FrankHaberle

                            Headless Ignatz

You sit down on a stoop. You pull the lid from the coffee cup. You look down into a pool of stale cream. You
take a big slurp. You burn your upper lip, your tongue, your gums. You blow and slurp. You burn yourself again.
Across the street, an old man slumps in a folding chair. A floppy tennis hat is pulled down over his eyes. Three
items sit beside him on a ledge—an old dust broom, a small red rug, and a plaster mouse body, a foot tall,
holding a brick, and missing its head.
You know that body. You know that brick It’s that comic mouse. It’s Ignatz, from Krazy Kat. It’s got to be fifty
years old. It’s got to be worth something.
You cross the street. Above you there’s an ancient brick building. Red and green paint flakes spray gently on
the old man’s shoulders. His eyes are pressed shut. His mouth is wide open.
“Hello,” you say.
He sucks his tongue into his mouth.
“Hello yourself.”
“This stuff. What’s it, for sale or something?”
“What? This stuff? It’s for sale!”
Ignatz’s neck is snapped clean. With the head he’s a collectible. You glue the head on, you fix him up, you’ve got
a hundred bucks.
“How much for Ignatz?”
“Ig what?”
“The mouse with the brick. How much.”
“Oh! The mouse. Five dollars.”
“Five dollars? Oh. Does he have a head?”
“Sure I got a head. I got it in the back somewhere.” The old man points toward a wooden door behind him. “I got
a house full of stuff.”
“Oh!” You rub the bumpy tip of your tongue against the back of your teeth.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll find the head. For free. You come back later for the head. Only you got to take the body now.
I ain’t dragging the body back up the stairs. I got a hernia.”
“Okay then!” You fish the change from your pocket. “I’ll take him.”

You’re back in your small rented room, your door open into the small foyer that connects you to the front door,
the bathroom, and the living room. You’re lying on your cot, your arms folded behind your head. You lick your
upper lip, still blistered from the coffee. You’re staring at the headless Ignatz. You try to remember the face. You
remember grainy old cartoons. Ignatz has a crush on Krazy Kat, and chases him, or her, with a brick. It was all
very confusing. You think of the old man. What if there is no head? What if he can’t find it? What if he breaks it?
Keys rattle the apartment’s front-door bolt. Before you can kick your door shut, Ginger, your roomate’s girlfriend,
the hairdresser, is standing in front of you.
“You’re here?” she asks.
“Who, me? Yeah. I’m here.”
“What a day,”Ginger says. She drops her bags and slumps against the wall outside your door. Her hair, huge
untamed curls, spills down across her face.
“I had this guy come into the salon today?” Ginger says, straightening one of the tangles with her fingers. “This
guy wants his bangs cut, and I say how much, and he says ‘I don’t know, this much,’ and he says it with all this
attitude, and I say okay, and I’m cutting his bangs, and he’s yelling across the room at Cody about this girl he’s
screwing, and he’s married you know, and he’s giving all the details, and Cody’s not listening, and I roll my eyes,
and then I unroll them, and I look at the floor. And I realize I just chopped off this huge chunk of the guys hair.”
“Huh,” you say.
“So the guy starts bitching at me, and I say ‘what’s you’re problem,’ and he calls me a stupid bitch, and Cody says
‘I can’t take this anymore,’ and he storms out of the place, and its his place. And I’m alone with this guy with a
huge gash in his hair.”
“Great,” you say. You reach for your boots, on top of your dirty laundry.
“So I look at the guy, and the guy looks at me. And he pulls forty bucks out of his pocket, and he puts it on my
chair, and he runs off after Cody.”
Ginger gives up on the tangle, pulls her hair back, then pulls the huge strands back around her head, wrapping
it until she’s completely hidden, just a big ball of hair sitting on a leather jacket.
“I don’t get people,” she says.
You get up and step toward the front door. She drops her hands, emerging from the hair. She looks at you
directly.
“Where you going?” she asks.
“I gotta go out.”
“I need a drink,” Ginger says. “You want to go get a drink?”
“I can’t,” you say. “I gotta meet somebody.”
“Oh. Did Dave talk to you about the rent?”
“Oh, yeah,” you say.
“Cuz it’s the seventh, you know.”
“Seventh! Yeah,” you say, pulling the apartment door closed behind you.

Night shadows blanket the front of the old man’s battered building. You sit on the same stoop, drinking a tall-boy
from a paper bag. A breeze blows down the street, sending paper tatters down the sidewalk. A lone yellow bulb
glows above the old man’s door. A hundred bucks easy, you think. Maybe one-fifty. One fifty and you’ve bought
another two weeks. You know where to bring it, who to talk to. These streets are filled with treasure,
collectibles, artifacts. People sell silver for pocket change. They throw gold into dumpsters.
One fifty. You say it again, setting the price in your head. You try to picture the old man rummaging through
things, but you can’t. You want to hear boxes and bags dumped out on the floor, but the avenue drowns out
everything. What if he isn’t looking? What if he doesn’t even live here? What if he just conned you out of five
bucks? You finish your beer, dig through your pockets, dig up another dollar in change, and return to the
bodega for another.
Back on the stoop, you pop open the cold can. You suck the cool foam off the rim, let it soak into the morning’s
burns. An ignatz statue’s gotta be pretty rare, you think. Now you remember the comic strip a little better. Ignatz
was in love with Krazy Kat, and threw bricks at him, or her. Or Krazy Kat was in love with Ignatz, who fended him
or her off with bricks. There was a third character, an officer grupp or gup or pup, who was in love with the one
that loved the other one, and threw the other one in jail. You can only scratch your head over that one. Scratch
your head, yawn and doze on the stoop until the early hours of morning.

You wake up in your room. Dave’s tapping gently on your door.
“Hey dude,” he asks. “You in there?”
You wait in silence for the tapping to stop. The front door closes. You wait ten minutes, lace your boots, and run
down the stairs.
You find the old man dozing in his folded chair. The tennis hat has fallen to the ground. Strands of comb-over
white hair jut wildly from a freckled head. His neck is twisted hideously, like his head is slowly wrenching itself
from his shoulders. There are three new items on the stoop: an empty wood photo frame, a crumpled paisley
shirt, and a smiling mouse head, squinting one large eye, taking aim.
“Hey there,” you say.
The old man looks up. His eyes focus. He squints at the morning sunlight. He looks to the statue head, then he
looks back at the young man who bought the headless mouse the day before, and he smiles.
“There he is,” the old man says to the head. “I knew he’d be back.”

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