My Body is a Temple. The Temple of Doom.

There’s a theory that the human race owes everything to alcohol. That it was fermentation sites brought people together out of the hills and forests, who then, once they gathered together in sufficient numbers, created trade and culture. But I’ve never had the same affinity for liquor as others; I’ll have wine with dinner sometimes and beer when I’m out, but I don’t spend the equivalent of a small nation’s defense budget on getting smashed. With the exception of two or three times a year, when a special occasion or happenstance dictates that I unleash a chemical Tet Offensive on my cerebrum.

New Year’s is as good an excuse as any.

At Ben’s party, in the midst of firecrackers, music, game-playing, and a rhetorical discussion escalating into a fistfight in the backyard, I quaffed three-quarters of a bottle of red and two glasses of champagne and then, because I am a lightweight, fell asleep on a couch. Woke up the next morning to the usual distressing symptoms: headache, stomach apparently trying to qualify for acrobatics at the next Olympics, a world that kept threatening to fall distressingly out of tilt. I was still on the couch. Maro had taken off my boots and someone else had thrown a blanket over me.

Now it’s the Year of our Lord 2006 here on the east coast of America, three hundred and some odd years after the first European settlers landed on New England shores in search of someone weaker to terrorize. We are still stuck with a President whose literary pursuits extended to the nutritional label on the back of a Tabasco bottle, when he should have been studying Kipling or Conrad for examples of what happens when Westerners fuck around in the wrong Sandbox. And my landlord still hasn’t fixed my kitchen ceiling.

A group of us wake up and wander out to forage, finally ending up at Tonic for pancakes, before heading back to Ben’s basement apartment for the inevitable cleanup. I walk out back. Ben, Joe and Hanna are standing in the small, brick-enclosed back yard, scanning for something. I ask, “What are we looking for?”

“Miller lost his glasses.”

Miller lost his dosage, is more like it; he and Patrice had gotten into some sort of argument that has escalated to a full-on brawl, the sole casualty of which was a small tree in the center of the yard that had been broken by the force of two grown men slamming against it. It tilts askew like the mast of a sinking ship amid the cracked, wet concrete and piles of brown leaves. We begin to search, the three of us, flicking our boots through the quasi-humus.

Joe, peering into a large ceramic pot on the back stoop: “I think there’s a dead pigeon here.” A stick is procured, wet leaves parted to reveal a dirt-clogged Marv action figure, grimacing manfully with a severed head in one hand.

“There’s still that smell,” I say. The glasses are not in plain sight. I decide to find them by listening: I’ll stomp through the leaf piles and if I hear a metallic crunch, jackpot. “It’s like overcooked chicken or something. Maybe it is a dead pigeon.”

My head is throbbing like a broken tooth. I help mop the floors inside, and then head home, resolved to start the year off right by writing lots of Nabokov-quality copy.

The Body

An hour later I come back down the hill. There were two police cruisers parked behind my building, and a navy-blue Ford Explorer with the words OCME-14 in white on the door, below a city seal. Under the pretext of taking out the trash I wander out back and peer in the windows. No cops, just crackling radios and a half-finished bottle of Snapple in the dashboard drink holder of one cruiser. The ‘ME’ part of ‘OCME’ stands for ‘Medical Examiner,’ and in the back of the Explorer is a cardboard box filled with cartons of latex gloves. Huh.

I wander back inside and stand in the stairwell, cocking my head for the sound of radios or the usual chaos that accompanies the arrival of law enforcement. No sound except for my new neighbor continuing his seemingly days-long phone conversation with someone who berates him constantly. I wander back outside, immediately greeted by the sound of sirens. A vehicle that looks like a navy-blue ambulance is pulling up outside, the words OCME-2 on its side. I promptly sit down on the stoop and watch as the driver, wearing latex gloves and a blue mesh cap over his hair, steps out. Even before he walks over and opens a side compartment, pulling out a gray bag wrapped in clear plastic, I know what I’m looking at: the meat wagon. He goes around, opens the back doors, and yanks out a collapsible stretcher. The scene is starting to draw a small crowd. Out of the building next door walks the medical examiner, an older woman with gray curly hair dressed in a white turtleneck under a black jacket marked OCME on the back. Two cops follow her. Words are exchanged between tech and cops and medical examiner; tech and one cop disappear inside as the others drive off, to reemerge minutes later with a body sagging in the gray bag between them. Whoever the person was, they spend their last thirty seconds in daylight being bumped and wheeled over the sidewalk and into the back of the wagon, which unlike an equipment-packed ambulance is empty save for another collapsible stretcher. And the wagon drives off.

“That’s it, my New Year’s resolution is to eat right and exercise,” I say to nobody in particular, and it seems forced and hollow coming out of my mouth. I wonder about the person, and about how they died. Not a homicide – there would have been detectives, more cops, the front entranceway of the building taped off. Maybe natural. Maybe suicide: someone who decided the New Year – and every New Year after this one – didn’t really look all that promising. I walk inside and select the loudest action movie in my collection, make some popcorn and spend the next two hours forgetting about how the tech and cop grunted and fought against the weight of the body as they carried it out the front door, and the slithering sound of the body bag sliding onto the scuffed crimson backboard of the stretcher.