TWO WEEK CRUSH
Humbert would have died
For six years, during periods I wasn’t in school, I held a shit job bussing tables at the Crystal Lake Country Club. I can point to years of hideously unsafe living, but when it comes down to it, I was always quite stable. I am probably the most stable person I know. I didn't even mind bussing tables, not even for six years. It had its own. Downtime like that is probably just as (if not more so) formative in a life than the things we popularly speak of: our college days, “teachers who believed in” us, the downright ugliness we see between our undeveloped shoulders as we book- and butt-clutch it in the halls of a nameless junior high. (Dear God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death, and let me never never fart in this place.) Furthermore, wait jobs put a person in contact with a great many strangers who we’d likely never encounter otherwise.
A family asks what the special is tonight. I’m pouring water. I tell them the waitress will be by in a moment. They ask, “But don’t you know?” I say, “I think it’s a halibut, but I’m not exactly sure.” The woman pauses. She smiles wide. She says, “Are you from Sweden?”
Ms. Sateris, who I’ve heard is the widow of a mafia man killed by a car bomb, comes into the bar. It’s late. She’s the only one, and is often the only one. As is our custom, we stay open until the members have all gone home, and they have all gone home but her. So she begins drinking. Her lips are full and painted. Her golfer's shorts bloom from a tiny waist. Her limbs, I think, remember the life of a younger woman. After she smiles, she looks away. She looks away as she smiles. She goes to the juke box while I begin recleaning the dining room. The lights are low. It’s us and the bartender. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” plays while I wipe the tables a second time. She reads the ice in her glass as one would tea leaves. Uninterrupted, “Crazy” plays twelve more times.
So, good lord, the days of our lives. …Every Mother’s Day was a 13-hour, breakless shift. I once worked a 19-hour day for a Motorola golf outing. By the end of it, I saw atoms quiver before me, I was a knife in the universe, and had to be careful where I stepped. I wondered how it is two atoms don’t just fuck us royal one day and, without human provocation, eradicate the Izods at the ninth hole.
I was 19. The Halperins came for dinner. The daughter, an accelerated twelve, wore a short skirt with black stockings strained thin at mid-thigh. She turned sideways in her seat and propped her legs, knees high, on the seat beside her whenever I poured water, so I was always reaching across her body, and the metal pitcher threatened to drip its cold condensation, and what would I say then? Her father drank something like a seabreeze and joked uncomfortably with me, while his daughter drank her water, and much of it, along with strawberry virgin daiquiris. I had ponied my grunger's hair to look the part: the suddenly refined student, a serious young man. Cummerbund included. There I was in my jacketless tux. Yes, Mr. Halperin. I'll check on that. The grandmother at the table stopped me. My pitcher of water sloshed still. She said, “You look like Jeff Spicoli.” No joke: THAT Spicoli. FastTimes at Ridgemont High Spicoli. (True enough: My hair was decently curly until I moved to Minnesota, a place that seems to have given me hair trauma.) My cummerbunded co-worker, Alvaro, shook his head. “Oh my god,” he said in his thick accent, which gave them all a laugh.
It was the only place I've heard the word "decadent" used in conversation. I was clearing dinner plates from table 9 (generally a four-top round) while the guests debated the spiritual-gastronomical merits of having dessert. The host was an odd odd man with a rather affected way of speaking, jut-jawed like he was trying to sound like a Harvard graduate. The waitress--Wendy, a total sweet pea for whom I made Absolut white Russians when the shifts were over and the members had gone home--recommended the Snicker Doodle Pie. The host loosed a rabid grunt. He said, "Ohhhh. Decadent."
-cK
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First crush
Funny how the phoenix of one's thoughts can skulk about with a trailer name like Tami.
Tami was the foster kid who came to stay with my family when I was seven or eight, but she wasn’t our foster kid. She lived with the family of my neighbor's friend. Her real mother was an alcoholic who drank during pregnancy, which left Tami with a bit of fetal alcohol syndrome. She had trouble making connections sometimes, and she certainly had an addictive personality. But those conditions were as much a result of her birth circumstance as it was of her life's instability and general teenage wildness. Her foster parents couldn't quite handle her and asked my neighbor to take care of her, but since my neighbors didn't have children and never planned to, and since they drank quite a bit—the woman who lived there has been treated (unsuccessfully) for alcohol dependency in the years since—and threw parties, the request then came to my parents. The foster parents paid my parents a bit of rent, I think, and Tami stayed in our downstairs bedroom, which five years later became my own.
It was a nice room to have. It was the only bedroom on the lower level, and there was a tv, a bathroom, a kitchen. It was like a little apartment after hours when the family had gone to bed.
There were certain ground rules, which I hadn't known about—or at least there was one: If she came home drunk or stoned around my siblings and I she would be kicked out. Otherwise, they let her be. No curfew, no chores. She could eat with us if she wanted to. She seemed to like the arrangement, and I think she genuinely liked being around kids because she could relax. There was no teenage pressure, you know? She was polite and patient, she told me stories. I was fascinated by her. She was a sleep-deprived waif, a bag of bones with cherry red lipstick and little banana boobs beneath tight tops. Each morning a cab driver named Felix came to pick her up—did she go to the Annex? The high school for the flunkos and discipline cases?—but she was never ready. I'd sit downstairs watching cartoons and eating cereal, and waiting. Tami would peek out from the bathroom where she was adding some curl to her otherwise dry, early 80s hair, and ask me to run out and tell Felix five more minutes. And I would, even in the winter. Even in my thin, Star Wars pajamas.
At some point I discovered more of her routine, and it became mine to get up just before six and wait on the stairs. From there I could see into the living room, to the door through which she walked each morning in her underwear on her way to the shower.
After school, if she came back to the house, she’d sit in the rocking chair and stare out at the willow tree and blow smoke rings because I asked her too. Sometimes I tried to shape the smoke before it broke up, or I’d just hold out my finger and let the smoke drift around it, which I suppose is its own Freudian mess.
Other memories get lost in here: a week during which she lived at a hotel with some boy; a night she came home drunk, or maybe just without a key, and rather than wake my parents and risk getting kicked out for good she slept on the front porch.
Five or ten years later, I'm really not sure when, she stopped by to talk to my parents and thank them for their help. She was living in Texas, and probably not doing too well, but she seemed very happy to see them and all in all comfortable with where she was at in life. She was thin as a rail and still seemed to suffer from a bit of sleep deprivation, but she was at peace with life, I think, whether it placed her in a trailer park in Texas or as a live-in with a family in the satellite suburbs northwest of Chicago.
The first 45 I ever bought was the Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby."
-cK
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Note to self
Found myself eating tirimasu ice cream straight from the container. Of course, I was spooning around the softened edges. One doesn't need to be a forensic expert to spot this straight-from-the-carton excavation pattern.
Be civilized, use a bowl.
-cK
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Release
Some people like to walk where the gods of history walked. Some people.
En route to Chanhassan, Minnesota, for a visit to Prince's studio, Paisley Park, I decided that my afternoon would be a waste if I did not urinate somewhere in that studio--preferably in a bathroom.
First, though, let me tell you this much: If the doors of Paisley are opened for public visits again, and if you happen to go, when someone in Studio A asks you if you play drums, say YES. You might even add, "I am a drummer." When our tour group was asked, no one responded, save for this unimaginative girl who no doubt did once play drums, only she played a snare or something in a high school band, or maybe just middle school. So the sound guy takes her into the granite-walled drum room while our tour guide, one annoying man named "Chad," who I'm quite sure would prefer to give a "Nothing to see here" tour, says, "With a granite wall, sound just explodes." (Look, Chad, you were annoying; but I have to agree: sound did explode.) The guy in the drum room disclaims he is not a professional drummer, but then belts out a basic funky beat. He's got a decent sense of time. (Dare I say Morris Day and the Time?) And then he turns the sticks and the kit over to the girl, who says, no shit, "A cowbell!" She played the cowbell for us. A fucking cowbell.
But the real question is, Did she expose herself in Paisley Park? if only in the privacy of the lavatory?
I pissed at the end of the tour. I pissed the piss of kings (er, princes). Prior to this moment of release, my friend Heather cued me in: lavender soap.
I am here to tell you, mortals, that amid the souped up digital equipment, the basketball half-court, the Prince for Prince iconography, the Oscar for his Purple Rain soundtrack, the caged doves, the swank kitchen, the kickass lounge furniture, the gold records, and the aromatherapy candles from Pier 1--that's right, Pier 1--there is lavender soap with a hint of musk. Even in the men's room.
I went home. I urinated. I washed my hand's with some nameless Aloe soap. I felt like a total puss.
-cK
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Heartless on State Street
Saturday, early evening. I was nearly late for a friend’s reading, having lingered too long with my parents at a gorgeous little trattoria on State Street in Madison. The restaurant is in the revamped corner building once occupied by The Ovens of Brittany, a vegetarian restaurant at which I had had a black bean burrito so wondrous that I still recall how good I felt on that day some twelve years ago. The name of the trattoria escapes me, but I suspect it was called Tutto Pasta, which is also a bow-tie dish that my father ordered.
My mother does not eat much olive oil, so my initial excitement at spotting "trattoria" written on the sign was tempered by the knowledge it was probably not a match for that good woman's fickle gastronomy. Yet, she glanced at the menu and found some excellent low- or no-olive oil foods--including a remarkable mushroom, butter and oregano soup--so we ventured in. The tipping point may have been our mutual remembrance of The Ovens of Brittany. It had been a favorite lunch spot back in the day when the family might venture northward. It was a city in which my parents could look at books and let us venture a bit on our own. My siblings and I could marvel at the size of the city, all the young people, the streets that allowed only pedestrians and buses, etc. It was this golden place for us.
So there we were, eating a fantastic dinner. Trattoria cooking is quite simple. I suppose it's like Italy's soul food. Lots of olive oil, pepper flakes, and pasta. Three to six ingredient meals (including spices). Good food for sharing. It's my favorite to cook.
And then it happened: I fell hopelessly in love with a waitress who must have been part of the restaurant owning family. She still had an accent, and there was a careful pace to her speech that suggested she thought of everything first in Italian. Initially she wandered towards our corner, though there were no other customers in this area. It was early in the night, just 5:30. Across the street a woman was in her fourth hour of fiddle playing, collecting loose change from passers-by. The waitress looked over our table, and then seemed to disappear behind me, though I was sitting at the window. She was, as it turns out, looking over the tables set along the walk, but I was so confused by this little moment that I stopped talking looked around me, wondering just what it might be that she was looking for. When our eyes crossed then I blushed terribly. Olive-skinned with a summer’s gloss beneath. Black hair pulled lightly back. There seemed to be a faint black line that circled the irises of her eyes, and shards of light within their depths. She wore a white button-up shirt with a very slight ruffle to it and the top two buttons undone, a black skirt to just below the knees. She was not like the Wisconsony college women who worked there--long limp hair, jeans and Italian football jerseys.
Later, when she asked if she should take the plate away, careful, always careful, making eye contact (How could one refuse?), I'd like to think she was asking, "May I rip your thundering heart from your chest, for you will never have need of it beyond this moment?" I said Yes, please, that would be nice. She smiled. She took what she'd come for. I fell apart.
-cK
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The Bachelorette
Once again, I was caught off-guard by the abrupt conclusion of a dinner reception--which should conclude, properly, with the end of the meal, and this reception did, but as I’m someone who warms to an environment and then becomes quite sociable, well, I didn’t get around to meet all the table guests and now feel a bit foolish. I do not want to be a wasted guest. Still:
After the reception, Jen, John Wallace, the Newburn and I went to a nearby martini bar. This is Decatur, Illinois, a city of about 80,000, according to the bartender, which is about 60,000 more than I would have guessed. She was amused when we ordered Old Style, a beer they did not carry. She said, “You must be from Chicago.” Fair enough.
A group of young, flush-faced women were having a grand time, laughing themselves to snorts and near asphyxiation. A short, shy woman in the center of things kept covering her mouth when she laughed as if she was burping. She wore a sash that read BACHELORETTE. Jen had just gone to the bar in search of strangers and cigarette lighters. The woman in the sash was brought to our table. Her escort kept her in check with a hand on her elbow and asked, “Would one of you fine gentlemen buy this woman a shot?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I will.”
A man in a flatcap is always a gentleman. She’s pleased. She instructs me to bring a blowjob to the corner table and gives me a post-it note. Erratic scrawl: “Have one guy buy you a blow job w/ extra whipped cream.”
So the bartender and I shoot the shit as she prepares this. We talk about Decatur, the drives from Minnesota and Chicago. The man two seats over asks “What the hell is that?” when the conical whipped cream tower is placed in front of me.
“A blowjob,” I say. And perhaps feeling a little pressured add, “For that bachelorette party over there.”
“A blowjob?” he says.
“They just don’t make classy-named drinks anymore,” I say. He agrees. The age of rob roys and manhattans is over.
The bartender adds some extra chocolate sprinkles and tops this tower of whipped cream with a full-stemmed cherry. She grins, undoubtedly knowing what I’m walking into, but I, unaware of the ways of bachelorette parties, smile naively and sally forth to a shared fate.
The flush-faced women rock in their seats as I approach. Something is about to happen. The bachelorette blushes terribly and covers her mouth. “Congratulations,” I tell her. Her friends tell me I need to stay a bit. They insist I sit down.
The martini bar is full of lounge chairs, small sofas and love seats. Small square end tables are scattered about. In this corner section, all the seats are taken and they’ve pushed many end tables together to create something of a coffee table to accommodate their mess of empty shots, umbrella drinks, and martini glasses undoubtedly reserved for later thefts. All the chairs are taken, so I, ever literal, say, “All right,” and proceed to sit on the fucking floor. This sends them into hysterics.
One of them, scarcely containing her embarrassment for me, says through her fingers, “Oh, no no no. You have to sit on the table.” I comply like a puppy. Now they hand me the shot. A bit of induction strikes me: It’s a blowjob, it’s a bachelorette party, they want me to … drink this? No. That can’t be it. It’s a blowjob, it’s a bachelorette party, they want HER to drink it, yes, that seems right, but I’m holding it now so they must want me to … OH. The eyebrows raise.
The obvious is finally spelled out: “Place this between your knees.” I do. And amid flashbulbs and cackles, the bride-to-be, with hands behind her back and down on one knee, sucks clean the whipped center with a fierce, Hooverific sluck. She stands wobbly as her friends shriek and point and celebrate. A lone member of the party even raises the roof. The bachelorette holds her mouth, holds the other hand out, and lowers her eyes, red-faced, as the cherry stem tickles her throat.
-cK
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