May 1, 2009: The Green Man with the Ashtray Hand

I was lounging, fetchingly, on the brick walkway of Lowry Mall, just opposite the Memorial Union clock tower.  A man with long, dark hair and a dark beard sat in front of me, just past beyond my feet were planted, but I wasn’t paying him much attention.  Suddenly, he came around to me and held out his tattooed stump of a left arm, and where a hand should have been was a decorative ceramic ashtray.  In the ashtray was my turquoise ring, which I hadn’t realized I’d dropped.  It must have rolled down to where he was sitting when I wasn’t paying attention.  He had a brilliant and slightly capricious smile—a real charmer—but I let him sit down with me anyway.  Across from me on the ground he was suddenly whole again, and the tattoos were gone.  He looked like Devendra Banhart.  Maybe he really was.  I thought about Chase in San Francisco and how I would be less frightened in this situation if this strange man were Chase instead.  (But even Chase scares me slightly; he’s too skinny.)  As the bearded man spoke to me, I noticed that his skin had a slight greenish tint to it, like he had at one time been a plant and was now taking human hormones; he wasn’t quite there yet.  I think he told me I looked colored too.  ME?  You’re green!  What?  He didn’t believe me.  We sat there gazing at each other, fingers entwined.  We slept together on the couch in the sunroom, and when I heard her stirring in the kitchen, I wondered what Jacquie would think if she saw us there together.