Creamy Bullets (4 page)

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Big Cheese

M
y dad owned a fondue restaurant when I was younger. It was called Big Cheese. Everyone had to wear those fake cheeseheads like Green Bay Packers fans. Even the cooks and dishwashers. I started out as a dishwasher but was promoted to server on my 17th birthday. I liked the job because I made tips and would always go out and spend them on paisley clothes on the weekend. I loved paisley for some reason.

The restaurant was always struggling before I started working there. But then, for some reason, things picked up. There was actually word-of-mouth happening—and this was in an oppressed factory town where no one said a thing to anyone. You were lucky to get a smile at the barbershop.

I started to think this buzz was due to my father’s frequent trips to Nova Scotia, where he would personally buy huge boxes of exotic cheese to be delivered to the restaurant. “This is the key to our new life,” he told me, caressing a forty-pound block of waxed something. “This shit is the motherfucking key!”

This was around the time he started swearing and yelling a lot and wearing rings on all his fingers.

It was around Christmas of that year when I realized something different was going on at Big Cheese.

One family ordered a fondue pot full of something called Nordic Swiss Calcutta. We served our pots of cheese with bread sticks, vegetables, sausages, or any variety of dipping foods. The mother and father of this family quickly commandeered the Calcutta and instructed me to bring out a different kind for their pimply twin girls. “Something less intense,” the parents laughed. I brought out the Smoked Hickory Feta for the girls and they all seemed satisfied. The father started whispering something to the mother. The girls poked their sticks of bread into the murky pot and lifted them out, sloppy blobs bit by teeth and smeared with cheap lipstick. I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes, talking to Joey, the headbanger cook, and watching the dining room from a safe distance.

“Judas Priest is the greatest,” Joey told me. “You wanna borrow their tape?”

“Sure,” I said. I was distracted and bored and trying to concoct some fantasy involving the twin girls that I could use later when I got home, or maybe when I had to eventually go to the walk-in freezer.

“They’re the Beatles of this generation,” Joey said. “The Beatles in leather, dude.”

I forgot what he was even talking about. I went out to check on the family of four. The father was still whispering to his wife. As I got closer though, I realized he was sticking his tongue in her ear. She had her eyes half-closed, fully enjoying it. I saw a spackle of cheese congealing on her chin. “Go out and play,” the father told the girls. His left hand lifted to his wife’s chest and began clawing aggressively there. The girls were glad to be excused. They too were suddenly alive and boiling with passion. They bolted through the front door and threw themselves into a pile of snow. I heard one of them say, “Pretend I’m Jesus.”

My dad had me come to his office the next day. He wanted to give me the “fingerfucking lowdown” as he called it.

He pulled out a map and dramatically crumpled it into a ball. He threw it in the tin wastebasket and threw a lit match in. Nothing happened. He tried again. I wasn’t sure what he was doing. “Hold a goddamn second,” he told me, and exited the office. He came back five minutes later with a can of lighter fluid. He took off his dress shirt, flexing his tank-topped form, and doused the shirt with the smelly liquid. He lit it on fire and threw it in the trash with the map. “Nova fucking Scotia,” he said. He looked at me hard.

“I d-don’t understand,” I stammered.

His skin flushed red and he shouted, “Daddy’s a drug dealer!” His ringed hand formed a fist and he pounded the top of his heavy oak desk. “Most of the cheese we serve to the customers is from downtown Cleveland, but do you think I can say that to Mr. Nigel Restaurant Reviewer? Hell no! They come to our place to escape. They want to think of Nova Scotia or cranberry manchego puree or hazelnut German cheddar or some other shit like that. Do you know where those names come from? My frickin’ hat! I write down a bunch of fluffy words and let my blind hands create a menu. But it’s the damn magic mushrooms that make people come back for more.”

I rubbed my eyes, thinking for a moment that I was dreaming. The flames were still going in the trash. “Are the mushrooms from Nova Scotia?” I asked.

“Jesus, no!” he spat. “And it’s not just mushrooms. It’s cocaine, marijuana, and some new stuff called Prozac.” Finally, he stuck his leg in the garbage and started stomping out the fire. Ashes and smoke billowed around him like the devil.

I stepped back, found the door, stumbled out, eyes watering and brain hurting. I was never the same after that day. I knew dad’s thinly-veiled drug empire would be found out soon. He was losing his cool and I don’t think he even knew where Nova Scotia was.

My innocence was squashed that day. Melted, as if in a pot full of cheese. Never to return. Never fucking ever.

Sharon Calls

I
’d hear from Sharon once every couple years, on a pay phone, in some state-sponsored home. I imagined other folks her age squirming around her in wheelchairs. Bad art on the walls. Plants dying in plastic pots on high windowsills.

We were never really friends but I was nice to her when others weren’t, so she kept in touch. Her most recent call was a week ago, as I was sitting down to dinner with my family. She was at a new home. She called it “the prison.”

I asked her if she was allowed to leave.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “But this place is out in the boonies and I don’t have any teeth.”

“What happened to your teeth?”

“I had an accident and they won’t give me replacements.”

Sharon was a poet I knew from the days I used to go to open mic poetry readings, about ten years ago. Even then, her body and mind were decaying. But she was a good poet and her craziness was vicariously thrilling to most people, if not a little confrontational. She walked with a cane, and never drove a car. Before moving to Portland in her late 30s, she was a regular in the San Francisco poetry scene and had a couple books published. One of her author photos told me that she used to be a bombshell. High cheekbones, sex kitten eyes, and blonde hair slicked back like a model.

Sometimes she heckled other poets.

“Did you hear that?” she asked me. “People are always yelling here. Even at bedtime.”

I did hear something through the phone line. Like she was calling from a carnival all of the sudden. I asked her if she was able to do any writing.

“They threw away my computer. I have to write in my journal. I have lots of journals. But they’re not publishable.”

I wondered when Sharon was last published. I used to see her work in several small magazines but that was many years ago. I was never clear on what was physically wrong with her. She once said something about Agent Orange. She was married to someone who was exposed to Agent Orange and it affected her too. I don’t know anything about war chemicals. And I’m not sure if she was ever telling the truth.

Someone told me her brain was damaged from a bad drug prescription. Someone else implied that she was beat up when she was a stripper in San Francisco. Before she was a stripper she taught sex education to high schoolers. Her friends back then were mostly Scientologists. L. Ron Hubbard wannabes. She was reckless and intimate with many of them. She turned her past into poems. She also talked about—and wrote about—how much she hated her father. She called him “The Devil.” Now she had different enemies. New enemies, all the time.

“There’s a guy down the hall from me who steals peoples’ cats,” she told me. “He takes them to the boiler room and then they’re gone. He broke into my room and took my black wig. I’ve called the police on him several times but I can’t press charges because I’m in their system and they don’t believe me.”

“What do you mean, ‘in their system’?”

“The police have been told not to take my calls.”

I understood that what she was saying was the truth to her. She wasn’t exaggerating. If she broke into police files and looked up her name she would be shocked if they didn’t corroborate what she was telling me.

“Are you still writing?” she asked me.

“Not poetry,” I told her. “Mostly short stories.”

“That’s what I should do,” she said. “That’s where the money is.” There was a pause while she waited for me to respond but I didn’t know what to say.

“Are you friends with Butch Stein?” she asked me.

“I know who he is,” I answered. Butch was a guy who won a bunch of poetry slams but would sometimes disappear on long drug binges. He once called me to apologize for something I couldn’t remember. He had to, he told me. It was one of the twelve steps. To make amends. Straight from the AA Big Book, written over fifty years ago.

“He tried to fuck me,” Sharon said.

There was a stunned pause. For a second, I forgot whom I was talking to. I tried to piece it together. Butch, a handsome twenty-nine year old with an Irish accent and Sharon, a fifty year old head case with a body twice its age. “What? Butch Stein?”

“Oh, you bet. He gave me a ride home about a year ago and tried to get fresh on my couch. He didn’t expect me to put up a fight, but I did.”

“That’s really weird,” I said before realizing she may take that as a slight. “I mean, doesn’t he have a girlfriend or something?”

“Some people like to fuck cripples,” she snorted. “I’m not interested in sex anymore. Or I should say that I am interested in sex, just not sex with penises.”

“I understand,” I told her for some reason. I heard someone else yelling in the background where Sharon was. Again I imagined a group of slouching wheelchair drivers rolling aimlessly around her, one of them squawking about their medicine or a baseball game.

“I guess I better go,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you remembered me. Sometimes I see your name somewhere and I remember that you weren’t as full of shit as some other people. Remember when you bought groceries for me?”

I thought about it for a second and did remember. Maybe six years ago. She gave me a list over the phone. All frozen foods and toilet paper. I had to take them to her in her fifth floor apartment. It was a bland place with brown carpet in the hallways and clammy air full of TV-through-the-wall noises. Her dishes hadn’t been washed and I think she complained about me getting the wrong brand of ice cream. “I remember,” I said.

“Okay. Talk to you later.” She hung up before I could say anything else. I suddenly felt dazed, and then, strangely, I thought of numerous other things I could have talked to her about. My family had started dinner without me. I held the phone away from my ear and let the dial tone hum freely.

In my head, I saw a clear picture of the phone that was just on the other end. It was a plastic green one, hanging on the wall, push buttons nearly rubbed clean, a small crack splitting the bottom where someone once punched it. A sticker with emergency numbers, applied on the side, top left corner of it peeling away, ink smudged. A metal phone book holder coming out of the wall underneath, empty and cold.

Today’s Events

–
DEFENSE
–

I’m at my son’s lacrosse practice. It’s on a big soccer field and the sun beats down. I’m watching from a distance, under a tree, in the shade. I didn’t bring a lawn chair, so I sit uncomfortably on the grass. The kids are grouped into teams and my son plays in one scrimmage, about thirty yards to my right. They wear helmets but no pads. My son stands in the middle of the field as the other kids race around him trying to cradle the orange ball. His holds his stick high in the air, like he’s waiting for a pass.

I call him over after the other team scores a goal. I tell him to get more involved, to chase after the ball, play defense.

He goes back and starts paying more attention. His defense is aggressive. He stick-checks a player for the other team and the ball bounces loose. The kid seems surprised, calls out to him, “This is just a friendly game!”

After the practice, I wait in the shade as my son gets a drink of water. There is a crow nearby, standing alone. I look at him and say out loud, “Crow.” I stare at him for a while expecting something from him. I’m not sure what. Perhaps I want him to say, “Human.”

–
SLURPEE
–

We go to 7-11 to get a money order and an after-practice Slurpee. I start to pull into a parking spot, but there is a truck with its driver’s door open. I wait for the person to notice but they’re too busy doing something. I want to honk but instead I move my car slightly to the left, barely fitting into the space. I look over and see that the woman in the truck is leaning over and looking for something in the glove box of the truck. Her knees are on the driver’s seat and she is wearing a short skirt. I can see almost her entire ass. It doesn’t look like she is wearing any underwear. I can’t tell how old she is. She could be sixteen or she could be forty. There is a yellow and blue bruise just below her left ass cheek. I look in the backseat and see my son playing his Gameboy, oblivious to the woman. We go inside and I feed money into the money order machine. $189.75. My son is helping himself at the Slurpee machine.

The woman comes into the store, walking with heavy steps. Her face looks haggard and she is wearing cheap-looking rings on her hands. Her face is much older than her body. I see her buy something in a box but I can’t tell what it is. Cat food or cereal maybe.

When my son and I leave the store, I see the woman sitting in her truck. She’s looking around nervously. We get in the car and my son holds the Slurpee to his head. I have to go back into the store to borrow a pen for my money order. I write out the info on my money order as the clerk watches me. When I go back outside, I see the woman yelling something and hitting her steering wheel. Her sounds though, are trapped inside the truck with her.

–
DINNER
–

At home, I get ready to make dinner. I turn on the oven and spread frozen French fries onto a cooking sheet. When I open the oven door, I notice the smell of throw up. I wonder if someone threw up in the oven. I imagine what it would be like to throw up in the oven.

The air outside is cooling down as the sun lowers. It’s still too hot though.

I spread the French fries so they’re not touching, like the instructions say. I open the door to the oven. It makes a loud creaking noise. I throw up in the oven.