prompt: rich, title: stunted growth in misc. flash fiction

I worry I’m nothing but a totem-pole of affectations, standing atop each other, in a trench-coat. Human-shaped at distance, but the closer you get, the more obvious it is I’m just an exaggeration homunculus. A weird contra-positive of Forrest Gump, bumping up against history but too clever for my own good, always bouncing away from significance. Not that I’ll confabulate from whole cloth, I’m a terrible out-and-out liar, but I elide, omit, reflexively exaggerate, deemphasize, draw connections that aren’t there as if my life depends upon it. In terms of self-image, maybe it does.

I’ll say things like “I’ve drank coffee since I was five, that’s what stunted my growth” while I loom over the room at six-and-a-half feet tall. It’s true Dad started giving me coffee on weekends at five, because I wanted to have what he was having, but the rest is just a sick need to always be on, walking a line between people-pleasing obsequiousness and class clowning. Or someone asks for a light and I quip “I don’t smoke” then after a long pause “tobacco”, to insinuate any number of things for a laugh and a sense of mystery. God as my witness, I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, just to be able to make the joke. I guess that saved me from one addiction, anyway. “My brother did smoke as a teenager, that’s why he’s only six-three, it’s proof coffee doesn’t do it but tobacco does” I conclude, just to wrap it all in some absurd bow. All things true but out-of-order, straining to be clever, fighting to get folks comfortable, trying to not feel like a fraud.

“I’ve never wed but I’ve married two women” I throw in, the automatic scripts almost riddles at that point, explaining I’d officiated a lesbian wedding. All of these things are true but twisted, all these affected gags I spit like an apartment-sized 1959 IBM mainframe vomits punch-cards, all just trying to be interesting.

“Being rich, being famous too young,” I’ll say about my time as a gofer into the film business, “they’ll ruin you, that’s why I’m hanging on into middle-ages before I succeed, it will ruin me less, no one ever talks shit about Grandma Moses.” That one really cuts to the quick and I say it at least twice a week. My doubts shambolically peeking through the curtain to remind you how hollow I find my own stupid patter. Twisting the truths of ruination-through-success into a self-deprecating pie in the face. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down my pants.

Every day, I wake up and I put my totem pole of bullshit up to the mirror and hope that I can see the wise-and-clever man, the welcoming good friend I want to be. It’s entirely possible along the line I became that guy through repetition but can only see myself through my own past’s image. Maybe it’s come time to wash the mirror. I wonder how one does that.