Mighty Mercury

My neighbor, Abner Costello, was playing  the radio very loud this afternoon, and every few seconds the door of his unit would open and close real loud as he came out to do some more laundry, then open and close one more time way too loud when he went back inside.  He was coming out of the laundry room when I went in there yesterday. "Erm, yuh scared me, guy!"  Abner said.  He was grinning from ear to ear.

"Sorry bout that,"  I told him.  Abner's always doing laundry.  Maybe he never feels clean or something; everybody here has funny thoughts.

Well, my name is Bucky Bilroy and I live in the Colfax Care Center in Denver.  We call it the You've-Had-It Rest Home.  It's not like a hospital really, more of a halfway house.  Everyone here is between things one way or another.  We can still come and go in the daytime as long as we check in and out at the desk, and we all get social security checks every month.

Mr. Hackler from down the hall came by today, said he wanted to borrow a cup of flour.  He was wearing a blue bandana and holding a green plastic measuring cup.  Well, I didn't have any flour just sugar, I told him that and he told me he wanted a cup of sugar, then, so I got him one-"What do you mean  ‘then'?"  I asked him.  "Are you gonna use that to bake with INSTEAD in some way?"  But no, he said, I'll just put it on my cereal or something, and by the way who ever heard of a crazy idea like that in the first place, Bilroy, baking with sugar instead of just flour, what are you, some kind of a nutballl?  Alright, Mr. Hackler, you have a good day, I agreed.  He went back to his room and I sat there thinking about it.

I didn't know shit about baking.  I didn't even own a cookbook.  I always bought cereal, sugar, some microwave food and canned juice with my S.S.I. money.  I knew baking had something to do with rising, expanding-like giving birth or growing plants.  But that was all I knew.  Maybe that's what flour was to baking, the soil or the womb or something, so what would happen with sugar instead, what would be the results of this fabulous experiment?  I kept on wondering about it.  Well you catch more flies with shit than honey, my mind said then, some wild thought trying to help me somehow, some kind of idiotic-automatic-mechanism deep in my mind.  I I am often interrupting myself like this.  Of course I was not trying to catch any flies without honey, or shit, no of course not, no, so I answered right  back-"Well then, what are the exact properties of sugar ITSELF, right down to the tiniest particle then, right down to a subatomic level so small no one else even notices, huh?  Can you tell me?  Just answer me that, if you're trying to help me!  Have you ever thought about that? Just answer me that if you can!  Ha ha!"

I knew it was time to calm down, but I still really wanted to try it.  I went to the desk and checked out for a half hour and started heading to the bookstore for a cookbook.  "The bookstore?"  I questioned myself as I went down the street. "Do they even sell cookbooks?  Is that where they are, or the grocery store?" and started walking toward the bookstore but worrying more and more is that where I ought to be going─or the grocery store?  In the end I decided they probably had them both places and there would probably be a better selection at the bookstore, but they might be more expensive, and kept on heading for the bookstore.

I started thinking about Mr. Hackler again.  Something weird he told me once was that he used to go to all the judge shows, you know  they have all these shows that take place in a courtroom, each judge with a different catchy trait, stern or folksy or black or southern or gay or whatever.  Well, when he lived in Hollywood Hackler flew over the pre-dawn streets in his beat-up Dodge van every morning at five AM, to get there right on time when the first show started and join the audience sitting behind the proceedings.  "They wanted a packed courtroom every time,"  .  he told me,  "the more people the better, since it makes the folks watching at home feel more tense, see, that's how their minds work, that's why they always let me in, and even gave me twenty bucks most times."

To hear him tell it, Mr. Hackler sat through hours and hours of these petty disputes about barbecue grills and backyard sprinklers and that which is hidden and that which is shown, and it satisfied something in him somehow, that they paid him just to sit there . . . What kind of therapy is that, I wonder, just what kind of sick self-surgery, huh?  To deny yourself stardom on purpose like that?  I can't help wondering.  Anyway there were five or six shows like that, and each one shot three or four times every week, so on a good day Hackler could make about a hundred bucks and just get drunk afterwards and go sleep on the beach, it was always there. Mr. Hackler sure is weird.  He also says he was part of the cast of the original  "1964"-you know, that whole Beatles revival  touring roadshow─he says he was specially trained at a  "secret camp"  to be the new George, right down to the finest detail, so during the show each night he had to go out on stage and get pelted with jellybeans, shake his leg wearing those high-heeled boots and gray collarless suits, just tapping his toe like the early George, and playing guitar in exactly the Harrison style, as trained─the same guy, only now he's on the star and his own former self the audience is like some kind of all-powerful enemy god in the new format.  Mr. Hackler tells a lot of crazy stories, some of them might be true, but I can't tell.  Anyway they're pretty interesting I think.

Well I wanted to find out what baking with sugar was like, the whole exploded masterpiece.  I wanted to smear that sweet pastry all over my face.  I wanted to know what that kind of strange taffy would taste like, all those tiny sparkling silver grains of pure white sugar just popping out into your cheeks as you chewed like the sweet sweet secret of light.

Maybe baking with sugar would do it for me, what going to all those extremes in the public eye had done for the mad, happy Hackler.  When I told him all I had was sugar, he told me he wanted a cup of that, then─he could go either way, if you see what I mean.  He was flexible.

It might be kind of cool in a way, sitting in on all those judge shows, like a trip to the lake in the park where you just watch the ducks float around, at the end of the day disappearing back into the sand dunes with all your good thoughts about cases you saw.  But getting arrested on purpose is going too far, in my opinion.

Pretty soon I reached the bookstore and after a long time lookin around, I chose a small red book called BAKING CAKES, slipped it into my pocket and left without paying.  I would cook the greatest recipes in there and just replace all the flour with sugar!  Maybe no one had ever tried that.  I sure never had.

It was a beautiful feeling, shoplifting that book, I felt like a big evil genius. "Mwa ha haaa . . ."   I laughed under my breath, walking out of the store.  Well, it was really pretty funny in a way, and once I was almost all the way home I started laughing for real, but it was like the hiccups too because I couldn't make it stop, it was a kind of inner bubbling.  I was almost home when some wild animal raced across my path and dove under a little red fence on the other side of the small gravel lot I was passing.  It went very fast and I didn't follow, I know some people would have, but I didn't even know what the hell it was, something furry and wild and fast.  I think it was a rabbit.  There aren't any rabbits in Denver wild, so it must have been someone's escaped pet running away, but no one was chasing it.  ‘Ahhaha!  HahahahAAAH!"  I kept on laughing, thiking, that rabbit's in a hurry!