Les Learns a Few Things

Les Learns a Few Things

Leslie is writing his water poems on the dirty floor of the garage. Well, not poems really, just whatever - he squirts the script out with a hose. Sometimes the words creep up the walls and out of sight. He writes what he feels in the moment, the words come quickly, pouring out in great bursts – parts he remembers, other bits vanish from his mind as they dry. He doesn’t let it trouble him, the is pretty sure there will always be more. At the garage where he works he is the closer, does the final clean and sweep at the end of day. He doesn’t mind it. He has nowhere to go really, there is no one at there to rush home to anymore. Besides he has found he kind of likes the silence.

He turns off the ever-present radio after everyone leaves, breaths in the silence, cleans and sweeps and then starts in with what he thinks of as his true calling. It is almost a sort of a dance, an invocation to some sort of universe that he can rarely touch in his everyday life.  He did get in a bit of trouble a few weeks ago when a particularly long saga drenched some boxes sitting up in the rafters. He had run out of space on the floor and had to creep the looping script ever higher on the back wall. This was complicated by the fact that the farther he had to squirt the water the more he needed to rely on his arm movements to place the script – the increase in physical intensity correlated directly with a decrease in accuracy in placement. His manager, Jim, good ol Jimbo, Jim the Rock, Jim Jiminey, had commented on the rather soggy looking boxes the following morning.

Les blamed that on the rats. The rats that shudder along the walls at night when darkness falls and all is quite except for the sound of Les’s cleaning, his cleaning and his writing. Les told Jim he had been startled into shooting a jet of water towards the ceiling by some sort of scrabbling noise. It wouldn’t happen again. Except for it probably would thought Les, Art demands.

Leslie never did like being called Leslie - what kind of name is that for a man? Yes, you can shorten it to Les, but maybe that’s even worse - who wants to be called less? Given a choice, wouldn’t you want to be called more? But here he is, Les for sure, working nights at the auto shop, cleaning up the oily rags and making sure the tools are all put away. That and making sure the meth head crazies don’t break in and try to inflate themselves with the air hose - again.

His only work friend is a half-blind rat he calls Ezekiel - he’s not sure why, other than he thinks it’s at least it’s a big name, and it has something to do with wheels - appropriate enough for a garage. He saves the tasty bits of his sandwich and tries to coax Zeke - he calls him Zeke for short, and Ezekiel for long- out of his dusty corner by the tires. He thinks maybe Zeke is mad at him for being held accountable for the wet box saga. He tosses a particularly tangy splodge towards his friend and it hits the concrete with a slap and a slide  - “two points” yells Les, momentarily causing Zeke to freeze before he reconsiders,  grabs the lump of the greasy meat like substance and tugs it back into the darkness.

The floor is tacky under Leslie’s feet as he shuffles back to the corner office, and when I say shuffle, I really mean it - he pushes his feet along the floor, trying not to lift them up, making long, snake-like tracks through the bits of oil and dust. He smiles to himself, thinking of that, thinking of that tabby old woman who works in reception and who is always going on about this and that and something and another, and thinking of her coming in all busily and smart first thing in the morning, popping her lips and blinking her eyes and then stopping dead in her tracks when she sees those two giant anaconda tracks slithering across the floor and ending right up under her desk. Good thing he primed the pump on that one, telling her this story he saw on the news about all these hundreds of snakes that had gotten away in a flood in China, hundreds of them spilling into the town. He imagines that slim connection will be enough, that and that intermittent air hose that gives and occasional pop and hiss.

Les was tired. Not the didn’t get enough sleep kind of tired, although a strong scent of that followed him around, had followed him around, for what seemed like ages. He always felt that, while he wasn’t running for his life exactly, it did sometimes seem like his life was running from him. Circumstances had conspired, and movement, physical and emotional, was the underlying throughline. Looking back, he is not quite sure who is the driving and who is the driver.

Fate, luck, happenstance, reams of pool ball trick shots that led from one thing to another. Sometimes it seemed as if he barely had a chance to breathe and stretch before the next siren song played - a sad rollicking blear of a sound, tuned specifically for him. His life wears a pair of cursed red shoes - dancing, forever dancing, and he bends.

Bends, never far enough to break, but also unsure if the swim of the churn is in his own best interests. It’s hard to know how to live out a life. He shuts the door between the office and the garage bay. As he turns the hose to high and steps into the pool of light in the middle of the dark floor, he takes a deep breath. He thinks he’ll start a new water poem all about snakes and tabby ladies and wheels with eyes, whipped to a frenzy and for just a moment and for once again embraces the possibility that Les is in fact More.