The Dream

In a dream, I looked for a secret in a mine, precious metal, a jewel.
In a dream, I asked for a taste, a sample, of the sounds of paradise, of heaven.
In a dream, I sang for a vast crowd.

The crowd vanished one by one.
I could not understand the harmonies of heaven.
The mine collapsed, killing all the miners.

The Secret protects itself.

Na Rua Calma

Na rua calma
da beira mar
espero
Eu sento-me na luz solar.

RELIC

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008



The day was tropical sticky wet with the thinnest of cloud cover. The air felt damp enough for rain but hot enough to boil eggs. Thin yellow skies hung over the islands like translucent sheets of silk.

I was restless and bored on the ship and I wanted something to do; I wanted something new, to go somewhere I hadn’t been, do something I hadn’t done, anything but whatever I was doing, but the humidity and heat made my imagination dull. Generally I like the heat and even the humidity but that day was just like being in a steam cooker.

I kept wandering outside onto the deck and looking at the sky hoping it would change. One of my shipmates finally asked me why I didn’t just go into town and do what everyone else did. What everyone else did just wasn’t my style. I didn’t even like beer and all the “hostesses” were irritating with their constant demands to buy them drinks or a helicopter. They thought the latter was funny and it may have been the first time, but the great seventeen block triangle of bars, upstairs and down, filled with hundreds of girls repeating the same joke quickly wore out my not very substantial patience.

Worse, as a kind of social lubricant I had, once upon a time, learned to read palms, and actually got quite good at it. One evening, to entertain myself as much as the girl I was buying drinks for, I decided to read her palm. Apparently I was so successful, she left and told every girl in the place, all of whom came running to my table, leaving their not so happy “boyfriends” and literally pushing the shipmate sharing my table out of the way so they could have their hands read. He was mostly unhappy because they wouldn’t let him get to his beer, although one of the girls finally picked it up, and without even turning, handed it to him over another girl’s head. After that the girls in town called me “Gypsy” and it was difficult to find a bar where a girl wouldn’t know the nickname, or, if one of my shipmates saw me coming, he would ask me, politely, to leave.

Some of the sailors maintained “permanent” girlfriends and even paid for apartments if they thought they could afford them. They measured their success with the girl by how loyal she seemed to be to their efforts at making her domestic. The girl’s loyalty was mostly demonstrated in cooking for her “man”, meaning the guy who paid for the food or her apartment. During the evening, it was an even bet that she would be at home or working in one of the dozens of bars. The girls knew what the priority was, and extreme poverty kept them working for any of the dribs and drabs of cash that found itself their way. Many women had out-of-wedlock children. My shipmates from the Midwest and the South called them illegitimate, even when the children were theirs. They didn’t care. Their wives back home had kids (of whom they would frequently share snapshots) and those were legitimate. These other children, “half-breeds”, were relegated to a class similar to cracked pottery. With one sole exception, a fellow who cared for, and tried to adopt (I never knew whether his adoption efforts ever paid off) two children that were left mostly to their own devices by their mother, I do not remember any of the guys with kids paying any attention at all to them; each man’s concern was the availability and loyalty of his woman.

No sailor I knew would go into town in the middle of the day, even for his woman. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was rare, and in the middle of a day like that, exceptionally rare. Deciding steam-cooked adventure was better than boredom, I got dressed in my civvies anyway and made my way topside. At the brow, the OOD and the enlisted guy on watch looked wilted, large sweat stains showing under their armpits and in the OOD’s case a massive sweat stain at his groin. I do well in heat. I only sweat lightly even in humid conditions, so I started to make the obvious joke about his sweat stained crotch but he cut me off with an abrupt, “…don’t say it! I’ve already heard the same thing about ten times.” So I cheerily waved and told them to drink plenty of water, and in spite of the heat and my rather oppressed mood almost bounced down the gangway. I heard the enlisted man yell something after me about getting some, or getting him some, but I really didn’t pay any attention.

The first thing I decided to do was get a haircut at the base shop where for a very small fee, servicemen got haircuts, facial and torso massage and manicure, all in one convenient chair, and it was cool. That day I got the works, even the manicure.

The barber was a local who wasn’t inclined to chat, which I appreciated. He was also the most precise of the men who worked in the shop. He not only knew the legal requirements of military haircutting, he knew the way around those rules which was important in those days when men in civilian life all had long hair. After cutting your hair he gave meticulous attention to removing all the loose hair. If you needed a shave, you were shaved rapidly with a strait razor that moved so quickly I am sure some clients feared for their lives.

Having accomplished the shave the barber would wrap a hot towel over your face and while your pores were opening or whatever it was they were supposed to do, he would massage neck and shoulder muscles until the towel cooled. Replacing the now cooled towel with another hot one, he massaged arms and hands. Then he removed that towel and pushing you forward, would massage your back down to the waistline and when finished there leaned you, by that point you were usually the consistency of wet pasta, back into the headrest, placed another hot towel on the face and massaged your chest and abdominal muscles. He removed the final towel and spread a thin layer of green or pink clay on your face and with a hair dryer on cool, blew the mud dry. Afterward he took another hot, wet towel and thoroughly cleaned the mud off. Then almost slapped a cold wet towel against your steaming face.

He would finish with the manicure. Nails, cuticles and, when requested, clear enamel were worked with a rapidity that seemed unreal. When I asked him one day why he worked so fast, he said, “…done this long time, sailors always in a hurry.”

I was never quite comfortable with the abdominal massage. It was just one of those procedures that seemed strange and too intimate but I never failed to let him do his work. I hesitated asking in any case because I thought it might disturb his routine. That day was the only time he commented on his work on me. “You more work here,” he said as he kneaded my midsection. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. I thought for a moment he was telling me I needed to do sit-ups, then because of the way he changed the movement of his hands, became fairly confident that he meant he needed to do more work.

“Too much time sit. You go walk.” That last was a command. He pushed me out of the chair and with a couple of quick swipes of a soft brush cleaned any remaining hair off my neck and clothing. When I paid him I always left a large tip. That day he just pushed it back at me and said, “go find nice girl.” I laughed and told him nice girls probably wouldn’t be taking money and lay the tip on his counter. He said gravely, “you good man. You go church, nice girl pray.” Then he turned to help another customer and I left the coolness of the shop and stepped back into the tropic sun.

The moment I first found myself in a tropic zone I knew I was home. Most Americans have a “nice for a visit, but wouldn’t want to live here” attitude about tropical climates. Come to think of it, that attitude persists no matter what the climate unless one was talking about one’s native region. My Midwestern buddies always exclaimed about the seasonal changes and the variety of weather; Southerners spoke rather fondly of their bugs for some reason; Northeasterners didn’t speak about their environment so much as the variety of activities that could be had in their part of the world.

I am a Californian. We like speed and change; we don’t care about climate much. If it gets too cold we build a fire of one sort or another, if it gets too hot we take off our clothing or invent a remote control air conditioner. When neither of those is an option, we migrate. If the climate seems extreme, then we write stories and make movies about it, it’s fun. The tropics are extreme in themselves. They require no embellishment or exaggeration; the tropics simply need to be experienced and lived.

When I stepped out of the barbershop and into the street that day, I was ready for another tropical experience. I really had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do. I just knew it was steamy hot, and I had just been told to go to church. I was certainly not about to visit the base chapel, so I did the next best thing, I walked over the bridge and into town and went looking for a church.

As I walked I tried to remember if I had ever even seen a church in town, and nothing at all came to mind. Not that I had ever come into town with the objective of going to church, but churches are usually pretty obvious. We sailors came into town at night with the lights from the bars glowing and the sound from the bar bands blaring into the streets. At that time the streets would be filled with vendors selling barbequed meat on sticks or pickled eggs; touts would be standing in every doorway waving any who would respond, inward toward “the best band” or “the prettiest girls” and occasionally “the best floor show”. The 'Strip' was crawling with small boys learning how to become pickpockets, mobbing an unwary serviceman and relieving him of all accessories and 'Brownshirts', the Federal Police, ready and willing to shoot them on sight. The air was redolent with the smells of polluted water, roasted meat and dust and unwashed bodies, vomit, feces and urine. Separated into component parts not particularly pleasant, but as a whole experience, rather exotic and exciting. You wouldn’t be able to spot a church easily at night. But I wasn’t walking through the town at night.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon. The streets were empty of sailors and marines. Many of the bars were shut against the day with metal pull-down gates. In a few open doorways, girls leaned against the doorjambs trying to look sexy to entice the occasional passerby inside. I watched as one girl, looking sadly forlorn at her street post, perk up when joined by another who seemed to materialize out of an interior darkness, turn happily to her companion; they talked briefly then the first, replaced by the second, vanished within. As soon as the first girl disappeared, the second took on the demeanor of the first girl, dejected and bored.

Leaving the bar district, I entered into an area of small shops selling fish and rice and produce for the local population. This wasn’t an area commonly seen by servicemen. The mid-day heat was keeping even most of the locals indoors, but a group of six or seven children were playing a game that looked like Ring Around the Rosie, only with a soccer ball being passed back and forth through a puddle. All the children were uniformly poor and were dressed in ragged pass-me-down clothing. One little girl with curly bright blond hair stood out among her dark-haired friends. As I passed the group they cautiously moved aside and stared at me. I wondered if they had ever seen a serviceman in the middle of the day, but after they knew I wasn’t stopping to talk, they all waved and smiled and one of the boys kicked the ball in my direction, to which I simply kicked it back and continued onward.

The town was built in a river valley running roughly east west between some low hills. As I walked, I could see the treeless condition of the north ridgeline. To the south, rain forest made it’s way right up to the edge of town, but the northern ridge had only a few small shrubs trying to survive in a deeply eroded desert-like hillside.

I stopped to make sense of this and was staring at that sere landscape when a voice behind me asked in a rather comically gruff voice, “what’re yew doin’ in town? I thought I tol’ ya this town ain’t big enough fer th’ both of us.” Turning, I saw a friend from the ship, Brian, smiling his lazy smile at me and peering over the top of his sunglasses.

“Couldn’t help myself. Mad dogs and Englishmen, doncha know.”

“Huh?” Apparently, he had never heard the song.

“Song…my grandmother used to sing. Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun.” I sang merrily.

“Mad dogs and Englishmen huh? And us. What are you looking at?”

“Well, look over there,” I pointed to the south, “covered with jungle. Totally. Right? Now, look over there,” I turned to the north, “nothing.”

Brian looked back and forth from south to north for a moment and then grunted, “looks like they stripped that hillside for some reason.” Then he paused and looking at the northern side, squinted and asked, “what’s that?”

“What? Where are you looking?” I tried to look in the general direction of his glance but the glare from the street was too bright and I asked him for the loan of his sunglasses.

“They’re prescription,” he warned, but handed them to me.

“They sure are,” I drawled, “how do you see through these things?”

“Better question is how could I see without ‘em.”

“I can’t use them, they’re way too strong for me,” I said, handing them back. “Now try and point where you’re looking.” So he held up his arm and I sighted along it to the mountainside. Shading my eyes by completely cupping both hands around them, I finally saw it. A rather large crucifix planted more than half way up the hillside. "How have I missed that?" I wondered aloud, and then answered myself, "I’ve never been here during the day ... Do you suppose we could get up there?” I asked.

“Sure,” Brian responded heartily, “if only we had climbing gear and supplies for what? A week? Sure!”

“Brian,” I whined a bit, “that isn’t even a mile away from here. That would be an easy, easy walk.”

“Yeah,” he said in a flat voice, “On a perfect spring day! Haven’t you noticed? It is really, really, really hot out here. I vote we go get something cool to drink.”

“Right there, my friend, on the other side of this very street, is a store where you may buy something cool to drink. And all the fresh fruit you could ever want.”

“Uh… I meant something cool to drink, as in say, alcoholically cool. Back that way,” he pointed back in the direction of the bars.

I began to cluck like a chicken and then stopped abruptly. “What are you doing here in the middle of the day anyway?” I asked rather peremptorily.

Grinning, he said, “I saw you come out of the barbershop on base and just thought I’d follow you and see where you went.”

“You followed me all the way from the base?”

“Yep. And I almost turned back when I saw you pass the Strip. I’ve never been this far into town, and I’m not sure I ever want to come back this way again either.”

“Let me guess; you’re broke and you were hoping I’d buy you a beer?”

“Nope, but if you’re offering, I accept.”

“I am not offering…yet. Go with me up there, though” I pointed at the crucifix, “and I’ll buy you a couple of beers.”

“I don’t know why you want to go up there. It’s just a cross with a Jesus built in the middle of a … a desert. And it’s hot! It’s hot! I could fry an egg on the sidewalk out here.”

“If there were any sidewalks, you mean. And anyway, your eggs would probably be steamed instead of fried. Come on! Where’s your sense of adventure?”

I don’t know why he agreed to go, but he did. He complained about every hundred steps and when we got to the edge of the hillside, looked up at our destination and said, “we, oh Lord, are going to need your everlasting help, to get our sorry butts up this fucking hill!”

“I don’t believe,” I said thoughtfully, “I have ever heard anyone petition Jesus’ help to get their sorry butt up a fucking hill. But your point is well taken. Where does that path up there start?”

Glancing back and forth across the hillside, Brian pointed at a spot about a quarter of a mile further east, “still sure you want to do this?” he said querulously like an old man.

“I,” and I paused for drama, “am as fresh as a daisy. A very hot fresh daisy. A very hot fresh tropical sort of daisy. A very hot fresh tropical sort of daisy with …”

“I get it,” he interrupted.

Unfortunately, with buildings and houses and fences built smack up against the mountain we couldn’t follow the hillside directly to the trailhead and had to backtrack another quarter of a mile to a street running parallel to the mountain. Then we panted our way to take another street eastward, to find the small side street which lead to the beginning of the trail, which street, also unfortunately, we had to search to find, adding what probably only seemed like miles, to our trek. Brian was sweating heavily and quite red in the face when we finally reached the trailhead.

To cool off, we asked a sympathetic older woman if she had anything to drink. Leaving us sitting cross-legged on her tiny porch she hurried inside her corrugated tin house and brought back two cold colas. How she kept them cold was a mystery, which neither Brian nor I ever solved, but she was truly sympathetic, especially when she learned we were trying to reach the hillside crucifix. Brian offered her money for the drinks but she steadfastly refused. I asked her if there was anything we could do before we left to which she just shook her head and in her heavily accented English told us to just say a prayer for the town.

When we left the shade of her small porch facing the mountain, Brian was silent for about five minutes, which I attributed to the heat but then he suddenly asked, “why do you suppose she wanted us to pray for the town?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she just thinks the town needs people praying for it.” Even I was feeling a little cooked, so I spoke a little shortly to him.

“She seemed … I don’t know … she seemed like … she seemed like the town needed something. Protection maybe.”

“What? Where did you get that? She just asked us to say a prayer for the town.”

“It was how she said it, you know? She kept looking over that way,” and he pointed inland toward the rain forest.

“She was pretty old, maybe she remembers the Japanese coming from over there …”

“Japanese came from the sea, dork. Over there!” and he pointed toward the base.

“Well then, maybe she wanted something from over there.”

As we talked the trail rose precipitously westward and rather unlike the streets of the town, was litter free. When I made a verbal note of this to Brian, he laughed, “not a lot of Americans up here.” But it was an irregular climb and totally washed out in places. Wide gullies had to be climbed around or through and the loose gravel and dirt made treacherous footing. In a while however, we overlooked the rooftops and a soft breeze from the bay was blowing in our faces. “GOD! That feels good!” Brian exclaimed to the waiting crucifix, still an eighth mile or so distant.

“Wow. What a view up here.” I said in a quiet counterpoint. “Look. There’s the ship!”

“Who cares? We see the fucking ship every day. But look over there; you can see those islands at the mouth of the bay and the shuttle boats. This is such a nice breeze, I’m not sure I want to go back down through that again,” and he pointed at the town, “I think I’m staying.”

“Gotta. How else will we get back? Jitney? I don’t think they make it up here too often. What would you eat? Those thorny looking bushes? Nope, you’ll go back, even if it’s only for the beer.”

Brian flipped me the bird.

“Speaking of beer, I wonder if Jesus will turn the dirt into beer ... for you, of course.”

“I’m thinking not. Just a guess, of course, but I just gotta feeling.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. We’ve been using way too much profanity on our pilgrimage.”

“Pilgrimage?”

“Well,” I wasn’t quite sure when I had first started thinking of this as a pilgrimage, “isn’t it kind of like a pilgrimage? Think of everything we’ve gone through to get here.”

“You mean, a couple of side streets and over a couple of mud puddles? Or rather, a mud puddle? All that?”

“Mud puddle? Oh, you mean that one where those kids were playing. No…I just meant, we came through all this heat in the middle of the day when no one else, even them,” and I waved at the town, “seems to want to be outside. So we gave ourselves a little challenge, and here we are!”

“I have to admit, the heat is a big challenge for me, I am fried. Even you are beginning to get a little red.”

“Oh crap! I forgot to put on sunblock!”

“Guess what, genius? I’ve got some right here.” With that Brian reached in his pocket and pulled out a tiny tube of sunscreen. “I didn’t forget.” Then he held it out, but when I reached for it, he pulled back his hand in a teasing gesture. “What do I get for some of this?”

“I already have to buy you a couple of beers. What else do you want?”

“Let’s see … I’m not sure right at the moment. I’ll think of something. I want it to be something good.”

“How good? I can survive a little sunburn.”

“Let me think.” We were approaching the crucifix, and breathing heavily from the last rise in the trail. Brian looked at the cross, handed me the tube and said, “I’ll get back to ya.”

The crucifix was standing in a saddle of the mountain about fifty feet across. The monument itself was placed as close to the rising hillside as the builders could get it, with the rest of the natural saddle leveled for spectators. The crucifix stood about twenty feet high with the cross painted white and the naked flesh of the Christ figure in an almost flamingo pink and wearing a bright blue loincloth. The figure’s hair was painted in shiny black enamel and around his head was a delicate wooden crown of thorns painted in an unnatural brown color, so unnatural, I wondered why they hadn’t simply left the wood bare.

The most startling aspect to the piece wasn’t the brilliant red paint dripping from the wounds made by the crown of thorns and the nails in his limbs, but rather the look of sheer terror and agony on his face. In the distance, the crucifix had looked like a pretty standard Roman Catholic monument. Up close, the colors looked silly until the viewer looked carefully at the expression on the Christ’s face. The figure was staring into the town below and the sculptor had caught pain, fear, in a terrifying intimate way. There was no calm benevolent glance in the face; it was a cry for mercy.

Brian and I were silent as we stared at that tortured visage. Brian made a small noise in his throat and walked closer. “Look at the crown of thorns, Jim.”

I walked closer and realized that what I had thought was painted wood was some kind of rusted bayonet wire with three to six inch long spiked points thrusting into the statues head and the viewers mind. I was staring up at the INRI scroll which was moving in the breeze when I started to say something smartass, but then I noticed Brian had moved suddenly to the base of the monument and looked to be suddenly caressing the statues feet, or holding them with his head resting in the crease between the legs.

At first I thought maybe he needed something to hold onto because of heat stroke or dehydration. Then with his hands still clasping the feet he had sagged limply to his knees. Then I could hear him muttering something quietly but couldn’t make out what he said. I stood quietly paralyzed for a moment then scurried over and put my hand on his shoulder, “are you all right?” I was genuinely concerned. Because of the heat I couldn’t tell if he was shedding tears or sweating. He nodded and pulled his shirt tail up to wipe his face.

“Something about the face. I … saw ... felt.” He was obviously shaken, but stood up still holding the Christ's feet.

I wanted to ask what he felt but doing so seemed wrong. “Should we say one for the town, now?” I asked quietly wondering if we shouldn't just go back to town. Again, he nodded. To my surprise, Brian got down on one knee; I just closed my eyes, tried not to think about Brian's seeming collapse, and bowed my head.

I don’t remember what I asked for the town, but as flippant as I sometimes can be, I participated as fully as I knew how. Brian seemed to know what he was doing so I just took my cues from him. I don’t think he was especially religious or even particularly Christian, I certainly am not, but in that moment, we were as sincere as Believers.

When I opened my eyes I was staring at the ground in front of me and as I moved, I caught the glint of something mostly buried in the red dirt. Reaching down I pulled an intact green glass rosary with a tiny gold-colored metal crucifix out of the dirt. I rubbed some of the dirt off while thinking the piece must have been dropped because it was somehow flawed.

I don’t know why, but I kept looking at it thinking there must have been a part of it broken or damaged for someone to have dropped and left such a pretty thing. The rosary was completely undamaged. The beads were a deep emerald color and made in the shape of hearts and the circular part met at a piece made of the same metal as the crucifix with the image of the sacred heart on both sides. The tiny figure of Jesus rested against what looked like an inlay of the same green glass as the beads. The little banner reading “INRI” was tilted almost jauntily.

When Brian asked to see it, I rubbed a little more dirt off on my pants and handed him the rosary perhaps just a trifle anxiously. I wasn’t sure why, but I was afraid he would do something like pull it apart or throw it over the precipice facing the town. He just took it though, examined the metal Jesus and handed it back to me.

“What are you going to do with it?”

I couldn’t tell him why, but I looked around the empty saddle of the mountain expecting the owner to come up and say, “excuse me, but I dropped my rosary and I would like to have it back.” When I told Brian this strange thought, he just laughed a little and said, “nobody here but us chickens.”

“What do you suppose happened?”

“Don’t know, buddy. Maybe … I don’t know.”

“I just had this thought that somebody came up here and got really disappointed, or disgusted.”

“You mean because it “didn’t work”?” He used his hands to make quote marks in the air.

“Something like that. It looks like a girl’s rosary … maybe she came up here and was saying her rosary and … maybe nothing happened, or she just dropped it and couldn’t find it.”

“Then she must have been up here at night. That would be pretty hard to miss if it was just laying on this ground.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know, the whole thing just gets my imagination going.” With that I put the rosary in my pocket and forgot about it.

Facing away from the giant crucifix, Brian and I walked to edge of the cliff over-looking the town and stood trying to pick out landmarks. What we saw were the buildings of the town, crammed so tightly together, the location of streets had to be guessed. The entire city looked like someone had jammed all the stovepipe chimneys on all the roofs of all the messy looking rusted tin shacks up against the river where it was force-fed a view. Across the river in a bright contrast, were the clean strips of black tarmac streets, neat white stucco walls of barracks and other buildings, all separated by the perfect patches of green clipped lawns and waving palms of the naval base.

On our side of the river, inside the town not one spot of green, grass or tree, could be seen. The town was a desert just like the side of the mountain where we stood. From the vantage of the crucifix, one side of the river looked like a raggedy man begging for the attention of his wealthy brother on the opposite shore. Brian and I were silently sharing an unforgettable experience.

“No wonder they think we’re all rich,” Brian spoke suddenly bitter, “look at that! Compared to any one of them, we are rich.”

I was thinking the same thing and told him so. “And tonight, we go into town, spend all the money in our pockets, tell them we’re out of money, go back to the base and repeat the whole thing tomorrow night. It must be like magic to them. Run out of money? Just go back and get some more.”

“I heard one of the chiefs talking with someone about how we improve their economy. Look at that, Jim. How have we improved their economy? Bars and hookers? Why don’t we offer to level the town and put in housing and air conditioning or something? Why don’t we clean up that fucking river? That’s just an open sewer! And those little kids swim in it. Do you know what happens to you if you fall in that river? The fucking Navy gives you every inoculation known to man, that’s what! Those little kids jump in that crap for coins that we throw at them …”

“ And miss on purpose,” I interjected. I was feeling disgusted with myself. I didn’t want to remember throwing coins into that river.

“… and miss on purpose …” Brian’s voice choked and he stopped speaking abruptly. Running away from me to the west, I could hear him gagging and trying to control the impulse to throw up. I stood listening and felt the gorge rising in myself, looked out over the town and felt my knees buckle, and both of us were vomiting into the chasm.

“Brian, I …,” I started to say something and vomited again.

He laughed weakly and said, “yeah, I know. … Jim,” he interrupted himself, paused and struggled for the words, “Jim,” he repeated, “I was looking through his eyes … I don’t know how … I was looking from up there!” Brian’s voice was catching as he tried to speak. He was crying but seemed to be getting through the experience.

It took me longer to regain my composure. Ever since I was little, vomiting made me cry. This time I had a reason. Brian stood waiting patiently though and leaked tears with me.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I sniffled a little angrily, “this is just stupid!”

Brian, wiping at his tears, laughed a bit saying, “I know what you mean. It’s too hot to cry like this.”

We both started laughing and crying at that, and started walking back to town wiping our faces with our shirttails. We passed the woman who had given us the colas and we waved and she waved and we smiled and she smiled showing us her missing teeth.

COMING SOON...

COMING SOON…


Tony was staring at a vacant lot between some houses in the distance. He thought that space on the other side of the freeway looked like a once perfect, but now gap-toothed smile; yeah, he thought, it’s a small town with missing teeth. It was a town where its image began to come apart with its economic health. Boarded up windows on Main Street, real estate signs with pictures of smiling agents advertising businesses and houses for sale had appeared as money dried up. Another house once stood in the breach. The house was consumed in a conflagration that left some burn marks still visible on houses on either side. One developer made a modest attempt to fill in the gap and regain some of his fortune and a little tax revenue for the city by an attempted re-zoning of the lot to commercial but that had ultimately failed. Neither the developer nor the city seemed to have the energy. A sun-faded sign was the only remnant of the effort.

It was a wooden sign originally built in two parts The top banner read, in large capital letters and nearly cursive print, COMING SOON . . . The bottom piece named the future effort some fantastic suburban dream like Forest Garden Mall or North Tree Gate; it fell away shortly after the sign was placed and no one, agent or broker or vandal, had the time, the energy or the will to remove or replace it. All of the neighbors had objected to the project and the city council never passed the zoning change or allowed a variance; this fact Tony wasn’t sure he should even think about. The gap was his guilt, and his shame, and his glee, and his success, and he saw it everyday he worked, all there in the one big, street-side, restaurant picture window.

Tony’s home town, like many small California towns, started for one reason and when that reason gave out, found another reason to survive and then another and so on until reasons to survive as a municipality gave out, but it still had its own city council and mayor, city police department, city public works department and all the rest. Because the town had survived it became “historic”, with a center section consisting of buildings more than half of which were “landmarks”. With economic downturn the “landmarks” became a liability in need of a great deal of repair and restoration. Since restoration was expensive and the halcyon days of premium rents had passed, landlords simply let them deteriorate, letting roofs leak and upper floors be taken over by bats and mold.

Although he was forced to move several times by incipient deterioration, Tony had loved the days of living in upper floor apartments and experienced fleeting moments of nostalgia for those days. He had enjoyed the views tremendously.

Tony had lived mostly in upstairs studio apartments after graduating from his community college. The best ones had views of the street. He loved watching pedestrians and automobiles passing below him; it gave him a feeling of privacy that he enjoyed. Just secretly watching like that also gave him a feeling of angelic benevolence. The last upstairs apartment also developed a mold problem, which Tony’s sensitive sense of smell picked out almost immediately, so he called the landlord but never got a call back. He tried to acclimate himself to the smell because he didn’t want to move again, but it got worse. Then Tony came home one evening and there was an eviction notice from the public health department and he was forced to vacate his last upstairs apartment. The landlord just vanished and a bank repossessed the building.

Tony was now living in another studio but it was a tiny downstairs apartment, at the back of a building, looking on a narrow alley with a gray cement retaining wall, covered with brightly spray-painted graffiti reading things like ‘Viva Che’ and ‘Whatever happen, happen for a raisin’. He thought frequently about painting over the graffiti but always reconsidered because he wasn’t sure it would improve the view. But he was quite proud and guiltless of the apartment’s internal appearance, which was as neat as a ship’s stateroom and fairly dust-free. Tony hated dust.

He cleaned the floor once a week and made sure he moved furniture. He made a habit of always making his bathroom gleam, cleaning behind the toilet and between all the tiles. All of his toilet articles were carefully arranged in an extra large medicine cabinet covered with a mirror he kept free of toothpaste and water stains, and though the shower stall was quite small and dark when he moved in, he installed a battery light in its ceiling and scrubbed its walls down regularly. In the main room he had placed a side table next to the door and a comfortable armchair next to the table. On the table was a rather fantastic lamp that an elderly aunt gave him and he treasured as a relic from the mid-twentieth century. The few furnishings, other than the lamp and a couple of other inheritances, were thrift store pieces he found nearly new that he’d accumulated over a period of a few years. A sofa he had really cherished had to be sold when he moved from the last upstairs place because it just wouldn’t fit in the new apartment. It wouldn’t even fit through the strangely narrow door of the new place.

His ex had left him because she didn’t want to live anymore in small places and would have especially disliked the new downstairs alley flat. She had vanished out of his life sometime before his last move. She’d always told him a larger place would be better for him because there would be room for more comfortable furniture and maybe an extra room would be nice for his weights and gym equipment. They had seriously looked for something bigger, even outside of town where Tony really didn’t want to live. He couldn’t afford to drive even if he had a car, and the larger places were either too large or too expensive. So she just packed up, said, “see you next lifetime,” and left.

He hadn’t thought there had been any hard feelings on her part, so one day he called her just to say hello and find out how she was doing, but her responses had been a little short and when she finally told him she had to go, he just said, “well, it’s been nice talking to you. Can I call you later?” She had said simply, “no,” and that was that.

When he thought about their relationship, he never could quite understand what the problems had been, and he would look, not too forlornly, around his apartment, for things she might have left behind. There wasn’t anything nor had there ever been. She had been extremely thorough in gathering her things. He had been grateful she didn’t have a lot to pack.

After he had been forced out of the last upstairs apartment by a growing stench of mold and the eviction notice, he’d moved into the back-alley place. He carefully installed his few pieces of furniture, which hadn’t left enough room for his gym equipment, so he sold a table and four chairs and a cabinet he had used for CD and DVD storage. Realizing that not having space for the CDs and DVDs meant they would be stacked or lying along a wall creating less space, he sold them also.

When he moved in there was an odd little hole in the new apartment’s only wall, which separated the tiny bathroom from the rest. So Tony expanded the hole until it was large enough to fit his old television, reinforced the space with some used lumber and surrounded the entire opening with some inexpensive picture framing, stapled the cable lead to the wall and plugged the TV into an outlet in the bathroom. His landlord was a little startled by the change but he didn’t really seem to mind and mentioned politely that it looked like Tony had a flat-screen TV.

He had been enculturated as a Roman Catholic, even though he couldn’t have responded at mass with any degree of accuracy. His family generally only attended mass on holidays like Christmas and Easter and he found himself making up responses for which he later felt guilty. He did know the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster, but sometimes got confused with the latter’s ending because he had so many protestant friends. When he sometimes absently recited the prayer in the protestant manner, he immediately felt guilty. Somehow he had offended someone somewhere. Tony was the kind of person who didn’t sin much, because he disliked feeling the guilt that went with it. So he tried to carefully organize guilt out of his life and his home environment.

To that end he was rather organized about pretty much everything in his personal environment, and since he seldom felt guilty, he also felt relatively successful. He had a routine for getting ready for everything. He’d developed routines in grammar school with the nuns and carried it over into public grammar school when his father decided they were a bad influence and took him out of Catholic school. Tony thought it was really because the school raised its fees. His mother had no objection at all however because she thought nuns were crazy. Nonetheless, even in the transition, Tony managed to maintain his rather tightly organized world and when he entered public school, it may have even grown a little tighter.

As a waiter, Tony maintained an immaculate appearance. His black work pants were always fitted with a belt, which hung correctly, just above his hipbones, gathering themselves tightly over his buttocks instead of hanging loosely, which was current fashion. Tony always bought expensive white cotton shirts and always washed them with bluing and starched them to a medium stiffness. He was meticulous about buying shirts with French cuffs so he could wear cufflinks, which he thought added elegance to his appearance. When he put his shirts on he always managed to create two perfect pleats in the sides at his waistline so the shirtfront would remain flat. He wore a bow tie that had to be tied instead of a clip-on because he thought having a tie like that gave him bragging rights of sorts, although when he did brag, he felt guilty. His work shoes he bought one half size too large because he always wore two pair of stockings, a white pair underneath and a dark pair on top. He had heard somewhere that dyed stockings were bad for feet but he didn’t want white stockings showing between black pants and black shoes, mostly because Tony the manager wore his that way. Tony the manager always noted Tony the waiter’s dapper appearance with a bit of a leer, which made the waiter uneasy.

“Lookin’ good, Tone,” the manager would nod his head approvingly, and then repeat, “lookin’ good…gettin’ laid tonight?”

“How can you always be thinking about sex?” the waiter would ask.

“How can I not think about sex? Some guy told me the other day that if you weren’t thinkin’ about sex, your mind was wandering. Ha haha ha haha.” The manager had an odd laugh that sounded like he was laughing while driving with a flat tire, and when Belladonna started her laughing in the restaurant, the manager was almost always the first to pick up the infection and because his laugh was almost as loud as hers, it could be easily heard everywhere like a misfiring engine.

He recalled his life in the upper floors as time when he knew nothing about Belladonna. He hadn’t really had time to grieve, Buster the busboy had told him. That sounded fair to Tony but he knew that Buster belonged to some fringe religious association that Tony didn’t understand, even though Buster seemed nice enough, he was also kind of touchy-feely which Tony did not care for at all. He actually told Buster that he would prefer it if Buster wouldn’t be so chummy all the time and Buster seemed to understand. Tony warmed greatly to Buster when the busboy asked his advice on weight training. It didn’t hurt that Buster shared his opinion of Belladonna.

It was about the time he moved that Belladonna made her first appearance at the restaurant. Belladonna’s sudden appearance and over-dramatic persona had driven old thoughts of the separation and the new apartment away like leaves before a hurricane.

Belladonna, La Donna to her closest and very few friends, was a strange mixture of beauty and ugliness all wrapped in one immodest package. Like her namesake plant, she had a kind of kinship to humanity that belladonna has to the tomato. It is rather pretty in some ways and one knows it is in the same family but there are differences that shouldn’t be ignored.

La Donna liked to wear tiny flowers in her glossy, French-rolled, jet-black hair, which remained resolutely the same color as she aged. Her favorite blossoms were always tiny and strange, baby’s breath, but more commonly the little blue flowers from filaree, or yellow ones from tarweed, or even the tiny purple blossoms from her namesake. On rare occasions, she could even be seen wearing blossoms from purple star thistle. She had beautiful flashing black eyes and a wide, well maintained smile, which showed often.

In public she always laughed distinctively loud and told jokes so everyone could hear. Her large bosom would leap up and down with her guffaws and so infectious was her laughter that other people near her would begin to laugh for no reason other than it seemed she was giving everyone permission. Everyone knew La Donna as a very happy person.

Belladonna had always been large but once had carried her weight, and looked rather like an opera star. But that day had passed, and now she was shaped like a potato sack with the potatoes in it. The year and a half of Tony’s acquaintance with her was after she received the gastric bypass surgery. She lost a great deal of weight, but she never followed her doctor’s orders and refused to exercise or monitor her intake of vitamins. In fact, she believed that if she paid for the surgery she should be able to eat whatever she liked, whenever she liked and did. When she lost the weight, she complained to her doctor that all that loose skin made her look like a Shar-pei in a dress and couldn’t he do something? The radical procedure only slowed her eating for a while. It also developed a habit for eating small portions. But the small portions kept becoming more and more small portions and she regained a lot of the weight, but just didn’t seem to carry it the same way.

La Donna also lead a secret life about which even her few friends knew nothing. She made much ado about animals in general and pets in particular and continuously joined committees to end animal cruelty and in public cried out loudly and in great distress when she saw or thought she saw a pet being misused by its owner. She herself had a medium sized dog and a cat, which were rarely seen. Her public protests about animal cruelty did not find their expression inside her home. Which, perhaps, is why the cat rarely made appearances anywhere near her. During her morning regime, she would call the dog sweetly to her side then thrash it with an old taped up roll of wallpaper because it had slighted her by perhaps not eating all of its food which she would blame for attracting ants or cockroaches. (This was true, but certainly not a primary reason she found vermin in her house.)

Belladonna hadn’t paid her housekeeper one month and then another month went by unpaid and then the housekeeper quit and never showed up again. Belladonna had never tried to hire another. “Waste of money”, she told herself. At any rate, housekeepers were too expensive it seemed and since La Donna wasn’t about to clean house, it never got cleaned.

The dog would almost always cheerily follow her barking to the door and receive a heel in the face because La Donna thought it was trying to escape; when she returned in the evening the process was only reversed in that instead of a heel the animal received a toe, for the same imaginary reason.

For nearly thirty years Belladonna worked for a government agency whose primary mission was doling out food coupons and writing checks to other agencies that in turn doled them out to someone else. She was very proud of her career, her “service” as she called it. She was helping people to help others. She was a giver. Except on the days when she ate at the restaurant where Tony worked.

The restaurant where Tony waited tables was one of those old fashioned Italian places where there are candles on the tables and the tables are covered with red and white checked oil cloth and there always seem to be red cloth serviettes folded into fancy shapes and stuffed into a water glass for the diners to admire before tucking one under their chin. There were old Neapolitan songs playing on the overhead speakers quietly enough that people eating could just about believe they might be in Naples, or if their imaginations were good, Capri. Colorful murals, track lit, painted with little sense of perspective filled an entire corner with a view perhaps of Portofino and the menu was extensive with all of the old favorites and variations for every taste, except Belladonna’s.

Tony knew, he always knew, the moment he saw a customer, what kind of customer they were going to be, a picky eater, a big eater, just an appetizer, just a glass or two or three of wine, or what he referred to as ‘a taster’. Belladonna was a taster. Tony hated tasters.

Tony’s first encounter with her was not pleasant, she smelled musty. She was a public jokester and for a large person moved very quickly when she wished. On that first evening Tony had seen her, sized her up, and unable to avoid her, took a breath and requested her to please follow him, which she had, with alacrity, too much alacrity. She made the trip across the restaurant into a conga line, holding Tony’s belt or grabbing his sides with a pinching grip. Occasionally, she would see an acquaintance and whirl him to the side while keeping a grip on his belt. He valiantly kept his cool and his patience. Tony the manager had assigned her to a table on the complete opposite side of the restaurant and for Tony the waiter, it was like running a gauntlet.

Around every table she never missed an opportunity to give him a hip or bump into him from behind, or, for that matter, to rub his behind, to which she would loudly proclaim to the other diners what a forward young man he was, and once, bumped him from behind and let go of his belt, knocking him into the lap of a pretty young woman who was just about to receive a proposal of marriage from her boyfriend, yelled loudly, “masher!” Tony found his face in the young woman’s crotch with his hands and arms, initially stretched out to save himself from the fall, still holding the menu but pushing rather painfully into the boyfriend’s groin. La Donna bellowed laughter and everyone except Tony followed suit, even the nearly engaged couple. Tony the manager was barking his missing piston laugh as loudly as Belladonna.

Tony had blushed scarlet and more embarrassed than he had ever been in his life, wanted desperately for someone to come to his rescue. Reading the distress on Tony’s face, which looked so helplessly from the woman’s lap, Buster the busboy rushed to his assistance. The busboy was always ready to help Tony. Buster was also the only other person not laughing.

With Buster’s help he righted himself, Tony muttered thanks and found his way to the table the manager had assigned where Belladonna suddenly screamed, “not here! This is where my ex-husband told me he wanted a divorce! I can’t sit here! What? Are you crazy? Take me to another table!!”

The laughter trailing from Tony’s fall died away suddenly and a deadly quiet seemed to gather around the perimeter of every table. “I’m terribly sorry. I’ll find you another table, miss!” Tony murmured very quietly. “HA!” cried La Donna, “did you hear that?” the voice called to everyone in the room, “he called me Miss!! Oh, that’s rich!” and once again she burst into her uncannily infectious laughter and everyone laughed again, nervously at first but then it built and built until even Tony felt a tiny urge to giggle.

It was, however, Tony the manager who came instantly and showed Belladonna to another table which many people thought was always reserved, but in reality was simply left open in case there was a celebrity (never had been) or the owner wanted dinner. Belladonna nodded her head in approval while jutting out her chin. Then she spread her arms wide and announced to the room in a bad Italian accent, “atsa nice, no?” Tony the waiter was of Italian heritage mostly and wanted to tell Belladonna talking like that made him a little uncomfortable but he was more concerned she would do something like knocking him into another table again so he said nothing.

Then Tony brought her water but she said the glass wasn’t clean enough. So he brought another glass but she didn’t want ice. So he sent Buster with another glass with no ice, but she said she had changed her mind and wanted ice after all and told Buster to send the waiter next time, I am not leaving you a tip.

So Tony brought water with no ice and before she could change her mind again asked her if she would like a glass of wine. La Donna looked him squarely in the eye and with a big booming laugh said; “Now you’re talking my language! Waddaya got?” Tony pointed to the wine list on the table and once again she boomed laughter, screamed laughter and proclaimed, “all the time this was here and we were fighting over water? HA HA HA!” She never touched the water, but as Tony walked away she grabbed his buttocks.

That first evening seemed endless. Belladonna would order a dish, Tony would bring it, she would taste it and push it away saying in a loud critical voice things like: “doesn’t have enough garlic!”; “good lord, don’t they grow any oregano around here?”; “this doesn’t have enough sauce, does it? HEY YOU! BACK THERE IN THE KITCHEN! WHADDYA DO WITH ALL THE SAUCE?” But she always took at least one bite, pushing the plate away afterward like she was allergic to it.

Belladonna had the time of her life. When she laughed everyone laughed. On that first evening she must have ordered twenty different dishes, all menu specials with special instructions, and never ate more than one bite from any of them. She tasted. She laughed and she tasted.

In spite of never seeming to like anything the kitchen turned out, La Donna decided it was her favorite restaurant, which she proclaimed loudly. It may have been because Tony the waiter was so patient or it may have been because Tony the manager never charged her for anything except the ten-dollar bottle of wine she drank. The last cup she swallowed directly from the bottle then belched loudly, which set people into gales of more laughter. When she finally left, Tony found three coins of foreign origin on the table, and a little scribbled note, which read, I’ll be back!

He told Tony the manager he needed a short break and almost ran to the dry storage room for the restaurant, where he sat down on a plastic milk crate and wept. Buster wandered in to get something, saw Tony’s tears and stuttering an apology, backed out of the storeroom, immediately forgot what he was supposed to get, went to the restroom and also cried.

Neither man knew it but that first visit was easily the most pleasant evening they would spend with Belladonna.

During one of her return visits, she insisted loudly that Tony call her La Donna, the very same night he saw her entering a house on the other side of the freeway. He asked Tony the manager if he knew where she lived and Tony asked him why, was he getting interested?

Tony the manager was the most sexually driven man Tony the waiter had ever met. On three occasions the owner had interrupted the manager while he was having sex in the restaurant. Once with the owner’s ex-wife, once with one of the waitresses, and once with a woman who came in to get a to go order. On this last occasion, the couple got so energetic they broke the toilet seat in the employee bathroom, infuriating the owner because he said stuff like that drove up cost of sales.

Naturally, after the third time, the owner ordered Tony the manager to pay attention to the business and stay away from girls. Tony took him literally and cooks and busboys often found him amusing himself with vegetables and melons and sometimes even bread. Buster frequently told Tony the waiter how freakish this looked. So when Tony the manager asked Tony the waiter if he was interested in La Donna, Tony the waiter nearly gagged.

“No,” he said. “I just want to know if that house over there is where she lives. That’s all.” He didn’t even really know why he was asking but he felt the stirrings of an idea, a feeling.

Tony the manager said, “maybe”, and also said she might be interesting to fuck, so Tony the waiter took his leave and tried not to think about La Donna again until the next time she would appear at the restaurant. He did know he would never have asked her directly because she could turn the question into her idea of an evening of comedy, telling everyone in the restaurant as loudly as possible, and bat her eyes coyly.

So instead, he watched her very carefully, observed her over the months. Belladonna always played all her usual tricks of bumping into him and on a few occasions “accidentally” spilled her water (with or without ice) somehow directly onto the front of Tony’s pants, swiftly grabbing her scarlet serviette would begin rubbing him. She invariably did this when he was holding a plate or two and was slow to react. She endlessly repeated ordering dishes she didn’t really want and never paying for anything except wine and then leaving a useless tip.

Tony had asked the owner about the situation and he seemed to shy away from the question. Tony asked if they couldn’t just refuse her service or something? The owner always demurred, or started talking about his last trip to New Jersey, or gave Tony excuses, like not having enough time to discuss this. On one occasion, the owner just told Tony to stop asking stupid questions and do his side work.

It was on that evening Tony finally asked the owner if Belladonna lived in the house across the freeway. The owner looked a little startled but admitted that she did indeed live there and then told Tony to go help the busboy clean the bathroom. As Tony carefully wiped all the water stains from the large mirror of the public restroom while Buster cleaned the toilet stall he admitted to Buster that the owner had told him where Belladonna lived and he wasn’t quite sure why, but he had developed a vague interest in her. Buster seemed disturbed that Tony had any interest in Belladonna at all, but Tony reassured him that he hadn’t developed that kind of interest; in fact, he wished she would just go away, or get hit by a bus or something. Tony had an almost psychic feeling that just knowing some information was going to make everyone’s life easier, he just didn’t know how. But that he didn’t tell Buster.

Belladonna’s visits never got any easier, nor did her loud and raucous laughter embarrass Tony any less, but Tony started to gain confidence in some mysterious manner he didn’t understand. He would look across the freeway at Belladonna’s dimly lit windows while he was serving her or after his shift and just wonder. He even started to answer her loud cries with an almost imitative behavior, to which Belladonna, at first startled, grew ever louder and more raucous. The owner told him La Donna must like him.

Accompanying Belladonna’s behavior came a coincidence where the more food she pushed away and complained about everything, the busier the restaurant became, not only on the nights when she plowed through hysterically laughing guests but also on week nights when the restaurant had been so quiet the owner had considered shutting down.

Mondays the restaurant had always been closed, Tuesdays had a good lunch crowd but dinner was very thin and Wednesdays only very slightly better than Tuesday. Belladonna limited her appearances to Friday or Saturday with the very occasional Thursday exception. But Wednesdays and Tuesdays picked up so much that the manager told the owner he would need to hire more servers and at least one other busser.

The owner hired one more server and a busser. Tony got more shifts and began to make some excellent tips, except, of course, from Belladonna, who continued to leave foreign coins of small denominations, subway tokens from eastern cities, gambling tokens from Nevada casinos and occasionally the punch-out slugs from electrical breaker boxes. Tony kept up a barrage of complaints to the manager and the owner.

“She doesn’t eat anything! She orders ten plates of food, eats one bite and says it isn’t done right and then drinks a whole bottle of Chianti by herself. And then you don’t make her pay for it? Why? Why not just refuse her service?”

Tony the manager would usually walk away in the middle of Tony’s tirade without responding, although he would sometimes ask Tony when he got laid last, to which the waiter walked away without responding. The owner always hemmed and hawed over Belladonna and told Tony over and over that this was the last time he would discuss the subject. On her penultimate visit, he just looked Tony in the eye and said, “look kid, she’s good for business.”

Tony responded by telling the owner that that was just superstitious, stupid, it was probably just an upturn in the economy, or maybe new people were just discovering the restaurant and found they liked it and were returning more often.

“Upturn? Kid, you haven’t been paying attention. There ain’t any upturn in the economy, look at all the For Rent signs posted around town; look at all the boarded up places; shoot, I was thinking about abandoning this place before it started to pick up, because I sure couldna sold it. I’m tellin’ ya, the more food that cow pushes away and the harder she laughs, the better business gets; who knows why?”

“Then can somebody else please take her when she comes? I’m sick of it!”

“She always requests you, Tone, always. If I was you I’d just take it in stride.”

“She leaves crap for tips…look at this. This is what she left for me last time. A fuckin’ coin from some country that doesn’t use the alphabet and they make their money from aluminum cans! She won’t let Buster take away the dishes until she’s finished drinking her bottle of wine and then burps and farts her way out the door. She’s disgusting! She’s slugged Buster in the shoulder so many times, he’s got a permanent bruise and she’s grabbed my ass so many times I’ve probably got her fingerprints…her fingerprints embedded permanently, not to mention the times she rubs my crotch, tries to put her hand inside my pants or knocks me into someone’s lap. I should take it in stride!!? I should sue!” Tony was nearly yelling by the time he finished.

“Don’t do that! It’d just cost ya a lotta dough. Maybe she’s lonely, Tone.”

“Maybe she should get a cat.”

“Dincha know? She’s got a cat. Dog too. Maybe she needs human company?”

“Maybe she should grow a human form then.”

“ Tony, Tony, Tony. Ain’t you been doin’ pretty well here?”

“You mean on the days she isn’t here? Well, yeah, yes, of course I have.”

“Think of it this way; she comes, what? Twice a week? Sometimes three times? Right? Well, there’re at least four other days in the week for you to cool off. So? Cool the hell off! I’m havin’ this conversation with you because I don’ wanna lose your great service. If I lost you, I’d lose her. If I lose her, I’d lose all the business that’s built up. See what I mean?”

“That is just screwy! She hasn’t built up business! The rest of the customers wouldn’t know her from a dead cockroach!”

“Relax Tone. Cool down. She’ll probably just go away on her own.”

“Yeah? When?”

Tony had dozens of fruitless conversations like these previously with other workers in the restaurant but the only truly sympathetic person was Buster, and he hated Belladonna as much or more than Tony. But it was during this particular exchange with the owner that something changed. It was just as he said ‘fingerprints’ and saw Buster rubbing his shoulder that Tony got his idea, his plan, because he just happened to glance over the owner’s head in frustration. He was looking in the direction of Belladonna’s house and a light in one of her windows flared to life and with it, brought inspiration. It was a relatively simple plan, a simple criminal plan. Tony just had absolutely no experience in crime however, even petty crime.

The day before her last visit to the restaurant was completely unremarkable. So too was the day of her final visit. Customers poured in for lunch and the owner decided that the evening prep could be helped by calling in Buster early to assist the chef. The owner had also wanted to call Tony in early but for the first time since Tony had worked there he was unavailable to answer his phone.

Tony was unavailable because he had developed a kind of madness that when he thought about it later, surely came from his Italian ancestors. Over the months he had developed a powerful urge for revenge on La Donna. Nothing the owner or anyone else said could alleviate the feeling. Not that he actually stated he wanted revenge. But frequently, in conversations with people at the restaurant he spoke of “feeling strange”. Buster had attempted to get Tony to talk about the feeling and what it was and where it came from and how meditation might help, but Tony wasn’t sure, so Tony attended mass once and even started to go to confession then decided the line was too long and he wouldn’t get to work on time, so all the conversation and intellectual exercise seemed futile because the feeling for vendetta restarted every time he looked across the freeway at Belladonna’s house. The force of emotion and his lack of guilt surprised Tony. So he let himself plan because his father had always said it’s good to have a plan.

That last day Tony walked across the pedestrian bridge and over the freeway with an almost jaunty stride; though he slowed a little when he approached Belladonna’s door, he still felt nothing resembling guilt. He wasn’t sure if she was home, so he knocked rather politely and waited. Receiving no answer he gripped the doorknob tightly and turned it until it broke off in his hand. Looking at it there in his large palm, he suddenly had the urge to giggle, and then he gave the door a tremendous kick.

The sound of the doorknob being broken upset the dog and it came rushing to the door probably expecting Belladonna’s familiar kick, instead the dog found itself hurled backward through the air by the door itself. Its high yelp was ended suddenly when the poor beast landed on the antlers of an ornamental iron stag grazing on a small rug. The cat, frightened by the noise, exited through a partly open window at the rear of the house while Tony strode into the hallway. It was five years to the day from the housekeeper’s departure when Tony found himself in Belladonna’s hall. Tony began his tour by saying an Ave Maria for the dog.

When he had opened the door, he found himself confronted by his own image in a full-length mirror placed exactly opposite the front door. His wavy dark hair had fallen casually over his forehead but his blue eyes had a steely competitive look.

He studied his image for a moment and then approached the mirror very closely and studied himself a little more by pulling up his tee shirt and looking at his abdominal muscles and checking his obliques. He thought for a moment that his obliques needed a little more tone, but just in case he flexed them tightly and realized the mirror had a bad horizontal distortion. Smiling to himself he suddenly got an idea and stripped off his tee shirt and kicked off his flip-flops and as he began a barefoot tour of the house, he noticed very little of the small house had been cleaned in a while.

Stepping into La Donna’s living room he accidentally knocked over a torchère, breaking its deco glass shade, giving him another idea. Walking directly to the old fashioned fireplace he caught sight of himself again in a mirror above the mantel and paused to push the drooping hair off his forehead. He picked up one small china animal and pitched it at another small china animal and scored a direct hit. Giggling at his prowess, he picked up an armchair and started to swing it like a bat, changed his mind, picked up a piece of the broken pottery and slashed the back and the seat, then carefully took the fireplace poker and rather quietly destroyed the chair. Using the poker as an arm extension, he swept all of the objects off the mantel.

One of the porcelain pieces landed on another chair seat, bounced, and freakishly came to rest unbroken staring at yet another china object on a small table completely smothered in dust. Tony used the poker as a pool cue and announced his shot quietly, made a quip about introducing the two pieces, then destroyed both objects in the collision. “And game,” he announced to the air as he tore the hook of the poker lengthwise through the fabric of the sofa. Finding a somewhat neat stack of old newspapers, he flipped all of them into the air and let them fall anywhere. Balling some of them up, he began throwing them at various targets around the room, at one point hitting the only thing that had been altered fairly recently, a vase of flowers. The wilted flowers flew toward the front window while the vase took a direct hit on the edge of a stone dog shattering into hundreds of pieces and loosing on the air a foul smell of decayed vegetation.

When the smell hit Tony’s rather sensitive olfactory nerves he gagged and vomited loudly, giving him yet another idea. Since he felt a little nervous, somewhat like stage fright, he could feel the pressure of activity in his bowels and bladder. He neatly removed and folded his pants and had a movement in the middle of the floor, then ran to the kitchen, his bare feet making splatting sounds on the linoleum. Stopping to push over La Donna’s table and break off its legs. Holding one of the legs in one hand and himself in the other, he urinated over as much territory as he could by whirling like a dervish where the table had once stood. With the table leg held like a baseball bat, he smashed everything breakable and dented what could be dented, paused and then broke some of the already broken things even further.

Standing in the middle of the wrecked kitchen filled him with a sense of pride; naked with the table leg held loosely in his hand he thought he probably looked a little like the classic statue of Heracles only without facial hair. Tony began to step forward and saw he would have to walk through broken china and glass, stopped and made a cat-like move to the top of a counter on his knees where a piece of dented metal pushed into his flesh. Feeling a little angry, he swept the metal away and examined his knee where only a slight dent revealed where the metal had been. Standing on top of the counter, he reached his arm across to an adjoining wall and pulled a small whisk broom from its peg and carefully climbed back to his position on the floor.

Carefully sweeping away the shards, he worked his way to Belladonna’s small bathroom where he checked himself in the medicine cabinet mirror and flexed a couple of times while he admired the sheen of sweat on his pectorals. He then removed everything from the cabinet and threw it all in the toilet. He ripped down the plastic shower curtain and pushed as much of it as would fit into the toilet also. Wondering how upset La Donna would be delighted and inspired him. His face lit up when he got onto the idea of completely breaking the toilet away from its floor bolts and dropping it into the bathtub. Straining like he was performing squats, he rocked and pulled until the toilet broke free at last. Tank and all were lifted into the tub and thrown where the porcelain reservoir lid broke, which disappointed him, so he pulled the medicine cabinet off the wall and dropped it where the toilet had been mounted. The toilet's broken water connection started to shoot water across the room.

Giggling, he rather carefully pulled the lavatory away from its moorings and to his delight more water began shooting from the broken fixtures. He put his foot up like he was testing bathwater and received a slight burn from the hot water side so he simply put his toe under the cold water and held it for a while. While he was holding his foot under the cold water spilling out from the wall, Tony looked downward noticing he could see part of his foreshortened reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, which hadn’t broken. Since he had never seen himself from that angle, Tony became fascinated by the view up the inside of his thighs. Straddling the cabinet, he checked his calves and his quadriceps then made them move individually. He rather absently played with his genitals and examined the way the hair ran in a dark nearly symmetrical stream around his anus and then trailed away up the darkness between the cheeks of his buttocks.

Tony took a last look and thought this must be how it looked to sail under the Colossus of Rhodes, then turned and picking his way back through the kitchen returned to the foyer. He stepped carefully into the living room and retrieved his pants and carried them back to the foyer where he picked up his flip-flops and tee shirt. Opening another door across from the living room, he discovered another short hall with two bedrooms, one off either side. So he placed his clothing on the hall floor in a neat pile near the foyer.

Each bedroom was littered with junk La Donna had failed to dispose of and smelled of mold and dust. One bedroom had obviously not been entered in quite some time; Tony’s damp feet were making themselves slippers of dust. He rather casually tipped over the dresser so the drawers could fall out and upended the bed, which tore a huge gouge in one wall and broke the headboard. Dust and paper went flying causing him to sneeze repeatedly. There was nothing in the dresser even though the room was full of papers from Belladonna’s work. From the floor he picked up an opened letter and started to rip it in half but changed his mind when he saw the restaurant owner’s name in the return address corner.

Tony pulled the letter from its envelope and read the contents. How in all the paper and debris he had found this letter must be beyond coincidental and he made a mental note to ask Buster about coincidence.

The letter was some kind of apology from the owner of the restaurant for not paying some money on time and it seemed that Belladonna had loaned him money from her job or her supervisor’s job, that part wasn’t quite clear. But what was clear was that the restaurant owner was late in paying and Belladonna had made up the difference and now the owner owed a large debt of gratitude as well as the sum and ‘slush’ agreed upon. Some relative of hers had visited the restaurant to insure the debt was going to be paid. The owner was very cordial and almost subservient in his tone and restated how grateful he was for Belladonna’s assistance. He also added a postscript saying her cousin would make a fine manager. When he finished reading the letter Tony absently scratched his nipple with the envelope.

Tony tucked the letter back in the envelope, then tucked the envelope between his thighs and brushed some of the dust off his arms and chest; he had begun to itch a little. He placed the letter on his clothing stack and returned to Belladonna’s bedroom. He then casually but systematically pulled out every drawer and every hanger and wrapped everything into a comforter and flipped it all into the dusty bedroom across the hall. He found what he thought must be a photograph of Belladonna as a young woman and spindled it on a bedpost. Once more feeling the urge to urinate, he simply walked and wet whatever caught his fancy.

Stepping back into the foyer, he checked and flexed a couple of times in front of the mirror. Tony studied the planes of his face for a moment, then flipping his hair once again back from his forehead, he redressed himself and carefully put the letter in his pocket. Tony was feeling quite relaxed when he returned to his apartment. “Good workout”, he thought as he showered and readied himself for work.

Tony arrived at work with the letter in his jacket pocket and kept its content in his mind continually as he did side work and helped a few early customers. Slightly earlier than usual, Belladonna arrived full of her usual banter yelling for her “guy”. Tony was occupied with another diner who wrote as he ate so the manager told her she would have to wait for a moment. La Donna had had a tough day at the office and started screaming for Superman to get his cute little butt over there, and stop wasting time.

All through her “dinner” she yelled and laughed at other customers asking them why they had ordered thus and such, and they should really have something else and if they didn’t like it, send it back. His sense of eagerness was so keen Tony wanted to caress her cheek and tell her sweetly he had a surprise in store, but he nonetheless avoided her pinches and crotch grabbing behavior not only for the reason that he hated it and her, but because he didn’t think trying to behave differently would have helped his anticipation.

With La Donna’s wine bottle at last empty, and her boisterous laughter still infecting the customers, she finally left. Her tip that evening, a game marker from an old board game, Tony flipped into the air and caught on the back of hand. With a lightening quick motion, he slid his flattened hand from under the piece and caught it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he dropped it into his pocket. A lone customer, the writer, applauded.

Buster shook his head as she left and said, “I really hope I never see her again. I feel bad saying that, but I really do.” Tony looked at Buster and felt such a rush of affection for him he actually hugged Buster’s shoulders and said, “me too.” Buster blushed, picked up his bus tub, and looking very awkward hurried away to the kitchen.

The shift came to a close with all of Tony the manager’s usual sexual innuendo following female customers to the door and the owner rubbing his hands at the evening’s take. Tony the waiter was watching for the light to come on across the freeway. When the owner came over to ask Tony what he was watching so closely, Tony, his gaze toward Belladonna’s house unwavering, reached in his pocket and handed the owner the letter.

The restaurant owner said nothing and walked away into the kitchen.

Tony finished his shift and still no light showed, so he waited, sitting on a bench outside the closed restaurant talking to a now very animated Buster about training routines and supplements. Tony laughed when Buster complimented his physique and thanked him, gently removing Buster’s double-handed grip from his bicep muscle.

Exhilarated, Buster told Tony he was going right home to start planning his workout routine and Tony waved goodbye. Tony leaned his back against the brick wall and watched the busboy disappear down the street. A brief moment later a flicker in one of the house windows grew larger and larger until the house was engulfed in flames. Tony wondered if he had broken a gas main.

Far away sirens began to wail.

Picking up his jacket, he slipped into a narrow alley between the restaurant and a lawyer’s office and returned to his apartment where he removed his work clothing, did his workout, took another shower and then sat in his chair by the door and read a magazine, wondering if Buster would make a good workout partner.

END