Brief Instances of Invisibility

He's wearing socks that have an R on the right foot and an L on the left, explaining that they cost him twenty dollars down at the sporting goods store, where the manager's cap is as worn as the rafters where he spends his Sunday nights, dressed all in black, black pants, black shirt, and he tells you that the shirt and the pants don't matter, that you could buy them at kmart or pick them out of a dumpster or even just color all over your arms and legs with a black sharpie but what matters are the two things that he makes his own, that keep him from turning completely invisible - the socks and the tape.

The socks he picks up at the sporting goods store for twenty bucks, they're expensive, he knows, but he tells you about how while you're pulling them on they feel so uncomfortable, so tight, until you hit that sweet spot and suddenly you're not wearing socks at all, you just have on another layer of silky skin, and how he loves that feeling - so warm, so soft, so perfect.

The tape is black, he buys that at the sporting goods store too, along with the expensive socks. It's for boxing, and he has his girlfriend decorate it with a silver sharpie right before the show, they hang out after church, and then in the evening he changes into his gear and drives them down to the theater, she cracks his fingers for him, she kisses his cheek, she leaves to meet up with her friends in the city and he takes the caged elevator up to the rafters, he watches the mic check while he slips on the rock climbing shoes he wrapped up in grip tape, he lives the regularity, he made this routine his own because up in the dark it's easy to lose yourself so he spends twenty bucks on socks and gets his girlfriend to write him notes on the tape that keeps his palms safe while he digs them into sharp edges and scalding lights so that he can always be himself, so that he won't disappear, he tells you about the time he slipped up on a greasy beam in the middle of Anthony Sher's I.D., and he tells you about the nail that cut up his arm but saved his life, he tells you about the blood that ran down his wrist and elbow and dripped to the stage, where the actors fell easily into roles that were not their own while above them he struggled to hold on.