Lippe Simone - Blank

Honor was browsing this storeroom of wonder when the kitchen staff caught up with her. They were tired and snorting from their battle and from running the length and breadth of the labyrinth looking for the guest who in their primitive view had run out without paying for her meal. Once the entire complement of kitchen workers were in the storage room Honor put down the remains of her sandwich and open her arms and smiled “come on over here, you”. The sous-chef cautiously but confidently approached his prize and as he entered her swing zone Honor selected from behind her back a 1-wood from a bag of golf clubs and pitched a perfect drive into the left side of his head. The club bent and the sous-chef stared immobile and disappointed at Honor, who dropped the club and dashed out the remaining door.

The pursuit that followed had something of the air of a French farce as Honor took a series of deliberately random turns through thickening clouds of flour dust only to come face-to-face with a dishwasher. She evaded capture by blocking the hall with the door to the pump room, turned, and found herself looking into the ghostly white face of the flour chef. Honor reluctantly but quickly threw her terry cloth robe over his head and again got lost in the maze of hallways somewhere between the restaurant and the hotel foyer. When she finally found herself briefly alone she took the opportunity to hide behind one of the seemingly countless identical doors. She was trapped in the liquor closet.

She heard the entire kitchen staff grunting and regrouping in the hall and was adjusting to the prospect of a long and well-stocked silence when she saw with a sort of resigned horror that she’d tracked clearly defined floury footsteps into the room. The door swung wildly open.

The massive sous-chef seemed somewhat bigger now and infinitely less romantic, having lost any inclination of mating with Honor and wishing now only to reassert his authority. In a moment he was on her like an angry chef on a weedy maitre d’.

The dead weight on her chest and the powerful hands around her neck competed in a lumbering marathon to compress the life out of Honor. This was just nature unfolding as it will, the strong dominating the weak, the large eating the small, the great and nicotine-stained crushing the life out of the civilized but slightly too adventurous. Honor mused again on this unwelcome concept of consequences and again found them not to her taste.

This unexpected and, in Honor’s view, unwarranted demotion in the food chain grew more real and possible and lucid until it was the only thing in existence and she raised her arms above her head in surrender, stretching until the neck of a bottle nestled firmly in each hand. The smooth angles of Jack Daniels in the right, a classic baseball bat of Wild Turkey in the left. Honor brought them together on each of the chef’s temples with the precision and force of a clash cymbal player in his one solo moment of a Russian symphony with his judgmental mother in the audience.

The Jack Daniels exploded in a cloud of glass and Tennessee cask-ripened sour-mash. The Wild Turkey held strong, still hoping to hit one out of the park. The chef was softened and bewildered and fell away to position himself helpfully on his knees with his head at roughly the level of a tee-ball. Honor couldn’t resist manifesting the metaphor and she treated herself to a brief wind-up before again testing the surprising strength of the bottle of Wild Turkey, which again held as the chef’s head bounced improbably off his shoulder and rebounded in a rubbery wobble like a porcelain bulldog rear dash ornament. The chef stared intently into the middle-field as though he saw there something that had scared him as a child. Then he fell the rest of the way to the floor in the way that only 225 lbs of lifeless meat can fall to a floor.

Honor rewarded herself with a deep intake of air and turned to some crates of Mouton Cadet for richly needed support. She was enjoying the recovered liberty to breath and promising to never again take it for granted when the otherwise jolly tinkling sound of glass addressing glass drew her attention. The remaining kitchen workers were arming themselves with a bottle in each hand.

Facing the four leaderless kitchen staff and their eight bottles of vodka, whiskey and, in one case, Benedictine, Honor had one extraordinarily durable bottle of Wild Turkey. She was most decidedly outgunned and the kitchen staff now knew everything she could teach them about weaponizing liquor bottles. But she hadn’t yet taught them everything she knew about liquor bottles.

With a touch of magician’s flare Honor presented her loyal Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit on the tips of the fingers of her right hand and elaborately and carefully uncapped it with her left. Her audience looked on, duly curious but not yet sufficiently impressed to copy her. Bringing the bottle to her nose, she made a show of appreciating the noxious bouquet of a freshly opened bottle of 101 proof bourbon. She smiled broadly, licked her lips like a pantomime child-snatcher, and drank deeply.

With a few false starts, particularly when confronted with corks, the kitchen staff of Milo’s restaurant took to spontaneous binge drinking with an enthusiasm well beyond anything for which Honor could have hoped. They opened and sampled and in some cases emptied at least one of everything. Soon the atmosphere was a dangerous mix of shared curiosity and aggressive evangelism as the kitchen staff forced new taste sensations on one another but from Honor’s perspective the chief development was an overarching lack of focus. They had completely forgotten about her.

Honor sashéd between the indifferent drinkers like a hostess excusing herself momentarily to see to a doorbell and left Milo’s staff cocktail soirée in the store room. Immediately she found the door she wished she’d found about a quart of bourbon earlier — the door marked “lobby”. In fact the door led to a little office, the very office that had been Darryl’s entire world for most of his short life, and from there Honor found her way back to the foyer. Apart from Darryl who, sadly, no longer registered on the census, the foyer remained empty and that suited Honor to a nicety because she had lost her taste for adventure and, more particularly, for the consequences which seemed so often to fall hard on the heels of adventure. She no longer wanted fast cars or caviar. She wanted to be home and safe and, ideally, armed.

Crossing the lobby Honor was captured by the mirror behind the bank of phones and had in that moment the sort of epiphany that rarely comes in adult life — she realized that she wasn’t Chinese. The photograph on her license had been of a dark and mysterious oriental girl but the face in the mirror was heavily influenced by generations of breeding beneath the sunless skies of Ireland and reflected back mainly inarguably red hair and a round and robust face, generously freckled under a neon sunburn.

It had been Honor’s plan to get back on her Harley and go to the Beverly Hills address that she remembered from her driver’s license. But the license wasn’t hers and the address wasn’t home and, issues of identity aside, the street had become a primitive war zone. In the time that Honor had spent on the worst group date in history the sun had begun to set and the nascent communities of police officers and golfers and religious nuts had become militantly partisan and were beating each other to death.

The policemen, unaware that they were wearing sidearms, were hitting the Hare Krishnas with garbage can lids and newspaper vending machines and the cultists were fighting back with whatever was at hand, mainly tambourines. A substantial platoon of businessmen in shiny suits was trying in vain to force its way into the many occupied cars trapped on the street and a pair of store mascots — a caterpillar and a butterfly — had managed to set themselves on fire. Across the street the cinema and stores and offices had been invaded in spite of the previous impenetrability of picture windows and, most disturbingly, revolving doors.