The neck I have you could easily feel each finger meet on each hand if you were to choke me. As you might care to imagine, a neck like mine brings with it more trouble than a neck not thin. I have broad shoulders, strong back, and quite a large chest. But having such a neck makes me appear less of the man that I am.
I know another neck. It belongs to a work friend, who I will call Mark. It sits on skinny shoulders that hang over a sick dog’s body with ribs that you could see if the dog hadn’t ate for awhile. Because you would need freakishly large circus hands to feel each tip of each finger should you wish to squeeze the life out of Mark, it has caused him to endure less problems than myself. Or so I have been led to believe.
A few days ago, he handed me a book, How to improve your life in 90 days. With spread wide lips that pushed his jaw fully into the full girth of his neck, he told me he’s going to do it, Improve His Life. I had to ask where he got the book from.
“The bank”, he said brushing his index finger over his overly ripe Adam’s apple. I asked why had the bank given him this book and he told me it was a gimmick to help you manage all aspects of your life productively. If he could manage his life efficiently, he could also manage his finances in a similar fashion. That’s what the bank told him.
What led Mark to manage his life and finances more productively wasn’t so much the book, but his neck. Mark is skin and bones but his neck is thick, so he looks a little bigger in jumpers and heavy knit garments, more intimidating you might say. People who are easily intimidated by others go a little more out of their way for those who are less intimidating.
While Mark read the author’s note, I turned on the radio on my desk and heard a clock chime eleven times. One minute of silence for all those who died in the war unfurled after the eleventh. Slicing through the static hiss of radio silence, a lonely trumpet resonated around some structure I could not see. Without care or thought for the fallen soldiers, the person I call Mark said, “So I’m going to do it, manage my life more productively. But maybe in 45 days. I’ll skip a few chapters.”
My doctor, who has a lightly tanned and reasonably sized neck, tells me there is no operation available.
“Is there an operation to shave a few inches off my jaw, to give the illusion my neck is much thicker than a neck where you can feel each finger on each hand meet?” I ask. He likes me so he suggests I try exercises, or pull in my chin more.
A tripod holds a camcorder mounted on a shelf in a shop window in the local shopping arcade so that everyone who walks past is a television star in a little 14-inch television world. Seeing myself in this little 14-inch television world makes me realise how less thick my neck is than the person who’s trying to sell this same camera to a woman holding a child of three in the shop. I try looking at myself side-ways to see how I look in the television and a group of 14-inch young girls dressed in jeans that reveal pendulum hips and tops that look as if a surgeon has cracked open their chests walk behind giggling at me. I scowl back, once, twice and three times over, but this just produces more laughter and a few derisory remarks I care not to remember for fear they’ll make me want to take a chisel and hammer to my jaw. I walk away from the shop in the opposite direction to where the girls are walking and the journey home is punctuated with my own self-loathing. “Stupid girls,” I say to myself. “Silly, stupid girls.”
The shaving clipper hum following the contours of my skull sounds like a thousand bees have landed on my head. The big sweaty fat man holding the clippers hasn’t any neck at all. The place where his neck should be is nothing more than a collar of white shirt that hasn’t been clean in days. Strands of freshly cut hair clump together on my lap and sit there like miniature nests upon the limb of each leg. There’s a lovely change in colour from one end to the other. The darker end is the oldest part of my hair, the same that has witnessed the persecution my neck had brought. The freshly severed ends are where the newborn hair has sprouted and would have to wait at least six months to witness the same hounding. If it was not for wanting to look more menacing by shaving my hair off, that newborn hair would have grown skyward, free from jibes and mockery, free from witnessing moments like the time I was set upon outside a bar for walking my neck home and two men came out of the bar and one kicked me in the leg and asked if I was a pussy. The friend I was with, who had a good strong masculine neck, didn’t even have one word thrown at him let alone a foot.
“But this is me and this is my neck,” I said to my friend much later in a cab where all I could see of the driver driving us home was a thick neck and curly black hair spiralling out of its nape like bedsprings.
In the barber’s mirror, a total stranger stares back. A fledgling’s head sits perched upon my neck that’s not thick and a wry old smile smiles back at me. I’m reborn. A new man. I pay the barber his money and leave his shop. On the way to work I glare and glower, I snarl and sneer at people who pass. Those who pass don’t appear scared, threatened or concerned that this stranger who has my face may be a danger to them or that I may take it upon myself to drive my fist squarely in their face and rip their heads from their perfectly proportioned necks should the urge present itself. They can be thankful at least for living in ignorance.
Back in work and the person I call Mark says I look like I have cancer. Even my boss thinks I look ill.
I check my reflection in the mirror at work, and sure enough, I look like I’m a bandana away from leukaemia, not menacing or surly like I wanted my lack of hair to present my head to the world to look.
In a hardware store on the same road that leads home I buy a length of rope half the size of my body stood upright and a book on how to tie knots. Page thirteen shows the correct way to bend and curl the rope into a noose and I wonder how small I will need to tie the noose so it fits snugly around my neck that’s not thick.
“Small,” I say to myself whilst threading the rope. “Very small indeed.”