I, Globerapist

Empty out the morning’s mopwater in the big sink. It’s black and smells like chemicals. All those wasted gametes, down the pipes. Not one to cry over spilt seed, but sometimes I wonder, as I’m sure you can imagine that one in my profession must, about the collective spunk of the metropolis at large. Fill mop bucket with fresh hot water. I swear I’m not making this up: I read somewhere, perhaps in “Harper’s Index”, that if you collected all the semen ejaculated during one night in our city- just one night, statistically selected for average frequency of sexual intercourse and masturbation-you’d have enough to fill a tanker truck. My mind then pictures the exact tanker truck-one of the big rigs hauling a huge, gleaming stainless-steel cylinder on the back, festooned with running lights and those diamond-shaped D.O.T. placards required by law to warn passing motorists to steer clear: Hazardous Materials coming through. A very well -cared -for vehicle, the cab shiny with wax, the chromework mirror-bright. Obviously belongs to a proud owner-operator, yes, he’s behind the wheel, a tattooed and suntanned arm hanging out the window…Can’t find the ammonia, must remind Mohammed to order more…wait, there’s some left in this plastic jug. Into the bucket. Pine Sol. Don’t get it on my pants. Slosh slosh. Time to go and meet the masses-it’s the weekday lunchtime masturbation rush.

I worked my way along the line of cubicles whistling an air, my mind much occupied with various speculations. Perhaps the mayor ought to appoint a commission of some sort…a body of men to go to and fro and canvass the metropolis from one end to the other and back again, in order to discover the dollar cost, in lost productivity, vitality and man-hours, of the masturbatory habits of the citizenry. Blue –ribbon panel of experts issues thick report that languishes unread on dusty official shelves. Columns of figures and testimonial interviews, all for naught. The men of our city continue, lemminglike, to spill onto the stony ground their life-essence, the very best of themselves. And one man remains behind to mop up the mess: me. Slosh. Slosh. Blue water turning grey, then brown. No matter how diligently I clean these cubicles, a filmy scum always remains behind. Don’t touch anything in here, Miss; you may become pregnant via osmosis. I keep my eyes on the floor as I move between cubes, seeing only the thick-soled fashion-sandals of the hired help and the seedy shoes of the clientele. It’s amazing what you notice when you start looking at people’s footwear. Many men, for example, who take the trouble to costume their upper bodies in clean, tasteful and well-fitting suits, completely overlook the importance of shoes to their ensemble. This is something women know about, but men don’t seem to think that anyone will ever notice that their shoes are in bad taste, scuffed, and in need of repair. This is neither here nor there, however.

Black Activity

Before I knew what I was doing, I had worked my way right up to the top level and Jenny’s hallway. I felt lightheaded and yet, strangely heavy-bellied, as if I’d swallowed, in pill form perhaps, a massy plutonium sphere that had sunk promptly to the exact core of my body, somewhere in the vicinity of the transverse colon. Thinking back, it’s the exact sensation one gets before one’s body commits some sort of act seemingly without the approval of the brain. Yes, that’s it exactly. The light and giddy head combined with a sinking and yet pleasurable fullness in the lower gut. The real danger signal is the sensation that one is observing the action from above, enjoying the puppet show without participating, as it were.

At the end of the hall was Jenny’s booth, in a choice position for spotting clients climbing the stairs from the mezzanine. I saw that the red lights were on over both the doors of the cubicle-each painted with pastel enamel and bearing a star like a Hollywood dressing room and the legends “BOY” and “GIRL”. This meant that she was busy with a client, which was just as well since it meant that I wouldn’t have to endure her glare as I worked my way along the rows of booths. A six-foot transvestite in a teddy and stockings with garter straps theatrically indicated the empty “BOY” part of its booth, several units down from Jenny and gaping a gold-toothed smile at me, said “Mop up real nice in there now, honey, I don’t know what that nasty man was shooting out of his peckerwood, but he got that stuff all OVER my window!”. I shuffled in to oblige, towing my wheeled pail of suds. When I was done, I emerged into the hall and all was still. I was so used to the constant loud music that I no longer heard it, and at that moment everything seemed silent. The transvestite stripper was back in its side of the booth with the door closed. I tottered across the sticky floor like a somnambulist. The light over the “GIRL” side of Jenny’s booth was off, but the “BOY” light was still on. That meant that the mechanical shutter had gone down over the window seperating the booths, and the show was over, but both parties were still inside straightening their clothes. Sometimes, clients stayed in their booths for a long time after the window went down, dabbing at stray filaments of spunk on their garments, or, for all I knew, translating the Talmud into Esperanto. It was one of my duties to hustle them on their way by thumping on the door and intoning, “Mop boy. Gotta clean up”.

Just then, the “GIRL”-side door of the booth unlatched and pushed open a bit. I quickly lowered my gaze, the better to avoid her insolent and hateful stare. There was a bustle from inside and, hazarding a peep, I saw a bit of flesh through the crack in the door, which suddenly banged open, and I saw that she was bent over in the cubicle, wrestling with something in her bag on ther floor and cursing to herself. She’d kicked the door with her heel in order to back out partway into the hall and have more room for whatever it was that she was doing. She was trying to fit something stiff and furry-either a dead golden retriever puppy in advanced rigor mortis or a fur coat stretched across some sort of trapezoidal frame-into her fake Dolce &Gabbanna carryall. I could see through her parted legs that whatever it was was refusing to accommodate itself amongst her spare high-heeled shoes, blowdryers, lubricants, cell-phones, toiletries and whatnot, and she was cursing under her breath. I stopped dead in my tracks, leaning against the wall for support, clutching my mophandle. As she furiously shook her bag, her ass-cheeks jiggled before my very eyes, split by the strand of a white G-string. She was completely oblivious to my transfixed presence and continued to struggle, like a shoplifter cramming goods into a purse in the dressing room of Macy’s.

The plutonium pill in my belly grew and became an ominous sphere, like a small cannonball, with a deadly mercury shine to its mirrored and liquid surface. It seemed to be pressing right down on my prostate gland, at the very core of my bodily being. The astral spectator in the private box above my head stretched his legs as if preparing to enjoy a show. But the physical me that is really me, like a wight with guts and brains disconnected, removed the mop from the bucket, and heedless of the foul water dripping on the floor behind, stalked on stiff stilts towards the open door, the black mophandle extended like a probe or wand. All I could see at that moment was that greyish-golden ass with its white equator, jostling before my eyes like the demonstration of an obscure principle of surface tension or Brownian motion.

No doubt you’d like to know what I intended at that moment. Part of me wanted to ram the mophandle to the hilt into her rectum and begin to churn her like a cask of buttermilk. I can’t be sure what I meant to do, but I think, as I recall how I began to carefully prize her buttocks apart, that what I really wanted to do was insert my probe a fraction of an inch into her, just to push at her nether entrance, really, while keeping my eyes fastened securely upon the global sight of her entire rear end, like a drunk driver struggling to keep from seeing double, lest it expand like a funhouse whirligig and become a inhospitable and indifferent world.

A Fracas

The moment the cool wood touched her skin, the spell was broken and the inevitable transpired in short order. All’s a blur, but when I came to, I found myself face up on the floor, writhing about, defending my ribs from a furious fusillade of kicks dealt by her pointy fuck-me shoes. I was clutching at her legs in fear, which drove her even madder. “Jose! Get your ass out here! This little faggot cocksucker tried to stick a broom up my fuckin’ ass!”. With that, the “BOY” door banged open and a Puerto Rican thug, whom I’d often seen hanging about the place, answered the call to arms. He was as fat and greasy as I am pale and skinny, with a perfectly spherical head upon which were dotted childish, pretty features radiating confusion and idiot malice. He had a beard, shaved to a perfect 1/8th of an inch line, running from one ear, across his chin and up to the other ear, like a chinstrap, or an indication of “here is where my jawline would be, if I had one”. His bulk was draped in a bright yellow jersey bearing the heraldic emblems of a professional sports team, which hung nearly to his knees.

In a panic, I kicked myself backwards across the floor, away from the vengeful duo. With my back against the wall, legs all a-spraddle, in a pool of foul mopwater, I seized the mop with some idea of keeping them at bay, like a cornered samurai, one leg lopped off, facing down a hemicircle of oafish ronin. With shaking hands I menaced first one, then the other. Jenny began shifting her weight this way and that, hoping to catch me off balance and make a lunge. Her eyes blazed with the desire to sink one of those pointy-toed shoes right to the instep between my ribs. The ball-headed chap shuffled nervously from foot to foot, jiggling fatly, arms waving like a trained bear imitating a boxer; for all the world as large, round and yellow as an indecisive Sun on Groundhog Day. It was apparent that he wanted a piece of the action as well, if only to stay in the good graces of the snarling she-hyena who had me up against the wall. “GRAB the cocksucker!” she screamed “you my fucking cousin, Jose, GRAB his skinny bitch ass!”

It was only then that the plutonium cannonball contracted to lozenge form and the astral spectator tipped the usher and hailed a cab. They split up and began to approach me from either side. Drunken and shaken though I was, I knew that if Jose got his hands on me, all was lost. From the corner of my eye, I could see a crowd of spectators filling the hall. Thinking only to clear a pathway between myself and the stairs down to the mezzanine and thence to the door, I laid about frantically with the mop, like a desperado, and connected with the cousin’s kneecap. He let out a squeak and went down on his knees into the suds like a torpedoed freighter foundering in a flaming oil slick. I scrambled past him on hands and knees, trying to find my footing on the slick linoleum, covered head to toe in reeking water, but not before I’d collected a high-heeled kick to the cocyx that still sometimes pains me when the weather changes. Down the stairs went I, a ghoul surprised by sunrise, making haste for the grave, my janitorial career in ruins behind me.

Interlude

If I were writing a novel here, this would be the ideal point to go check up on how some of the other characters were doing, in order to provide the reader with a breather after a climactic point in the action. Unfortunately, there are no characters in this tale. There is only me, the inside of my head, and the ghosts I see when I walk the streets. Sometimes they hail me in greeting, beg for alms, or inquire as to the time of day.

It’s no problem for a man as average in appearance as I to lose himself in the swirl of a crowd, even when pursued by avenging Furies and distinguished by the smell of spermy water. Many are the lost, the ill-favoured, the gaunt and poorly-dressed, one more grain of sand won’t bring the termite colony tumbling down. As soon as I set foot upon the street and the masses closed ranks around me, my fear drained from me and was replaced with a combination of shame, anger and bitter self-scorn that caused my limbs to tremble. I wanted to go back in there and slap that cunt to her knees, I wanted to shrink to invisible dothood, nevermore to be seen by human eye. I found refuge in the cool darkness of a drinking establishment.

Lonely are the sputniks that peep and chirp in the void. If one had the highest of high-speed elevators and means to ride it all the way up to the sky, it would take days of constant travel to reach the orbit of the lowest man-made satellites. This is a fact I remember from boyhood, when we used to lie on the rooftops under the approach path of homeward-bound jet airliners, listening on shortwave radio for the voices of the pilots and discussing matters celestial. From that height, several hundred miles up, the world still appears almost flat, spread out below like a blue desert under black and starry skies. It’s not until one is incredibly far away that the globe assumes its proper ball-like aspect.

I sat hunched on my tall stool, spending the last of my funds on a series of cheap house wines and whiskies and absent-mindedly eating the free lunch with a tongue that could not taste. Drawing listlessly, circular shapes on the old bar with the condensation pooling on my glass. Linked rings, perhaps Pythagorean. With increasing inebriation came strength, courage, focus, and the usual sorts of self-mocking existential self-criticisms that tend to overtake me in restaurants, cafes and bars & grills, especially when liquor is present. Why, I kept asking myself, should I not take this situation as an opportunity to break my mold of passivity and convert shame to triumph through concerted and daring action? After all, I’d already precipitated a radical break in my usual pattern by assaulting Jenny, however gently, with the end of my mophandle. Perhaps, had I only the moxie to up the ante, a chain-reaction of circumstance might be initiated, one that would free me from my lowly status.

Speculations and a Plan of Sorts

It’s really a horrible thing to be broke, unemployed, humiliated, poorly dressed, self-concious, cursed with unpleasant bodily odor, possibly sought by the Law, or worse, by hoodlums bent on revenge-and yet, with all that on one’s plate, to also suffer the type of consciouness that makes one sit drunk in bars and kick oneself mentally for lacking the Nietzschean wherewithal to, with one bold stroke, pull a reversal upon the forces arrayed against one and uproot all that is weak, indecisive and fearful in one’s character.

The desire to do something, anything, in order to wriggle free of the frightful burden of shame I’d brought on myself (not in the eyes of others, but in my own eyes, for having been “driven from the field of battle”, as I put it to myself) collided headlong with the sensible terror of consequence and the collateral urge to flee home to my furnished room and bury myself in the shelter of my books and my notes. Though my exterior self remained passively slumped over the bar, betrayed only by a slight restless tangling of the interknotted fingers, my soul was jumping like a Mexican bean. Desperate fantasies of rape or assault were uppermost in my conciousness, alternating with despair and fury at my cowardice. Though I longed to somehow puncture Jenny’s ass and deflate it down to size, to crush and humiliate her beneath me, I knew that it was no more possible for me to demonstrate such piratical flair than to eat a bowling ball.

I reviewed the options and opportunities for action. More liquor was certainly the thing, but my funds were completely gone. I thought of sabotage, and of various plots to defame her character, possibly by posting scurrilous flyers, containing lies and half-truths, all over the neighborhood. Though reasonably safe and certainly not beneath me, these schemes, fantasized, left a taste of toast in the mouth and a painful hollowness in the spiritual belly. What was needed was some sort of confrontation or at least contact with the object of my turmoil, during which I could exorcize myself. I decided to follow her home after work that very evening, which would provide me with at least the illusion of action.

I knew she usually left by an anonymous rear door and then boarded a city bus bound for the Latino ghetto crosstown. I hadn’t the nerve to actually follow her onto the bus, but I had in mind an alternate means of transportation. Heaven smiles on the bold, we are told, and it just so happens that one of my stooges, a Pakistani exchange student named Achmed, worked nights as a bellhop at a nearby hotel of the faceless sort that caters to conventioneers. With luck, he’d have arrived to start his shift just as Jenny was leaving for home and I could commandeer his moped, carry out a black plan (which at this point was only half-formed, at the subverbal level of my psyche), and return it to him in time for the shift change. It didn’t take long to accomplish this, and as the skies over the city turned toxic yellow and green with twilight, I was idling on the moped in the shadow of a taxicab parked on a side street, watching the employee exit and fantasizing myself to be something along the lines of a French Resistance operative preparing to assassinate a colonel.

Right on time, the door banged open and Jenny emerged in her street clothes, lugging the knockoff carryall and talking into her cell phone. I ducked my head and watched her through the cab’s windows. I thought she’d walk down the block and I’d follow at a safe distance, and then wait for the bus while keeping an eye on her. I anticipated no problems tailing the bus, since it would be slow and make many stops. The only difficult part would be spotting her when she got off without revealing myself. Things didn’t go as planned, however. She stood on the sidewalk, still talking on the phone, agitatedly it seemed to me, and a minute later a car pulled up and she got in and zoomed away. It happened so fast that I was caught by surprise and almost lost control of the moped trying to catch up before they turned the corner and dissappeared. It was a late-model American sedan, bright yellow, covered with louvers, vents, detailing, and all sorts of other automotive accessories. The back window was dominated by a huge decal of a flaming skull with crossed axles on a field of cogs and camshafts, bearing the enscolled legend: T.W.C. AUTO CLUB-“Together We Chill”. A Dominican-flag bumper sticker identified the nationality of the owner, the outline of whose prize-pumpkin sized head I could make out even through the tinted glass: Jose, the cousin, recently wounded by me.

He drove with aggressive Latin flair, blasting through through yellow lights with a blare of glasspack mufflers, and I was hard-pressed to keep up with him on my underpowered mechanical steed. The taillights of cars went zapping past me like rogue comets. I followed them across the city into the outskirts of town, finally trailing them down a dark street that bordered on some kind of City Park. It was a dirty and neglected neighborhood. They stopped outside a big apartment building, parked the car, and went up the steps and into the building.

I Peep with Impunity

I ran up after them and pressed my nose to the glass of the vestibule. There was a long hallway with doors but they were nowhere in sight. Since I’d been right behind them, I figured that they must have gone into one of the first-floor apartments. I crossed the street and squatted in the shadows, where the shady trees blocked the light from the streetlamps. The shells of burnt-out cars lined the curb like Salamanders come under the knacker’s hand in some elemental stockyard. From down the street arose a noise of loud talking, and a band of miscreants or ne’er-do-wells came shambling along, arguing and laughing loudly yet mirthlessly, and took up residence on the stoop of the building I was watching. There seemed to be about six or eight of them, by all appearances elderly folk.