Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  She wasn’t referring to Norman Mailer, the novelist who had looked her over—approvingly or disapprovingly, she could not determine—at the I & I party. No, she referred to a certain street performer, who . . . well, never mind. Turn Around Norman’s turn will come. Let’s allow Ellen Cherry to sleep this off.

  Knock knock knock! Something was knocking like the pistons on Satan’s Nash Rambler. Ellen Cherry actually couldn’t tell whether the sound was external or internal, whether it was a visitor rapping at her door or her hangover trying to hang a picture on the wall of her skull. A picture of The Massacre of the Innocents painted on black velvet by a hydrocephalic baboon.

  She sat up in bed and opened her eyes. She opened her eyes carefully so that they wouldn’t break. Her eyes seemed to be playing the eye game without her. The room was so out of focus she was afraid to breathe until she made absolutely certain she wasn’t underwater. She could hear better with her eyes open, however. Most people could. Knock knock! It was the door.

  “Who is it?” she called—and instantly winced.

  “Me!”

  “Who?”

  “Me! Open up! I used to live here! Wahoo!”

  Why now, dear God? Why now? She hadn’t seen the fool in more than a month, and he shows up when she was undressed, hung over, and doubtlessly looking like The Massacre of the Innocents painted on black velvet by a hydrocephalic baboon. The fact that he’d seen her a hundred times first thing in the morning after a hard night didn’t mean a thing. That was then and this was now. She sprang from bed. “Give me five minutes,” she called, knowing full well that it would take longer than that just to peel the wallpaper off her tongue.

  The fact that she didn’t have to brush her hair—what difference would it have made?—cut down on her repair time. In eight minutes, exactly, the mirror showed her only marginally below the summit of her potential. Of course, she hadn’t bathed, but a splash or two of Jungle Desire cologne would take care of that. She splashed, then went to the door.

  “Sugar britches.”

  “Yeah, Boomer?”

  He was wearing one of his old faded Hawaiian shirts and, were she not mistaken, the same steel-toed work shoes he’d been married in, but his leather pants were new and expensive. A beret as red as a mosquito’s belch reduced the amount of scalp revealed by his receding hairline to an area just slightly too small to invite spray-can graffiti. The beret was nothing new, however. He had taken to wearing it the day that he discovered that he was an artist.

  She found him a beer in the fridge, a Pabst Blue Ribbon that he’d left behind. There wasn’t a slice of cold pizza on the premises, but he didn’t suffer, having consumed three that morning already.

  “I was in the neighborhood . . .”

  “Yeah. Right. Well, then, how’re you doing, Boomer?”

  “Got my nose to the grindstone.”

  “Good.”

  “My shoulder to the wheel.”

  “Fine.”

  “My ear to the cauliflower.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My cheeks to the halibut.”

  “You’re certainly flip these days.”

  “My lip to the flipper.”

  “Is that what she calls it?”

  “Be nice.”

  “How is ol’ Ultima, anyway?”

  “Ellen Cherry, I don’t hardly ever see Ultima. I don’t see her that much. She wants to see you, though. I told her I thought you were painting again.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Whadda ya call them?” He nodded, beret and all, toward the twenty or more canvases stacked against the wall.

  “Experiments.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “No! Don’t you touch those paintings!”

  “I thought they weren’t paintings.”

  They sat for a time in silence. Boomer gulped his beer. She didn’t offer another. He crushed the empty can in his big welder’s fist, then began twisting the aluminum into some form or other. She wondered if he would include it in his exhibition.

  After a while, he asked, “You doing okay?”

  “Indisputably. I’m gainfully employed. I’ve got my health. Except I have been having psychic problems lately. I keep channeling Janis Joplin.”

  “Huh?”

  She commenced to sing. “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair, I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair . . .”

  “Ellen Cherry.”

  “. . . and send him on his way-ay.”

  “Ellen Cherry, now.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got no control over it. Sometimes she just takes over my body.”

  Nervously, Boomer scratched his thick neck. “Yeah, well, that was some kind of Broadway show tune you were singing. Janis Joplin never sung any song like that. She was rock ’n’ roll.”

  “She’s dead, Boomer. In death, a singer can expand her repertoire.”

  “And I don’t buy that bull about washing a man outta your hair, neither. That hair of yours? Man get caught in there, you could shampoo forever and not set him loose.”

  “Well, that sure wouldn’t be any problem for you. Exactly how many hairs do you have left now? Under that corny damn beret?”

  That was the way it went, sparring, beating around their respective bushes, neither of them saying what was really on his or her mind, until Ellen Cherry glanced at the clock and realized that she had to be at the I & I in twenty-four minutes. He offered her a ride, and because she was late, she accepted. She made him wait in the hall while she changed, not so much out of modesty as fear that as soon as her back was turned, he would sneak a look at her paintings.

  Descending in the elevator, she primed herself for some industrial-strength flirting with Raoul. She wanted Boomer to have a good look at how much that young stud wanted her. Raoul wasn’t manning the door, though. She’d forgotten that he didn’t come on duty until four in the afternoon. He’s probably home balling his sister, she thought. Or brushing his hat. Maybe both at the same time.

  Ellen Cherry was wrong. Raoul was in a recording studio spending his Ansonia earnings to lay down a track.

  Pigeon she strut on the rooftop

  Cockroach he strut on the sink

  My baby strut down to Jerusalem

  Where blood is the favorite drink

  “Leban zabadi. That’s the creamy Egyptian yogurt. Turshi. Uh, turshi is the . . . the mixed vegetables in . . . a spicy sauce. Dajaj mashwi. That’s the half-chicken marinated in lemon, oregano, garlic, pepper, and olive oil. Why did the half-chicken cross the road, Boomer?”

  “Which half was it?”

  “Either half. Take your pick.”

  “Well, if it was split down the middle, it’d be a half-assed chicken. I’d have to be pretty hungry to order that.”

  “Shawarma. That’s the thinly sliced beef with Middle Eastern spices. Majadra is the rice cooked with lentils and flavored with fried onions. Roz bel khalta. Roz bel khalta. Now what the heck is roz bel khalta?”

  “Yiddish for Mrs. Jimmy Carter?”

  “Sounds more like a stripper to me. Roz Bel Khalta, the Gypsy Rose Lee of the Middle East. But we’ve got no strippers at the I and I.” (Maybe not yet, Ellen Cherry. But a time is coming. Oh, yes! A time is surely coming.)

  “Shish kabob. Everybody knows shish kabob. Shish tawook. Same thing, only chicken. Funny name, though. Mr. Hadee likes the name, shish tawook. Musical name, he says. Like a little poem.”

  Boomer shook his head until his beret slipped askew. “Right out of Robert Frost,” he said.

  Riding to the restaurant in Boomer’s brand-new Ford van, Ellen Cherry was going over the menu in her head. She had to know it intimately so that she could monitor the waiters and waitresses. It was her job to scold them should they misinform a diner or mix up an order. Neither extensive nor, in her opinion, particularly appetizing, the menu was a challenge, nonetheless.

  “Baba ghanoug. I ought to know that one. Baba ghanoug . . .”

  “T
hat’s the name Richard Alpert took when he got back from India. Or else it’s what that Walters woman drinks at Christmas time.”

  He dropped her off on the corner of Forty-ninth and United Nations Plaza at precisely 10:00 A.M. He blew her a big welder’s kiss as he sped away. Outwardly, she scowled, but her insides turned into leban zabadi.

  Since this was a shakedown lunch, the first lunch of the I & I renaissance, Spike and Abu were on hand. In the future, they would be present only in the evenings. They would spend most of their days playing tennis.

  They had met at a senior citizens tennis camp in Florida. Fate threw them together as doubles partners. The best duo in camp, they were well on their way to winning the camp doubles trophy when Spike announced that he wouldn’t be available for the championship match. To Spike’s surprise, Abu said that he couldn’t participate, either.

  The next morning, at the scheduled time of their forfeited match, there was a modest peace rally in Miami Beach. Spike and Abu bumped into each other outside the Fontainebleu Hotel, where a jingoistic presidential candidate was ranting about the need to reduce Soviet influence in the Middle East. Spike stared at Abu’s placard. Abu stared at Spike’s. They laughed. After that, they were partners off court and on.

  Ellen Cherry’s title was maître d’, but technically she was day manager. Her duties included captaining the reservations desk, orchestrating time slots and table configurations, making up work schedules, assigning sections, finding replacements for ill or hooky-playing employees, receiving deliveries, ascertaining that tables were set correctly, that ice bins were full and the bar stocked, and generally overseeing service. She wasn’t required to keep books, but she did have to inspect waitpersons for dirty nails, unusual odors, and flamboyant hickeys, and she had to be vigilant against cockroach appendages in the baba ghanoug.

  As did most other Manhattan restaurateurs, Spike and Abu bribed the health inspectors. Still, a skinny little leg draped over a chickpea, like a bathing beauty’s gam encircling a beach ball, was considered bad for business.

  “What business?” one might fairly ask, since the dining room was no more than a quarter full for that first lunch, and those diners—unsuspecting tourists in the neighborhood to visit UN Headquarters—were evacuated in a hurry when a bomb threat was phoned in a few minutes past noon.

  Standing on the sidewalk waiting for the bomb squad to complete its search, Spike asked Ellen Cherry if the caller had mentioned his affiliation.

  “No, he didn’t,” she said. “He had a foreign accent, but I couldn’t tell if it was Arab or Jewish.”

  “In many parts of the Middle East, they sound alike,” said Spike. “People ask, what’s your menu, Palestinian or Israeli? So, what’s the difference? I ask back. In Jerusalem, all peoples are eating basically the same. One time down the street there at the United Nations, no kidding, the PLO officially complained that the Israelis had stolen their national dish, falafel. Ha! The Israelis laughed and kept munching already. You know what science says: you are what you eat.”

  “Are you implying that Arabs and Jews are a whole lot alike? Mr. Hadee thinks otherwise.”

  “Alike or different is not the problem. The problem is that they think they’re so different. Each one thinks they’re superior. Their religions teach them they’re superior. I love my people. In modern times, at least, we have been a smart, industrious people, and a caring people. A kind and humorous people. But to say that we’re God’s ’chosen’ people, the ones what are favored above all the others, hoo boy! that’s tempting fate. That’s begging for trouble. And trouble we got already. Jerusalem is the trouble capital of the world. For thousands of years, Jerusalem is the capital of trouble and death.”

  “Then why do you and Mr. Hadee love it so much?”

  There was a long and dramatic pause. The pause was almost as long as the East River, that scruffy orphan of the ocean that ran like a gutter of snot at their backs. The pause was nearly as dramatic as the UN Headquarters building, that modern Tower of Babel, tower of ego, cipher, hope, and suspicion, that rose into the brittle sky a block to the south. There was a long, dramatic pause, during which Ellen Cherry suspected that Spike was leering at her slippers.

  Spike Cohen was considerably shorter than Roland Abu Hadee. He was stockier, and usually more animated. Whereas Abu was as placid as the eye of a storm, Spike was a funnel of worry twisting around and around that eye. His hair was as silver as a royal tea tray. He oiled it lightly and combed it straight back. It resembled the moonlit surf on a chrome beach, a wave breaking over a tropical Detroit. His features were as finely formed as those on a poster in a Greek delicatessen, but his eyes were anything but classical. They were ray-shooting emeralds that might have been scooped from the sockets of a jaguar idol. Indeed, there was something feline about him; Shoe Lion rather than Shoe Wolf. Abu—who had walked up in the middle of the long pause—had taken, as he matured, to wearing dark, heavy clothing, but Spike wore the orange sports jackets and chartreuse ties of a man who dressed to impress racehorses.

  Abu had just begun to comment on the mess the bomb squad was making inside the restaurant, when Spike terminated his pause. “What I love most about Jerusalem is that it’s not about money.”

  “Pardon?”

  “New York here is a city about money. L.A.’s about money. Las Vegas is about money. Dallas the same. Tokyo and London, Milan, Zurich, Singapore, the whole reason for them is money. Tel Aviv’s about money. But Jerusalem, it’s not about money.”

  “He is absolutely right,” put in Abu. “Jerusalem is about . . . something else.”

  The bomb squad proclaimed the area safe, questioned Ellen Cherry briefly, and then departed. Surveying the disorder, Spike commented that the I & I might have sustained less damage had there actually been an explosion. Chick-peas rolled hazardously beneath their feet, and loosened bamboo matting hung from the walls like the baggy folds of elephants. “How much liquor did they steal?” Spike asked the bartender.

  “About twelve bottles.”

  “Oy! With our best brandy they wash down their doughnuts.”

  “If there is another bomb scare, we should let our own security guards handle it,” proposed Abu.

  “What you mean if?”

  It took the three of them and the lunch staff most of the afternoon to get the place in shape for dinner. Around five o’clock, the cooks and waitpersons were sent home, and Ellen Cherry sat down with Spike and Abu for a glass of tea. Spike had a shot of rum in his. “Hoo boy!” he said.

  When Ellen Cherry expressed her condolences for the external problems besetting the I & I, Abu advised her not to fret. “It is quite flattering,” he said. “There are so many people, many of them powerful, who object to a peaceful settlement in the Middle East. It is encouraging that they think our little restaurant could make a difference. Let them protest. Let them bomb. I am flattered.”

  “Not me,” said Spike. “I am heartsick already that there are Jews in this hanky-pank. I got heartbreak even though I know that in ancient times there were Jews behaving worse, that biblical Jew behavior set a bad example for the Christians what followed. All that ’smite smite smite,’ ’slew slew slew.’”

  Wondering aloud how there possibly could be people who didn’t want peace in the Middle East, Ellen Cherry realized instantly that she should have kept her mouth shut. Abu and Spike, each in his distinct fashion, were all too willing to fill her in. Their explanations might have been instructive had they the virtues of simplicity or logic, but apparently such assets were entirely missing from any accurate Middle East account.

  Until quite recently, if Ellen Cherry had been asked what was the first thing she thought about when she heard the words “Middle East,” she would have answered, “Rugs.”

  She had never paid much attention to the Middle Eastern situation, per se, and now she knew why. It was an overload of craziness. It was a seventy-piece orchestra rehearsing a funeral dirge and a wedding march simultaneously in a broom
closet. It was a firebug convention in a straw hotel.

  Since her association with the I & I, she’d learned about the various kinds of Arabs: Druse, Shiites, Sunnis, Hijazi, Bedouins, Sufis, Wahhabis, Arab Christians—and the Palestinians, who didn’t really consider themselves to be Arabs and who were contemptuous of the nomadic traditions of their “Sleeping Gypsy” cousins. Jesus! The Middle East had more kinds of Arabs than Cartier had pillboxes. Apparently, it was about as bad with the Jews. Hardly a monolith, Jews ranged over a wide, politically diverse spectrum; instead of one Jewish point of view, there were dozens, angrily divided along ethnic, class, and religious lines.

  As for who was legitimately entitled to Jerusalem and the land surrounding it—entitled to Palestine or Israel or whatever it ought to be called—forget it! You could make a perfectly just case for either side; in fact, you could make a different just case for either side every fifteen minutes from now until bulldogs barked for bean sprouts. And then you’d have to factor in the Christians.

  It’s too complex, too confusing, she thought. Nobody’ll ever straighten this damn mess out. From that afternoon on, when anyone mentioned the Middle East, she went back to thinking rugs. Give her an Oriental carpet, opulent and jazzy, comforting yet intense, like an overtuned eye game flattened and spread out on the floor. Give her pattern and color, give her a map of the higher mind, a map woven from dreams and hair and dyed with spices and wine. Give her beauty, in other words. Give her humanity’s best shot. Give her art.

  She kissed Abu and Spike on their sad, spunky foreheads, untangled herself from their wild weave, and walked what remained of her hangover hurriedly up to Fifth Avenue, hoping that she wasn’t too late to catch Turn Around Norman at work.

  There was a full hour of daylight left, but it was the lame-duck daylight of autumnal afternoons, a daylight that already had been defeated by night. Long brown shadows sepia-toned the streets, and the chill that was settling upon Manhattan felt as invigoratingly decadent as the breath of a jack-o’-lantern. Indeed, the watered-down morbidity of Halloween trappings haunted the windows of the recherché brownstones along East Forty-ninth Street. There was actually a paper skeleton dancing in the doorway of the Mel Davis Dog Boutique, where Ellen Cherry paused ever so briefly to gaze in a kind of pre-Halloween horror at a prissy hound being anointed with oils. She wondered why Mel didn’t paste a dog skeleton on his door glass, little that poodles understood about the Way of the Dead, although all dogs, including barbered poochie-woochies, had a nose for invisible paths.