Watch Andrew’s Video about the Making of “Mephibosheth” and his tribute to writer and professor Birk Sproxton.
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Mephibosheth: Part 1
This was a suicide note, but then I remembered crying. It was a true story. I thought the little actress was the little girl. I cried because the doctor said she would get better, because she was about the same age as me. It was probably the first made-for-TV movie I ever watched. She had a strange disease. No one knew what it was. It was the mid-seventies, so television writers could pass off the disease as some mysterious condition that science couldn’t explain, in the days before kids had HIV, or Tay-Sachs. Then, kids were scared by kids coughing up blood, even if the blood only showed up in black-and-white. I remember coughing a few days later before going to bed. My mom turned my hand over and looked at my palm. She didn’t say anything, just turned the palm over slowly, eyes wide, to check for spots of black-and-white blood.
You want your own tragedy to have its own TV movie, because you want proof it’s sad enough. You want to know who’s gonna cry. My movie plays in my mind on a loop, the same images all over again. I can remember what I ate for breakfast that morning, and what I ate for breakfast the morning after. But somehow in the midst of bursting glass and police sirens I’ve forgotten the details in between. Wheaties with brown sugar and a hot-cross bun. Who was the first athlete to be featured on a Wheaties box? Then sugar water in a bag.
I stepped outside of time that morning before the accident, stepped outside the continuum of my life. I was at the breakfast table and sensed the world had changed. Time had stopped but I had not. Everything around me was frozen. The curtains slowly breezing. The neighbor outside trimming the hedge. The morning radio newscast. Only I moved, I alone, when everything else was motionless. I picture myself there now, at that table, spoon in hand, can smell the scent of pine cones and grass in the air. That’s the last memory as my former self. One quiet moment I spent unmarked by time, sitting at the table eating cereal.
After breakfast I pulled out of the driveway, maybe a little carelessly. I was late for work and then it was tires squealing, broken glass, and complete silence.
I can remember now the moment of decision, of entering my body for the first time. How I was above myself lying on the gurney. You see yourself but you are a stranger to yourself. Not bound by the law of gravity. At that point free to observe the tubes pump fluids in. Free to watch what tubes the fluid comes out. It is weightlessness. You don’t need to breathe because breath suspends you. You are outside, unhomed. You’re a spectator. You hover. You’re unmade. You aren’t defined because in that moment you aren’t contained.
Slowly I became aware that the man I watched was me. Time was still again. Only I moved in the blur of stilled motion. I see myself lying there. Blood covering my hands. Nothing in the room is moving. The hospital staff. The ceiling fan. The graph on the heart rate monitor. I close my eyes and imagine blue-white sky. I hear my name called and turn toward the voice.
Then it is ceiling tiles, the throb of my pulse in my ears. A blur of surgical gloves, round eyes behind plastic glasses, slanted eyebrows, thick eyelashes. You hear strange voices call out your name. You don’t know where they come from. The heads looking down at you have blue face masks where mouths should be. You just stare. That was how it was when I entered my body for the first time. Unfamiliar faces, too much eye shadow, scratchy hair bursting from swollen pores. That was my first in-body experience. The last footsteps I ever made were back into my own body.
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A guy Jay works with told him about this fat couple. They were so obese that sex became a physical impossibility. What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhino? They were whales, one-tonners. Their fatness interfered with their bodies’ ability to come together and join as one flesh. There was too much space between them. Food was their pleasure. All they could do was eat. All they ever would do was eat. So they decided to bring their pleasure into the bedroom. They made love to each other one at a time. They would take turns, undressing each other. One at a time they’d slowly untie the laced string at the back of each other’s Muu Muu. Trace a finger along the crisscross of string then with one hand press the string into the skin while the other hand slowly pulled it free from the cloth.
If the wife undressed the husband first, she would lie him face down on his steel reinforced bed, arms above head. She would pull his Muu Muu up along the surface of his body. Ankles, calves, hamstrings, the enormous flesh of his buttocks, lower back, shoulders, his already exposed neck. Then, with his cooperation, roll him over to expose the other half of his body. Only the thin cloth of his Muu Muu between her hands and his shins, thighs, the mound of his stomach, nipples and chest. With both sides of the clothing pulled up to his neck she would slip the fabric over his head, cupping his armpits, his biceps. She would let the clothes fall to the floor, interlock her fingers with his, lean forward and kiss his forehead.
Then he would rise and stand beside her. Hip against hip, they would tango over to her steel reinforced bed and he would lay her down on her back, pull her Muu Muu across her flesh, expose the curves, the crevasses, roll her over, the heaps and mounds of skin, interlock fingers and kiss her forehead. He would return to his bed. She would stay on hers. And, backs to each other, they would reach for the basket of food prepared beside their beds. She loved chocolate so he would take eclairs, mints, chocolate-covered cashews and hide them in the folds of his skin. With a finger rub mousse into the crease of his groin. Oreo cookies under the flap of his right breast, chocolate caramels behind each knee. Glossettes in the flab of his biceps.
He loved smoked meat, occasionally dried fruit. She would plant smoked turkey between her breasts, slabs of beef jerky in the cellulite rolling her thighs. Papaya inside the lines of her buttocks, dried pineapple in the fullness of her armpits. Rings of apple over her ears and toes. Hickory smoked venison between her neck and collarbone. Raisins and honey in her navel.
When the food was hidden, the wife would turn off the table light between them. The husband would go to his wife’s bed and begin his search. Sniff, taste, consume the hidden ecstasy folded into the furrows of her soft skin. The wife submitting to the exhalation of his breath, the force of his tongue and teeth against fruit, meat and her flesh. Then it was her turn to mine the buried pleasure. Love was a feast where their spirits could leave their bodies and meet together in the air.
Their love transcended the function of body parts.
© 2010 Andrew Kooman. All Rights Reserved.
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