Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

We sat in a different Black Bear Diner in a different Oregon town sometime shortly before the sun came up. Seth sat chomping on what he called a “Zoo Baby,” which was a plate of cut-up banana, kiwi, and apricot — like something they’d set down at the bottom of the mongoose cage. Josh pounded on the table. “It’s not hard to make acceptable coffee! I mean, it seems almost harder to make it suck.”

Knowles seemed to be making a go of it, grasping the mug with both hands. “I think it’s not so bad if you just get the light roast. It doesn’t have that ashy taste. If you get the light roast and tell your brain it’s tea it goes down okay.”

“Fuck that and fuck you. What do I look like, a sorcerer?”

I could tell this exchange would go nowhere. And just then I noticed Evangele, the homeless regular, slithering across the entire perimeter of the restaurant just to get to our booth, all the while caressing the walls with his hands. Classic schizophrenic behavior. We’d been through town enough to come to expect Evangele here, his Gumby frame bent into one of the booths. Lately, he’d adopted us as a kind of proving ground for new material and fresh schemes. He sat down, his eyebrows jiggling like two flushing toilet handles. “Do any of you people know about the Romanian pornographic actress Blebe ‘Blaze’ Cedourno?” Nobody moved or said anything, “She! does this thing where — ”

“That name sounds Italian or something — ”

“I assure you it is Czech.”

“Romanian?”

“ Romanian .” And I’m reminded of that strange night at the diner, around Christmastime, around two thirty in the morning. It was me, the waitress, and Evangele. He had wheeled in his brand spanking new homeless man cart with this stuff: a boom box, didactic para-Christian psych-evangelical picket signs, and a live pigeon sitting on a pile of quarters in a cage — all strapped to various parts of this two-wheeler thing. His cart was blocking the entrance so I was almost kind of apologetic when a spacey girl in a dress and pants tried to come into the restaurant, only to have to scoot uncomfortably around this odd pile of shit. But then I noticed the girl had barf all down the front of the dress and when she opened her mouth it went something like this: “ You guys . I just wanted to let you know that my family is coming in here and they are with the fuckin mob, okay? They are organized crime, gangsters. They will hurt you. Be careful, they will fuck you up. Just don’t say a word — be careful!” And the strange thing was that then these white people came into the diner and it was her family, her parents and a sibling. Midwestern types in honest wool and small gold jewelry. They sat and ordered breakfast while the girl spent the majority of the meal in the bathroom, regurgitating. She returned to the table and fell asleep. They laughed with their mouths closed, polished off their various plates and exited as the girl threw up on the booth and waiting area before leaving some vomit on the front door. But the family didn’t run out the door, they strolled — without even pretending to mime the international gesture for “Sorry, let me wipe this all up.” Outside they wrapped their safety belts firmly around their midsections and drove away, the girl just folded into the back seat somewhere, going God knows where. I stepped out into the cold night to have a cigarette next to a garbage can and I thought of how Seth and I used to play a game where I would go limp and he would try to stuff my deadweight upside down and sideways into the passenger seat of the car. This was the most hilarious thing ever to happen in a parking lot, we thought (or maybe just I thought). My limbs would flop around, willy-nilly, as he threw them inside and clapped the door shut. This display could go on for quite some time, with all sorts of horrified people peering over their shopping bags at me whooping it up with my neck craned around my ankles and my foot on the steering wheel.

But let me tell you a little about Evangele (say it “Ee-vawnguh-lay”) and his Vagrant Cart (a new thing; he used to have a van, now he had a cart). He had recently de-evolved to actual vagrant status with his cart, but otherwise he was the same old Moroccan in sweatpants with a boner. An ex-Yogi from Fremont who published a Christian Yoga book in ’72. Evangele, whose true age was a mystery, likewise kept under wraps his reasons for hiding out in the diners and vans of the Northwest. Whispers of possible reasons he may have fled his home circulated around the salad bar but none were as alarming or convincing as suggestions that Evangele was a disgraced Moroccan spirit photography scion. It didn’t help matters that Evangele would speak often, and in the vaguest possible terms, about his “deep ocean of sadness” lurking just under the surface. He was old enough to have lived several lives already and the fact that he surrounded himself with people under twenty just seemed like that much more wood on the fire, one more eccentricity. Just something you want to do, like buttering your bread with salt pork. When he disappeared for four months everyone just assumed he got deported. Maybe they found out about the stash of illegal postcards or the incendiary annotations in his Bible or the whole Morocco thing — or any number of things , come to think of it, the cops could have stumbled upon, their fingers itching with repulsion. Evangele was the kind of man who always had multiple reasons for getting put away all going at the same time. His plate was full of runny side dishes. So no one was surprised when he surfaced several months down the line spouting homespun Commie rhetoric and a whole new take on didactic signage. Where did he come up with this stuff, we wondered.

“What did you — pull this shit out of the sky?”

“You’re a genius!” he told us, no longer differentiating between the individual and the group, “You always ask the wrong questions… I’ve been away these many months now, and I’ve learned many new things. I’ve had many awakenings, many illusions yanked out of my brain and I’d wake up in the middle of the night — every night — and write letters, so many letters, but not to send. They were letters to my children, my past, to Me long ago… There are a lot of things no one will ever know about me, for beneath my smile is a deep ocean of sadness.”

Outside we ran into some crusty straightedge boys (Evangele’s new friends), who were these Victorian-looking Black Cross people with hankies stuffed into their sleeves, all lined up along the side of the building sitting crosslegged. They looked moist sitting out there in the full moonlight, like they were getting a moonburn under all that sweat. Josh threw a branch at them and that started them screaming at us, all charming-like, about how sexy communism is. They jumped up, raised cold little fists, and surrounded us with sheaves of grubby newsletters on the sidewalk. “Listen, skip — it’s fucking May Day .” The ringleader banged on the window with every emphatic phrase, his breath making empty speech bubbles. “Commies from all corners of the globe, wielding scythes in fields, pushing rivets into steel cargo barges are calling us to the table. It’s our time to sniff the gruel of class war!” The ringleader read, “Commies have never been so hot, what with the caps and boots and aprons sheathing their outpouring of earthy laughter. Aprons smeared with the serum of technical innovation, littered with the hairs of chimps projected into space to gather samples of Mars dust for the fabrication of vitamin powder for Red infants. They will grow up to use their soulful, big eyes to reverse the course of enemy tanks.” Hey hey hey hey he barked, shoving flyers at us. “This is full commitment! Join us, swaddled in cloth woven from the loom of resistance. Our hair is like wheat. Papa Karl! State-sponsored violins play for you. The warm embrace of your beard has never seemed so inviting, it’s a specter haunting my conflicted gut!!!” Seth, Knowles, Josh, Murph, and I stifled our giggles (except Murph — he was really upset!) as we hopped into their stolen school van for a ride to an abandoned gas station. There, in this big busted garage, some fat motherfucker was up on stage with a bloody microphone and a blue tarp wadded up next to the drum riser. The crusty Anarchos started screaming at some other kids at the door. They all jumped on each other in a pile which seemed that much more chaotic because it was extremely loud in there. I coughed but I couldn’t be sure it was real cuz I couldn’t hear it. Blood gathered on the linoleum at the bottom of the pile. Dirt filled the air and beer seeped in under the windowsills. The guy on stage was bleeding too and it came off in damp sheets when he sweated out of the top of his head. He looked out into the audience with a brown sweaty stare and barked, “Ow! Hey, my body is the rock ’n roll temple; my flesh, blood, and body fluids are a communion to the people,” before smashing the mic into his clenched jaw and hopping into the drum kit. Yeeyah… He mashed broken glass into his doughy gut — my skin is like paper! He threw shit and glass out into the audience — “My rock ’n roll is not to entertain, but to annihilate” — all around us people started screaming out their names. Epithets and quotations sprung up out of the ground and crashed into each other in the air as if we were in the cemetery and all the words on the tombstones had suddenly sprung loose. Weeds and bramble lay tangled in a mess on the floor —