Old Man and Hat
He wears a hatman’s hat, broad brimmed, felt brown and quail with feathers. He has on a haberdasher’s jacket, brownish gray with widespread lapels and a two-rose buttonhole. He rides a bicycle without a horn, flagon or bell. His trousers, brownish brown, are cinched round his ankles with tape; the cuffs tucked into his galoshes with object care. The man in the hatman’s hat eats sparingly, generally boiled dog meat with asparagus and potatoes, boiled with the skins left on. He prefers his meats and vegetables boiled, as they retain less of their flavor, dog meat, as one might imagine, having a too strong domestic taste, which is reduced from excessive boiling and mincing. Mincing, as opposed to dicing or cubing, being the preparation of choice, at least for the man in the hatman’s hat, as his knowledge of culinary technique is middling to nil.
He is neither a religious man nor an agnostic, or for that matter an atheist or a true believer, as he finds anything organized unwholesome and troubling. He has a penchant for small dogs, cur and dioxins being more to his liking. Yes, he eats sparingly but with great relish and clacking of teeth, which have been abraded to stumps and gate stiles, leaving a horrid aftertaste at the back of his throat. His esophagus is striated with dog and asparagus, both of which, due to improper cooking, he finds troubling to swallow. He eviscerates the dogs, which he catches behind the viaduct behind the Sears store, with a lancet he borrowed from an acquaintance with whom he is no longer acquainted.
He hangs the meat to dry, or cure, as he sees curing as a more efficient manner of dressing dog, behind the viaduct behind the Sears, where he has constructed a lean-to out of scrap linoleum and castoff two by fours left behind once the Sears was built. Beneath the man’s hat he has a whorl of hair, crenellate and tufted in cornrow rows, a row or two which have been spiffed with Brill Cream to effect an authoritarian look, which it does not, though no harm can be attributed to trying. He likes his hat, and wears it when eating, even when the heat is inhospitable and his hatband gets soaked through to the felt with perspiration and Brill Cream. He is extremely short, dwarfish, barely the size of a nursling or a small domesticated lapdog. He likes tightrope walking, and sees it as a sort of unofficial avocation, one which he would like, time permitting, to parlay into full-time employment. He reads nothing but atlases and Popular Mechanics, sometimes a book on soccer foot positioning, to help in his own foot positioning for the purposes of tightrope walking.
My grandfather wore a hat, though had neither interest in nor dexterity for tightrope walking. He took snapshots of family gatherings and building sites, both of which he found unendingly fascinating. He preferred the fedora, the bowler when he was of the mood, to the simple hat or cap. His tertiary interest was in painting, with oils and acrylics, which he applied to enamel boards and stretched canvasses, many of which hang on the walls of my flat. He was a short man, but by no means dwarfish or nursling. The hat, or hats, he wore, covered the bald spot on the crown of his head, where faint wisps of gray hair grew in defiance of capillary baldness. My grandmother, to the best of my recollection, never wore a hat, preferring the luster and thickness of an unadorned head of womanly hair. Yes, she did once don a sunbonnet while boating with my grandfather on a pristine, bottomless lake in the Eastern Townships, but more as a favor to my grandfather, who feared she would swoon and subsequently faint from heat prostration. They had a dog, Simon, which they took care of for my uncle, an English teacher with an ex-wife who he fondly referred to as the cunt. She drove a Volvo sports car, a graduation gift from her wealthy parents, both of who drove standard Volvo sedans.
Yes, the man in the hat, lest we go off on a tangent, which, as you know, can be most difficult to return from. Did I mention, I fear not, that the man in the hat is clubfooted, dragging his clubbed limb behind him, which causes him a great deal of discomfort and no little humiliation? One acquaintance, with whom he is no longer acquainted, referred to his foot as a cudgel, and offered to shellac it with a badger’s hair brush that he kept in a scabbard on a belt which encircled his trousers. I doubt he would have shellacked the man in the hat’s foot, though stranger things have been propositioned, one might suggest. This man, the one-time acquaintance of the man in the hat, rode a bicycle with a flagon attached to the handlebars with a scotching of tape, from which he sipped Whisky through a straw. He also, this man, wore a hat, though one that was in no way a cover up for balding, as he had a full, healthy head of hair, tresses of which dangled from beneath the brim of his hat. He was not, to the best of my recollection, of the Jewish faith, though one could, I suppose, draw such a conclusion. He neither owned nor ate dog, but saw no reason why someone, should they be so inclined, should be persuaded not to do so if they found it a sumptuous delicacy. Meat is meat, he contended, regardless of its begetter or ancestry. The man in the hat, however, has some moral restraint, and will not eat a dog that is smaller than a cat. Having eaten a cat, which he mistook for a small dog, he considers the experience a most troubling one, one that he has never quite forgotten, much as he has tried.
In history, yes history, there have been many a great man who was a tightrope walker, many of whom fell to their deaths as a result of their avocation. I have neither the time nor patience to recollect who they were, but suffice it to say, and I give you my word, there were many. His choice, the man in the hat’s choice, to take up the avocation of tightrope walker came about as the fulfillment of a childhood wish. He wished he could, so he did, fulfilling a wish that had dogged him since boyhood. One might conjecture, should one be so disposed, that there is a connection between tightrope walking and the eviscerating, boiling and eating of dogs, even if this connect, at first glance, seems improbable. I assure you I am not making this up, but simply recollecting for someone who prefers to remain anonymous.
Long ago, when the man in the hat was younger, a boy, he was prescribed a therapy of drugs to curb his appetite for running round aimlessly in circles. He did so, darting in and out and around objects, many of which we put in his way to prevent him from whetting his appetite for running in circles, his tongue slapping the side of is face, his eyes tightly closed. He claimed that running in circles made him feel at ease, lessening the horrible anxiety that he was prone to and experienced without end day in and day out. His parents, under the doctor’s supervision, decided that wearing a hat (not a straw cowboy hat with a drawstring around the chin, or a sharp sounding whistle, but a man’s hat) might stop their son from his frenzied running in circles. Thus began the man in the hat’s disposition for wearing a hat, long after his running in circles had stopped. It might be suggested, perhaps, that there is a connection to be drawn between wearing a hat, one inappropriate for a young boy, and the eating of dog meat in later life. I see no reason why this might not be the case, given the vagaries of life and the backwardness of psychiatry and insipidly bad parenting. A gestalt of images, some half, others mixed together to form a montage of likeness and facsimiles of likeness’, combined to confuse and addle the child in the hat. A partnership between a child’s building blocks and a shaman’s trickery, a slight of hand done in the open. The man in the hat, seeing no viable way out of the dupery at hand, simply gave into the therapy, learning in the process to disassociate reality from thought, sophistry from authenticity, sorcery from truthfulness. In this manner eating dog seemed neither extraordinary nor immoral, nor, for that matter, unseemly or horrifying. Meat is meat, after all, regardless of ancestry or breeding. Self-reflection, he was told, is the hallmark of humans, what differentiates a thinking thing from a reactive or non-self-conscious thing. A dog, for example, doesn’t reflect on what it is about to devour, but simply gnaws it into bite size smithereens. Eating a dog, then, is nothing more than a natural reaction to hunger, and one’s self-consciousness of that hunger. Broiled, spitted, slow-cooked over an open fire, skewered, stir-fried or baked, it’s all the same, meat. Carnivore, omnivore, glutton or epicure, the end result is the same, satisfying the want for food.
Mt grandfather, who wore a hat, a fedora with a silk hatband, and my grandmother, who once wore a hat in a boat in deference to my grandfather’s pleading, liked roasts of beef, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and white bread, to sop up the gravy and bits with. My grandmother, who had no great like of cooking, preferring stitching and rug hooking, boiled everything in the same pot, meat, vegetables, spices and dumplings. To the best of my recollection, they never once ate dog, even though they had one around and at hand. Their son, my uncle, referred to is ex-wife as a dog, a cur with wide ankles and a barking cough that annoyed him to no end. The man in the hat, as is of his mien, would have eaten their dog, Simon, had the opportunity presented itself, standard poodles, in keeping with his moral approbation, being a tasty festive dinner. The standard poodle, he felt, was best prepared as a roast, with the appropriate vegetables as a side dish.
The man in the hat on the bus, which was how he referred to himself when he was out and about, seeing to errands or simply to test his patience and intolerance. The most common hat, he discovered, was the standard baseball cap in a variety of colours, some with tags on the headpiece, others with stitching, names and insignias that represented gods only know what. Many seeming to have no other purpose than to attracted attention to the wearer and their hat. Vagabonds, hobos, derelicts and the deranged, all seemed to find their way onto the same bus that he happened to be riding. An enormously fat woman with an proportionately fat toddler, her face a squab of veins and blotches, pressed into the seat next to him, her child screeching like a banshee. Or a bawdy woman with chicken scratches on her arms, nodding back and forth, her neck seemingly incapable of supporting the weight of her head. A fancy man with in a fancy hat, teeth the colour of corn, needling the bawdy woman with the screw of his elbow. A traffic jam of perambulators and baby carriages, old people shuffling behind walkers made from tube steel, leatherette and Velcro, tires splayed through to the rim. And all that hacking and coughing, and the odor of peppermints, clothes recently unpacked from mothballs, mildew, and the blight of necrotic flesh. He thought of them, all of them, as dogs, creatures lacking in self-consciousness and purpose. The unprincipled fat woman, even though the sight of her made him sick with dread, he would eat, boiling her with leeks and garlic, making sure to skim the oily fat from the top of the simmer. He imagined there were dogs that size, even though he had never seen one or known someone who had.
The bus was a phantasmagoria of delinquency, a steel sarcophagus stuffed to spilling with the odds and end of humanness. He, the man in the hat, felt there must be a hierarchy of humanness, one where the incurables were at the bottom rung, the ambulatory and half witted in the middle, and those on the verge of destitution somewhere near the top. There were days, too many to count, where he felt that he was somewhere in the middle, between the not quite incurable, those held in purgatory for no other reason than bad luck and beggary, and the ambulatory, just a hair below the destitute and downward spiraling. At times like these the craving to run in frenzied circles was like a hunger, a need to split the infinity of his being in the world of things. At times like these, the urgency to disassociate, to escape from it all, was impossible to censor from his thoughts, as disordered and random as they were. He would recall his grandfather’s fedora, his grandmother cowed in a sunbonnet, her eyes staring discerningly at the clear, blue water; and the smell of dog broiled over mesquite coals, the skin shriveled like curdled milk, a scratching at the back of his neck. A downward spiraling he was helpless to put a stop to, and even if he could, wouldn’t have known how to. Wretched bad luck, beggary, a busload of half-wits and incurables, and a sour burning sensation at the back of his throat that caused him no end of worry.
When it rained, which it did, almost habitually, the man in the hat would fasten a kerchief to his hat with safety pins and tape. Actually it wasn’t a kerchief, but a bathing cap; the sort used by old woman and small children, a precaution against earaches and pus boils. Gobbets of rain would bead on top of the protective cap, preventing his hat from getting watermarked and soggy. He noticed that the deranged and half-witted seldom wore hats or rain bonnets, and how they scuffled through the rain seemingly unaware, or caring less, that they were soaked through to the bone, hair matted like rug hemp. He neither felt sorry or pity for these poor creatures, but rather avoided them at all cost, sometimes parrying round them, or rerouting his trajectory to avoid contact with them. Rain was not God’s tears, as some suggested, but nature’s way of wearying the incurables from the face of the earth. His, the man in the hat’s rain slicker, was standard yellow with buttonhole clasps rather than snaps. When he was a boy he had a squall jacket, with cinch cord at the bottom to keep it from bluffing in strong gale force wind. He learned to sail, but sparingly. Like most things he did, or put his mind to, an economy of energy was the first principle, the one he expended the most energy on. For the boy in the hat, entropy was something to aspire to, a complete cessation of dynamic thought and action, an inertia of sorts. He willed very little, and those things he did with an eye to despotic inactivity. It rained for a year, perhaps more; clouds the colour of poached mutton tarnishing an otherwise blue-gray sky. But the man in the hat slogged on as if under a robin’s egg blue sky, his hat safeguarded beneath a nimbus of polymerized cowling. Never wearying, housed beneath a luminous aurora, his galoshes splitting infinity in two, he trudged on, his slicker cutting a V in the mutton gray sky.
He kept a scrapbook where he affixed pictures, odds and ends, of those things that he found intriguing. Pictures of safaris, which he found irresistible, Banyu trees slung with monkeys and red-faced gibbons, salt grass where lions and jackals skulked like devils, other men, like himself, in ox hats shouldering impossibly heavy rifles. As far as he knew these places didn’t exist, as he had no first-hand knowledge to verify their reality, no way of knowing if places other the one he inhabited existed at all. Yes its true, safaris and red-faced gibbons have very little of anything to do with the day to day drudgery of life, but the imagination does, and the man in the hat’s is exemplary. His capacity to disassociate from the moment, his inimitable endowment for finding unreason in reason, is without stead. He lives a life of absolute disinterest, an almost disinterest in his own disinterestedness, a disinterested disinterestedness, so to speak. He cares for little, not even his own upkeep, and would rather watch stragglers and knockabouts going about the routines of the day, than pay attention to his own interests. Finding his own meager existence not worth of the bother of mentioning, and when he does, in the third person particular, he sees no great need to make sense of the senselessness of his own existence, his ontological wherewithal, his disinterest in his own disinterestedness. For him, and perhaps those like him, though he has never met one, another like himself, life is one long arduous, time consuming translation from one language to the other, neither of which he has mastery of. Decoding codes, re-transcribing an enigmatic pandect of untranslatable nonsense, inane chitchat, blather. Language is a decoy for stupidity, an excuse for prosaic chatter, a waste of precious time, which, the man in the hat feels, we have so little of.
