a true story

Trotsky in the Bushes

It was on Newbury Street that I saw him. Trotsky, that is. He was a little worse for the wear and the years. His skin still retained its bronzed patina from the South American sun, though by now it was more than a little dry. Impossible to miss him. Sure, he had changed, but the pointed bear and shock of hair atop his head – had to give it to him, only a few flecks of gray showing through – could have been those of no other. He looked tired and he wore a black Ecko Unlimited sweatshirt that appeared as though it had been picked carefully from the dollar bin at a thrift store – quite a find, really, and it fit him surprisingly well. No pipe, though, just an unfiltered Camel sticking out the side of his mouth, burning dangerously close to his lips. He spat at my feet as he passed: perhaps he had noticed that flash of recognition.

I can’t figure for sure why he’d show up in such a place. It didn’t seem, to say the least, to be his style, strolling down the sidewalk of this clusterfuck of rampant capitalism. But one can’t so easily judge a man of such a mind, especially one who would now be dead of old age had he not had his life cut short by assassination – one who appears before you as though aged only a few years from their last known photograph, a grainy black and white of the man dying in the hospital from his fatal axe wound, and it looks as though he is grimacing and turning his face up and away from the lens of the camera. Impossible. No longer conscious at that point. Still.

I wanted to speak to him, to say something, anything, but it was too late: all that was left was the back of his head bobbing through the crowd. I suppose I could have run after him, but what was the point? What did I have to say to such a man, after all? Certainly nothing he’d want to hear.


It was a few days later, at my apartment in Allston, when I woke to find a small tin cup filled a quarter of the way with what could only have been either rancid oatmeal or lard set carefully upon the railing of my back porch. It reeked horribly and when I picked it up some of the substance on the outside of the tin came off on my hand, oily and slick – so perhaps it was lard, but who would leave such a thing? Who would eat it? And indeed there were the marks of a fork being scraped through the thick substance, frozen into it by the night chill. Had a bum slept there the night before? Where did he get the tin? What, indeed, was it?

I left it out there, I don’t know why. It was disgusting, it should have gone immediately into the trash, but it fascinated me, some human co-existing unbeknownst to me, separated only by a door that was beginning to split down the middle, that could have been pushed over with ease.

I suppose that it was a stupid thing, to keep it, to go so far as to place it back exactly where it was found. It would tell whoever had left it that the resident of this apartment did not often venture onto his back porch, whether such was true or not, would tell him that it would be safe to come back. Perhaps it had been left as a test for exactly this. I knew that then, too, but I left it anyways. That night I pulled my Buck knife out of the trunk of my car where I usually keep it and placed it, unsheathed, next to the headboard of my bed. In any case, I’d be at least somewhat protected should whoever it was suddenly realize how flimsy the door was.



For the next several days I left it there, that old tin, allowing the substance within to rot and blacken, home to countless bacteria, sitting out there during the day and looking at it over my book. Wondering if whosever it had been would come back or if it had been a one night deal after all, moving on to a new place each night. In any case, I kept that Buck knife near at hand each night. I lived on the third story of a house and my porch was small – I can see why he wanted to stop there, it was the most inconspicuous in the area and easily accessed, fire stairs leading down to my neighbor’s much larger porch and finally to the back yard that lay empty, given over to the rats and the wild, unkempt plants that had somehow managed to sprout there and survive many years ago.

I’d sit alone drinking bourbon, usually in my bedroom, waiting to hear shuffling coming from outside, maybe a few tentative slaps at the door before knocking it down. But sometimes on dark, clear, cool nights I’d sit out there in a folding chair in the dark smoking and waiting to hear those first steps on the fire stairs, no matter how hard you try to mask it, there’s always that ringing noise as the shoe hits iron. What would I do then? I can’t say for sure. I never brought my knife out there with me and always shut the door behind me. It would be just him and me, squinting at each other through the dark, trying to figure out if the other really was there or just a shadow from a tree playing a trick, until finally one of us broke the stasis and moved – maybe for the door, maybe turning tail down the stairs, maybe for that other shadow figure – and the shadows would coalesce and begin to make some sort of sense, if only for a short moment.


It had been weeks since I found that tin on my porch but I still hadn’t even gotten rid of it, or ever touched it again. I had begun to forget about it though, like all those unused items around the apartment that had lost coherent meaning and had become just another knick knack cluttering shelves. Too useless to keep, but too familiar for it to register that it should be discarded. I’d look into it now and again – it was completely overtaken with mold that seemed to have grown larger since last I looked – but it never occurred to me to handle it again, to physically pick it up and toss it into the dumpster. I had put the Buck knife back into the trunk of my car – no need to tempt the fates, as it were.

I had gotten up early – for some reason I had taken to that habit more often of late, usually incoherent til later in the day but now driven out of bed by seven o’clock – an unheard of time to me before then. I had stopped drinking coffee on a daily basis, perhaps that was why, no caffeine hangover crippling me each morning. I usually did not venture out to the porch until evening, since it faced the west, but this morning I pulled open the door – still not repaired though the call had gone into the landlord over a month before – and stepped outside in my boxer shorts, lighting a cigarette and looking out over the parking lot beyond my fence. Grass grew up through the cracks in the asphalt.

I stood smoking in silence for awhile, barefoot, feeling the grain of the wood with my toes. I finished my cigarette and, noticing the tin, stamped the butt out in the bacterial overgrowth, burning untold parasites in the process. No sooner had I taken my hand away I heard a scuffling below me, on my neighbor’s porch. I paused for a moment, startled – maybe it was a raccoon, the neighbors often left their garbage there overnight and it was not unheard of the creatures to inhabit the city. I had once seen three raccoons climb over a friend’s fence into his back yard out on Mission Hill. I threw a chicken bone at them and watched them fight over it before disappearing into the bushes.

I heard someone curse under their breath.

I stepped out onto the fire stairs and peered over the railing. It was him. I suppose I should have expected it, that pointed beard, that curled hair, that same sweatshirt now caked with dirt. His pants were around his ankles and he was in the process of taking a rather considerable shit upon my neighbor’s patio – his face was clenched and I could see it oozing out of him, plopping with an audible noise onto the hard wood. I can’t say why he would choose such a place to do such a thing, with the bushes just feet away, but there you have it, Leon Trotsky himself obscenely emptying his bowls directly below me, unabashed, perhaps even proud for his daring.

So this is what it has come to.

I remember that he was smoking one of those unfiltered Camels at the same time – I hear that nicotine improves intestinal activity, and it certainly seemed to be working for him. He must have heard me, then, because he looked up and, seeing me, fell back into his waste in surprise.

We remained motionless, stunned, he with his pants around his ankles and me in my boxers unbuttoned, I realized then, at the front.

It was he who reacted first, leaping up and pulling his pants up around his shit-stained thighs, buttoning up lickety split. Thinking back on it, I’m sure that not a hair on my head moved during the entire encounter, surreal – I recall that it was like an elegant painting in motion, perhaps a Munch or a more conservative van der Goes, I can’t say for sure now.

But these are just embellishments to the action and the action was this: he moved, not I – I watched only in awe, noting that he wore worn blue jeans with holes at the knees. He impudently gave me the middle finger, a universal language. He conveyed nothing else - no meaning, no excuses, no explanations – until he was almost over the wooden fence in the back yard.

“Every tenth man!” he shouted, defiantly and in clear English, and then he was over, landing on his feet, running across the parking lot, disappearing behind the buildings beyond.

That night I tossed the old tin into the dumpster. I haven’t seen him since, but I’m not convinced that I never will.