Human Furniture
Every day at the corner of third and Harrison, across the street from the VA offices, an older black man stands reading the paper, his dog on a blanket at his feet. Sometimes, if I’m really late, he’ll have left his post to grab a tall boy down the street, and I’ll catch him walking back, the rim of the paper bag already a little soggy.
Today, though, he wasn’t alone. Sometimes, he has a raggedy blonde friend who sips coffee with him. But he wasn’t there either. In his place, a man with a drawn face and bony knees pressing against his polyester pants sat next to him. Hands on his thighs, he seemed a bit regal, dark glasses covering his eyes so you couldn’t see all that wisdom pouring out of their blindness and tragedy.
As I passed on the left, reading RSS feeds on my cell phone (BLDGBLOG quoting from Tom McCarthy’s Remainder: “What tasks would you like them to perform?”
“There’ll be an old woman downstairs, immediately below me,” I said. “Her main duty will be to cook liver. Constantly. Her kitchen must face outwards to the courtyard, the back courtyard onto which my own kitchen and bathroom will face too. The smell of liver must waft upwards.), I realized that the man wasn’t sitting on an ordinary plastic or wood chair. No, this chair had hair. It was biological, alive and human. His ass was pressing down on tissue, squishing nerves and blood vessels, changing cells moving through vessels in time, not merely trading atoms with the surface of a lawn chair, built to last beyod humanity.
No, the legs of this chair were female and her pelvis was the seat. This woman dwarfed the little man. And maybe this strange chair, the woman, was what gave him that royal cast. He could transform a person into an object like that (he snaps). Ain’t no thing. Even out on the corner across from the VA, that means something, and is uncut power.
Or maybe her ass was just padded and his ass was bony. Maybe they switched places every once in a while, allowing themselves to be vessels of comfort in some kind of regular 4/4 time. A superorganism better designed to withstand the bitter extremes of life on the street, a four-legged chair, a double-backed beast.
