Mr. Schmidt, in profile

So there was Mr. Schmidt. Kind old Mr Schmidt, who gave the children chocolates and regailed them with fairy tunes and tales of simple wonder, much to their mothers' dismay. He was harmless though. He was just Mr. Schmidt from down the street, Mr. Schmidt with the newspapered flesh that curled in great leather waves at the corner of his eyes when he smiled--which was frequent but just as frequently for politeness sake only, or to give the impression he was kind or friendly or unpretentious, that he was approachable. It was rarely because he felt moved by happiness, by joy, it was rarely because he was so full of life that it poured from him and he was completely unable to stop it from showing to the wide dangerous world outside the boundaries of his bodies. He preferred to protect himself.

See, Mr. Schmidt ... well, I knew just what kind of man he was. He was the kind of man who minded his own business. He just grew up and he grew gray, hair expanding as it withered and belly contracting and as it overflowed, mind slowing like a train, like a lonely horse or a broken automobile or a smashed and milky living room in the bad part of town, open for all the passerby to see and jeer at. Mr. Schmidt, he didn't ask no questions and he didn't ever seek no answers either. He had no great loves and he had no great heartbreaks. He had never really felt life, never touched it with a pickled tongue or never tasted it with cobbled fingers. He had never peeled back the rind to sink incisors into dusty pulp and never been intoxicated by the curve of a sigh or the slope of a breast, never seen the brilliant black light come pouring out of another's eyes as they shed their skin for a nickel or three and drank the city rain pouring off the night's river for him, just for him, and his lonely pulsing heart. He had certainly never smelt the juice that flowed from a candlewax cracked taboo, or felt the wind screaming triumph into his ears as the Gloria Saw lay waste to an evening sky so high overhead it made you dizzy in the twilight.

No, he had never stumbled home mumbling and ranting, raving and panting, dreaming the dream of an infuriated ocean as the morning cracked with tears in its eyes. No, he had never climbed the trunks of the ramrod redwoods in the steam-filled North to see life from another angle, to see life as it was seen from the upper-reaches. He had never seen that sea of branches that lay at the top just waiting, just silent and hoping and just waiting there, waiting to be discovered by him if he'd just bothered to look up every once in a while. A whole new world that was just holding its breath for him, a whole new world filled with all the dreaming creatures he had once invented as a child lost in a thought, creatures that had never ever seen the ground once in their life, in fact never knew that there was a ground at all, that such a thing was possible because the sea of branches at the pillar of heaven was all they had ever known from dusk till death for all of their days just as the dust of the ground was all he had ever known for all of his.

No he had never seen that sea of branches, Mr. Schimdt, he had never even seen the real sea because there simply was no sea for him to see. He knew not what lay beyond the end of the horizon and had little desire to ever find out, that was for others to see and others to map, others to breath and others to tap. He had never seen a moon or a sun or a lake or a star, never felt another's breath on the clearcut crystal nape of a neck. He had never sung the song of the September swans as the sunlight poured from his mouth in joy, in pure scalding joy that wept and burned so bright as it came flooding out, not in politeness, not in approachability but in a billion brilliant dazzling colors that were rude and offensive, drunk and life-loving and oh so very loud.

That was Mr. Schmidt, in profile. All he had wanted was a small life and that was all he ever got. And sometimes, just sometimes when the sky was sour and the milk was red, and a lover's whispers spoke of nothing but treebird bloodlust and shallow brilliance ...well, sometimes I knew just how he felt.