Step Back
1.
He lies on the bare wood floor, accordion on his chest, and plays a tarantella, the same one he performed last week for the Merida Symphony Orchestra. He’s a round man with a florid Slavic face, the kind that warns: Step back! Heart attack! He sweats like a pig when he plays, even in an air-conditioned hall, as if his body is only attuned to the humid world outside, with its slice of moon.
2.
The surfer saint thought: I’d like to be buried with a boom box, so I can boogie my way into Hell. I’d play my CD of Rokie Erikson and the Thirteenth Floor Elevator, the first psychedelic band, and make insane asylum guards march in my funeral parade like the members of a ghetto high school marching band.
3.
Their friends celebrate him, the way he lies on the floor and pulls the bellows in and out. He’s a local novelty. Through association, he enhances their status. He was a chemist, but now he’s returned to the love of his youth, the instrument his Rumanian grandfather taught him. He’s forgotten all the chemistry.
4.
I’d play Dylan on my boom box. I’d play Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat.
5.
He’s a lot older than his wife. She’s chronically depressed. Her brothers live in northern woods like animals and sometimes she thinks of them, in Idaho and Minnesota, and wonders how they got that way and what she’s doing so far from them, in the Yucatan.
6.
I’d take all the yearning in the world and all the yearning roasting in Hell like a rotisserie chicken from King Sooper’s Supermarket and stuff it into that pillbox hat and send it to Jackie O.
7.
He sweats so much, the natives call him “the Waterfall.” His wife never sweats. She is afraid to, afraid that if she starts she will never stop and will run away like a river to Argentina or the South Pole.
by Mitchell Grabois