The Storm

Six inches or more says the bouncing blonde on Channel 8. Her expression is serious but Arthur detects shadenfreude. Or maybe it’s just the thrill of the performance. If you’re a comely weather girl with the ink barely dry on your weather degree what you want most are thousands tuning in to hear about the approach of the biggest snowstorm of the season with you on stage as the prima ballerina. Her knit wool skirt clings to the cleft of her ripe plum and the hem falls at the knee-cap to accent delicate calves and ankles.

We can expect 6 to 8 inches beginning at 5 p.m. and continuing overnight

before tapering off before daybreak. Stay in, stay off the roads, make

cocoa and get into your jammies. If you must go out, take it slow and easy.

Slow and easy.

Jeannie is going to stop by the store on the way home from the mall. Arthur isn’t going near the place. Desperate housewives, terrified of being snowbound. Driven to clear the shelves of milk and bread and other perishables. To hoard and hunker before the hearth. To huddle and cower before the coming onslaught. How thrilling! Jeannie will pick up the fixin’s for a big pot of chili. Arthur had stocked the refrigerator with beer yesterday and an unopened bottle of Bushmills watches him like an alert and smiling doorman. Welcome, good sir.

###

Jeannie honks the horn for help. They carry in the paper bags. She asks the clerk for paper instead of plastic because the stiff, brown paper bags stand upright on their own so they can be filled with cans and glass and plastic water bottles for recycling. Jeannie is practical and organized and wishes Arthur was practical and organized too. But he isn’t and she knows it and no longer expects it. Arthur wants to burn the house down and run away to Ireland.

Or fuck the weather girl.

Ground beef, a yellow onion, cans of kidney beans and tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes and smoked chipotle and a bright green jalapeno pepper with perfect, smooth skin. Arthur picks up the jalapeno. He likes its firm shininess and the crown with a stem like a handle.

Arthur wants to insert the jalapeno in the weather girl’s anus.

Jeannie wordlessly sheds her coat, takes a knife from the drawer and a cutting board from the shelf and sets to work. Arthur assumes the task of browning the ground round in a skillet. Arthur hates the idea that the red mound of flesh was once part of a living creature. If he could start life over again he’d be a vegetarian. But they are already poisoned.

Arthur wonders what the weather girl eats.

“I ran into Molly at the store,” Jeannie says. “She and Frank have finally called it quits. He moved out this morning.”

Arthur grunts an acknowledgement as he moves the chunks of sizzling meat around in the skillet.

“She says she’s lonely and it hurts but it’s for the best. She said she’s glad the kids were grown and gone before it happened. I was afraid she was going to cry right there at the meat counter.”

“Frank’s an asshole,” is all Arthur says.

Jeannie pours oil into a pot, dumps in the chopped onion and the once perfect jalapeno and turns on the burner. They stand side by side at the stove. She works the chopped onion and pepper. He works the meat. In a minute he turns off the flame from under the skillet and bumping Jeannie at the hip, puts meat into her pot.

“I wasn’t ready for that yet,” Jeannie says. “Mine wasn’t soft yet.”

“Sorry.”

###

“The T.V. says we might not get the full brunt of it,” Arthur says. The station is interrupting regularly scheduled programming to give storm tracker updates. Arthur senses the weather girl’s deflation. Maybe this stage isn’t big enough. Maybe this is the pinnacle of a very short meteorologist career before some old guy convinces her that the fastest route to fame and fortune is to take off her clothes.

With the chili on to simmer, they have moved to the living room and the larger flat screen television. Arthur is happy because he can smell the chili, has a beer in his hand and the high definition Toshiba renders the weather girl larger, more life like and more accessible.

“Doesn’t look like we’re going to get the six inches. I knew we wouldn’t,” Jeannie says as she stands having heard the muffled ring of her cell phone from inside her coat pocket draped over the back of a dining room chair.

She talks into the phone as she stares out the big kitchen window that overlooks a patch of woods. The snowstorm is already two hours late. Arthur joins Jeannie in the kitchen to stir the pot of chili and to get another beer. Jeannie looks at him without expression as she talks to her phone. He deduces that she is talking to Molly based on frequent references to Frank. Arthur lifts the wooden spoon from the chili and puts it to his lips. Takes the bottle of chili powder from the counter next to the stove. There is only an inch of powder left in the bottle. They’ll have to remember to buy some more. He dumps the chili powder into the pot and drops the empty bottle into the recycle bag. Jeannie frowns. He always makes things too hot.

###

They eat dinner in the living room while staring at the television show that neither one of them is watching. Sitting atop the unused dining room table is a stiff, waxy candle with dusty plastic holly leaves and berries twisted around the base, a pile of Arthur’s papers and Jeannie’s purse. She gives him an update on Molly and Frank as they eat but there’s not much else to talk about. She says that a month ago Frank had told Molly that he was no longer attracted to her. Molly had cried but had no defense for a charge of such finality. Molly couldn’t remember the last time she and Frank had sex let alone good sex, she had told Jeannie. Molly had put on weight and certainly wasn’t the woman Arthur remembered from the early days, the woman who was cute and flirty at parties and to whom he had made more than one pass and could have closed the deal if he had been a more persistent salesman. Still and all, Frank had little room to talk, fat and balding as he was. But it isn’t the weight gain or the lack of sex that pulls couples apart, Arthur thinks. It’s entropy.

###

He should have married Jeannie years ago. When she wanted him too. After the last ‘on again’ of their on again, off again relationship. When a more familiar and comfortable passion had been briefly re-ignited. Before the real estate business failed and money got tight and Arthur lost interest in houses and the people that live in them. Jeannie’s job at the County Assessor’s Office is what keeps them afloat though they take on a little more water everyday. They are just two clocks ticking, springs slowly unwinding, unsure why they are still marking time. Something will happen, Arthur knows. Something has to happen. Maybe Molly is the beginning of it.

Arthur exists at the very limits of Jeannie’s imagination. He is the boundary of what she knows about the world, what she cares to know. She once believed him profound and full of mystery, with great secrets. Now he is just an unruly wilderness. Dark and bestial and unknowable and of little use to her everyday world. She had bragged to her friends of his insatiable appetites, his exploration of her senses. Now, she might say, the adventurer is lost. He spends his days drinking or wandering around the neighborhood taking pictures without purpose. Driftwood looking for a beach.

Arthur remembers their lovemaking. The way her mouth would form a perfect O during the bliss of her orgasm. The tight slickness of her vagina and how she smells like no other woman he has known, not unpleasant but distinctive, oily and resinous like balsam or tree sap. But what he loved most, he must admit, was her ordinariness, her lack of ambition, her lack of need for what he didn’t provide. Now, in contrast to his degradation, she serves as a constant in an equation long since solved.

###

Jeannie carries their empty bowls into the kitchen. He hears her rinsing them in the sink and opening the dishwasher. Arthur follows to drop an empty beer bottle into the recycle bag and to get a full one.

Jeannie lifts her coat from the back of the dining room chair.

“You’re going out?” Arthur asks.

“I’m going to visit Molly. She’s a mess. She’s at Ruby’s. In Near North.”
”Aren’t you worried about the storm?”

“There is no storm,” she says and leaves.

###

Arthur stays in the kitchen with his beer and the view of the woods and the smaller television still tuned to the storm tracker channel. He opens the bottle of Bushmills and pours a shot. The weather girl comes back on with her creamy skin and her lovely, firm girl arms and gripping a baton she uses to point at the Doppler weather map.

With an overnight low in the teens and winds from the west at 10

to 15 miles per hour things are going to get slippery.

Arthur touches his erection.

It has begun to snow.

 

 

The End

The Connoisseur

I like rye more than bourbon and Scotch more than bourbon or rye but not the cheap blended stuff that you pour over ice or dilute with water or soda so you get the buzz without much taste. I like the single malts, beautiful golden liquid that smells and tastes like smoke and sometimes the sea, served neat like something rare and valuable which it is, relatively speaking, because you see, I’m the kind of man who has a taste for things that many people don’t like because they’re too busy following the masses, doing and drinking and thinking what everyone else is doing and drinking and thinking and if that makes me a pretentious snob according to Judy, my ex, well then that’s what I am because I am Gunnar.

I am a connoisseur.

I like books that aren’t on the New York Times Best Seller list and movies with subtitles that none of my friends have ever heard of and wouldn’t watch anyways because they’re too busy watching “Housewives of New Jersey”. I like women with tiny breasts and maybe an over-bite or another visible flaw that makes them special and unique because any dumb-ass can go ga-ga over a bleached blonde with big boobs and lips and nails all painted up like a zulu warrior while hanging out at Friday’s instead of eating sushi or Cuban food or attending poetry readings at the coffee house or the bookstore which is where I meet Nanette thinking at first sight she is my kind of girl because she is dug in deep like a tick in the literature section and ignoring the display tables where you find the stuff that gets forgotten.

Before the book tour is finished.

Nanette wears glasses which I also like and she has the requisite shortage of mammary glands and good legs in tights as she stands languidly in front of the O’s and P’s flipping through a copy of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins while I’m stiffening up as I pull Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London from the shelf and pretend to look at it while secretly staring at Nanette but, of course, I don’t know her name yet. I’m even more excited when I learn her name because I think I said before that my ex is Judy which is about as common and undistinguished a name a woman can have. I know Judy didn’t get to choose her name but I always held it against her along with her lowbrow tastes which include country music but not the good old stuff like George Jones but the modern tinker-toy tunes and Judy smokes which she tries to hide when she says she quit but I can smell it on her breathe through the peppermint and especially in her hair and on her clothes and I can sometimes taste it through her koochie, as she calls it, while I am down there feasting which is something I like to do but I don’t think she enjoys it quite as much because maybe it’s not featured in her favorite bodice ripping, romance fantasy novels which are full of chivalry.

And damsels in distress.

No, No, Nanette is an old musical and not a terribly good one I think though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it and I’m not particularly interested in musicals anyway which is a shame because it might have served as a topic of conversation after Nanette and I became introduced so I was relieved to learn that Nanette does not have an affinity for musicals either, not that it matters because I relied on George Orwell for the introduction. Though it has been years since I read Down and Out I find a passage I like as I flip through the book and read it out loud to the girl who will soon be known as Nanette – It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety -. Nanette looks at me with brown eyes through medium thick lenses and asks – I’ve never read it, do you recommend it? – to which I say – highly – with a mixture of hope and disappointment because in my idealized vision she has, of course, already read every important book but then maybe if she knew Down and Out she might just smile and turn back to her Walker Percy which she holds at her side with one of her long and pretty fingers tucked in to mark her place as she looks at me with interest. So her ignorance, if you will, allows me to follow up on her question and even to coax her into having a drink with me in the Bronte cafe attached to the bookstore where they brilliantly have a liquor license that allows a connoisseur to not only talk to a sophisticated female reader of the high art of literature but to learn that she likes wine and good ones to boot instead of the white zinfandel that Judy prefers when Judy drinks wine at all because you’ll usually find Judy with a rum and coke or worse, like Captain Morgan’s or Southern Comfort, in Judy’s hand and I can’t stop repeating Judy’s name when I make references to coarse tastes and habits. I talk with Nanette about Orwell and Dostoyevsky and Camu and Kafka and I can tell she is impressed by my knowledge of literary fiction because of her rapt attention and not talking much herself other than to ask questions so I go on and on because I finally have an appreciative listener instead of Judy who would just walk away and file her nails or something. Nanette shakes her head in agreement while holding a glass of Chianti in her pretty hand when I say that bohemianism is a form of connoisseurship and proves that a Rolex or a Beemer need not be involved in leading a life of thought and sophistication and sensuality.

Like George Orwell

A bookstore is the best place in the universe to meet women except maybe a wedding but that’s a whole different dynamic so I still think a bookstore is better because they know you want to get them in bed but they can pretend they don’t know it and you can pretend that you don’t know they know it so it all works out pretty well because you can build a healthy amount of anticipation just before the climax like in a Henning Mankel mystery which represents the kind of book you don’t mind re-reading  even though you know the ending which is how really good serial sex with the same woman is though you, irrationally, keep hoping for a surprise, a slightly different ending each time which is unrealistic to expect in a book and probably in a woman but that would sure make for the perfect book and the perfect woman.

Which Judy is not.

###

I wander around Nanette’s dining room and kitchen and living room, which is actually just one room, looking at her stuff like the Leica camera on the dining room table that she said was a rangefinder, whatever that is, and I’ll remember the brand because I pronounce it leaka and she corrects me. It’s a warm, sultry evening and the apartment building doesn’t have central air conditioning only window units which Nanette doesn’t have so her bare arms and shoulders and legs have a sheen and I find her glistening as she peers into the pot on the stove makes me all the hotter in a different way so I make small talk like maybe I too should take up photography as a hobby and we could go out and take pictures together and maybe some day we can both afford big cameras. After the dinner she cooks which is some kind of creamy, cheesy, pasta, broccoli thing and tastes pretty good though I realize she is a vegetarian without her having to tell me and I should be too. We snuggle on the couch and wind up lying down face to face kissing like teenagers and she throws a skinny leg over my hip and while probing I find a surprising absence of panties and an unsurprising absence of pubic hair as girls seem to prefer these days so I reach in and grab a veritable fistful of what feels like warm, oiled dough and she opens her eyes wide and looks at me in a strange way perhaps expecting a reaction but all I do is venture deeper into her cooze though I admit I really want to jump up and flip on the lights and take a really close look because in addition to the dough I have between my thumb and forefinger the biggest clitoris I have ever encountered, as big as a bullet and just as deadly, so I roll the bullet between my two digits without too much pressure and continue to knead the calzone because boy am I in need and she must be too because she goes crazy grabbing at my belt which I am myself trying to work free with my other hand that is partially pinned to my side on the sofa while Nanette lolls her quick and agile tongue around in my mouth. When I finally free myself I kick my pants and underwear down around my ankles and soon enough I’ve gained entry having rolled over and pulled her under me with my pants balled up at my ankles in a knot and shoes still tightly laced but there is no time to attend to my strictures because she fits like a moist flesh gasket creating a kind of seal that produces the sucking sound that I’m sure was the inspiration for the word fuck and when it ends it’s all I can do to keep from asking Nanette to marry me right then and there. She coos a bit and we kiss some more but before long she drifts off to sleep so I roll off the sofa and I relieve my discomfort by putting myself back together all careful and quiet so as to not wake her and I go into her bedroom and grab a pillow to slide under her head and bend over to kiss her on the nose for some reason and that still doesn’t wake her so I pull down her skirt so she can sleep in a more dignified fashion but not before I get the best look I can of her honey suckle by the light of the moon shining through the old casement windows but what I really want is a spotlight so captivated I am by her horse collar but instead I leave as silently as possible while checking the door to make sure it locked behind me and I go home.

Where I masturbate.

The first taste of a hoppy ale, an Islay Scotch, the discovery of Fellini and Hertzog; garrotxa and fresh pecorino cheeses, Bill Quist’s interpretation of Erik Satie and Leonard Cohen and Randy Newman; Uwe Timm, Jakov Lind and Dino Buzzati (because the connoisseur is nothing if not a lover of the offbeat and obscure). These experiences have put me on the path to connoisseurship and you are about to say that it’s all just matter of taste and you’ll try to drag me into an argument about whether subjective opinion has any standing in the quality debate so I’ll save you the breath and say that – no, it doesn’t – because you may truly prefer a slice of individually wrapped American cheese-like product to a fine Vermont cheddar but that would only prove that you’re an rube and eliminate you from consideration as a connoisseur. My larger point is that anyone with any taste at all, if he is the adventurous type, quickly realizes that with the fruit of discovery comes the seeds of ruination, a raising of the bar to impossible heights, that sets you up for a lifetime of disappointment because once you’ve sampled the best your palette no longer accepts the pedestrian so your only hope is that you are still a relative ignoramus facing future though increasingly rare connoisseur frontiers and I had my doubts before Nanette. So the next day I think to call her with the obligatory “had a great time” message since she hasn’t called me and then I realize that in the fever of our first blush we failed to exchange numbers or email addresses or any of that so I decide to swing by her place in the evening to correct that little oversight but as I park at the curb outside her apartment building I can see into the poorly lit room through the casement windows, which are not adorned with curtains or blinds or any obstruction whatsoever (although I hadn’t noticed that on my first visit), that Nanette is not alone and I can see two people looking at the wall with Nanette spinning like a tiny electron around a second, larger stationary nucleus of a person so I sit there for the longest time like a stalker jealously thinking about the quim that gripped me like something separate and alive on its own before I come to my senses.

And drive away.

I do a couple more drive-bys over the next few days but each time Nanette’s place looks abandoned so I sit there again, stalker-like, which isn’t like me at all and stiffen up just thinking about her sugar canyon and her nub like a bullet and I’ll confess that I relieved myself while looking longingly at those darkened windows. Just as I’m beginning to lose hope and contemplating going to the police because I’m starting to worry that maybe I’m not the only one obsessed and maybe the dark nucleus I saw Nanette with in the window has done something terrible, well, just as I’m considering all kinds of drastic actions some of which, like breaking in, would get me into serious trouble, well, one day, there she is. – I was away for a few days on business – is all she would offer when I inquire perhaps a little too abruptly and eagerly and, of course, I’m dying to ask where she has been and with whom but I know I shouldn’t ask those things at this stage anymore than I should ask about the nucleus that was in the window so I keep my mouth shut and try to find something else to think about and talk about and to keep my mind off my concerns not to mention the lap land down there between her legs like a siren beckoning a horny seaman because I want more than anything in the world to know what her thing tastes like and I’m thinking it tastes like a briny, sweet  oyster and a peaty, smoky Islay Scotch all in one but a Scotch flavored oyster that I can chew on rather than one that slips down my throat leaving but a faint memory of  its succulency, if that’s even a word. Lo and behold this girl doesn’t disappoint, first taking me into her mouth and like most guys I enjoy looking down on a sweet face pressed to my groin especially if it is looking up and I like watching my bishop disappear and appear and disappear again like a magic act. Yes, I like that a great deal but her fig bush has spoiled me and I don’t even let her finish before I insist on my turn and again she’s a little shy because I’m sure she understands her exceptional attributes and what happens is I’m so thrilled kneeling at the alter of the blossom and filling my mouth with her mumbler that I accidentally finish what she had started and leave a pool of myself on the nice rug in front of the sofa so I apologize and I can tell she is confused by my excitement and the state of her rug so I try my best to explain my fascination with her crumpet but she is not as flattered as she should be and will have nothing of my praise which comes just short of a proposal of marriage so she says she has some important business to attend to and all but gives me the bum’s rush out the door which leaves me feeling lonelier and longinger, which I also realize is not a word, than I’ve ever felt in my life and stranded at home alone.

Without Nanette’s phone number.

I’ve told you my name is Gunnar but it was not the name given to me at birth which was John and hardly a name for a connoisseur and since a name is only a label whose owner should feel free to revise at any time which is what I did though I couldn’t convince Judy of this logic with her saying that she likes the name Judy and has no intention of changing it which is just further proof of her commonness and she totally rejected my suggestions including Natalie which you can see is not that far off from Nanette and perhaps evidence that my encounter with Nanette and her fabulous clutch was preordained and a sort of destiny on my part and an indication that my search for the ultimate, the Holy Grail if you will, of fur boxes was over and I could turn my attention to other topics.

Like rangefinder cameras.

On my next surprise visit to Nanette because remember like a fool I still don’t have her telephone number, she responds to the intercom downstairs in the foyer but takes forever to buzz me in and does so only after I ask – Nanette are you still there? – over the crackly speaker thing and she is a little distant and wary when I enter and I don’t know why other than it is late on a Friday evening and maybe she thinks I’m scouting her social life or it has something to do with the nucleus in the window and her unexplained absence and I’ll admit that her attitude and lack of forthrightness has me irritated to the point that this visit doesn’t go all that well because I erupt in what I can only assume is a jealous rage which is something I’ve only experienced from the other party, you see, and I realize quickly enough that I’m being childish and have overstepped my boundaries but the damage has been done so I must comply with her request that I vacate the premises thinking it for the best that I go home and cool down and make amends tomorrow. Despite my foolish behavior I have tucked into the back pocket of my jeans the phone number I secured first off in my explanation of my unexpected visit and before the meltdown and I scatter quickly before she asks for the number back and I dig into my back pocket on the way to my car to make sure it’s still there but my jeans are now so tight.

Thinking about her swollen love button.

The problem is Nanette won’t return my phone calls despite my apologies piling up in her voice mail box so my depression and self-doubt cause me to return to the well from which I regularly draw since, you see, despite our differences Judy and I occasionally quench each other’s thirst which is how I end up at her place on a Sunday evening with Judy’s ankles on my shoulders and me lapping away like a dog at a puddle on a hot August day but Judy’s slit is a faint scar compared to Nanette’s gaping wound and I slink home, tail between my legs, unsatisfied and I suspect Judy feels the same since I didn’t follow-up the slurping.

With the customary poke.

###

Judy and I are naked and lying on a mattress in the middle of a river and the mattress is soggy and uncomfortable so I am complaining but Judy seems to think everything is fine and dandy and I can see Nanette on the bank with a camera but not the little Leica from her dining room table but a huge camera with a long and thick telephoto lens which she strokes as she snaps pictures of Judy and John which is the way I’m thinking of myself in the dream and the river becomes a raging torrent and I can hear the waterfall ahead so I understand I am in deep shit while Nanette fades in the distance as she strokes the lens faster and faster while Judy sits smiling. I alone am ashamed of my nakedness and humiliating predicament and I decide that I am not, absolutely not, going over the edge to die with Judy so I roll off the mattress into the river but instead of being swept along in the current I sink to the bottom where I am eaten by a giant clam and the clam meat is as soft as a pillow or maybe a ball of fresh dough and the clam juices flow over me. I am becoming one with the clam as I think about Nanette on the riverbank and wish I had been able to swim over to her and that’s when I awaken to realize I have disgorged copious amounts of my reproductive fluids on myself which is called a wet dream and something I haven’t done since I was 14 shortly before I discovered masturbation and nookie, which hasn’t been in short supply since, and I remember in my dream Judy over the edge and the beautiful Nanette standing on the bank taking pictures and me under water and alone with the clam.

Such was my revelation.

Imagine my low opinion of myself when my rangefinder research shows Nanette’s Leica to be a prestigious camera and worth a pretty penny to boot and when I google Nanette to find her website and her art and photography I begin to ponder those images and the others I saw on the walls of her apartment that I should have had the good sense to ask about though many were sort of abstract representations of genitalia of both persuasions and I guess I didn’t bring them up at the time while she was cooking because we hadn’t done the deed yet and I was as yet unacquainted with her quiver but I still should have shown as much interest in her art as her honey pot and the dates of the recent art and photography show referenced on her website coincided with Nanette’s recent absence so I purchase from her site a print that looks like a small, strange flower.

 

Or a puckered asshole.

The End

 

 

 

 

Fall

Weather as crisp as an apple plucked fresh from the tree. The fruit beckons. It calls my name. The light, soft and diffused.  Autumn is the world’s dimmer switch, turning off the glare so that we can see each other more clearly in the shadows.

A glance held in the night, across the void.

Fall and school and leaden skies and the aroma of rotting leaves and cooling embers and toadstools kicked in the wood. Even at this ripe age, the autumn of my own life, I feel as if I should be strolling across a college green. Books under my arm, glancing at coed beauties with firm bouncers under tight, thin sweaters, sleeves pulled to elbows. My favorite spectator sport becomes no less engaging when a chill is in the air. Notice the way she moves in her clothes. The form and the flow of the under-current rather than the shimmering surface of exposed skin.

She checks her bearings. Afraid to drift.

A time to notice subtleties. The timbre of her voice. The arc of her gaze and the softness and warmth in her eyes. How she pins her hair, loosely or with precision. Whether her smile unfolds all at once or spreads slowly like a velvet curtain opening onto a show. 

Flats or heels or black, high top Converse All Stars.

Fall makes me want to return to Italy or take a lover. I should take a lover to Italy. Cypress lined lanes. Chipped ochre plaster. Old men playing cards or bocce ball. Old women laden with the makings of the evening meal. I am the outsider watching a world that has become familiar yet is still alien. Book in one hand, wine glass in another. The tight American knot of busy-ness slowly loosening in my stomach.

She might soothe my soul.

Fall evokes a different musical register. Giorgio Conte’s whimsical Gne’ gne’  or Leonard Cohen’s Tacoma Trailer or Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopedies or 3 Gnossienne. Don’t confuse melancholia and introspection with sadness. Sorrow and regret and longing can be joyful too. For me, fall runs deeper than the other seasons. It folds rather than whisks. Fondles and caresses instead of chafing and rubbing.

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And then on into winter, we could go.

I should take a lover in the season when the petals will open only to accept the kiss that searches for the sweetness within.

Lackman 9.27.10

SW corner of Vine and 13^th. A tiny, shotgun space dominated by what it should be dominated by – a 20’ or longer bar. It’s an estimate. I don’t routinely carry a tape measure. Perhaps I should. Lot of uses for a tape measure, you know.

Brown, burgundy and yellow palette. Exposed ductwork. Warm and soothing. Innocuously pleasant jazzy music. Everything perfect except for the damned muted 50” (again, an estimate) televisions mounted on the walls. I’m not arguing that they turn the sound up. I’m saying the T.V.’s shouldn’t be here in the first place. This is an historic neighborhood. How about a little retro, a little authenticity? How about a place where people can drink and talk without being lorded over by the glow of the idiot box? There are plenty of bars where Frat boys can drink PBR and watch the Bearcats. At least turn the damned things off once in a while. If they deserve to be muted they deserve to be blackened.

The measure of a society is what it worships.

Anyway. 14 taps. Raging Bitch and Old Rasputin included. Those are beers, not customers. There are precious few customers on a chilly, damp early Monday evening.

Good beer. I also see an excellent selection of Bourbon but no Single Malt Scotches. That will have to be rectified. No food. I suggest a jar of pickled eggs on the bar. A young woman to my right says pickled eggs are common in the bars in Wisconsin. Keller, the bartender, likes the idea of pickled eggs but thinks I should supply them.

I am the egg man. Koo Koo Ka Choo

The same customer who weighed in on the Wisconsin pickled eggs asks if I’m enjoying the Raging Bitch. I tell her I always enjoy Raging Bitches. I tell her it reminds me of Stone’s Cali-Belgique. A blend of Belgian and IPA styles. A Raging Mongrel Bitch. She says she loves the Cali-Belgique so she orders a Raging Bitch of her own. Careful. I don’t think bitches like orders.

A woman’s measure is her will.

6:45. Twenty or so customers. A good crowd for a drab evening. John Back of Neon’s makes a cameo appearance. An actor out on loan. Neon’s upstairs is officially open, he tells me. They are playing late night movies. I make a couple of suggestions even though they are sub-titled and require attention. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Fellini’s 8 ½. Two of the best movies ever made. I doubt most Cincinnatians have seen either. Too busy watching Adam Sandler, this generation’s Jerry Lewis but even less funny.

Black girls with babies in their arms walk past Lackman. They look in through the open door. Look in as though looking through a padlocked gate.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society.

Bugs come through the open door, lured by malty yumminess. We swat them away. Bugs are to be expected, I say to Keller, it’s still warm enough outside and moist. Don’t say that word. Moist. Women hate it. She doesn’t clarify. Keller and I have a mutual friend, Molly. Molly used to tend bar at Mainstay before she left for California for a modeling gig. Now she’s back. They always come back. Molly likes both sides of the bar. But, I think, not equally.

I want to measure the distance between here and eternity.

The restrooms have a common lavatory, like the Comet. Only newer, fancier and better. A brilliant space-saving design. The architect deserves praise.

Measure a thousand times and cut once.

Amy is a Medical Technical Writer and Photographer. Chris is a construction guy and housing developer. I didn’t need a Facebook account to meet either of them. I just needed Lackman. More Lackman, less “social networking”. That’s my vote.

 ”I’ll have an Old Rasputin,” I say to Keller.

Joe’s Diner: Sycamore & 12th: 9.12.2010

It’s good to see this little treasure brought back from the dead. It was sad to drive by the ghostly shell with broken windows and weeds and trash around her skirt-tails. Now, she looks much the same as the old days. Chrome and vinyl and mirrors, (Joe’s needs to ditch the televisions. Sports Center on Sunday morning tarnishes the retro-experience).

The Diner looks the same but the feel is different. In the old days, The Diner was a yuppie restaurant. Joe’s Diner is more authentically…a diner. In ways both good and bad.

On my fourth visit to Joe’s, my third for breakfast (I live within walking distance), I order the Triple Play: three scrambled eggs, three strips of bacon and three pancakes. A lot of food and not cheap at $7.99. On my first breakfast visit I ordered the Sycamore (two eggs cooked to order, toast and sausage, as I recall). The Sycamore is gone from the current menu, though I suppose I could have recreated it ala cart. On my second breakfast visit, a breakfast meeting, I had gravy and biscuits. Also gone but no big loss. You can’t hide stale, hard biscuits under a pond of sausage gravy.

Back to the Triple Play. Scrambled eggs are scrambled eggs, so I ask for Tobasco to spice them up. No Tobasco but the waitress offers a hot sauce from a squeeze bottle that’s just as good, if not better. Flaccid, fatty bacon instead of the crisp lean version that I prefer. I hate peeling a thick strip of fat from the edge of a slice of bacon. The pancakes are pretty good. Light and fluffy and creamy. I taste sour cream. All in all too much food (my fault) and not exceptional (their fault).

My one and only lunch at Joe’s, a couple of days after they opened, featured a tuna salad (or was it chicken salad) sandwich. I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter because I see neither on the current menu. Besides, it was soupy and sweet.

Joe’s has a beer and wine license. The usual industrial beers (Bud, PBR, Heiny) plus some Moerlein thrown in. And Mondavi, Woodbridge, yada, yada, grocery store wines. If you want to drink go next door to Neon’s on 12^th and order from Joe’s menu. They’ll run it over. Joe’s also supplies the free happy hour munchies at Neon’s on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They have a Late Night menu (10 p.m. to 4 a.m.) for the after-bar crowd.

I’ll give Joe’s Diner more chances since they are convenient and I really want them to succeed. Joe’s and Neon’s and other establishments along Main Street could be the seed of a renaissance for an area all but lost for a decade after the 2001 riots. But there are limits to my patience.

The annex at the back of the Diner is still sunny and architecturally consistent with the old car itself. But this morning there is no toilet paper in the crapper.

I have my limits.

FUBAR Tuesday: Highway to Hell

A few years ago when I was regularly negotiating the I-71 slalom back and forth between Cincinnati and Cleveland, I would usually spend half the trip cursing the oil, automobile and highway construction lobbyists. You see, it was their fault that I was making a dangerous and boring (boringly dangerous?, dangerously boring?)  four-and-a- half-hour automobile drive instead of riding comfortably on high-speed rail where I could work, read, flirt or even have a cocktail (while flirting). The trip from cities like Cleveland to Cincinnati is ideal for rail because it’s too far to safely drive and too short to fly (by the time you get through the check-in and security bullshit you might as well have driven).

Americans have been stupid enough to allow lobbyists to deprive us of an efficient, low-polluting, pleasant mode of transportation enjoyed by the civilized world, (notice I didn’t say “rest of” as I don’t consider America civilized). Yes, high speed rail would have to be subsidized but so is the automobile and so is aviation. The real cost of gas is about $15.00 but we only pay $2 to $3 dollars. As a buddy of mine is fond of saying, conservatives only call it subsidized socialism if it rides on a rail.

In the Sep/Oct edition of Miller-McCune magazine (if you haven’t heard of it and I’ll bet you haven’t, you need to rectify the situation www.miller-mccune.com ) Bruce Selcraig lays out the details of the American transportation travesty in his article, “A Track to the Future”. I’m going to excerpt portions of it below but you need to go read the whole piece.

“…Unthinkable in Europe, America has metro areas with more than a million people – such as Nashville, Tenn., Columbus, Ohio, Phoenix and Las Vegas, – with no inner-city passenger rail of any kind, at any speed.”

“…In virtually every developed nation except the United States, although there may be pitched battles over immigration, foreign policy and soccer, hardly anyone argues about the wisdom of fast trains.”

“… Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system…”

“… in America it [subsidies for rail] has become a call to arms for libertarians and “fiscal conservatives” who insist that high-speed rail pay for itself, while ignoring the massive subsidies received by the auto and airline industries.”

“…Since 1983, mass transit has only received about one-eight of those highway taxes, and none went to true high-speed rail because, to date, the U.S. has no high-speed trains.”

“… not be enough to alter the course of a me-first, car-first nation, until, of course, $8-a-gallon gas does the altering for us.”

Small Rebellions

A radio personality with a microphone urges people to step up and participate in an ice cream eating competition. He sounds like he’s talking from inside a culvert. The person who can eat a quart of Creamery Brand Ice Cream fastest wins a year’s supply.

Nate steps up on the stage where a long table is laid out with intermittent spoons.

They can choose from a variety of Creamery flavors. Most of the contestants choose vanilla because it is bland and will melt quickly under the withering sun, thinking they may be able to drink their way to victory.

Except Nate, who chooses Mint Chocolate Chip even though it has big slabs of dark bitter chocolate that, like life, he will need to chew. He chooses it because it is his favorite.

When the contest starts, the frantic competitors shovel great gobs of ice cream into their wide mouths, many swallowing the frozen cream whole without savoring, tears in their eyes from the cold pain.

Nate calmly scoops a small spoonful with a bit of the chocolate as he looks around at the desperate, cream-slick mouths and soiled shirts. He loves the tingle of the mint, the way his mouth comes alive when he draws a breath. Fire and ice.

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

By Nate’s fourth spoonful, a contestant rises from his seat and brandishes an empty carton to the stunned and cheering gathering . The winner is declared but Nate, with most of his carton intact, has already wandered down the makeshift steps from the stage and onto the Square, leisurely enjoying his treat. Eyes of confusion or mirth followed. The Creamery Ice Cream Representative and the Radio Personality are not amused. Nate sits by the fountain and scrapes the waxed paper carton with the wooden spoon. Tosses both into a waste can.

At the far end of the Square, a group of people wear stickers that read My Name Is on their breasts. They sip cocktails in clear plastic glasses within a velvet roped area. Signs and buttons with stars and stripes read Re-elect Senator Powers. An effusive young woman asks Nate if he is a registered voter and satisfied with his answer and his signature and fictitious address and phone number, writes NATE with a Sharpie in big block letters on a label and presses it on his shirt pocket. Ms. Effervescence smiles and moves on to another unlabeled human.

Nate looks down at his pocket and seeing, from his perspective, his name upside down, peels it off and inverts it.

Nate makes small talk with the guests. Answering questions about his place of residence and livelihood and other matters demographic and social. Harmless fictions. He sips at his gin and tonic through the tiny straw. When an interrogator tells him his name tag is upside down, he looks at his breast and says it looks right to him. They are amused

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

and take him for a prankster. They thrust business cards in his face. Nate accepts the cards though he has none to offer in exchange. After he has accepted enough cards to warrant five weak gin and tonics he moves toward the velvet rope where he encounters a young woman who blocks his path. “Hello. I’m Alex,” she says even though her nametag is clearly visible. She offers her small, soft hand, “it’s short for Alexandra.” “Nate,” says Nate taking her hand in his. He does not shake it but holds it delicately as though he has been handed a Faberge egg. When her hand is released, she takes a business card from a small, grained leather sleeve. “Do you have a card?” she asks.

“I have several,” Nate says as he withdraws the stack from his pocket. He flips through them. “I think this is my favorite,” he says handing a card to Alex. He smiles, steps around her and walks through the gap in the enclosure.

Alex watches him for a moment before she looks at the card. It reads Margaret Tomlin, Vice President of Sales, Hummingbird Communication. There is a colorful hummingbird, snout poised above a honeysuckle flower, in the upper right hand corner of the card. Alex knows Margie Tomlin. She laughs and shakes her head. She studies the gathering, busy sipping, chatting, gazing, listening, posturing. Looks at faces she recognizes. Then she turns and follows Nate, who becomes ever more diminutive in the distance.

Nate crosses the street against the light. A car skids to a halt inches from his thigh. Horn blaring, the driver gesticulating from within the fishbowl Ford, air conditioning

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

blowing at full blast. He hits the horn repeatedly as Nate passes but fails to capture the jaywalker’s attention. Nate’s expression is not defiant but detached. Nate is already across the street when the driver drops his window. The driver sits open-mouthed and confused through the light change, his eyes wide in something akin to, but not exactly, amazement. The driver withholds the invective but continues to idle until the driver behind him begins honking. The light has changed again.

Alex has quickened her pace but can’t close ground in her fashionable heels. She’ll lose him now, she fears, but looking through the traffic she sees him turn into an alley. She should reverse course and return to the party, to her friends, but she doesn’t. She crosses the street. At the alley she pauses. Even in the bright sunlit afternoon the alley is dark and bleak. Foreboding. She presses on anyway. In the alley she discovers a singular store front next to a dumpster parked at the rear exit of a Chinese restaurant, the Delirious Dissident Bookstore. She has practiced her lines to explain her unexpected prescence. You were so captivated that you accidentally gave me someone else’s card. A card you might need. But once inside the practiced words fall away when she sees Nate talking to a bearded, long haired clerk behind a glass counter displaying old books. She can only blurt, “Curiosity kills the cat,” and wonders, herself, precisely what she means. Nate smiles a crooked smile. The speechless clerk shifts his questioning gaze back and forth between Nate and the young woman who has sweated profusely in her three piece suit.

 

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

Alex peels a lock of dark hair from her sticky forehead. The Delirious Dissident has no air conditioning but she is intermittently greeted by blasts of air from a large, swiveling pedestal fan. The store’s climate  is pleasant, liking stepping inside a cave. The fan’s thrust lifts her fine, silky hair from her shoulders and makes her skin tingle like the taste of mint. The shop holds only the three of them and the books that smell pungent and ripe. Alex plops down, uninvited, into one of the old over-stuffed chairs scattered about the shop. As Nate and the clerk study her like a curio she scans the bookshelf nearest her. Dusty volumes of books by people whose names she doesn’t recognize and some she can’t pronounce: Hannah Arendt. Amiri Baraka.  Nathaniel Chalmers. Noam Chomsky. She kicks her shoes away from her tired, hot feet as if she has arrived home at last from a long journey. On a battered table next to the chair is a copy of Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin. She picks up the book. The text is in Russian.

“I could translate it for you if you like,” Nate says. “What do you usually read?”

“I don’t know,” Alex says and is disturbed by her own revelation, “maybe you could make a suggestion.” She kneads her foot cocked upon her knee and knows that she is showing too much thigh but shifts her leg higher instead. Brazen  and obverse. A thrilling self realization hits her like a crashing wave.

A large dog has arrived from the back of the shop, tail swishing vigorously, rolling his rump to and fore. The dog tries to push his nose into Alex’s crotch. She grasps the dog’s big head with both of her hands, kneading the fur and scrunching his ears in her

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

fists. The canine teeth, capable of ripping out her throat if that be the animal’s choice, belie the slobbery smile and loving gaze. That’s how the world is, she is slowly learning, it happens or it doesn’t and the vagaries of life, the randomness of reality may make a mockery of her plans. The dog tries to launch himself up to lick her face or perhaps to join their sex. Alex doesn’t wear undies and she imagines that her fecund fragrance fills the room and complements the musky books, that it beckons all of the animals in the room.

She fondles the animal’s ears as she pushes his head back down between her knees, the insides his ears feel like velvet.

“Zhivago!” the clerk scolds.

Zhivago turns and looks at his owner with a contrite expression. Then backs away to sit. Drooling. Admiring his new friend.

Nate, who had wandered to the back of the store, has returned. He studies Alex with an expression she can’t quite define. Not the countenance to which she is accustomed. He hands her three Mad magazines from the ‘70’s, their back covers creased from folding. “This is a good place to start,” he says. He isn’t kidding. And then he smiles, steps around her and strides to the door. The bell’s ding signals his departure.

“…?” her eyes ask, maybe of the clerk, maybe of the dog. Maybe of the books. Maybe of herself. The dog puts his head back into her inviting lap.

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

The clerk shrugs and says, “He’ll be back,” remaining motionless behind the counter.

The dog’s muzzle has dampened her skirt.

She closes her eyes and enjoys the breeze from the fan. She feels like a hummingbird probing an exotic, beautiful and unknown blossom.

Wary but hungry and thrilled with discovery.

 

End