Drinking Days

Margolis was a drunk with skin like leather and a couch that was also made from leather. If an ant was crawling across Margolis' hand, and then it crossed the border onto the couch, it probably wouldn't know the difference. That's the point about Margolis here.

True, the couch didn't have hairs, which to an ant would appear like trees or giant erect fire hoses, but unless the ant was really paying attention he would probably miss this detail. He might just think he had come out of the woods and entered a wide, open prairie of leather.

Who's to say what an ant thinks, anyway? How could an ant even know what a forest or a prairie was, really? It's very unlikely he'd have the vision to see the big picture like that. To him, the forest would be like a universe anyway, and which of us knows whether our universe is a forest universe or a prairie universe? We can't tell, we're too small. Maybe all those stars form into something once you get far enough away, but to us they're just a bunch of random dots in the sky, like a Lite-Brite decorated by the world's biggest retard.

Margolis saw the world's biggest retard once. In Topeka, Kansas. Personally, he didn't think the retard was all that big, but the man there said it was a reference to his level of retardation, not physical size. Which sounded like a cop-out to Margolis. He'd known retards who could take that vegetable easy.

"Green beans are probably the easiest vegetable," Margolis thought sometimes. Pretty hard to mess those up. "If they ever had a run-off contest for which was the easiest vegetable to prepare, I'm giving great odds that green beans would finish in the money."

But green beans or no, this chapter is really about Margolis, the guy with the ant crawling across his hand. You ever wonder what an ant's thinking when it's walking across your hand? Is he daydreaming tiny dreams, or is he on the lookout to make sure he doesn't step in a puddle of skin oil or a pile of fly shit?

"Jesus, you think we really have tiny fly shits all over our skin?" Margolis thought. "I'd better not have fly shit on my hands, I just touched my eyeball."

"I'm not entirely convinced ants know what leather is, either," also thought Margolis. Sure, one might crawl up a cow's leg on a dare or something, but that's hardly leather. No more than running your hand across some ore out of the ground tells you anything about steel. Margolis thought steel was made from ore, something like that. Some kind of rock thing that gets melted.

"Seems like they should have thought of that a long time ago, instead of messing around with shitty metals like iron and tin for so long."

But Margolis couldn't vouch for what's really in steel; there could be alien spunk or something mixed in to give it integrity, something they didn't have back in olden times. Margolis wasn't really certain what makes steel so special.

Anyway, there's just one point this chapter is trying to put across.

Margolis: drunk.

Got that? Okay, now we're ready for Chapter Two.


For more of this great story, buy Eddie Smurphy's
Drinking Days

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