Slobber Excerpt-7-14-2008

So Slobber walked the school hallways, head down and eyes averted. He closed off his ears to all voices but the ones within his own head. He felt only the rough fabric of his coveralls and the soft, worn feeling of his Highlander t-shirt. He smelled the cloying scents of flower and fruit enhanced perfumes worn by the girls, the speedstick, the oniony smell of armpits, and the everpresent smell of testosterone. It all blended with the smell of stale mopwater infused with ammonia and a sour mop wetted too many times, left to dry in a heap in the corner of his “building engineer” closet. He tasted the everpresent overspice of the previous night’s microwave dinner and the blood from grinding his teeth to the point of damaging his gums. He only wished he could turn off his sense of smell and taste and touch as easily as he could sight and sound, but was left with the attempt to ignore instead of push away.

Dream

The dream is always a variation of the same theme. Last night it was spraying disinfectant all over the neighbor's veranda to kill the germs and smell from cat crap. The night before, it was spraying an anti-algae spray in the "pond" in front of the the old Hotel Como to keep the algae and lichen from the lake infiltrating the rowboat area and eating the wood of the ancient rowboats, now seriously in need of several coats of paint. Before that, it was a giant can of bugspray in the tiny kithenette connected to the even tinier studio apartment at the back of the hotel because giant cockroaches, ants, and silverfish had staged a coup near the tiny refrigerator and were threatening to annex the brie and the grapes. And, before that, it was the cloying smell of father's aftershave used as an air freshener to cover the odor of decay that swelled forth like some massive sneaker wave, beginning at the hollowed out spot beneath the floorboards of the bedroom he had shared with his lover for years and years until, one morning, the poison finally worked and he just didn't wake up. That particular tableau of the theme seemed to occur more than any of the others and it was beginning to work. He began to research slow acting poisons on the internet.

Slobber is moving

Slobber is much more comfortable being 'fleshed out" , as it were, in a more private forum. So, he is moving to AppleWorks where he will have a quiet folder to himself...much less embarassment and stress when the bandages come off. However, he will be making regular appearances on Chiaroscuro--he calls them "excerpts". They will be little snatches of his growth and development, of his life and story, along with many of the characters in the school and in his town that he has yet to introduce, even to me.

Untitled II

He had been quietly moving through these halls with either a mop, or a broom, boxes of toilet paper, or a giant trash can on wheels for 10 years. Before that, he unobtrusively attended classes in English and Philosophy at the Community college for 3 years. Before that, he had walked these same high school halls. He walked them in much the same way he was walking them now, but rather than cleaning tools and garbage, he carried textbooks and a ratty 3 ring binder, once covered in purple fabric, now sweatstained, inkstained, potato chip oil stained, and most holey (to him, most holy). Now, when even noticed by either the students of the faculty, he was Mr. Cloud. In high school, he was Slobber the Clod or, if anyone wanted to poke fun at his obsession with "The Highlander", he was Slobber McClod.
He was never quite sure where the idea for "slobber" came from. He didn't slobber--he rarely opened his mouth. To him, it made no sense,and, becasue he rarely spoke to anyone so had no friends to ask about the name, he never found out that he was "Slobber" because his pillow combed his oily hair, his oily and pimply face was oily and pimply ALL of the time, and his jeans and t-shirt never changed. The other students didn't know that he really did have several pairs of jeans and several t-shirts--because he didn't realize he portrayed "slobbiness", he never explained to anyone that he had 4 pairs of jeans, all roughly the same color and 4 t-shirts, all black with a gothic lettering of "The Highlander" superimposed over a claymore.
Oddly enough, because the t-shirt had been his own design and he could get them screenprinted almost anywhere, he continued to wear blue jeans and black t-shirt to this day, now hidden beneath his gray coveralls. Had any of the current faculty who had also been students at the school with "Slobber" known what he wore beneath his coveralls, they may have passed the legacy of "Slobber McClod" down to the current student body. But, they didn't know, so Slobber was simply Mr. Cloud.
He had been born Conner Cloud of a mother frightened of her own shadow and a father who felt so very grandiose that he tried to overshadow everything. Thus, his mother was in a constant state of fear and his father was in a constant state of wind and bluster, making sure that his shadow covered everything within his "domain". That he considered his domain to be wherevver he was at the moment was odd, as reality placed his domain in a broken down single-wide on the very edge of town, camped like a gypsy trailer on the 10 acre plot of land which was the sole legacy left by Conner's Grandfather Cloud, a man also given to boasting (and, to make the boasting bigger and more unlikely, given also to the daily overconsumption of cheap Scotch).

Untitled I

He managed to feel alone in a grayfloored hallway, flourescently lit, and filled with the sounds, scents, and vibrations of hundreds of high school students. He could be in a place completely lacking sound, even natural sounds or the hum of machinery while around him the dischord and din of voices, loud, boisterous, strident, whispered, desperate, confident, frightened, or just made for the sake of the sound itself bounced around the 10'x10' hallway tunnels. He saw in grayscale, when he looked at anything at all other than the floor, in spite of the bright t-shirts, the endless stream of hair colors, the make-up, the posters and signs and art projects and dirty word poems scrawled on the gray walls. The world was a gray coverall, a yellow mop bucket on squeaky black wheels, gray mopwater with a scant film of dirty bubbles flaoting on its surface, a white mophandle with gray woodstreaks peaking through the peeling white paint, his graying hair, unruly and combed by several nights rubbing against a pilled and dirty pillowcase, and gray/green eyes that saw the world in gray but noticed all of the little things overlooked by the boisterous rabble surrounding him.

The Ivy

I planted Ivy to hide the dirt, to cover the rocks
And to call the house a quaint cottage. It has
Stretched to cover the pathway to the door,
To cover the porch where other homes have
Neighbors gather with coffee and talk and
Small laughter. The Ivy I planted has made
Our porch a quiet and lonely stretch of wild,
Made on a small scale, where no one laughs
Or drinks or smokes or even talks of the each
Day happenings of social lives. I planted the
Ivy and it became a mirror of the way I have
Been living; a wilderness of quiet, of the aloof
Thoughts and of self-concern. There is no
Invitation for coffee or tea, it chokes small
Talk like it chokes away at the brick columns
To either side of the porch. I am hidden
By green walls and ceiling of my own planting.