Kids of Appetite (9 page)

We slid out of the booth, shooting worried eyes at one another, and followed Margo through the near-empty restaurant all the way to the kitchen. “Come on back,” she said. “Sorry about the mess. Haven't quite got the whole clean-as-you-go thing down yet.”

Margo stepped up to an industrial-sized stove with four simmering skillets cooking something sweet and caramelly, and my mouth started watering like a faucet. On the floor next to the stove, she bent down, grabbed the corner of a large kitchen floor mat, and pulled. Underneath, in the floor, was the outline of a hatch with a small brass handle.

I looked at Vic, who pointed at Margo and whispered, “
Super Racehorse
.”

I made a mental note to tell him about Margo's situation, about her gambling habit and how, when she ran out of her own money, she'd dipped into her father's business account. Atlantic City was only a couple of hours away—it wasn't an uncommon story. Luckily for Margo, her father was a frequent patron of Cinema 5, where he divulged his woes to a very understanding employee. Baz knew that Hubert Bonaparte had soft spots for his daughter, for his restaurant, and for independent film. So he spent the next three weekends at Napoleon's, painting the interior and exterior walls, ceiling, and trim; he also arranged for Hubert to have unlimited access to the back alleyway entrance to the Cinema 5 (an entrance with which I was very familiar). The results of these actions were trifold: first, Margo's
debts to her father were considered paid in full; second, the Bonapartes, while somewhat baffled at the request, agreed to let Baz have their story for his book (which, according to Baz, could use a chapter on family redemption); and third, both Margo and her father turned a blind eye when it came time for us to pay the check.

Oh, and a fourth thing: Margo Bonaparte was relentless in her own pursuit to “repay” Baz Kabongo. Her advances had, as yet, remained unfruitful.

“This used to be the grease trap,” said Margo, pulling the handle and swinging the door up and open. “You guys ever clean one of these things? Stinks something awful. Every time we had it cleaned, it scared customers off left and right. So Dad had a new one installed outside—way smaller than this one. This old one's huge. Here, look.”

We stepped up to the edge of the trap door. Margo was right. Probably five by seven feet, it was roughly the size of an old hatchback, and had the ambience of a tiny unfinished basement with smooth gray floors and walls.

Margo Bonaparte hopped down through the hatch door. “Stopped using it years ago, but it still smells like sulfuric shit down here.” A couple of seconds later her hand appeared, and in it, a full bottle of Bacardi Silver. Coco took the rum, while Baz pulled Margo out of the grease trap. “Never hurts to order an extra bottle or two,” said Margo, closing the hatch door and pulling the kitchen mats back into place. “Off the books, of course.”

“Is this real rum, like what pirates drink?” asked Coco, every word in her question at a fever pitch.

“You're adorbs,” said Margo, taking the bottle from Coco, “and maybe a little nutso. Yeah, it's real rum like what pirates drink.” She unscrewed the lid, took a swig while nursing the
skillets with the other hand. “You guys ever had Bananas Foster?”

We all shook our heads, and as much as I hated admitting it, Margo had my full attention.

“Who's Bananas Foster?” asked Coco.

“Not
who
,” said Margo. “
What
.”

“What's Bananas Foster?” asked Coco, who had officially become a broken record.

“Fried bananas,” said Margo, pulling a box of matches off the counter, tipping the rum over the stove, and pouring a healthy dose in each skillet. Then, lighting a long match, she touched the flame to the sizzling bananas, setting them aflame. “On
fire
!”

Zuz snapped once.

We were inclined to agree with him.

I sat in a high-backed, purple suede Victorian-style chair with brass studs and ornate angels and demons carved into its legs.

The chair was one hell of a Super Racehorse.

The Parlour's waiting room followed suit. Antique furniture, framed posters of old movies (including one of
Casablanca
, my parents' favorite), a crystal chandelier dangling from a high ceiling—the whole place was saturated in patchouli, but other than that, I found it quite surprising. Not at all how I pictured a tattoo parlor. But it didn't end with the décor. Even the architectural design was unique. The entire ground floor was the waiting room. A spiral
staircase wound up and up to an open loft space above our heads. If the electronic humming was any indication, the actual tattooing took place up there.

We sat in the room and waited.

The waiting room was a very literal place.

Back at Napoleon's Pub, we'd used Margo's phone to find out when the Parlour closed for the evening: eight p.m. It was only a few blocks away, which left us just enough time to walk over and try to figure out where to “hang” Dad's ashes. (I still had no idea what this meant, but I trusted Dad would compass me in the right direction.) On the walk over, Mad cited a few quotes from her favorite book,
The Outsiders
. I'd never read it, but the one I liked best was something about two people admiring the sunset from different places, and how maybe their worlds weren't that different because they saw the same sunset.

I think Mad saw in books what I saw in art: the weightless beauty of the universe.

She sat now with Baz and Coco, the three of them combing through a photo album of the Parlour's prior handiwork; Nzuzi stood by the window, gazing into the nighttime snow, while I sat in my Super Racehorse of a chair and thought about my first real encounter with tattoos.

I was six. Maybe seven. We were in Ocean Grove. Mom sat in a chair, her toes in the sand. She was a beach reader. Dad lay on his back on a towel, his ankles in the sand. He was a beach dreamer. I built a sand castle because I was six. Maybe seven.

I was a beach anythinger.

A piece of my castle crumbled into the moat. Dad sat up, helped me rebuild it. He was leaning across my lap to grab a shovel when I saw the tattoo on his shoulder.
What's that, Dad?
I asked. He said,
A compass. Points due east, see?
I asked
why, as six-maybe-seven-year-olds are wont to do. He looked at Mom.
Let's show him
, he said. At this point I'd forgotten all about my messed-up sand castle.
Show me what?

Mom set down her beach read.

Dad set down his shovel.

Things were happening. Things I wasn't privy to. This was a real problem for me.

They turned around and stood side by side, close enough for their shoulders to bump together. To my shock, Mom had the same tattoo as Dad, except for one difference: her compass pointed due west.

Their compasses pointed toward each other.

So we never get lost
, said Dad.

I emerged from my Land of Nothingness to the sound of two snaps. Still standing by the window, Nzuzi was smiling at me. He nodded very slightly, but it seemed more a question than an answer. I nodded back, and he turned and looked out the window. Earlier, Coco said Nzuzi had plenty to say if you knew how to listen. I hoped I learned to listen like that. I was no stranger to people making the wrong assumptions about me, or to the punch-in-the-gut feeling that immediately followed. The last thing I wanted was to be the one doling out punches.

“Oh God,” said Coco. Baz flipped to the next photo in the album.

“God,” she said again.

Baz flipped the page.

“Oh my—”

“Coco,” said Mad.

Coco's eyes were laughing and a little crazy. “Mad. This guy tattooed his balls. His
balls.
And I don't even know what
that
”—she pointed to the current photo in Baz's lap—“is.”

Baz hastily flipped the page.

Before Coco could grill him any further, footsteps clanked down the spiral staircase. A shiny-bald man with a short stick through his nose, gaping holes in both earlobes, and layers upon layers of tattoos joined us in the very literal waiting room.

“Okay, guys, sorry for the delay. Chump upstairs keeps changing his mind, and I've been alone all motherfrakking day, so it's like”—his entire demeanor changed once he saw us—“Baz, you
scoundrel
!”

They hugged so hard, Baz's Thunder cap fell off his head.

It was the very opposite of a sideways hug.

Coco hopped off the couch, ran over, and wrapped her arms around the guy's waist. “Hey, Topher!”

“Coco, my darling, how you doing?” The guy—
Topher
, apparently—bent over, pulled her into a tight hug.

“Great! I haven't even cursed today.”

Someone in the room, maybe even two someones, cleared their throats.

“Well,” she said. “It's been at least an hour.”

Topher slow-clapped, nodded in approval. “Frak yeah.”

It's him
, I thought.
The Battlestar Galactican.

Topher stood, smiled at Baz. “I miss you, brother. Thought you guys must have moved without telling me, or something.”

“It has been way too long,” said Baz. “You're clean?”

Topher pulled a necklace out from under his shirt, a long chain with a round chip on the end. “Eight months, six days, and . . . nine hours.” Tucking the necklace away, he looked around the room, his eyes landing on me.

It didn't take long, maybe a second or two, for a person to check off the usual suspects—
Burn victim?
Stroke?
Birth defect?
—before quickly looking away, averting their eyes like
I was the very surface of the sun. I often thought the most unfair thing about having Moebius wasn't Moebius at all, but other people's inability to define me by anything else.

It was a real problem for me.

Topher pointed to Baz's arm. “You need some detailing, brother? Whatever you want is on the house, of course. Not like a few free tattoos squares us. I could never repay you guys for—”

“Yo, Toph!” interrupted a voice from the upstairs loft. “Where'd you go, man?”

Topher raised his head toward the ceiling. “Simmer the frak down, Homer!” He looked back at us, lowered his voice. “Homer's a turd. Been waffling on this butterfly tattoo all evening, like whether he gets it on his forearm or bicep is gonna make or break him in the biker community. It's a motherfrakking purple-winged butterfly.”

“I can hear you up here, you know!”

Topher smiled, shrugged. “What can I do for you guys?”

Baz introduced me, gave a quick overview of our situation. I handed him Dad's Terminal Note, hoping he might see the momentousness of the moment.

“Hang me from the Parlour,” said Topher, studying the letter. He rubbed his shiny-bald head, and it sounded like this: waxing a brand-new car with olive oil. He looked up at the crystal chandelier. “You got the ashes with you?”

I unzipped my bag and pulled out the urn. “I didn't used to be able to touch it. The urn, I mean. But now I can. I touch it all the time. The urn.”

. . .

Smooth, Benucci
.

. . .

There were times—socially, or whatever—when I
pictured myself crawling into a hole only to have the hole spit me back out.

But hey.

Topher passed the letter back, smiled at me, and this time he didn't look away. And I could tell this shiny-bald man with holes in his ears and a stick through his nose saw the momentousness of the moment. He started up the stairs, pointed to the ceiling. “Only place I can think to hang a person here is the chandelier. Y'all chill for a sec. I'll be right back.”

Mad walked to the center of the room, pulled off her knit cap, and looked up at the chandelier. Her long yellow hair tumbled to one side like a dripping wet sun. “This doesn't feel right,” she said.

. . .

The thing about uniquely pretty girls is that their prettiness cares nothing for time or place. It cannot be rescheduled or relocated. They are pretty wherever they go, whenever they get there. It can be quite distracting. For example: right now, instead of thinking about the best way to hang my dead father from a chandelier, I was thinking about the best way to keep Mad's hair out of our mouths should we ever kiss. Actually—yeah, never mind. I'd rather her hair get in on the action. Not like it would ever actually happen. Not like someone like her would kiss someone like me. Not like I'd ever know what the skin side of her head felt like, or her legs around my waist, or her tongue on—

“What are you doing?” said Mad.

Shit.
I'd stared so hard, she felt it.

“What?” I said.

“You're sort of . . .” Mad looked over at Baz and Coco, who had gone back to the photographs of tattooed body parts.

Before I knew what I was doing, I stepped closer to Mad,
right up in her space. Of all the girls I'd fallen for in the past—and there were many—I'd always fallen from a distance. But that was impossible with Mad. Something about her was inherently up close. And if I couldn't reschedule or relocate her prettiness, it was best to acknowledge it head on. “Finish the sentence,” I said, close enough to smell her lips—honey and sweat, and I loved them. “I'm sort of . . . what?”

She looked right back into my face. “You're sort of staring.”

. . .

. . .

“So are you,” I said.

We both stared into the sun. And we didn't look away.

Maybe the two worlds we lived in weren't so different.

* * *

“This ain't gonna work,” said Topher, standing on the top rung of the ladder. After a few seconds of deliberation, he climbed back down. “I thought maybe there'd be a spot up on one of those old candle-holder thingies, you know? But one good draft through the front door and your dad's gonna blow all over the place.”

Nzuzi—who had been standing by the window this whole time—walked across the room, picked up my backpack, and started for the door.

“Zuz,” said Mad.

But he didn't stop. Cradling my backpack like an infant, he walked out the door and into the snowy night.

I no longer felt distracted. It had taken a very short time for Dad's urn to become part of me, not unlike a limb. Now that it was gone, I felt its physical absence. Without a second thought, I was out the door too.

The Parlour was set back at least an acre off the road; the lawn had become a thick blanket of snow that was only getting thicker. Ahead of me, Nzuzi walked toward the street. I had no idea where he was going, and he gave no indication whether he'd be walking ten feet or ten miles.

I didn't care.

He had my compass.

Suddenly a hand was in mine. Next to me, Mad trudged through the snow, and I turned to dust and feathers and other things that float.

“It's pretty,” she said quietly, looking around. “The snow.”

I've always found a certain warmth in words when they're spoken in the cold outdoors. I don't know. It's like words take the breath of the person speaking them, and wear that breath like a sweater.

. . .

Up ahead, Nzuzi stopped in the faint glow of a streetlight. We caught up and he snapped once, pointing to the Parlour's wooden sign dangling chest high between two posts in the ground.

The Parlour

Hackensack's Premier Tattoo Shop
since 1972

Ink Up!

I stepped up to it, nudged it with my fist. It swung slightly, toppling the layer of snow. “Hang me from the Parlour,” I said.

Nzuzi handed over my backpack, nodded once. Unlike his last nod, this one was an answer. And I knew Coco was right:
Nzuzi had plenty to say if you knew how to listen.

“Thank you,” I said.

Again, Nzuzi nodded.

“Colder than tattooed balls out here,” said Coco. Behind us, she and Baz and Topher stood shivering in the snow, a look of hesitant anticipation on each of their faces. I felt bad, like I was to blame for more than the cold, but also for not knowing what exactly came next.

“Look,” said Coco, walking right up to the sign and pointing near the bottom. Under the words
Ink Up!
was a small inscription carved just deep enough in the wood to last:
B. B.
D. J
.