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AUGUST 15TH, 1997, THERE WERE DAYS WHEN I LIVED ONLY TO SPIT ON HIM
My greatest achievement would be to outlive him and spit on his grave, I thought of him, as weak and bald as ever, drowning on emphysema in the old men's home, and I created the spit inside my own mouth as I walked down the street, kind of like watering at the mouth for a hot meal in mid winter, when the only thing that you have left in your fridge is the flour and sugar, I spat onto the footpath seeing his face in every crack, and the spit dispersed like the weaker pressure of a hose left to rot, I wondered that if when I spat on his face that it would backfire somehow, that rather than being a straight hit like it was on the movies, it might miss his cheek and spray across his silk tie, or that the noisy fan at the old mens' home or an open broken window might blow that spit back onto me, or that I would somehow spit on myself, I got depressed at the lack of power regarding my own spitting technique, yet I didn't want to start practicing spitting every day, because I was already going to the gym and had given up smoking, and I couldn't take on anymore disciplines, also I didn't want to spend too much time on something that mightn't eventuate, or worse still when the higher degree at the end of the three years amounted to saliva on someone's face, when I thought of spitting on his face or on his grave to be life's greatest achievement, in that moment I knew that life wasn't so good, so I used my fantasies about spitting on him as a barometer to my thinking and sense of worth, on the days where I most felt like spitting I would take good care of myself, there were actually many days where I didn't feel like spitting at all, and on these days my mouth was quite dry as though it had been baked by the sun, these days I noticed birds, I smiled more and before I knew it I caught myself singing, it came as such a surprise to hear myself, that for a minute I thought I must have heard another woman singing down by the river, either about to swim or wash clothes, like in all those movies where the man always comes upon her as though he is a hunter, and gets more than he bargained for, then she will sense something out of the ordinary and grab for her clothes to cover her body, as well she should, against the sexist mysoginist fool, who wouldn't know a wet crotch from a wet branch, and this was what I felt like, stumbling upon myself singing whilst doing my hand washing, I covered my own mouth in case there was some force that wanted to capture me or destroy the unselfconscious moment, and before I knew it I was self-conscious, although my mouth was quiet dry, I think it was all this smiling and singing, that had let the fresh air in, these were the good times, where the spitting on his crooked old face or his lawn cemetery grave were far away, on these days he became the spit itself, a huge globule of yellow and grey mucus tarred from cigarette smoke, and I knew that this particle of gigantic spit was doing just fine by just being itself, and that no more spit needed to be added to it. |
