Mr. Potato Head looked at the directions he had printed out from the internet when he was in the small university town where he had lived for three years. He was wearing his glasses, his hat, his shoes, a light shirt because it was still summer, thinking “A job will make things better.” He felt like his plastic shell would melt away, under the heat of the sun. He opened the window of the truck he had rented.
He was arriving to the city where he had popped out of Mama Potato Head’s vagina twenty-five years before. This is the city where he had lived as a young potato head, where he acquired his language. They had lived in a five-story brick condo. There had been an orange tree in the patio of the building. No one ever ate the oranges it dropped. There were always sweltering ripe oranges over the ground which circled the tree. The kids, along with the young Mr. Potato Head, would throw the oranges at each other.
It was a city that had had thrived during the industrial revolution of the country, but now, in this postindustrial society based on service industries, was suffering a decline.
This is where his father, the Pastor Potato Head, had helped the community of potato heads living in this area of the country. The help Pastor Potato Head did eventually engaged other types of non-dominant cultural communities.
Mr. Potato Head was thinking about copping heroin. The breeze entering through the open windows made him feel good.
Gloria, the potato head who would be providing Mr. Potato Head with a place to sleep for the night, was en ex-colleague of the Pastor Potato Head, and also a very good friend of Mr. Potato Head’s potato head family. Gloria and the Pastor Potato Head had worked together at a nonprofit in the downtown of the city. She had spent a lot of time with Mr. Potato Head’s family.
Mr. Potato Head remembered staying over at Gloria’s on nights when his parent potato heads wanted to be alone.
Back them he did not have a mustache piece to wear. Back then he might’ve worn his dog ears, because he thought that was funny.
He’d sit on Gloria’s couch until late in the night and he’d watch a children’s show whose protagonists were sock puppets. He’d eat vanilla ice cream covered with pieces of sliced apples and feel connected to the sock puppets singing, “This is the song that never ends, and it goes on and on my friends, some people started singing it not knowing what it was and they’ll keep on singing it forever just because.”
He’d feel connected to the sock puppets singing on the television screen because he saw that they were just like him: toys existent in this world of skilled manipulators.
Now she lived in a suburb west of this city, and Mr. Potato Head was driving through the city to get to where she was. He only had directions to the city where he thought she lived in, not to where she actually lived, outside of the city.
He was calling her using his cell-phone, which he had left outside of his butt. It’d be too complicated to get his cell-phone out of his butt while he was driving.
“Hello?” Mr. Potato Head said. He had the cell-phone set on speaker. He didn’t have to hold it in his hands while driving. He was speaking into the space around him. He wore his pair of extra large ears.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” Gloria said. “Okay. So, you’re around here yet?”
“Yes. Yeah. I am.”
“Good.”
“I’m having trouble getting to where you live. I think I might be lost. I only have directions to the city.”
“Okay, well,” and she told him directions.
He was driving uphill now, in the suburbs, through multi-story homes with pools and lawns and patio furniture. They all looked very similar in design. Maybe the shades of beige were slightly different. There were grocery-marts in between the groupings of homes. Where these grocery-marts were, those areas looked like constructed miniature downtown areas. One of them had a post-office fashioned in an antique manner, European.
Mr. Potato Head was still lost and called her again. His nose was clogged.
“I’m still lost,” he said out loud in the space of the truck he had rented.
She explained to him again how to arrive to her house.
He called her again. She said, “Okay. Now I’m driving towards you. Don’t drive anymore. Where are you?”
“I’m at a hill where the road forks into two. The houses are—”
“What’s the name of the street?”
“Greenway.”
They met up finally, at a different hill. Mr. Potato Head had not stayed where she had asked him to. The hill also had a road that forked into two. The area around this hill was also dotted by similar-looking houses. Mr. Potato Head drove following Gloria driving in her SUV.
She lived in a large house. Mr. Potato Head would sleep in a room on the second floor. He took Popcorn in the cat cage upstairs to the room on the second floor.
He saw that he would sleep in a comfortable bed. He removed his hat, placed it on the bed, took out his hair from out of his butt and put it on. It was black, well-combed hair-piece which was parted at the left side.
He went downstairs to where Gloria was, standing in her kitchen. She wore matching white pants and shirt. She wore long hair, a necklace, and large, round, white earrings.
She said, “I bought you chicken and some bread and some soda.”
She said, “You can take a shower and then rest. Tomorrow I’ll take you to where me and your father used to work together.”
Mr. Potato Head said, “I’m tired.”
He wanted to inject heroin into the veins of his plastic body.
“Okay, honey. You eat and you already saw where your room is. I need to go back downstairs and work.”
Gloria no longer worked in the city. She now counseled nonprofits from the basement of her home in a suburb outside of the city where Mr. Potato Head had grown up.
Mr. Potato Head stayed in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen. It opened into the living room. He could see a pool outside through the glass door to the left. There was a garden and a garage with two cars in it. The roof of the room he was in was very high. There were sparse decorations, a vase, and three framed painting along the walls.
He pulled apart pieces from the roasted chicken Gloria had bought him. He took these pieces of chicken and placed them in between slices of bread. He ate the bread and chicken in this manner. He ate until he felt his insides were stuffed of matter. He went upstairs, lay on the bed, and fell asleep with all of his pieces placed on him.
The next morning the pieces of him felt cruddy. He wanted to take a shower. The holes of his body through which the pieces of him were connected to give him form were dirty with blotches of oil and pieces of lint stuck to him. Hair from Popcorn’s body was also stuck on him. Inside the shower, he wore his eyes, his ears, his arms, and bare feet. Gloria had a lot of hygiene products to use. He used a sponge and a hair brush and scrubbed his body hard in the shower. It was a noisy process.
Gloria is going to take me to where Dad used to work, he thought. He walked out of the shower. He wondered if there were liquor stores nearby there.
He put on his jeans and collared shirt. He went downstairs to see if Gloria was ready to take him into the city where he had grown up.
Driving through the highway into the city, they drove by abandoned warehouses. They drove by extinguished factories. They drove by half-way occupied brick buildings.
While being driven through the downtown, Mr. Potato Head noticed that the colors of the skins of the people wandering were of more variety than those of the people he saw while driving north from the small town where he had lived. He thought that he might’ve even seen a few potato heads wandering around the streets.
They drove until they arrived to where the nonprofit was.
The nonprofit was a brick building surrounded by more brick buildings. It was in the downtown of the city. Gloria parked the truck and they exited it. Gloria went into the nonprofit and Mr. Potato Head followed her. It was hot and humid and droplets dewed on Mr. Potato Head’s body of plastic.
He entered the office and was at a lobby with a reception desk. There were three female potato heads. They all wore long hair and dress suits.
Gloria said hi to everyone and everyone said hi back in a cheerful manner. She said, “So this is the Pastor’s son.”
Mr. Potato Head said, “Hi,” and everyone said hi at once. Mr. Potato Head saw Gloria wander into one of the halls of the nonprofit and he went outside.
He placed anything of value of his into his butt for safekeeping. He walked down a street leading away from the nonprofit. He made his first left.
There were parked cars along the sidewalks.
By the end of the corner, he saw three black men dressed with baggy pants and baggie hoodies. They wore beanies. When Mr. Potato Head looked at them they all nodded up and then down.
Mr. Potato Head approached them.
“What you want?” one of them said.
“I want some dope and some weed,” Mr. Potato Head said.
The black man speaking sold Mr. Potato Head four bags of heroin, two bags of cocaine, and a bag of marijuana. Mr. Potato Head was happy. He felt accomplished. He returned to the nonprofit.
“Where did you go?” Gloria said when Mr. Potato Head was inside the nonprofit.
“I took a walk,” he said.
The potato heads present in the office were quiet.
“I can’t have you disappearing like that,” Gloria said. “Your mother’s going to kill me.”
Mr. Potato Head walked through the different offices of the nonprofit, calmly.
He said hi to people, and they said hi, and somebody told him that they remembered him as a child potato head, always running around, like that one time at a major event, Mr. Potato Head had removed all the clothes-parts to himself and had run around the conference hall with the pieces of his genitals attached to him, open to the air, and had found the Pastor Potato Head while he was speaking to some people and had hugged the Pastor’s legs, and that that had been a beautiful sight.
Mr. Potato Head was wearing his smile. He had no desire to remove it or change it. The past could do this to him sometimes.
He saw framed pictures of his father at community events or speaking somewhere, wearing his suit and tie, wearing an elegant smile. In a few of the pictures he wore a beard, but in all he wore his top hat. The Pastor Potato Head had lost his hair.
He walked around some more and ran into Gloria.
“Okay. You’ve seen this,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“I feel okay,” he said.
“Good. Now we should go. I have to get back to work, and I’m sure you need to keep on moving.”
She drove him back to her house in the suburbs. He went inside and got Popcorn in the cage out into the truck. He went back inside and said goodbye to Gloria. She went down into her office to work. He went into her bathroom. He shot up some of the heroin and cocaine he had copped into one of the veins of his thin plastic arms. He felt ready for all oncoming obstacles.
He left the house. He didn’t see Gloria again.
He fed Popcorn and emptied out the cage’s dirtied toilet paper. He put the toilet paper into a large plastic trash can outside Gloria’s house. He felt solidarity with the large plastic trash can.
He sat into the driver’s seat of the truck and began to drive. He was headed to a city to the east. A city with a reputation of never sleeping.
He didn’t need Holiday to hook him up with drugs, but he wanted to see this potato head, this metaphorical brother of his. Holiday had told him that he’d help him move into the city where he had gotten a job teaching English.
The drive from Gloria’s house to the city where Holiday lived was short.
He was driving inside the city now. Mr. Potato Head wasn’t sure where to go. Driving this truck in this enormous city was causing him to feel nervous. His plastic face was wet with perspiration.
He was calling Holiday with his cell-phone. He was stopped at a light. A police officer approached his window and Mr. Potato Head lowered it.
“Turn off the cell or put it on speaker,” the officer said.
Mr. Potato Head hung up on Holiday. He closed the window. He called Holiday back, on speaker.
Holiday explained to him how to get to where he lived.
Mr. Potato Head parked the truck on the street where Holiday lived. He took out Popcorn in the cat cage and brought him inside the apartment. Holiday lived with his girlfriend potato head, Nelly.
Holiday wore baggy shorts, a jersey with the numbers 666 and a pair of eyes of thick black sunglasses. He wore a stubble on his face. Nelly was a short potato head who always wore her long black hair.
Holiday and Mr. Potato Head were sitting in the living room of the apartment. Nelly was inside her bedroom.
Holiday took the marijuana that Mr. Potato Head brought and given him and placed it into the bowl of his bong. He lit the pieces of marijuana with his lighter and inhaled puffs of marijuana smoke. He passed the bong to Mr. Potato Head. Soon they both felt high.
“We’re leaving today, right?” Mr. Potato Head said.
“Yeah. That’s cool,” Holiday said. “I got some golden mushrooms for when we’re done.”
Popcorn in his cage stayed with Nelly. She had agreed to take care of Popcorn while Mr. Potato Head found a place to live. Then he’d return to pick Popcorn up.
They went outside and into the truck. Holiday was driving.
They began the drive towards a city more north, where Mr. Potato Head had gotten a job teaching English to people who had recently moved into the country where he resided.
