{"id":2003,"date":"2010-08-01T00:02:28","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T05:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"\/nashvillereview\/?p=2003"},"modified":"2015-03-14T09:25:42","modified_gmt":"2015-03-14T15:25:42","slug":"the-figures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/2003","title":{"rendered":"THE FIGURES"},"content":{"rendered":"

For three years I\u2019d been holed up in a downtown warehouse working on THE FIGURES.\u00a0 Every night I fell asleep believing I\u2019d affixed my last towel rod or casaba melon, but every morning I rose to find THE FIGURES somehow incomplete.\u00a0 My only companion was a retired circus chimp named Claude, rescued from a petting zoo on a rare day I\u2019d ventured beyond the city.\u00a0 He ate nothing but Korn Nuts and lay on the couch watching infomercials: spiritual energy bracelets, food dehydrators, exercise machines run on rubber bands.\u00a0 Sometimes he threw feces out the window, and I think now the most incredible thing about that time was how Claude threw feces out the window\u2014hitting passersby\u2014but no one complained.\u00a0 It confirmed the cultural malaise, the reason I had undertaken THE FIGURES initially.\u00a0 On Thursdays, we played contract bridge with Girts and Olgerts, the warehouse owners.\u00a0 A pair of Latvian refugees who once worked for the KGB to conceal their forbidden relationship, they used the warehouse to store cases of liquor stolen from the airlines.\u00a0 Whenever we played bridge, we drank vodka from tiny bottles liberated from their supply.\u00a0 They played a mean bridge game, aided by Claude\u2019s overbidding.\u00a0 Sometimes the conversation turned philosophical.\u00a0 Slightly drunk, they\u2019d consider THE FIGURES.\u00a0 \u201cThis one looks like a constipated tax man drowned in his bathtub,\u201d Girts would say.\u00a0 \u201cThat one looks like a dowdy schoolteacher unzipping her chest,\u201d Olgerts would reply.\u00a0 \u201cMore pathos,\u201d Girts would advise.\u00a0 \u201cMore golfballs,\u201d Olgerts would insist.\u00a0 When they questioned my inspiration, I said only that THE FIGURES had occurred to me one morning before I left for my former job as a commodities broker.\u00a0 I showed them my wife\u2019s letter, sent the previous year, saying, \u201cFor the sake of getting on with things, I\u2019ll presume you\u2019re dead.\u201d\u00a0 I asked if they regretted stealing the liquor, and Girts said they were hurting fewer people now than when they were \u201claw-abiding\u201d citizens.\u00a0 He made the quotation marks with two fingers on either hand.\u00a0 \u201cWhat makes you angry?\u201d Olgerts continued, and I said it was the public radio announcer who gave the story behind every jazz composition rather than letting the music speak for itself.\u00a0 To this day, I don\u2019t know why they rented me the warehouse space.\u00a0 I wish they could have been there to see THE FIGURES unveiled\u2014to see how I stopped the police cruiser with my mock-panic, screaming \u201cThey\u2019re robbing the Payless.\u201d\u00a0 When the police turned the corner, a crowd had already gathered.\u00a0 Traffic locked.\u00a0 THE FIGURES jammed the sidewalk.\u00a0 Claude swung from the building, releasing a banner above the Payless that read Free to All<\/em>.\u00a0 By then, the police were out of their car.\u00a0 \u201cMust be that time of year,\u201d the first one declared.\u00a0 The second spoke into his radio.\u00a0 \u201cWe got one of those again,\u201d he said.\u00a0 I imagined Claude ambling over rooftops, heading for maybe the bus terminal, maybe the river.\u00a0 \u201cOne of those,\u201d I repeated softly from my hiding place.\u00a0 \u201cIndeed, one of those<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

J. David Stevens<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For three years I\u2019d been holed up in a downtown warehouse working on THE FIGURES.\u00a0 Every night I fell asleep believing I\u2019d affixed my last towel rod or casaba melon, but every morning I rose to find THE FIGURES somehow incomplete.\u00a0 My only companion was a retired circus chimp named Claude, rescued from a petting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[20],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-wj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10482,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions\/10482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}