Excerpt: Disco Rice

Days went by in New Hampshire. A hot afternoon in early July and there was Gerry alone in the backyard digging around by the garden. While other people celebrated the Fourth of July with fireworks and beer, Gerry marked the occasion by picking maggots out of the squalor in his yard.

Less than a week prior he had deposited on the back lawn, right beside the small potato garden, some household garbage: chicken bones, empty tuna tins, and a batch of spongy bananas. Intermixed with this garbage were tufts of old carpet, strips of wallpaper, cat hair, brown lettuce, and three dead sparrows, all of it heaped in one huge stench-pile near the chain link fence. Over the passing weeks, he kept adding to the filth. Gerry went over and added a slab of steak, greened with decay, to the fetid pile of debris, and inspected the progress. Grinning with his discovery, Gerry saw squirming amid the rotting garbage hundreds upon hundreds of fat white maggots.

“It’s a hell of a rough road that leads to the welkin of greatness,” he said, paraphrasing some renowned Roman philosopher’s famous quote. The stinking refuse, this was how Gerry’s greatness would be achieved.

His wife Janet, biting her lip pensively because of her husband’s odd personal project, watched him from the window. Was he indeed destined for greatness? Or was he just another nutcase collecting maggots in the yard? When she met Gerry in college, she had listened to his stories of how he was destined for a greatness of some description, whether in music, art or literature. During the time she knew him, however, the greatness was not there, fame always eluding him.

Janet came out where Gerry was examining the maggots, avoided getting too close, and asked, “Want to stop for lunch, Gerry?”

Ignoring her question altogether, he told her, “At its best, there’s a gentleness to humanity.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“There are little snippets of courage here and there, an inkling of style and strength — but it’s such a rarity,” he said.

A hotter than hot day, she sipped at the cola in her hand but didn’t respond. She couldn’t respond to something she didn’t comprehend fully.

Gerry started out on the path to mediocrity as a child, especially in physical education class. Nowhere was there a more fitting place to prove inability than in sports. He couldn’t hit a baseball. He couldn’t skate. He excelled at being a benchwarmer and a guy to fetch water bottles. He always tried and he always failed. At an early age he told his mother, “I’m gonna be a rock star! I’m gonna be the next Keith Richards!” But the kid couldn’t even carry a tune in the shower.

This time would be different, though. These juicy fly maggots, which he referred to as disco rice, would change his life. Disco rice was a slang term that he garnered from his buddies in the sanitation department. They were garbage workers. They had their own secret language of sorts, and used terms such as “urban white fish” to describe used condoms, and “mongo” as a depiction of salvageable garbage.

“People can’t do what they’re trying to do,” said Gerry, perhaps more in reference to himself than everybody else.

“You’re such a cynic,” said Janet.

“When humanity is turned on, it excels at hostility, brutality, violence, selfishness, rarely anything of value,” he said, speaking with a shrewd clarity that shrouded his ninth grade education.

Accustomed by now to her husband’s erudite pessimism, she asked, “What about Olympic athletes, what about people of artistry or inventors?”

“Like I said, that’s humanity at its best, but it’s not an everyday occurrence.”

Gerry was in need of maggots, lots of them. So he kept organic material in his backyard to attract them. His strategy worked. As planned, the bodies of the dead birds were decaying. Decomposed birds released foul-smelling gases and odors that lured egg-laying insects. They fed off the other squalor by the garden. Now the rubbish swarmed with his precious, itty-bitty creatures.

This was an appropriate term, disco rice, because the tiny critters scuttled around like Uncle Ben’s white specks dancing to a catchy KC & The Sunshine Band disco tune. That’s the Way I Like It.