humorous fiction

Hindsight and 2020

STEVE BIERSDORF

I’m twenty-five pounds overweight. I have a stomach. Not a belly or potbelly. Not basketball-ish, more like sloppy-distended. Neglected, toneless. Harder to obscure or diminish by sucking in if I’m shirtless. 

I plan to attack the problem at some point. Before turning sixty. A lot of things I plan on starting or being consistent with by the time I’m sixty. Sixty seems like a crossroads between I’m over it, and dying before my term policy runs out makes better economic sense, or fuck my heirs, I’m going to run this thing out as long as I can, eventually rotting away forgotten in a nursing home that accepts Medicaid.

What I’ve done so far, I’ve cut out the occasional key lime pie, quit the blueberry muffins, and I’ve saved several posts on Facebook for various abs or core exercises I’ll get around to. The effect of ten thousand steps a day has been negligible, other than a distressed spine and hip joint and intermittent back spasms. My pants and shorts are still difficult to fasten, even though I averaged four point eight miles per day last week, four point five the week before.

There’s a floor to ceiling mirror I pass on my way to my office. I watch myself. I move like the upper and lower portions of me are articulated. My upper body looks relaxed, my lower body looks jolting and distressed, like I’m walking with a prosthetic leg to my hip joint and I’m only now getting the hang of it.  

***

I mall-walk around the outside of the Viejo Mall. Late winter, in the fifties, not much wind, blue skies, so I’ll get a little sun on my face. A pinkish hue that will become ruddier in a day or two. Anything but pale. We white people, we hate being pale. 

As I’m walking I see my shadow, diagonally and slightly ahead of me. I wonder if I’ve seen this shadow in my dreams, when I was younger. I feel like I have. The shadow I see as I walk around the Viejo Mall is herky-jerky and misshapen. I have on a jacket that’s zipped, and protrudes more than does my protruding stomach, so the shadow looks neglectfully overweight. 

If I’d seen this shadow in dream when I was young, I’d have refused to believe this was me. And what if, in this predictive dream, I’d been able to infiltrate the body and mind of this man in his fifties? It would have seemed worse than it is, to a young man. The hip pain, the tweaked back, shortness of breath, enervation, I’m accustomed to it, I make it work. As a young man I would have been horrified to know this was my fate. Or destiny. 

Which leads me to wonder. Why not allow this to happen? If I’d been able to see this cartoonish shadow when I was young, or temporarily inhabit this fifty-something body, long enough to internalize its afflictions, maybe I’d have become obsessed with my health. Maybe I’d be better off these days. Just a thought. A suggestion for anyone listening.  

***

Her latest apothegm: “I’m going to stab myself in the neck with a fork.” Examples of its application: Trying to schedule an appointment with the workman’s comp doctor; attempting to get AT&T Uverse fixed remotely (‘have you tried unplugging the modem?’); toilet paper and mask scams on Facebook. The empty aisle at Walmart where anything to wipe your ass is normally stocked, Huggies or the local newspaper your best remaining options. Or a bottle of Fantastik 409, hold it under you and spray upwards, a kind of do-it-yourself bidet, if you can live with the burning sensation.   

Singha

STEVE BIERSDORF

He usually parked at the edge of a weedy vacant lot for sale that would soon belong to someone, adjacent to a new home under construction. It was early, and he desired to get the day started right with a brisk walk. Atop a ladder was a man in a white t-shirt, injecting nails with a nail gun as if he was stapling the house together. As he was walking by the man looked down at him and said something, what, quite, he didn’t catch, only the word “local” and a number, and it was a question judging from the tone.

He noticed they were dressed similarly, he also in a white t-shirt and jeans, though his white t-shirt was an advertisement for Singha beer, a souvenir from his one visit to Bangkok, there for a week and a half, where he had unprotected sex with a deaf Thai hooker who started menstruating mid-copulation. And so he came back with the Singha t-shirt and six-months’ wait to see if he was HIV positive, an interminable wait for the results in those early, terrifying days of HIV. Since he wasn’t conversant in sign language, the deaf hooker had communicated with him by pointing and gesturing and making nonsensical noises. When she wanted to get paid, she pointed to his wallet and grunted. She observed as he counted off the bills, and when he didn’t give her enough Baht, she grunted with more emphasis. He’d felt entitled to a discount.

“Sure,” was all he could come up with, and the man on the ladder pointed toward the front of the skeletal house and he heard the man say, “start cutting those boards. And make sure you wear the safety goggles.” Appreciative that the man on the ladder was concerned for his well-being, he came into the front yard and there was a single board lying across two sawhorses, other boards piled nearby, one by sixes if he had to guess, the safety goggles hanging from a protruding shoulder of one of the sawhorses. After affixing the goggles he found the hand-held circular saw and began cutting, one board after the other, slicing easily through them and a pile of sawdust growing steadily like an ambitious anthill beneath where he cut.

A while later and the man had descended from the ladder, and he was trying unsuccessfully to shout over the zinging metallic whine of the circular saw. From the man’s expression, he appeared upset. He took his finger off the saw trigger to hear what the man might have to say.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’d think that would be fairly obvious. By the way, I’m getting paid for this, right? It’s not that I mind lending a hand, but I did have other plans.”

“I mean, what the fuck are you doing to this wood? This is all the wood we have. We’re on a schedule.”

“I’m cutting the boards in a herringbone pattern. For never having used one of these things,” looking slightly maniacal or overzealous with the safety goggles still on, he hefted the circular saw aloft and shook it for emphasis, the man staring at the Singha advertisement on his t-shirt, coming to a realization. “For never having been trained and thrown to the wolves, this is precise work if I say so myself.”

Man Tits En Bronze

STEVE BIERSDORF

This is the statue coronation speech I wanted to use, wrote and considered giving, but decided against in the end. There’s a good chance they’d have taken it the wrong way. It’s lovely that they do these things for me, and if I’d given this speech, well, they might not have appreciated the humor and I might’ve come across as ungrateful.

That’s why they love me. I wasn’t a great player and that’s my shtick, lovable loser, the self-deprecating quips, and I’ve been doing the radio play-by-play for thirty-plus years. That’s why they’ve made this hideous bronze statue that looks nothing like me. The other statues in front of the stadium are of great players, home run hitters, ace pitchers, heroes for what they did on the field, and so I’m different that way. I made my bones off the field, that’s why my statue will be the only one in front of the stadium not wearing a baseball uniform but a crewneck sweater and knit slacks depicted in bronze.

My name appears on the base of the statue and that’s the only way you’d know it was me because it’s a shitty likeness, a big, shitty-likeness statue of the team’s self-deprecating radio announcer who played briefly in this city, and not even for this team but for another franchise that used to play here until it relocated to a larger metropolitan area. And because I was on the Tonight Show and had a recurring role on a short-lived prime-time sitcom with a laugh track:

“Thank you, thanks (here I turn to my right and ponder the statue for a few seconds). First and foremost, I’d like to say that if you think I posed for this statue, you’d be mistaken. Does anyone know who did? Whoever he is, he needs to lay off the estrogen pills. Kidding, seriously, if I’m not mistaken this likeness was created from a surprise picture taken of me fresh from the men’s room. I’d just taken care of my business and my hands were still wet so I had ‘em in my pockets in case someone insisted on shaking hands with me, which happens often. People see me, they want to meet me and shake my hand, so this explains the pocket billiards.

“Yeah, so I’m just out of the men’s room and someone insists on taking my picture. I have to say it’s always a little intrusive, but especially fresh from the men’s room. This also explains the shit-eating, please-get-away-from-me grin, which in bronze makes me look like I don’t take very good care of my teeth. In fact, looking at this statue, I look like I might have lived in medieval times and some think I’m old enough. I’d suggest for future bronze statues with closed mouths only, otherwise shit-eating grin lends itself to a literal interpretation.

(Again I turn to the statue and ponder it)

“I’m glad I didn’t forget to zip up.

(More pondering)

“What struck me when I first saw this statue are the man tits.

(Here I’d expect mostly a silent, taken-aback reaction where a few people would laugh insanely, possibly some current players they’ve ‘invited’ to the ceremony. There’s a chance their laughter would be infectious, though I couldn’t be sure, and it’s largely because of this uncertainty that I scrapped this speech.)

“I can see it now. People approaching the stadium from the outer edge of the parking lot and they see me from afar, there by the stadium they’ll see my statue and they’ll know it’s me because of the man tits, which are prominent enough to see from that far away, and possibly from space. On a statue that size, those are some ample man tits. I’m really stacked. Fortunately for me, I’m a happily married man. Maybe some little boy a generation or two removed from now will look up at this father and ask, ‘daddy, who’s the guy with no hands and man tits?’

“‘Son, I do believe that was the first handicapped hermaphrodite to play in the major leagues.’

“At my age, man tits are inevitable. How many men over seventy have tight pecs? In fairness to the artist, the man tits are at least pushed up like I’m wearing a sports bra. So I appreciate that, firm man tits are preferable to unrestrained, droopy ones. I can’t help but think, generations from now, as being referred to as the man tits guy, ‘daddy, who’s the man tits guy again? What did he do?’

“And honestly, folks, I didn’t do very much. I have the best job in the world, the best seats in the house. Thank you for the tribute.”