I guess I should be thankful the vagrants, beggars, and crazies waited to accost me en masse until my mother and my aunt left town. Because I'm convinced it's more or less just me they're after. They seem organized. Like they have a strategy for me. There are days I do everything I can to avoid them, and like a troop of zombies from a George Romero B-movie, which is about what they look like, they just. Keep. Coming.

Last wednesday was weird anyway. I went out to get a sandwich around ten a.m., and sat in Davis Square to eat it and read an article in the new New Yorker about itching. Guaranteed to make you scratch. I mean, it opens with the story of M., who could not stop scratching. She scratched her head till her hair fell out, then just kept on scratching...

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

ZOMG! Can you BELIEVE that shit? That's something your mom would tell you to keep you from scratching. "STOP SCRATCHING! You'll scratch your BRAINS out!" That's like an urban legend. But in The New Yorker? I mean, shouldn't it be Weekly World News? Regardless, now it's all I can do to keep from scratching.

And as I was sitting, reading and scratching, I kind of was looking around and noticing that the only people sitting around in the square were old men and vagrants. And me.

My future awaits.

A particularly belligerent one I'd seen before, with a beet-red face, lurched up and sat at a table a ways away. There was another old guy there and they seemed to know each other, but the other got up and left with a third guy (probably to go hang out at Starbucks, which has become Davis Square's new Someday-Lite), leaving the belligerent one alone.

Even though I was halfway across the square I was hiding behind my magazine, knowing that if he happened to whip around in my direction he would make a beeline for me. Why? I already told you. Because they're after me. Why are they after me? I must have been scratching. Zombies eat brains.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

So when the other dudes left the especially scary one alone he stood up, started waving his arms and cursing and carrying on. Of course. I mean, what else would he do at ten in the morning on a Wednesday? I'm sure it's on his Blackberry. "10 a.m.: Go to Davis Square, wave arms, curse, carry on."

I peeped up over my magazine, even as that little voice inside screamed "don't do it!" (sometimes I wonder which is worse: zombies or Little Voice...) I didn't think he had seen me, but knew it was probably time to quietly make my exit. Problem was he was in the direction of home. I thought, OK, no sweat. I'll fake him out.

I got up and started walking, real leisurely-like, in the opposite direction. Clever, aren't I? I haven't survived years of Davis Square zombie attacks with my brains more or less intact for no reason. Just at the last moment I whipped around to make my dash through the square and across the street.

And THERE HE WAS. Right up in my grill. But I busted an emboite, followed by a double-jete-plie-plie and a pas de chat with a port de Bras to distract him, and then a triple-headstand-piroutte, and leapt to safety before he could sink his teeth into me.

It's not good enough to just have a strategy, as I have discovered. You have to have style.


After that close-call I hopped on the T. I had bought a 7-day pass for my mom's visit, and had decided to go ahead and use it to get to work, since it was threatening rain. I like using the T fairly infrequently, because when you only ride it occasionally you see things you'd tune out if you were commuting that way every day.

The T was not crowded, and there was a very tall, clean cut, handsome young man who looked like he had just fallen to earth or popped from a giant bean pod or was just released on his own recognizance from Clones-R-Us. I mean, I could see him naked and all slathered in ectoplasm like Jalil Lespert in Oedipe - [N+1].

I noticed him immediately, because he was so exotic — tall and sleek, in shorts with legs that just. would. not. stop. The eyes of a foreigner: a little more alert to his surroundings, but above them, and a little suspicious of those around him, wary of catching something from them. Radiating nervous energy at a very low frequency. Aside from zombies, Davis Square is full of high frequency types: squeakers, bleepers, and buzzers: people with tight little auras moving very quickly and purposefully amongst each other without their auras ever touching. And if they do, that's when the bells and buzzers go off.

So this sprawl of his was especially exotic. I could feel his presence, a kind of low purr you feel as the slightest tickle in your extremities, from the top of the stairs. But most exciting of all: when he finally came into view, he was devouring a sandwich with the poised and tensed muscles of a panther ripping its prey limb from limb. I don't know what was in that sandwich, but the way his mandibles were working on it, the masseter muscles bulging and churning, you'd think it was honey-glazed gazelle on rye.

It was all I could do to move along, the action was so riveting. The train came in short order, and luckily he got in my car and sat across from me, looking even more foreign and formidable than he did on the platform. Like a panther in a subway car. Alert but detached. I had an urge to ask him a question just to hear his voice — I was sure he'd have an exotic accent. But what if he didn't? My day would be ruined. So I kept quiet.

He placed his knapsack on the seat next to him, and started foraging in it. Remember Milla Jovovich as The Supreme Being, Leeloo, in The Fifth Element? How voracious she is right after they make her? She eats those two whole chickens? That's what this guy was like. It was the bottomless knapsack. He had about a fifteen course meal in there. He'd finish one course and dip in and pull out another. And those muscular mandibles just masticating away. I was transfixed.

Usually, as you may know, my rule is nothing goes in or comes out of one's person on the T. Nothing. We have all seen egregious violations of this rule, I'm sure. Enough of them and you don't want to make any exceptions to it, ever. But then you see this sort of thing — a creature of such exquisite beauty and fierce intensity — and it's riveting to watch him feed. And you have to admit — blast it! — there really is an exception to every rule.

Some people, even when eating in our species' designated feeding areas, are vile, their gestures furtive, greedy, mean — something profane, if not downright pornographic in the way they stuff it all inside themselves. It is not as easy to be beautiful when eating as you might imagine. All it takes is an errant piece of lettuce stuck to a tooth to make a total fool of you. But muscular mandibles are definitely a start.

Here is a factual inventory of goods the stranger on the train devoured in the mere two stops from Davis to Harvard:

1 whole sandwich
several cherries (spitting the pips into his palm)
1 banana
1 medium-sized thigh of an emu (I'm guessing)
1 protein bar
1 nectarine
1 hog
1 ziplock baggie of granola
several seedless grapes
2 baby alligators
1 apple
1 chocolate-covered warbler

He just kept diving back into his knapsack and coming up with little treasures. He would study them momentarily, see if they twitched, and then just obliterate them with those superhuman mandibles. It was brutal, but beautiful. Is there a word: brutalful? There should be. There must be. There is now.


That was my only brief respite from the zombies Wednesday. I got off at Park, and they were amassed there around the Monument to The Great Pigeon Shitting Catastophe of 1744. Sometimes you can slip through without incident, especially this time of year, with all the tourists about. I got all the way to Boylston before being spotted.

This time it was two belligerents. A big fat black guy with Ginsberg glasses and a burly beard who looked like a giant beetle, and his unlikely sidekick, a beet-faced Irishman three sheets to the wind by the looks of him. They were holding each other up, staggering in my general direction, and Ginsberg was looking around for victims.

I had to think fast. Once you're in their orbit, guys like this are like black holes. You can't ignore them. They suck you right in. I could dash across the street, but I hate dashing about on other people's account. I could use another pedestrian to block, but there weren't any suitable ones around. I could take my cell phone out and pretend to be too enthralled in a conversation to pay them any mind. It's funny how even hardcore indigents still respect your space when you're on the phone.

But then I realized I already had the solution. In my very hands. All you need, as Jack Handy once put it, is two sacks. In my case, I was carrying my customary canvas pannier (please don't call it a "fag bag") and my Hello Kitty mini book-bag backpack. (It was a gift.) Hey! It ain't perfect, but it'll do!

As I approached I slipped my backpack off, so that I was holding it in my left hand and my pannier in my right. I was ready for Ginsberg when he pounced. But I have to say I was impressed with his agility as he leapt into my path. I almost wanted to give him a buck just for busting a move.

Instead, there was a moment of tension, as he breathed hard in my face from the exertion. Before he could propose whatever it was he had so urgently intercepted me to propose I decided to launch a preemptive apology.

"Sorry, dude," I said.

"Sorry???" he roared. "Sorry for WHAT???"

"Sorry, I can't help you. My hands are full."

I held up my two bags and shrugged.

"Maybe next time!" I told him, giving him one of those little apology-smiles (sad from the eyes up, happy from the mouth down, no teeth, no lips) over my shoulder as I walked away.

Works every time.

Now, that's what brains are for.