Grimoire Diabolique

He had to have it. He had to scrape it raw off the sidewalk and eat it, hoping no one would bear witness. He could imagine the reaction of an associate partner walking down the street one day and seeing Barrows scarfing bum phlegm. He could imagine what the firm’s president might say upon hearing of this. With every day that went by, and with every chunk of some rummie’s hock that he ate, Barrows knew he was living on borrowed time.

Once a Seattle cop had seen him, and though Barrows could not conceive that eating phlegm off the sidewalk violated the law, he was grateful that the constable had received a call on his radio at the same time. Barrows did not want to have to explain what he was doing. A number of homeless had seen him too, but he needn’t explain to them.

Sometimes he paid the dregs of the local prostitutes to cough into his mouth. Sometimes he’d walk right up to paralyzed bums rotting in alleyways and pay them $100 to drag up a giant loogie and hack it up into his hand, after which he’d eat it like a culinaire savoring Nicouli ossetra caviar off of toast points. Once he’d paid an obese homeless woman on Jackson Street to cough up a big one into his mouth. She’d smelled worse than anything Barrows’ olfactory senses had ever experienced, but she’d obliged and then some, hacking up a blob of phlegm the size of a baby’s fist. When Barrows had rolled it around on his tongue, he’d found a rotten tooth, which he’d swallowed with the rest of the prize.

Bums and whores and Seattle’s constant human street detritus were one thing, but he knew he had to be careful, more careful than he’d been in the past. He couldn’t have people on the street recognizing him, oh no, not with his picture constantly in the state market news, not with his picture in Forbes and the financial trade magazines. But too often it seemed that the longer this grotesque curse went on, the more he became lost in it.

With every glob he slurped down, he realized how wrong it was, how demented and abnormal. And for the two decades that had transpired since his first indulgence at age twenty, he’d always assumed that his sickness was so remote, and so insulated, as to be totally exclusive to himself.

What could he say to his doctor? What could he say to a shrink? I have this problem, see? I have to eat phlegm.

No, no. He could not say that, because he couldn’t believe that anyone else on the surface of the earth could be stricken with such a bizarre and filthy addiction.

Barrows, in his curse, felt alone in the world. Until—

««—»»

He’d been hunting for a fresh wad, after work as usual, stalking the most rank warrens of Third and Yesler—the “Bum” district. Damn it! came the desperate thought. He itched, junkie-like, when he saw the droves of people milling up and down. The Kingdome loomed, reminded him that baseball season was in full swing; the extra pedestrians would make his travail all the more difficult.

Wait, he thought.

No other choice.

Barrows ducked under the pillared cover of the King County Courthouse, amongst a coterie of employees out for a smoke break.

He stood there for hours.

Waiting.

By eight p.m., he was cross-eyed in his need. His fingernails had dug crescent gouges into the meat of his palms, and his face felt was slicked with sweat. He watched the whores flit by across the street, each of whom would be grateful to hack into his mouth for a C-Note; he watched the bums straggle, spitting their precious wares onto the sidewalk.

Too far away for Barrows to claim.

The sun sunk. He came close to chewing a hole in his lower lip as he waited. Then—

An obese, bearded man in a wheelchair (wearing a plaid dress, of all things [but this was Seattle]) rolled by and hacked loudly. A wad of blackish phlegm landed only feet before the place where Barrows stood.

Barrows’ heart picked up.

He ducked out, an index card in each hand. Anxious glances up and down the street showed him meager pedestrian traffic.

He scooped up the wad, walked to the big brown garbage can behind the bus stop, then knelt as if to tie his shoe.

He didn’t tie his shoe.

His lips pulled the fresh lump off the card. He sighed as his tongue squashed the briny lump between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He savored and swallowed.

Jesus…

It was all he could do, then, not to stick his hand right down into his pinstriped Italian slacks and beat himself off. His knees wobbled at the rush. He was fixing as the lump went down.

Jesus God…

When the rush lifted, and his vision cleared, he heard a scuff to his left. The bus shelter, he thought but hardly cared. Suddenly, though, the sidewalk was vacant, and in the bus shelter, he saw—

A tall, haggard man, another “bum.” Jeans smudged black with dirt, long hair, beard flecked with bits of food and boogers. The back of his dun-colored jacket read KING STREET GOSPEL HOMELESS SHELTER, and he was doing the most unusual thing:

He was—

What the…