From my barstool, I didn’t pay attention to who was playing the noon game. The Jets, Jags, Browns, I didn’t care. I only wanted a heavy buzz before the Pats took the field at three. I’d been invited to a small dinner party at six by an old friend, Greta. She told me there would be artists, doctors, lawyers, and they needed an everyday working man to feel superior. I signed up.
I spent the afternoon at the Copper Top talking to the bartender, Anna; a dog named Sir Walter, and a plethora of drunk faces cheering for the Pats who decimated the Steelers by more than thirty points. The clock above the bar read “six” when the game ended, I’d been walking the line between buzzed and drunk for the last hour. I staggered out to my hatchback car and drove to Star Market in Five Points. Greta told me to bring something, I bought a twelve pack of beer and decided on a chocolate pie with loads of whipped cream. Who doesn’t like pie? I thought.
I opened one of the beers in the parking lot, downed it, and put my car into gear and drove through Five Points, across Governors’ Drive, and found Greta’s little street. Colorful fall leaves, a dozen pride flags, and stickers all over her front windows about the importance of Art, NPR, and PBS littered her yard. I put the beer under my arm and held the pie in the palm of my hand like a chef bringing a tenderloin to the table of a gooey lipped dictator.
“Come in,” Greta shouted after I knocked.
A slow violin song played on the stereo. No rock music. No blues. No jazz. Simply a sad violin sinking melancholy sounds into the wall, a drama machine. In the back of the house, I heard conversation. I walked in half thinking people would say, “Hi,” but they were all too far concerned with their opinions about the state of the world, no facts, simply their opinions. I showed them the chocolate pie, but no one cared. I offered everyone a beer, but they declined in favor of an ancient artisan wine they had been drinking. Later, I’d find out the grapes were crushed by the soft feet of dainty artists in a giant wooden barrel. They danced inside the wooden barrel, stomped the grapes, and chanted Buddhist words of peace all while laughing when no one said anything funny. Pretend laughs for the pretend people.
I took a seat across from three students of the luxury. One, a man named, Gregoire Livingston. Black fluffy hair rested on his exquisitely crafted blue sweater, a black leather necklace with a silver Unk at the end blinded me. To Gregoire’s left, an ancient crone with silver hair in dreads with little plastic leaves decorated inside sipped the ancient white wine and refused to look at my face. To the Crone’s left sat a Doctor of Medicine, Sissy Cavendish. She’d been carrying on how she just returned from South Asia. She spent months among the flies, snakes, and monkeys who kept stealing morphine from needy patients to get high. She was angry that she had to return to work at Huntsville Hospital working for close to two-hundred grand per year. Her time in Asia living among the high as fuck monkeys, making a lowly twenty grand a year was where her heart lived. Greta was busy stirring a pot with a pineapple sticking out of the top.
“And your name is?” Gregoire asked me with a pinkie sticking out before he took a sip of his artisan wine.
“Francis,” I replied, opening a fresh beer. “Are y’all sure you don’t want a beer?”
“Beer is for men,” The Crone interrupted, “And I’ve simply had enough of MEN.”
“Excuse me,” Sissy Cavendish said. “I was talking here.”
“Oh please, Sissy. We have a guest.” Crone replied, turning her head to the side with a sigh.
“Greta told us you’re a poet,” Gregoire said.
“Not really. I go to work every day, then go to bed.” I replied, opening another beer.
“I’m a writer,” Sissy Cavendish said.
“And a damn fine writer of culture,” Crone said.
“Yeah, Sissy. I really liked that deep dive into the inner workings of poverty in 6th Century Europe. I think you should submit it to the Havard Review.” Gregoire said.
They all started to giggle and touched each other’s wine glasses as a show of appreciation.
“My art is really starting to take off,” Gregoire said. “It’s hard to find time in between taking care of all the orphaned farts in Alabama.”
“It’s a good cause, Gregoire,” The Crone said. “Without you, who knows where the orphaned farts would end up. Before you got involved, they showed up at my house and upset the Goddess. I do NOT like to upset Mother Earthen Manifest of the Equal Heart Journey.”
“What do you do for art?” I asked.
“I’m glad you asked,” he replied. “I pick up tiny blades of grass with great care.”
“What for?”
“To make tiny violins with, of course. Like, um, what else?” he said with an air of cunt.
“Do you play the tiny grass violins?”
“Francis,” he said like I born eleven seconds ago, “You hear the music Greta is playing?”
“The sad violin music?”
“I’ll have you know that’s from my one-man grass string violin concert at The Flying Monkey.”
“It was a packed house, too,” Sissy shouted. “I fell in love with Gregoire right then and there.”
“You two are a couple?”
“Yes. We are to be married on March 4th of some year.” Gregoire said.
“As soon as Mother Earthen Manifest of the Equal Heart Journey approves,” Sissy said.
The crap. The enormous, stinking, crap filled the room. Growing bigger, busting pipes, and soiling sheets, the table in front of me smelled like Patchouli was holding onto its last astrology chart.
“The Goddess knows all,” The Crone said. “Soon you two will be able to procreate and make little Cavendishes.”
I looked up and watched Greta furiously chop celery like her life depended on it. She smiled whenever one of them mentioned their jobs, artistic endeavors, or Mother Earthen.
“Who are your favorite poets?” The Crone asked.
“I like Bukowski, Carver, James Wright.”
“Bukowski?!!!” The Crone yelled. Her handcrafted colorful beads that wrapped around her neck like Mr. T’s gold fell off her neck and shattered on the table. “Strike one, Francis! That man should burn up and die.”
“He is dead.”
“Burn his words.” Crone looked up at the ceiling, “Goddess burn that man’s words!”
“I thought you people were against banning books.”
“Oh, we are, kind of, “Gregoire said. “But I say, ‘no banning books,’ for status. We are totally for burning books that don’t fit our narrative.”
“Well, now we know you have zero literary taste,” The Crone said. “What do you do for work?”
“I’m a butcher.”
There was this silence, this continuing silence. A gasp, someone farted. Gregoire collected it. The Crone stood up and began chanting and running in place. Her baggy Rastafarian colored clothing shook twenty gallons of sacred oils out into the air. I sneezed a dozen times.
“Greta, you invited this mother fucker here?” Sissy shouted.
“He’s a poet. You said you wanted to meet a real poet.”
“Yeah, a man wearing a Kasaya. I at least expected a damn Kasaya. Not a man with God damn blood on his hands. I expected a man in robes to recite poems about goldfish and swallows. Not a life taker.”
Gregoire stood up and pounded one inch off his glass full of artisan wine. “Greta, you let a murderer into your home.”
“What’s for supper,” I asked, hoping to calm them down.
“Pineapple and tofu stew and for dessert fistfuls of air.”
“What kind of food is that.”
“Vegan! You murdering, dirty, son-of-a-bitch,” Sissy Cavendish shouted.
“Eating air? Isn’t that the same as breathing? I asked. Mistake.
The Crone gathered herself and sat down. She reached across the table and took my hand. Her lips narrowed, the ancient waddle under her neck shook, she began to chant.
“Holy Mother Earth, manifest this lost soul onto the path of Coexist.”
“This isn’t coexisting,” I said. “But keep going, I’m having fun.”
Gregoire busted out an acoustic guitar of nowhere, and I mean out of nowhere. Like he carried an “in case of an emergency break open this sensitive acoustic guitar.” Sissy stood behind her future lover, and they began to sing the “Hare Krsna Mantra.” The Crone waved her body behind them with her hands in the air, and her face pointed up to the clouds. Greta chopped a single tiny carrot and tossed it into the stew.
“I think we’ve gotten rid of the bad Ju Ju,” the Crone said, taking a seat. Sissy Cavendish and Gregoire Livingston both agreed and stopped singing.
“I traded football for this,” I mumbled to myself.
“Excuse me?” Sissy said. “Did you say, football? That macho manly man game?”
The guitar reappeared and Sissy and Gregoire chanted and sang louder and faster. The Crone did the Russian Prisiadki dance behind them and slammed miniature steel cymbals in between her fingers.
“I’m calling on my gypsy ancestors to help this man of the football, butcher of the living and hater of literature.”
The room began to spin. I felt sick. I was in the middle of a living cult. Those who proclaim love need love more than any human being on earth. Those who scream out into the abyss for peace need understanding and peace more than any living creature. Those who speak the language of tofu will soon eat the flesh of the living.
As the kitchen decorated in dead flowers, tiny leaves, basil, photos of oboes and French horns swallowed all of us, Lauren, Greta’s sister walked through the door. The chanting stopped, as did the gypsy dances of the damned. Her body, covered in a grey dress that ran to her mid-thigh, black stockings connected to the snaps of black garters up high over her black combat boots.
“I brought some whiskey back from Japan,” Lauren said, opening a fancy wooden box painted white with a Japanese symbol on the front.
I stared at the different woman inside Greta’s house. And although she smelled of peaceful protesting, she also looked like she’d tell a rug to fuck off if given the chance.
“I’ll try some,” I said.
Lauren poured a shot, and it went down smoothly on top of the dozen beers and five other whiskey shots I had taken earlier that day.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Vegan dinner is almost ready,” Greta said.
“None for me,” Lauren said to her sister. “I just ate a burger at Goldies.”
I waited for more chants, more dancing. A séance to break out, complete with candles and astrology charts. It never came.
“Wait, I cut meat for a living, and I get shitty James Taylor songs?”
“It’s okay for Lauren,” Gregoire said. “She ate local. If you eat local, you get a pass.”
“Local is the way,” the Crone said. “And Francis. I’ll only ask once. Don’t say harsh words about James Taylor.” She touched her heart and sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to run my fingers through his three hairs, touch his fleece vest. I’m a HARDCORE feminist, but I’d iron his pleated Khakis any day of the week if he asked me to. If James Taylor demanded sex if I weren’t in the mood, well, not even the Goddess would turn down a man who drips such sex and tenderness.”
I opened another beer and kicked back. Lauren sat next to me, and we began talking about her trip to Japan. She told me about her life as a traveling nurse, and how she helped the sick and the job afforded her free travel to check out people in different states and countries. We exchanged phone numbers. Not because we had a mutual liking for one another, but to find a friend in the middle of violent judgmental “peace,” made the minutes feel less like hours.
We both understood the other guests didn’t find a secret meaning to life through astrology, chanting, praying to a god or goddess. Secrets were not revealed by grasping onto the latest fad found through a reel or heard in a drum circle. That a lot of people only grasped onto those things because they fear death, fear that what they think and say is utterly meaningless in the end. And I get that, because I get the same types of anxieties and grasp onto my own things to find meaning in the middle of the absurd. Lauren understood too, but like me, she also could see through the bullshit.
“Want another shot, Francis?”
“Yeah, I’ll have some more of that Jap…”
But before I could finish the word Japanese, they accused me of saying, “Jap.” That I was a racist not worthy of their artisan wine talk. Not allowed to sit at the table of the great vegan goddesses. “I’ll pray for you,” the Crone said.
“Will you really?” I replied.
“No.”
I grabbed my non vegan pie, and my new age free beers and walked towards the door.
“You know what?” I said, they all looked back at me.
“James Taylor fucking SUCKS!” As I closed the door Lauren smiled at me. We are still friends to this day.
I drove back to my friend Chris Dayton’s house. It was a little after ten, he must’ve been asleep because the entire house was dark. I opened a beer, put on my headphones, and cranked Johnny Thunders’ “Born to Lose.” Chris’s cat came outside, jumped on the black iron table, and sat with me. I petted him a while underneath the November sky. Lauren shot me a text. I opened it. It was a photo of her giving the middle finger to Greta’s pineapple stew.
Hunger raged through my body, but I didn’t want to eat. Disbelief is best mixed with an empty stomach. I drank two more beers and listened to another dozen songs: The Kinks, Iggy Pop, Otis Redding. Lauren sent another text, “I don’t think the Crone hated you, she probably actually wanted to fuck you.” She ended the text with an “LOL.” I snatched the pie, tore the top off, used my hand as a giant spoon and dug deep into the center of the whipped chocolate pie and slammed scoop after scoop into my wide open, meaty mouth. The midnight clouds tasted breathless.
