THE BANANA PROJECT
A Cat Oars Publication
Copyright 2011 Cat Oars
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and lending to friends as commonly allowed. This ebook may not be re-sold.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Francais
Plan B
Litteratzi
Jennie and the Diamond Ring
Francais
What the Baby Birds Sing as They Fall From the Nest
R_Toady
Chaz
CGT
Mallory on Everest
Ghostofmajestic
After the Storm
Sandshovel
Banana
Litteratzi
Anna Vocalizing Angst
Laidevorah
Dickey Hartley’s Mallards
TapasTonight
The Jelly Man
Kohno
Postscripts
Introduction
Francais
FOR BANANA I asked the Cat Oars writers to find a few words from a Velvet Underground or Lou Reed song that had some personal resonance, then blend them into a story, then write about why they picked that song and those lyrics. You may or may not agree with Sheisty and me that Sandshovel did the best job by far: a slow burn, simmering intensity all the way through, with a moving payoff at the end. R_Toady gets a special mention for the most ambitious effort. Just listen to the rhythms in his writing. And Ghostofmajestic unfurled a rather complex picture, then ran across the balance beam while holding it high, flew into the air, somersaulted and nailed a perfect landing. He makes it look too easy; you know it’s not as easy as he makes it look.
And I do have to mention CGT. He named the romantic interest in his story after my Litfo handle. He wrote a touching story about baking a lemon meringue pie, a haunted chess board and falling in love. I’m honored.
Thanks also to Litteratzi, TapasTonight and Laiadevorah for their stories, which were also very good. After I wrote this introduction, I put together the postscripts, which led me to read Tapas’ story again – and it’s not just very good, it’s very, very good.
And after I wrote that last paragraph, Kohno sent me his story. It’s excellent. I started out thinking that this collection might not be as good as the others. Now I think it might be the best yet.
Los Angeles
July 12, 2006
Plan B
Litteratzi
“WHAT?”
The veins in my boss’ neck rose as his face roasted red. He looked like a sad middle-aged thug, with oversized baggy jeans, green T-shirt and tasteless jewelry. I’d planned my little speech from start to finish, and practiced it in front of the mirror. My daughter had given me pointers on stance and eye contact, but as I stared into those alcohol tinged rheumy eyes, I realized that things were not going well.
“I think that it’ll be great if you hired another guard to help me cover the store.”
“No.”
“But – ”
“Company rules are very specific, Mrs. Dawson,” he said, stretching himself to his full six feet. He walked from behind his desk and stood in front of me. The alcohol from his breath threatened to set his red hair alight. He smirked, and then spoke slowly, as if to a mentally deficient child. “One security guard for every 20,000 square feet of shop floor.”
“But I work six days a week and I need some time off. My daughter is getting married soon and I –”
“No.”
“But I’m really petite, suppose I needed back up?”
“Mrs. Dawson,” he growled, “what part of the word NO do you not understand?”
He reached into his pocket, took out a gold engraved cigarette lighter, and started flicking it on and off.
“If you want time off, I could easily arrange to have you replaced… permanently. Do you know how difficult it is to get another job at your age?”
I flushed in anger as I stormed out of the office.
“Tight fisted, mean spirited, big bast – ”
“No luck, huh?”
I looked up. Emma was sitting at a cash register with no customers.
“He just won’t budge. I really need time to plan for the wedding.”
“I know. He didn’t even want to give me time off when I was pregnant with the twins. I had to complain to the union officer.”
Then suddenly, Emma took a sharp breath. Her jaw dropped.
“Did you see that?”
“What?”
“That man over there in Aisle 2 – he just put something in his pocket. Look! He’s running to the door.”
I sprinted down the aisle, dodging customers as I went. He flew out the door and dashed down the street.
“Stop him!” I yelled.
Someone stuck a foot out. He stumbled and fell. I grabbed him by the collar as he turned to get up. A crowd of people surrounded us.
“What did you steal? Come on, hand it over…”
I didn’t see the fist coming as it slammed into my head. Down I went and sank into oblivion.
By the time I’d come to, I was in a luxurious room at a private hospital. A bunch of overly pretentious flowers next to the television swamped the room with their fragrance.
“Are you OK?” my boss asked nervously. Sweat was glistening across his forehead and his hands were fidgeting behind his back.
“My head hurts. The TV is too loud.”
“I’ve had time to consider what you were saying earlier. I think that we need another security guard. I’ll recommend this to the head office immediately.”
I knew why he was uneasy. He could see the newspaper headlines now: “Security guard in critical condition – Boss ignored plea for more staff.” The union could make a big issue out of this. I had him where I could squeeze him.
“I think that I need some time off.”
“Of course. One week off.”
“Two!”
“Two? But the doctor said that you suffered only a minor head injury…”
It was then that the television came to my rescue.
“Have you been injured at work?” the advertisement blurted. “Our lawyers can get you maximum compensation…”
Our conversation ended abruptly. We looked at the television, then at each other.
He shifted uncomfortably. His shirt was now drenched.
“Two weeks,” I repeated. “I am tired, I am weary, and I could sleep for a thousand years.”
“Yes, of course, two weeks.”
“And?” I glanced meaningfully at the television.
“And… how about five hundred dollars compensation?”
“What’s that you said? I think the blow to my head may have affected my hearing. Five thousand dollars? Yes, that will be just fine.”
“FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS?” he shrieked.
“Yes, I definitely heard that – five thousand dollars. My hearing seems to be improving already.”
Twenty-four hours later I left the hospital, with check in hand and a grin on my face. My future son-in-law Simon picked me up in his car.
“It’s a good thing that you thought up a Plan B, just in case your boss didn’t give you time off for the wedding,” he said.
“Actually, it went a bit better than I expected.” It still hurt a little when I spoke, though. I moved my sore jaw from side to side. “Simon, did you really have to hit me so hard?”
“Sorry,” he smiled sheepishly as he steered the car out of the hospital parking lot. “You did say to make it look real.”
I signed the back of the compensation check and handed it to him.
“This should give you and Jessica a really happy honeymoo
n. It’s from my boss. It’s amazing how generous he has suddenly become.”
Jennie and the Diamond Ring
Francais
“GENUG SHOEN – ENOUGH ALREADY. I’m making good money with the taxi. You don’t have to schlep with the cart all the way up to Lexington and 1-2-5 every day,” Izzy would say to his mother-in-law every morning.
“Vy not?” she’d say. “Vat else I can do?”
Along with thousands upon thousands of other Jews, Isidore had fled Russia before the revolution. With his parents and brothers and sisters, he made his way from Minsk across Europe, via Budapest and London, and landed at Ellis Island in 1913. They stayed in Charlotte, North Carolina for a while, where he worked at a junk yard and drove a motorcycle. Then they went to Calgary while waiting for American naturalization. Iz learned to be a projectionist there. As soon as they got their U.S. papers, they set up in New York. That’s where Iz married Fannie in 1922. He drove a cab and was doing pretty well for those days.
Fannie’s family was in the garment business. Her mother Jennie, a tiny woman, had been taking a pile of end-pieces from their sewing shop every night. She’d load up a cart with them the next morning and push it to Harlem. Black women would buy the cast-off fabric and use it to make potholders, scarves or even socks.
But it was driving Iz crazy.
“Why? Why? Genug shoen, Jennie.” Sure, when he was a projectionist, the pocket money she brought home from the end-pieces helped. But as a taxi driver working double-shifts he didn’t need it any more. He had gotten married, had two kids. His father died and he was supporting his family and his mother-in-law in their rented apartment. She didn’t need to push the cart any more and he didn’t want her to.
But it gave her something to do every day and she wasn’t going to give it up without a fight. She wasn’t even going to give it up with a fight, the one they’d have almost every night when he’d come home from his long day behind the wheel, shuttling fares across the Bronx and Brooklyn and Manhattan.
One day Jennie came back from Harlem and was emptying the cart when she saw it: A spectacular diamond wedding ring. A gold band with three prongs held a big flawless stone, must’ve been at least a carat and a half, maybe two. On the inside of the band was the engraved inscription: “To Marcella From C. Love You Always.”
“Hmm,” Jennie said to herself. “It must have slipped off the finger of one of the black ladies.”
She put the ring in a piece of fabric and tucked it into a pocket of her purse. She re-stocked the cart with that day’s new end-pieces and went to bed.
The next morning, as she approached Lexington and 125th, she saw a woman standing on the corner, with body language displaying some signs of anticipation. The woman didn’t wait for her to get all the way down the block – Jennie’s tiny steps and advancing age made for a slow trip. The woman walked forward to meet her.
“I was so afraid you’d never come back,” the black woman said. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“My son-in-law, he doesn’t vant me to come no more. But I like it. Vat else vill I do? But he says I don’t make enough money. It’s not vorth it, he says. He doesn’t vant me out pushing the cart. Oy vay, ve fight about it every night.”
“Do you remember me from yesterday?”
Jennie didn’t really. There were a lot of women coming to look at the fabric every day. And she was getting old. She grimaced and shrugged.
“I was looking through your cart. I lost my ring yesterday. I thought maybe you found it later?”
Jennie smiled. The woman’s eyes widened with something beyond relief in reaction. But it wasn’t over. There would have to be authentication.
“Desc-rrr-ibe it,” the tiny Jewish woman commanded the large black woman. Jennie rolled the ‘r’ with her Yiddish accent.
The black woman remained calm.
“It has a gold band and three prongs and it’s engraved “To Marcella From C. Love You Always.”
Jennie opened her purse and plucked the piece of fabric holding the ring out of the pocket and handed it to the black woman.
“Here it is,” she said.
The black woman opened the fabric and saw the ring. She looked at Jennie for a few seconds with something like bewilderment. Then she walked away.
“Hmmph,” Jenny said to herself. “You’d tink a ‘tank you,’ maybe?”
It was Shabbat. Jennie went home for the Friday night prayer. The men went to synagogue in the morning and the women prepared the lunch. The weekend passed. Iz begged Jennie not to walk the fifteen blocks back to Harlem anymore. For the first time, she thought about it.
“Maybe he’s right,” she said to herself. “I am getting old.” But then she realized how bored she’d be. And a couple of bucks a week allowed her to buy a pin for her granddaughter and a toy car for her grandson every now and then. “Maybe a few more months,” she said. “Maybe I quit ven the vinter comes.”
She pushed the cart slowly down the block toward Lexington and 125th on Monday morning. But something was happening. Things seemed different.
There was a crowd of black women there and it looked like they were waiting for something.
They were waiting for her. About a dozen of them, maybe more.
As soon as she got to the corner, they crowded around her cart and started buying the cast-off fabric pieces faster than she could count the money. Instead of selling six or seven pieces for nickels and dimes, she unloaded the whole cart. Suddenly, about five dollars worth of coins was weighing down her purse.
When the crowd cleared, she saw the woman whose ring she’d returned the week before, standing across the street, observing the scene with her arms crossed.
Marcella nodded to her. Jennie nodded back.
The same thing happened the next day and the day after that.
Marcella had gone to church on Sunday and told the story of the ring. She was the leader of the choir.
“So I want all the women in this church to go down to the corner whenever you can and buy the fabric from the honest Jewish lady who gave me back my ring.”
When my grandfather Iz heard the story he put his hands over his face.
“Oy gevalt! Now she’s never going to stop with the fershlugginah cart!”
And so my great-grandmother Jennie pushed that cart up to Lexington 1-2-5 every day until she couldn’t push it anymore.
What the Baby Birds Sing as
They Fall From the Nest
R_Toady
even though I survived my admittedly halfhearted attempt to end my life the experience left me weakened nearly worthless a flightless fledgling featherless helpless withered on the pavement archaeopteryx fossil waiting for a hand to come put me back on the branch of course that hand would never come there is no hand
i dropped out of school no chance of going back left broke & broken returning to the shithole where i grew up post-industrial pigeonshit town in southeast pennsylvania the good news is i eventually got out of there the bad news the bad news is it just about wrecked me
i was still so goddam depressed skinny & stuffed to the gills with pills still breathing though against my will the idea being to keep me alive but really i wasn’t maybe never had been life one continuous viola string stretched close to breaking screeching with one seemingly endless dissonant note held & held & held & held & held & though i kept waiting for it to end it didn’t
my parents long since divorced both remarried within a month of each other that year 1994 i got left behind at my mother’s house as she & my stepfather Vietnam vet haunted by the ghosts of splitskulled gooks mind fogged by mosquitoclouds of reefer agent orange moved into a ranch house in the suburbs on the hill behind the amusement park where i’d worked as a teenager now at 21 they left me in the city to fend for myself in the turn of the century brick row home where i’d spent my childhood on an incline too steep to ride our bicycles up
so in a house full of abandoned furniture i alternated nights between my mother’s old
bed & my own up in the attic pimply walls parking lot view me the basket case miscast as a manic depressive & thus medicated shady asian doctor wearing his apathy proud as the phd certificates that hung crooked in the waiting room of the clinic across from the mall right off the highway at the edge of town 45 minute bus ride away from the house
i played the role best i could finally decided i’d had enough flushed all my pills down the hopper steeling myself for the withdrawal inevitably
like a slow rising out of the fog
my whole body a mess my diabetes uncontrolled despite insulin shots every day since i was 14 those slim steeltipped syringes you never get used to the prick sugars never quite regulated i couldn’t think about it all i could do just to keep from dot dot dot
i started hurling my shell of a body further and further out from that husk of a house to stumble across the bridge to a coffeeshop on the other end of town for poetry readings every week hosted by an old newyorkpuertorican supposedly EX junky wrote terrible poetry delivered with raspy breathless insincerity skin stretched taut you could see every bone of his skull he’d die years later of a collapsed lung i didn’t write but sat & drew sketch upon sketch of him & the other scenesters
there was an old hippie who shared the name of a famous contemporary poet and never bothered to correct you when you made the mistake once i went to his house where he lived with two black hookers i stood in the living room while he read me a story he’d written in prison five years for trafficking possession intent to sell etc he read the story he’d written about a desert island on which lived a giant extinct boa bird that was worshipped by the islanders there “you mean moa” i asked & he kept insisting no, it’s BOA i asked “you mean boa like the snake” he said yeah only it’s a bird i knew he was wrong but decided not to press the issue he asked if i wanted any pot & i said no
there was local hero slash rabblerouser mark klee artist deejay writer it was hard not to love him one night years later he would blow his brains out in a car in the parkway by the fish hatchery under extremely suspicious circumstances were there drugs involved well of course there were aren’t there always he heard voices too poor fucking mark