Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“Where are you from?” Alice grabs Mark's belt and pulls him a little closer to her table.

“Leave the fella alone,” Kevin says. “Here, have a Keith's.” He slides a bottle towards Marvin.

“Mind yer business. I'm doin' me own survey for the hell of it. The hello of it.”

Marvin says he's from the States.

“Is that so? And how'd ya get down here?”

Marvin explains that he is staying in a friend's cabin.

“I been to Boston, that's all I been to up there. So how do ya like it down here?”

“Leave the fella alone.”

“I'm doing my survey of the tourists. I want to know, does he like it?”

“I think it's very beautiful. It's a beautiful place, I think.”

“There's Candy going up to sing now,” Kevin says. “I bet she sings ‘Sixteen Tons.’ That's what she sings every time.”

“It's stupid. That's a man's song,” Alice says.

Hilda and Alexander step onto the verandah with their basket of chicken wings. “You know those two?” Alice asks Marvin.

“Leave the fella be.”

“It's none of your business, Kevin. I'm interested.” She tugs on Marvin's belt so he sits down next to her. “You just stay here one winter, shovel the snow, see how dark and cold it gets, then tell us how beautiful it is. What's your name?”

“Mark.”

“Mark what?”

“Mark Allenby.” His name was Allen. He didn't know why he added the extra syllable.

“Hey, you two,” Alice shouts, surprising Hilda and Alexander. “What flavor of chicken wings did ya get?”

“Alice, shut the fuck up. Leave people alone.”

“… and what do ya get / Another day older and deeper in debt” reverberates through the windows and the door. “She has a voice like a man,” Kevin says. “It's deep.”

“Ya know,” Alice says, as Hilda and Alexander approach their table. They want to meet everybody, because you never know who might have a line on a great piece of property. “There are two things I really care about. You know what they are?”

“We got the spicy,” Hilda says.

“Two things,” Alice repeats, “I care about.”

Candy gets a big round of applause for her “Sixteen Tons.” Wren and Molly jump back to the microphone. “For our final performance, we're going to sing ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,’ by Jim Croce,” Molly says. “No,” says Wren. “‘You're So Vain,’ Carly Simon. No, my mistake, Freda Payne, ‘Band of Gold.’” They both look over at Elaina, and she points at the screen, then they say in unison, “‘It's Raining Men,’ by The Weather Girls.”

“Okay,” says Kevin. He is sobering up and he doesn't like it. No matter how much he drinks, at some point he starts to sober up, until he passes out. “What two things? What are the two things you care about?”

“I care about genealogy.” She stares into Hilda's face as Hilda nibbles on a chicken wing. “And I love sex. I care about sex.” Alexander lays an arm around Hilda's shoulder. He hasn't done that in a long time. Hilda puts a chicken wing in his mouth.

“Well that's good,” Kevin says. “Then you'll always know when you're fuckin' yer brother.”

Everyone at this hour is well-lubricated and raring to boogie. The young and the not so, the capable and the infirm, crowd the dance floor. Maybe the remoteness of Inverness from the centers of urban culture that produce this music gives everyone that feeling of freedom, of what-the-fuck, letting everything hang out in the brown haze of this pub. Maybe it's just the sweeter universal trips of alcohol.

Marilyn Goo-goo is sober, however, and almost leaves when she hears Elaina call her to the stage, emphasizing the name Goo-goo , in a way that sounds almost nasty. But she is used to it. She has found a Rita Coolidge song, and she knows what she is going to do. The only song she could find after flipping through Elaina's white pages of lists was “I'd Rather Leave While I'm In Love,” a Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen song. That one is cued up just for her, and she is going to start singing it straight, but at a certain point she will begin a cry like the Cherokee cry that permeates Rita's Shaman's Way album. She will penetrate the room with a chant from her present, from her ancient ways. Why does she want to do this? She doesn't know. This is no pow-wow. There is no alcohol permitted at a pow-wow.

Marilyn watches the screen as the intro starts and the people below on the floor, who never stop dancing, are still dancing, and the bouncing ball starts to lead her through the lyric, and just as she leaves the lyric to start her chant everything goes dark — the screen, off; the sound, off; the lights, off. Silence. No clatter and whirr of the poker machines from the back. No hum of the coolers. The odor of chicken wings thickens in the atmosphere. The darkness is like stone. And outside, in the streets of Inverness, in the parking lot, not a streetlight, only a few car headlights turning pass through the window to make shadows like ghosts of the vanished dimensions.

On the verandah, conversations continue in a shifting constellation of cigarette tips.

“It's a blackout,” Alexander says.

“Remember I was stuck in that elevator for four hours?” his wife says. “This is nicer. That was New York City.”

“It was an hour-and-a-half, not even.”

“Felt like half a day. Are there any elevators in Inverness?”

“Only in the skyscrapers, along Central Avenue. Every place else you walk up.” Alice is a little impatient with the stupidity. This American is doubly in the dark, doesn't have any sense of what kind of a town is Inverness. Alice doesn't like the dark at all. “Did you get pregnant in the elevator? That's what I would have done.”

“Alice, why don't you go have Gordon fix you another drink? You sound too damned sober.” Kevin pushes on her.

“I'm not going in there in the dark.”

Gordon scoops around with a flashlight behind the bar. He doesn't want to get too far from the cash register. He keeps Emily with him back there, doesn't want her delivering chicken wings in the dark. So far things seem pretty calm, just the mumbling of people waiting for the lights to come back. Emily opens a few beers, one Blue for Billy Crump who sees through the window a curious glow. “Geez,” he whispers. “Will you look at that, will you?” What he sees is a brightness out there over the ocean that he doesn't know how to explain. It's in the sky. The light doesn't penetrate the room, as if the window is a black screen lit up, but opaque, reflecting none of its luminescence on the interior. It seems to move in waves, and take forms. He wishes his wife had shown up to sing the Dixie Chicks, and tell him if he sees what he sees, because he sees chickens, bright chickens tumbling across the sky, a great mass of illuminated chickens is what he thinks he sees, and he's too shy to tell someone.

Edwin Frasier can't see his poker machine because the electric failure has cut it off. The frustration is that he was about to draw two cards to a flush or a possible inside straight. Just his luck. He's lost a lot of money and this win could keep him in the game. Even his wife, gone three years now, was in his mind telling him to play the hand. The darkness makes him nervous and edgy. He leaves the paddock and steps onto the verandah and up in the dimly phosphorescent sky sees a straight flush in diamonds, Queen high, pass through.

“Will you look at that? I've never seen that.” Andrew is looking at the sky. To Lillian it seems as if some cosmetic cream has been spread across the firmament, a nourishing anti-wrinkle thing for the sky. Occasionally a diamond flashes. She presses herself harder against Andrew. “I like it,” she says.

“I've never seen the northern lights so bright, and at the same time as the Perseid.” Andrew explains it that way, but he's not sure he really knows what's going on. The electricity has failed. This he knows for sure. “We're lucky.”