Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

Nolly pulled on her. She knew she had to go. She quietly opened the door, but something started beeping. “Fuckin' Jeep,” she mumbled, and ripped out some wires under the dash so the beep stopped. She lowered Rick's head from the steering column to lay it across her seat. He shifted his body. He was out.

Timarie followed Nolly into the woods. It all felt to her like a different movie from the one they had seen. Through the trees they could see an edge of brightness pushing at the dark eastern sky. It was no longer late. It was early. Another day might come. He stopped, and held her back with his arm.

“Shhh!”

They could hear a faint clank of metal against metal.

“That's them,” Nolly whispered.

“Who?”

“Shh. I don't know. Come.”

They got low and crawled farther through the trees, where they saw the beams of flashlights whipping around the underbrush. Timarie was getting into this, like it was a real movie. Nolly had his gun jammed into his belt at his back. They crawled behind a rock at the edge of the cliff that overlooked the United Artists parking lot.

“Who are they?” asked Timarie.

“Fuck do I know?”

There was more light. They could see the men were white, which always made them suspicious. They were dressed in combat fatigues, which was worse. They had some guns set up pointing towards the parking lot. “Mortars,” whispered Nolly. Bits of conversations carried toward them on the dawn breeze.

“That ain't Spanish, vato,” said Timarie.

“What the fuck are they doing? Why are they here?”

Timarie looked down at the parking lot. “That's the car. Ain't that the Fairlane we just traded? Look, there's people around it. People are in it too.” She looked back to the men with mortars. “This is like something you get on TV. Like some war. You gotta do something, Nolly.”

Nolly pulled his gun from under his belt and looked at it. He checked the clip. Three rounds gone. He looked at Timarie. She saw fear in his face. “What can I do?”

The men in fatigues were lifting mortar rounds out of their crates.

“Santa Maria y Jesu. Do something quick. Those people down there are gonna get blown up if you don't do something.”

“So, what? What can I do anyway?”

The first mortar round blew about eighty yards from the car. The soldiers adjusted quickly as the family scrambled below.

“There's kids there. There's women gonna die. Nolly. Do something. Give me the fuckin' gun.”

Nolly handed her the 9mm and crawled back toward the Jeep. Timarie looked at the gun. She had never fired a gun. She pointed it at the men in fatigues. Several mortar rounds went off below, one followed by a big explosion as the car was hit. She squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. She turned to ask Nolly how to shoot, but he was gone, so she looked at the gun again. Sig Sauer was engraved on the handle. That didn't mean anything to her. She squeezed again and nothing happened. Nolly had taken the clip with him. She stepped out toward the men, holding the gun in two hands like they did in the movies. “Stop,” she said. “Just stop.” The men in fatigues were startled to see her, and they stepped back from the mortars, then they started to laugh. “Parar! Detener!”

She didn't know if she was using the right word, but she was pissed. “Stop the guns. Don't kill those people.” She squeezed the trigger again. The laughing stopped and she stood there. She stood there for about sixteen seconds.

After several days, Gloria returned to the coffeehouse alone. She half-expected the actors still to be there; after all, the movie was still running. It was late and there were no customers. They were ready to close. The tattooed waitress was obviously annoyed that she had come in. “To go,” Gloria said immediately, to reassure her. The waitress became friendlier.

“What would you like?”

“I was in a couple of nights ago.” She tapped her nose. “You had a thing.” She didn't know how to say it.

“You mean the special?”

“Yeah. It was a special.”

The waitress brought it in a take-out box, with the sauce on the side. “This is the last one.” She handed back Gloria's money. “It's on us.”

Gloria set the box on her bed and hung up her coat. She got into her peejays and straightened up the shrine and cushion where she meditated, then opened the Styrofoam take-out box. Without the sauce on it, this looked even more like Harvey Keitel's nose, tattooed, but without a septum. Maybe too much cocaine. She grinned. When she meditated she grinned a lot. But she could have been mistaken; maybe it wasn't Harvey Keitel's nose. She could call his agent and find out. No, she was sure it was; anyway, it made no difference. She had no inclination to bite into the nose. It was just a model, anyway, a simulacrum. But she did have a peculiar inclination to wear it over her clitoris while she sat. The word, clitoris , still made her uncomfortable, though she was grateful for it. Before her procedure was completed, the nub had been the tip of her penis, and it felt to her fingers very much like the tip of her former organ. She didn't know why, but felt it would be right to cap it with Harvey Keitel's nose.

No one in Denver, her new city, knew she had formerly been a guy, not even her best friend, Harriet. The children she had fathered were still living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and hadn't yet come to see her. Maybe some day. She understood it was complicated for them. It was complicated for her; for instance, was she Grandpa, or was she Grandma? She dreaded running into her ex-Special Forces buddy, Mike Sugman, who she knew lived somewhere around Denver. At the same time there was a thrilling possibility, after all they had been through together, of becoming his girlfriend, or his mistress if he was married.

There were some things about being a woman she still needed to smooth out, although as a woman she felt she had definitely become more herself. Meditation helped, meditation on the body of woman. She used to pray, but she stopped doing that. When you prayed, you prayed for something concrete; for instance, he had prayed a lot for the body of a woman; but you meditate to empty your mind of all desire, to stop the painful attachment to thought and emotion. If she were ever to pray for something again, aside from asking for a man who would truly love her and care for her, it would be to be granted the function of menses. She knew she would penetrate further into her womanhood if she could only menstruate, at least once, just to know it, just to deepen her kinship with the moon. No one who had counseled Gloria had advised her what her womanhood might be after menopause, how sad it might be.

But this was all right. She felt really good about herself now. She didn't know if the impulse to cap her clitoris with this particular nose was sexual or what. Was it just crazy? Was it demeaning to herself as a woman? Did other women have such notions? She hadn't yet had time enough as a total woman to think this all through. She'd learned other things — to relax and let men open car doors for her, to let them slide restaurant chairs under her butt. But now she was alone, in the privacy of her own meditation corner. And when she was through, she decided, she would attach the nose to her small Corning cutting board with Krazy Glue, and then cover it with polyester resin to preserve it forever for herself.

She turned off the electric lights, lit a candle and a joss stick, and lowered her butt to the cushion, and sat still to gather herself for a moment before she slipped Harvey Keitel's nose over her clitoris. It fit like a cap, and that made her grin. This felt like some mischief, and she liked that. As she breathed she repeated the mantra that guru what's-her-face had given her during one expensive weekend at the ashram in the Catskills. The mantra was SO on the inbreath, HAM on the outbreath. SO HAM, SO HAM, SO HAM. It translated roughly as I am that, I am that, I am that.