Buildings and food. Food and buildings. Food in buildings. Food in front of buildings. Food on top of buildings. I feel like I am about to read Green Eggs and Ham, Sam I am. My perfectionist mind had a hard time NOT taking the assigned topic for Writing, Writer, Writest literally. I “googled” food and buildings and it came up with random blogs about food and buildings. It was not until I searched again that I came up with the Talking Heads album, More Songs about Building and Food, which I guessed might be the inspiration for this week’s topic.
I read the Wikipedia explanation of the album. While admittedly interested in why my music-lover husband nor I had ever heard about this album, its description had me craving a trip to the record store. A real record store. And I was particularly entertained by a quote offered concerning the title:
“When we were making this album I remembered this stupid discussion we had about titles for the last album," Tina (Weymouth) smirked. "At that time I said, 'What are we gonna call an album that's just about buildings and food?' And Chris (Frantz) said, 'You call it more songs about buildings and food.'"
But none of this helped me. My brain was still stuck.
What the heck was I going to write for this WWW entry? Tick, tock; tick, tock. No, I got nothing. I asked my family. Hounded my husband. I even asked my kids. Some incredibly talented people contribute to Writing, Writer, Writest. Fantastically creative people. I spent some time trying to channel some of those creative juices. I read past entries from fellow WWW contributors. I thought, what would I like to read about?
My tired mind again answered, “I got nothing”.
I enjoy the discipline and the challenge of writing my weekly submissions. The challenge wherein I not only have to find time to write but also find time to write well. Finally, in my stress of finding what exactly I might put together this week, I decided that what I needed to do was just start writing! One of the oldest tricks in the book. I thought something would come to me along the way. Not so much. Just a bunch of half-brained ideas floating in the white space where the brilliance should be.
Surely, I am missing something. I could have contacted the WWW community for advice, I supposed. But part of me did not want to do that either. I wanted an idea I could own. So far the only thing I owned was my perfectionist mind stuck in a box with four sides and a top, awaiting an idea to seep through the tiny cracks.
Buildings and Food. There is the obvious: one of my favorite things in the world to do is eat in a beautiful building, i.e. a restaurant. As opposed to eating out of a building, i.e. outside. You could eat a building if it was made out of cake or Rice Krispie Treats or chocolate, like the masterpieces from the show, Ace of Cakes. There are hundreds of recipes online describing how to make a castle cake, which is something that I never plan to do in my lifetime. Though, I am ecstatic that there are people out there with such ambition.
However, I have no desire to write about these things, either.
I should also say that I do not intend this piece to mock this topic. I am sure written genius will be plentiful on this topic, this week. More so, I began this piece out of desperation and the common sense knowledge that writing anything is better practice than writing nothing. This was the goal in creating this collaboration, correct? And, thus, this is my tribute to WWW. Hail to the chief.
Today is my husband’s birthday. He is turning 40. Shortly, I will be leaving my office to go to a warm, cozy, inviting building to celebrate his birthday with greasy, delicious food and libations. And we will eat cake...in a building, too. Or, maybe mud pie. The building will be full of people, young and old gathered together to celebrate a very special friend, dad, brother, son, colleague and partner. We will laugh. We will toast. We will laugh while we toast. And I will send this to Writing, Writer, Writest, though my creative brain is still trapped in the box. Better luck next week.
Showing posts with label buildings and food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label buildings and food. Show all posts
Friday, October 22, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Patrick White: Fast Food
48. 49. 50. Jimmy, delivery boy extraordinaire, caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of the elevator doors. He was delivering a six foot party sub, and had decided to holster it across his back, like a samurai from a delicatessen of death. He had practiced this specific carrying technique to induce tips (AND free beer) from frat parties thrown around town, and had guessed by its apparent success that it looked pretty badass. But he had never actually seen what he looked like, and now, even he had to admit that it made delivering a sandwich look about as awesome as possible. “It’s not all fun and games folks, but it certainly has it’s perks.”
Ding! Floor 54 had arrived, and he quickly ‘unsheathed’ the sub into a less intimidating stance. Unfortunately, this was a professional place, and they would want the food to be delivered professionally, by someone who would of course themselves be a professional. Not a Zatoichi-wannabe. The doors opened, and Jimmy stepped out of the elevator, and into an office.
The receptionist pointed towards the back room (decidedly unprofessionally, Jimmy thought), and he made his way through the cubicle maze to reach his destination. The ‘party’ room, whose true identity seemed normally to be a conference room, had large windows making up the far two walls, giving a panorama of buildings across the street, unusually dull by even office building standards. A few streamers and signs had been placed around to celebrate some business milestone, but it seemed like trying to cover a wall with a 4x6 photograph, merely highlighting the deficiencies present. It was at this point that a particularly nasty gust of wind came by and blew out the window Jimmy was standing in front of.
Floor 54. Jimmy himself, briefly teetering forward, quickly fell back. The fine piece of food he had been carrying was not so lucky. It slipped right out the window and began its fatal descent.
Floor 53. The sub had just begun to fall. It still had not turned fully vertical. The wrapper was already most of the way off, the wind tearing at it, and soon it floated away, escaping the scene. Two tomatoes had dislodged themselves, but otherwise, the structure of the sandwich was quite strong. It had been tied together to ensure maximum integrity upon delivery, and those ties showed no signs of tossing in the towel now.
Floor 46. The sub now was fully vertical, a drill ready to bore into the earth. It weighed only 5 and half pounds (with just 80 grams of fat!), but because it refused to be torn asunder into its smaller, lighter components, it was quickly picking up speed (at a rate of roughly 9.8 m/s^2). Its sleek design, crafted so carefully by a master for simple aesthetic pleasure, now caused it to slice through the air with deadly purpose.
Floor 33. It had been created on regular wheat bread, and contained three two-foot sections. One end was a Vegetarian Spinach Garden, that was seasoned with light dijon mustard, oil, and vinegar. It contained tomatoes (two of which had now floated off), spinach, peppers, swiss cheese, and avocado to spice things up. The middle section contained the “Dagwood”. Ham, turkey, roast beef, mustard, mayo, lettuce, tomatoes (which had not floated off), peppers, mushrooms, swiss, cheddar, and muenster cheese. There was a noticeable bulge in the sandwich over its middle section to accommodate its unwieldy, and thoroughly unreasonable size. And the far end was the cheesesteak. Green peppers, lettuce, steak, provolone, and onions populated this end. The entire sandwich was sprinkled with a touch of fresh ground pepper. It would have been quite delicious.
Floor 24. George Milton, twenty-four stories lower, stepped onto the curb in a rush. His head was swimming with thoughts of something, and those thoughts were about to be forcibly pushed out.
Floor 12. The first sighting of the sandwich took place. Nine people sat bored to tears (literally in one case, as a man had excused himself to go cry in the bathroom) as some asshole gave a presentation on the rising market for Louisiana swampland. The phrase “Crocodile proof fence” had exited his mouth when the sandwich dropped by the window. It was only for an instant, but everybody saw it. One bored member thought, “I guess they ran out of pennies up there.” It was an event odd enough to allow a forced recess and stall the meeting. Everyone left the room for lunch, gleeful, except for the man crying in the bathroom.
Floor 2. The last sighting of the sandwich, while it remained definable as such, occurred among three pedestrians. They gasped at the sub falling (and rightly so, as it was probably the strangest thing any of the three had ever seen), but their gasps vocalized only after the sandwich had finished falling.
Floor 1 (or “L”). Ding! The sandwich, a furious 130 mile-per-hour bullet, arrived at its destination, colliding with George. Approximately six seconds after the initial window blowout fifty-four stories above, George Milton had been put into an irreversible coma due to massive brain trauma and hemorrhaging. A few seconds later, pieces of glass began to rain down, too light to cause anything but superficial cuts, followed by the unceremonious landing of the two tomatoes: one of them on the sidewalk about ten meters away, the other on top of a parked taxi.
Jimmy looked out the window and saw the commotion several hundred feet below him. He could only see a mess on the sidewalk, unable to extract the finer details, and suddenly wished he had gotten the secretary to sign the receipt.
Ding! Floor 54 had arrived, and he quickly ‘unsheathed’ the sub into a less intimidating stance. Unfortunately, this was a professional place, and they would want the food to be delivered professionally, by someone who would of course themselves be a professional. Not a Zatoichi-wannabe. The doors opened, and Jimmy stepped out of the elevator, and into an office.
The receptionist pointed towards the back room (decidedly unprofessionally, Jimmy thought), and he made his way through the cubicle maze to reach his destination. The ‘party’ room, whose true identity seemed normally to be a conference room, had large windows making up the far two walls, giving a panorama of buildings across the street, unusually dull by even office building standards. A few streamers and signs had been placed around to celebrate some business milestone, but it seemed like trying to cover a wall with a 4x6 photograph, merely highlighting the deficiencies present. It was at this point that a particularly nasty gust of wind came by and blew out the window Jimmy was standing in front of.
Floor 54. Jimmy himself, briefly teetering forward, quickly fell back. The fine piece of food he had been carrying was not so lucky. It slipped right out the window and began its fatal descent.
Floor 53. The sub had just begun to fall. It still had not turned fully vertical. The wrapper was already most of the way off, the wind tearing at it, and soon it floated away, escaping the scene. Two tomatoes had dislodged themselves, but otherwise, the structure of the sandwich was quite strong. It had been tied together to ensure maximum integrity upon delivery, and those ties showed no signs of tossing in the towel now.
Floor 46. The sub now was fully vertical, a drill ready to bore into the earth. It weighed only 5 and half pounds (with just 80 grams of fat!), but because it refused to be torn asunder into its smaller, lighter components, it was quickly picking up speed (at a rate of roughly 9.8 m/s^2). Its sleek design, crafted so carefully by a master for simple aesthetic pleasure, now caused it to slice through the air with deadly purpose.
Floor 33. It had been created on regular wheat bread, and contained three two-foot sections. One end was a Vegetarian Spinach Garden, that was seasoned with light dijon mustard, oil, and vinegar. It contained tomatoes (two of which had now floated off), spinach, peppers, swiss cheese, and avocado to spice things up. The middle section contained the “Dagwood”. Ham, turkey, roast beef, mustard, mayo, lettuce, tomatoes (which had not floated off), peppers, mushrooms, swiss, cheddar, and muenster cheese. There was a noticeable bulge in the sandwich over its middle section to accommodate its unwieldy, and thoroughly unreasonable size. And the far end was the cheesesteak. Green peppers, lettuce, steak, provolone, and onions populated this end. The entire sandwich was sprinkled with a touch of fresh ground pepper. It would have been quite delicious.
Floor 24. George Milton, twenty-four stories lower, stepped onto the curb in a rush. His head was swimming with thoughts of something, and those thoughts were about to be forcibly pushed out.
Floor 12. The first sighting of the sandwich took place. Nine people sat bored to tears (literally in one case, as a man had excused himself to go cry in the bathroom) as some asshole gave a presentation on the rising market for Louisiana swampland. The phrase “Crocodile proof fence” had exited his mouth when the sandwich dropped by the window. It was only for an instant, but everybody saw it. One bored member thought, “I guess they ran out of pennies up there.” It was an event odd enough to allow a forced recess and stall the meeting. Everyone left the room for lunch, gleeful, except for the man crying in the bathroom.
Floor 2. The last sighting of the sandwich, while it remained definable as such, occurred among three pedestrians. They gasped at the sub falling (and rightly so, as it was probably the strangest thing any of the three had ever seen), but their gasps vocalized only after the sandwich had finished falling.
Floor 1 (or “L”). Ding! The sandwich, a furious 130 mile-per-hour bullet, arrived at its destination, colliding with George. Approximately six seconds after the initial window blowout fifty-four stories above, George Milton had been put into an irreversible coma due to massive brain trauma and hemorrhaging. A few seconds later, pieces of glass began to rain down, too light to cause anything but superficial cuts, followed by the unceremonious landing of the two tomatoes: one of them on the sidewalk about ten meters away, the other on top of a parked taxi.
Jimmy looked out the window and saw the commotion several hundred feet below him. He could only see a mess on the sidewalk, unable to extract the finer details, and suddenly wished he had gotten the secretary to sign the receipt.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Steve Strong: Gramercy Park Place
She was already eighty years old when I first met her, and for the next 15 years I was required to sit with her a few days each year. Although she was a native English speaker, I never understood her. We were from different planets, she and I. I endured our visits. I begrudgingly attended, held my breath, and gave a great exhale as I motored away from her home.
Who was she? Why was I required to do this? She was no relative of mine, and no relative of anyone related to me. She was my ex-mother-in-law’s godmother. A woman with no children of her own. No living relatives of any kind. And anyone she ever loved had died in that very house I visited her in, on Gramercy Park Place, in Los Angeles.
Her name was Helen Browne, but she asked to be called Sunny. She had been a movie star, you see. She had appeared in several motion pictures of the silent era. When asked to identify them, titles rattled off the top of her head along with silver screen stars I’d never heard of. But you know, that’s not what really matters. She told me the really important roles were in the theatre. And she showed me pictures of her playbills and her schedule as she toured the Western U.S. in theatre troupes with the likes of Ralph Bellamy and Jason Robards, Sr.
She had a birth name, a married name, a nickname and a stage name. And she was all about drama. You see that house across the street? Why, that’s where the young man lived who wrote “When the Swallows Return to Capistrano.”
I had no idea if that was important or not. I was a Michigan country boy. I’d never heard of the song. I’d never heard of the town. I kept trying to find a way to relate to this ancient woman, but it wasn’t easy. Something told me she was a big fake. I was convinced all this strangeness just couldn’t be for real.
When she was still mobile, she insisted I drive her to the Brown Derby or El Chollo for lunch because that’s where the stars eat. I had my choice of driving her dusty old 1966 Mustang or her dusty old 1966 Continental. Both had under 30,000 miles on them, and both only moved if I drove them.
She would tell me things like how healthy urine is for your eyes, and how to communicate with the dead through séances. But mostly, she would talk about the life of an actress. Oh! How the young men adored her. Oh! The suitors. Oh! The proposals of matrimony. But she had steadfastly fended them all off. She remained aloof until middle aged when she married a ship pilot for the Port of Los Angeles who died ten years later.
The house. The house was her mausoleum. Her father built it in 1905 and she moved in when she was two years old. And she never moved out. Her parents each died in that house. Her husband died in that house. Eventually Sunny died in that house in 1998 at the age of 95.
In her final years she was confined to her bed and often mistook me for a doctor or some kind of accountant. She would tell me how she had been dancing around downstairs earlier in the day, and I would tell her how nice that was.
Having no offspring, she left the bulk of her estate to the Norman Vincent Peale foundation. But the task of sorting through her home fell on me. I was supposed to clean it out and look for items of interest for my in-laws to sell at auction. I figured I could go through the whole house in two days. I ended up being there seven.
I started out down stairs, which was sort of clean and always ready for company. I found the Chinese snuff bottle collection which was the most prized asset in the house. In a cabinet in the living room I found an unused Lone Ranger game from 1936. It was in mint condition, so I delivered it to the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in exchange for a lifetime free pass.
When I made my way upstairs my task became truly strange. Most rooms were stacked to the ceiling with junk so that the doors couldn’t be opened. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, the hallways, closets, offices were packed to the ceiling. In fact the only room that had an access way was the room Sunny died in.
So I started in the corner bedroom. I had to pry open the door, and then reach my arm around and start pulling things out to give me space to open the door wider. I used this technique for all the rest of the rooms in the house. For the next two days I worked in that room and the hallway. We ordered in a forty-foot dumpster, and I ended up filing more than two of those.
I discovered all kinds of weird things in that room, and was always worried I’d find a skeleton. But I didn’t. Instead, I found boxes of canceled checks from the twenties and thirties. I found hundreds of dresses, shoes, jewelry. When I got down to the floor level, I found a made bed, and items on the dresser that had been covered for 50 years.
It took a full day to get to floor level in the hallway, but at the bottom I found a cedar chest with two newspapers on it. Both were defunct Los Angeles papers and both were dated November 11, 1918 and the headlines heralded the armistice.
In the hallway, when I could finally get into the cabinets I found glamour shots of silent movie stars I’d never heard of. I recognized the names of Lillian Gish and Tom Mix. But beyond that, they were just stacks of head shots.
And then I found the pictures of Sunny. They were stunning. She was certainly beautiful back in her day. She had long flowing blonde hair and often had furs draped strategically around her bare chest. It was so hard to picture her as a teenager and starlet. But there was the proof in front of my eyes.
In the second bedroom upstairs I worked my way to ground level again to find a bedside table. I think this was Sunny’s room as a child. In the drawer by the bed I found love letters. Dozens of them. I read the words of Ralph Bellamy and Jason Robards, Sr. as they confessed their undying love to Sunny. These were passionate letters.
There were many other letters from actors and names I didn’t recognize. I put them all in the stack of stuff for the auction house to sort out.
I spent a full day cleaning out a big walk-in closet, only to get to the bottom and discover it was actually a small office. There was a working desk in there. As I went through the desk I found the police files for a case from Philadelphia for indecent exposure against her husband Brownie. It was funny reading it. Who knows what he was up to our how drunk he was, but the charge was from the 1930’s and described in detail chasing him down and arresting him. At my in-law’s request I destroyed the file.
Towards the end of the week I was working very late hours. I would work about 14 hours, then go to a hotel and sleep and start again the next day. Whenever I was on a roll, I hated to stop. Frankly, the stuff I was finding was so interesting I was running on adrenaline a lot of the time.
The last room I ventured into was the storage room at the top of the stairs. Like the others, the door wouldn’t open, so I had to reach in and start pulling things out. It was getting late, and I was excited to see what this room had in store, so I pushed myself to work late into the night.
The light was very poor, so I got floor lamps from around the house and set them up in the hallway as I started pulling things out of this storeroom. When I pulled enough junk out to get the door open halfway, I saw the room had shelves around all four walls, and there was a closet in the back.
The shelves were filled with black boxes about 18 inches square. There were probably 100 boxes in there in total. Each box had a sign on it. Some said, “Fall 1938”. Another might say, “Winter 1927”. I was absolutely mad with curiosity to find out what was in these boxes. As soon as I could push my way in, I started pulling those boxes out to find each one had a fancy women’s hat in it!
By the time I had reached the closet in the back of that room it was nearing midnight. I had to step over a pair of beautiful green marble lamps that I took home and re-wired for myself.
At last, I opened the closet door to find it was also packed to the ceiling. By one o’clock in the morning I was ready to go home, but I saw in the back of the closet a most unique object. It was a treasure chest, like a pirate might have used to keep doubloons in. I was intrigued and got a new burst of energy as I lugged that trunk into the hallway.
I positioned the floor lamps and took off their shades so I could get the maximum light from the bare bulbs. As I opened the trunk, I found it had been filled with newspapers as packing material. The dates of all the newspapers were 1919. It occurred to me that this trunk had not been touched since it was sealed up 79 years ago.
One of the first things I pulled out was a little Eskimo doll made with real seal fur. It had a badge on it that said, “Admiral Byrd Expedition – 1919.” I also found several toys, including a little hand-held game called “Beat the Kaiser” in which you tried to roll little BB’s into Kaiser Wilhelm’s eyes and mouth.
At the very bottom of the trunk I found what looked like three small logs wrapped in newspaper and neatly tied with three strings each. As I inspected the first, I noticed that it too, was wrapped in 1919 newspaper. My heart was pounding with anticipation to find what was hidden in the most remote corner of the most remote room in that creepy old house. I tugged on the bows of the string and it easily removed itself. I unrolled the newspaper to find two blue eyes pop awake to look back at me!
My heart stopped, and I nearly dropped the thing. When I caught my breath I realized it was a doll. All three were antique dolls from France. Their eyes could open and close. I was relieved, but I called it a night after that.
As I look back now, I can picture a 16 year old girl, active in drama and looking for a career on the stage, putting away the things of her childhood. She wrapped up those pretty dolls and saved them for the children she’d never have. And she never opened that trunk again for the rest of her long life.
Who was she? Why was I required to do this? She was no relative of mine, and no relative of anyone related to me. She was my ex-mother-in-law’s godmother. A woman with no children of her own. No living relatives of any kind. And anyone she ever loved had died in that very house I visited her in, on Gramercy Park Place, in Los Angeles.
Her name was Helen Browne, but she asked to be called Sunny. She had been a movie star, you see. She had appeared in several motion pictures of the silent era. When asked to identify them, titles rattled off the top of her head along with silver screen stars I’d never heard of. But you know, that’s not what really matters. She told me the really important roles were in the theatre. And she showed me pictures of her playbills and her schedule as she toured the Western U.S. in theatre troupes with the likes of Ralph Bellamy and Jason Robards, Sr.
She had a birth name, a married name, a nickname and a stage name. And she was all about drama. You see that house across the street? Why, that’s where the young man lived who wrote “When the Swallows Return to Capistrano.”
I had no idea if that was important or not. I was a Michigan country boy. I’d never heard of the song. I’d never heard of the town. I kept trying to find a way to relate to this ancient woman, but it wasn’t easy. Something told me she was a big fake. I was convinced all this strangeness just couldn’t be for real.
When she was still mobile, she insisted I drive her to the Brown Derby or El Chollo for lunch because that’s where the stars eat. I had my choice of driving her dusty old 1966 Mustang or her dusty old 1966 Continental. Both had under 30,000 miles on them, and both only moved if I drove them.
She would tell me things like how healthy urine is for your eyes, and how to communicate with the dead through séances. But mostly, she would talk about the life of an actress. Oh! How the young men adored her. Oh! The suitors. Oh! The proposals of matrimony. But she had steadfastly fended them all off. She remained aloof until middle aged when she married a ship pilot for the Port of Los Angeles who died ten years later.
The house. The house was her mausoleum. Her father built it in 1905 and she moved in when she was two years old. And she never moved out. Her parents each died in that house. Her husband died in that house. Eventually Sunny died in that house in 1998 at the age of 95.
In her final years she was confined to her bed and often mistook me for a doctor or some kind of accountant. She would tell me how she had been dancing around downstairs earlier in the day, and I would tell her how nice that was.
Having no offspring, she left the bulk of her estate to the Norman Vincent Peale foundation. But the task of sorting through her home fell on me. I was supposed to clean it out and look for items of interest for my in-laws to sell at auction. I figured I could go through the whole house in two days. I ended up being there seven.
I started out down stairs, which was sort of clean and always ready for company. I found the Chinese snuff bottle collection which was the most prized asset in the house. In a cabinet in the living room I found an unused Lone Ranger game from 1936. It was in mint condition, so I delivered it to the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in exchange for a lifetime free pass.
When I made my way upstairs my task became truly strange. Most rooms were stacked to the ceiling with junk so that the doors couldn’t be opened. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, the hallways, closets, offices were packed to the ceiling. In fact the only room that had an access way was the room Sunny died in.
So I started in the corner bedroom. I had to pry open the door, and then reach my arm around and start pulling things out to give me space to open the door wider. I used this technique for all the rest of the rooms in the house. For the next two days I worked in that room and the hallway. We ordered in a forty-foot dumpster, and I ended up filing more than two of those.
I discovered all kinds of weird things in that room, and was always worried I’d find a skeleton. But I didn’t. Instead, I found boxes of canceled checks from the twenties and thirties. I found hundreds of dresses, shoes, jewelry. When I got down to the floor level, I found a made bed, and items on the dresser that had been covered for 50 years.
It took a full day to get to floor level in the hallway, but at the bottom I found a cedar chest with two newspapers on it. Both were defunct Los Angeles papers and both were dated November 11, 1918 and the headlines heralded the armistice.
In the hallway, when I could finally get into the cabinets I found glamour shots of silent movie stars I’d never heard of. I recognized the names of Lillian Gish and Tom Mix. But beyond that, they were just stacks of head shots.
And then I found the pictures of Sunny. They were stunning. She was certainly beautiful back in her day. She had long flowing blonde hair and often had furs draped strategically around her bare chest. It was so hard to picture her as a teenager and starlet. But there was the proof in front of my eyes.
In the second bedroom upstairs I worked my way to ground level again to find a bedside table. I think this was Sunny’s room as a child. In the drawer by the bed I found love letters. Dozens of them. I read the words of Ralph Bellamy and Jason Robards, Sr. as they confessed their undying love to Sunny. These were passionate letters.
There were many other letters from actors and names I didn’t recognize. I put them all in the stack of stuff for the auction house to sort out.
I spent a full day cleaning out a big walk-in closet, only to get to the bottom and discover it was actually a small office. There was a working desk in there. As I went through the desk I found the police files for a case from Philadelphia for indecent exposure against her husband Brownie. It was funny reading it. Who knows what he was up to our how drunk he was, but the charge was from the 1930’s and described in detail chasing him down and arresting him. At my in-law’s request I destroyed the file.
Towards the end of the week I was working very late hours. I would work about 14 hours, then go to a hotel and sleep and start again the next day. Whenever I was on a roll, I hated to stop. Frankly, the stuff I was finding was so interesting I was running on adrenaline a lot of the time.
The last room I ventured into was the storage room at the top of the stairs. Like the others, the door wouldn’t open, so I had to reach in and start pulling things out. It was getting late, and I was excited to see what this room had in store, so I pushed myself to work late into the night.
The light was very poor, so I got floor lamps from around the house and set them up in the hallway as I started pulling things out of this storeroom. When I pulled enough junk out to get the door open halfway, I saw the room had shelves around all four walls, and there was a closet in the back.
The shelves were filled with black boxes about 18 inches square. There were probably 100 boxes in there in total. Each box had a sign on it. Some said, “Fall 1938”. Another might say, “Winter 1927”. I was absolutely mad with curiosity to find out what was in these boxes. As soon as I could push my way in, I started pulling those boxes out to find each one had a fancy women’s hat in it!
By the time I had reached the closet in the back of that room it was nearing midnight. I had to step over a pair of beautiful green marble lamps that I took home and re-wired for myself.
At last, I opened the closet door to find it was also packed to the ceiling. By one o’clock in the morning I was ready to go home, but I saw in the back of the closet a most unique object. It was a treasure chest, like a pirate might have used to keep doubloons in. I was intrigued and got a new burst of energy as I lugged that trunk into the hallway.
I positioned the floor lamps and took off their shades so I could get the maximum light from the bare bulbs. As I opened the trunk, I found it had been filled with newspapers as packing material. The dates of all the newspapers were 1919. It occurred to me that this trunk had not been touched since it was sealed up 79 years ago.
One of the first things I pulled out was a little Eskimo doll made with real seal fur. It had a badge on it that said, “Admiral Byrd Expedition – 1919.” I also found several toys, including a little hand-held game called “Beat the Kaiser” in which you tried to roll little BB’s into Kaiser Wilhelm’s eyes and mouth.
At the very bottom of the trunk I found what looked like three small logs wrapped in newspaper and neatly tied with three strings each. As I inspected the first, I noticed that it too, was wrapped in 1919 newspaper. My heart was pounding with anticipation to find what was hidden in the most remote corner of the most remote room in that creepy old house. I tugged on the bows of the string and it easily removed itself. I unrolled the newspaper to find two blue eyes pop awake to look back at me!
My heart stopped, and I nearly dropped the thing. When I caught my breath I realized it was a doll. All three were antique dolls from France. Their eyes could open and close. I was relieved, but I called it a night after that.
As I look back now, I can picture a 16 year old girl, active in drama and looking for a career on the stage, putting away the things of her childhood. She wrapped up those pretty dolls and saved them for the children she’d never have. And she never opened that trunk again for the rest of her long life.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Coco Higgins - Unmasked
I admit I’m a little rough around the edges. Sometimes my mouth doesn’t have a filter. If you’re actually ever around me in person, you might even witness a mind-->out verbal excoriation of sorts.
Once upon a time, I was with a group of girls in gym class. It was the end of the period, and a girl I (secretly) didn’t like announced, “I think I’ll go change now,” to which I immediately and thoughtlessly responded: “INTO A BETTER PERSON?”
Oops.
I’ve also been known to rip new assholes into employees and strangers.
Exhibit B: Back when I was a business tycoon/captainess of industry, I managed about 150 peons. I was quite demanding at first, before I mentally checked out and stopped giving a shit. I used to hold weekly collections meetings with my account managers in which I would ask for status reports of when we could expect customers to make progress payments against their contracts. I would routinely run down the list of accounts and the minions would update me. The expectation, obviously, was that they would be prepared with answers.
Well, one time, an account manager had the audacity to come into my office ill-prepared.
Matt was one of the nicest guys in the company, which says a lot because I was otherwise surrounded by a bunch of misogynists. It was the construction industry after all, and my employees were about 95% male. Never mind that Matt’s co-workers complained that he farted at his desk, or that one time I caught him napping in his cubicle. For the most part, he was always amiable and had a strong work ethic.
He came into my office with a bunch of “I-don’t-knows” and “I’ll-get-back-to-you-on-that” type of responses. After hearing about five of these in succession, tendrils of smoke issued forth from my crimson ears and I exploded. I yelled at the poor kid, something along the lines of: “How dare you come in here and waste my time with these useless answers? What the hell have you been doing this whole time? This is completely unacceptable! Don’t come back in here unless you have something useful to report. But you better do it by this afternoon. Now get the hell out of my office!”
After being subjected to a few minutes of verbal abuse, Matt walked out of my office with his tail between his legs. Am I proud of this? No. (Maybe.) Did Matt’s behavior warrant a tongue-lashing? Not necessarily. Reprimand, yes, but not in the way I delivered it.
Then there was this other time just this past summer. I was at a coffee shop with two friends when a stranger came up to us to bum a cigarette. Anthony offered the guy -- let’s call him Douchebag -- an American Spirit. Douchebag declined it and asked for one of my Camel Crush menthols. How dare he. But I gave him one, thinking it was because he preferred the minty taste. And that’s fine because I can relate to it.
But then Douchebag said, “Yeah, I like these better because these are real cigarettes.” Something then clicked in my brain, unleashing a monster.
This sub-human creature inside of me then pointed at Anthony’s pack, glared at Douchebag, and exclaimed, “Oh, so you’re saying those aren’t REAL cigarettes? Those are as real as you can get! They’re organic!”
Douchebag was a bit flummoxed and said something about how the Camel Crush cigarette was fun to smoke. So then I thought, “Okay, he likes to squeeze the filter and hear it pop, just like me. Forgivable.”
But then he didn’t even pinch the cigarette. Instead, he proceeded to rip. it. OPEN, essentially rendering it unsmokeable, to which I asked, appalled, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know how to smoke a fucking cigarette?”
Apparently not. Douchebag responded, “I thought these were those cool cigarettes you can take apart and smoke. But I guess not. Man, these cigarettes suck!”
That was it. The floodgates opened, and a rushing torrent of verbal whitewater came out of my mouth to drown the dumbass. “First you come here asking for a cigarette. Not just a beggar, but a chooser. Then you insult my friend’s American Spirits, and then you fuck up one of mine because you don’t even know how to smoke one. Then you say my cigarettes suck. WHAT KIND OF AN ASSHOLE ARE YOU?”
I had at least three opportunities to bite my tongue and let the issue slide. And most people probably would’ve just let it go to avoid confrontation. But for some inexplicable reason, I decided that the best thing to do was to cause a scene. In a coffee shop. In broad daylight. With a complete stranger. Yeah.
Well maybe it’s not so inexplicable. Just the other night, I was with a group of colleagues (yeah, that’s how we obnoxiously refer to each other now that we’re in grad school). Anyway, we were at a coffee shop and it was past midnight. Half the group was getting ready to call it a night. I guess no one else has a near-inverted sleeping pattern and is a vampire like me.
I jokingly called one of them “a big fucking baby” for wanting to go home so soon. Then one of my other new friends, also lightheartedly, said I was “so mean.” I smiled and admitted that I was, and she replied, “Yeah, it’s because of all your self-loathing.”
SELF-LOATHING.
This made me think of a few things. First of all, we’ve only known each other for a couple of months, yet she was able to make this psychobabble assessment of me that kind of hit like a dagger to the heart in its precision. Is she that perceptive, or am I that transparent? I mean, it’s taken some of my other close friends at least a year or so to figure that one out. Quite impressive, really, if you think about it.
More importantly, just how true is that statement?
Well, I do engage in acts of self-loathing. I revel in agonizing episodes of unrequited love, and along the same vein, stay in terrible relationships longer than I should. Then there’s the addiction and general lack of moderation - cigarettes, awful food, alcohol and other substances. And again, I can be a bit of a reclusive nocturnal creature. At times, I envision myself as a decadent bohemian in fin-de-siècle France, wallowing in my self-pity and ennui. I brood to Fiona Apple on repeat. It’s a sad and pathetic existence sometimes, but I love it in its own twisted way. It makes me feel alive.
But I’ve just been talking about acts of self-loathing. To take it to a more literal definition - do I actually really hate myself? I don’t think so. On the contrary, I feel like sometimes the exact opposite is true. I know I have minor freak-outs about my insecurities, but I actually love myself to the point of megalomania sometimes. I won’t elaborate on that here because it will probably just alienate me further from friends. Just take my word for it for the moment. So why do I subject myself to acts of self-loathing when I am, in fact, a narcissist?
Now that I’ve identified the dialectical tension between self-loathing and sheer narcissism in my personality, what next? Nothing really. I’m not up for trying to figure out the root of that right now, nor do I believe my personality will or should change. I just am.
Oh right. You’re probably wondering what this has to do with this week’s theme of buildings and food. Well, I started thinking of all this when I was at a coffee shop (a building) with people who were eating sandwiches and pizza (food). Also, my friend who pointed out my self-loathing, an act that served as the impetus to this entire inquiry, is a huge Talking Heads fan, and she probably loves their album More Songs About Buildings and Food. Truth.
Coco Higgins is an aspiring art historian, post-hipster, obnoxious Twitterer, proud owner of delusions of grandeur, has a knack for remembering useless trivia of all kinds, all in all an extraordinary machine.
Once upon a time, I was with a group of girls in gym class. It was the end of the period, and a girl I (secretly) didn’t like announced, “I think I’ll go change now,” to which I immediately and thoughtlessly responded: “INTO A BETTER PERSON?”
Oops.
I’ve also been known to rip new assholes into employees and strangers.
Exhibit B: Back when I was a business tycoon/captainess of industry, I managed about 150 peons. I was quite demanding at first, before I mentally checked out and stopped giving a shit. I used to hold weekly collections meetings with my account managers in which I would ask for status reports of when we could expect customers to make progress payments against their contracts. I would routinely run down the list of accounts and the minions would update me. The expectation, obviously, was that they would be prepared with answers.
Well, one time, an account manager had the audacity to come into my office ill-prepared.
Matt was one of the nicest guys in the company, which says a lot because I was otherwise surrounded by a bunch of misogynists. It was the construction industry after all, and my employees were about 95% male. Never mind that Matt’s co-workers complained that he farted at his desk, or that one time I caught him napping in his cubicle. For the most part, he was always amiable and had a strong work ethic.
He came into my office with a bunch of “I-don’t-knows” and “I’ll-get-back-to-you-on-that” type of responses. After hearing about five of these in succession, tendrils of smoke issued forth from my crimson ears and I exploded. I yelled at the poor kid, something along the lines of: “How dare you come in here and waste my time with these useless answers? What the hell have you been doing this whole time? This is completely unacceptable! Don’t come back in here unless you have something useful to report. But you better do it by this afternoon. Now get the hell out of my office!”
After being subjected to a few minutes of verbal abuse, Matt walked out of my office with his tail between his legs. Am I proud of this? No. (Maybe.) Did Matt’s behavior warrant a tongue-lashing? Not necessarily. Reprimand, yes, but not in the way I delivered it.
Then there was this other time just this past summer. I was at a coffee shop with two friends when a stranger came up to us to bum a cigarette. Anthony offered the guy -- let’s call him Douchebag -- an American Spirit. Douchebag declined it and asked for one of my Camel Crush menthols. How dare he. But I gave him one, thinking it was because he preferred the minty taste. And that’s fine because I can relate to it.
But then Douchebag said, “Yeah, I like these better because these are real cigarettes.” Something then clicked in my brain, unleashing a monster.
This sub-human creature inside of me then pointed at Anthony’s pack, glared at Douchebag, and exclaimed, “Oh, so you’re saying those aren’t REAL cigarettes? Those are as real as you can get! They’re organic!”
Douchebag was a bit flummoxed and said something about how the Camel Crush cigarette was fun to smoke. So then I thought, “Okay, he likes to squeeze the filter and hear it pop, just like me. Forgivable.”
But then he didn’t even pinch the cigarette. Instead, he proceeded to rip. it. OPEN, essentially rendering it unsmokeable, to which I asked, appalled, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know how to smoke a fucking cigarette?”
Apparently not. Douchebag responded, “I thought these were those cool cigarettes you can take apart and smoke. But I guess not. Man, these cigarettes suck!”
That was it. The floodgates opened, and a rushing torrent of verbal whitewater came out of my mouth to drown the dumbass. “First you come here asking for a cigarette. Not just a beggar, but a chooser. Then you insult my friend’s American Spirits, and then you fuck up one of mine because you don’t even know how to smoke one. Then you say my cigarettes suck. WHAT KIND OF AN ASSHOLE ARE YOU?”
I had at least three opportunities to bite my tongue and let the issue slide. And most people probably would’ve just let it go to avoid confrontation. But for some inexplicable reason, I decided that the best thing to do was to cause a scene. In a coffee shop. In broad daylight. With a complete stranger. Yeah.
Well maybe it’s not so inexplicable. Just the other night, I was with a group of colleagues (yeah, that’s how we obnoxiously refer to each other now that we’re in grad school). Anyway, we were at a coffee shop and it was past midnight. Half the group was getting ready to call it a night. I guess no one else has a near-inverted sleeping pattern and is a vampire like me.
I jokingly called one of them “a big fucking baby” for wanting to go home so soon. Then one of my other new friends, also lightheartedly, said I was “so mean.” I smiled and admitted that I was, and she replied, “Yeah, it’s because of all your self-loathing.”
SELF-LOATHING.
This made me think of a few things. First of all, we’ve only known each other for a couple of months, yet she was able to make this psychobabble assessment of me that kind of hit like a dagger to the heart in its precision. Is she that perceptive, or am I that transparent? I mean, it’s taken some of my other close friends at least a year or so to figure that one out. Quite impressive, really, if you think about it.
More importantly, just how true is that statement?
Well, I do engage in acts of self-loathing. I revel in agonizing episodes of unrequited love, and along the same vein, stay in terrible relationships longer than I should. Then there’s the addiction and general lack of moderation - cigarettes, awful food, alcohol and other substances. And again, I can be a bit of a reclusive nocturnal creature. At times, I envision myself as a decadent bohemian in fin-de-siècle France, wallowing in my self-pity and ennui. I brood to Fiona Apple on repeat. It’s a sad and pathetic existence sometimes, but I love it in its own twisted way. It makes me feel alive.
But I’ve just been talking about acts of self-loathing. To take it to a more literal definition - do I actually really hate myself? I don’t think so. On the contrary, I feel like sometimes the exact opposite is true. I know I have minor freak-outs about my insecurities, but I actually love myself to the point of megalomania sometimes. I won’t elaborate on that here because it will probably just alienate me further from friends. Just take my word for it for the moment. So why do I subject myself to acts of self-loathing when I am, in fact, a narcissist?
Now that I’ve identified the dialectical tension between self-loathing and sheer narcissism in my personality, what next? Nothing really. I’m not up for trying to figure out the root of that right now, nor do I believe my personality will or should change. I just am.
Oh right. You’re probably wondering what this has to do with this week’s theme of buildings and food. Well, I started thinking of all this when I was at a coffee shop (a building) with people who were eating sandwiches and pizza (food). Also, my friend who pointed out my self-loathing, an act that served as the impetus to this entire inquiry, is a huge Talking Heads fan, and she probably loves their album More Songs About Buildings and Food. Truth.
Coco Higgins is an aspiring art historian, post-hipster, obnoxious Twitterer, proud owner of delusions of grandeur, has a knack for remembering useless trivia of all kinds, all in all an extraordinary machine.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Barbi Beckett: Gladys
My dad thought I should drink milk, for some reason. I appreciate milk as a grown-up, with a warm cookie or some chocolate cake but, as a kid, the only thing it was good for was moistening my sugar cereal. We call it “cow milk” now, which would’ve been like saying “earth dirt” back then.
I use to fantasize about falling ill and having a doctor gravely tell my pop, “Mr. Beckett, your daughter has a rare disorder and will die if she drinks any more milk. In fact, it is of ‘up’most importance that she drink only coke from now on.”
Coke meant any corn syrupy carbonated beverage – Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite. What kind of coke do you want?
Fortunately, I did get my share of coke. When my mom would blow through and take me on some weird road trip where we’d sleep in the back of her Pinto and wash-up at rest stops, I’d always get to enjoy her breakfast of choice; Dr. Pepper and Hostess Cupcakes, the kind with the creamy filling and white curly cue on top. She got her false teeth before she turned twenty. I wasn’t going to remind her that mine were real.
Much more nurturing, but still nutritionally challenged, was my grandma. My short, round, Kool smokin’, instant (hot water from the tap) coffee swillin’ grandma introduced me to Aunt Jemima’s pancake syrup mixed with margarine, in a bowl, as a snack.
I spent every weekend at Grandma’s little house. She was a packrat (aka, hoarder) so there was always something to explore. Grandma had only been to Muskogee, Oklahoma and El Paso, Texas but she had an affection for all things ”Oriental”: Pictures of Japanese huts and fisherman, a low, round, black coffee table with abalone inlays and Chinese scenery, a red Buddha that sat about a foot and half high, whose nubbly head I rubbed for years. I passed hours laying on her couch, head hanging off, imagining the ceiling as the floor. It seemed so clean and Asian. I’d have to replace the doors with paper screens and justify the tiny walls between the rooms but it was a nice break from the chaos of her right-side-up house. I mostly loved her clutter though. The treasures were not buried deep.
My grandma mothered me and pampered me in ways that I craved. Growing up with my dad, I’d get hugs now and then but he wouldn’t think to, say, hold my hair back and rub my tummy when I threw up. My grandma would give me bubble baths and then lay me on her bed and dowse me in a cloud of baby powder. She was an Avon lady. She wasn’t a good Avon lady. Being an Avon lady cost my grandma a lot of money. There was the bubble bath, powder and Skin So Soft, but also the perfume bottles shaped as animals or fountains. She might have been her only costumer.
A major weakness for Grandma was the Avon candles and candle holders. She had hundreds and every once in a while, when we were feeling fancy, we’d have a candlelight dinner. That meant rounding up all of the candles, which was like an Easter egg hunt after finding the first twenty obvious ones. We’d end up with more than fifty candles of varying shapes and colors. A frosted purple tulip, a red globe, tapers, votives, tea lights. We’d light them and place them all over the messy dining/living room space and then turn off the overheads. The room sparkled and glowed so bright. The bedlam faded to the background as all those little points of color and light stood up front, creating a magical illusion.
Dinner would already be prepared and was always the same; Snickers, sliced into bite-size rectangles, eaten with a fork, and to drink, a lovely wineglass of coke with ice. Grandma and I would linger at the table long after the meal, just chit-chatting. The room would gradually dim as a candle burned out here and there. Eventually, we’d turn on a light and start blowing out the rest of the candles. If there had been a smoke alarm, we would have heard about it then. I don’t know how many candlelight dinners we had, but there were enough that they are burned into my mind as one perfect evening of love.
As a teenager I spent less and less time at Grandma’s house. I couldn’t stand the cigarette smoke. When I pulled up to her porch on my bike, I’d see her in her special chair, frantically stubbing out the fire on her Kool as she waved the smoke around with the other hand. I also hated how desperate she was to be touched. It made me uncomfortable and yet, had she not put her hands on me so much as a little girl, I might not have survived. I grew uneasy with her emotions and how quickly she’d tear up when telling a story. I knew then that it was because I had inherited her sensitivity and fought it daily. I couldn’t bear to see her cry and she couldn’t not cry so, I began to stay away, then moved away, and then, six months later she died.
When I received her ashes in the mail, my boyfriend and I took them to a beautiful spot by a river. As we sprinkled the ashes on the banks, the sky, honest to God, opened up. There was a solid cloud cover and then, a huge circle of blue sky right above us. The geese went nuts, honking their heads off for a full minute. She was diggin’ the scene of this place. (When I was little, my grandma would spot shooting stars and say, “money money money”. I’d always miss them but on one visit to the place where I’d taken her ashes, I sat picturing Grandma perched atop the tall wooden foot bridge, against the night sky, about to do a swan dive and, in that very moment, I saw my first shooting star).
After the ashes were spread and the geese calmed down I went, with my swollen eyes, into a 7-11 for provisions, then we returned to our unfurnished apartment and balanced a shelf on two speakers for a table. We sat on the floor for a candlelight dinner of Snickers and Coke, without wineglasses and with a paltry five candles.
I still have the wrapper from that candy bar in a little drawer of her black Japanese music box. When Grandma died, my mother made it to town before I did and had a massive yard sale. Most of the objects that Grandma treasured were gone. I did get that frosted purple tulip candle, the black coffee table with Folger’s rings and cigarette burns, that music box and a note in my grandmother’s handwriting that said, “To whom it may concern, Barbi Beckett can have anything from my house that she wants to keep.”
I use to fantasize about falling ill and having a doctor gravely tell my pop, “Mr. Beckett, your daughter has a rare disorder and will die if she drinks any more milk. In fact, it is of ‘up’most importance that she drink only coke from now on.”
Coke meant any corn syrupy carbonated beverage – Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite. What kind of coke do you want?
Fortunately, I did get my share of coke. When my mom would blow through and take me on some weird road trip where we’d sleep in the back of her Pinto and wash-up at rest stops, I’d always get to enjoy her breakfast of choice; Dr. Pepper and Hostess Cupcakes, the kind with the creamy filling and white curly cue on top. She got her false teeth before she turned twenty. I wasn’t going to remind her that mine were real.
Much more nurturing, but still nutritionally challenged, was my grandma. My short, round, Kool smokin’, instant (hot water from the tap) coffee swillin’ grandma introduced me to Aunt Jemima’s pancake syrup mixed with margarine, in a bowl, as a snack.
I spent every weekend at Grandma’s little house. She was a packrat (aka, hoarder) so there was always something to explore. Grandma had only been to Muskogee, Oklahoma and El Paso, Texas but she had an affection for all things ”Oriental”: Pictures of Japanese huts and fisherman, a low, round, black coffee table with abalone inlays and Chinese scenery, a red Buddha that sat about a foot and half high, whose nubbly head I rubbed for years. I passed hours laying on her couch, head hanging off, imagining the ceiling as the floor. It seemed so clean and Asian. I’d have to replace the doors with paper screens and justify the tiny walls between the rooms but it was a nice break from the chaos of her right-side-up house. I mostly loved her clutter though. The treasures were not buried deep.
My grandma mothered me and pampered me in ways that I craved. Growing up with my dad, I’d get hugs now and then but he wouldn’t think to, say, hold my hair back and rub my tummy when I threw up. My grandma would give me bubble baths and then lay me on her bed and dowse me in a cloud of baby powder. She was an Avon lady. She wasn’t a good Avon lady. Being an Avon lady cost my grandma a lot of money. There was the bubble bath, powder and Skin So Soft, but also the perfume bottles shaped as animals or fountains. She might have been her only costumer.
A major weakness for Grandma was the Avon candles and candle holders. She had hundreds and every once in a while, when we were feeling fancy, we’d have a candlelight dinner. That meant rounding up all of the candles, which was like an Easter egg hunt after finding the first twenty obvious ones. We’d end up with more than fifty candles of varying shapes and colors. A frosted purple tulip, a red globe, tapers, votives, tea lights. We’d light them and place them all over the messy dining/living room space and then turn off the overheads. The room sparkled and glowed so bright. The bedlam faded to the background as all those little points of color and light stood up front, creating a magical illusion.
Dinner would already be prepared and was always the same; Snickers, sliced into bite-size rectangles, eaten with a fork, and to drink, a lovely wineglass of coke with ice. Grandma and I would linger at the table long after the meal, just chit-chatting. The room would gradually dim as a candle burned out here and there. Eventually, we’d turn on a light and start blowing out the rest of the candles. If there had been a smoke alarm, we would have heard about it then. I don’t know how many candlelight dinners we had, but there were enough that they are burned into my mind as one perfect evening of love.
As a teenager I spent less and less time at Grandma’s house. I couldn’t stand the cigarette smoke. When I pulled up to her porch on my bike, I’d see her in her special chair, frantically stubbing out the fire on her Kool as she waved the smoke around with the other hand. I also hated how desperate she was to be touched. It made me uncomfortable and yet, had she not put her hands on me so much as a little girl, I might not have survived. I grew uneasy with her emotions and how quickly she’d tear up when telling a story. I knew then that it was because I had inherited her sensitivity and fought it daily. I couldn’t bear to see her cry and she couldn’t not cry so, I began to stay away, then moved away, and then, six months later she died.
When I received her ashes in the mail, my boyfriend and I took them to a beautiful spot by a river. As we sprinkled the ashes on the banks, the sky, honest to God, opened up. There was a solid cloud cover and then, a huge circle of blue sky right above us. The geese went nuts, honking their heads off for a full minute. She was diggin’ the scene of this place. (When I was little, my grandma would spot shooting stars and say, “money money money”. I’d always miss them but on one visit to the place where I’d taken her ashes, I sat picturing Grandma perched atop the tall wooden foot bridge, against the night sky, about to do a swan dive and, in that very moment, I saw my first shooting star).
After the ashes were spread and the geese calmed down I went, with my swollen eyes, into a 7-11 for provisions, then we returned to our unfurnished apartment and balanced a shelf on two speakers for a table. We sat on the floor for a candlelight dinner of Snickers and Coke, without wineglasses and with a paltry five candles.
I still have the wrapper from that candy bar in a little drawer of her black Japanese music box. When Grandma died, my mother made it to town before I did and had a massive yard sale. Most of the objects that Grandma treasured were gone. I did get that frosted purple tulip candle, the black coffee table with Folger’s rings and cigarette burns, that music box and a note in my grandmother’s handwriting that said, “To whom it may concern, Barbi Beckett can have anything from my house that she wants to keep.”
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Sean Tabb: The Meek Shall Inherit the Kitchen
I was a college sophomore when I rented my first apartment, a roach-infested flat I shared with three older roommates. The Council of Elders, I called them. It was safe to assume the roaches had been there a long time, given the age of the building and its proximal location to the known nexus of the cockroach universe (Allston, MA). Then there was the X-factor, the untold grunge of our unknown fellow tenants; the screamy sex-ers in the apartment next door, and the kimchi enthusiasts living below. A roach’s apartment building is his castle, and they don’t respect the boundaries formed by walls and doors with multiple locks. They roam, baby. They roam. But by some mysterious barometer, the Council of Elders discerned a spike in our apartment’s roach-to-human ratio, coincident with my arrival. An inquisition began. I was accused of being messy with food.
Denise was the Council potentate, a 30-something actress, thin as a whisper, beautiful and fastidious. She once told me that she slept with her asshole clenched tight to keep the cockroaches from using her as a hotel, a comment I mistook for flirtation. Her boyfriend, who looked like a perfect roach hotel, made his living as a beetle-browed musical composer, and drank the rest of any opened bottle of wine he ever found. They ate like royalty, these two, and never offered me a bite. It was the unspoken rule of the apartment, delibly inscribed in invisible ink on the lease. Buy what you eat, eat what you buy. They never left a crumb behind.
Kate, the Council magistrate, was a set designer of indeterminate age; she might have been 25, but in my mind she was closer to 40. I thought of her like a mother, and studiously avoided her like I avoided my own. The glowing ash of her ever-present cigarette was counterweight to the red-hot fireball of hair that leapt from her head, and she thrust it at me like a sideways exclamation point whenever she found evidence of my dealings in the kitchen: “CRUMBS!” Handy with a welder’s torch, a tool belt slung around her hips, she flung hammers for sport. It was hard to tell her laugh from her cough. She never ate a thing, and so couldn’t be held responsible for the roaches.
Gabe, the Council flagellate, was an actor too, a chewer of scenery. He would lounge around the house naked, a white feather boa strategically placed, more for effect than modesty. Gabe was like the older brother dressed in drag I never had. He taught me how to make coffee when no maker was handy; “cowboy coffee,” he called it, boiling water and grounds together in a pot and drinking the unfiltered brew. The dregs would lodge in our teeth for days. He subsisted on a diet of fancy olives and sardines.
For $200 a month, the Council of Elders let me sleep in the pantry behind the kitchen. It wasn’t much; barely room enough for a futon mattress and a stack of milk crates to house my clothes and books. We were on the third floor, and I had a window. There was no door. Kate gave me a remnant from a theater curtain, which I hung for privacy. The roaches were unsympathetic.
My relationship with food was underdeveloped. I had gone from living at home, being fed by my mother – first at her breast, then later from her Moosewood Cookbook – to living in a college dorm, where the food was laid out cafeteria-style three times a day and no one complained when I inhaled four bowls of Fruit Loops and a rasher of bacon for breakfast. I was pampered and ill-prepared to forage for myself, as the contents of my grocery bags irrefutably proved.
At the supermarket, I went for durability over taste. Anything processed was bound to keep, and I needed to stretch my meager food dollars as far as I could. Expiration dates were anathema. Plus, I had a tooth for kiddie comfort foods, the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, the Spaghetti-O’s, the hot dogs. Gabe sneered and taunted me for the pre-packaged, pressed meat cold cuts I purchased, waving the foil packets in my face: “You know what that is? It’s the lips, and the hooves, and balls! They drive over it with a steam roller to make it look like that.” The thought hadn’t crossed my mind.
Worse, knowing this didn’t stop me from eating it. I was drawn to the convenience, and cowed by the idea of saddling up to a genuine deli counter, taking a number, asking for a half pound of roast beef sliced wafer thin. I was afraid of doing it wrong, sure to look like a fool before the sausage guy and all the other deli customers. My only concession to the penchant for processed foods was my all-natural peanut butter. It wasn’t that I went looking for fresh ground. Some smart marketer put the plastic tubs on a grocery store aisle end-cap. It was the first thing I saw, so I grabbed it.
Cockroaches appeared to favor these junk foods as well, perhaps because the preservatives fortified them against the pending apocalypse, or the exterminator, whichever came first. My slovenly habits of post-meal clean up certainly weren’t helping. I’d heard somewhere that “cleanliness” was next to “Godliness,” and since I was approximately eight degrees of separation away from “Godliness,” I didn’t feel a whole lot of compulsion to wield a sponge. SOS pads did funny things to my finger tips, made them look all sloughed and shredded. As a result, our kitchen had suddenly become the hottest cockroach speakeasy in town. In the dark you wouldn’t know it, but the instant you flipped on a light, BAM! A thousand tiny roaches would freeze for a moment, snap their heads in your direction, then one of them would mumble “shit,” and another one would yell out “RUN!” and they would scatter, leaving their cocktails and their hors d’oeuvres behind.
And so it came one morning that I stumbled from my pantry hovel, stomach growling like a junkyard dog, and thought to make myself a fancy, healthy breakfast: peanut butter on toast. All natural peanut butter on toast. My assigned cupboard was wall-mounted, way up high, in the corner by the sink. I reached up and grabbed the tub, pulled it down and, seeing what had become of it, dropped it in horror. “Denise! Kate! Gabe!! COME QUICK!” I shouted, and all three responded to the alarm, huddling around me.
Something, some unfathomable force of animal nature, had smashed the lid of my peanut butter container into plastic shards, done a kind of happy dance in the now exposed butter, and left behind a scattering of poo, like a signature, like a warning, like its own personal Mark of Zorro.
“Cockroaches?” I whispered, reverently.
“MICE!” the Council of Elders shot back in angry chorus. I was nearly evicted on the spot.
These pests clearly meant business. Their skills for survival were evolving, mutating, like a virus or a bacteria evolves to beat the world-class brains who arrogantly believed they could erase it. We were up against something far more powerful than sealed food containers and an immaculately clean kitchen could protect against.
What followed was a long period of reform. Under the Council’s tutelage and wary eyes, I was schooled in the art and science of disinfectants. Denise taught me to scrub beneath the stove top, down by the pilot light of each heating element; Kate introduced me to Lestoil. Gabe showed me how to dance with a mop.
It all seemed a bit futile to me, but I wasn’t positioned to argue. Buildings are meant to shield us from nature, but food is a powerful magnet. These four walls around us mount an effective defense against the larger of God’s scavenging creatures, the wolves and the bears and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they’re no match for the smaller ones. The meek shall inherit the kitchen. I was anxiously aware of that fact as I lay in my pantry at night, clenched in body and soul, awake to the sound of skittering feet just beyond the crumbling horsehair plaster.
There’s a pretty good chance that Sean Tabb resembles the guy your sister dated in college. He gets that a lot. There’s an almost equally good chance that he DID date your sister in college, and just doesn’t remember. He does his parenting, husbanding, living and writing from his home in Portland, Maine. Check out his website at http://punctuatedequilibriumblog.wordpress.com, or follow his drivel on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pithnvinegar.
Denise was the Council potentate, a 30-something actress, thin as a whisper, beautiful and fastidious. She once told me that she slept with her asshole clenched tight to keep the cockroaches from using her as a hotel, a comment I mistook for flirtation. Her boyfriend, who looked like a perfect roach hotel, made his living as a beetle-browed musical composer, and drank the rest of any opened bottle of wine he ever found. They ate like royalty, these two, and never offered me a bite. It was the unspoken rule of the apartment, delibly inscribed in invisible ink on the lease. Buy what you eat, eat what you buy. They never left a crumb behind.
Kate, the Council magistrate, was a set designer of indeterminate age; she might have been 25, but in my mind she was closer to 40. I thought of her like a mother, and studiously avoided her like I avoided my own. The glowing ash of her ever-present cigarette was counterweight to the red-hot fireball of hair that leapt from her head, and she thrust it at me like a sideways exclamation point whenever she found evidence of my dealings in the kitchen: “CRUMBS!” Handy with a welder’s torch, a tool belt slung around her hips, she flung hammers for sport. It was hard to tell her laugh from her cough. She never ate a thing, and so couldn’t be held responsible for the roaches.
Gabe, the Council flagellate, was an actor too, a chewer of scenery. He would lounge around the house naked, a white feather boa strategically placed, more for effect than modesty. Gabe was like the older brother dressed in drag I never had. He taught me how to make coffee when no maker was handy; “cowboy coffee,” he called it, boiling water and grounds together in a pot and drinking the unfiltered brew. The dregs would lodge in our teeth for days. He subsisted on a diet of fancy olives and sardines.
For $200 a month, the Council of Elders let me sleep in the pantry behind the kitchen. It wasn’t much; barely room enough for a futon mattress and a stack of milk crates to house my clothes and books. We were on the third floor, and I had a window. There was no door. Kate gave me a remnant from a theater curtain, which I hung for privacy. The roaches were unsympathetic.
My relationship with food was underdeveloped. I had gone from living at home, being fed by my mother – first at her breast, then later from her Moosewood Cookbook – to living in a college dorm, where the food was laid out cafeteria-style three times a day and no one complained when I inhaled four bowls of Fruit Loops and a rasher of bacon for breakfast. I was pampered and ill-prepared to forage for myself, as the contents of my grocery bags irrefutably proved.
At the supermarket, I went for durability over taste. Anything processed was bound to keep, and I needed to stretch my meager food dollars as far as I could. Expiration dates were anathema. Plus, I had a tooth for kiddie comfort foods, the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, the Spaghetti-O’s, the hot dogs. Gabe sneered and taunted me for the pre-packaged, pressed meat cold cuts I purchased, waving the foil packets in my face: “You know what that is? It’s the lips, and the hooves, and balls! They drive over it with a steam roller to make it look like that.” The thought hadn’t crossed my mind.
Worse, knowing this didn’t stop me from eating it. I was drawn to the convenience, and cowed by the idea of saddling up to a genuine deli counter, taking a number, asking for a half pound of roast beef sliced wafer thin. I was afraid of doing it wrong, sure to look like a fool before the sausage guy and all the other deli customers. My only concession to the penchant for processed foods was my all-natural peanut butter. It wasn’t that I went looking for fresh ground. Some smart marketer put the plastic tubs on a grocery store aisle end-cap. It was the first thing I saw, so I grabbed it.
Cockroaches appeared to favor these junk foods as well, perhaps because the preservatives fortified them against the pending apocalypse, or the exterminator, whichever came first. My slovenly habits of post-meal clean up certainly weren’t helping. I’d heard somewhere that “cleanliness” was next to “Godliness,” and since I was approximately eight degrees of separation away from “Godliness,” I didn’t feel a whole lot of compulsion to wield a sponge. SOS pads did funny things to my finger tips, made them look all sloughed and shredded. As a result, our kitchen had suddenly become the hottest cockroach speakeasy in town. In the dark you wouldn’t know it, but the instant you flipped on a light, BAM! A thousand tiny roaches would freeze for a moment, snap their heads in your direction, then one of them would mumble “shit,” and another one would yell out “RUN!” and they would scatter, leaving their cocktails and their hors d’oeuvres behind.
And so it came one morning that I stumbled from my pantry hovel, stomach growling like a junkyard dog, and thought to make myself a fancy, healthy breakfast: peanut butter on toast. All natural peanut butter on toast. My assigned cupboard was wall-mounted, way up high, in the corner by the sink. I reached up and grabbed the tub, pulled it down and, seeing what had become of it, dropped it in horror. “Denise! Kate! Gabe!! COME QUICK!” I shouted, and all three responded to the alarm, huddling around me.
Something, some unfathomable force of animal nature, had smashed the lid of my peanut butter container into plastic shards, done a kind of happy dance in the now exposed butter, and left behind a scattering of poo, like a signature, like a warning, like its own personal Mark of Zorro.
“Cockroaches?” I whispered, reverently.
“MICE!” the Council of Elders shot back in angry chorus. I was nearly evicted on the spot.
These pests clearly meant business. Their skills for survival were evolving, mutating, like a virus or a bacteria evolves to beat the world-class brains who arrogantly believed they could erase it. We were up against something far more powerful than sealed food containers and an immaculately clean kitchen could protect against.
What followed was a long period of reform. Under the Council’s tutelage and wary eyes, I was schooled in the art and science of disinfectants. Denise taught me to scrub beneath the stove top, down by the pilot light of each heating element; Kate introduced me to Lestoil. Gabe showed me how to dance with a mop.
It all seemed a bit futile to me, but I wasn’t positioned to argue. Buildings are meant to shield us from nature, but food is a powerful magnet. These four walls around us mount an effective defense against the larger of God’s scavenging creatures, the wolves and the bears and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they’re no match for the smaller ones. The meek shall inherit the kitchen. I was anxiously aware of that fact as I lay in my pantry at night, clenched in body and soul, awake to the sound of skittering feet just beyond the crumbling horsehair plaster.
There’s a pretty good chance that Sean Tabb resembles the guy your sister dated in college. He gets that a lot. There’s an almost equally good chance that he DID date your sister in college, and just doesn’t remember. He does his parenting, husbanding, living and writing from his home in Portland, Maine. Check out his website at http://punctuatedequilibriumblog.wordpress.com, or follow his drivel on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pithnvinegar.
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