest of your life to be sexually unfulfilling and for your car radio to crackle for no reason at all and for you to get a pain in your upper clavicle every time you cum.”

Wallace Wallace spoke the whole car ride back about how he’s the police chief’s son and whether, immediately, Do you know the color mauve?

I looked mighty good for the wedding. On Sunday, I wore something I ironed myself. Only the best for me. I was not the best man. I was not a ring bearer. I was not a flower boy. My sister asked me to be security detail and to, under no circumstances, enter the service. 

I patrolled for anyone, without thoughts of the tiger even, with a fire poker and my right hand. I only realized later after the type of introspection only security guards can do, that she wanted me not to be in the wedding service because I would have done something, 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 wedding 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--as the cake maker crossed my path coming into the services-- and I shouted for my mother and my father, but what really shocked me was my mother crying. Along the back of the cake were claw marks and canyons from where incisors and the scroll of tiger claws mapped their way across chocolate and lemon zest, right down to the gold-plated, cake rinds. My mother 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. 

“Wow,” he said.

“I don’t want to be hit over the head with this sort of thing!” Bonnie said.

“I don’t want to be hit over the head at all!” 

I said that; I said that.

The guests went home early. 

The car ride home was excruciating. The kind that made me not wear a seat belt. I held on to the handle to make Wallace Wallace feel like a bad driver. My mother tried to slap my hand down, but I forced her hand up to hold the handle too. We passed the lumber yards on the way back into town. We passed fields of lillies as well. The days were turning Spring, the April showers brought on May flowers, yadda yadda, Wallace continued to left-hand the wheel and right hand on about laundry detergent, his favorite flowers in paintings, about how Giverny would have made a great wedding, helped out his Monet-maniac friends that would only mumble about monet, but I mean everything he thought was said and got on my nerves. My sister ate their wedding cake off of a paper plate.

My father, in the passenger seat, said nothing.

The next morning, Monday, when I met Ms. Lombardi, she greeted me with the news that Rasputin had been murdered over the weekend. She had found his picked-clean skeleton on her patio the night before along with a marimba made out of vials of mercury filled to different levels. Rasputin’s skeleton sparkled so much it looked power washed. Ms Lombardi showed me the pictures she was taking to the police station. 

The pictures were blurry.

“By that cat no less,” she told me. She 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 because it felt so right before.  This will be the last time I see you. Goodbye.” 

There was nothing I could say.

I felt like I had lost a lover. 

I didn’t know if this made me feel more or less 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. This girl was wearing paisley, which is a real pain to wash, and the two mormons were way more utilitarian in khakis and white shirts with blue neckties. 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 man in the orange jumptsuit’s silhouette was similar to the kind I washed from the penitentiary. I didn’t want to get close to him to find out, but I imagined he was an escaped convict and he came to the city bus because he, too, was lost. I didn’t care about who he was, only his silhouette. Only what I was courageous enough to see. 

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, and the orange jumpsuit read a paperback book. 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?” 

“The tiger?” asked the man in the orange jumpsuit.

“There’s a tiger that escaped,” I said, “if you haven’t heard it, you live under a rock.”

“I’d rather live under a rock than get killed by a tiger,” said the woman.

“I’ll stand security detail,” I said.

I sat right where the street lamp waned for thirty minutes as the bus grew more late.

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.  I was both terrified and calm, which meant I was there. This allowed me to wonder if Merengue felt confused by his new surroundings. He was alone in a foreign place and wandering. 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 imagined behind me the mormons forming the girl’s hands, the man in the orange jumpsuit, his hands two, into a prayer position so they could bless the tiger.

 I would touch the tiger’s head and forgive him for walking around without purpose, without a because, even for hurting people and killing a sick dog and destroying the wedding cake. And I would take his paw and pretend the marimba was marrying the air and Merengue and I would dance the merengue even though I don’t know how to dance. The two of us, both uncertain on two legs, would  sway, gently, balancing on each other in the lamplight. 

And, standing there, outside of the circle of light, I realized that to be gentle with time, all I could ever do was wait for it.