May I just say that something odd—or perhaps magical—has been happening since I’ve started to write with an awareness that I am being presently read by an audience as opposed to individual friends or relatives. It feels like my environs have been alerted to some sort of psychic shift. More likely, my shift in awareness has caused me to observe my environs more intensely, but it genuinely seems that everything that happens during the few hours of the day that I am not reading or writing has stepped up to the dramatic plate, as it were, to furnish me with increasingly savory tidbits of reportage.
Just one half an hour ago, I was about to take a shower and as I laid my toiletries out, , another neighbor from a bunk across from mine, Angel, inquired as to whether he could ask me a question. (we were the only ones in the shower room at the time).
Angel. looks like a younger, Latin version of Ben Kingsley, with a similarly deliberate and gentle manner, as well as a smile that warms up an offbeat face to make it positively handsome. I answered “sure,” thinking this was perhaps going to be an extension of a conversation we had earlier about AIDS transmission. Instead, Angel asked, “Do you ever wake up in the morning with this, you know, bad feeling in your stomach?” His expression indicated the all too common existential anxiety of waking up and realizing you are in prison. (Since I know this is actually an anxiety many people feel wherever they wake up, just take that feeling and say, triple it.) But I decided to respond by emphasizing as much as possible the discomfort’s universal aspect and answered: “ I think it is something a lot of people feel waking up because it reminds us of the horrible experience of birth. What baby didn’t want to go back into that safe, wonderful, warm belly, the second the doctor slapped him?” And Angel listened, intently, the water streaming down his face, his hand poised over his solar plexus, making a gesture one would associate with the having that feeling in the pit of the stomach—or acid reflux. And suddenly Angel’s slightly quizzical expression made me wonder if I had completely misunderstood.
“Angel” I queried, “you weren’t talking about heartburn, were you?”
To which he promptly replied: “Yeah, with this food, don’t you get it too?”
Of course I went beet red with embarrassment. Who was I trying to be, Sartre in the Shower?
Then slowly, that movie star smile spread across Angel’s face, making him look like Gandhi in the rain. With the most almost imperceptible of nods, he let me know he was indeed talking about what I thought he was talking about.
The little devil.
MCO 2004
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