[lights up]
Introduction: Because I haven't written a No Shame piece in a long time, I
thought I might try using some sort of formal structure to give me a
smooth way to jump back into it. My plan was to create a piece consisting
entirely of sentences from a group of books, based on some numerical
pattern. So I began by using my birthdate (Sept. 8, or 9-8) to locate
the starting place. Moving top to bottom, and east to west, I went to the
ninth shelf of books in my room (I'm a graduate student in English so I
have a lot of books), and then counted over 8 books, which gave me the
starting place. I planned to use sentences from books on the rest of that
shelf, and then continuing to the next shelf, and so on. I then used
yesterday's date (The FIRST of June) to indicate which sentence--the
first--I'd be using from each book. And then I started to string together
the first sentences of the books on my shelf. So this is the piece
created out of this very rigid structure-sentence after sentence taken
from book after book. The trick is to see what comes out of putting these
things together. The one piece of flexibility I allowed myself was that
I'd stop when the sentences seemed to suggest an ending point.
In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
When I bend down in the shower to wash the lower half of my body, my legs
have started to look like my arms to me.
They're not, arms, of course, and I really can't explain why my legs look
so armish. It happens when I start exercising. Maybe it's the amount of
muscle tone, or the bend or the knee, but when I look at my legs, my mind
says "arm", and then my brain does that momentary queasy thing that makes
me look away. But then I look back again. At those army legs. Even
when I'm wearing clothes, I know they're there: flapping akimbo under my
jeans, windmilling just to spite me, with those rude awakenings of feet
where hands should be, stubby toes where long fingers should be, the
opposable thumb now just a knot of a big toe, opposing nothing but my
sense of what's right in the world. And perhaps the worst part-the other
ends of my arms run right into my crotch, where no arms should be. Of
course I cringe.
It's like watching the surgery shows on TV, Dr. Mark Fletcher is cutting
into the skin just below the patella, and suddenly I have to turn away,
never mind that it's a repeat of a show I saw last night and a few weeks
before that-when I had watched it without blinking an eye. Suddenly for
no reason, I'm grimacing and squirming in my seat, hunching my shoulders
forward, bringing my head down, as if to protect my face. Raising my hands
in protest. Suddenly leg surgery is everywhere on TV.
So I close my eyes when I wash my legs and stop viewing the surgery shows,
and sing "Tiptoe through the Tulips" whenever I catch myself thinking
flinchy thoughts (at least until I realize that just mentioning toes is a
way to keep my mind on my ever-embracing armlegs, at which point I begin
singing The Yellow Rose of Texas like I won't ever stop). But then my
legs wrestle into in my dreams. One night I wake up sure I am chewing the
flesh of my own calf. My jaws keep grinding even as I start to gag. And
then I dream that I can't stop scratching my head with my deformed
feet/hands. My head is covered with sores--my hair thinning because of
the scratching until the blood running down the sides of my head fills my
ears with a throbbing sound. The sound of the approaching march of
thousands of feet. And behind all of these dreams, my legs are lurking,
folded across my chest, menacing me: See? You'll never outrun us. So
instead of going to bed each night like a condemned man, I stop sleeping,
which isn't as much of a solution as it seems, because after several days
I might as well be sleeping, given the things I start seeing around me.
Mostly legs. Armish legs. Uncomfortably familiar armish legs.
Emily Bronte wrote: "I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with
me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me,
like wine through water and altered the colour of my mind." But in my
case, I'm not sure what is coloring what. Which came first? The molting
chicken feet of my day-to-day cringing or the putrid stinking egg I crack
open when I sleep?
[sit, so the piece ends with the speaker in a chair]
I decide to face my legs. I consider strongarming them into submission,
but then I realize how horribly outnumbered I am. My strategy then shifts
to one of acceptance. I won't beat them; I'll join them in one huge
revelry of arm-legdom. I'll move into the cringe. Embrace the wince.
I'll take my legs out, hold their hands in public, mention them in passing
to my friends as if things aren't horribly wrong. But then I realize I
couldn't stand for that kind of life. To know that coiled beneath the
skin of my legs was the soul of two arms. I couldn't live like that. Who
could?
And so I take my legs into my own hands. I've seen enough Surgery TV to
know a thing or two about local anesthetics and minor operating
techniques. And so I lance this boil on my soul. First I wrestle my
lower half to the ground, using a couple of moves I learned from Jet Li
movies. While I hold legs down with my elbow, I shoot myself up with
lignocaine and cut the tendons that allow these armlegs to parade
themselves in front of me day after day.
And so I sit before you here today, unable to stand on my own two feet
literally, but because I stood on my own two feet figuratively. I showed
the arm legs who was boss, and crushed them under the force of my own arm
arms. They won't be bothering me anytime in the near future. Cringe
free, baby.
[blackout]
"Call to Arms"
IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND MAY NOT BE DOWNLOADED, TRANSMITTED,
PRINTED OR PERFORMED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE
AUTHOR
"Call to Arms" debuted June 2, 2000, performed by Carolyn Space Jacobson.
Library]
