Just One Thing
(also watch the short film adaptation)
It’s not like it was some kind of Mondrian fucking minimalist or Kafka-esque hunger-artist thing, if that’s what you think. And it wasn’t some political call-to-arms for the poor, puppy-eyed Tibetans, like a certain writer from a certain well-known weekly suggested. The fucker.
It’s just that, well, I’d always been like that. From childhood. My older sister no, my younger brother no, but I, oh yes, from the day I was born from bloody thighs triumphant. My mother first noticed it with the breast milk. He only suckles at the right teat, she would think to herself. How peculiar. She never told anyone. It was our little, dirty, one-tit secret. I would sit there, grinding that one nipple, mashing it in my hungry gums, looking up at the woman, knowingly.
My father noticed it in the way I slept. Not fetal, not on the back, not on the stomach. I slept only and always in a perfect T, legs extended straight downward side by side, knee to knee, ankle to ankle, each arm stiff at 90 degrees. In elementary school I wore only corduroy. In junior high I ate only white food. Yogurt for breakfast, white cheese on white bread for lunch (without the crust, of course), rice for dinner. The rice I would form into bitesize cubes. Something about the uniformity intriguiged me. Sugar cubes for desert. My shit stayed brown, though.
Years passed. Inconsequential. There were women and money and women and music and women and hard drugs and cotton-diaper fetishes and guerrilla wars in South America and even one charismatic cult. All of it, inconsequential.
And then I moved to Williamsburg. Ah, Williamsburgh. I found a place at 4th and Roebling. The third floor in a building being gutted for more of the transformative shit you see happening all around the neighborhood. When I moved in, my front door was wreathed in glorious graffiti, but I knew it wouldn’t be for long. And let’s stop pussyfooting around with a word like gentrification and call it what it is, folks. Fucking friendly neighborhood genocide. Smiling like a clown on the outside but beneath the paint and red rubber nose, pure evil. Hipsters and trustafarians and trustafarian hipsters, the Puerto Ricenas and the Polskis and the mics and krauts and everyone else all but gone. Except the Hasidics, for some reason. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, I loved that neighborhood, I loved the middle-brow Thai restaurants, the coffeeshops without wifi, the corner bar shaped like a fallopian tube, the honest-to-goodness Rod & Gun club, the three-dollar falafels, the punks, the indies, the industrials. I loved it if for no other reason than because it ran Starbucks out of town not once but twice.
My place, like I said, was on the third floor. The whole third floor. I chose it with care like you would your prostitute. The floorplan a perfect square. Upstairs an old crotchety lady with gaping teeth. She didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother her and that pleased us both just fine.
I started with the furniture. One twin bed, one vintage armoire, a couple of retro lime-green chairs that reeked of Parliaments or Pall Malls, I couldn’t tell which. Getting them down the stairs was difficult, but I managed. Left them on the streetcorner and by the end of the week, gone. It wasn’t bad furniture. But it had to go.
The kitchen cabinets and appliances came next. A lot of crowbarring and checking that the gas line was closed. Everything came out, leaving a clean, naked, wall where a kitchen once stood. The bathroom followed. The tub I broke up with a sledgehammer. The sink. Toilets are easy to remove.
You’re probably wondering: if he threw out his shitter where did he shit? You want the truth? I didn’t. I kept it in, for weeks, months, resorbing my own shit and piss through reverse osmosis, just like those space suit things in that book. Dune. By that point I had realized I was genetically evolved. There was no need to eat. I slept in a perfect T that perfectly triangulated the bare floors, I folded my nightly masturbations within myself, imploding, every orgasm more potent than the previous, hording my genetically evolved jizzum.
There was one last thing to do. I started where the partitions met the walls, my trusty crowbar rending each stud with long sickening yowls. It made a helluva lot of noise. The old lady knocked on my door. She didn’t say anything, just peered into the room. I closed the door. I went back to work. I threw the partitions out the window. Down below, people yelled curses. The roof began to sag.
Then I got out the spackle. I tell you, I took pride in filling every crack, smearing the curds of plaster on the walls and then pulling them tight and clean with the metal edge. In all things I was meticulous.
Of course you know how it ends. You heard about the wacko they found at 4th and Roebling, the 30-year old white male with the striking shock of blond hair they found lying in a perfect T in the middle of a perfect cube in the middle of Williamsburgh, presiding over the morass of hustle and zip below him like a god on high, a Buddha-smile on his lips, the smell of shit and spackle everywhere. So there’s no need for me to go over that. There is, in fact, only one reason I comment on the whole thing in the first place. Only one thing that needs clarification. One thing that no one understood, no one understands. About why I did it. Just one thing.
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