Monster's Chef

by Jervey Tervalon

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Soon as the car started to move, Monster called to the driver, “Play Prince.”

  “You’re a Prince fan?”

  Monster snorted as the bass line of “Head” reverberated in the cavernous backseat. “I like Dirty Mind, and some of his older work. I’m not a fan of his new stuff. I just don’t get it. People talk about how innovative he is, but I think I’m the one who kept up with where music is going.”

  I didn’t want to get into a debate with Monster on that subject, but I did want to know where we were going since we were in such a rush, going over a hundred, blowing by traffic, racing somewhere.

  When we reached the 101 and started north, I began to worry as I sat across from Monster in the seat that faces backward. I tried not to glance in Monster’s direction, knowing if I did I’d be snared by him and unable to look away from the horrifically beautiful car accident that was his face.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “I’ve been working in Manhattan for the last ten years,” I said, looking at my hands like I was surprised to have them.

  “No, where were you born?”

  “I was born in Germany. My dad was in the army.”

  “Oh,” Monster said, disappointment echoing in his voice; I guess my answer wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Did you like Germany?”

  “We moved a lot, I don’t remember much about the country other than it was very cold.”

  “Have you visited since?”

  “Yes, a few times.”

  “How do they treat black people?”

  My mind ground to a halt.

  “What?”

  “How do the Germans treat black people?”

  “I couldn’t say I noticed anything particularly racist.”

  “Some places don’t treat black people very well. That makes me uncomfortable because some of the cats in my band, they don’t get respect and that makes me angry. Russia, for instance, isn’t a place I’ll play again because I’d have to leave all my black personnel home, and I can’t see doing that.”

  He paused but looked as though he was on the verge of saying something else.

  I assumed he thought I was black, black man to black man, explaining the difficulty that black folks have in the world. Then for a moment I got the impression he didn’t think of himself as black, and that I, with my light-skinned ass, had become the single black man in the back of the Rolls.

  “My whole life I’ve tried to be a bridge between groups of people because I see all sides. I’ve evolved. I’ve become something different; I’m not bound by what holds people back. You see what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

  “When I was black, I couldn’t see it, the big picture; then when I changed, it became clear to me and I’ve never looked back.”

  “You changed?” I asked.

  “It just happened. I became something different. It happened at first internally, then the changes radiated outward. Mr. Chow said it was inevitable, that I evolved at such a fundamental level that my appearance would also reflect it.”

  “Well, what started it, this change?”

  I realized where we were going, and at Pismo Beach we pulled off at the Arroyo Grande exit and headed for the ridiculously long line at the In-N-Out Burger.

  I thought, as the Rolls idled in line, that Monster had forgotten my question, but I was wrong.

  “I changed when I made my first hundred million. I wasn’t black anymore, nothing was going to hold me back from finding my destiny.”

  I must have looked confused because he immediately began explaining himself.

  “I know it sounds silly to say that once I made my money I stopped being black, but it’s true. I became a different person and different rules apply to me.”

  I wanted to ask another question about the rules, but the driver had reached the window to order.

  “Monster, what would you like?” the driver asked.

  Monster clapped his hands together with childlike anticipation.

  “Six orders of fries and four animal-style grilled cheeses, two vanilla shakes. You want something?” he said, nodding at me as though he’d forgotten my name.

  “Just a root beer and fries.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad you’re not eating cow. I can’t stand that, cows are sacred to me.”

  I nodded in agreement, glad to make the man who paid the bills happy, but I didn’t know how much happier he could be, the way he tore into that gigantic order of fast food.

  Monster sat back, wiping his face with a napkin, satisfied with his large meal, Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend” reverberating about the cavernous interior of the Rolls as we returned to the Lair.

  “You were so right, man, this is what I wanted. I owe you, Gibson. Mr. Chow needs to understand that I’ve got to let go and live.”

  I DIDN’T WANT IT TO HAPPEN, but it did. I became a kind of friend to Monster. I just wanted to work, earn money, and settle myself into the rhythm of a drug-free life, but that hope was dead. Without me being anything more than professionally friendly, Monster could not get enough of my company. He’d drop in to say hello and watch me prepare the food I knew he didn’t want to eat but insisted on. I suspected that for him it was like magic, and that if he stopped with the Living Food, who knew what might happen? Maybe he’d revert, lose all the progress of that miraculous change, the spectacular and spontaneous event that transformed him from being a black man into a new man, a man whose color bled away until he was near albino. Is that evolution? And his hair, now that was technology, or maybe science fiction. I suspect that his hair had a mind of its own, twisting itself into a ponytail, lengthening or lightening itself whenever it got the inclination.

  With a man like Monster it’s hard not to become obsessed with every little detail of him, and adding up those details was an unending job.

  Around him I was an anthropologist, and he was a race of one and the subject of my life’s work. Reading him was worse than reading tea leaves. I had no idea what Monster thought. If he said anything at all, it was usually to complain about whatever music I played in the kitchen, though he tapped his foot to it.

  Then one afternoon I watched him sample the fresh blueberries I put in front of him; he ate a few, his long white fingers staining blue, and looked up at me.

  “You were married? How did that go?”

  “It was good, marriage was good for me.”

  “Explain that.”

  “Explain what?

  “How marriages can be good.”

  “I just know about my marriage, I couldn’t tell you about anybody else’s marriage.”

  “Well, can you explain why your marriage went bad?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t interested in this, explaining my life to him, but I did want to know about Rita. If his relationship with her was falling apart, I wanted to know everything I could about that.

  “My wife and I had a good thing going for a while and then I blew it,” I said.

  “Drugs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it her fault, did she lead you to drugs?”

  I shook my head, “No, that disaster was all me. She didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  “You’re lucky. Rita makes me wish I was high all the time. Sometimes I think she wants to drive me crazy. Women are like that, capable of all kinds of evilness, but I thought she was different, different from that. I was wrong, I see that now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Monster stood and did some fluid dance move like floating away, and then suddenly he was so close to me I took a step backward.

  “You know I’m a religious man. If you’re gonna bring a child into the world, you need a family, a father and mother. That’s what I wanted, a real family, but I have to admit the reality, the reality is a bitch.”

  “If you feel like that, maybe you should get help, counseling or something.”

  �
�Oh, no, my friend. It’s not me. It’s her. I try to get her to see, I want her to know she’s got to do better. Otherwise . . . I don’t know.”

  I didn’t have a clue of what to say to him, but he looked at me like he expected something.

  “Maybe you should get somebody to talk to her. She might not understand your point of view.”

  “I’m a private person. I don’t like dragging my business through the streets. You know how that works. All those media vultures waiting for me to slip, and camping outside the gates, waiting for the stray word on my collapsing marriage. Nothing is confidential, everybody has a price. You can bank on that. The truth is, I don’t think I can make her happy. That hurts me because I do love her and she’s the mother of my baby. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think she’s not into me the way she used to be. I get jealous thinking maybe she’s looking for something better.”

  Chopping nuts to keep busy, I glanced up and he twirled again and left the kitchen so fast I almost sliced my finger off.

  I WANTED THOSE MORNINGS with Rita to last, but I feared that at any moment Monster would fire me, thinking I was making a play for his wife. On the other hand, I thought maybe he didn’t care, wanted her off his hands and I was doing the job for him.

  Our lessons hadn’t been going on for very long, but already I longed for them, and it wasn’t because I wanted to perfect my sign language skills. One afternoon, in the middle of teaching me, she reached for my hands and held my fingers and stroked each one, and though it was awkward with Security being so close, I also found it tremendously arousing. Thank God she had to leave before I reached over and kissed her.

  Nights crept slowly by as I waited for sunrise and to see her again, incrementally more pregnant, enthusiastically trying to get me to the point where I could sign a basic conversation.

  I knew Security watched us, looking out over the courtyard and herb garden, never a private moment. I knew I could be fired, half expected it, knew it was coming like you know that when you fall out of bed you’ll hit the floor.

  What could I do? She sought me out. Was I supposed to tell her no, leave me the hell alone? We sat there on the bench with her fingers blazing away and me doing my best to understand. I’d slip a glance at her breasts and want to lower my head into her cleavage and rest there for a day. One morning she took my hand and placed it on her belly.

  She mouthed, “He kicks,” then smiled with delight.

  So, Monster was having a boy. That seemed wrong to me; maybe a girl could survive having such a strange man for a father, but a boy? I couldn’t imagine Monster showing up for Saturday morning soccer, scaring the butter out of all the nannies.

  She kept my hand on the drum-tight skin of her belly, and I was more than happy to have it held there.

  We kissed then, briefly, our lips hardly touching. I looked up to the alcove, but Security’s view was obscured by a stout avocado tree, or so I hoped.

  “You are so beautiful,” I whispered to her. Somehow it seemed okay that she might not be able to understand.

  Maybe I didn’t want that, for her to understand me. Monster might have been drawn to the same thing, not having to explain yourself with spoken words. I pulled away from her and wrote a hasty note.

  Do you have to call him Lamont or Monster?

  She laughed wordlessly and took my notebook and wrote: What do you think I call him? I can’t call him anything.

  I shrugged and wrote another note.

  When you write to him how do you refer to him? You call him Monster or Lamont?

  Monster, she wrote. He is a monster. That’s what he thinks of himself.

  She smiled and leaned over and kissed my lips lightly and returned to the mansion.

  THERE WERE MANY THINGS I forced myself not to think about; why she was with Monster was one of them.

  For his money or fame or whatever—I didn’t want to know. I accepted that, at some point, Monster was the goal she had in life. Maybe she had been in a bad situation, and if she landed him, everything would make sense. I guess that bad situation changed into a fairy tale, and Monster transformed into a white knight in shining armor. It didn’t last, Monster being the strange cat that he was, and Rita went back to being the needy woman. Me, I had been there; thought I could be a good husband and not the man I had been before who liked to get high. My shining armor crashed to the floor and I stood there naked to the world, a reformed basehead. And, as fucked up as I was, I had to pull myself out of that rathole of despair. If you want to help someone in a bad situation, you need to give them the opportunity to work their way out of it. At least that’s how it was for me, and with the help of Asha I managed to pull myself out of the mess of my life. But it wasn’t Asha dragging me by the scruff of my neck to independence from drugs. It was me; I wanted to stop. I wouldn’t ruin that for Rita, snatching away that last shred of dignity, even if it made me feel good about myself, like I was some kind of half-assed hero on a mission to save wayward white women. I didn’t need to know her personal tragedy, character flaw, failing, or whatever it was that led her to Monster’s Lair. She was down that path and so was I, and now the future was more important than rehashing the past.

  I PICKED UP Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in a cutout bin at a gas station in Solvang.

  If I couldn’t sleep, I’d listen to Marvin relentlessly until I passed out, drunk off his voice. He had his demons, but his soul was made pure by the suffering that even a deaf fool could hear in his voice; he became my companion in misery. He made nights bearable. Before, I’d lie in bed listening to crickets until the crickets got tired of putting on a show, and I’d get sick of myself and think that this was why I became a basehead, not being able to stand myself. I wanted to get to a better place, a quiet place, a place very much like Monster’s Lair, a high that isolated you from all the madness and noise until you realized none of it made sense, that you were fucked. The pipe will do that for you, make the mundane bullshit of everyday life disappear, to be replaced by the monumental bullshit of looking for the next high.

  I could have written a book on how I was slowly becoming a roach, giving up my humanity for the constant thrill of the pipe, the allure and squalor of it.

  Dreams of Rita receded into the fatigue of sleeplessness, and I couldn’t force myself to stay awake; when my growing fascination/minor obsession with Monster couldn’t sustain me and Marvin couldn’t help me, I’d drift off to a dead sleep, usually and thankfully free of dreams, but not tonight.

  Tonight I heard gunshots.

  I heard them distinctly and they were near. I had an innate instinct not to get too excited by gunshots, and of course I didn’t make the suburban mistake of flinging the door open to see what was happening. I pulled a pillow over my head and hoped that whatever it was would end, but it didn’t. I heard stout voices shouting, and more shots, and the endlessly shining lights of Monster’s Lair blazed brighter. They invaded my bungalow, casting shadows, making everything disorienting. From behind the bungalow a commotion erupted, shouts and curses, the sounds of a struggle.

  Panicked, I rushed for the door, flung it open, and ran down the steps of the bungalow, and before I could decide where to run next, I heard a command to freeze.

  “Don’t move!”

  I stopped and held my arms high. Blinded by the lights, all I could do was squint in the directions of the voices.

  “Is that him? I thought we had that son of a bitch.”

  “No,” another voice replied. “He’s the cook.”

  “Go inside and stay,” the voice shouted.

  I did as they asked. I sat in the rocking chair with a blanket wrapped around me, and listened to them shout as they searched for the intruder until just about daybreak. Was this the same intruder who had been mentioned earlier? He had found a way onto the grounds and caused a DEFCON 1 kind of reaction, even with all the security upgrades. I felt kind of giddy with excitement and I wasn’t sure why, other than I guess I liked the idea of Monster’s kingdo
m besieged.

  Early the next morning Monster appeared in the kitchen, sporting a fuzzy purple robe and matching slippers and a bone-colored stocking cap over his jet-black hair. He reminded me of actor Claude Rains in a smoking jacket, wrapped in white, wrapped ready to unroll and disappear in an instant.

  “You heard that craziness outside of your bungalow?” Monster asked as he ran his hand over the purple fuzz of his robe.

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t a problem. I could have slept through it, but these days I don’t sleep well.”

  Monster laughed. “You don’t have to lie. I heard the situation got ugly. I need to fire somebody, madness just keeps going on and I can’t convey to Security how important it is to roll up this intruder.”

  “Who?”

  His eyes flared.

  “My stalker. He comes with the job. You don’t get to be a true superstar without a stalker trying to get into your life. You catch one and there’s another popping up like a fucking jack-in the-box.”

  I had never seen Monster pissed off; his cheeks had an unnatural ruddiness to them, and he shook his head, unable to calm himself.

  “I hate my life when it gets like this, when I can’t control what happens. I can’t live like that. I can’t do good work when my head is about to explode.”

  “Security had the stalker under control, but somehow he got free. I thought they would have him arrested by now.”

  Monster scowled.

  “I’m not talking about that idiot, he’s just a humbug. I let it get out of hand because I don’t want to get nasty, and that’s the only reason he gets away with what he does. When I’m ready, it’s done like a fucking baked potato.”

  Monster had got himself so agitated that he had to wipe his mouth with the back of the sleeve of his robe.

  “You know the stalker?”

  “Hell, yeah! I know him, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the stupid business I’m in. Dealing with those fuckers just makes me insane. Like my time isn’t valuable. They don’t respect me and I’m the one making money for them, the greedy fuckers.”