Wackyland Is Where You Find It

Let me tell you about my desk chair, the one I have at home. n It's your basic, 80s-style desk chair, black, mildly padded, screwed into position atop a four-wheeled pedestal. It has no arms, which is good. I don't work well in a chair with arms, given the way I sit. n I've had it for a long time now, and it shows. The seat is covered with claw marks (from the cats) and stains from various past mishaps. It's always wobbling, too, the seat. So far as I can tell, it's currently held to the rest of the structure by a single screw. The others simply dropped out over time, and I'm not really sure where they ended up. Given that, sitting down in it has become a bit of a tricky business, but I've pretty much figured it out. So long as I do it in one fluid movement after planting a foot in the middle of the chair to stabilize it, everything's okay.

Also, given that the floor around my desk is not perfectly level, the chair tends to roll quite a bit while I'm sitting in it?usually away from the desk. It took me a while to figure out, but I found that if I locked myself in place by hitching one knee up under the top desk drawer, it usually takes care of things.

A lot of these problems, of course, could be quickly and simply alleviated if I simply sat in the damn thing like a normal person, eyes forward, feet planted firmly next to each other on the floor, but I just don't work that way. I work cross-legged, a habit I picked up Lord knows where. Long time ago, though. And so long as I can continue to cross my legs (can't say how long that'll be), that's the way I intend to continue working.

I still like it though, the chair. It's served me well over the years. I'm pretty sure it's the only chair I've ever used at that desk, and I've learned to treat it with respect and deference.

It was a late Saturday morning, and there was nothing different about it. It was the same as it ever was. I was sitting in front of the machine, cross-legged on the broken desk chair. My elderly beasts were around someplace, and I was at work.

I'd been sitting that way for about an hour, trying to get through the last few pages of something I'd been working on for far too long. It had been piecemeal work up to this point. I don't like to do things that way, but there I was, and I'd had no real choice in the matter. If all went according to plan, though, this would be it. A few more hours and I could shut that file down for good. It would be a tremendous relief.

Then, from out in the kitchen, I heard a familiar sound: the wet, hydraulic, hiccoughy, "n-gk...n-gk...n-gk..." of a large cat about to spew on the floor.

Well, Christ, I thought. He's been doing that too much lately.

Figuring I'd best at least see where he's spewing so I don't find out in the usual way (followed by the inevitable changing of the socks), I rolled back in the chair to peer into the kitchen to try to establish his coordinates. I'd see where he spewed now, and then later, when I took a break, I'd clean it up. It'd have cooled off by then, anyway.

But something went wrong. As I was both rolling away from the desk and leaning back in my seat, one of the shirts that was hanging limply off the back of the chair got snagged in a wheel. The rolling stopped abruptly. I could feel the center of gravity slip from beneath me as the chair toppled slowly backward past the point of no return. I heard a splash in the other room.

If I'd been sitting with my feet on the floor like a normal person, this wouldn't have happened. But I wasn't, and there wasn't a goddamn thing I could do.

I stayed in that position in fact?cross-legged?as I slipped from the upending chair until my spine crashed against the tile floor, forcing my legs to spring straight upward, toward the ceiling.

Jesus Christ.

I lowered my feet to the floor slowly and just lay there, next to the broken chair, for a bit. Apart from having had the wind knocked out of me and receiving a mighty blow to my already weak lower spine, I seemed to be intact. But it was kind of nice there on the floor. Cool and smooth.

I heard a familiar set of claws clicking toward me from the kitchen. Then a familiar round face was gazing down at me in confusion, his yellow eyes staring, his mismatched whiskers pointing this way and that. As I stared back up at him, he opened his mouth and a tiny sound emerged?a sound that seemed to say both, "Hey...wha'cha doin' down there on the floor, there, Jim?" and "Oh, by the way...I just puked in the kitchen."

He soon grew bored with the carnage spread out before him, and clicked around my supine head, then on into the other room.

I lay there for a while longer still before finally pulling my aching body off the floor. I grabbed some paper towels and mopped up the sputum, then swallowed a few aspirin, righted the chair and went back to work.

Early the next afternoon, Morgan came over and we stepped out for lunch. My back was still a little sore, and I figured the walk would do me good. We stopped by a local pizza parlor we'd never visited before, only to discover that the place was packed. That was unexpected. We also soon discovered, much to our initial shock and horror (well, Morgan seemed more "bemused" than shocked, though I was without question horrified) that we had walked smack-dab in the middle of a kid's birthday party. A big one. There must've been at least 15 kids there, more even, together with a few parents, gathered around a long, central table. They all wore party hats.

Well, we'd come this far.

We stopped by the bar first and had a beer before being led to our booth. That was a good idea, too, given that when we got there we discovered that our table (1) was positioned roughly three feet from the guest of honor, and (2) was already occupied by a small girl who was spread across one of the seats. Her mother carried her away quickly, but the child stared at us with hateful eyes for a long time afterward.

As we took our seats and I stared back at the little girl, Morgan pointed out that it wasn't the guest of honor we were dealing with, but rather guests, as they were fraternal twins. (It wasn't until several hours later, back at my place, that she also informed me that we were sitting right next to a small puddle of "pizza and orange juice" vomit. I was very glad she waited to tell me that.)

As around us children shrieked and gamboled, others fiddled with Flash and Green Lantern action figures (which, as Morgan noted, was an almost heartening thing to see) and still others played with cutlery, we settled in and ordered a pitcher.

"Twins are creepy."

On a small stage near the head of the table, a quiet jazz duo?guitar and violin?played standards. "Take the A Train" and the like. It seemed less than appropriate for a children's birthday party, but somehow, strangely, it made sense. Or would make sense, eventually.

Quite suddenly, it all seemed very odd and funny. The beers might've helped with that some. Despite the shrill noise and the confusion, our waitress through it all?a young bespectacled woman with a ponytail?remained chipper, which I found amazing.

Children ran to the front of the stage in small groups, some to dance in that jerky, still-figuring-out-how-their-bodies-work sort of way, others simply to stare at the two musicians. A cake arrived and people sang. One kid at the table had the good sense to holler out the "you live in the zoo" version.

On a far wall, an old sign read "Killer Beer." We ate our pizza and ordered another pitcher.

Halfway through that one, our waitress, unannounced, it seems, climbed up on the stage herself, grabbed a microphone and sang a lovely version of "Girl from Ipanema" in the original Portuguese (or whatever the hell it was), replete with hand gestures.

"She's not plain?she's beautiful!"

After she left the stage, another employee got up and sang another Jobim song in something that wasn't Portuguese.

It was all very strange, and we were hoping to ride the strangeness of the place out all afternoon. In time, though, the children?pukey and non-pukey, shrieky and non-shrieky alike?were herded together and marched out the front door. Tables were separated, party detritus cleared away. Not long thereafter, the musicians stopped playing and left the stage. It was fast becoming just another pizza parlor again.

It was probably for the best anyway. Another pitcher might've killed us. Finally we stood and made our slow way to the door, not quite fully understanding what it was we had just experienced. It was more than just a damned kid's party at a pizza parlor. Maybe the fact that it so closely resembled the few birthday parties I went to as a kid is what made it seem so odd. Maybe not.

For us, at least, it had been a crossing of wires, of lines of force, of universes, with results that didn't make much sense, but were still fascinating to watch. Kind of like Porky Pig tracking down the last of the Dodos.

The afternoon outside was a damp and mostly cloudy one. The Sunday streets were crowded with awful people. There was nothing new or funny or interesting about that, so we turned abruptly down a sidestreet, only then beginning to recognize how drunk we were.

Two boys, probably 10 or 11, one black, one white, were playing basketball in a school parking lot. As we walked past the chainlink fence that separated us, the black kid took the basketball and shoved it underneath his shirt. Then, in a high-pitched voice, he said to us, "You love me, don't you, Stanley?"