Kulinski Coal Company

Skinny, chapped-lipped little Michael Pekart used to stare at me with those scary, beady, crust-cornered eyes of his.  He would drink his white milk with great gusto when everyone else wanted chocolate, and he would stare, except I could tell that his gaze was aimed about six inches above and to the right of my head.  I remember the time he flipped out while we were all playing in those fields behind the coal company.  Michael started throwing clods of earth at everyone and that raspy, raspy breathing came out like grunts - grunts that mixed with a mournful cry, a cry that probably began when his old man came home from the factory by way of the tap room, drunk and stinking of beer and far too many cigarettes.  Michael would get the back side of his old man's right hand any time he tried to talk when that dirty, filthy presser of seamless rolled rings was looking at the damned idiot box and waiting for Mrs. Pekart to shovel out another hot, fatty dinner framed with instant mashed potatoes.  Mr. Pekart was such a dried-up little turd of a man, sunburned and drunk and stinking and with a grubby, scowling, unshaven face that always seemed to cry out "I'm a pointless bastard of a human."

"Don't bother your father, Michael," his mother would say, "he's had a long day."

Michael would slink off to his room and tear the wings off of flies that he trapped against the window pane.  He kept a metal band-aid box full of wings that he had torn off of flies, and when the summer nights were hot and he had trouble falling asleep, he would take that little metal box out of his night stand and give it a little shake, just to remind himself.  He would feel better, and sleep would come more easily.

So he would stare at me with those scary, beady, crust-cornered eyes of his and when he spoke of how his dad would kick the ass of anyone else's dad, little bits of white saliva froth would collect at the corners of his mouth - the mouth that had those lips that looked like they were twice as thick as they really were, owing to the chapping.  When he got all crazy and wild like that, everyone would back down and go away, even the biggest kids in class - they all thought he was crazy, I think - which he probably was - and they were scared of getting little flecks of spit blown at them.  So we would all scatter, leaving Michael Pekart to shout at the school building until one of the teachers would come out to try to calm him down.  That usually took only a few minutes and the teacher would lead Michael back inside.  A box of white milk and the skinny, chapped-lipped little devil was ready to go again.

The day Michael Pekart put his arm through a glass window on a door near the school gymnasium was another story.  He had rushed up to the door and missed the little brass hand-plate.  His hand went right through a glass pane about eight inches square, and his arm followed - right up to the elbow.  Michael made the mistake of instantly wrenching it right back out again, shredding the inside of his forearm on the glass shards and exposing veins and tendons for all the world to see, including me, as I stood about five feet away and received a little drop of the sacrificial blood on my gym shirt.

I should have known what he would say, what he would start crying out the moment the pain registered in his brain - maybe even before it registered.  That skinny, chapped-lipped little Michael Pekart started crying out and thrashing around, in no way that a teacher and a box of milk would ever settle down. And he shouted at the top of his lungs, crying bloody murder and screaming himself hoarse until the paramedics arrived.

"I want my momma!! I want my momma!!  Momma!!"

(Appeared in "Dreamscapes 3" at hackwriters.com)

Macaroons and Sprayvy

“I had to laugh when you told me it was a macaroon,” exhaled a nervous Sheila Day.  “I thought perhaps it might have been a windmill cookie, and for goodness sakes, NO ONE eats windmill cookies anymore.”  Neither did anyone sharing her public space in the small city park take note of the macaroons.

Sheila Day outweighed her companion by a good 200 pounds – those pounds being mostly comprised of adipose tissue that very likely had been placed upon her swollen frame by a good number of macaroons and the ubiquitous windmill cookies.  Eat them furtively, Sheila – no one sees you.  Hide in your Sheila-forsaken closet and cram those windmill cookies into your mouth.  “Wrap your rosies around them,” as my father would have said had he ever known you.  Sheila wore that hot-pink jumpsuit with an attitude.  It would forever be 1983 for Sheila, and hot pink jumpsuits would forever be the rage.  As classy as the paint-spatter mini-skirt she could no longer fit into.

“No, they’re just macaroons, and I like ‘em.  But I like windmill cookies, too,” replied a forever-scared Tony.  Tony had been scared since 1983 – the year in which Sheila was eternally residing.  It had something to do with the threat of the Soviet Union’s missiles, unemployment, the second coming and that sprayable gravy in a can that Tony was never sure actually existed.  Tony was genderless.  That is, Tony never knew if Tony was a man or a woman.  In 1982 Tony had been taken to the doctor in the middle of Tony’s 9^th grade year (freshman? freshtony?), and Tony’s family doctor had to finally admit that something had gone really, really wrong.  Tony had no gender…no discernable sexual organs.   Tony’s anatomy below the belt resembled that of a G.I. Joe or a perhaps that of a Barbie…somewhere kind of in between, in fact.  To cover all the bases, Tony tried out for the football team and the pom-pon squad that year, being selected for neither.  Tony then just settled into life as a member of the forensics team and a bit-part in the spring performance of “Equus.”  Life was never quite the same after the diagnosis, but finding an open changing room at the local Fashion Bug was a whole lot easier.

“Well, if I ever saw anyone eating a windmill cookie, I'd have to just laugh aloud.”  Sheila reached for a macaroon, and nearly tipped off the park bench as she leaned forward and her center of gravity shifted.  “My dad used to eat windmill cookies and he would dunk ‘em in his coffee, until they got all soggy and soft.  I remember the little chunks of windmill cookie in his coffee cup when I would do the dishes.  I hated that.”

“I hate coffee,” shot back Tony.  “You can stick your coffee up your ass.  And leave my macaroons alone.”

“Geez…why so touchy?  It’s just a cookie.  I’m not even drinking coffee, anyway, it’s a mocha.  Geez.”

“Well, just don’t eat all my macaroons.”

“I won’t.  Now tell me about your new job.  You like it?”

Tony just kind of stared off into space and ran the soft bits of macaroon between tongue and palate.  Tony could feel the tender little bits of coconut once the rest of the cookie had dissolved.  For a second it was the late 1970’s, and Tony was in grade school again, eating a macaroon in the school lunch room, thinking about the episode of “Welcome Back Kotter” that was on last night, wondering who would get picked first when they chose up sides for kickball after lunch.  Tony never got picked first.  Hell, Tony barely ever got picked.  Tony would end up watching the kickball game from the sidelines half of the time, half-heartedly watching, and with the other half of the heart thinking about going home to the family dog after school and playing out in the backyard that Tony’s mother had insisted be turned into a concrete topiary playground.  Rotten concrete gazelles eternally staring at concrete gnomes who in turn stared eternally at anthropomorphic concrete pigs.  A great yard to come home to.

“So you like it? Do you?” Sheila prodded Tony with her plastic drinking straw, and left a tiny droplet of mocha on Tony’s arm.  “Sorry, whoops,” offered a genuinely repentant Sheila.

“Well, if I didn’t have to talk to anyone, it would be a whole lot better.”

“But Tony, you’re a morgue attendant.”

“Yeah.  I know,” Tony replied, “except we prefer the title ‘Post-Human Mass Storage and Retrieval Specialist.’  Now keep your filthy hands off my macaroons.”

Across the street from the small park a group of school children were just beginning a game of kickball.

With #3 You Get Egg-Roll

I remember running around in that big green back yard of the neighbors' - the yard  loaded with summertime scenes of grass and dandelions and creeping charlie and a huge, hollowed-out lilac bush that my cousin Steve and I turned into a fort for our six year-old adventures.  I remember the scary, crazy man who lived two doors down from the fort - the man who would stand in the alley and stare at you when you walked past...for some reason the most vivid thing I remember about him was his stubbly chin and the bags under his eyes.  We always told stories about him chasing other kids with a baseball bat - fueled by the true story of my own brother being chased by the guy; the crazy old man driving his Vespa scooter, swinging the baseball bat and my brother running away from him with the Frisbee that had landed in his yard.  Years later I thought about that Vespa scooter and what it might be worth today - a beautiful relic of Quadrophenia and invested with memories too strange to tell.

Thinking back to the yard I see myself in a pair of brown Garanimal trousers - was it the monkey?  A brown bear?  A badger?  Who knows?   I ran around and got into all kinds of six year-old mischief in those trousers, I am sure...grass-stains on the knees, mud on the seat, the usual.  The unusual was the white lumpy stuff into which I knelt one day while Steve and I were having some imaginary adventure in the big green grassy yard.

Mrs. Vilviotchky  had cleaned out her ice-box.

The smell is still with me.  I think the stuff was old rice that had some sort of oil in it - well-aged butter or well-aged vegetable shortening - who knows what some freaky old Polish lady was making in her freaky old Polish kitchen? It was rancid smelling, and had a cloying property that settled in my nose and stayed there for some time.  I carried it around on my trouser knee for a little while, as well, and I had it on my hand, and like a strange little six year-old kid will do I kept taking a sniff of it...I did this all the way home, distractions and all...until I was able to wash it off and as a little kid will do, I didn't change my trousers - I just wiped the crap off my knee and went back to playing.  I ended up touching it again later and the smell was back on my hand again.  Walk...sniff...walk...sniff...play around a little bit...sniff...throw the ball for the dog...sniff.  What a little weirdo I must have been. Sniff.

Every now and again I smell something kind of like that rancid-y old greasy patch of rice from the freaky old Polish lady's freaky old kitchen that got smeared on my Garanimals.  I take a whiff while walking behind the filthy little Chinese restaurant down the street.  I inhale as I drive my car over the tracks near that warehouse just south of here. There it is.

I might as well be wearing brown Garanimals.  Thank God there is no scary, wacked-out old man with razor stubble and baggy eyes chasing me on his Vespa scooter.

Salt Lick from the Old Country

David Trzebiatowski was a skinny, oily little Polish-American kid growing up in the 1970's on the south side of Milwaukee.  That describes me pretty accurately, as well.  Strangely, that describes about 2/3s of my second-grade class, too.  Anyhow, David T. was a strange little kid (there's the pot calling the kettle black), and I distinctly remember a very strange morning of show-and-tell that involved my oily little acquaintance.

David had recently traveled back to the "old country" with his family over some holiday or something, and while in Poland he managed to visit a salt mine and come back with the most interesting souvenir - a small model of a mining car with a tiny block of pure salt in the back.  Use your imagination - a little four-wheeled cart with railway type wheels and a one-inch square block of salt in it.  What fun.

David stood at the head of the class and beamed as he told about how his uncles and cousins worked in the salt mines (and we all thanked God that our ancestors had had the presence of mine to LEAVE those God-forsaken salt mines in Poland), and he showed us the little mining car model with the salt in it.

"Should I pass it around, Mrs. Anderson?" David asked.

"That would be fine," said Mrs. Anderson.

"Should everyone take a lick?" David asked.

Mrs. Anderson paled.  "No David, I think just passing it around would be fine."

I always kind of wondered what that little block of salt tasted like, but I was always glad that I was not given the chance to find out.

Grew up in the 1970's?

Yeah, I did, too.  Do you remember how things looked different back then?  Do you remember going to a "supperclub" with your parents on your birthday?  Well, I do.  I remember this place called "The Blue Canary" on the south side of Milwaukee, where they had an all-you-can-eat buffett every now and again, complete with broasted chicken and freaking turtle soup. No kidding...turtle soup.  Whatever the case, they would invariably have a polka band that would serenade the corpulent diners with the greatest hits of Frankie Yankovich or the Jolly Dutchmen or someone or other.  There was always this guy there who polkaed with his hands in his pockets...a strange little guy who would hop around with some woman, gazing like a weirdo at her bosom and keeping his hands lodged snugly in the pockets of his polyester leisure suit.  Pathetic.  Pathetic but somehow strangely comforting to think about.

Some years later, in the 1980's or 1990's, I think, the Milwaukee Journal or Sentinel ran this special publicatiobn on special things about Milwaukee.  One of them was the "Blue Canary," and strangely enough they had a photo of Mr. hands-in-the-pockets-polka-man.  There he was, in all his glory, doing the Polish two-step and playing pocket pool at the same time.  God bless him.