Pipe Cleaners are People Too
By Benjamin Bond


It is dawn, or at the very least it is dawn-ish. The sky is streaked with purple and grey and orange and unhappy businessmen with rumpled ties are slithering to the bus stop across the street. They all have matching briefcases and they stand in a perfectly choreographed line with their matching briefcases for a full half-hour as they determinedly avoid eye contact with everyone save perhaps their silver-banded Swiss watches and the laminated bus route. Every day I watch my little men stand there, poised like a row of Christmas trees beneath the axe, and every day I wish that they would do something to break the spine-tingling monotony. More than anything else I wish they would burst out in song. The sort of thing you never see outside of old musicals and coffee commercials. Something big and grand and dramatic. Like “Carry On My Wayward Son” or “Heat of the Moment.” I’d give my left foot to see them do “The Safety Dance,” and I haven’t been able to stomach that little number since my last high school reunion (a long story involving multiple rejections and, if memory serves, somebody—likely me—eventually vomiting on my shoes). I wish they would burst out in song. But they never do. They weave inside the Greyhound’s tangled web of gum, rebar, and mysterious paper bags. They pause momentarily. Rearrange their papers. Ruffle their newspapers. Adjust their ties. Remember what variety of paper towel is to be obediently fetched after work (“The brown ones with the little triangle, hun. We’re trying to be eco-friendly, remember?”). And then they are gone, with nothing but footprints and cigarette butts and fourteen seconds of stale, warm air to indicate that they had ever lived. If I ruled the universe, there’d be a lot more singing.

At this point I usually get out of bed.

This story isn’t about much, so if you’re expecting me to lay my heart on the line it’s about time you wandered my streets and looked into the eyes of the people you find there. Real people. Real people never emotionally spill their guts. You can beg and beg and explain how your hope for humanity is wrapped around the base of their uvula and they’ll just walk on by. And when they seem like they’re doing it they’re usually just going through the stereotypical motions. “No! Really! I do feel that way! I just… I just wasn’t sure you felt that way about me too!” Four failed relationships, a bachelor’s degree in the solitary consumption of alcohol, and the most mundane apartment in the world has taught me that for most people most of the time most things are mostly not good. Where was I?

This story is about a book. The book is called Anno’s Faces and it is a picture book. It is sitting in a pile of childhood memories which is sitting in a cardboard box which is sitting outside and slightly to the left of my front door. By the end of the day it will have gotten me robbed, kissed, drenched, and score me a conversation with someone who might possibly be God. But I don’t know any of that yet. I’m inside, writhing like an earthworm orgasm as I try to remove a mauve cardigan from my otherwise naked body. Usually I don’t wear cardigans to bed, but at some point last night I happened to be cold and the dresser happened to be closer than my extra blanket. Look. I’ve ripped the stupid thing from my shoulders and hurled it vehemently at the wall. It lies crinkled and crying in the corner, the inevitable result of its budding romance with my torso crashing to an end. It was bound to happen. They just weren’t right for each other. I’m obviously more of a “salmon” than a mauve. I am walking into the bathroom, I am turning on the shower, and I am realizing that for the twentieth Thursday in a row I don’t even have the energy to masturbate. Now that we know where this train is going, I trust you’re still going to stick along for the ride? Good. Let’s see what I’m doing now.

My shower is a relic of the Soviet Union. It is small, uncomfortable, and provides only a wide, low-hanging toadstool shelf for shampoos, conditioners, bars of soap, and bottles of body wash to be stacked side by side. Little businessmen with their little matching briefcases. Like anchovies. Or Soviets. Since this is my morning shower and I am far too tired to bother with any of my beautifying agents, I knock them to the floor and take a seat. My elbows are pressed into my knees and my head is resting against the frosted glass. Water curtains down over my eyebrows and my thoughts dwindle away. I am a warm, wet, and unconscious ball of a person. Every morning, before I head out for the day, I spend forty-five minutes pretending to be a fetus. And I’m damn proud of it.

I wake up once the water turns cold. My drains clog on a regular basis, regurgitating dirty water from any numerous apartment neighbors up into my little cleansing cubicle, and after forty-five minutes I am calf-deep in filth. Shampoo bottles bob up and down above the few feet of contaminated water, desperately clinging to the soap scum on the walls to avoid capsizing. I say something obscene to myself and struggle to my feet, brushing through clouds of hair—the vast majority of which is of unknown origin. If I have to die in this ratty apartment, I hope at the very least God will finish me off in some sort of elaborate murder. I want to see the face of the CSI agent who has to run my bathroom for DNA. They’ll probably decide that I’m some sort of weird serial killer and that this is the holding cell where I keep my victims. A dirty shower. Ingenious.

I force the door open and water cascades out across my bathroom, instantly drenching the tiny shag square I purchased three days ago at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and seeping under the door into the hallway. There are very few colors of tacky that go well with dirty bath water, and aqua-chartreuse (which by itself is a somewhat bizarre conjuration) is evidently not one of them. This time I am somewhat less eloquent.

“Fuck! God fucking dammit! Motherfucking fuck!”

I rip several towels from the wall and dump them on the ground, trying in vain to mop up some of the lagoon. Usually I get out before the water level gets that fucking high. The translucent remnants still pooled deep within the shower is decreasing slowly, forced through my swollen drain, and it’s leaving behind a gruesome treasure trove. Blond hair. Red hair. Blue hair. Brown hair. Back hair. Nose hair. Chunks of soap from brands I’ve never seen. Hair ties. Once I found a wedding ring. No kidding. Some poor sap was showering with their ring on and it slipped down the drain and into my life. Another time I found a penny. Once a condom. Another time a miniature set of tweezers. A soggy page from a book or magazine. You never know what people are going to take into the shower with them, and what’s therefore going to climb grotesque and soggy out of mine.

I push the door open and look down. My pink hallway carpeting is tainted by a shimmering pool of water radiating from the bathroom, and I look up toward my bedroom as I hunt for towels not already drafted for the fight. Suddenly, I realize that something is wrong. It’s like how if you were sitting in your living room and filling out your taxes and a bomb went off in the house across the street. For a few seconds you wouldn’t be able to do anything but stare. Because your mind was so preoccupied by something so totally unrelated that the sneaky conversion throws you into total mental disarray. Your mind isn’t ready to handle the shock.

Therefore, it isn’t until a few wasted half-seconds later that I notice a young thuggish kid standing square in the center of my room and clutching my miniature television to his chest. The outer door is open, and before I can entirely comprehend what has occurred he bolts through the portal, chipping the TV on the doorframe as he makes his subtle getaway. I say:

“Fuck!”

And I scamper, towel hanging from my waist, down the hall into my room. The turn, most unfortunately, is not made with the sort of grace befitting this situation. I catch my right foot in the rebellious cardigan, fly past my open door, and topple to the ground. I get up, now completely naked and at risk for a spinal cord fracture, and take off sprinting into the hall.

I don’t live in the classiest complex around, and although it’s still early, the halls are bustling with crying babies and lord knows what else. A quiet girl I once convinced to follow me home after a date remarked that “it smelled like crime.” And apparently that wasn’t a turn-on. Regardless, the building’s expectations are curious enough that a naked man bolting toward the stairwell and releasing a seemingly endless chain of creative insults has very little impact. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen already. By the sound of it the man I caught in the act of stealing my life (or at least the most prized possession left in it) is descending the stairwell. It isn’t until I hit the basement that I realize that my Thursday-morning thief got off at some prior floor and that I have a better shot of finding a few thousand dollars in my shower tomorrow than of ever seeing my hunky Panasonic again. To make matters worse, as I trudge solemnly back to my hovel I pass an extremely attractive Latino woman, who covers her surprise—in that way that only attractive girls seem able to convincingly pull off—with a smirk and a giggle. She presses herself against the wall and allows me to storm on by. I am an enraged fetus.

Sitting outside of my room and slightly to the left is a large box. I wonder fleetingly if the rapscallion who invaded my apartment merely wanted to take away my old TV and bring me a new one. But, alas, the box is stamped from my mother. The last thing that my mother sent me is lying victoriously by the bed inside, having succeeded in infiltrating my apartment, breaking my back, and allowing my primary source of entertainment to escape down the stairwell. I take the cardboard cube inside, throw it on the bed, and rip the top off with a pair of scissors. That’s what I’d do to that kid’s neck if I ever saw him again. I look down. The box is filled to the brim with pipe cleaners. They are red, white, blue, green, yellow, black, and a hundred different colors for which I hardly had names for anymore. They fill the box down to the bottom layer, which as I tunnel through, realize contains merely a book. I pull it out. It is purple and white and it is called Anno’s Faces and from the cover a large pumpkin is smiling back at me. It is quite obviously a children’s book. And this, to say the least, is curious.

The book is filled with large colorful pictures of fruit and vegetables. Artichokes. Pineapples. Cucumbers. Apples. Pears. Grapes. And tucked within the front cover are two plastic faces. One happy. One sad. These little see-through emotions are attached to little see-through wands. There appears to be only one possible use for them. It is both as self-explanatory and as bewildering as sending somebody a pack of darts and a “Famous Men of Peace throughout History” wall-calendar. Do I really seem like the sort of guy who would enjoy pegging Ghandi or Nelson Mandela in the face? I slide the unhappy face across the two-dimensional artichoke and smile. Artichokes always seemed like an unhappy vegetable to me. To slide the happy face over it would just seem cruel. Mocking, you know? Why hide your inner feelings from the world, Mr. Artichoke? We like you just the way you are. Well… I don’t. But you are frequently re-stocked at the supermarket, so somebody must.

And that’s it.

What I said earlier... about the kiss and about talking to God and all that nonsense? That didn’t really happen. Hell, picture it if you want to. I take my book and walk to the coffee shop. As I do so, I realize that if I hold up the plastic faces I can change the world around me to match the emotions pictured. Lights dim, clouds form, and people turn away when I hold the transparent frown over their foreheads. And women smile, tax is accidentally not included, and the sun glows when I hold up the smile. I make the men with the matching briefcases do a complex sing-and-dance routine to “Don’t Stop Believing,” I make the gorgeous Latino woman fall in love with me (we have sex on the table where my TV used to be), and I get my thousand dollars bubbling out from the drain. I have the power to change the mood of the world, and I use it every damn chance I get. Until, one day, a man comes up to me and warns me against using my powers too frequently. I disregard him and fall asleep with Anno’s Faces tucked under my arm. Magical children’s books are all the rage. Suddenly, with a bolt of lightning, I wake up in an endless white-paneled room. The man who attempted to warn me is there, he reveals himself as God, and gives me a lecture about using my own humanity to change the world. And when I wake up again in my own bed, book now left neglected in my closet, I wear a smile and change the mood of the world with my own two hands. Or my own face. With my head. With my heart. With something or other. The kitsch little details can be figured out later. Because magic be damned, when it comes down to it, it’s people that change their lot in life and people that decide their own fate. And that’s the valuable lesson. I play God, I talk to God, I have sex on a shabby table, and I learn the magic of optimism. The End.

But it didn’t happen that way. Not by a long shot. I wrote my name with pipe cleaners, got bored, took a shit, threw on my jacket, and headed out for coffee. The book had put a quirky bounce in my step (as do most very strange things, as a matter of fact), and I figured I’d phone the police when I got back. About the T.V. and all. On my way down the stairwell I run into the Latino woman again. She grins.

“I see you found your clothes.”

I wrap my arm around her and push her abruptly towards me, kissing her deeply as I roll my hand across her back. I release and continue walking silently down the stairwell. She is stunned and hovering on the landing, likely questioning whether or not she had made some sort of gross communication error. Even pretty girls don’t have the answer to everything.

The sun is high in the sky and the day is crisp. I order a shot of espresso and walk across the street to head back up to my apartment. A man is waiting at the bus stop. I tell him the bus won’t come for another two hours. He believes me. As he turns I recognize the back of his head. Well, not the head exactly. But I swear I’d seen that hair plastered on the floor of my shower. Sort of a brown-ish hue. Short. Thick. Speckled with pepper grey.

“You live around here?”

“Yeah,” he says, and points up at my complex. It’s even uglier from the outside. It looks like a monolith. An evil, ugly monolith.

“Fourth floor,” he says. “My car stalled and I don’t know shit about the bus.”

I grin.

Maybe tomorrow they’ll sing for me. There’s a certain freedom about having hit the bottom of the barrel, you know? But I got my kiss, and when I get home I’ll decorate my apartment top-to-bottom with pipe cleaners. Because inanimate objects have personalities too. We just can’t see them until we hold up their faces. And maybe if I’m good and optimistic... well maybe tomorrow they’ll sing. Maybe tomorrow they’ll dance. My life is not especially exciting, but I’ll be fucked if I won’t make something out of every last minute of it. From now on. Hell, lacking television this is the only alternative to soaking up my spare time other than suicide or a hefty sleeping pill addiction. And they’ll sing for me, all right. Even if they only sing in my mind. I reach into my pocket and pull out the smiley card.

“I thought I’d left you in the room...”

I smile up at the sun and quite literally, for the first Thursday in six weeks, the sun smiles back at me.

Benjamin Bond is a resident of Lincoln, Nebraska preparing to enter the University of Chicago as an undergraduate.  He has never been published anywhere before and so all this is rather exciting.  He would love to hear from anybody who read his story, and can be contacted regularly at Ben.D.Bond@gmail.com.

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