The Blind Man

and the Newspaper Machine
by Richard Martin

On the 49th day, I woke to the hawk glare of the sun. I crawled from the bag and meandered the platform without aim or purpose. I updated the blackboard, but had I missed a day? Was it 48? Was it 50? I stared at the city as if at an immense blinding TV screen. Exhausted from sleep, unable to focus, I achieved, like a horse, a standing slumber, eyes open and unseeing.

An angry violent banging below brought me to. I looked over the banister upon a red-faced man in dark glasses pounding his fist on a newspaper machine in front of Cool Hand Laundry. He might as well have been pounding directly on my cotton-filled head. “Hey!” I called, jarred by own bark. “Buddy! Knock it off!” The man looked around. “Up here,” I said. “How’s about vandalizing something a little farther away?”

The fellow held up a red-and-white cane and swept it back and forth in the air in my direction. “What say little who?”

“Oh,” I said. “Never mind.”

“Who oh mind?” He probed the air with his stick like a feeler. Besides the dark glasses and the sunburn, he wore a tan leisure suit, plaid golf cap, and plastic yellow gloves. “Where’s you voice?”

“Forget it.”

His stick hit the pole and he stopped.

“I’m on top of the pole.”

“Tota?”

“What?”

“Tota pole?”

“No. Look, resume your criminal activity, Sir.”

“What you doing up for? Lineman man?”

Despite the fact my life was a casserole of incomprehensible misery, I had to chuckle at this pathetic idiot. “Well, to paraphrase what Thoreau said to Emerson,” I said, not for the idiot’s sake but that of a teenager in saddle shoes slowing as she passed, “‘What are you doing there down?’”

“Tony Anderson?” said the fool.

The girl stopped, then a gay couple holding hands, then other varieties of folks. Before I knew it, I was the focus of a little impromptu mob interview.

“What are you doing up there?” Saddle Shoes asked.

“I just ask him it,” the blind man said.

“What’d he say?”

The blind man shrugged. “Tony Anderson.”

“Oh!” one of the gays said. “You’re Joe something, the one who’s camping on the flagpole!”

“Sitting,” I said.

“You can’t stand?”

I had no energy to holler. I remembered the bullhorn Clover had sent up. “Wait a minute!” I found it, unused, still in the box, popped the trapdoor in the middle of the platform, sat in the rectangular space, my legs dangling, and tried it out: “Yeah, I can stand. I can stand on my head if I want. It’s called ‘sitting.’ Flagpole-sitting. Can you all hear me?” The gathering—a dozen strong now and growing—gave enthusiastic affirmatives.

“How long you been up there?” said a kid with a goatee.

“Forty-nine days.”

“How long you gonna stay?”

“Four hundred and forty-five days.” The amiable little mob gasped innocently. What a tonic! A minute ago I’d been a zombie blinking at an alien sun, and here I was now kicking my bare feet and shooting the breeze with folks who were as good as long-lost friends—better, for I owed them nothing. To hell with despair and bankruptcy. To hell with Clover’s machinations. And to hell with getting down! “That’s the world record,” I said.

“Guinness?” somebody asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. “Got a Coors?” The assemblage’s laughter cleared my chakras like a half-hour of meditation. I felt made for this. It was working wonders. The bullhorn gave me sensations of power and certainty, as if dispensing thunderbolts from Mt. Olympus.

“You were on TV,” a grandma said proudly.

“Briefly,” I said.

“What do you do when it rains?”

“Get wet,” I said. My people laughed, sweet as pie.

“What’ll you do if there’s an earthquake?”

“Hold on!” I said. And again they laughed. I could do no wrong. They were giddy children chatting with Santy Claus on top of the chimney. I thought of calling Clover to come join the fun, then remembered she was the basic cause of the desolation the Q&A was bringing me out of. She was probably in the café right then eavesdropping, figuring how to put the jimmy on it.

“You got a TV?” asked a scroungy teenager on a skateboard.

“Nope.” How liberating it was that I had not gotten around to having Clover send one up. “The pole life is the pure life.”

“Radio?”

I thought about lying, but a lie about the radio would have tarnished my joy about having no TV. “Little one. I don’t listen much.”

“You got bored up it?” the blind man piped. “No, Sir.”

“What you do do up it?” the fool asked. My crowd and I tittered at his “do do.”

“Think. Read. Meditate. Write. Lots to do. Exercise. Watch the world. Be.”

“Any plans to write a book about it?” from some businessfellow.

“Could be.”

“Why you up it?” asked the blind man.

The crowd moaned. “People asked him that three times already,” somebody said.

“You up it protest peace in earth?” the blind man said. “Food for starve?”

“Guinness Book of Records,” said someone.

“Stupid,” the blind man said.

“Shut up,” Saddle Shoes said.

He poked her in the butt with his stick.

“Hey!” she said. “Watch where you’re waving that around, Dorknuts!”

“How do you get your food?” a voice asked.

“My wife and son send up a basket via rope.”

“Wife son slave, you sunbath,” he said.

“Not at all,” I said. “My wife and son are very independent and have their own lives. They support me 100%, but I would never take advantage of that.”

He snorted. “How you bathroom go?”

“I don’t think people want to know that, Sir.”

“How you bathroom go?” he repeated.

I waited for the mob to shout the idiot down, but it waited, apparently curious itself. “I use a chemical toilet, like the astronauts.”

“You stink? How you wash?”

“I lick myself clean like a cat.” My crowd howled. “I wash all right, Sir. And if I do stink a little, I don’t get many complaints up here.”

“You lonely up it that?” the blind man said.

“Sometimes. Who isn’t? Let’s let somebody else ask a question now.”

“Why you hate poor blind man me?” “I don’t hate you, Champ. I don’t even know you. I’m just sitting up here minding my own business, and you’re a complete stranger who came bumbling along.”

“Know Camus?” the blind man said.

Had I heard right? “Camus, did you say?”

“Albert Camus,” the blind man said, pronouncing the name perfectly à la Française. The blind sunburned idiot was French. That explained it all. “Tota pole man know Camus?”

“Of course I know Albert Camus. I teach literature, when I’m not sitting.”

“Stranger?”

“His novel? What about it?”

The mob grew restless at our digression.

“You know happen man on beach? Minding business, then snip, snap, snop.”

“What’s your point, Jacques?”

“Point stranger pick you off.”

Sweat broke on my scrotum.

“Shut up, stupid,” somebody said. Others gave grunts of censure.

“What you do for sexual up?” the blind one asked, not missing a beat.

“I’ll tell you this, Pierre,” I said, “nobody wants to know what you do for sexual down!”

The crowd exploded.

“You mastrabate?” the blind man said.

“Shut up, pervert,” somebody said.

“There’s women and children here, you French degenerate,” I said.

“You desert family for sunbath and mastrabate!” the blind man barked, with a headthrust which caused his dark glassses to bob off his eyes—gray eyes which I saw see me and which saw me seeing back. It was none other than Blake, the bastard whose record I was up to break.

“It’s him!” I shouted. “Pull that guy’s hat off! I know who that is! Grab his sunglasses! He’s no blind man! That’s Shipwreck Blake! Grab him!”

The mob instinctively drew away from the shady character, who began bowing as he backed down the sidewalk, waving his stick in the air, a potential weapon now.

“Don’t let him get away!” I bullhorned. “Grab that son-of-a-bitch!” The blind man tossed his stick in the air and dashed up the café driveway and down the alley. The throng watched meekly. “Go get him!” I squealed.

The mob dispersed as if the Q&A had been hard labor and the 5 o’clock siren had sounded. In thirty seconds I was alone again. I closed the trapdoor, put the bullhorn away, made myself some toast, got in the sleeping bag and plopped the pillow over my head against the sun that stood up there like a million waiters in white.