Excerpt
Excerpt from the upcoming novel
American Blow Job
(to be published in February 2010 by Open Books)
by Teri Louise Kelly
© 2009 Moronic Ox Literary Journal - Escape Media Publishers / Open Books
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Teri Louise Kelly: "I am much loved in certain parts of the global bath tub,
whereas in others I am on anti-review/mention lists,
and all I do is get up every day..."
I Really Screwed Up This Time
I knew as much the moment I said yes. I have an unsettling inability to say no. Maybe I'm too good-natured, I don't know, but whenever it came to the straight choice, somehow, I always said yes. 'Yes' fits nicely into the American dream anyhow; everything and anything is possible in America, and no matter where in the world we are born and raised, we understand that the word 'no' doesn't exist in America. So yes, I really screwed up this time. I screwed up because I am screwed up. In that respect I share an affinity with America and its screw-ups. I ought to have been born American. We have so much in common; for one thing, we are both whores.
America whores its cruel dreams; I whore myself, and my few skills. The affinity between us, I guess, is what always attracted me, just like it’s lured countless hundreds of thousands of others before, and will continue to do so beyond, beyond me, beyond this fucking book, and even beyond Nancy Reagan and wars on everything. But, if I had it all to do over, I would do it again without a moment’s hesitation. As you can see, I am still inclined to say yes when every other part of my sensory system is screaming No!: NO! NO! NO! If my brain could somehow bind and gag the rest of me and throw me in the trunk, it undoubtedly would.
God bless America.
Life Is Not Worth Living
In England I'd hooked up as a pen pal with a New York stockbroker – he was in Rikers, I think, or in a witness protection program, whichever… Anyhow, he'd been ejected from the civilized world like a spent cartridge.
Don’t worry, he’d told me in shaky handwriting, I’m as innocent as Oswald.
Whatever… His new screw part-owned a restaurant, and all we needed to finialize our little arrangement was a little grease money Fed Ex-ed to the nearest INS office. Or so he said…
That guy had gone heat crazy in the can, drooling with post-release plans. The INS probably thought he was just another white-collar crook, and I a juvenile offender with bum raps for under age violation and drunk and disorderly. The due process took forever, longer than it took to find someone to play Darth Vader even. “What the hell does the INS do all day in London?” the stockbroker yelled into the phone at me some months later.
By then I’d all but given up. Masses and masses of forms, all with the same questions: Had I previously been refused entry or deported? Did I traffic narcotics? Did I admire John Lennon? Had I previously been arrested? If so, had I been convicted? If I’d been convicted, what of? Were any of my immediate family, friends, neighbors or co-workers communists? Was I a communist? How many times had I visited America? Did I have any aliases? Did I have friends or family in the USA? Had I ever sworn a declaration of war against the USA? Had I printed, distributed or funded any anti-US propaganda? Had I ever demonstrated against US foreign policy? Had I ever burned the stars and stripes? Did I intend to leave the US lawfully upon expiration of my visa?
“That’s what the goddamned INS does all day in London,” I told the stockbroker. “They feed me into a computer profiling program and then get psychologists to study the results. Next it’ll be a fucking lie detector test because I’ve had to lie on at least six of those questions.”
“Oh jeez man, if the Feds turn that up, we’ll both be in Sing-Sing.”
“You might be, not me buddy – I’m protected by E.R.”
“Which questions?”
“Well, it's like Strother Martin says to Cool Hand Luke in the film: ‘What we've got here is a failure to communicate.’”
“Huh?”
I didn’t want to tell the guy too much as he’d already invested a considerable sum in the paperwork. As far as I knew, I’d never declared war on the USA. I’d never burned old glory or distributed anti-US literature, not unless you count taking the piss out of Reagan, but so far as I knew, everyone did that – even the Feds. On and on it dragged, like the fight for civil rights.
The stockbroker still rang me periodically to tell me he’d had another correspondence from the INS and that he’d had to put the family mansion up as collateral. It was all becoming far too intricate; let’s face it, we were talking about professional cookery not goddamned surgery. “Maybe you could get your relatives in New York State to intervene,” the stockbroker suggested. Well sure, I had relatives in upstate New York, but they weren’t classy folks. They ran a few horses up on a stud – Morgan’s maybe. They bred dogs too, for shows – they were big into the whole breeders thing, the ribbons and the year’s supply of biscuits, all that jazz. Like I said, they were ordinary people, decent even – law abiding. The kids, all shiksa's, had married – the older two had married doctors – well, surgeons actually – those girls knew how to dig. The youngest had turned out to be trouble – ran off with an AWOL Negro sailor to Virginia and had started breeding multi-colored kids.
My uncle was Irish – no, he is Irish. Only nowadays he’s American-Irish, although I’m not sure there’s any real difference apart from location. When he was just Irish he had a drinking problem. When he became American-Irish he degenerated into a drunk. Still, he was a happy drunk, and that’s far better than being an angry one. He lived for the booze and when it ran out, or when my aunt had poured it all down the drain, he’d unscrew the pipe work to suck out the dregs. The man had no shame.
Regularly, it all got too much for my aunt to bear, but she couldn’t leave him – he’d fathered three children and done the all American thing: the house, the job, the picket fence, the booze, the guns, and he’d provided. Men like that are hard to find and no one really blames them for turning to the bottle – not even the Catholic Church.
Anyhow, I didn’t want to ask my pro IRA uncle to find out what the fuck was going on, because I knew damned well that as soon as he became involved, he’d have every Federal department crawling over him like preachers at a televangelist seminar.
Then, one day, I got the call; no more stays, all pleas for clemency denied.
“Hiya pardner!” the voice on the other end of the line said gaily. “How y’all doing there in England?”
“Okay,” I said wearily.
“Great news bud! Guess what?”
“You’ve been nominated Democratic candidate for president?”
“Hell no! We’ve finally got your A-OK here! Signed, sealed, delivered, you're mine!”
Fuck, I thought. The guy sounds so goddamned happy, like a song; and me, I really don’t give a flying fuck. “That’s good huh?” I finally replied.
“GOOD? It’s GREAT bud!”
Yeah. Great.
Two years ago the idea did seem great. But not today – today it seems like the most far-fetched idea I’d ever birthed.
I May Be A Bit Peculiar
There’s no doubt about it, I’ve had it in writing from at least three psychiatrists: I am peculiar. I run too; that has always been my way. And by running, I don't mean jogging around the fucking park for an hour each morning, I mean leaving, you know, cutting out. When I delivered the news of my imminent departure, my folks said: “Why are you always running?” I knew why; I was running from myself – only that is a perpetrator that you can’t outrun. You can try though. They were right, I guess, right in their parental assumption that I couldn’t stay still, that I was always leaping straight into some new kind of fire-fight where the only possible outcome would be burning and long-term scarring. But I wanted it, in a masochistic way. I wanted my soul to burn in a high-speed wreck.
Live fast and die young is an okay mantra – an American mantra, which is probably why that country appealed to the narcissistic side of me. I was in love with myself, and I hated myself too.
I think everyone was pissed off with my 'American dream', the way I kept harping on about it – no one thought I'd ever actually go, not even me. But shit, the stockbroker had done a hell of a lot of work on my behalf, whereas I'd done practically nothing other than lie on forms. I hadn't made his job any easier, so maybe I thought I owed him the decency of at least showing up. After all, where else was I to go? Sometimes you are just honor-bound to buy the ticket and take the ride. I packed up a few things: some decent music, as nothing much was filtering out of America in the early eighties, whereas in England we'd gone all new romantic and it was okay for boys to wear mascara and cry and pump up the volume in teased bouffant. We had Thatcher, they had Reagan: a match made in hell. Other than that, and the terrible niggardly thought of being ex-communicated from English football results, I was pretty chilled with the whole deal. After all, I was pretty good looking and I talked cute, which are about the best two attributes a boy can have when he is setting off on a great adventure to a bad land. A few days later I sat at Heathrow with my folks drinking warm Fanta and eating an out-of-date Kit Kat, everything had been arranged, the wheels were turning, the barrels had been cleaned. I had the Jam, Duran Duran and ABC on a cassette tape. Easy as hey-ho, let's go…
The girl sitting next to me on the flight to JFK (where my Irish uncle was going to meet me) was full of Columbus. That tubby Spaniard was her hero. Men like him, she told me through a mouthful of gum, had made America the fine, upstanding nation that the rest of the world looked up to.
“Really?” I replied, uninterested.
“Oh gee yeah,” she said. “Columbus discovered America you know!”
“Wasn't it Latin America?” I asked her. She just shrugged, blew a giant gum bubble that popped on her face and carried on telling me that it made no difference, in the end, it was all America. She was certainly a specimen that needed a prolonged laboratory shelf life.
“Gee, you're cute. Where you from?” my fellow traveller inquired.
“Spain,” I told her. “Like Columbus.”
“Oh my god! Really?”
“Do I look like the type that lies?”
“I thought all Spanish people were dark skinned and black haired.”
“Like Columbus?”
“Sure.”
“It's a popular misconception: Columbus in fact was an albino Italian. He had flabby white skin, and Satan's red eyes. Really! These days he'd probably be locked in an asylum instead of being given command of a ship to find the new world. Though maybe giving him that ship was the king's way of getting shod of him for good?”
“You mean?”
“Exactly! Maybe they really hoped he'd never come back, that that wild Sargasso Sea would swallow him whole.”
“Jeez, they don't teach us that in grade school.”
“I guess not. Anyhow, you ought never judge a book by its cover. They teach you that, don't they?” She didn't answer; she had a faraway look in her eyes.
We went back to Columbus for a while.
“Anyhow,” I told her, “truth be told, Columbus might have found the land, but it was Walt who found the psyche.”
“Walt Whitman?”
“No, Disney.”
“How come?”
“Well, look at it this way: it was Walt who first unlocked the truth about Americans.”
“What truth?”
“The fairytale fantasy. Cute little meeces with malicious agendas going around saying how great everything is and . . .”
I couldn't fill her in further; we were landing.
Immigration at JFK is a time consuming and bothersome affair. The staff wear frowns and guns. The queue I'm in shuffles along at a slow pace, slow enough for everyone to have read their immigration obligations thoroughly, at least twice. And yet, one after another they stand at the desk being berated for their stupidity by some brutish immigration official. But not me… I'm fully prepared for any eventuality – apart from the one concerning knives. It strikes me as rather queer, not to mention contradictory, that a country already full of firearms, Bowie knives and psychopaths, should detain and question a professional chef with legal work entitlements over the tools of his trade – i.e. knives. As if a set of good, Swiss-made, chef's knives are somehow going to contribute further to a homicide rate that makes Nicaragua look like a swell, family-friendly vacation destination?
The woman interrogating me wants to know what each and every knife is for – and then, and only then, can she and a dozen supervisors determine whether or not these dangerous-looking items can be included under the 'tools of trade' subclause. It'll probably require a fax to Wolfgang Puck. Jesus, I thought as I sat there, I hope my uncle is still sober – shit, still in the airport even! Finally word came through from the Pentagon and the Culinary Institute of America that knives were essential tools of the trade, as much so as steady nerves, insomnia, scabies and foot fungi.
The immigration hussy gives me a look of incredulousness, even as she reads the clarification to herself. Finally, legally entered, I'm free to pass through the doors that so many hundreds of thousands before me have passed. I wasn't just on my way to America anymore; I was in it.
My uncle was barely coherent. My aunt was in a bad-assed mood. They hadn't really wanted to come all the way from upstate New York just to collect me, not on such a fine day, and especially not on such a fine day when there was a dog show. But, they did. They bundled me into the family vacationer and sped off on some freeway like members of the SLA having just snatched Patty Hearst. My uncle gave me a rambling drunk's tour of New York sights, not that I could really see any of them apart from some stadium that was named after an Irishman, O'Shay maybe, or O'Fay, where they played baseball or gridiron, maybe both.
So much for the Big Apple…
Within a short time, we were out of the city and into New York State, out into suburbia, and it wasn't exciting at all. Though it ought to have been. I mean, here I am, in America, and all I can see is freeway. Bummer. I rest my head against the car window, close my eyes; I wonder how the fuck Manchester United went today. What time is it? Why am I doing this? How do you get to own a gun?
My Yankee kin cranking up the old married hicks routine rudely awakens me. They can't quit scratching at the sores they'd given each other. My uncle keeps smacking his lips and grinning at me in the rear view mirror. He ought to be concentrating on the freeway, it looks dangerous, but instead, he keeps dropping not so subtle comments about booze. Clawing at his shirt and tie, the one my aunt had obviously forced him to wear for decency’s sake, he asks, “You hot Luiz? Eh kid? Brother, I'm cooking!”
“Stop it, Patrick,” my aunt scolds him coldly.
“Stop what? Jesus, a man can't even comment on unseasonably warm weather?”
“It's not the weather that's bothering you, it's withdrawal.”
“Oh good Jesus! Hey Luiz, you know I'm an alcoholic? Over here kid, one nip a day… Worse than prohibition ever was!”
One nip a day! If ONLY!
“Say, aren't you thirsty though kid, huh? Can't you just feel some nice cold suds, or a nip of the hard gear, hitting the plate?”
“Luiz doesn't want to drink, Patrick; Luiz has been air-pressurized, isn't that right, honey?” Oh Jesus, here I was again; not even a flight clear across the Atlantic could remove me from the bad home vibe. Damned right I could murder a beer, I thought, but hell, this is a lose-lose situation, the Devil's choice…so I just said: “I'm okay right now.”
My uncle moaned wearily as we sped by bars and liquor stores. He was dying a slow death out there on the freeway, strapped into his collar and tie. I was tired. I closed my eyes. This wasn't my fight, or my land, or my anything… Some time later, we stopped. We were now upstate. It was greener, more affluent, even cute, if your gig is trees, pigtailed girls and squirrels. We were getting some chow at a pizza joint – one that didn't sell booze. The waitress came over with a greasy menu, smiled at me and then caught my aunt giving her the evil fisheye. My uncle kept tugging at my sleeve and asking me if I needed to use the restroom. Finally, I said okay. “Don't you be in there all day, Patrick,” my aunt warned him.
We went right past the restroom and out the back door into the sickly sunlight. “C'mon!” he urged me, “there's a liquor store just up there.” And there was, too; my uncle knew the location of every liquor store between New York and Connecticut. He bought two beers, and we stood outside the store like shabby drunks guzzling hard before the preacher arrived. “Ah Jesus!” he sighed after a loud belch. “To be sure, it's a beautiful day kid!”
I hoped I wouldn't get the blame for this little escapade, and that my aunt wouldn't be able to smell the yeast; but given that my uncle was an old hand at secret binge drinking, I guessed he'd have a plan. Which turned out to be Tic Tacs. A mouthful of them!
By the time we got back to our seats, I was dying for a whiz. Those suds had shot right through me like a bad Dr. Pepper. Even after the Tic Tacs, my aunt smelled the booze, but she didn't want to make a big scene in a swanky roadside pizza place. The waitress was mighty surprised when I said thank you; “Gee, you're polite now, aren't ya?” My aunt brushed her away from the table like you would a bothersome insect and told me to eat up. Eat up? I thought, as I surveyed the mountain of pizza stacked high on what I presumed was a plate. Each triangular piece was the size of a pennant, and just the sight of that much dripping grease made me want to heave…but man, the beer had made me hungry…so into the world of American fast food I dove.
Four hours later, I paid for it, big time . . .
It's customary in the States, I'm advised, to take your uneaten food home in a doggy bag. There is no shame or stigma attached to it like there is in England. The waitress arrived back at our table with a cute little bag that read 'Fido' on the side, and to be sure, Fido would be gorging like a pig tonight: only I’d not fully appreciated at the time, that in fact, I was Fido.
We rolled up at my aunt and uncle’s house. The sound of manic barking and snarling filled the otherwise quiet street. My uncle was keen to show me his arsenal, but by then, I was out on my feet.
The spare room smelled like canine; I couldn't stop itching. I got up and was met by the strangest sight; my aunt was in her La-Z-Boy, one hand on the TV remote, the other holding a lead. The lead was attached to a huffing and panting mutt, overweight and breed unknown, and the dog was walking – on the Walkmaster! Jesus, I thought, would it kill her to take the goddamned thing outside? You know, where the air and the trees are, especially the trees… “Walking the dog?” I said to my aunt, thoroughly dumbfounded by the sorry scene. “Oh sure,” she told me. “Only way to keep the flab under control.”
Really, I thought to myself, I wonder if any human resident of this gingerbread house has ever used this piece of exercise equipment? Why bother asking though?
I was going out to get some air, and my aunt looked mortified: “You're actually going outside?” she asked me.
“Uh, yeah, is it okay?”
“You sure you don't need Pat to drive you around the block instead, maybe with the window down?”
“Uh, no, think of the gas, hell!”
She waved away my concerns; gas was cheap here, everyone drove everywhere, even to the mailbox. Well, I thought, maybe…though I didn't know where the mailbox actually was so…but outside, I could see it, just up the street…with a good arm, you could easily ping it from this very lawn with a baseball, even with a bad arm, I guess.
It was a quiet neighborhood, sedate, Eastwick-esque: the papergirl arrived on her bike with a startling whoosh and a back wheel skid that tore up a good chunk of turf. “Hi!” she said to me excitedly. Obviously, she didn't see much articulate life on her route.
“Hi,” I said back, quickly picking up the upstate vernacular, and the paper.
“Where you from?” she continued, playing with her pigtail nervously.
“Iceland,” I told her.
“Gee, where's that?”
“Up near Vermont.”
“Wow! Vermont, like, that's almost Canada, y'know?”
True enough.
“You sure talk funny.”
“Do I?”
“Uh huh… Wanna meet my sister? She loves boys with cute voices.”
“Is she older or younger?”
“She's older… Like, she's almost fourteen!”
“Wow, fourteen, that is old. And how old are you?”
“I'm only ten.”
“You got a boyfriend?”
She broke out in a fit of giggles. “No! Yuk! Boys are so, like…”
“Yup, I know. Tell your sister to call around here after supper.”
“What's your name?”
“Patrick, like the saint.”
And off she went, cycling hell for leather into America. I waited for my uncle to get back, from whatever gun store he'd been to. I wanted to see his guns. I went back inside, the dog was on its side gasping for air; well, whatever air there was, which wasn't much with all the windows nailed shut.
“Did I hear you talking to someone?” my aunt asked.
“The papergirl,” I told her.
“We have a paper girl? I never knew.”
So how'd she think the paper got on the lawn every afternoon? Whatever… I heard my uncle's car, bottles clinking, brown paper rustling, two dozen cartridges spilling out onto the driveway… Jeez, what a swell joint this was! Fourteen… That was some pretty fresh squaw.
Ripe Fruit
Folks here are distance friendly, curious with a nervous edge. They'll wave at you from their automobiles, smile at you, if one or other of you is secured behind bullet proof glass, and maybe occasionally they'll even speak to you – unless they see you in your uncle's garage manhandling weaponry like you were born to it, then they'll just shoot your ass dead (only kidding folks).
Sissy was the papergirl's big sister, fourteen going on twenty-eight. Neither her, nor my uncle, could quite work out why she was on the doorstep asking for Patrick, and I could tell by my aunt’s narrowing eyes that she figured my no good uncle was up to more jailbait business. Eventually, they got it all worked out; which at least gave me a bona fide exit strategy concerning the rapidly decaying pizza. Let Fido have it.
“O-migod!” Sissy said. “Janie is like, so right; you do speak funny! Have you got any cigarettes?”
“Aren't you a bit young to be smoking?” I replied, being the good upstanding foreign visitor that I was.
“I do everything that's bad,” she told me prosaically - exorcising a few small town solecisms into the bargain. There wasn't much leeway in that for the imagination to play with, nope, that was all pretty upfront and in your face. I didn't think I'd get involved; besides, I was shipping out tomorrow.
“Where y'going?” she asked me.
“Connecticut,” I told her, as we sat side by side on the step throwing stones at my aunt's mailbox.
“Man, that's like, the other side of the world,” she finally said.
“Want me to send you a postcard?”
“Shit yes! A postcard from Connecticut would be real swell!” For all her bravado, Sissy wasn't as seasoned as she'd have had you think…but give her a year or two, I figure, and who knows?
“You like Mickey Mouse?” I asked her.
She was sucking her own hair, deliberating. “No,” she finally said. “Do you?”
“Fuck no,” I told her. She rolled around, laughing.
“What about Cyndi Lauper?”
“Hell yes!”
“I'll be legal in just under four years,” she told me, without blinking those saucer eyes of hers.
“You will, too,” I replied. “Maybe you'll even be married with a kid or two?”
“Yuk! No way. I'm gonna go on the road for awhile.”
“Like Charlie Starkweather?”
“Who?”
“You'll find out about him and his kind, soon enough. Write your address down, I'll send you a postcard for sure.”
It was a restless night. Loon calls, the odd gunshot, suburbanites ripped to the tits on TV drama, people padding around the hallways at all goddamned hours, lights, camera, action! When I got up at zero six hundred, my kit bag packed, the TV was already blaring and the dog was eating and my uncle was already out doing his morning job.
“Is he a paperboy?” I asked my aunt as I pretended to eat yesterday's pizza for breakfast.
“Oh gee no,” she replied in all seriousness. “He does the tabulating at a downtown store.”
Tabulating? Downtown store? What the fuck? Strange gibberish from an unworldly creature who was once, I am told, a cute English girl who didn't even like the Irish but was now married to one and living in a much larger version of the Emerald Isle. Downtown? Does she mean he drives to Manhattan to tabulate? Tabulate what? Bookies’ numbers? Fascinating… I give the pizza to Fido, who sniffs it disgustedly and ambles back to his bowl of popcorn. Stupid fat dog! I hang around, think about going out, decide there's nothing out there anyhow, and instead plop into a chair. I am fast learning how to be an American. My uncle comes back, wearing a grocery clerk’s uniform; he is sixty-two years old and has obviously never progressed past grocery clerk. He smells of booze, the Catholic's devil. I want to get out of here; how much worse could it be up the freeway, huh?
I Don't Even Like Cricket Butt-wipe
After less than a morning ensconced in my new situation, things have turned ugly. Okay, so the stockbroker isn't really a stockbroker, but I pretty much knew that anyhow. In another life, he might have been a decent guy – right now, however, he's an A-grade shithead. I find myself in the unenviable position of playing the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company C to Yosemite fucking Sam. I ought to have gone to the Waldorf, not come up here to New England with its leaves, lawns, acorn crackers and manicured housewives. I thought it'd be okay; New England, like England, only better.
During the two-plus years that I've waited for my residency, the stockbroker has quit consumption and the witness protection program with a brand new identity and has gotten into capitalism. It's his wife who is wearing the pants. Who has big ideas and the family trust fund to back them. Sometime in the recent past, she woke up and decided to sack the whole kitchen brigade and import a new one. A new one headed by some New Mexican with beans for brains. This New Mexican is big into Tex-Mex and new wave, tournedos are out and nouvelle huevos rancheros are in. I don't understand a word he says, and I don't understand why these idiots keep going on about cricket – saying things like: “Did I bring my bat? Oh, jolly good show old chap, things are fair to middlin' wot”, and “Where's my bowler hat?” They seem to think I play cricket, a lot. I am already relegated to the vegetable prep area, where, oh so regularly, some jerk-off slides up to me and asks me to describe the game of cricket.
Which I do: I say cricket is a game played by twenty-two men who each take a turn to have a ball thrown at them and then get a chance to throw a ball back at the people who originally threw it at them, and occasionally, in the middle of all that throwing, they run up and down a wicket, not a pitch, a wicket, trying to get back to where they had just come from before another fool throws down their stumps. Fuck man, how hard can it be to understand?
Right now, seeing as how I don't even have a place to stay, because the stockbroker hasn't arranged it, I feel about as alien as I ever have. I don't know where I'll be sleeping tonight. I've been pitched into this storm like an empty Bud can into the Atlantic. I wish I was anywhere else, someone else – even Doralee in 9 To 5. If I survive this day, it will be a miracle. If I don't kill someone, it will be a miracle; if they kill me, it'll be par for the course.
In the afternoon a guy called Henny, a Dutchie, takes me to some motel and has a beer with me. I have no idea where this motel is, or how I'm supposed to get back to the restaurant. And I really don't care, either. You can make the bed vibrate if you put in a nickel. If I had one, I would. On TV, they are showing Benny Hill. I can't believe I came to America and the first thing I see on TV is Benny Hill. I go out onto the landing. My room is on the second floor of a motel that overlooks a highway. The highway is busy with trucks and automobiles whose makes I don't recognize. I wish I had a nickel.
There is a light tap on the door around five-thirty. Some guy has come to take me back to work. He is polite, asks me what I think of America. I tell him not much, which clams him up. Boss Lady takes me to an office when I get back to the restaurant and tells me to fill in and put my John Hancock on the stack of forms she has on her executive-sized desk.
“All of them?” I ask.
“All of them,” she says as she swings her legs out from behind the desk with a swish of nylon. I get to see her pins in all their glory. As I start filling in the forms, she gets up suggestively and walks around the desk to where I'm sitting. She leans over my shoulder as I write – which in England would be considered pretty bad manners. I can feel her chest lightly touching my back. I can smell her scent; it smells expensive. I can smell her breath, and on her breath I can detect traces of hard liquor. I keep writing. She leans closer and closer until I'm all but sure her lips are on my ear. Just as she's about to say something profound there's a knock at the door and I hear her whisper, “Damnit!” I let out the breath I've been holding on to – CO2 x 10.
She is talking curtly to some flunky as I write fast. By the time she's dismissed the walking pea brain, I'm all but done. “Finished,” I tell her.
She walks casually back to her seat behind the desk, swish, swish, swish, and sits provocatively in her large leather chair, smoothly sliding her legs across one another. Then she picks up the top form and starts reading. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, so I start to get up and all she says is: “No.”
So I sit there. Doing nothing. She keeps flicking through the pages I've written until finally she drops the one she's been reading back on the desktop – from a considerable height. I watch it flutter down to what passes for earth here.
“In the future, when you address me,” she instructs, “it's not yes, no, finished; it's yes ma'am, no ma'am, finished ma'am. Or ‘madam’ will suffice. Do you understand?”
I look at her. She is nothing but a jumped-up product of middle America. Daddy's little girl… Faye Dunnaway in Network. “Sure,” I say.
“Sure what?” she says.
“Oh, I'm sure, my lady,” I say.
“My lady?”
“Isn't that okay?”
“Okay what?”
“Isn't that okay – madam?”
She smiles. It's not a pleasant smile, or a seductive smile, or a welcoming smile; it's the smile of a coyote.
“Very well,” she says. “Dismissed.”
I get up abruptly – dismissed my goddamn ass – I walk to the door, open it, and, before I leave, I turn around and bow to her graciously. She's so stupid she doesn't even realize I'm taking the piss. Maybe I'll grow myself a forelock; that way I can tug it like Huck Finn. Who are these people? When did slavery get abolished in Connecticut? Has it been abolished? Did I check?
My first observations aren't that flattering: the maitre'd is as jittery as Ichabod Crane. The sommelier looks like Truman Capote. There is an ashen-faced person who stands by the hearth all day pondering life. Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald re-incarnated. The loud guy who brings the meat resembles Foghorn Leghorn. The clam man is obviously married to the mob. Apart from Henny, only the cheerleaders cheer me. Prom queens by the dozens, a never-ending parade of kewpie dolls, all with magnificent eyes, hair, teeth, tits, bums, legs, and empty heads. Henry Ford would've been proud of a production line like this – faultless in every anatomical aspect. They are all the same height, bust size, ass size; a regimented sorority of teenage ass plucked from every paternal orchard in the immediate vicinity – hell, it must be something to be in high school with all these honeyed girls.
They all have those cute double barrel first names too: Mary Jane, Cherry Ann, Debora Kay… And when I say hi, they all go flushed and giggle. The big guy, Mr. Santa Fe, not Santa Claus, tells me to keep my eyes and paws off 'em. I tell him it's just the natural logarithm of life, but he looks at me blankly. Thinks I'm cussing him out in Latin or something. Anyhow, it's impossible not to come into contact with them – in the cheese room, the bread house, the cool store – and those places are pretty cramped, and it's all panting and red cheeks and huge smiles and big fluttering eyelashes, like Venus flytraps on steroids, and if I dropped a line like I had orders to be noblesse oblige around them, then most would cream their clean little linen panties there and then. So I can't avoid contact, and I can't avoid speaking, but each time I open my mouth they all hold their collective breaths; and even if it's just something straight-forward like “Hey Debbie Dee, chuck me that whisk there honey” they'll all fall to pieces, so I'm in a no-win situation; coz they'll all say ‘Omigod!’ or ‘Say it again, go on, pleeease!’
I can't ask for the whisk six straight times. Not with Pat Garret watching me like a cougar about to pounce. And the more those girls flit around me like fireflies, the more the rest of the boys in the band think I'm gonna steal all the oyster meat for myself, and they keep referring to me as puta, whatever that is. Then there's Her Ladyship, always summoning me to the oval office on some pretext and showing me those pins and sticking her cue tips in my back. Oh man, what a jive this is! The stockbroker has gone west, I've heard, looking for cheap labor. Maybe he'll bring back Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp. Who knows? My hands are not only bound in legal tape, but I've got the feeling that pretty soon they'll be tied behind my back while Nancy Reagan, my boss, whacks me with her fancy walking stick until I learn to say my pleases and thank yous.
With no idea when payday might be, I have to go see Her Ladyship voluntarily, which of course she likes a lot. So I go, cap in hand, poor little English immigrant far from home, and I sit there while I receive a lecture on the American pay and banking systems. None of which I understand. I feel like asking when I might be due some R&R too, though before I can she tells me that on Monday she'll take me to the bank with a check. She'll need to escort me to get me 'set up'; maybe she'll even show me around the area… Would I like that?
I want to say no. But I say yes. I say yes like the stupid little piece of bought but not-yet-paid-for limey trash that I obviously am. She has an evil smile on her face – a creamy look of smugness and satisfaction all rolled into a cute little chocolate kiss. “Be here at eleven sharp, Monday. No, scrap that. I'll collect you from the motel at eleven.”
She'll collect me, like I arrived by package.
“Am I off on Monday?” I ask.
She just stares through me.
“Am I off on Monday, ma'am?” I choke as I cough it out.
“Sure,” she says. “Dismissed.”
I am in the goddamned Union Army. A real Doodle Dandy.
About the Author:
TERI LOUISE KELLY AKA INSOMNIACAL MANIAC
Even God makes mistakes.
True enough. Tiny little screw ups that can occur in utero, or beyond . . . small shit like chromosomes going awry and the magic hormone fairy forgetting to do her damned job after a heavy night on the juice. Sure, no big shit, get over it – grow some balls, maybe some facial hair, and get drinking. Teri Louise Kelly managed all three in her previous human incarnation when as a surly young tearaway in London, England, she served 'his' time at one of Elizabeth Regina's juvenile detention facilities for wilful destruction of public property, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police dog at a football match. Confused? Well, join the damned club. After muddling through as a 'cute' but rather lippy boy, becoming a chef and traveling the globe, he finally became 'she' in Australia. A strange place to do it for sure, but then again, way down there in the big sandy desert, no one can hear you scream.
Teri Louise Kelly
Trials of a
Modern Author
Seeking Recognition
Below we share some of the responses received by Kelly while seeking representation and publication for her third book, American Blow Job.
Famous Last Words:
“As much as I believe that your work will, eventually, come to be appreciated by a cult audience, my reservations are that firstly, I shall be dead by then, and secondly, that you are far too iconoclastic to be a client.”
-Australian Literary Agent
“We don't handle work such as this.”
-Australian Literary Agent
“If there is currently one author seemingly intent on dragging literature down to street level and then kicking it in the face, might I introduce Teri Louise Kelly.”
-UK Reviewer
“We run a serious art's festival, not a circus.”
-Australian (Writer's) Festival Organiser Declining An Opportunity To Have Me Participate
“Teri Louise Kelly is to literature what the RAF was to Dresden.”
-UK Blogger
“A dick, a doodle, a dawg, what's the diff? She's still cute.”
-US Blogger
“It might help if you could write a sentence.”
-US Literary Agent Declining First Draft Of American Blow Job
“We can't publish this, it's obscene.”
-Australian Publisher Declining First Draft Of American Blow Job
“Are you a rock star, a poet or a writer, or all three?”
-Australian Radio Interview
“I think You're Funny, Do You Tell Stories In Bed?”
-Email Fan Query
“Even though I detest Your Work, And You, I'd Still Like To Meet You Sometime.”
-Email Fan Mail
“95% of all submissions publisher's receive are garbage. Yours is in the 5% marked interesting, unfortunately however, I have a wife and family to support.”
-UK Literary Agent
“If I see one more book with your name on it, I'm going to kill you.”
-Anonymous Fan Mail
American Blow Job will be published by Open Books
in April 2010.
