I Think Torture Speaks For Itself
Torture is a moral issue on my right and a pig on a leash to my left. I left the house early and after crossing Houston found a path to follow with good sunlight and also shade. I would run into a friend much later, a black, tidy, smooth speaking ex-Marine who would tell me of his most recent woes involving hospital and a lack of a proper lunch. I wore a light rain jacket and in the left pocket were a few bills set aside for just this purpose, the contributing towards a lunch for someone I could through his demeanor and bearing see as a friend even though it would be a fiscally unbalanced friendship filled with periods of resentment and the seeming unfairness of it all. But the bills in my pocket weren't there, literally disappeared like a goddammned insertion of a metaphor, so I had to bring out the wallet which is only ever full in just these situations, so that I have to rifle through twenties and such to get to ones while the person towering over this personal cash drawer is adding detail to his woe in hopes of having one of my Jacksons, or come on man, you really gonna miss that Hamilton? My yes is always unspoken, allowing instead how possibly wrong it may be for a man so obviously flush in paper to be so cheap. The spoiler has already occurred and I'll give you a hint it has to do with a pig on a leash in NYC. And one other thing, as if this should have to be explained to you each and every time--nothing happens. Seeing the pig is all that happens. This isn't one of those guaranteed gold stories you might hear at a dinner table where one transvestite regales the table inhabited by other transvestites and friends of transvestites with his story about the parrot of his masseuse. So what if you value that type of story and were happy for the one bit of genuine laugh it gave you surrounded by a lot of other minutes where you were painfully aware of the negative aspects of being a non smoker who can't use the I have to go out for a smoke excuse. So this would be a good time to head to the market, nothing to see here folks. Think to all the times you have watched that barely tolerable sitcom and waited for the last bit after the last commercial break and all that happened, all that came on was the credits. Doesn't that piss you off? Don't say I didn't warn you. I was going to on these next lines, one, describe what it would look like for a Border Collie dog or possibly a Holstein heifer to have messy, awkward, could even be barbaric sex with a pig, two, the resulting if unlikely progeny, three, a brief running over the drama laden upbringing of inter-specie offspring, and just when the most sentimental of you were wiping away that one tear, I would four, make you cry many tears of happiness as the freaky looking low lying dog/cow/rhinoceros-looking calf-pup-lets are adopted each and every one by middle-aged childless lesbian couples across the city of New York only days or minutes before certain annihilation and perhaps transformation into items found in a to-go container purchased on or around Grand St. But that description will have to wait. My siting of this pig is many years later and the horror perhaps only my own. And there is only one of the pigs left in the city, and I am on this day, yesterday, seeing it while killing time under the leaves before heading off to pull down my pants one final time for the urologist. The other pigs have moved north with their owners or been pawned off to friends in Hudson or Woodstock or in the case of the litters' runt, Vinylhaven, Maine. I can see from a reading over that I am branding myself a pig hater and while this is strictly not true, I will say I lack the necessary vehement conviction to alter outside opinion. Inside where I imagine things I nod sympathetically to each and every lovely thing spoken about pet hybrid pigs. Later I found those three single dollar bills in my left coat pocket just where they have been for the last month or so but could not find earlier to assist the ex-Marine. I rubbed the folded green paper between my fingers inside my pocket before extracting the now completely unfrozen peanut butter medical marijuana brownie. I was sitting on a bench by the lake in Central Park. A gregarious group of Dutch kids had finally finished all their photo taking and moved on. Two gay men, uncomfortable with their silence, moved silently on. A Chinese couple moving with inscrutable precision leaned over the short hog wire fence separating the path from the lake and in less than a minute expertly ripped from the ground enough lush dandelion green to fill a grocery sack. After they moved on I unwrapped the peanut butter brownie and ate it, licking the adhered residue from the cellophane just in case I should somewhere on the road home run into a pot sniffing beagle attached to a six foot six jackbooted policeman.
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