Freddogg Off The Chain

Duck, a 6’5” too white for direct light, Temple basketball recruit, stuck his long neck and obnoxious face into the transom window over top the dorm door of Johnson Hall’s 10th floor room inhabited by a pair of artists from the Tyler School of Art. The year was 1964 and it was un-cool for a football athlete like me to have artist friends but nevertheless there I was holding a large seashell while this talented scrawny guy from New York painted something that resembled the hand of god pulling back on evolution which wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
Duck-ironically the duck billed platypus excites anthropologists because “what the hell is it” - kept amping and ramping up his game, so I took a short break, opened the door, took Duck gently to the floor and began to polish the tile with his long blond hair. Domestic duck went mallard, turned many colors, got up and threw a laughable punch,I grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back and threatened to break it if he didn’t just go away. He went away sticking out his neck and face like he had just kicked my ass.
The artist, who turned out to be New York famous, did a charcoal portrait of me for helping him out. Six months after I took it home I asked my mother where it was. “Where it was mom?”
“It’s upstairs on top of that television that won’t turn off,”she said. “While your up there, see if you spot checkers”?
The calico Checkers, who would bite your nose unprovoked, was curled up on my charcoal face as Bandstand warmed the television. I took a minute to fantasize about Justine Corelli then Arlene DiPeitro then yelled at Checkers to “get off my face!”
My face had been erased, pulled back, matted and etched into the evolutionary belly of a biting calico. I was a hologram of history, only seen by moonlight, undulating across suburban backyards on the left side belly of a stupid assed soon to be backed over by a 1959 Plymouth house cat I was worth nothing, as hairline drawings and disappeared faces by famous artists had no market value except in Argentina.

Freddogg