A Life of Honey

It was some late September dreary morning, the clouds hung like steel wool and rain freckled the windows. I walked to the corner grocer and bought one jar of honey. There were probably other items I should have gotten, but I had forgotten the reason I went out in the first place. I didn’t even have a kitchen, what could I buy? The place I was renting off of 112th street belonged to some withering old lady, Mrs. Eskin. She was about the height of a gremlin, the weight of a paper bag, and looking every minute of 89 years old. I rented out one of the bedrooms of her Manhattan apartment; two other students were doing the same. We all shared one bathroom. None of us were allowed to use the kitchen. She had her personal toilet in a small little cupboard of a room, opposite side of the stove. It was enough reason to keep me from arguing for permission. My 60-square foot box of a room had a mini fridge and a half-broken microwave. I managed. It was the cheapest rent in the city.

The supermarket off Broadway and 107th was much like a garden party at all hours of the day. It was a deep burrowed store, constantly buzzing with people. All that Manhattan motion was dizzying, surreal in the same way a circus is surreal, or the moment you finally understand the significance of a peach when you rip through it’s juicy flesh over the kitchen sink one drunken summer night. On occasion, when boredom sunk it’s own teeth into me and I was low on cash, I would saunter into that supermarket and hunt for samples of cheese or pickled tomatoes. The pleasures of bachelorhood are simple, borderline survival techniques. If you live in the jungle, you are at all times the prey and the hunter. You make your way and you learn the rules. But whatever you do, make sure you act like you know exactly what you are doing, even if you are shit-town clueless.
Ah yes, back to the honeyjar. I know what you’re thinking. How could one meaningless little jar of honey be enough to set this high voltage-bachelor jonesin’ for a spell of storytime? Boredom, my friends. The answer is simple, unforgiving, and profoundly wanton boredom. I’ll continue.

I wandered through the middle-eastern spice aisle and then through the seafood section with the lobster tanks and the crab dip and alongside the sushi bar until I ended up in the glassy foods section. Apparently there is only one shelf in the jar aisle for honey. I guess Newyorkers don’t really have a tongue for the stuff. They’re more about salty foods, anything that will jack up their blood pressure and keep them pumping through sidewalk traffic. Anyway, the honey jars stood with the other creamy non-paste, non-liquid food products, the cousin of apricot jelly and the mistress of peanut oil.

The honey jar itself was strangely appealing to me. It was about the width of my wrist and the length of my palm, with one neatly plucked cylindrical honeycomb suspended in the center, surrounded by the bright golden glue even the tamest insects fiend after. Natural Honey it spelled in block letters on the label. I hadn’t had natural honey in a grip, and for less than four dollars a jar, it might have been one of the cheapest food items in New York City, so I bought it. Honey sandwiches, honey tea, honey soup, frozen honey drops; I was coming up with some life sustaining culinary ideas with this stuff.

When I got back to my place I was shivering. The hole in my sole was starting to bother me now. I kicked off my shoes and removed my dampened socks, put on another pair and began to boil some water in my plastic hot pot I filled in the bathroom sink. That honey tea was starting to sound like a divine herbal remedy right now. I pulled the jar from the grocery bag and noticed something I had apparently missed in the store. A dead bee. Yes, a real bee. A dead one. It clung weakly to the underside of the rectangular honeycomb by thin black legs.

I stood statuesque for a moment, half perplexed, half considering whether I should return this infested product back to the store. I let out a grunt of dulled excitement and studied the dead creature mummified in his own juices. In all my years of consuming animal by-products and live ingredients, never have I been so intrigued by a creature of such benign influence.

This is the common fate of a honeybee, is it not? I started falling into a heavy existential lull, pondering the life of bees. They know nothing outside of honey and wax. Do they die as workaholics buzzing tirelessly in their sticky obsessions for perfection? I mean, are they like us? Working for the pleasures of effort itself, and not actually tasting the sweet dew of their labor? Or maybe they are more like drug addicts. Buzzing for a buzz, fiends eager for a fix, for that sticky glucose high. It could be either, and I suppose I thought I could tell from the position in which he was embalmed how this bee had lived his life. I figured he had passed during the apex of some hymenopterus artistic revelation. He looked like the type fool around, to daydream, to forget things and just bask. The bee's existence seems more playful; sweeter one might say.

I imagined him buzzing furiously around the honey hive, perfectly geometrical, assembled and constructed by him and sibling bees. I imagined them gorging in the sweetness of that sticky amber, racing to all corners of their bowling ball weighted home, without a single thought, a blank existence that only runs on instinct and impulse. He and his companions hunting out nectar, sucking and fucking that hive all of their 90-day lifespan. What bliss.

I picked up the jar and held it closer. As dead as he was, this bee seemed to have more life than that ladybug of a woman I had for a landlady. My eyelashes almost brushed against the glass. His legs were thick, probably as muscular as insect hind legs come. They each had tiny, beard-like hairs projecting outward. His coat was the color of a high noon summer, and black as Texas leather, striped down his thorax like a bomber. His eyes were small, deep black pits, like pilot goggles, as kaleidoscopic as the honeycomb itself. As if the design of his eyes rendered his entire world in honeycomb configuration. Everything honeycomb: Honeycomb skies, honeycomb flowers, honeycomb bees, honeycomb honeycombs. Everything. He was dead, still. He must have swam in that overdose avalanche for weeks already, an addict basking in the revelry of some beautiful ecstasy just before slipping out.

I finally unscrewed the jartop and spooned a teaspoon sized spoon of honey into the only ceramic cup I had in my possession. I decided to leave the bee inside the jar as a monument to nature. As a fossilized animal with the tool he used to produce the goo I was to consume. And, I confess, as some lively decoration to my otherwise bland and peeling white-walled room.
I stirred the cup slow with my teaspoon, a metal rod of a utensil rusted to a brownish-red, dissolving the honey into the dark liquid, but still the tea lacked the sweetness I had expected. After some contemplation and toe massaging, I unscrewed the jartop again and slipped the spoon back in, all the way to the glass base this time, and fidgeted around with my museum pet. With some effort I ripped the bee from off his honeycomb, one of his microscopic legs still attached to the underside of that golden death plank, scooped him from the bottom and dumped him with another spoon’s worth of honey into my cup.

It was dream-like. His body sank below, dissolving with the sugar in the hot dark herb-suffused water. For a couple minutes I just watched the steam dance off the edge of the cup, wisping wildly into vapor and then into nothing. Then, almost completely by impulse, I picked up the cup and swallowed the whole dark concoction in four or five large gulps. It ran like liquefied magma down my throat, the heat neither scalding nor calming, but perfusing warmly in my gut. Bee and all, all drunk in still, damp September room silence. Over and done. I burped. I cocked my head toward the window and listened to the rain softly beginning to click on the sill. After licking my lips in a daze of abent-mindedness I decided with satisfying breath the fate of this bee was justified by my own fate. And the taste; still bitter.