Grimoire Diabolique by Edward Lee

phlegm-eater.
     
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    He couldn’t help it, and he never knew why.
    This is so wrong, he thought every time he scraped up a lump and ate it. What seemed even more wrong was what followed after he swallowed: a titan sexual surge. Most times he was able to contain himself until he got home, other times no. Other times he’d slink into a urine-fetid alley or between a high bank of bushes, to vigorously masturbate.
    Seeing phlegm on the street lit a oracular fire in him. It nearly stripped him of all sanity, of everything that could be called healthy.
    Barrows had to have it.
    He had to eat it.
    Picture a person stumbling across the desert. This person has not drunk water in days. Suddenly that person, close to death, happens upon a clear cold babbling brook…
    To Barrows, the babbling brook was sputum. The dirtier the better. The more catastrophically disgusting, the more he’d need it. Homeless bums were best, the people literally rotting in the alleys, hacking up clumps of respiratory discharge from soiled and emphysematic lungs. Virtual wads of congestion. Sometimes the chunks were coppery with blood, or uniquely textured by bits of cancerous lung tissue. Sometimes the clumps contained mysterious grit.
    All the better for Barrows.
    He had to have it. He had to scrape it raw off the sidewalk and eat it, hoping no one would bear witness. He could imagine the reaction of an associate partner walking down the street one day and seeing Barrows scarfing bum phlegm. He could imagine what the firm’s president might say upon hearing of this. With every day that went by, and with every chunk of some rummie’s hock that he ate, Barrows knew he was living on borrowed time.
    Once a Seattle cop had seen him, and though Barrows could not conceive that eating phlegm off the sidewalk violated the law, he was grateful that the constable had received a call on his radio at the same time. Barrows did not want to have to explain what he was doing. A number of homeless had seen him too, but he needn’t explain to them.
    Sometimes he paid the dregs of the local prostitutes to cough into his mouth. Sometimes he’d walk right up to paralyzed bums rotting in alleyways and pay them $100 to drag up a giant loogie and hack it up into his hand, after which he’d eat it like a culinaire savoring Nicouli ossetra caviar off of toast points. Once he’d paid an obese homeless woman on Jackson Street to cough up a big one into his mouth. She’d smelled worse than anything Barrows’ olfactory senses had ever experienced, but she’d obliged and then some, hacking up a blob of phlegm the size of a baby’s fist. When Barrows had rolled it around on his tongue, he’d found a rotten tooth, which he’d swallowed with the rest of the prize.
    Bums and whores and Seattle’s constant human street detritus were one thing, but he knew he had to be careful, more careful than he’d been in the past. He couldn’t have people on the street recognizing him, oh no, not with his picture constantly in the state market news, not with his picture in Forbes and the financial trade magazines. But too often it seemed that the longer this grotesque curse went on, the more he became lost in it.
    With every glob he slurped down, he realized how wrong it was, how demented and abnormal. And for the two decades that had transpired since his first indulgence at age twenty, he’d always assumed that his sickness was so remote, and so insulated, as to be totally exclusive to himself.
    What could he say to his doctor? What could he say to a shrink? I have this problem, see? I have to eat phlegm.
    No, no. He could not say that, because he couldn’t believe that anyone else on the surface of the earth could be stricken with such a bizarre and filthy addiction.
    Barrows, in his curse, felt alone in the world. Until—
     
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    He’d been hunting for a fresh wad, after work as usual, stalking the most rank warrens of Third and Yesler—the “Bum”