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ed for days? That his clothes are the same ones he's worn for more than a week? It doesn't matter. He's invisible to them as soon as they pass, taking any assumptions they might make with them. They might just mistake him for one of those hoity-toity college kids, one of those clean limbed and beaming have's who has happened to find himself caught out without his umbrella.
He makes a desultory attempt to straighten his shoulders, to lift his eyes from the buckled sidewalk. To look like he might have a purpose or a destination. It doesn't help. He has become the day. He has internalized the environment. He did that years ago, in fact.
That's all I can do.
Not his words, of course, but he understands them. He is intimately acquainted with his limitations.
His entire body is telling him about his limitations right now. His stomach roils on acid and nothing else. He doesn't remember the last time he ate, but if his guts have their way, he'll offer what little may be left to the street before long. He walks with his hands crammed deep into the pockets of his blue jeans. If he pulls them out, they'll only shake like the hands of one of those fucking retard kids Jerry Lewis was always putting on television. There's more. His aching head. His shoulders and elbows and his goddamned knees that all feel like the joints have been rapped with a hammer.
That commercial: this is your brain on drugs. Fuck. They should talk about your body on drugs. That would have been something like a deterrent.
He shuffles along in his tired clothing, with his greasy hair and his palsied hands and his plugged up ass. Oh, he hadn't mentioned that one in a while. Not just constipation, the doctors said, but chronic constipation, and for it they gave you these little brown butt nuggets. Suppositories. Shove this up your ass, they tell you. Shove this up your ass and in a couple of days, you'll be regular again.
How 'bout you shove it up your ass? That's what he wanted to say, always wanted