WHATEVER HAPPENED TO KITCHENS?
by Albert Huffstickler
"I haven't seen any of those people In years. Everybody I know has drifted away."
--Old Plantation Restaurant habitue.
"So be their place of one estate
With ashes echoes and old wars,
Or ever we be of the night
Or we be lost among the stars."
--Calverlys, by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Places people come to in the evening after work
to eat and drink coffee, then wander back later
with the dark coming in and the loneliness on them.
Day in and day out, that little core of regulars
meeting in clusters, each cluster aware of the others,
nodding to each other. And the waitress of many years
knowing just what to bring when someone sits down.
Weary with the day, they come, ready to mingle hopes and needs,
voices tinged with boredom, a furtiveness about them,
the furtiveness of one who has no place else to go.
"What ever happened to Kitchens?"
They find their places and they stay, year after year,
a new face appearing from time to time, an old one vanishing,
the loss absorbed slowly after endless discussion of
the manner of his going, his new estate;
the light in the room a quality of their lives, a condition
more familiar than the rooms to which they return
to fall exhausted across the rumpled bed and sleep
till morning draws a damp and cheerless hand across the drugged face.
"What ever happened to Kitchens? Where did he go?"
The one who left unannounced, the one who broke all the rules
and vanished without a word--
the brawler, the bruiser, the banger against lives,
who fought and cursed and spoke his mind and embarassed them
to a man,
who was ugly and graceless and knew all their flaws
and flung them in their faces and laughed at them
and was dragged out more than once drunk,
cursing the world and the cops and all of them individually
and returned unrepentant to their subdued midst
to continue as though he'd never left, haranguing, mocking them--
And then vanished one night with a wave and a curse to return no more,
black jacket flapping, bald head shining, beak-like nose
plowing through the darkness like a ship at sea, big Harley roaring.
"So long, Motherfuckers!"
The shadows of the room converge, the talk goes on.
The shadows listen and do not comment. The waitress
moves from table to table, filling salts and peppers, wiping
catsup lids.
Voices sound from the parking lot, shrill and despairing.
Lights flash against the window then vanish to the engine’s roar.
They huddle closer in the close, still room.
The night grows. They are dreams without a dreamer.
"What ever happened to Kitchens?"
They slouch in their places, humble before his absence.
"He shouldn't have gone away like that. He should have said something!"
Lonely and dissatisfied, they talk desultorily, watching the clock.
"Somebody oughta call the shop and ask."
"Maybe he's there and don't want to be bothered."
"Maybe he's--" the word never comes out.
They crouch over their coffee cups; the shadows draw closer.
His absence as bulky and menacing as his presence--but less acceptable.
The waitress refills their cups automatically, her boredom a texture
of the space
like the shadows in the corner and the night that swirls in
with each opening of the door.
"Hell, he could write! He could send us a postcard here. They'd get
it to us!"
They sit on, later than usual. The talk turns to other things but no
one is fooled;
they're waiting.
They think of seasons past: Kitchens stomping in in the cold,
jacket zipped tight, gauntlet gloves encasing his forearms,
cursing the cold in his high, venomous voice;
or shirtsleeved and sweaty summers, bald head glistening, cursing the heat.
Now nothing.
The silence descends like a shroud. They smoke and wait,
gathering their courage, not meeting each other’s eyes.
Finally, one stands, glancing furtively at the door.
"You leaving?"
He almost sits down again, then straightens, nods.
"Yeh, I gotta get an early start in the morning."
Another shifts uncomfortably, settles back, then rises slowly.
"Me too," he mumbles.
One by one, the others rise, stand hesitating,
then slowly, one by one, move down the aisle and out the door
to stand there in the night.
"I guess he's gone," one says.
"Yeh, he's gone."
"Gone without a word."
One by one, they move off down the street, heads bent,
a dread on them--of the night, of the silence,
of the musky rooms with their rumpled beds and the darkness.
One stops and stares upward, mouth agape.
"What happened to him?"
A car screams around the corner, then vanishes in a spray of light.
He stands a moment longer, then trudges on,
homeward beneath the clear, unanswering stars.
October 14, 1982
ANIMAL PLAY
by B.Z. Niditch
Scene I: In Dr. Mammalian's New York Office.
[Dr. Mammalian awaits his first appointment. Around his office are animal pictures of every species, intermixed with naturism of the human variety. Princess Annette D'Carlo is overdressed with jewels and a feather boa.]
ANNETTE: Oh, Dr. Mammalian, what an honor to see you. I know you are a busy man but I've read all your books and I believe your theory that we poor humans are basically animals. I know it's true and I know besides the Creator and Darwin you will find your place among the kings of our jungle.
DR. M.: And to whom do I owe this privilege and honor?
ANNETTE: The Princess Annette d'Carlo.
DR. M.: Oh, Princess, I saw your name on the society pages. Weren't you engaged to the Duke of Puerilistan?
ANNETTE: Well, actually, the Duke and I weren't compatible. After he read your book he realized he was a giraffe, and I made the discovery that I was a lioness.
DR. M.: So you evaluated yourself even before seeing me? You see how self-help books are changing our world? From Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book to Dr. Mammalian's All Animal.
ANNETTE: How difficult it was to get an appointment.
DR. M.: But Princess, when I heard your voice on the answering service--
ANNETTE: Was it my roar?
DR. M.: Well, you weren't exactly purring.
ANNETTE: I was mad as any alley cat -- that's what my sister is. The Princess Cleve -- remember her? She was diagnosed last year as a cat and decided to seek a sex change operation rather than remain a woman. Now she is a drag king at the Palace.
DR. M.: I have so many patients-- but where exactly is the Palace?
ANNETTE: (in a low voice) Las Vegas, honey. Oh, I mean Las Vega in Venezuela...
DR. M.: I try to be patient and I hope you realize how expensive a visit to me is.
ANNETTE: Oh, I'd give you my life, short as it is, Dr. Mammalian.
DR. M.: What's wrong, my dear?
ANNETTE: Oh, we lionesses have problems with overprotection and I've had eleven lovers just this mating season. The poor cubs; some were confused about when we were to get together. I usually go with lions yet all they want to do is sit around, eat and have sex. And I used to think they were the king of the jungle. We lionesses have so much more to give...
DR. M.: Precisely, Princess. So if you have self-diagnosed, how come you have come here?
ANNETTE: Well, it's not for myself, but for one of my cubs, Jake. He's waiting outside, but he's outside.
DR. M.: Let Jake in. I'm sure I can make a killing with him. But this will cost you double.
ANNETTE: No problem, Doctor. I'm loaded, and I told you, honey, I'm from the Palace.
DR. M.: Of course, my Princess. You are attractive.
ANNETTE: I used to be a guy.
DR. M.: No matter. You're a real lioness now. Go and let in Jake.
(Enter Jake)
ANNETTE: Jake is so demure.
DR. M.: Jake -- let's get down to business.
JAKE: That's what all the guys and girls say at the Palace. Shall I undress here?
DR. M.: I'm not a medical doctor.
JAKE: Whatever. I know you are an animal too. I've read your book.
DR. M.: Well, if you'd like an exterminator. We can do that after some queries. What's your problem?
JAKE: After reading your book I realized I was a bug. I had all the symptoms; I hated myself. I went to every self-help group -- AA, NA, SA -- that's Sex Anonymous -- and I read every pop psychology book I could find and still I realized I was only a bug. I've come here for a transplant.
ANNETTE: Do you do them, Doctor?
DR. M.: Of course. I'm a hypnotic specialist.
ANNETTE: Oh, thank God. I knew Dr. Mammalian would not fail us.
DR. M.: So after you both undress for me I will hypnotize you and you will be a recovered bug. Which animal do you wish to be?
JAKE: I wish to be a wolf -- a ravishing wolf. I think in another life I was. My last name in the natural world is feral -- Jake Ferrell.
DR. M.: Well, we will make you into a wolf -- after we all undress. I'd like to take part in this animal play as well.
ANNETTE: I brought along a little strip music that Jake and I use in our act outside the Place, in a place called Queens.
DR. M.: Sounds so regal.
ANNETTE: We think it's a place to let your hair down and for a lioness like me, it's so easy.
(Annette plays the music and they all strip to the waist.)
DR. M.: (to Jake) Watch my third finger...I'm holding up...you are not a bug. You are a...wolf. Repeat after me. I am a wolf...I am a wolf...that's it.
JAKE: I am a wolf. I am a wolf...
STAINED GLASS
by Greg Fitzsimmons
The breakfast-nook in our kitchen was like a restaurant with green vinyl-covered cushioning curving around a formica table top. I don't remember a breakfast ever being served there after my parents' divorce, except for once when our mother in the mental hospital on Easter and our dad took care of us and gathered us there in the morning and gave us (us being my two sisters and I) colored eggs and baskets filled with green plastic grass and hard candy. But that memory is an out-of-focus and uncentered photo only the most sentimental slob in the world would put in a scrap book and later stare at after the tape holding it down had turned yellow and begun to take off.
My souvenirs of the breakfast- nook come from ten years later when I would read there after everyone else had gone to sleep. I ate Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs novels like they were movie-theater popcorn and drank red wine while Louis-Ferdinand Celine explained to me the big bitter world I'd soon have to enter. Those books were like drugs; I didn't need the booze or the marijuana I occasionally smoked but sometimes they pushed me one step further where I was inside the Interzone or fevered with malaria and being brought out of the jungle on a litter carried by natives whose language was as incomprehensible to me as the muted grey, green, and blue pattern on the formica table top on which my adventures rested and which was exposed every time I lifted the book and turned a page to see what would happen next.
Earlier in the evenings, we often drank beer and Southern Comfort and Kool-Aid at the nook and made faces at each other and at our friends and had bad-reputation-carrying neighbors explain to us how to make over an aspirin bottle into a pipe or how to break open a capsule of speed or a look-alike drug and pour the powdery contents into an Old Style can (a combination of up and down that was too self-contradictory for me but my younger sister liked it, until Nancy Reagan started doing TV spots and Maria switched to plain beer and straight Southern Comfort and drank it in small sips while telling us we were wasting our lives on drugs). My mother was in the hospital a third of the time, and during that third no one was around to tell us we shouldn't be doing these things, except for our grandmother, who lived next door and was too old to recognize the extent of our '80s-style precocious vices and only complained about our friends, who were easy enough to sneak in and out.
One of those friends, Amelia, lived with us while her parents didn't like her new boyfriend. Amelia's presence was hard to hide, but our grandmother understood her story in a much more dramatic way than we ever could and allowed her to stay anyway. Pity was at the core of our grandmother's decision, but around it raged a confusion that expressed itself in the use of insulting phrases like "no-good slut", "street tramp", and "looking like a whore" in place of the girl's name. These insults were often accompanied by spastically hostile gestures and interspersed with foreign commentary on Amelia's appearance that none of us could understand or find in the Italian-English dictionary in the livingroom bookcase but that were probably the worse things you could possibly say or sign to someone on Taylor Street in the 1930s. Still, she never even suggested Amelia move back to her parents' (who never even called to check on their daughter) because anyone who'd kick a child out of their house was a less-than-human monstrosity in our grandmother's eyes.
One evening the four of us sat around the nook drinking Coca-Cola from long bottles - no booze because we had school in the morning and it was only early October so there were still a lot of interesting reasons to get out of bed that had nothing to do with what the teachers had to say and everything to do with the new social configurations of a new school year.
Maria put the lip of a half-finished Coke bottle in between her own lip-glossed lips and tilted it way back, slowly sucking out a gulp. A tan foam formed like a lace doily on the brown surface underneath the air at the bottom of the upside-down bottle only to be quickly swished away when she tilted the drink right way again and set it on the table.
Amelia (who was sitting across from me) said: "God Maria! Why don't you use a glass? It looks like your sticking a guy's cock in your mouth."
"Yuch." My younger sister made a face that said she would never do a thing like that.
My older sister asked, "How can you even think of a thing like that?"
I said nothing; but it occurred to me that if she could think a thought like that than she was also capable of doing it. (You'll have to excuse me here because I was young and hadn't yet found out about T.S. Eliot's Shadow: at this point in my life the distance between a thought and its action was lit up like a stained-glass window in late afternoon when the sun nearing the horizon shoots straight through the glass and fills the interior of a church with the bright spiritual color of a life beyond the present moment.) Perhaps she'd even done it before. She now no longer seemed as young or as naive as I'd thought.
She liked to walk around wearing a towel, trying to pretend it was no big deal, and sometimes sitting in the living room with me and watching TV while pretending to wait for her hair to dry before getting dressed. I would pretend I wasn't looking at her naked shoulders and the wet little stands of hair that stuck to the back of her neck while she leaned forward to bum a cigarette from my pack on the coffee-table. Sometimes, she would exclaim along with the screen in a shrieking voice that would catch anybody's attention and cause them to turn her way. I let her think she was too young for me (only a year) so I'd continue to have the opportunity of seeing her in towel. I was even able to partially convince myself that my new freshman sights in high school rendered her eighth-grader's small breasts, delicate shoulders, and bony hips a nothing in my list of attractions. "If only her lips were fuller, her legs thicker..." I'd sigh while picking a subject for contemplation during masturbation. And I'd think of an older girl who had never even noticed me other than to giggle at the Punk she passed in the hallway or to smile within the smug amusement I'd added to her otherwise dull cheerleader's day.
In truth, Amelia looked like a fragile flower I wanted desperately to hold and my thoughts always turned her way just before I came in my hand.
Between us was a first step towards love that was forming itself in an awkward, too-young-to-know way: she acted like a hostile brat; I teased and treated her like she was an idiot; we both had an infantile attitude towards sex.
"What?" She asked my sisters, meaning she couldn't understand their disgust or their confusion. In demonstration, she held her Coke and pushed the neck of the bottle as far inside her red mouth as possible. Pulling it out without drinking, she pointed it at me. "See. I told you that's what it looks like. Look at Steve. He's blushing."
I gave her a mean look meaning "No I'm not. You're acting like a little brat again," and wondered if I was blushing. I turned away from her and stared at my drink, too afraid to take a sip because she might point at me and tell me I was sucking cock.
"I told you. See. I told you."
I could fell a hard-on coming on and knew I was blushing.
Amelia bent her head over her bottle, strands of her hair hanging over her eyes, and eased her lips around the neck. She hummed, then took her mouth away and slightly giggled while brushing the strands out of her face.
"I'm getting out of here," Lisa said.
Maria said something similar and I got off the bench to let them out.
"See. Look at Steve. He's blushing," Amelia told their departing backs.
When I sat back down in the booth I could hear my sisters close their bedroom door with a self-righteous definitiveness. But they'd taken their Cokes with them so they couldn't have been too upset or disgusted.
I wanted to get back at Amelia for embarrassing me so I grinned across the table with what I thought was confidence and leaned over my own bottle while running the tip of my tongue around the mouth of it in what I thought was an imitation of cunnilingus. I imagined I was showing her a real porno scene. Looking up, "There, now you're blushing," I lied.
Her eyebrows serrated with bewilderment. "No I'm not. What's that suppose to be anyway?"
I smiled, "You know."
She stared at me as if trying to figure something out that had nothing to do with me or anything that had occurred previously; her brown eyes reflected the light in the ceiling; she bit her bottom lip, gently; then she took a casual sip from her bottle as if she'd forgotten her earlier comparison.
Somebody had once shown me a trick that I wanted to show her now to keep the subject alive. The trick was like a Stupid Human Trick you might have seen on David Letterman, except they would never put this one on TV. I was wondering more and more what she did with that boyfriend of hers her parents didn’t like. I never met him but he was a few years older and I figured anybody his age must do things I could only dream and read about. (I hadn't ever even kissed or been kissed.)
I got up and went to my bedroom, returning to the nook a minute later with a fresh pack of Marlboros. My cigarettes went along with my pot and the Louis-Ferdinand Celine-like attitude I showed to my teachers. (While one dangled and fumed at the corner of my mouth, I stood in front of the high school. Adults passed by my leaning form and probably thought of greasers and other American delinquents. But I thought of myself as someone with a real reason to feel alienated, like a World War I vet who had seen all his friends killed and had been lost many nights in No Man's Land and had seen his division officer reduced to two dislocated arms separated from an atomized torso, his hands reaching endlessly towards the sky, and an empty pedestal of hips and legs that stood teetering for a few seconds before falling over in the road; later I found his head in a ditch and talked to dirt-filled blind eyes and mute lips. "Well, old buddy, it had to happen to one of us eventually. And I'm glad you made the sacrifice. Don't know how I'll pay you back, though. But when - or maybe if - the good times ever come again, I'll always think of you while enjoying myself." And I gave it a football player's kick into the woods; then I just kept walking and walking down the road and walking until I reached Paris where no one could ever find me or accuse me of desertion because I had become Lost, even to myself; if I couldn't find myself, how could anyone ever find me? And the teachers and the dean would walk by and wonder why I had such a bad attitude; I'd squint and pretend I was invisible and Lost, dropping the butt and grinding it into the suburban sidewalk to show them how much they could never know true happiness because they had never known the true unhappiness that's at the center of it.) Smoking also went along with the inarticulate routine of my relationship with Amelia and was something we could tenderly share while pretending we didn't care for each other. She only smoked (anything) when she was with me (once she had told me this and coyly accused me of corrupting her) and was always bumming a butt from me or asking for a hit off a joint; then we could bicker and toss gibes back and forth as if we hated each other within our surrounding cloud of second-hand tenderness that no one else entered.
I tore a filter off the end of a Marlboro and peeled away the tan-speckled brown paper, exposing the white fibers underneath so that it looked like a miniature fresh tampon.
"Give me your hand," I said sitting down next to her and explaining that I wanted to show her a trick.
With the same innocently vacant expression she'd used to stare at me a minute earlier, she held her hand out. With the male counterpart of her expression, I leaned over and ripped the naked filter into tiny pieces, tearing it apart lengthwise like shucking corn, and put it on her palm (half the size of my own and pink like it was blushing, but her face still showed no emotion).
"Now what?" she asked, studying the white fibers like she was Jack with his Magic Beans and waiting, waiting, waiting every second for a miracle.
I wrapped my hand around hers, closing both in a double-layered fist, and said, "Squeeze tight."
She did.
Turning her fist over so that the circle of her forefinger and the squiggle of her bent thumb were on top, I reached for my Coke. A few drops went through the circle and into her hand. "Stay holding tight." And I wrapped my fist around hers again, putting it around the bottom this time so nothing could drip out onto the table.
"Yuch. What kinda trick is this? What's gonna happen?"
"You'll see." (I felt so worldly at that moment.)
A little more fizzy Coke and I was done with the libations.
"Now, squeeze really tight, as tight as you can," I said.
She did.
I told her to look me in the eyes and make the tightest fist she could. She had never looked at me so intently and I really enjoyed it. Thirty seconds later I let her open her hand. Spread across her palm was a thick white substance from the acid-dissolved filter, and strands of the milky goo arched between her open fingers like liquidy cobwebs.
"What's this supposed to be?" She wasn't disgusted but confused and stared at her palm like Jack again. (Only this time it was Jack after the Beans had sprouted and a vine poked up over the house and into the clouds and he wasn't sure yet what he was supposed to do next.)
If she knew how to imitate fellatio (She'd looked exactly like the pictures I'd seen in magazines) then she should have known what come looked like. But, for some reason, she didn't recognize the realistic facsimile I'd created. "Don't you know?"
"No. Tell me."
"Well, if you don't know..." I laughed. I hadn't found out exactly how much she knew about sex, but I could guess that she probably knew little. Somewhat disappointed, I consoled myself with the thought that I knew more than she did, and suddenly, momentarily, I felt so much more mature because for the first time in three years (ever since I'd grown a real bush of pubes and begun jagging-off) I didn't feel intimidated by a girl.
The trick or joke was that after you have the person open their fist, you're supposed to say, "Do you always come in your hand when you see my face?" But there was no point in saying the punch line if she didn't recognize the stuff.
I took her by the hand and led her to the sink.
"But what's it suppose to be?"
The faucet gushed into her blushing palm (whose blush seemed to indicate it knew what she didn't) and washed away the "come". I used my fingers to loosen the slime in the small webbing between her fingers and in the creases around her clear-bright nails.
"You don't want to know." (I now felt silly, no longer worldly.)
"I do. Tell me. Steve!"
I could feel her wriggling against my side. The skin on our arms touched and I imagined their microscopic textures must have fitted together perfectly, like a jigsaw puzzle, the empty places in my epidermis being filled with the tiny raised parts of hers. It was invisible and warm and very close.
My hard-on was coming on again.
"Tell me what it is."
I dried her hand with the dish towel.
"Please."
She pressed closer, her jeans hip brushing against my jeans fly, and almost whispered, "Please tell me."
(This is what I would like to be able to write, if I wasn't so addicted to making these stories follow the truth: "I put my arm around her and took her to my bedroom; I locked the door behind us; she smiled; we said nothing; then I unzipped my pants and she watched my hands fish out my penis; I looked at her and she blushed; I took her warm hand and placed it on my erection and repeated my earlier instructions to 'Hold tight.' When we were done, she said, 'Oh, that's what it's supposed to be.'" This story is probably pretty close to the fantasy I had later that evening. But the distance between reality and pornography is even more insurmountable than T.S. Eliot's Shadow.)
"Its supposed to be come," I said, laughing to emphasize that I knew more than she did and she could admire me if she wanted. I took a step away from her and waved my arm in a gesture of cool, nonchalant explanation (like it was no big deal). "You know..."
"Yuch. Who taught you that trick?"
I forgot what I said or who had taught me the trick or what happened next. But I'm sure she shook her head at how weird I was and went off to my sisters' room to hang out with them. I'm sure I went to my room and masturbated while thinking about her blushing palm.
Two weeks later she broke up with her boyfriend. She'd only seen him two or three times while she was living with us and things must have been far less serious with him than she'd thought. She immediately moved back to her parents' house and I rarely ever saw her after that.