Handsome Man

THanks for all the Dad props, yo, my Dad, he is truly the SHIZZOU! Also,L.A., thanks, am immensely relieved to know I am not a snitty booger. HARRR! I’m going to print that out and frame it, should anyone ever question me on THAT one. Heee heeee whooooooboy, I’m just so dadburned HAPPY to be in the house, IN the house, snug like a little bug in a big, filthy, messy damn RUG. My house has gone in the shitter, yo. When the cat’s away, the mice will… make one helluva mess. Is what. Good god, junk everywhere. ANd no socks. Not one clean sock in this house. I’m currently wearing two pairs of my husband’s dress blacks, THAT’S how desperate I am for socks.

The kitchen looks like… Bombay? I don’t know, I was going to say “Beirut”, but it’s been done.

But I have a sidewalk, and an entryway into my house that is not crumbling and tripping and scary and law-suity. It’s so beautiful. Tear. Sniff.

Did you ever read Lewis Carol’s Alice In Wonderland? Me, I haven’t, not entirely, and I’m wondering, I’m thinking, I should.  Not “should” as in, it’s a “classic and everyone SHOULD read it even though it’s painfully archaic and irrelevant in today’s world”, not that kind of “should”. The other kind. The kind where I really might enjoy it. Also, Winnie the Pooh. ANd here is why:

“But his arms were so stiff … they stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think – but I am not sure – that that is why he is always called Pooh.”           A.A. Milne

Brilliant!  I’m going to the library. I need some damn WHIMSY, is what. Winter looms nearer and nearer, and believe me, I am well acquainted with the icy temperatures recently… I could use a little whimsy and ridiculous…ness in my life. Also, coffee.

I’m reading online, speaking of whimsy, I’m reading the Field Guide To Identifying Unicorns by Sound. You can find it here:

http://www.oneletterwords.com/unicorn/

Because, by golly, if there’s a unicorn to be detected anywhere in the Pittsburgh vicinity, you bet I’m all over it. No unicorn is going to waltz undetected beneath MY nose.

This is how I feel, after thinking so hard for the past two months about that rock-wall and decked-walkway dimensions:

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I told you Franki and Zack are MADD SPAZZY INTO the Lego minifigs, right? Because just LOOK at them, how cute ARE they?!!!! But I found this spec-sheet, and I thought, geez, it’s very precision, the cute factor. Because Zack has some larger, more GANGLY Lego minifigs, or perhaps they’re the evil, red-headed cousin to the Lego’s, the Mega Bloks,  but he hates those minifigs (they’re pirates), because they lack the precision cute dimensions. I totally get it. I wonder if there is a kitten spec sheet, because kittens are just built cute. Atticus, he’s a grown cat, he’s a crotchety old geezer, actually, but he’s got an extra big, fluffy head, and his paws are fluffy and kitteny-cute. He has kitten tendencies to his appearance, but  inside and underneath, he’s a crusty old curmudgeon. With the arthritis.

Beane and I used to pass by a billboard on our way to her orthodontist, advertising a tanning salon that was located, well, directly across the street from the billboard itself.  A kind of run-down place, defiinitely not up-scale, you know the kind, where the tanning business may not be cutting it, so the owner starts selling stuff in the window and the lobby, in this case, a weird line of glittery, spangled, cheaply sewn clothing, maybe some equally awful, gaudy costume jewelry… So the billboard featured this guy, this handsome guy, truly, he was very nice looking, dark, tan, muscular, wearing a  (shudder) tank top… But he was balding. Nothing against balding guys, I love a good bald head like anyone else, but the point is, the guy’s on a billboard, like he’s a big-time MODEL, okay, he’s looking into the camera like, “Oooohhhh you know you want me, check out my delts…”  or something.  Except he’s not the big time, he’s more like… JC Penny catalog model… Not bad, but not,  Forbes Agency…

So we would pass this billboard on a regular basis, and we took to providing the Handsome Man on the Billboard with a name and a running monologue. “Oh. Hello. I did not notice you there. Because I am the Handsome Man. Am I not the finest specimen of manhood you have ever encountered. Many people come to me and they say, ‘how can you be so damned HANDSOME:’  Do not fear my deltoids. Do not fear my tan. You too can be handsome. Not as handsome as I. But handsome at some level to be determined.”  Beane had braces for three years, and so the Handsome Man had quite the running monologue…

One day, a couple years ago, I was reading the paper, and I spotted an ad with the same picture as on the billboard. There was the Handsome Man, with a little tiny paragraph beneath his picture that read something like this: “Over the past year and a half I didn’t give 100% due to medical and personal reasons. I apologize for that. One thing it has taught me is who is real and who is not. I want to thank those customers and friends who have stuck by me- it proves that there are still good people out there. Back, 100%, and looking forward to seeing you, Larry.”

Actually, it reads EXACTLY like that, because I have it right in front of me, because I cut the ad out, and framed it for Beane. Except I added “Larry, Handsome Man” . I thought it was a funny thing for a business owner to publish in the local paper.

Larry, apparently, wasn’t doing so well as a business owner. Due to medical and personal reasons, I presume. Also, the hideous clothing and jewelry lines couldn’t have helped. The tanning salon closed, or more accurately, it appeared to suffer a slow and lingering death, over a long period of time. Just from my peripheral vision, as I drove past the place on the way to the orthodontist… I watched as the clearance signs on the window, for the clothing, escalated from 50% OFF, to 60%OFF!!!! , to 75% OFFFFFFF!!! ALLLLL SALESSSS FINALLLLLL!!!!

And then one day shortly thereafter, the salon was out of business. Doors shut. Windows soaped. Done. Kaput.

A few weeks later, they started a sidewalk/yardsale type thing, in front of the salon. Two pitiful racks of the busted-up remains of the glittering, ragged clothing line. A laundry basket full of cheap, designer-imposter sunglasses, scrawny little tub of jewelry… Of course I pulled in to check it out, I’m a YARD-SAILER, it’s what I DO.

It was strange, because no one was “manning” the sidewalk sale, and no one came out to see if I wanted to buy any of the cracked up “merchandise”… It’s like they just set it outside, and hoped someone would mail them a check to recover their costs or something. Maybe someone was inside, lurking behind the soaped-up windows, I don’t know. Maybe it was Larry, Handsome Man. I’ll never know…

The sidewalk sale continued over a couple weekends. It looked like nothing was ever sold, to me as I drove past, it just looked the same every week, and no one outside with the stuff. And then one week, they just left the whole mess out, even after the weekend was over… Monday… Tuesday… Wednesday… It’s like they abandoned it. It was already sad, and now it was downright epic-scale pitiful.

Then one day the stuff was gone. Tanning salon, gaudy clothing line, Handsome Man… Just gone.

About a year later, somebody opened a health-food store in its place.

About 3 weeks ago, Franki and I were yard-sailing on our way home from her guitar lesson. We followed a sign to a “HUGE MOVING SALE-EVERYTHING MUST GO!!!” It was cold that day, and the wind was blowing. As we approached the dilapidated, truly awful little house, there was a man sitting on the porch, looked to be in his late thirties, he wore a stocking-cap on his head, a scarf around his neck, a ratty sweatshirt, all huddled there against the cold. I didn’t like the looks of him, really, he looked sick. He looked ill. He looked way WAY thin and cold and ill.

Franki and I walked up the porch steps, (reluctantly, at this point, because no one else was at this HUGE MOVING SALE), and he said to us, “Everything in the house is for sale, all the rooms, just ask about anything you might be interested in… There’s a really nice jewelry line in the kitchen, left over from when I used to own “Ultimate Tan”.”

When he said “Ultimate Tan” I froze. Franki and I were already in the kitchen when he said it, and there it was, the pathetic, plastic-coated, faux-gold-tone jewelry line, spread out on a board or a bench, beneath a table loaded with a motley, ratty assortment of Christmas decorations past. He said “when I used to own Ultimate TAn”, and I knew, this very very sick, scrawny, consumptive man was in fact, Larry. Handsome Man.

A heaving sadness gathered and then throbbed in my chest. Very near panic, if ever I’ve been close to a small panic attack, it was then. The throbbing, it was… palpable? It hurt.  Wind raged through the house, as the back and front doors were propped open. The house was unheated, in shambles. Miserable. Crappy, busted up junk covered every surface. Mangled furniture bits, walls peeling, floors uneven and spongy, a thousand miles of dingy Christmas garland. That damned jewelry line.

I stepped into the “living” room. I stepped back into the kitchen. I looked for something I could buy. I considered the “set” of 5 glass goblets on a shelf. But they had a nasty gold-leaf ring around the rims. I hate gold-leaf. There were no prices on anything. I didn’t want to ask how much anything was. I didn’t want to look at it, and I didn’t want to be here, and I didn’t want to see that sick guy huddled on the porch.

As Franki and I walked back out onto the porch to leave, Larry was nowhere to be found. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to get a better look at him. I wanted to be sure. But at the same time, I didn’t try too hard to find him.  

I could tell you I feel bad now, about sorta making fun at his expense. But that’s not really true. I don’t feel bad about laughing with my daughter, and picking a little fun at a silly billboard. Larry chose to be a figure on a billboard, and as such, you know, he’s putting it out there… But you know what I feel bad about, it’s that the very healthy-looking, very handsome, albeit prematurely balding, very tan and muscular man, a business owner with dreams and hopes and youth, the guy who felt the need to pay for that very sincere, very heartfelt ad in the paper, even if it was a little… weird… that guy was now sick and ruined, huddled in a filthy house with no heat.  

Sometimes I tell myself, maybe he owned more than one house, and maybe that horrible, ramshackle thing was a RENTAL UNIT, maybe he’s a land baron or something…    

I’m keeping the framed picture of Larry, Handsome Man. I hope wherever he’s at now, he’s warm. I hope he’s regaining his health. I hope someone bought that hideous jewelry.