LUDIC LOG

First: he is tall. He would always have been tall, though he is perhaps less so now. Tall is in more common coin than once it was and he can stand in a room and not be thought a giant; this would not have been the case two hundred years ago. Of course there are other things that would have set him aside back then, but he would certainly have been the tallest man in the room, whereas now he might only be the second or third. But he is certainly tall, though also wide: he is broad and round. It is not so much that he is fat; he is that, a bit, even if it is a strong and healthy fat: he is stuffed like a sausage and his clothes appear to have been stretched over him and knotted at the ends to prevent him from bursting out. He is mostly torso, describing an upward arc from his legs to his wide hips to his bigger belly to his massive chest and finally culminating in meat-slab shoulder, not the vee-shape of the bodybuilder but the lazy ess of the naturally huge. Some people can stand in a doorway and you know that if you had to, say you were at a party and they were there and absently sipping at a bottle of beer and you suddenly taken sick (too many bottles of beer, yourself) and had to get to the bathroom right away, you could slip past them even in a hurry with asking their forgiveness or shoving them rudely aside or anything like that. But he fills up a doorway, even a very wide and heavy one, about as well as a door as it happens. In fact he is so broad that it somewhat reduces his height; so far does he stretch from side to side that it seems to diminish how tall he is, not that you would underestimate him for it. His hands hang at the ends of his arms like great weights; his wrist are actually quite thin and delicate given the urnlike breadth of the forearms to which they are attached. The massive hands, with long blunt fingers, seem indeed to be tied loosely to his arms by the string of his wrists. The hands are not animated, for he is not a nervous man, and they barely seem alive when he isn't using them: they seem instead to be a burden he must carry around all his life. Perhaps it is these burdens that pull down the corners of his mouth and fix it into a perpetual scowl. His lips are heavy and thick and split into tiny fragments like a tree stump and you never see his teeth, because he never smiles, and he doesn't eat in public. It could be that they are yellow and gross and discolored, or chipped and stained and crooked, or perhaps he is missing them altogether. It is almost frightening, though I cannot exactly say why, to think that he has a full set of teeth, clean and white as the bowl of a sink, lined up perfectly straight like the crosses at Arlington. But I cannot talk about the teeth, because I have never seen them, and I am telling you what he looks like. Now I return to describing him to you: his head, oddly or not given the hulk of his body, is rather small. It is a tiny dome capping the temple. The smallest part of him, it would appear -- certainly it must be smaller than those enormous hands -- and yet, it would seem, many people have made it their target of choice. Aside from the split lips, there is the nose, which is not flat but is wide, going up into a crooked, half-caved bridge that has clearly been broken at least once and possibly twice in the past. It has an artificial look about it, the nose: not in the sense of artificial where he might have had cosmetic surgery, a rhinoplasty it is called, but in the way a load-bearing member in a building might have once collapsed and been hastily rebuilt, built again, jerry-built and jury-rigged. I don't think there is bone in the nose -- am I wrong about that? Maybe there is. I thought it was only cartilage. Whatever the case, perhaps it has been battered but never broken. At any rate the nose has certainly been smashed and has not healed expertly. There is something they say about ears, the ears of a fighter, that they have been "cauliflowered", but I don't know what this means. In my mind it is associated with a deformity, a puffiness, a state of being outsized and abnormal. I don't know if this is actually the case, but if it is, he does not have this: his ears are those of anyone else, only with tiny traces of evidence of past wounds. Behind the left there is a small patchy scab that perhaps was once a burn or an improperly healed cut and here and there are nicks and cuts that have turned into scars. Also on the head, just above and to the left of the right ear, so I can specifically say on the back of the head, there is an ugly pockmarked thing, a rising and puckering mark like a grotesque kiss, that was obviously a terrible wound once upon a time. You look at it and think that it must have been a bullet wound, but how can that be? It's not small, and surely he couldn't have been shot right in the back of the head like that and still be alive. Whatever it is, his hair (which, and this is I realize an important aspect of his appearance but I give it short shrift only because it is not particularly interesting, he wears kinked and cut close to the head and it is what they call "nappy") does not grow around it properly. I think this is probably why he wears a lot of hats. That is to say, he obviously only wears one hat at a time, but you might see him wearing a different hat every day, though almost all of them are baseball caps. There is finally the most noticable scar of all, the vicious pink one, standing out against his black skin like lightning across a night sky. It starts somewhere to the left of his left eye, near it without touching it, and splays down across his left cheek, scything back towards the jawline and stopping just short of where it might draw back his mouth into a sneer, but it does not, allowing him his eternal scowl. He carries himself as if he is not aware of the presense of the scar, which after all is very large and visible, as if it were nothing but a birthmark, although it is obviously something that arrived on his face long after birth. Now, I have said that his skin is black, so this should be qualified. His skin is not the blackish-blue of some of the African tribes, the sullen and stretched-out Sudanese, nor is it the western browns of Mexico and California and of those who come from a mixed-race union. He is a chocolate brown, dark but not black, and I use the color as the description only because it is thought acceptable in our society these days. Whatever the case, he is an African-American, and his eyes are brown like his skin, or at least where his skin is not ruined by scars. His eyes, as contrasted to his mouth, do not forever scowl: they are indeed the only part of him that are never at rest, always alert and moving. It would be easy to say that they bug out, but this is not quite the case: he is not a cartoon, nor yet a madman. It is that his face seems somehow drawn back from his eyes, as if it has decided to simply step away from them and let them go about their business. And so they are not at the front of him, for surely his eyes are not so huge that they can get past his massive belly and chest, but they are at the front of his face, and they are forever moving up and down and left and right around, seeing everything always. In this I judge: I do not know that they see everything. But I have told you what I see, when I look at him, so that you will know him when you see him too: only you should know that when he looks at you, and he will, when he first sees you, as he did when first he saw me, he is likely to see more of you than you see of him.