Charlie

I know what detasseling corn is (Super Crue motha fuckers). Once when I was a kid, I had an earache so bad that I bled from the ear. In 1985, when my grampa was helping my dad hoe the garden in the front forty, a guy on a bike came hauling ass down the hill on the oil and gravel road. he was completely naked with a mess of wild matted hair and almost gave my grampa a heart attack. He was my neighbor, a nudist that lived far back in the woods in a lean-to dug into the earth they called "the Cave." I live with a cat named Turbo that will claw the shit out you on a whim. We got him high on catnip for the first time last night and he just hid under the bed. One of my favorite places in the world is on a tube in an ice-cold river south of Austin, Tejas. I used to collect arrowheads as a kid and still have them. I am a copywriter at an advertising agency and I spend too much time at work. I bought a quilt at a garage sale in the Marina the other day. It's lime green and orange and purple and in general hideously awesome. The sale consisted of all the belongings of a woman who had been hit by a bus and was killed a few weeks before. The family was raising money for her funeral expenses. In Brazil, they have worms that live in the sand that will burrow in your feet if you're not careful. They call them 'foot monsters' and they leave tracings on the hard sand that look like aerial photographs of a city with all the streets and whatnot. I have been ordering Thai food from the same restaurant since I moved to SF. It's not that it's particularly good, it's just that their pad thai has a taste that I will forever associate with good pad thai because it was the first pad thai that I ever had. The delivery driver I call “My Thai Guy” told me he had to move back to Thailand because he finished school. I asked him if he was excited and he said he wasn't because he loved America and would stay if his visa hadn't expired. It was heartfelt. And it was strange because although he had delivered food to me at three different apartments I'm certain more than a hundred times over the course of a few years, we had up until then never had a conversation beyond the hello, here's your receipt exchange. My father wanted to name me Zeno Mott after my great grandfather and my great uncle, respectively. Zeno's favorite food was pig’s ear sandwiches. My grandfather had gone to ask Zeno for permission to marry my grandmother at Zeno's local bar where he always hung out. Zeno made him eat a pig's ear sandwich with him before he said yes. Grandpa claims the pig's ear was as tough as leather and still had little downy hairs on it. I've never eaten a whole banana and probably never will. I have had the following pets: a king snake, three dogs, four cats, a ferret, box and paint turtles, a ferret, many finches, a pigeon, anoles, a hissing cockroach, a hermit crab, guinea pigs, a gerbil, tree frogs, random fish, an alligator snapper and a small deaf mute named Kiki.