3

Asshole ate my other foot! This really impacts my outlook.

Oh, I was close. I was there! I was dancing in the end-zone. I would be angry, oh how pissed off I would be if my mood weren’t so well-stabilized. I would be howling mad and probably depressed and blubbery too, maybe even weeping like a little girl, or trembling like a blind kitten in a sack falling towards the water … man, you gotta love mood stabilizing drugs.

But can I at least describe this to you? How close I was? I woke up in the morning and Mister Bear was gone. Sensing an opening, I unsheathed my plan and plunged into action. From the snack box I extracted one Texas Pete’s Yard-Long Spicy Chorizo Jerky Twister — the largest, longest, thickest and most satisfying beef jerky Texas has to offer — and bent one end of the stiff, sulfated meat into a crude hook. Using this wobbly meat-hook I reached out like a stoned croupier to rake in the jackpot: the jack! I hooked the knob of the jack crank, but it slipped free. I hooked it again, it slipped free, again and again … but I did not give up, I persevered, because Marv Pushkin Gives Nothing to Nobody, and Especially Not UP! and finally, after eons of this, I somehow snagged the jerky in its scissor knee and oh so slowly, oh so carefully and gently began to reel it in across the lumpy, scrubby, muddy and buggy bog I’ve been lying in, soaking in, sinking into … thence to jack the fucking axle off my knees, thence to clamber into the cockpit, lock the door, load the gun, cue up the Slayer, crank up the seat-heater and the Shiatsutronic roto-massage system … oh, I could smell it!

And then Mister Giant Fat Stupid Snarling Vicious Ugly Malodorous Evil Angry Buzz-Killing Bear arrived out of nowhere, howling and screaming as if I was his girlfriend and the jack was his best friend from college. He charged, rammed the car hard — further crushing my knees, and somehow lowering this oil pan a centimeter closer to my face — and then he tried to squeeze under here with the rest of me, swiping with his paw, snapping his teeth … he almost got me.

He got the jack instead, and he also got the Jerky Twister. My Texas Pete’s Yard-Long Spicy Chorizo Jerky Twister. Like my feet aren’t good enough, that he has to raid my snacks as well. He’s eating me and he’s starving me.

But it’s a funny thing: in the pantheon of jerky, there’s chorizo, spicy chorizo, extra-spicy chorizo … and then, at the bottom of a smoking crater in the center of the room, there’s Texas Pete’s. Hotter Than The Sun^™. Don’t Mess With Texas^™. Face-Melting Good^™. (And it’s no lie — it did actually melt a small child’s face once, which is where Image Team got involved, and how I became a fan.)

Mister Bear gnawed on this yard-long cord of jerky napalm, appearing to enjoy it for maybe ten seconds … then he spat out half of it in a smoking gob of drool and began rubbing his face on his belly, huffing and puffing with his lips pulled back and his giant tongue flipping around, spraying bear-spit in all directions. He panted and spat and drooled and waddled around in a circle trying to cool down his lips. What a pussy! Take that, Mister Bear. Don’t mess with Texas! I laughed out loud it was so funny.

Shortly after I started laughing at him he started eating my other foot. Who knew bears were so sensitive? Jesus, it almost hurt. I mean the pain is pretty much blocked but just the concept of the blocked pain existing down there somewhere in my leg, the crunching and the ripping and the being yanked on, it disturbs me slightly. But a great feature of OxySufnix is you can chew one up and get the whole twelve-hour timed release dosage in one hour of bliss. And that’s where I am right now, floating on cloud nine while Sensitive Mister Bear lies on his belly a few feet left of the Rover, still rubbing hot chorizo oil off his lips. Sucker.

Mister Sensitive Bear, how smart are you really? I’ve read that you’re “cunning” and “subtle”; I sure don’t grasp your subtlety yet. Whenever someone cites me evidence of the intelligence of animals, they further convince me of the stupidity of humans.

Take dogs, for instance. Dogs are prized, by dog-prizers, for their intelligence. Edna’s hyperactive Papillon, Wagner, never despairs of impressing me with his intelligence. He keeps bringing me his leash. When I enter the house, when I sit, when I stand, when I emerge from the bathroom, he picks up the little leather strap, symbol of his own slavery, and drops it drooly on my feet. He thinks maybe I’ll take him for a walk so he can shit all over our nice neighborhood. Maybe he even thinks I’ll buy him ice cream and a movie. I throw Wagner’s leash in the closet, he brings it back. I throw the leash in the trash, he digs it out and brings it back. I kick him in the ribs, he brings the leash. I take the leash and whip him with it, he leaves me alone for maybe five minutes, then he brings the leash again.

Wagner exhibits no learning ability. A robot vacuum cleaner can grasp concepts this dog cannot grasp. He’s deluded: he thinks he can make me his friend, make me throw his dog-spit-covered chew toys and scratch his hairy testicles and do all the other stuff that Edna does for him. I yell at Wagner, I step on Wagner, I pick him up and throw him, but he just won’t comprehend my loathing. It’s a very retarded kind of intelligence, if you ask me.

Mister Intelligent Bear, what’s your S.A.T. score? Or did you take the Bear Aptitude Test? How did you do on Lumbering? What’s your Snarling percentile? Do you have plans to further your bear education? I’d get further from here if I were you, Mister Bear. When those Search and Rescue guys show up with their big bear-killing guns, you’re going to have a lot of flying lead to outwit.

Truth is, I don’t even know how much of me you’ve eaten, because I can’t see past this axle. But I’m a realist — or at least an opti-realist. I have to assume at the rate you’ve been gnawing on me I’ve lost quite a lot: tendons, little bones … things they can’t just graft from my earlobe. It’s horrifying to contemplate, but it’s a brutal fact that when I get out of here I’m going to have to buy some new feet. They’ll be expensive, I’m sure, and time-consuming, but I’ve got time and Range Rover has lots of money, and my legal position is iron-clad, vis a vis the utter failure of this jack to provide reliable jacking in exactly the adverse jacking conditions Range Rover has repeatedly claimed their product easily overcomes, leading to undeniably severe injury and lifelong mental trauma. What jury wouldn’t sympathize with a guy who lost his feet to a bear due to blatant manufacturer negligence? To the tune of several dozen million American simoleons, at least! I mean, who can put a price on feet?

So I’ve been thinking more about that human foot transplant. I’m sure they can do those now, in our futuristic era of high-tech medicine. I could end up with the feet of a professional athlete who died in a car crash after smoking too much marijuana. I wonder how high I could jump if I had basketball player feet? I’ll probably get a new shoe size and have to buy a whole new set of shoes. That’ll be fun. I live for shoes.

Only, they better not give me negro feet.

You know … prosthetic feet are kind of cool, too. In their way. For instance: there’s a café in Belltown where I get my double latté in the mornings — only because there’s a girl who works the espresso machine there who’s kind of a dyke, but really really hot, so I go there to leer at her — and at this café I’ve often noticed this guy with prosthetic feet. Some kind of veteran, I guess. He’s got nothing but aluminum and plastic from just below the knees all the way to the floor. He’s kind of an older hippie looking guy. He usually wears tie-dyes and jogging shorts, a waxed grey mustache and his grey hair in a pony tail; he looks like shit, basically. But he can walk quite well, which is amazing if you think about it. He’s a little bit overweight but not fat or anything, not Edna fat. At least he’s trying. He’s got little sport shoes on his little plastic feet and he takes his little pug dog out for a walk every morning. He stands, he sits, I even saw him jump up and down once when I knocked coffee in his lap. (I watched him fall over once, too. Actually I sort of pushed him, accidentally — or like, fifty percent accident, forty-nine percent enforcement of my personal space against hippies in general, and maybe just one tiny percent of curiosity about whether he could break his fall with those legs of his. Which he couldn’t, and that was entertaining to watch, but mostly it was an accident.)

A guy like that, it’s not fair to call him a cripple — or rather you could call him a cripple — in fact I must have called him a cripple at some point — but he’s more than that, he’s evolved beyond it. He’s trans-crippled … he’s Crippled Plus! Crippled Pro! A guy like that is an inspiration to a guy like me. I wonder how he lost his legs. I never thought to ask him … actually I never thought to speak to him at all, because he’s a dirty hippie with metal legs. But me, I’d be different: I’d be clean and well-shaven, and I’d wear long Armani slacks, and I bet people wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. Because I’ve got way more legs left than that guy. In terms of legs remaining, that guy’s not even in my league.

I wonder if a bear ate his legs, too. I can’t wait to ask him!

It’ll go like this: After an absence of several months, all the café regulars and the hot lesbian barista chick will have been wondering for some time: what ever happened to that stylish, sexy, edgy ad executive who used to grace them all with his presence every weekday morning for ten minutes or so? And then I’ll just saunter right in with an air of mystery, nonchalance and trial-by-fire machismo, with a spring in my step and a smile on my face, saying nothing, betraying nothing, as if I’d never been gone. When the hot lesbian (bisexual?) barista chick asks where I’ve been keeping myself I’ll tell her: Oh, you know, up in Alaska, hunting bears.

And she’ll be strangely turned-on by the rugged, world-weary edge in my voice, the voice of a man who’s stared down death. She may feel momentarily confused about her sexuality, but she won’t notice my feet and the other regulars won’t notice my shiny new feet, not at all. But then, as I gaze penetratingly into the now-blushing face of the hot barista chick who’s sexually flexible, at the moment I drop a nickel suggestively in her tip jar … our old friend Super Cripple will clank through the front door on his metal legs, his relatively antiquated and somewhat dumpy-looking aluminum legs, to get his morning coffee. He’ll see me, and instantly, he’ll know. He will spot with my first step that something has changed about me, and he’ll look down at my shoes and see they’re brand new, polished and of a different size than they used to be. Our eyes will meet, he’ll raise an eyebrow, look me up and down and exclaim, “Dude … nice feet!”

And that might be the beginning of an unlikely but long and lasting friendship, the kind of friendship one might eventually parlay into film rights. But then again probably not. Because I’m a busy guy and he smells like wheat grass juice, and if I tell him how I killed the bear that ate my feet he might get all liberal and indignant on me, and when hippies weep it’s just embarrassing.

But still, he can give me some pointers in the early stages, as I learn to operate my new bionic feet, to walk and run and leap in them, to kick Wagner with them, to cross them up on my desk as I stretch out in my Aeron chair after a long day of creativity and delegation. I bet I could be a bad-ass kung fu master with my lightweight rock-hard titanium super feet.

I just have to somehow make sure they don’t graft negro feet onto me. I wish I had a Sharpie, I could write WHITE FEET ONLY PLEASE on my arm or some place on my body where neurosurgeons would see it. My forehead, even. Just in case. Just in case I’m not conscious when they rescue me.

Which they definitely will do. Soon!

Look, don’t get me wrong: negroes have excellent feet. Amazing feet. Look at Jesse Owens! Michael Jordan! (Actually it could be kind of cool to have Michael Jordan’s feet, if I could have them certified and really prove to people, “Hey, these aren’t just any negro feet, these are Michael Jordan’s!” Imagine the cachet of that.) And even if they just gave me the feet of some semi-famous pro or college basketball playing negro I’m sure they’d be excellent feet in the practical sense, not inferior in any way, not funny smelling. My concern is purely an aesthetic one. I just want to match. I’m a man who takes care of himself, who works hard to look good at all times. Having negro feet would be like walking on to the tennis court of life in black socks, every day. It’s beyond faux pas — it’s well into freakshow. I wouldn’t even know what box to check on the census any more. I’d be an other, a mixed. I’d be a decline to state.

Who was that detective with the claws instead of hands? Mister Claw? No … J. J. someone. J. J. Arms. Yeah, there’s a super-cripple for you. How did he lose his hands? Bears, probably. I wonder if he’s still alive, fighting crime, solving mysteries, stabbing bad guys in the face with his claws. I could be just like that only I’d use kung-fu high-kicks on bad guys and save my hands for getting freaky with Marcia from Product Dialogue, in a tender erotic embrace on the bear skin rug in the executive bathroom.

I hope Marcia isn’t along when they come to rescue me. I’d hate her to see me like this. Mauled, mud caked … and yeah, one of the many awful smells you smell is me. I have soiled my wool hunting slacks and my Calvin Kleins. It had to happen, didn’t it? I’m at peace with it, but I don’t want Marcia to see me this way. I am not looking my sexiest right now. So not sexy. The image of me, steeped in blood and shit and Slim Jim wrappers, trapped and … humiliated, really, by that dumb bear … If Marcia sees me like this she’ll never call me Daddy again.