Stella McCartney Got Crusty Feet

Forget 9/11. It’s fashion week in New York. Which means the main public library on 42^nd and 5^th, where I need to do some research, is closed. A skinny blond gets out of a limo and is hounded by photographers. Instead of walking past them, she preens, on the arm of a guy with grey hair and a goatee. I may be spotted in the photographs with a shaggy beard and blue yoga mat.

“Who’s that?” I ask a plump black woman aiming her cell phone for a shot.

“Stella McCartney,” she says.

“You see how skinny her legs are?” I ask, looking at calves the size of wrists. I hold up my pinky, the Argentine symbol for thin.

“Yeah, and I saw how crusty her feet are,” she says. “You see how crusty her feet are?”

“No,” I say.

“They crusty. I gotta get a shot of them.” She runs up behind Stella and snaps a shot of her crusty heels. She shows me the picture.

“You’re gonna have to blow that up a bit; I can’t see,” I say.

“Yeah, maybe when I get home I can do it on the computer. I didn’t know all the stalkarazzi was going to be here. I told them to get a shot of her crusty feet, and one of them did. But I don’t know if he’ll do anything with it.”

Comestibles

Is there any nutritional value in human hair? I was gnawing on my beard this morning and pleased at how much came off in my mouth.

I was looking for a book in the stacks of my college library when a girl I didn't know came up to me and said with an admiring gaze, "Is it true you eat scabs?" I wasn't sure how this had spread, or why this might be considered a cool thing. "Yeah, I like scabs," I said. I don't know if we spoke another word, but I think she was rolling out for me the red carpet of the Gothic set.

I think it was in Yugoslavia when I heard something moving underneath my train seat. Out crawled a short Englishman named Moon. He said he'd been living in a cave on a Greek isle. He had run out of water and survived by drinking his own piss. "It's not as bad as you might think," he said. "I also rub semen into my skin for the zinc." He read the palm of the coal miner beside me and said he would die soon. The man nodded and ran his finger across his neck, as if to say he already knew. Whenever the ticket taker could be heard shuffling up the aisle, Moon would either crawl back below the seats or climb up on the luggage rack behind the suitcases. When he left, the tone in his voice was the sincerest thing I'd ever heard: "All the best in life."

It occurred to me today that these arm hairs are the same ones that have always been there. The same ones that James Holmes stroked once in Mr. Wallis's 7th-grade science class. "Damn," he said, "you got more hair on your arms than I got on my legs!"

Neither of us ever listened to Mr. Wallis. Once I was staring out the window when apparently Mr. Wallis had asked me a question. Will Nelson said, "Space cadet blast off, peeeerrrwww!" James also had more important things to think about than proving our hypotheses. One day I noticed him twirling a metal bolt on his finger. "What's that for?" I asked.

"It's for Nick," he said. After school he planned to kick the ass of Nick, a big white boy-man who didn't even go to school but could always be seen lingering in front of the steps at Leland Junior High. Though he had no hair on his legs, James was already six feet tall. Him against Nick the racist would be an epic battle. But like most legends it never happened. I would have heard. Like I heard about Rommel breaking that guy's nose and knocking out his two front teeth with one punch.