Damon and the Samosa

The flustered waitress hastily bent over to pick up the shattered glass. It had fallen off of her tray as the eager and substantially chubby boy demanded another plate of samosas. "The customer is always right" she repeated in her head, hoping to find an exception which deemed punching this odious, fat-assed punk in the teeth as hard as she could acceptable. Nearly thumbing this invisible clause, she continued sweeping the shards of glass onto her tray with her bare hands. She went back to the kitchen to find a broom and asked Peter, the cook, for another plate of samosas. She pushed the kitchen door open with a red wooden broom to find the fried pastry connoisseur back for more. "Hey. Can you hustle on those samosas?" he demanded "I have to go deejay my cousin's birthday party." "Oh yeah? What are you gonna play?" she asked as she grabbed the collar of his oversized t-shirt which read "HIP HOP IS DEAD" on the center in large, oozy purple letters. 

"What are you doing?" he shrieked in a much higher voice.  Just as he was about to scream for his mother, she tightened her grip on his shirt, inching closer to his face. "What in the fuck is your name chubs?" she whispered fiercely. "Jesus lady. It's Damon" he stuttered, silently praying that his parents would discover him soon. "Damon? That's your name? Damon?" she asked, barely audible. "Take off your fucking shirt Damon." she insisted, baring her usually concealed snaggle tooth. "No way! Are you crazy?" he gasped incredulously, nearly shitting his pants. "NOW!" she grunted in his ear, pushing the broom handle into his throat threateningly "Or your cousin will never have another birthday again." He threw his hands up in the air in surrender pleading "Ok. Ok. I'll give you my shirt, just don't hurt Mazie." 

"Alright." she heaved "and you're not going to tell your parents either, because I'll fucking kill them too." Damon pulled up the bottom of his shirt, and slowly began pulling it over his head, revealing a large potbelly and a pair of sweaty, stretch-mark pocked breasts. "Here. Take it" he yelped "just stay away from my family." The waitress reached for an extra large restaurant t-shirt sitting on the chair beside her. "Here. Put this on." she said with the tiniest twinge of remorse. He obeyed as Peter yelled from the kitchen "Hey Tracy! Your samosas are up." She opened the kitchen door and reached for them. "Here you go Damon. Eat up." she smiled "You want another coke to wash those down with?" He replied with a hesitant "Sure" and returned to the table with the plate of samosas.

When his mother asked what had taken so long, he used everything he had learned in his three years at the children's theater to convince her that the waitress was really nice and they had been hanging out in the back. "See? She even gave me a t-shirt." he exclaimed gesturing to the large picture of Ganesha dancing over his heart. "Oh how sweet of her." his mother exclaimed  "We'll have to give her a nice big tip." A moment later, the waitress came out with a glass of soda for Damon. "Thank you for being so nice to our little boy" the mother said, gingerly touching the waitress's forearm with her scarlet nailed hand. "It's no problem Ma'am. Damon is such a delightful boy. I hope he likes his new shirt." She returned a few minutes later with the bill and wished the family a fine evening at Mazie's birthday party. After they had left she went back to clear the table and discovered a forty percent tip. She smiled to herself, freeing a long captive laugh and returned to the kitchen. 

"I'm out Peter." she informed the cook and walked out the back door to the parking lot. Stepping out onto the asphalt, she stripped naked and put on her new t-shirt. With furious glee, she gazed down at her chest to see the purple letters gleaming in the new started drizzle. She let out a long "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" and ran all the way home.

Jermaine and the Finger

The rosy cheeked butler sat on a three legged stool in the basement, blotting his soaking brow with a silken purple cloth. He let out a slow grunt of frustration and resumed his crooked position over the table. He gazed confusedly at the little machine; it's gears locked in an eternal jam, unless he could mend them. He surveyed his tools and reached for a small needle nose pliers. "This oughta do the trick" he muttered in a dampened tone. He reached cautiously into a narrow space between two gears and gave a hopeful pinch. In an instant the machine resumed it's course and the gears churned a wild tune. Sparks flew out as the man's finger severed neatly, half still attached to his hand, and the other forever lost in the depths of the machine. He once again removed the silken cloth from his front pocket and wrapped it tightly around his newly formed stump. "I've done it!" he exclaimed, and leaped in jubilant excitement, a river of red meandering down his forearm. The gramophone was fixed. He would be eating well tonight.

"Jermaine!" an anxious voice called from the floor above. He dropped the cloth in surprise and mopped up a small puddle of blood on the floor as he replied "I've fixed it madam." He lifted the machine off of the table and ascended the thirteen stairs which separated him and his mistress. As he opened the door, his eyes were cut by the bright lights of the lounge. Hours spent in the din of the basement made for a lengthy adjustment, but as the room came into focus he spotted Lady Fiona reclining in a La-Z-Boy in the corner. Her feet rose above her head as she pulled the upholstered lever to her right. "Do you have it?" she asked despondently. "Yes ma'am" he replied and pulled a Rick James record out from behind his tailed waistcoat. "Let's Dance!" she demanded and threw herself onto the bear skin rug. He dropped the needle on the record, and hoped Lady Fiona wouldn't question the absence of half of his ring finger. They boogied earnestly until the butler was too winded to continue. 

He climbed the stairs up to his attic bedroom and exchanged his uniform for a pair of striped pajamas. His old bones creaked with the bed as sat down. He picked his feet up off of the ground and positioned himself comfortably on his back. He turned off the small lamp on his bedside table, heaved a sigh of a prayer, and was asleep. He died that night, deep in dreams of Rick James and affordable yet luxurious living room furniture. Lady Fiona discovered his body the next morning and wept at the loss of her old friend.

Two weeks later she noticed a most foul odor coming from her gramophone, and when her vast collection of febreze failed to cover the smell she decided to take apart the machine. She toiled for the majority of the evening, finally stumbling upon the old butler's decomposing finger around eleven o'clock. She lovingly wrapped it in the purple hanky she had found on his bedroom floor, and thought about what to do. Moments later, with a fiendish grin on her face, she went down to the basement and filled an old apricot jam jar with formaldehyde. She returned to the lounge, tied a red satin ribbon around the butler's bony finger and dropped it into it's final resting place. 

From that day forward, each time she yearned for her old dancing partner, she would play a disco record on her newly refurbished gramophone. During especially lonely times, she would sweep the jar off of her kitchen counter and waltz feverishly, imagining a sweeter time, when her butler Jermaine would hold her firmly in his experienced arms and masterfully caress the back of her next with his index finger. Yes. She missed him, but the beacon on her counter would shine through a world of weariest darkness.

Gregor and the Cracker Mishap

The small bearded man took joy in the little salted crackers.  He opened his mouth wide in anticipation and knocked a hearty handful of Asian delicacies down his eager gullet.  Masticating, the man fell back in horror at the memory of a mortifying childhood incident occurring June 21, 1989:  A large grasshopper, brown.  crisp, entered his mouth unexpectedly as he sat in a wicker seat.  The grass quivered, the sprinkler sprinkled.  Dude was choking. . .and the salty critter tumbled in his startled mouth.  Aware that his beloved was watching, he chewed twice in surprise and shuttered at the bitter taste of shame.

  He smiled a wormy grin and reached for another sizeable installment of rice crackers.  At once, the sprinkler turned on, twitching in its nervous pattern, and he turned and took pause, alarmed at this:  a second reminder of his former embarrassment.  He recalled the X-ray that had revealed the grasshopper live and running the length of each rib like Sisyphus, like the eternally damned.  A whispy shadow in a darkened chamber.  

With every swing of the wok, the bag of rice crackers edged closer and closer to the corner of the counter.  Eventually, the bag slipped off and slopped onto the linoleum floor to join the victim.  Soon the plastic of the cracker bag was spattered with shiny blood droplets.  The bearded man's behemoth cat Gregor had desperately attempted to clean himself in the sink at the discovery that his massive haunches were too wide for his antiseptic tongue to reach.  Through these efforts, Gregor sustained a nine - inch slice through the belly carelessly given at the hand of a neglected butcher knife resting on the counter.  The bearded man heard a banshee - like yelp; a call to fell weeping willows, to stir cold lakes into crested waves, to ignite the fires of the ashiest hearths, and the most heartless bellies.  "My beloved," he thought.  

Trouble arose when a group of punks emerged from a shrub ,sporting bicep tattoos and necklaces.  Melvin immediately cowered and offered them his weekend funds, but they craved the taste of blood.  Fin.

Missed Connections

Recently, we've become fascinated by the Missed Connections section of Craig's List, in which people write addressing people with whom they'd had chance encounters in restaurants, or made eye contact with on the bus. I wrote a series about such encounters this morning.

7:43 AM
Saw you on the 3 bus yesterday. You were wearing a green jacket, the green was the color of elm leaves in full sunlight. One sleeve was rolled up almost to your elbow, and your forearm pushed a little against the fold. You took the jacket off, and your arm moved slowly and elegantly, as if its own separate being. Would you like to talk sometime?

8:24 AM
I was on the 3 yesterday in a green jacket that I did indeed remove. It was hot on the bus, and I steadily felt myself becoming foggy with the temperature, as if the feeling of being overheated could conceal and muffle other happenings of my life, the way cloud cover does on a bay. Have you ever been to the ocean? Were you the man in the red hat across the aisle?

9:11 AM
I am not the man with the red hat, although I recall him too, now that you mention it. I don’t wear hats, I’ve never liked them. I once had a tightly knit cap that my aunt made for me. It had an itchy stretch and pulled slightly upwards when I wore it, in part because it was too tight and in part because of the massive pom pom she had sewed on the top. I always had to wear it in cold weather, no excuses my mother said, although I thought of many: it was too unique for daily wearl, it was too artfully stitched, it pulled at my ears and might eventually pull them off, hairs of mine that found their way into the wiry knitting were inevitably pulled out. And as I ran on the playground with my friends, the pom pom flopped back and forth, counting the moments until a hole would appear, and the hat would be set aside. I am the man who was holding lilac clippings in his hand. I have never been to the ocean. You got off at Spooner and Monroe. Where were you going?

9:35 AM
I was going to the grocery store to buy eggs. I was once presented with a single egg from the grandmother of a friend. She talked little, but when we were putting on our coats she approached me and placed a large, white egg in my palm. I cupped it in both hands as we walked to the driveway, as we rode home in the car. Out of sight, it grew warm, and somehow the slightness of its shell became more apparent. Yesterday, I awoke from a dream in which she had placed another egg in my hand, a fuchsia one dappled with deeply pigmented spots. Awake, I checked the refrigerator but was out of eggs. I closed my eyes, and recalled making a fritata for a dinner party, and cracking forty eggs into a large metal bowl for whisking. Each yolk fell, vibrantly whole, into its own clear gel. So I got on the 3, and eventually bought four cartons of eggs, a little bit of thyme, a sprig of fresh basil. But in truth, now that they are in my fridge I am reluctant to recreate this memory. Today I fried two eggs and ate them with toast and cheese, the favorite breakfast of a former lover of mine. It was too heavy, in the end. Where did you get off?

9:57 AM
Have you ever seen the shells of ostrich eggs? A woman sells them at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings, and the eggs themselves are weighty and tan, somehow more reminiscent of the developing bird that would have been inside them. The woman keeps a basket full of pieces of the shell on her table. They are like mosaic tiles, thick, and white along their broken rims. Anyone who likes may keep a piece, but I never take one. I got off way on the west side of town, at a strip mall near a lone ice cream shop that stands on a patch of dry ground away from the other shopping stretches. There’s an Iron Skillet nearby, I often went there as a teenager for black coffee and hash browns, with friends or alone. One woman has been working there for at least half a decade now, and she has never showed me any signs of recognition, although she must know me at this point. The other day, I felt as I sometimes do after a few weeks without black coffee and hash browns, and I clipped some lilacs for her from the bush behind my house and got on the bus. They’d already started to wilt slightly, as if they are made of muscles that have tired from weeks of blooming. The bus ride didn’t help. I watched you take off your jacket and crack each finger on each hand, a gesture I’ve never been able to bring myself to do but I admire every time I see someone else doing it. It indicates, I think, such a trust in one's own body, that something won’t just snap, that all of your joints won’t be whittled away years later. I watched you, and I thought, that is some lady. And the woman at the Iron Skillet, she is some lady too. I arrived on the West Side, stepped out of the bus, and crossed the four lane road to the strip mall. Inside the air conditioning was on, and the room tasted so dry it was almost chalky. All the booths were empty, and I sat in one by the window, where I could imagine the heat leaking through the glass. I ordered black coffee and hash browns and made a tower out of the creamer and jam packets while I waited. My food came, I ate. I left the bouquet of lilacs with my pay and tip. I looked for her through the window once I’d left, to see her reaction to the flowers, but couldn’t see in because of the glare. I wanted to tell her, Do you realize how long ago the potato first left its origins in the Andes, and do you know how unpopularly it was received by Europeans? Do you know that Marie Antoinette wore potato flowers in her hair to try to make it palateable to the French, because of it was cheap, nutritious, and calorically dense, and because the King realized that famine would contribute to their eventual downfall and death? That he placed his guards on the lawn to guard plantings of potatos, and strategically let them off early so that people would steal them out of the yard? That one can live indefinitely on potatoes and milk? That you can do whatever you like with these lilacs, you can wear them in your hair? By which I would have meant, People all over the world have been interacting for a long, long time, yet I have never found it in myself to leave the Midwest, and I don’t know if I want to.

You can check out Missed Connections for the Madison area here: http://madison.craigslist.org/mis/

You can read more about the history of the potato, as well as the histories of human relationships with the apple, the tulip, and marijuana, in Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/conversation/jan-june01/botany_06-29.html