bio

Sam Hurwitt has newspaper ink in his blood and extraordinary powers under the U.S. Constitution. He is light and airy with delicate fruit flavors and goes well with pasta and veal.

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sam's 21st century resume

Jonah 2:5

Thales said the world is water, and I believe it. I can feel it pressing down on my shoulders and stinging in my eyes. When I inhale, the air is thick with water vapor. And I'm drinking it, I'm drinking it down deep in my lungs where it nestles in pockets like red-hot dewdrops. My sweat is pouring out of me as if some little god inside turned on a faucet wedged in my spine. Three fifths of my body is water, and I can feel it all welling up in briny slime on my skin until the warm river washes it away. Out with the bad water, in with the good.

It has become my custom to shower every morning. Lora's habit, really, not mine. I've always hated showers. I used to be able to go a couple of days without bathing, and no one seemed to mind. I'd just wash my pits and run out the door. Lora changed all that. If I did that now, my arms would feel as if they'd been dipped in wax. I wouldn't be able to tell the bristles on my brush from the ones on my head. I've got to get clean. But I wish to God I didn't have to bathe.

I don't like bathwater heat. It's not the honest stinging heat of morning tea or the quick, pounding heat of an open fire. It's a subtle, insidious heat that sings madrigals to you as it sucks your life out through your pores. I don't like the way the stream makes me feel, as dense as a water balloon, like Godzilla being pelted by tiny bullets. And I don't like the fear. I don't want to slip and break my neck or go blind when the shampoo gets in my eyes. I figure it's only a matter of time before something awful happens to me in the shower.

From the shower stall I can see the open attic door, and I'm afraid of that too. It's just beyond the reach of any ladder that could fit through the bathroom door, so we've never seen the attic. But I suspect a Martian lives up there, and my housemates seem to have become its lovers. I knew all three of them before we got the place, and they were all fairly rational. But now they've changed. One of them brought four goldfish home to be our pets. Now I ask you, what kind of goddamned pod-person pet is a goldfish? Might as well get a banana slug -- it's got the same personality, and you don't have to listen to the tank bubbling all night. I picked a big ugly orange and white one with fin rot. My fish-buying housemate wants to flush it down the toilet because it ate her goldfish. She should have expected that when she named her fish Schopenhauer. Mine's named Mothra. It's a question of role models, basically. But all my housemates have become strange to me. They shower with a macabre spore thing that looks like a macramé brick with potato-eye tendrils reaching out. I wouldn't want that thing touching me, but I guess the Martian demands a particular kind of hygiene from its lovers. I know Lora does.

It's over. The shower, I mean. The relationship, too, but I'm not thinking about that. You must understand that I don't care about the strange silence, the three eggs instead of five, my unbalanced weight in the bed. What matters is that I can see now. There's no one standing in front of me.

In Japan, crises are simple. Giant monsters with names like French artists -- Rodan, creature from the outer deep, or Go-gan, friend of Rodan -- terrorize the city, and Godzilla rises from his nap on the ocean floor to restore the status quo. he slams the foreign invaders through a couple of buildings and then returns to the water. It's like King Arthur in a green rubber suit, only with more frequency and three billion dollars more in property damages.

Here, it's not so simple. We have Elvis, Jesus, Disney, L. Ron Hubbard, but we don't know when they'll come back. It may be when we need them least. Meanwhile, we have to deal with our own problems as best we can.

I have the light turned up all the way. The dimmer was a compromise. My housemates don't like any bright lights. I suppose their alien lover has sensitive eyes. I can't stand poorly lit bathrooms. They make the mirror useless. You can't see what you've got caught in your eye in manufactured twilight. Lora's bathroom was always poorly lit. She was probably fucking the Martian too.

I don't know why I told her that I drank blood. It was New Year's and I was at a house that had shaped me, so any newcomers had to conform to my chosen reality. And I do like the taste of blood. I had just never opened someone up to get it.

Later that night she asked me if I had any razor-sharp knives around. I was glad I didn't. But we did it anyway: Lora found a razor blade and she cut me too deep on my thumb. I still have a scar. It wouldn't stop bleeding. She was drunk when she did it. It just kept coming and coming and it was so thick, and I don't remember cutting her. But we opened each other up and drank the thick salty choking red stuff. We smeared it all over each other, ruining my best blue sheets, and we tore into each other like wolves until all we were was a scarred and rutting mass. I hated it. It hurt. And I kept thinking of that line from Macbeth: "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."

My clock radio is blaring. The snooze time always runs out while I'm in the shower. I suppose it would be the doorbell if I lived in a friendlier neighborhood. If Lora were here, she'd glare at me. She has a problem with sounds. The neighbor's dogs used to keep her up at night, and she made me promise that if I ever got her pregnant I'd kill them.

All my piles of paper get speckled with water as I run to turn the radio off. It's playing a particularly pretentious Sisters of Mercy song. Lora and I liked the same music -- death rock, old blues tunes, old-school rap, punk, Irish folk songs, and loud, oppressive classical music. At first she didn't believe that we had as much in common as we did. I did. I had faith from the start. I held her head when she convulsed on the carpet, and I knew I was really in love for the first time in my life. She played me a tape of her first aura reading, and I showed her the book my father drew for me when I was six. She cried when the balloon I had given her slipped from my fingers while she tied her shoes. She had to see my failure as a betrayal. She had been raped twice. Never fool yourself into thinking that pain is useful. Pain's just there. And after ten months I'm not there. Neither of us had seen that coming. Deep down, we both assumed that everything would be all right.

I told you I'm not thinking about that. It's true. That kind of story demands a moral, and I don't have one handy. I must have left it in my other pants. Were I to fictionalize my life, I'd make it a Russian novel, only without all the sermons. Here's a helpful hint. When you read a Russian novel and the anguished moralizing becomes too cumbersome, scribble "Insert Godzilla" in the margin. The inner turmoil of any petty government functionary would be put into perspective instantly by a rampaging sixty-foot reptile. There are no theses in life, only examples. And my failed love life is the furthest thing from my mind. That's not why I want to get clean.

I don't want to tell you this.

I had a burrito last night. I had to go across town to get it, because there are no restaurants in my neighborhood. I wanted a burrito, and I wanted it with black beans, not pinto. And I wanted avocado. They call it guacamole, but I couldn't taste anything but avocado in it. I wonder at what stage an avocado becomes guacamole.

When I was four, my family was split along very specific lines. My mother and my sister were fond of avocado, and my father and I preferred papaya. I'm not sure why those two fruits are connected, except that you cut them in half and remove the center before you eat them. I later grew to appreciate avocado, but it was too late. My parents had long since split up, and my sister and I followed suit. I like every fruit now, except pears.

It was late when I came home. The BART station was closing, and I had to leave through the back door. I don't know if you noticed how cold it was last night. I've always loved the crisp taste of winter air, but last night I couldn't taste it at all. It just made my tongue feel clammy.

A woman rose out of the bushes, pulling her shirt down to cover herself. I didn't know why she had her shirt up, or why she was lying down in the bushes. I didn't want to know. She was very large and very dark, and she was staggering toward me, telling me not to run. I wasn't running, I told her, not exactly. But I stopped walking and stood there, exactly like Tokyo waiting for giant rubber monsters. She was large. Her face was masculine and streaked with dirt and tear tracks. Little beads of perspiration dotted her forehead like shimmery zits, and her breath stank of wine. The rest of her smelled bad too, of sweat and smoke and unwholesome things, but it was a fresh kind of bad. It wasn't the twelve-day-old bad of the man who knocks on our door looking for old bottles. She had started the day clean.

"Please. I need three forty-four to buy canned milk for my baby. He's three months old. He's home right now with my thirteen-year-old. I'm real sorry to bother you, but I need the money."

"I can't. I'm sorry."

"Please. I swear I just need it for my baby. I'm drunk. Damn right I'm drunk. But I'm not going to buy any more. Just some milk for my baby."

"I really can't afford it. I'm not doing so hot myself."

"I need the money. Please. I don't want to have to shoot you. I've got a little gun, but I don't want to use it. I just want to feed my baby. Please."

I don't know if she had a gun or not. It didn't look like it, but she was fat enough that I couldn't really see the other side of her. I looked in my wallet. There was only a ten, a one, and some coupons. I gave her the ten.

"Thank you," she said, and she started to cry. "I'm sorry. I just need the money. I asked some of my so-called friends, but they wouldn't give me no money for milk. Why can't black people stick together? They paid to get me drunk, but they wouldn't buy no milk for my baby. Why aren't they good? Why aren't they good like you? Let me suck your dick."

"No."

"I'm sorry. Why do people have to act like that? And they say they're my friends. I can't take all this money from you. I just need three forty-four for the milk. I swear that's all I'm buying. Walk with me. Walk with me to the store, and I'll give you your change back. "

"I really should be getting home."

"Walk with me."

I walked with her for a while. Her name is Mandy. She graduated from Fremont High School at seventeen, and had her first child eight months later. She started using and dealing then too, but she says that's over. You've got to be clean or Jesus won't take you, she says. Her mother died when she was in high school, leaving her a house. Welfare covered the rest, except when she was drinking. She has five children.

"There's Andre. He's thirteen years old. And Nicole, she's eight. Natalie's two. And Leroy. No, wait -- I forgot about Victor. he's five. And Leroy's only three months old. Pierre's thirteen, Victor's five.... Hold on a minute."

"It's all right. You don't have to..."

"They're my children. We've had forty-two presidents, there are fifty states in the union, there were twelve apostles, and have five children. I know who they are. Andre's thirteen, Nicole's eight. Victor's..."

"Five."

"Five. I got to start over. Andre's thirteen..."

"Thirteen. Nicole's..."

"Eight."

"Then Victor."

"Victor's five."

"Natalie..."

"She's two."

"Natalie's two. And?"

"And Leroy..."

"Three months old."

We never made it to the store. The nearest one was closed, and I wasn't going to go any farther. We talked for about an hour. Then I told her I needed to go home. She started to cry again. I gave her a hug. I usually don't notice it, but when I'm hugging someone, I make a little sound, halfway between humming and growling. Because that's all I have, really. Because I have damn little to give in this world, and all I see is need. But for a moment there is hug -- and all I am is this giving.

"Ooo," she said, "take me home and fuck me or I'm gonna shoot you."

"No."

"You have a girlfriend?"

Yes, I said, I do.