bruce

Trying to solve the mystery of love, it's participants and their worth has been human endeavor since the very origin of entertainment. People live, people die. They are lucky if they happen to find love in between. Mostly the events of our lives are incidental, without epiphany or grandeur. We are encompassed by circumstance. But there is a patterned method to everything. We feel compelled to analyze, condense and re-tell our observance of love or lack of it, if we capture it, at least in fictional aspect, we can account for why we don't <believe in> it, despite being surrounded by other, equally, lonely people to ourselves. The clues are in the details and the minutia. God is meticulous.

There are seven living quarters in the dilapidated Happy Harbor, not counting the weeks that the mutual house acquaintance Adam takes up on the living room sofa. Even though the three top floor rooms, currently occupied by Wallace, Diana and Jenn, could bring serious repercussions upon The Landlord, (who in 1974 put up cork board “walls” to delineate attic from rooms, before most of the current residents were even born) they are suites compared to Bruce's hovel. Since an incident in March when a heavy snowfall collapsed the roof of a neighborhood garage, killing a tenant therein, the Happy Harbor Landlord has been extra careful about which corners he cuts. He insists on receiving only one rent check per month, per lease. Clark writes the checks and the other residents pay him cash. So only six people know about Bruce's jury rigged ten-by-eight dwelling in the umber, sweltering basement.

Usually when Diana throws her bi-weekly leather and denim keg bashes, she keeps the basement door locked, more to keep her bevy of unsuccessful bros and babettes listening to mix cassettes of their own actual bands' live demos than to either respect Bruce's privacy or to keep him a secret that saves her forty-nine dollars every month. But were a bohemian couple desperate enough for a seclusion to smoke, discuss Foucault and perhaps orally gratify one another, were they to sneak around the cobbled back entrance to the accessible bulkhead, they would stumble and giggle down into the basement and find dozens and dozens of bicycles, unicycles and baby carriage husks stacked in piles of jutting pedals, saddles, chains and frames. They would hear the dulcet tones of an Irish sessun and one deep, solitary voice calling out, “Weigh!” and clapping furiously after every pause. There are polished gears and warped spokes along with a mounted hex wrench set trophied along the paneling on the south side of the space, lending the room the esprit of a closed butchery. Behind this work area is a leaning, four walled space, behind the ancient oil heater, built out of old drywall, scrap boards, insulation and bed sheets. This used to be a practice room for former residents of Happy Harbor playing in a makeshift jam band called The Fuck Yeahs. The interior still smells rancid and electric,like burnt glass, from all the spilt beer, blown fuses, amplifier tubes and stale cigarette remnants that Bruce found when he moved into the space a few months ago. There is still a nest of Blue Steel guitar strings below the box spring he mounted on three cinder blocks and an old Fender Reverb mini-amp left behind by The Fuck Y's. He has it raised, because there are still, months after having moved in, tiny black specks of insects crawling through the fibers of the stained oriental rug below him. Bruce believes the tiny black specks would refuse to crawl up the cinder blocks or mini-amp to find refuge in his hair or orifices throughout his fitful sleep. The box spring has no mattress upon which Bruce lays. For the first two hours of every day, he has two inch circadian indents on his chest and upper back from the springs digging into his nightlife. Aside from the box spring, there is only a green plastic picnic table lined with three twelve-inch computer monitors. Two of the monitors display open windows of internet browsers, linked to various sites, minimized to squeeze four pages to a screen. The third monitor is set to a word processing document and half-filled screen of twelve-point type. The CPU's built-in three inch speaker plays the aforementioned sessun, set on loop, playing infinite repetition of Album Name. This is the only album Bruce owns. It was his father's.

No one, not even the other six house mates, knows what Bruce does. They wonder of course, how he pays the rent, but they assume it must have something to do with all the bikes, despite there always being more and never less, of the wheels and frames cluttering the space around that bulkhead. He does walk the street on Tuesday nights, when the trash goes out, and picks for old bicycle parts or other various wheeled devices. And he has certainly built many wheeled Frankensteins, some not even capable for the purpose of riding, their wheels so terribly mismatched or their frames too weak to carry even the youngest child. But each is intact and technically functional. The pedals turn the wheels. The brakes stop them. There are safety reflectors on each.

The majority of Bruce's daylight time was, until recently, usually spent listening to his father's album, computer screens humming, while he observed pop up after pop up: shaved genitals, synthetic breasts, lower backs inked in Celtic tattoos, arched poses, exemplars of what his mother called “child-bearing” hips. He preferred to peruse amateur sites, male and female, for authenticity, looking in each JPEG for a sensation or an idea or an emotion to react to. He records these reactions in text documents and has several megabytes of files devoted to the analysis.

A typical entry follows:

September 22. http://www.amatuer-nurses.com/gallery/0034/htm. Subject has black hair, hazel eyes and pursed fuchsia lips. Slight mole to the right of the right eye, mounted on cheek bone crest. Heavy cosmetic adornment. The name given in accompanying text piece is Kari. Said piece describes website entrepreneur's discovery of subject during impromptu visit to local emergency room for cranial trauma. Verification of such event is impossible. Subject gallery begins with subject in back seat of mini-van, fully clothed in corduroy skirt and white polo shirt. Note: despite HTML title and text accompaniment, no detail of subject's occupation as nurse is evident. Subject removes clothing. Note: no undergarments shown, despite subject's above average breast size: between C and D fittings. File marked kari004.jpg depicts subject nude, smiling nervously, photo clearly capturing subject's moral dilemma and realization of potential mass audience to her very own frailty. File marked kari005.jpg depicts subject reaching for rubber band wrapped stack of cash ten dollar bills from off-screen entrepreneur, while trying to cover left aureole with outstretched twenty-degree arm. Subject performs oral gratification on off-screen entrepreneur. Files kari008.jpg to kari013.jpg depict intercourse between subject and off-screen entrepreneur in two modes: Congress Of The Cow and Missionary. File kari014.jpg depicts subject with (presumably) off-screen entrepreneur's ejaculate on forehead and in subject's feathered bangs above subject's right ear. Subject looks sad. Subject looks frightened. Subject pinches lips, squints eyelids in effort to prevent secretion from lachrymal glands. Previous analysis reveals this as possible affectation, to increase pleasure stimulus for paying entertained. Personal note: subject looks and reminds self of a sister of a former high-school companion. Nostalgia for companion's family's generosity and home-cooked ziti experienced by self.

Bruce does not pleasure himself to this entertainment. In fact, Bruce only pleasures himself when he has difficulty sleeping. And even then it is function, like taking a medication or physically exercising, the only images in his imagination are of the process inside himself, like a projector presentation in Freshman Biology. He never wonders what intercourse feels like. Bruce's average, non-laboratory opinion of the nude female form would be best described as similar to a pre-teen reaction to cooties, just prior to puberty. He has considered homosexuality an explanation, but ruled it out, his reaction to male form being only slightly closer to revulsion than ambivalence.

But as Bruce's investigation into his own, clearly dysfunctional attitude toward sexuality made progress, he found himself to have developed a side effect; another, even more debilitating habit. Whenever he did leave the confines of Happy Harbor's basement, like when he searched out his bike parts, he instead found himself compulsively ogling the other residents of the neighborhood. He became a chronic people watcher of the first class.

There is a bag-girl at the health food grocery with coke bottle glasses and cropped blonde hair that has twin bangs, easily a foot longer than the rest, whipping around her head like a mane or headdress. Or the filthy, dirt covered mentally disabled man who wears flannel in July and picks his hairy ears on the bus. The bank has a tiny Latino clerk with over-sized breasts and two Mardi Gras necklaces that she always wears over her professional blouses and business suits. She looks like she could tip over with unbalance when she waddles to his security box. There is a woman he passes on the sidewalk every morning at 8:34, probably on her way to work, who has the curliest frizzed hair he has ever seen and a dimpled, purple birth mark on her chin. And the black mustached manager of the pharmacy, whom Bruce's internal voice refers to as “Virgil” or “The Father”. Not to mention the surplus of customers, street walkers, drivers, home owners and others in the complex medley of citizens provided for him, just to witness such fleeting glimpses of their lives.

He doesn't just watch the eccentric. Even the most suburban of mothers, waiting in line at the video store, has some uncanny gait or unique inflection that Bruce has to restrain himself from glaring at. He determined that no fictional character, no matter how complete or well-written, multi-faceted or endearing, was as captivating as any singular, mundane plebeian. The average American watches six hours of sitcoms, crime dramas and reality games on television a day. Bruce spends at least that much time puttering around, pretending to read magazines or check nutritional fact listings, when he indulges in his own audio-visual addiction.

And so, as the heuristic obsession with erotic photography was a self-prescribed solution to his dovish reluctance in sexuality; so too has he been searching for a solution to his embarrassment at often being caught staring. Even the unattractive assume he is being sexual, of having a predator's mien. Bruce has relegated himself here, to his basement shanty, for the last thirty-six hours. He left only once for a living room meeting to discuss Happy Harbor's bills, dish washing, gardening and Diana's penchant for surprise all-night binges with about thirty of someone else's best friends.

During the meeting, Bruce ordered food, along with his other house mates, from the Chinese restaurant downtown. Kyle picked up the order and must have played one of his pranks, or “performances” as he titles them, on their house mates' fortune cookies. Bruce didn't read the others, but his fortune read: “You will be alone. Forever.” on the cookie slip, complete with red Mandarin characters and phonetic numerals on the back. Wallace chastised Kyle's immaturity and ever since the meeting ended, Kyle's been pretending to be on the telephone with the local university's psychology department, as if he were applying to a study on ESP, which chafes Wallace to the core so purposefully that he is cleaning all of the public areas of Happy Harbor in an admirable effort of restraint. Whether he is aware that Kyle is not only speaking into a dead receiver, but also customizing his “answers” to mock Wallace's own lifestyle is something Bruce has yet to determine.

But during the meeting, the effectiveness of which Bruce has already forgotten, while Wallace and Clark attempted to reprimand Arthur for his flip presumption about the rent checks, Jenn burst out laughing and said, “Why don't we all have an orgy?”

She giggled all through a long, pregnant pause which Clark was first to break.

“Would....What purpose would that serve?”

“Well we wouldn't argue so much about this stuff. We'd work out all of our frustrations on each others bodies...”

“That's a great idea,” smirked Kyle, “So you'd... include your brother in this?”

“Oh.”

“I'm not... I mean I wouldn't...” Arthur stammered.

“I bet Mister Frigidity would love that” Kyle jabbed, “wouldn't you Bruce?”

There was another pregnant pause, this time without Jenn's hysteric accompaniment. Bruce looked up, focused on a point on the bridge of Kyle's nose right between his eyes, and unleashed every fiber of that absorbing clarity he had been secluding himself away from using.

“No.”

And it was true. There was no slight interest in sex with these people. They were just as null and synthetic to him as the multitude of amateur models whose penetrations he had so scrupulously examined. But Jenn's comment did rattle something in Bruce's consciousness, that he was very careful not to register on his face. Until then he had treated them as inferior automatons, a means to an end, like Barbie and Ken dolls with flat polished plastic where the reproductive dermis should have been. But Jenn's observation made him realize their humanity. They were just as curious and extraordinary as The Bag-Girl, The Mentally Disabled, The Bank Clerk and The Father; that they too were capable of great epiphanies to change the course of time.

He retreated the meeting to his basement, climbing over bicycle skeletons to his poorly constructed shanty, where he erased the multitude of porno computer screens and began a new text document. Instead of strangers, he turned his acumen on the people he surrounded himself with, the people he could most intimately explore, without being noticed as a lingering shadow. One-by-one he created full blooded characters out of them, basing entire personalities on a single gesture or incident he had encountered.

And finally, re-reading what he had done, when he had almost run out of fuel for the evening, after eavesdropping and fantasizing; forming conjecture and recording axioms, Bruce realized there was but one subject left to scrutinize and judge with that pattern of self-righteousness. Someone who strove to purge demons through descriptions, that honed his talents on insecurities, while ignoring his own considerable defeats and measures.

I experienced at last my own epiphany and realized a common thread weaving in and out, a transparency that overlayed all of their stories: that I am not the only one who had yet to figure out what it was in this world that he loves.