HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [9]
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.