The Porridge-Kitchen Story

I think that an incident that occurred a few months ago sheds some light on why Zach omitted what is probably the most important part of yesterday's passage -- but don't let me get "ahead" of myself (excuse the pun ... which you'll see). We had just left a -- I believe the phrase translates best as -- "porridge-kitchen" (? any help from Germans here?) on Bindestrasse. Zach was swinging (a word I use for the sake of poetic description, the reduced pendulum action of his arms being a common topic of conversation amongst his detractors) his ebony cloth shopping bag, which contained some bulky mass I can't quite remember and also a thin topbound pad of celadon notepaper from which some of the sheets had turned back around the spine and come frilling out of the top of his bag, creating quite an exacerbating rustling for someone with my sensitive hearing. He was walking on my right, and I, since we were walking northeast (having turned right out of the "porridge-kitchen") was closest to the street, acting, I'm sure, in the subtle masculine capacity which Zach subconsciously assigns me when we are in public, even though I know a number of people who've expressed no surprise when it's revealed that he considers himself the more masculine of the two.

Anyway, as we talked, we approached a natty old woman who was on the inside of the sidewalk and pushing one of those terrible streetpurpose shopping carts, the kind about the size of a rolling suitcase but that look like a giant metal basket and are harnessed to an invisible rattle-machine that appears to use as fuel the odor given off by slowly decomposing worsted peacoats and loose guttersoaked boot laces. So we rapidly catch up with this tottering octogenarian and her clunky purse-on-wheels, but Zach is so oblivious to the woman's presence that I find myself getting pushed behind him, diagonally, to make room for the three of us abreast on the narrow concrete. It is only on obtaining this new position, arranged like a flopeared rook in mid move on Jim Henson's (R.I.P.) muppet chess set, that my eyes are drawn to a languorous unfolding in the soft depths of this woman's pushcart, a domain which I had thought, until then, contained only the corpulent messes of translucent plastic shopping bags cannibalistically stuffed with the cadavers of other members of their own brittle species. Then this gaunt monkey (I don't feel right using "gaunt" to describe a creature with so much fur, but it's really that cheekbone pattern of facial fur that gives those munchkin simians their hunger artist aspect) climbs out of that jerryrigged ballpit. And then I think, boy, it's carrying its fragile little head as though that cluster of sticky shopping bags adhering to its scalp is much heavier than it must be. But as the monkey reaches over, tremulous, to grab at the leafy notebook plumply calling to it from the next bag over, what I had thought was a clump of shopping bags resolves visually into a huge, hairless, bubbly lesion. As I trip in astonishment, grabbing Zach's arm and bringing it around and down, his wrist descends and, for a shining moment, before the two bodies are united in a spray of blood and pain when the monkey sinks its fangs into his skin, it looks like a David Lynch shrunken zombie is beginning to scale the heights of skinny brain mountain. So that probably explains Zach's aversion to mentioning strange heads. And probably cabbage, too.