lickhaven

[Chapter two of Jenny’s story, wherein we meet Filt, who will long be with us.]

The outside world has grown hotter. Chestnut Street is crowded with – shoppers? walkers? What are they doing out in the middle of a sweating hot day, when they should be inside eating or at home watching the soaps?

In Rittenhouse Square, flowers struggle out of the recumbent browned greenery of an early, dry summer, doing their best to push upright along the wrought-iron fence. A few singles and couples, seated on cardboard or folded newspapers, annoy the almost grass. They smile, hoping some exhausted deity will bless them.

A covey of skateboarders skrinch through, rattling and intent. Jenny sits on one of the benches to watch them. Jenny likes skaters. A rare hope for the future, they slip, schlep and pirouette. One guy skitters off balance. The board shoots sideways. In a marvelous and unlikely backflip, it returns to him, slamming its end into his forehead, drawing blood that trickles into his left eye. Not again. But he paws at his face, then whoops a hyena guffaw that fills the canyons of the enclosed square. Sometimes it’s OK.

 She starts the block-and-a-half walk to an Indian restaurant that provides great heaps of cheap food, excellently flavored. The Indians know how to cook vegetables – disguise them within rice, spices and succulent gravies. Today’s destination offers dishes with goat, which tastes not particularly different from other meat but provides a sense of the unusual, along with rock-like bones that the shattered sidewalk woman would have found helpful.

Jenny’s spirits lift as she turns into the bustle of 17th Street. She shimmies in sympathetic vibration to the squalling life of the city, the blend of noxious odors, trash, ebullience and intensity that creates an almost palpable force. On her good days, it rubs against her like an affectionate cat (Jenny is a cat person). Other times, it gnarfs at her heels, a vicious dog, the accumulated destruction from too many beings crammed into too little space.

At Raj Palace on Sansom Street, she orders goat biryani at the counter, three-deep with customers awaiting orders, and sits at a tiny square table by the bay window. The Raj operates in a row of storefront buildings owned by an absentee landlord who holds large sections of Center City hostage in hopes of rising real estate prices, while his buildings deteriorate. Today is still her lucky day. Too often the upstairs tables are full and she must hunker in the windowless subterranean room that exudes tears and misery.

The counterman calls out “goat” and beckons. Jenny pays and choo-choos the tray back to her table. A large aluminum pie plate overflows with yellow rice, chunks of sturdy ungulate, peas and other trace vegetables. Jenny forks into the rice rapidly, picks out a gobbet of meat with her fingers. She gnaws at the impenetrable bone, holds it before her eyes, then drops it on the table. Bones. We’re all bones, inside.

A thin, t-shirted man of indefinite young age plops into the opposite chair. He looses a lopsided grin; his dirt-brown hair looping out and down from his head like a tiny umbrella. Something shadows his face. Probably more dirt. His plate holds a poori, the fat-soaked, deep-fried inflated-balloon of Indian bread.

“Hi, I’m Filt,” he says.

“Hello.” Jenny feels invaded but little troubled by the invasion. “Phil?”

“Filt. With a ‘t.’ And a ‘f.’

“Is that short for Fillet?”

“Fillay? Nah, it’s just… Filt.” He bites into the poori, deflating it. “Ya know, what’s goin on,” he says, a greasy flap hanging from his mouth, “the whole world’s all fucked up. It’s all fucked the fuck up.”

“Um.”

“You go out in the street, they try to run you over, they just try to run you the fuck over. You gotta be fast.”

Jenny studies the knots of goat in her rice. Bones. “There was,” she says, “a Roman emperor who liked to roast small boys and eat them.”

“No shit.”

“You can read about it.”

Filt shakes his head, swirling the hair parasol. “Only boys?”

“So far as I know.” So long, calm solitude of lunch.

“Wonder what he did with the…”

Jenny looks at him directly. “He said it was the best part. He ate it with mustard. Or horseradish. And shared it with his mistress. “

“Wow.” Filt takes another bite from his poori, looks around as though searching, then leans across the table, intent. “There’s other stuff.”

“I suppose there often is.”

“What’d you lose?”

The question bores into her, reaches her center through the hole it made. She studies him in a new, dark light.

“Lose?”

“Yeah.”

Her answer surprises her. “I don’t know.”

“Things are gonna happen. Yeah.” His fingers pinch reflexively across the plate, but the poori is gone, finished.

“Would you like some of this?” Jenny lifts the dish of goat biryani, an offering.

“Nah, I don’t eat animals.”

“It has other things in it. Vegetables.”

“The animal meat – see, it shouldn’t be there. Don’t get me wrong.”

Another surprise – Jenny doesn’t think she gets him wrong. “I lost something,” she admits. “Way back.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“What’s the use, huh?”

“So why would you ask?”

“Cuz that’s how you find stuff out.”

Unassailable logic.

Jenny pushes the aluminum pieplate to the center of the table. “I don’t want any more.”

Filt looks around again. “Things are gonna happen.” He takes his paper plate to the trash can without saying goodbye.

Jenny bends up the sides of the pieplate and deposits the remainder of her lunch in the can. She wants to slather someone with a couched obscenity. Filt? No, someone she appreciates.