Delicious (9 page)

“I'm not going to drink it.”

Jack wasn't going to argue. He signaled for the waitress. “You should, because if you're gonna dress like that you oughta at least be loaded.”

...

Joseph pushed the scoop of macaroni salad to the far side of his plate. He nibbled at the grilled chicken and rice and listened as Sid continued to fume.

“No way! Dey not doin' it.”

Wilson leaned over and looked at Joseph's plate. “You don't want your macaroni?”

“Help yourself.”

“You sure?”

“Please. Take it.”

Joseph treated macaroni salad as if it were laced with strontium 90. He couldn't understand how it had become a staple foodstuff of the Hawaiian Islands. Pasta and mayonnaise mixed with pickles, frozen peas, and potatoes: hardly indigenous food. High fat, low fiber; he avoided it at all costs. Yet it was everywhere you went in Honolulu. Joseph found himself ordering Vietnamese spring rolls and finding macaroni salad mounded alongside the spicy fish sauce. He'd get Korean bulgogi and there it was, nestled next to the rice. Somehow it had insinuated itself into Hawaiian life. Omnipresent macaroni salad. It was a mystery.

Joseph watched as Wilson forked a glistening mound of macaroni into his mouth.

“I love dis shit.”

Sid looked at the two younger men. “You listenin'? Huh? Dis not important?”

“I just wanted his macaroni.”

“We're listening, Uncle Sid.”

Sid picked up his plate and shoved his scoop of macaroni onto his son's plate. “Dere. Happy? Now leave your cousin alone.”

Joseph tried to calm Sid down. “It's okay, Uncle, I wasn't going to eat mine.”

“Yeah? Good.”

Sid grabbed Joseph's plate and scraped his macaroni onto Wilson's, right on top of the fried Spam and egg.

“Hey, watch da egg. I don' like fo' da yolk gettin' on da macaroni.”

“Everybody happy? We all got wot we want fo' to eat on our plates den?”

Joseph and Wilson nodded. They weren't about to interrupt. Sid leaned in, talking in a tough conspiratorial voice. “I'm plannin' things.”

Wilson forked a piece of Spam into his mouth as he tried to speak.

“We know, Dad. Break dey fuckin' legs. Torch dey fuckin' trucks.”

Joseph watched as bright yellow yolk dripped off the vibrant-pink processed meat product onto Wilson's T-shirt. Sid leaned across the table and smacked Wilson on the forehead.

“Don't talk like dat. Dat's not how you do nothing.”

“Wot den?”

“It start small. Little dings and dents in da doors. Let 'em make a couple insurance claims. Den some driver hits your second cousin's new car. Den dey's a lawsuit. Always late. Never on time. Little things. Drive 'em fuckin' nuts dat way.”

Joseph didn't like the sound of that. “That'll make the union guys look bad.”

“Da union owes me.”

“I know they do, Uncle, but we're not going to get their help if we ask them to do things that make them look unprofessional. Then the next production that comes in will go nonunion. It's not a good idea.”

Sid glared at Joseph. “You gotta better one den?”

Joseph didn't respond. The truth was, he didn't. “Let me think about it.”

...

Francis crunched a small mound of crystal meth with his credit card. The tappy-tap-tap of credit card against glass reverberated through the room. That, he mused, is the sound of the eighties. Francis scraped the powder into a line, rolled up a ten-dollar bill, and snorted half the line into his right nostril. It burned, like stuffing a chunk of dry ice up his nose, but it felt good too, like some kind of adventure was beginning. He hoovered the other half of the line into his left nostril, stood up, and stretched.

What a day. Nothing but an unbroken chain of migraine-inducing minutiae layered with bullshit and stacked on top of the general incompetence of his underlings. Frost it with a hangover and decorate with gastrointestinal distress, and it was the cake of all clusterfucks. The shit everyone with a job eats every goddamn day.

He would've gone ballistic if the smelly girl hadn't managed to handle a couple of fuckups on her own. Francis appreciated that. Maybe she was going to work out after all. He made a mental note to learn her name.

He felt the amphetamines slowly creep into his system. His heartbeat picked up. His blood pressure rose. The fatigue that had hung around his neck all day like a gigantic cartoon anvil suddenly filled with helium and drifted off into the sky. The party lights in his brain popped on and the mirror ball began to spin. He felt alive.

The day hadn't been a total loss. He'd gotten a lot of the groundwork done, all the administrative crap required when you're preparing to land an invading army for a few months. He'd met a really cute guy. Obviously straight, but hey, like they say, every man has his price. And, as Francis
recalled from his college days, it was usually just a couple of margaritas that got most straight men bent.

Francis remembered he still had a little bit of work to do: a business drink with the guys from Las Vegas. Some political smiling and glad-handing with the below-the-liners before he went out. Still, it was no reason not to get started with his evening.

He pulled on some freshly pressed slacks and checked his reflection in the mirror. He looked pretty good. Fit. Handsome. A roguish sunburn gracing his nose. He ran his fingers through his hair, just to make it look like he didn't care, and threw on a Hawaiian-style shirt he'd bought in the hotel gift shop. He studied himself again, turning sideways to check his profile, and realized something was missing.

He took the bottle of pills off the dresser and shook them out into his hand. He decided on a Levitra first, because they work twice as fast as Viagra, and popped one in his mouth. Then he realized he was planning for a long night and didn't want the Levitra to wear off, so he popped a Viagra as backup.

By the time the elevator doors opened and the sweet sound of Hawaiian music welcomed him to the patio bar, the vardenafil/sildenafil citrate/methamphetamine cocktail had kicked in like a mofo. His cock stood upright in his pants, huge and throbbing, like a missile ready to launch. If he hadn't had the Hawaiian shirt hanging untucked in front, he was sure his penis would've been peeking out, taking in the scene. He was having difficulty walking, and his brain was firing signals at hyper-speed, making him feel hot and itchy and aroused.

At the far end of the patio, Francis saw the guys from Las Vegas waving to him. He'd worked with them before—not that he really remembered them, but he recognized them.
They were the guys who handled the production catering. Slopping up bad greasy food to complement the long hours and bowel-stirring anxiety that were the stock-in-trade of filmmaking. These were the guys the locals had their panties in a twist about.

Francis walked toward them, his cock rubbing against his pants with every step, getting harder and harder, the friction exciting the nerves, the nerves sending a signal to the brain, the neurotransmitters and neuropeptides in the brain telling his heart to beat faster and faster, sending oxygenated blood to his genitals and releasing serotonin. Francis smiled, he couldn't help himself; it was too funny. He was just trying to walk and he was about to erupt. He wasn't sure he could hold it back if it came. He hoped no innocent bystander would get sticky.

But Francis's arousal was short-lived. He was shocked back to his senses when Jack pulled himself to his feet to greet him. Maybe he shouldn't have looked, but it was a force of habit. Francis couldn't help but see the unmistakable outline of a big stiff water snake bulging out of Jack's pants.

The two men stood shaking hands, their erections straining toward each other like twin fingers of God.

...

Hannah sat on the sofa, grading her students' responses to a pop quiz she'd given that afternoon, as Joseph cooked in the kitchen. Occasionally he would peek out and see the piles of papers slowly spreading across his floor like an oil slick in an Alaskan bay. Although he was used to her wanton organizational habits, the way she took over the living room—really,
the only room of his small wood-frame house except for the kitchen and bedroom—alarmed him. How could they ever live together?

Joseph liked his place neat, clean, and uncluttered. His home was sparsely decorated; he didn't have a lot of stuff. Just a nice modern couch with a kind of fake-bamboo looking wood trim around it, a rattan coffee table made in Thailand, two mismatched wooden chairs, and some funky lamps shaped like angry tiki gods that he'd found in a trash heap of set-dressing debris after a movie shoot. A battered old restaurant sign hung on the wall. Hand-painted, chipped, and faded, dating back to sometime around the attack on Pearl Harbor, it read:
FAMILY STYLE—PLATE LUNCH—COCONUT SHRIMP
. Amateurish doodles of dancing shrimp were festooned around the sign, dotting the edges.

He watched uneasily as the pop-quiz answer sheets spread across the room, covering every available surface. Even the brand-new television in the corner had become a repository for the blizzard of paperwork.

Hannah concentrated on her work, unaware that the grimy soles of her feet were smack against an ecru pillow and an open pen was resting dangerously close to the cushions.

“Watch the pen.”

“What?”

“The pen. If the tip touches the fabric, it'll make a big spot.”

Hannah capped the pen. His compulsions annoyed her.

“I'm trying to finish up.”

She turned back to her work as Joseph looked around his living room. The house wasn't much, he had to admit, but he'd been lucky to buy it a few years back before the boom
in housing prices would've made this tiny, 800-square-foot cottage unaffordable. Located in a narrow valley on the other side of the freeway from a part of Honolulu called Kaimuki, it was a pretty part of the city, quiet and friendly, and he was in walking distance to the university on the off chance something interesting might be going on there. Now it was worth almost three times what he'd paid.

Joseph went back into the kitchen and took the taro greens out of the steamer. He divided them between two plates next to thick slabs of
hamachi
he'd seared quickly in a skillet so it would be blackened on the outside, sashimi-raw in the middle. He hated overcooked fish and didn't understand why people would ruin something by grilling the life out of it. When he cooked for mainlanders, which happened frequently in his line of work, they were always sending the fish back to be cooked a little more, turning something tender and sensual and moist into a dried-up, chewy thing. It was bizarre. What were they afraid of?

He dribbled soy sauce on the taro, put the plates on the table, and called out to Hannah. “Dinner's ready. You want a glass of wine?”

“Sure.”

She tossed a stack of ungraded tests onto the coffee table and came in to join him.

“Smells great.”

Joseph uncorked the wine, a pinot blanc from Australia, and poured two glasses. “Thanks.”

She pulled out a chair and sat down. “Someday you'll make someone a great little wife.”

She liked to tease him about his homemaking skills. As if being able to cook and keep your house clean was somehow
anti-male. He'd been to her house. He'd seen the heaps of dirty laundry and the cardboard box filled with empty beer cans. Did he tease her when she liked to spend her Saturdays watching the University of Hawaii football team? Was that unfeminine? Of course, she could live like a frat boy and then squeeze into a bikini, and there was no mistaking the fact that she was a woman.

“You're just jealous.”

Hannah gave him a wry smile. “I am.”

She tore into the fish with her chopsticks, picking up chunks and popping them in her mouth. Joseph watched her eat. He liked that she had a big appetite. He believed you could learn a lot about people from watching them eat. How a woman eats can tell you a lot about what she's like in bed. For example, someone who is super picky about her food, someone who eats slowly and makes sure to trim off all the fat, would probably be prim and controlling in bed. Too rigid, lacking imagination. While someone who bolts down their food in a big, gluttonous frenzy might be fun in the short term, but they are usually selfish lovers, only interested in instant gratification.

Joseph liked the way Hannah ate. She was messy, but it was because she was enjoying her food. She wasn't afraid to eat with her fingers, get her face and hands sticky, and revel in the whole sensual experience. Watching her eat turned him on.

Although lately they hadn't been getting very messy together. Hannah was burned out from the demands of her job, at least that's what she told him, and had been spending more and more time at her own apartment on the other side of town. Joseph knew it was his fault. He'd become preoccupied
with leaving Honolulu and had stopped making an effort. Not that he'd stopped caring for her. But he had ambitions, and she'd made it clear that she never wanted to live anywhere but right here. Joseph told himself that was why he hadn't proposed to her. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life trapped on this tiny island. But that wasn't all of it. He wondered if there was something more, something deeper. Hannah was the only woman he'd ever been in love with, but what did that mean?

She looked up from her plate and smiled. “You want me to sleep over?”

Joseph grinned at her, but before he could respond, he heard a bang on the front door and his uncle's voice as he came tromping into the little house.

“The fuckin'
mahu
isn't gonna help us den.”

Joseph rose to greet his uncle. “What are you talking about?”

Sid stopped when he saw Hannah sitting there.

“Hi, Sid.”

Sid broke into a big smile and rushed to put his arms around her. “How's it, girl?”