BLINDMAN'S NEW HOME

 

 

Lew takes a little yellow, plastic impregnated tablet from her jewelry box and then thinks about it and takes another one. She washes them down with a tepid glass of water.  The unbidden day comes streaming in the window, wrapped in a yellow ribbon of sun.  Adolph will be here any minute.  She doesn't want him to see her like this --- so pale and thin, sooty circles around her large brown eyes.  There is an almost total absence of color, except the azure webs, spreading like fingers, beneath the translucent wash of Lew's skin.  She poses in front of the mirror to take stock.  It's the breast less blueprint of a boy who peers back.  A young fragile teenage boy whose featureless reflection and gentle fawn-like grace belie the dynamo of charisma that skulks beneath.

 

No time for a proper making-up.  Stamp the eyes with a few black lines.  Soften the hollows under the cheeks.  All very subtle, almost invisible.  Then the dark red on the arabesque of mouth. Like she's sucked blood to camouflage the thinness of her lips.  Her hair is whipped up and tied to give the ears, with the carved jade monkeys dangling, a full place in the total picture.  She winds a pubic hair around her finger and turns a little sideways to see what Adolph calls her best part.  The full round puffs of a real woman's ass.  Lewlyn really wants Adolph to like her.  She has to have a card in the deck that she can find whenever she needs it. Adolph's not exactly the ace, but in this game, in the empty shadows of self-doubt and boredom, any card, any card at all, is better than folding.  Besides, Adolph's nice to her.

 

Lew wishes Blindman could be located at night, but his habitual, nocturnal ramblings make it almost impossible to get a hold of him anytime but from dawn to dusk.  A nervous giggle escapes from between Lew's sharply curved lips.  Why, he's an old vampire, she thinks.  Lew feels uneasy.  Now that she's dressed, brushed, fluffed, ready to venture out into the unflattering, nit-picking light of day, that will magnify her every flaw, the urge to augur back into the safety of her four-poster is exceedingly strong, but rumor has it that Blindman is in a bad way.  Nobody's seen him poking through the trash containers, looking for returnable bottles, for over a month.  Lew knows better.  Blindman is some kind of super evolved subway-cat; creeping around right below the surface   He isn't dead.  That's for sure.  Lew gives him a big-hearted bundle every Thursday.  She puts it in the dumbwaiter near the old Edison tunnel in the basement of her building.  The envelopes of barbs, the cans of vegetarian beans in tomato sauce, Bugler tobacco, peanut butter--- are all gone   There's even a tingly moment late one night when Lew returns to the dumbwaiter for a second time with a double batch of tollhouse cookies that she feels Blindman nearby like a parenthetical silence, waiting for her to go away.  Still!  He might be sick or something.  It's been a long time since their last talk.

 

Blindman lives in an abandoned warehouse under the Bleaker St Bridge near the docks.  The warehouse is such a hostile relic of steel and ice that he's made himself a nest out of a large shipping container.  He calls it 'the Egg'.  Lew has no desire for another expedition to Blindman's 'Egg'.  First of all, the warehouse is pitch dark.  There are rats and crawly things.  Maybe even bats.  The idea of a surprise encounter with an unsympathetic derelict doesn't thrill her either so she makes darn sure to put the .22 in her purse even though Blindman is vehement in his assurances that any damned fool who sets foot in the warehouse is soon scared out of his wits.  Blindman knows every bit of the junk strewn maze like a book.  He can move with silent cunning to within inches of an intruder--- "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeee," he shrieks hideously--- routing some poor, unsuspecting guest of John Barleycorn with his blood-curdling howl.

 

Lew, with a good deal of discomfiture, remembers her last trip to Blindman's --- per his invite.  For this occasion, Blindman had rustled up a battery powered barrier blinker with the intention of providing his guest a little illumination.  He didn't know that the pilfered lamp blinked like a tallow candle and Lew, after having found it necessary to crawl on all fours through a long clay culvert in total darkness in order to enter the Egg's inner sanctum, was greeted by this eerie, intermittent orangish omen, the half-light of Blindman' weird cloister.  As Lew unbent her stiffened body, bitching about the incommodious entry, Blindman held aside a razor sharp hook, positioned to impale an unsuspecting night crawler --- should one be so demented as to want to gain entrance into the Egg's cave-like interior.

 

Lew was starting to get used to twilight sight, like being half-blind.  In the milli-second flashes, an object here and there began to take on identifiable characteristics like the plethora of deposit bottles that were lined neatly in rows almost everywhere she looked and a Lincoln Continental hub-cap, sitting on its waist high box, surrounded by the instruments of some sort of primitive hygiene soap, toothless comb, a yellow stained towel.

 

"What do you take in your tea?" he asked as he rummaged in the unseen recesses of a grapple-scarred crate.

 

"But --- how?  How do you?"

 

"Sterno”, was Blindman's proud reply.  Already the apparatus was set efficaciously into place and Blindman was digging in his grubby jumper for a light.  It didn't take very long.  The sound of water bubbling, then the odor of good black English tea.  In a firefly flicker of the cell's unnerving strobe, Blindman's gentle, but shuttered eyes glinted darkly in Lew's direction only to melt back into ghoulish obsidian.  This bothered Lew because she had felt, for a moment, that penetration that is the result of having been searched deep down into the blackass core of her being.  She was also worrying about the effects of excessive dampness, temperature fluctuations, dust, vermin--- a maddening, endless list of reasons that Blindman should not be living in a box in the middle of a cold, leaky warehouse at this godforsaken out post of urban blight.  She was beginning to marshal her arguments when her eyes were drawn to the explosive inferno of color that adorned virtually every inch of wall space available in the Egg.  She was on her feet incredulous.

 

Despite the sickly light that bathed everything in the color of wet cheddar cheese, she couldn't help but notice the sunsets, sunrises, solar auras, flares, eclipses --- every stellar phenomena imaginable--- giant reds, dwarf whites, novas painted brilliantly on scrounged pieces of just about any material that was flat on one side.  There were paint pots with brushes sticking up like wild briar, growing hither and thither and on the floor, a stucco of colorful anarchy.  It was a testament to Blindman's artistry that was nothing short of miraculous.  The stars boiled in the velvety firmament.  It was like a planetarium show fused in a dream.  Blindman's beloved suns approached the very brink of the plasmic edge in a dance of image --- camera obscura.  They twinkled with the soul of sol's all-consuming raw energy, burst upon the blearyeyed world.  Lew felt like an archeologist who had just discovered some deep, forgotten cavern and come eye to eye with the plate maker of the sky's silver dollar.

 

At least Adolph's gonna make the trek with her; It's gotta be safer with two, she hopes to herself as she examines the tiny white scar under her lip, but still, it would be nicer to meet in bar light.  It's much kinder.  A little touch to that blemish, a dot on the mole and powder for the crows-feet that dances when she smiles.  She has to lie flat on the bed to get into her jet-black, skin-tight chinos.  A flimsy mid-rift top shows her large nipples to their best advantage.  Keep it, she thinks.  Keep those hot-mamma jugs, flopping like cow's udders.  Lew likes her pert little buttons.  No waste in design or function.  It doesn't seem to make any difference to men anyway.

 

Adolph is never on time.  Lew wants to get this thing with Blindman over with.  The speed has opened her brain and now the thoughts are running around, chasing each other like otters, trying to keep warm.  Warm!  She shivers.  Speed is a cold high.  Maybe, I'll take a sweater, she thinks.  Blindman will want some downers. So at first, she slips a whole bottle into her purse, but then she thinks better of it.  With all the drugs that she's been giving to Adolph and her own intake, she's gotta take it easy.  Half a bottle'd be ok.  She puts the too-generous bottle back on the dresser and picks one closer to half-full.  Where's Adolph?  Time's a wasting. Lewlyn wants to get back early enough to catch the soaps and this weekend her mother and her sister are coming to visit.  That means the hovel will have to be given a thorough cleansing.  This treading water, waiting for Adolph to crawl out of his mole-hole, is wearisome. She stomps into the living room and picks up the phone just as the rap on the door echoes in the mean silence.  When Lew opens the door, ready to bitch about the time, there's Adolph, sitting in a high-backed, purple chair.

 

"Hey look what I found in the alley.  A present for your highness. It's a beauty, isn't it?  There's an end table too.  Look, it'll match the oriental rug and with a piece of cloth to cover the seat; you won't even see the torn cushion cover." Lew laughs.  The king of hearts on the derelic throne, come-calling on the Princess Oleander.  They drag the chair into the apartment and spend an hour rearranging the furniture to accommodate the scavenged treasures.  Then it takes another hour to get back on the track, to rekindle the urgency of the mission that has these two devout night-people up and about at mid-morning.