Randy Coleman

The year was 1962, the place was Schenectady.  I’d been working in pest control by day and shacking up with an alcoholic dancer named Pauline by night.  In my pocket I carried a tiny notebook in which I placed a tally mark each time she didn’t respond to something I said. 

I was on my second notebook by the time I got assigned to the Coleman place.  Vince, my dispatcher, told me to bring four tanks of imiprothrin, a pair of galoshes, and a cyanide capsule, just in case.  Randy lived over on the eastern edge of the city, in a rathole flat above a 24-hour pawn shop called Make Or Break’s.  I meant to knock twice, but he swung open the door after only one. 

In those days Randy looked nothing like he does today.  His most notable characteristics were his dreaming, unassuming eyes and his painfully twisted back – a deformity attributed to a childhood bout with scoliosis, which would be suddenly and miraculously healed years later following a mushroom trip in the Himalayas. 

He was cleanshaven, which I found odd, considering the bohemian trappings of his apartment.  On an easel in the corner rested a canvas draped with a cloth, in which holes had been cut such that only very small portions of the painting underneath were visible at any given time.  Candle butts were melted into the ceiling and the walls.  In the kitchen I found a hifi stereo with an axe through it. 

After a cursory inspection of the apartment turned up no infestation, I asked Randy for more details as to the specific nature and location of his pests.  A rambling, near-incoherent monologue-cum-rant followed, by the end of which I was forced to conclude that the creatures plaguing this man were in reality the hallucinatory manifestations of the dozens of pieces of music gestating in his mind at the moment.  I sat on a wooden milk crate while he described them to me, his eyes tracking them around the room: a bat-winged myna bird screeching from atop the doorjamb, a blue cat with six legs scurrying under the armoire. 

It was hours before I left, retracing my steps through the snowy streets, lugging the imiprothrin back to the pest control offices.  Stray dogs padded past without looking at me, yellow in the sodium lamps.  When I arrived home, dawn was melting over the horizon and Pauline was gone.  She’d taken my wallet and my record collection. 

Walker Evans is a writer of trivia questions, an unemployable musician, and a librarian-in-training.  His default state is one of astonishment.  His work has dared to show its face in past issues of AlienQ, Enchiridion, and the Plum Creek Review.