Mr. Robin
Constantine P. Firme III
Mr. Robin choked on a piece of unleavened bread during church communion. Her best friend, being one of the few people in the front row who didn’t queue for the body and blood of Christ, leapt to her aid with the Heimlich maneuver and dislodged the piece of Christ flesh onto the pastor's cowl.
The entire procession was taken aback, and one woman fainted.
Mr. Robin hung her head low in embarrassment as she was escorted out of the building.
Two hours after the incident, the pastor made a courtesy call:
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Guess he loved me so much he wanted me to join him early huh?” Mr. Robin said with a lighthearted tone, and made the pastor giggle.
“Though God doesn’t take favors,” the pastor reiterated, “your caring for his animals is a plus.”
Mr. Robin was twenty nine years of age, and an everyday Veterinarian in her neighborhood in San Francisco.
She was known amongst the locals for giving free pet care to the financially distressed, and administered preliminary examinations free of charge; still, every holiday, she affords lavish gifts to her co-workers.
But managing a Vet Clinic had it’s run of the mill problems. Having been habituated to sleeping late at night by eight years of college, her motivation for starting work at 8:00 A.M. was based on the fear of disappointing her co-workers and patients. Her personal schedule book looked like a receptionist’s sign-in sheet, and was full of crossed-out vacation plans. She lived in a drab apartment complex on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Castro District.
A cardboard-thin ceiling conveyed disturbing bumps and howling pipes- one of the many functional defects fitting for a mediocre flat.
Her passable single apartment was clean to the point of being presentable, but messy enough to keep her feeling at home.
Sitting in the middle of the living room was her futon couch with a plain solid blue cover, next to a prosaic coffee table that shook with the wind. Across from her futon, and mounted above a banal wooden stand, was a conventional CRT 16 inch television equipped with a lumbering DVD player, and digital cable service common to the other residents in her complex. Two identical floor lamps lit the corners of the living room with their regular 60 watt brightness. And all this on a dull beige carpet floor spotted with dirt.
Her typical kitchen was a humdrum collage of cookware by generic brand names, and unreliably made electronics. Her pans were left greased in the rack, and she had a pile of unwashed dishes in the sink. Her bowls and plates were rarely stacked in cabinets, and she had a tendency to leave out half-used produce.
Her standard top-mount refrigerator full of condiments and empty space was in contrast with the plethora of meats in the upper freezer.
“A woman who doesn’t like to cook and eats plenty of meat is a common thing,” she once said to a friend.
And for a woman who considered packaging material part of a daily diet, microwave-safe plastics were a Godsend; and a microwave was a must- though she was annoyed with how the waves cooked out the delicious fats. Her poor choices of diet were supplemented by the habit of eating technicolor kids cereals and avoiding most vegetables like the plague.
Her bedroom was a typical display of Contemporary Art. The colors of her cutaway Gibson melded with the poster laden walls that featured her favorite alternative bands. She had a computer desk at one end of the room where she processed most her paperwork, and a colorless twin sized bed perfectly centered in the room.
She had plenty of cubbyholes, shelves, and drawers that helped her keep things in their general categories, but finding a specific thing, like a .05 drafting pen for example, was like looking for a document in a file-drawer of unlabeled manila folders. Even in a small bedroom, she lost her office papers more often than one should.
Across from her disorganized shelves of books was her cabinet of dull and inexpensive clothes. Her clothes were mostly jogging pants, shorts, cotton sweaters, exercise shoes, and cotton upper-body apparel. She was very active in the day, and the sweating made form fitting clothes uncomfortable, so except for two pairs of jeans, a shirt, and a dress suit, her clothes were loose and slightly oversized.
Then there was the wholesale mountain bike on which she almost broke her face when she tripped over a picture frame destined to hold her mother’s photo.
Throughout the apartment, she displayed irksome photos of friends and family. She had the ordinary assemblage of associates consisting of a few close friends, direct family, and a handful of acquaintances. But of all the friends she had, there was only one friend she wanted but didn’t have, a boyfriend.
While in college, she spent too much time studying and not enough time finding a sweetheart. Nearing the end of her supple marriage years, she had yet to attain a suitor; at least, one that she’d feel suitable.
She was the kind of handsome looking girl waiting impatiently for love, but with the emotional selectiveness that keeps her narrowed on a minority of men her sexual attraction qualified her to chose from.
Her best bets had been social gatherings, though she was annoyed to find most who attended were stereotypical self-observers who believed they had to flaunt their personalities to be acknowledged.
She grew tired of singles bars and flings and dreamt of the day she’d open her closet and find someone else’s clothes taking up the open space.
Whenever she took love into her own hands, she stumbled upon another’s curiosity and lust, mistaking smiles for sincerity and cuddles for security. She blamed herself for limiting herself to this rare directory of men; but a disposition, she claimed, she couldn’t deny herself nor fake the thumps of her heart with someone otherwise.
She blamed others in her list of classifieds for their indecisiveness in orientation.
“They feel it for a few minutes and they think they’re attracted, then they feel it for the next few hours and they think they’re in love. They think it’s a sign of preference and either fight to suppress it or embrace it, rarely remembering that their decision would be permanent had they realized the seriousness of declaring standards of attraction. But that’s empty, all physical, it’s classical conditioning because they end up believing their love rather than naturally feeling it. Some who genuinely know what kind of person they love won’t fall victim to the confusion of that minute-hour rule, instead, they will see their potential mates in seconds- slowing down the clock to allow more time to think about them.”
Her original experience with love had been one of deep companionship, construed as a sexual desire by the compelling norms of culture and interaction; and her love evolved in its respective path. She loved differently, and yet, she loved men much the same way men loved women.
Mr. Robin was beaten to death after Sunday mass. His arms spread open and his head tilted slightly to his right shoulder; he lay upon the stairs before his former house of worship.
The attackers smothered Mr. Robin’s face with make-up, and mutilated the parts of his body that made him a man. They said they hated him, but couldn’t express a substantial reason. They were annoyed with Mr. Robin, and again, with no material reason.
Mr. Robin had a formal funeral; his friends and family watched over his casket.
Mr. Robin’s brother wondered if death was a proper consequence for a sibling who would have filed domestic partner papers rather than marriage certificates, or be flagged by his people to enjoy limited freedoms, and an unsaid feeling of shame.
Mr. Robin’s mother cried on her knees, against the casket, and knocked at the lid with her palm. “Why did he have to be...” she pressed her face against the cold wood, “Oh God, oh MY GOD!”
Mr. Robin’s father refused to show, but shed a tear for his disowned son; and in spirit, he tossed the mounds of dirt onto the coffin and finalized Mr. Robin’s special spot in the ground with the others.
“I was an ordinary man,” the epitaph read, “who embraced my choice to love like a woman.”
