althusser

Lately, when approached by beggars, Ive been handing them dollar bills paper-clipped with a business card that reads YOU SHOULD STOP ASKING AND START TAKING on one side and the locations of banks throughout the city on the other, but since I still see the same faces asking for 83 cents, for 15 dollars, each day Ill start using twenty-dollar-bills and see how that works. Theres a gun shop down the street from my house with a sign that says Seven Days From Now You Can Be Rich. My wife complains to me about this same bum who comes up to me every morning at the same spot and asks me for money and I used to say sorry but now I just ignore him or say no real sharp but he just still doesnt get it. I tell her to watch her tongue, that those same bums are in cahoots with the Jews and Anarchists that are running the world, that they have our living room bugged, that they listen to us have sex each night and translate her grunts into codes that manipulate the stock market, that they sleep in dumpsters because thats where the best reception is. She laughs, but when Im going down on her I sometimes use my pauses to say things like Quiet, they can hear you, or Youre causing another Depression. She starts to talk, but my tongue is all around her and anyway I only say these things knowing she cant reply with my fingers inside her mouth. There is this movie, comedy, where some bully dumps a trash can all over the sidewalk and prepares to roll some geek down the hill in the now emptied metal can and the model bumunruly gray beard, dressed in brown, clever hat, shoes spilling toes like open wounds, pocket watch that doesnt workwalks over and complains, Waste of good garbage; the bully looks up at the man and the way the camera pauses on that kids face you know hes confused about which garbage the man is mourning. In high school a nine-year-old girl gave me a bloody nose on the bus, junior high I was tripped at recess, middle school was the underwear incident, and one spring second grade afternoon some faceless memory knocked me from the merry-go-round into a bottomless pit of mud. I threw my apple at no one in particular while I was lying on my back which is not a position to get full velocity out of a thrown object so I think that maybe I was just finished eating the apple and wanted to get rid of it, maybe my underwear was already ripped, maybe I shouldnt have tripped him first, maybe that nine-year-old was joking when her fist split blood vessels in my nose. So maybe Im joking when I look someone in the eye and say Trust me before I slip them a twenty and a card that boasts the addresses and operating hours of every gun shop in town. Maybe hes joking when he corners my wife one morning, beats her unconscious, and steals her purse. And maybe Im confused when I walk by and he says Thank you, or maybe I think hes joking, or maybe I get it, and maybe my wife gets it, maybe were all laughing like circus clowns at a funeral, maybe were all in stitches because what a wacky world we live in, isnt it funny, heres a dollar, friend.