first comment: a fictional character (has to be one that I know - and preferably human)- Kevin Doherty - The Mad Hatter
second comment: a type of food or specific dish - Star Chicaderis - Veggie Puttanesca
third comment: an old saying or cliché - Heidi Cappadonna - "The early bird gets the worm"
fourth comment: a mode of transportation - Cindy Hannah-White - riverboat
fifth comment: a type of pet - Alice Warmouth - turtle
On the Passage of Time
-or-
The Raven and the Writing Desk
The soft, dark, slumbering cocoon of my bedroom was shattered, almost literally, by the sound of something smashing against the tile floor of the kitchen. I opened my eyes. My first thought was, “What the fuck was that?” My second thought was, “What time is it?”
It was 6:30 in the morning.
Still groggy, I stumbled my way into the kitchen, where I was greeted by the sight of Charlie, my roommate, wearing a pair of threadbare gym shorts and an ancient, faded T-shirt which declared “I’m a Pepper”. He was sweeping shards of what was once a coffee mug into a dustpan.
“Jesus Christ, Charlie, what the hell are you doing up at this hour?” I asked him.
“The early bird gets the worm!” he answered.
I replied with only a grunt, wondering to myself what the hell kind of worm he could possibly be after, since he worked at the Store 24 at the gas station and his shift didn’t actually start until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. That’s how Charlie was, though. It seemed that nearly everything he said sometimes was some sort of a cliché or slogan, as if he had learned English by reading greeting cards or the insides of fortune cookies.
He breezed past me, and deposited the broken crockery into the trash can. “Coffee?” he said. “It’s good to the last drop!”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “I’m probably not going to be getting back to sleep anyway.”
Charlie wasn’t too bad of a guy, as far as roommates go. He had moved into the apartment almost a year before, after my last roommate, Brie (“Like the cheese, just not as runny!” she would always say with a little twitter and a wink. I hated when she said that.) had met the love of her life at a karaoke bar and moved out a week later. He overheard me telling my friend Gary about it one night at the Store 24 when we were buying some chips and some Coke.
“I gotta find someone, soon, Gary,” I said as we stood at the counter. Gary was toying with the idea of buying, and perhaps actually eating, a Slim Jim. “$950 a month is way too much for me to afford by myself, and the first of the month is only like two weeks away!” Gary wisely decided to pass on the Slim Jim.
“You need a roommate, man?” Charlie said from behind the cash register. “Well, I’m looking for a place to live! Why don’t we let one hand wash the other? You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!”
After an exhaustive vetting process which consisted of waiting five days for his check to clear the bank, Charlie had moved in, along with his pet Turtle, Mr. Wizard.
Charlie, I have since learned, is an on-again, off-again Recovering Alcoholic. At the time he moved in to the apartment, he was sober, and he had been on the wagon for a couple of months. He seemed like a decent enough roommate: cleaned up after himself, came and went quietly, and helped out with the groceries and the cable bill. Plus, he had pretty good taste in music and an awesome DVD collection.
All of that changed, though, a couple of months later when he started drinking. First he didn’t come home for two or three nights, but I didn’t really think too much about that because he sometimes worked the graveyard shift at the convenience store, and he was, after all, a grown man. Maybe he met a girl or something, I thought. But then when he finally did come home, looking like he had spent the last few days getting hammered on cheap booze and sleeping in his car, which, as it turned out, is exactly what he had been doing, I figured out that Charlie had not only fallen off the wagon, but had dived off of it head first.
I didn’t say anything to him at first, because, as I said before, he is a grown man, and as long as he paid the rent and didn’t puke all over the furniture, I didn’t really feel like it was much of my business. But then one night I was jolted from a dead sleep by what sounded like somebody torturing a cat in the living room, and I found Charlie sitting in front of the stereo in his underwear with a can of Milwaukee’s Best in his hand and some horrendous Yoko Ono album playing full blast. I walked over to the stereo, turned the “music” way down and took the beer out of his hand.
“What’d you do that for, man?” Charlie slurred. “I was watching that!”
“Go to bed, Charlie,” I said, and he did.
Two days later I got up in the morning and found Charlie in the living room again, this time without his underwear, and passed out on the sofa. There was a scrawny, stringy-haired prostitute sitting next to him. She was just putting her crack pipe back into her Hello Kitty handbag as I walked into the room. “Hey baby,” she said to me, “got a Marlboro?”
I told her I didn’t, gave her $40 which I had fished out of Charlie’s jeans, and directions to the closest bus stop.
The next morning Charlie was at an AA meeting and back on the road to recovery.
The cycle has repeated itself a few times since then, but I’ve learned to spot the warning signs and I’ve been able to get him sobered up and back into meetings within a day or two. It’s gotten to the point where I can actually tell if Charlie’s been drinking just by smelling him. When he’s off the wagon his sweat gives off this acrid, sickeningly sweet smell, like Jasmine mixed with cheap drugstore perfume.
Today he only smelled like unwashed laundry and day-old Brut. He was sober.
“I’m worried about Mr. Wizard, Ben,” he said to me, setting two cups of coffee down on the kitchen table. “He hasn’t been eating much and he looks really depressed.”
“Really?” I replied, looking over at Mr. Wizard in his usual spot on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. “He looks fine to me.” I wondered how Charlie could tell that his turtle was depressed. I mean, he moved so slowly that sometimes it hardly seemed like he was moving at all, and it’s not like he had a tail that he could either wag or tuck between his legs; and his eyes had that inscrutable, reptilian quality which always looked to me like he was struggling to stay awake. It took him five minutes to blink, for Christ’s sake.
“I offered him a grasshopper yesterday,” Charlie said, “and he didn’t even touch it. And grasshoppers are his favorite!”
All I could do was wonder to myself how the hell you figure out what the favorite food is for an animal who eats breakfast on Monday and lunch on Thursday.
“I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe he’s bored.” This was the best advice I could muster on two sips of coffee at 6:30 in the morning.
“I think I’m gonna have to take him to the vet. If it ain‘t one thing, it‘s another!” said Charlie. He left the kitchen and made his way to the bathroom for what I knew from experience would be at least an hour of morning ablutions. I always wondered what he was doing in there all that time, since he usually came out looking pretty much the way he did when he went in, just with wet hair and a fresh coat of Brut 33.
“What’s up, Mr. Wizard?” I asked, more to myself and the air around me than to the enigmatic reptile in the corner. As I sipped my coffee and stared blankly at the melancholy terrapin, I found myself wondering what the world must look like from his point of view. Did it look like everything was whizzing by at warp speed, the way hummingbirds and houseflies look to us? I began to envy him a little. With time so stretched out, so decelerated, the trials and tribulations of everyday human life seemed to take on less and less significance, like listening to Italian opera at 78rpm. That interminable hour and a half stuck in traffic seems like no more than a heartbeat; the week in bed with the flu becomes a mid-afternoon catnap. How nice it must be, I thought, to always take the long view of things; indeed, to be unable to look at things any other way.
I was shaken from my reverie by the sound of Charlie in the bathroom, singing “Lady Marmalade”, off-key, in the midst of his 45 minute shower.
“Snap out of it, buddy,” I said to Mr. Wizard. “Have a grasshopper.”
I finished my coffee and went back into my bedroom. I sat down on the edge of my bed, grabbed my guitar and the pages of a song that I’d been working on for the past few days. It was turning out OK, a real gut-wrencher about a guy who can’t work up the nerve to say hello to a girl he’s been in love with for years, a girl he sees every single day at the Starbucks in the lobby of his office building. I’ve tentatively titled the song “Venti Latte”, but there’s a key change in the third verse that’s just not working and I can’t seem to get the words in the refrain to mean exactly what I want them to. I worked on “Latte” for a few minutes, but my mind kept wandering back to Mr. Wizard and the whole slowed-down-sped-up time thing and suddenly I got this music in my head which seemed to capture the whole thing perfectly. No lyrics yet, but within an hour or two I had scribbled down five pages of music with almost no corrections or eraser marks. I had read somewhere that Mozart’s manuscripts were like that. There were no corrections or cross-outs because the music was already finished, written inside his head, and he was just copying it down onto paper.
Writing music has always been my dream. Ever since my parents took me to a concert in the park one night, when the Biloxi Symphony Orchestra was performing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. I was only about eight years old at the time, but I sat there spellbound, amazed by the way music can paint a picture with sound. I learned how to play the piano, and then the guitar, and I’ve spent who knows how many hours writing songs about my life and stuff I’ve seen in the world around me. I would love to actually make my living writing songs. I don’t even have to be the one singing them; I don’t even want the spotlight, really. Just let me spend my days in a quiet room with my guitar and my thoughts, writing it all down in a way that will paint a picture for the people who hear it, so that they’ll actually hear what it is I’m feeling, and maybe even feel the same thing for themselves. Man, to spend my life doing that would be totally awesome, but it’s hard, really hard, to chase a dream like that when you’re just a regular, ordinary guy from the Mississippi suburbs and you have to worry about things like gas money and paying the rent and punching a time clock at some lame-ass job.
I scrawled a title at the top of page one: “Themes on the Passage of Time”, and tossed the pages on the top of the pile on my desk.
The rest of the morning was spent with the usual: laundry, housework, a couple of phone calls, and my daily 30-minute date with Drew Carey and “The Price is Right”. By 3:30 I was grabbing my keys and heading out the door for my shift at the casino.
I work at the Huck Finn Riverboat Casino here in Biloxi, as a waiter at the Mark Twain Restaurant. It’s billed as the Huck Finn’s “upscale” dining room, but in reality all the food on the boat comes from the same kitchen, so the $8 “Steak-n-Fries” at Injun Joe’s Grille is actually exactly the same as the $24 New York Strip at the Twain, just on different china. It’s not a bad gig, usually, nothing more than slinging hash and kissing ass for bus tours full of blue-haired old ladies and the occasional “big winner” who just hit a $400 jackpot on the nickel slots and who’s determined to have it all spent before stepping off the riverboat.
Anyway, the shift was going along OK. The people were nice and I had been making decent money. Then at one point, the hostess, Marla, came over and asked me to put some tables together for a party of eight. “They’re from New York,” she said to me, in a way which I knew meant, “They’re pushy, loud, and obnoxious.”
That’s when it all started to go to Hell in a handbag.
I was in the kitchen when Marla brought them in, so they had already arranged themselves at the table when I saw them. There was one person at each end, and the remaining six had divided themselves by gender and sat staring at one another, like the beginning of a chess match or the line of scrimmage in a football game.
The women, one Society Blonde, one Blood Orange, and one Blue Black, were probably in their sixties, but it was impossible to know for sure because they were so Botox’ed and collagen’ed that they could barely move their faces. Their eyebrows were stretched so high on their foreheads that, along with their permanently flared nostrils and downturned mouths, they gave the impression that they were perpetually watching a really gruesome horror flick. Their outfits were nice enough; I mean, I’m sure they were The Latest and everything, but they were just a little too flashy and a little too colorful, and the women came off looking like they had just filmed a commercial for Stein Mart. Their jewelry, I’m sure, was all real, but somehow it looked just as tacky as the $3.99 stuff the girls at work buy at the mall, especially when worn in such copious amounts. As I walked behind them, their perfumes, when taken together, reminded me of a Kahlua cheesecake that had been left out in the sun for three days.
Across the table sat the men, completely indistinguishable from one another and totally interchangeable. Probably mid-fifties, well maintained, nice watches and bespoke suits from Barney’s- the kind of guys you’ll see driving a perfectly nice, totally unremarkable $75,000 Acura.
At the foot of the table sat a guy who I quickly came to think of as the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. He was dressed in this absolutely ridiculous suit which probably cost more than I make in two weeks. I don’t even remember what color it was, just that it was very, very shiny; and he had so many accessories: cufflinks, pocket square, necktie, tie tack, lapel pin, and on and on- he looked like he belonged in a community theater production of “Guys and Dolls”. At any rate, he kept looking down at himself and fiddling with his outfit so much I could tell he suspected that he looked like a complete asshole. He would not stay in his seat, but kept flitting around the table and appearing at the shoulders of his companions, spouting non-sequiturs and asking inane rhetorical questions like, “What would we call this place if we opened one just like it in Chelsea?”, “You don’t think my shoes are too much, do you?”. All he was missing was an oversized top hat.
If he was the Hatter, then at the head of the table sat the Red Queen, although she looked nothing like the brutish battle-axe from Lewis Carroll. She looked more as if someone had chopped off Liz Taylor’s head (fat, old, over-the-hill Liz, that is) and stuck it on a stake, and then hung a Chanel suit over the stake. Her hair was enormous and exactly the color of a nice Napa Valley Merlot. Her face looked as if she had gotten a good old-fashioned facelift back in the 1970s and simply let it go since then, so she has actually had the chance to grow old and wrinkly twice. Her hands reminded me of the Crypt Keeper from TV, if the Crypt Keeper had long, blood-red, razor-sharp nails. In keeping with the old tradition of no diamonds before sunset, she wore only gold, seemingly enough to sink the Atocha. She was such a cadaver, albeit a nicely embalmed one, that the weight of her jewelry must have doubled her overall mass.
I learned that her name was Isadora by hearing the others at the table address her as such. Usually, if someone has a name with that many syllables and people address them with the whole thing, without ever shortening it or using an endearment, it’s because they are either respected, loved, or feared; and I had a strong suspicion it wasn’t love or respect.
When she opened her mouth to speak, I wasn’t sure whether to expect a booming, commanding contralto like an Empress Dowager, or a croaking, barely audible old woman. When I heard her, in reality sounding like a cocktail waitress from a sports bar on Flatbush Avenue, I had to stop myself from smirking or rolling my eyes.
I had not even gotten water on the table before they already had me at my wit’s end. I was previously unaware of so many variations on A Glass of Water: with lemon, without lemon, with ice and lemon, with lemon no ice, not too hot, not too cold; and the Mad Hatter kept protesting that the water in Mississippi was giving him constipation. It took me ten minutes to get the water situation under control and I had yet to attempt to get an actual drink order from them. And naturally, not a single glass of water was touched for the remainder of the meal.
I started the drink order with the Society Blonde.
“I’ll have mine with no ice.”
“Your what, ma’am?”
“My drink.”
“What would you like to drink, ma’am?”
“A Diet! I told you! With no ice.”
“Very good. A Diet, no ice.”
“With lemon.”
“Lemon.”
“No, wait - do you have iced tea?”
And on and on. And this was just the first of eight customers.
By the time I was finished with the drink order, the only thing I was actually writing down on my pad were the words “I hate you. I hate you.” over and over again.
By some minor miracle, I finally got the cocktail situation in hand. I took a minute and got an espresso from Billy at the bar before facing the Herculean task of obtaining a food order.
A full twenty minutes later, I had gotten food orders from seven of the eight people, a process which would have taken considerably less time if every single one of them didn’t keep asking me how long it was going to take. It seemed like hours since I had heard the words “please” or “thank you”; and of course, the Hatter kept having to jump in, with stuff like, “Don’t you want the sauce on the side with that, Trish?” and “I had that last month at that new place on 59th! It was awful!”
So, by the time I finally got around to Queen Isadora, my nerves were completely jangled and I was nearly shaking. The menu lay unopened on the table, and she was rooting around in a Coach handbag big enough to hold a small pony.
“I can’t find my goddam glasses,” she said. She looked blindly up at me. “What do youse recommend?”
“The moment I saw you, ma’am,” I said to her, “I immediately thought of the Pasta Puttanesca.”
“That’s because it means “pasta for the whore”, you old hag,” I thought quietly to myself.
“I’ll have that,” she pronounced, dropping the Coach handbag at her feet with a thud.
I was able to escape for a few minutes then. I had to turn in the food order and I had some other tables to finish up. Tranh the busboy, who is Cambodian, took care of the salads and when he saw me in the walk-in, he just looked at me and rolled his eyes and said, “Crajee.” He was saying “crazy”, but that’s only because he hadn’t learned the word “obnoxious”.
Before long, I was putting the main course down on the table. There were so many special orders and modifications and things on the side, I knew there was almost no chance of getting away without at least one issue. So, it was no surprise as I walked away, perhaps halfway to the relative sanctity of the waiters’ station, when I heard someone snapping their fingers. “Hey, waiter!” they said.
It was Isadora, the Red Queen.
I stopped, froze for a fraction of a second, and closed my eyes. Then, I exhaled, bowed my head a little, and turned around to face my tormentor.
“What is your name?” she asked, squinting at me.
“Benjamin, ma’am,” I answered, checking to make sure my name tag was still there.
“Well, Benny,“ she hissed. “What the hell is this crap?”
“That is the Pasta Puttanesca, which you ordered, ma’am,” I answered, flatly.
“I hate it. Take it away,” she said.
I picked up the plate. “Would madame care for something else?” I said, switching into my completely fake Waitron voice.
“You’re just going to have to bring me a menu and read it to me,” she said.
I turned. I walked. The fork on the plate rattled just enough that I was the only one to hear it as I was starting to shake with rage. Then he said it.
It was the Hatter. “What an idiot,” he said.
Once again, I stopped and froze for a fraction of a second. Suddenly the room around me seemed to have gone completely quiet. I could still see people moving their mouths, and clinking their wine glasses together and stuff, but to me the world went dead silent. I was calm.
I walked over to the Mad Hatter.
“What is your name?” I asked, expertly mocking the Red Queen at the head of the table.
“Why… my name is Duncan,” he answered, somewhat nonplussed.
“Well, Dunky,” I said, “Eat this.”
I dumped the contents of Isadora’s uneaten Pasta Puttanesca down the front of his Oscar de Pretentia suit.
At that point, the silence in my head was replaced by the most amazing music I had ever imagined. I began to feel a bit like Charlie’s turtle, experiencing time on my own plane while those around me appeared frozen, slack-jawed. I heard that music the whole time as I took off my apron, walked out of the Huck Finn Riverboat Casino, said goodbye to Tony at security, and got into my car.
I remember every note of that music. I’m going to go back to my apartment and finishing “Themes on the Passage of Time”. And then I’m going to figure out how I can start living the life that I really want to live.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Charlie will probably quip; or, “When God closes a window, He opens a door.” And Mr. Wizard will look at me and blink slowly, and remind me that life is actually going by at warp speed.
“I know it is, buddy. I know,” I’ll say. “Let’s have a grasshopper.”
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