Book excerpt

When I was demoted to minister of the Cigarette Depot Acts of God Bible Ministry Church, I cried.
"I want to do," I argued with the circle of whiskered and rouged faces clustered on a street corner, "not be."
"You're the best listener."
"You smile like you're sad and you never yell."
"You laugh when you talk with children, even when you're soused."
"You're getting too old to roll drunks."
"I don't care." That's what I said. What I wanted to say was, 'I want to be alive.'
Their heads shook slowly, their eyeballs rolled white under the streetlight. "No, man. You're the best we've got to offer."
"I can trust you with my girls."
"I've never seen you do a bad thing."
"That's because you haven't looked, man." I didn't want to be good. I didn't want impotence and white senility. I wanted electricity crackling from my fingertips. I wanted to be bright lightning. I wanted to be the actor, not the audience. Have you ever seen a minister man who was whole?
"You're the one we need, man."
Then Emmaline’s predictable, “You gots to be minister. A minister gots to be a man, and you is a man who knows how it goes to talk to people.”
"I don't care."
Maybe I didn’t, but they didn’t listen, either.
Puking up rotgut booze behind the dumpster is better than sitting on Emmaline's cracked steps and feeling its dampness seep into the worn seat of my trousers while Emmaline tells me how her second man beat her when she reminded him he had told her they would get married. "Maybe he forgot," I reached past myself to scratch a fingernail across the chalky paint, feeling vibrations shiver along my fingerbone.
"Maybe he got drunk," Emmaline answered, leaning on the fat roll above her hip. "I tell you, maybe he didn't never want to get married. And here I was, living with him. What's my mama going to say?" She waved her arms, then stood motionless except for the loose flesh at the backs of her arms jiggling in echoes. She frowned. Then she laughed. "So I kicked him out. What's my mama going to say about that?"
"Maybe he changed his mind."
"What do you mean by that?" Her head bent forward above her double chin like a turkey gobbler hunting for his beak.
What did I care what I meant by that? I meant nothing except anything: lifting a shot glass of amber oblivion, filching the last packet of peach jam from a table at Nellie Slimey's Restaurant, leaning back against a winter doorway in an overcoat stiff with dirt, even beating Emmaline myself: anything was better than sitting on the cement stoop listening to her go on. I'd rather be a wife beater than a woman's listening post.

Kitchen Wars

We are having company for dinner. The peanut butter cookies are cooling on the table, the chopped vegetables are marinating. I am cooking milk and cream, to stir into chopped chocolate (Emilie recommends the $22.95/lb; I resist and designate Ghiradelli as chocolate-of-the-day.) It’s a new recipe, so I read it over and over, mouthing the directions to myself. ‘Whisk the first 3 ingredients…the first 3 ingredients are…the size of the bowl should be…whisk the first 3 ingredients.’
He arrives to clean up my mess: any loose pot, bowl, mixing spoon, or utensil, sometimes the one set ready for me to use. [“What’s this doing here? It should be in the cabinet.” “Where’s the spoon I had right here?”]
We’ve had many discussions about how even rinse water does deadly things to melting chocolate. We’ve discussed the necessity of having the baking soda, sea salt, baking powder (gluten free, aluminum free), and chocolate chips where I can open the cabinet door and reach them while my eyes are on the mixture blending in the bowl. “I straightened up the cabinet for you,” translates to my resultant clandestine operation: dump the chocolate bits packages back where they belong and set the baking soda, open-side-in, on the first shelf (rather then the third it had been relegated to in the sorting). A clean kitchen is a better kitchen, is his motto. A kitchen where I can find the teaspoon measure I set down thirty seconds ago is a sane kitchen, I mutter.
“This is the Maginot Line,” I said, extending my arm across the counter, to separate the may-wash from the in-use.
“The Germans flew over it. I could too.”
“Yes, you could.” I left unspoken the rest of my response, ‘But if you do, there will be war.’
He washed and dried the dishes; I dirtied more of them, talking the recipe to myself, stirring chocolate cream. It was less than a skirmish when he opened the drawer and dumped silverware as I poured hot milk into the chopped chocolate, jostled my stirring arm, and the hot white liquid splattered onto the burner and smoked into brown bits.
While I wasn’t watching, the mixer was decapitated (“If you take off the motor, it stores more easily, on two shelves”), and the beaters escaped captivity to nestle on the kitchen table, next to a box of eggs (Phil’s, cage-free). They might have kept their freedom, huddling under the page of glorious chocolate cream in a teacup (Emilie is not stingy with her portions), if he had not abandoned the tv to join in my hunt for them.
In a few hours the company will arrive, and we will greet them: tidy and organized. The chocolate chips will rustle in their squatter acreage at the back of the first shelf. Many people will make many dishes dirty, so he can wash up. And I will agree wholeheartedly with our company: it’s very special having a person who not only loves me and my foibles, but is willing to clean up after them.