lickhaven

[further adventures of Jenny]

No goat today. The Indians have a lot, but they don’t have everything. Democracy, you say? Five hundred thousand villages full of rape and sewage and tiny homes with no escape route for smoke from their cooking fires. And gods with elephant heads. Our gods come down to get nailed to pieces of wood. Huh!

Jenny spends a hell of a lot of time wandering Center City ferreting out places to eat. When she makes her own meals, it’s just ingest, digest, egress. But it matters to her what a bought lunch tastes like.

She turns in at her third- or fourth-favorite mid-day haunt, Son of Diner, pretending it recalls the ’50s. She always takes a counter stool when one’s vacant. The dingy formica tables in back reek of loneliness.

A single counter seat open today. Halamotherfuckinlujah. She slips in without looking right or left. No one talks at the counter. They eat with swiveling jaws, the counter-back mirror for companionship. Jenny reads a Nabokov short story as she munches her chicken wrap. The chicken tastes better than seems reasonable and the cheese is fresh. She wishes they didn’t toss in rippled chips made of reprocessed potato waste.

“Oh crap,” yaps the waitress at the soda machine.

“What?” queries the short-order cook, chasing beef strips and onions around the grill.

“It’s stuck or something, nothin’s coming out.” The waitress slaps hard at the machine handle. A sharp crack, and a plume of soda shoots toward the ceiling then down again, spattering over the waitress and seated customers. She grabs a handful of napkins and wraps them around the broken faucet but they quickly sog and shred, she switches to her apron as stopper but that only shoots the spray directly into her face. She lets go and the geyser resumes its merry way. 

Her hair sopped and dripping, Jenny finds it 3 Stooges-hilarious. She laughs and slips back off her stool. Then a voice pitches in from her left. “The whole world’s fucked the fuck up. Fucked up.”

Filt, sitting on the adjoining stool where he must have been the whole time, why didn’t she see him? shakes the liquid from his sandwich and bites into it, deeply. 

“You little shit, where’d you come from?”

“Come here a lot. Seen you. I knew it.”

“You knew – you’re part of it too?”

“You’ll see.”

She cuts to the door, slipping in the scatter of liquid on the floor.

The Philadelphia County Fair is a stripped-down nephew of the Pennsylvania State Fair, itself an enantiomorph of state fairs throughout the mid-Atlantic, all trucked in by an outfit somewhere in Maryland. A bundled nostalgia feast, it retains something genuine under the duplication – kindness or caring or a sighing lost memory.

The tawdry midways and Day-Glo stands of grease-saturated food make Jenny happy in an alert-relaxed way, like leaning back with a knowing expression to watch her DVDs of “Twin Peaks.” 

“I don’t know what you find in this,” says Rachel, swiveling 270 degrees.

“That’s because you’re a Negro.”

Rachel stops mid-stride. “What you call me?”

“One of those brown-skinned people who don’t know about carnies.”

“What the fuck, carnies?”

“Shut up and have fun.”

They climb on the whir-a-gig and Rachel throws up. They schlep through the aging X-Files fun house and Rachel laughs so hard she almost pisses herself – laughing at, not with. They stare at the glitzily restored merry-go-round and Rachel mumbles why anyone bothered. They sit on a midway bench and watch little girls and boys play rigged games to earn prizes worth less than a penny.

“Pisses me off,” says Rachel.

“What?”

“Lookit that, what they’re doing. Nobody wins any of the real stuff.”

“Of course not.”

“That’s no-way fair.”

Jenny crams Cracker Jax into her mouth and nods. “They know that.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean –”

“The people playing. They know it’s fixed.”

“Naw.”

Jenny leans forward on the bench. “Everybody knows it. That’s what makes it so much fun.”

“Wha-a-at?”

“Everybody wins and everybody loses.” Jenny waves her arms. “It’s make believe.”

“Make believe losing your money?”

“No, you really lose your money, but it’s a little bit of money and a whole lot of living – so you win. They always give you something, some piece of junk no matter how you fuck up, so you feel good. Look.” She flourishes the loose-stitched Raggedy Ann she won tossing a single ring onto an array of Coke bottles. “I love this, I love it.”

“Somebody makes and everybody loses. These guys go home and count their cash.”

Jenny sticks her finger toward the moon-faced man behind a counter where two kids throw darts at balloons. “You think he’s making money? You think he goes home?”

Rachel blows a razz of disbelief through her lips. “They’re no kind of gypsies. They go home and watch TV.”

“Look at him, all of them. It doesn’t matter where they go, where they live. They live in little rundown houses with paint peeling off the clapboards, even if they don’t. They… they just subsist, but they subsist off the happiness of the people they rip off.”

“You’re certifiably sick.”

They get up to walk along the midway – more raggedy than Raggedy Ann – where games of chancelessness bloom.

The few remaining freaks wallow listless, remembering lost heydays. The Iron Man rams nails dispiritedly up his nose, and a Malaysian midget lady lies back in a folding chair inside a tank-like depression, knitting a sock and occasionally glancing up to chat. 

“You want a corn dog?” Jenny asks.

“What the fuck I want a corn dog?”

“Stuffed intestines wrapped inside a saturated grease blanket – like chitlins, but with cornmeal instead of pig shit.”

“When’s the last time you had chitlins?”

“NEVER SHALL I, UNTO MY DYING DAY, EAT A CHITLIN!” Jenny barooms to the midway stragglers, who pay no attention.

“Girl, chitlins don’t come singular.”

As the sun sidles down to escape the temporary fairgrounds – by Memorial Hall, the last grand leftover from the Philadelphia exposition of 1876 – they rest heads on each other’s shoulders and shamble out across the spotty parkland grass toward Rachel’s venerable Camaro, now listing toward the driver’s side.

“Damn, a tire.”

Jenny peers under the chassis. “I don’t think so.” 

Rachel joins her. “Lookit that, some damn thing sticking out of the ground and I parked right the fuck on it, ripped the strut out. This baby’s not goin nowhere.” She reaches into her purse for her cell phone. “We sit till we get a tow truck.”

Jenny walks in slow circles, kicking at non-existent flotsam. A small thing sticking out of the ground. It could have been anywhere in the city, the world, but it was right here, waiting for us, for me. “What are the chances of that? Hitting the only obstruction within” – she snaps right and left – “a couple hundred yards? Probability – do you think it gets clumped sometimes? Squnched, shimmied?”

“I don’t, actually, think about, know about, try to compute such-like things. That’s your job.”

“How so?”

“Ain’t that what you think about?”

“Stop talking like that… that stupid Black shit.”

“O… K.”

“What is my job? I mean, what’s a job? Suppose you didn’t have a job and just had to do things – just do whatever it was you were created to do, not think about it, just do it. What?”

“Tell me what in hell you were created to do.”

“Make a difference. I’m bright enough to change things, to get rid of the fuckedupness.”

“Fuckedupness?”

“I want the world not to be the way it is, because it doesn’t work. I’m not responsible that it doesn’t work, but I am responsible for not trying to make it work. I need to find out what makes it so existence is such a mess, and can we fuck it into place to make it work better. It’s everywhere, fuckedupness, the way the universe doesn’t work – the way stars devour their planets.”

“You, by your lonesome, you’re gonna make it so celestial bodies don’t eat their babies.”

“I didn’t see it all before. How it’s everywhere, but if I learned how it worked, what the laws were behind it that… the fuckedupness down here, for people, I could… Aw shit, I can’t.”

“Girl, you may be the brightest woman on the face of this particular planet, I’ll give you a good maybe on that, but yeah – you can’t. I can’t. Everybody can’t.”

“I could do something. Something.”

“You could change bed pans in a hospital.”

“Huh?”

“Shut up, got a couple bars here.” She shakes the phone like a cocktail.

“Bars.”

“Found something, some car place.” Rachel taps at her cell phone while she looks into the declining evening sky. “What you should apply for is a job to change your native language. Whatever it is you’re speaking makes no damned sense. This phone’s for shit.”

”There’s no answer until you know the question to ask.”

“They oughta shut philosophy off after 5 pm.”