Current Stories

I Miss Methuselah

Article by Morgan O'Neal

I sorely miss Methuselah, all almost ten centuries of him; sliced precise crosswise at his midsection you can stand on the edge and count the rings of a stump so deeply sunk into its own wisdom, so firm imbedded in the gauze of the good earth’s worms, so as to be up-rooted by neither man and pick and shovel nor man and mechanical contraption but only by resort to subterranean explosion. The memorial brass plaque, rectangular as a coffin, dedicated to the late and the great with his faithful mutt, will read for those whose lazy eyes could at all be bothered as follows: “A Thousand Year Old Walker of the Crooked Paths & Beloved Lawgiver to the League of the Despised, Now Gone to see a Dog about a Man, Methuselah, in Well Deserved and Dreamless Sleep, Here Lies.”

I have a big old soft spot in my heart I wear on my sleeve for Methuselah, right below and to the left of the small hole in it with which I was brought into the world by botched Caesarian somewhere in Saskatchewan, all of which I’m sure Methuselah was aware, for the two of us had grown some close over the last few years, if not sitting opposite each other over ashtrays in the Savoy, then sitting side by side on this bench in this park just as I am at present alone, and at very near the time on any given day when if he were still around we would have met to shoot the shit. I can hear the broken creak of Douglas Fur one-by-four under me as he takes his seat. I wait in a silence of squawking gulls for him to clear his throat. I feel the intense heat and taste the stale smoky nuisance, the nuance of nine centuries and a bit of it, I suppose, if he started in his early teens; and I would know only three things, in particular, anywhere: the smell of the singe of a beard, the sign of a cigarette burn, and the sound of the clatter and rattle of bones.

If only he could have sucked it up one more time, he might have stuck it out for another thirty one, which added to the rumored nine hundred and sixty-nine makes a nice round number near enough to rough out a millennium, give or take a month or two, a fine full-figured Roman numeral that should make him almost a sure shoe-in for a real honest to goodness funeral. As it stands, now, wherever Methuselah may lie, for some reason he must have just made up his mind to go out again; and so he picked up a plastic glass and a green blown bottle the size of a Methuselah and he packed it in, one by one, and when that was done he got another one and so on and so on until the Total Eclipse of the Sun at Hysterical High Noon. I think I know why he did too, but that’s between him and I and nothing to do with you. And all the skewed brass numbers on all the warped and wrong hung doors on one side or other of all the long lonely half-lit hallways in all the rotten rat-infested rooming houses and wet brain dry drunk derelict holes called hotels where he had tried to live or merely to survive, the numbers on doors on the other sides of which he politely hung his heavy many-colored coat and Cowboy hat or Caterpillar cap on the one brass hook before hefting himself horizontal onto the bug-ridden single bed and drifting off to the tortured ticking of a cheap Chinese clock eternally winding down the world fully-clothed, those numbers in the bitter take-out sweet and sour end add up a lot believe it or not to exactly nine hundred and sixty nine, give or take the size of a bottle of wine and the kindergarten arithmetic of a Lost Last Will and Old Old Testament. I must miss the aroma of him, the Grizzly Bear of the Underwear, the Fly Swarm of the Under Arm, the Pound for Pound of the Underground, the Grudging Portion of Bare Nutrition given him by the Gospel Mission, the Speed Stick of the Calvin Klein given him by the Sally Ann, and the flat of foam in a Common Room offered by the sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Doom. Methuselah I mean, I mean the frankincense and myrrh, the chaos and the crises, the ancient herbs and spices that rise in measured doses from the pig upon a stick above an open fire in a pit of scavenged brick.

The last time I saw him I thought his furrowed face was looking younger, less wrinkled and sprinkled with the dust of days in the street below the field of his hair half-stuffed thickening gray beneath the toque with the Maple Leaf, the beer bulbous nose and lupus lips behind the bird’s nest in the berry bush beard and moustache, a junk store of a face forced to get used to turning itself away from the rest of the human race unless an honest greeting grew enough on him to call to mind an earlier time before he’d given up his membership in the private club of the known world. I know what killed him; it was the swell of his swollen heart that grew so sore the junkie inventory in that store became too much to stay encased and burst within his sunken chest, collapsed upon the Drum roll and the riled up bellows of his lungs; like the proverbial glass half empty and half full they rose and fell and took their Navy Rum Neat and nicotine tar toll with each excruciating breath they blew him like a whore or like the wind forward or backward to his oaken aged and awkward death. For whom the smoke ring signals sadness in the common rooms of madness that are the final shelters and psychoses of the homeless; for whom the posters on the walls of all the Residential Schools inform the graduating classes that their teachers were no more than pedophiles and fools; for whom the sirens of the cop car, the fire truck, and paramedic ambulance and the fire engine mean another day of classes are beginning at the College of Hard Knocks established in a tent hay wired between a Hard Place and the Rocks. And the Scissors and the Paper have a suicidal purpose for a sharp thing does the damage and the paper posts the notice that this person thus reduced to a state of inhumanity must live like a pig and die like a dog and give his own matted tail a feeble little wag while his only friend in the whole wide world an abused and orphaned three-legged mutt looks up into his eyes with hangdogs of his own and watches him prepare his fix with a needle and a spoon and on the heels of other souls disappeared into the fog, prepares to lay him down a pallet and disposes of his final rig.