Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Turning blindly, I found myself bouncing down a narrow strip of asphalt. Only veiny bushes were visible in the yellowish cast of my headlights. A few low branches clawed and scraped at the sides of my Subaru. It was the kind of rural road where cars always broke down in horror movies—I half expected a man with a meat-hook to emerge—or, the more I thought about it, some mutant life-form from Applebee’s—but after a few minutes, it merged with another access road and I came upon a town. For a moment, I felt a bolt of relief. There on my right, on the side of the road, illuminated ghoulishly, was a sign.

  JOHNNY’S.

  Beyond it, up a little rise, was a low, shingled building with two neon logos sputtering in blackened windows. It sat there awaiting me. Like a reward.

  The planked floors inside crunched sandily with sawdust; Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” played on an antique jukebox at a volume high enough to cause arrhythmia. A few steps down past the pool tables (kwok kwok!), a large, horseshoe-shaped bar rose up from the center of the room like a shrine, the illuminated shelves behind it displaying bottles as if they were artifacts, glowing amber, citrine, topaz in the light.

  The air had that wonderful bar perfume of wood varnish and hops. Competing televisions blazed from the paneled walls around me: replays of a Pirates game was being televised at full volume, Fox News on another screen, a video of Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé feeding each other french fries and twerking in a kiddie pool. On CNN, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz were yelling at each other above a digitized swoosh reading “America Decides,” before the camera cut to a clip of a bombed-out high-rise in Syria. As nonchalantly as I could, I sauntered down the steps, my eyes fixed on the screens. I pretended not to notice I was making a beeline for the bar. It was like visiting the Pink Pussycat boutique as a teenager again. You just happen to be here, I told myself. You’re just taking a break from sitting in your Subaru so you don’t get that deep vein thrombosis they warn you about in airplanes. But my dirty little heart was kicking like a horse. Just one. Just one. I could feel it already: I was nothing but a parasympathetic nervous system now. I Want. I Need. Fill Me. I could already feel the satiating heft of beveled glass, the pillowy crescent of lime giving way between my thumb and forefinger.

  “Sorry, ma’am. We’ve got a private party here tonight.” A man in a flannel shirt stepped in front of me and flicked his thumb at two velvet ropes cordoning off the bar. “It’s table service only now.” He tilted his chin toward the jukebox. A young waitress slumped against it, absorbed by something on her phone. When he summoned her, she looked startled to find herself in the middle of a roadhouse.

  “Just one?” She barely glanced at me. Pivoting sullenly, she scanned the dining room. “The thing is, it’s Happy Hour, so, like, there’s not really any places free right now?”

  “You’ve got nothing?” I said. “Look. Please. I’ve been driving for hours. I just—dammit! This shouldn’t be rocket science!” I glanced around, embarrassed by my own shrillness. I was certain the whole bar was turning to stare at me. I forced a laugh. “I mean, what do I need to get a drink around here?” I tried to sound playful. “A special user name? A password?”

  “Well?” Knitting her fingers together, the waitress squinted back toward the kitchen. “Are you, like, okay, just having wings?”

  “Wings?” Good God: That was exactly what I needed. Great wings of violet and peacock green and gold. To soar above all disappointment and pain.

  Then I realized: No. She meant chicken.

  “Because if you want to join the table over there,” she said, “the deal is, tonight, for twenty bucks, you get all-you-can-eat hot wings and a ‘bottomless’ Bud. That’s, like, five bucks more than normal? But the extra money goes to Kiwanis? For, like, these kids with hiatal hernias or something?”

  She motioned to a banner hung above a banquet table by the blacked-out windows: “WINGIN’ WITH KIWANIS 4 KIDS.” It was already crowded, I could see; the table was piled with discarded red plastic-mesh baskets and half-empty pitchers.

  Hot wings were one of Joey’s favorite foods—not mine. In fact, whenever possible, I avoided them. They were oily and messy, impossible to eat with any sort of élan. Plus, because they were chicken, you might think maybe they weren’t fattening, but they were! One serving of six had 616 calories—not even counting the blue cheese dressing (another 230)!

  And beer? Why would anyone order Budweiser when you could have tequila? Or a martini?

  But the room was starting to constrict around me—and the prospect of walking back up the steps and climbing into my Subaru felt suddenly unbearable—my heart was throbbing with longing—and once my eyes fixated upon the foam-streaked pitchers dotted up and down the long table, well, it was done. Already I could feel the mug sweating in my hand.

  The Kiwanis diners had large paper napkins tucked into their shirt collars like bibs. They were laughing with their mouths wide open, tossing wetwipes at one another, slapping each other’s backs with exaggerated bonhomie. They were in the early stages of inebriation—the best stages, flush with goodwill, when everybody’s still your friend, even the strangers. I’d forgotten how much I missed this camaraderie. Drinking together was like being in a band.

  There was only one empty chair left, next to a biker with a gray ponytail and a walrussy mustache. He was wearing a red baseball cap with WING MAN embroidered across it in white. “Hey. Welcome to team Wing Nuts,” he said as I wedged myself in. “Glad to have you aboard. We’re already one man down. Let’s get you set up.”

  An older, cadaverous woman passed me a stack of napkins and a fresh plate. She had hair dyed the color of paprika and a neck-load of beaded necklaces. “Hi. I’m Leanne,” she said in a rusty voice. She nodded at the biker. “This here is Lenny.”

  “I’m Brenda.” I don’t know why I said this—it was just the first name that popped into my head. I glanced around for a waitress.

  “So,” Lenny said, “are you a speed freak or a fire eater?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Marty over there, man, our ‘Wing Leader’? He ate forty wings in under three minutes this year at the annual festival in Buffalo. Tina?” He motioned toward an Asian girl in a Ball State sweatshirt seated to my left. “Almost the same. They’re aiming to be inducted into the ‘Chicken Wing Hall of Flame.’ Now me? I’m a ‘fire eater’ myself. For me, it’s all about the burn, man.”

  He leaned in and gazed at me with the intensity of a war veteran. “You ever eat wings made with the sauce from the Trinidad Moruga scorpion pepper? Or ghost peppers?” He shook his head, drained his beer. “Hottest things on the planet, man. They’ll fuckin’ kill you—pardon my language. But I find it’s a very spiritual experience, you know? The pain is very purifying.”

  Good God: Why is everyone so besotted with self-inflicted pain? I wondered. Was this now a thing? I scanned the dining room again. “Do you see the waitress?” I said. “I don’t have a mug.”

  “Oh, honey, you don’t want to start with the beer,” the redhead said. “It’ll fill you up too quickly. You won’t be able to stomach more than four or five wings. We always save it until after.”

  “Sorry?” I said over the din.

  She raised one penciled-in eyebrow and grinned. “You know this is a wing-eating contest, right?” When she saw my face, she patted my arm and chuckled. “Oh, wow. A first-timer. Don’t worry, honey. We gotcha covered. It’s all in good fun. Just eat what you can, fast or slow. It’s a team effort. They count up how much we eat as a group. Otherwise, those professional speed-eaters over there, heck, they’d win every time. Here.” She passed me a cruet bowl of flecked whitish dressing and a fistful of celery sticks. “Just remember: Blue cheese is your friend.”

  “Oh, wait. No, listen. I’m sorry.” But as I pushed my chair back, it got caught in the legs of the others.

  “Everybody ready?” Marty shouted, picking up his phone. “Now, for round three, we’ve kicked it up a notch. It’s ‘Hell’s
Kitchen’ level now, folks. For those of you just joining us, over here, in the yellow T-shirts, all the way from Akron, is the team Wings and a Prayer. Next to them, from Bakerstown, winners of round one, is the team Hot Lips. Beside them, going for their second win of the night, I bring to you the Kiwanis chapter president himself, Sammy Ballon, and his lean, mean, chicken-eating machine, Lords of the Wings!”

  Other customers were woo-hooing and whistling and climbing up on their chairs, aiming their phones in our direction. I felt that same cold panic I used to feel in high school when a test that I hadn’t studied for landed on my desk. I just wanted a beer, dammit. But as team Wing Nuts was announced, Leanne grabbed my hand and shook it in the air above our heads as if we were a pair of boxers entering a ring together, and then a basket heaped with greasy, gleaming wings appeared before me. “Don’t worry,” the biker said and winked at me. “You got this. You’re good.”

  “Okay, folks,” Marty called down the table. “I’m setting my timer.”

  “Excuse me,” I called after the harried waitress doling out more chicken. “My beer? Or a shot of Cuervo? I’ll pay extra.”

  Tina, from Wings and a Prayer, and her teammate Bruno were both Instagramming pictures of their chicken. “I hashtagged it ‘mouthkiller,’ ‘toohottohandle,’ and ‘wingwoman,’” Tina announced. “Dude,” Bruno said to his phone. “Already, mine’s got, like, forty likes?”

  “All right, folks,” Marty said, holding up his phone and squinting at it, trying to approximate the button on the touch screen with his thumb. “On your mark…get set…Go!”

  Suddenly, heads bent down all around me and moved back and forth over the chicken drumlets like the chassis of old typewriters and dot-matrix printers. They chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, tossing the stripped bones into the baskets with robotic speed, not once looking up, each one singularly absorbed, their puffy, sauce-slicked fingers delicately pinching the ends of the lurid wings as they sucked and devoured and tore at the flesh. “Go, go, go!” a few onlookers shouted, crowding closer.

  In the plastic basket, the chicken wings awaited me, deep-fried and radioactive in their tangerine-colored gloss. They were all that stood between me and a mug of Budweiser. “More Than a Feeling” was now blaring over the jukebox; the television mounted above us was running an extended commercial for diabetes medication. The air around the table was pungent with the fungal, slightly vaginal smell of blue cheese. How the hell had I gotten myself into this?

  Suddenly, I thought of Joey with an odd pang. He’d have loved all-you-can-eat hot wings—I could see him chowing down with his old fraternity brothers, licking his fingers sequentially, covered in napkins and sauce. Then I thought, Fuck him. Unlike my husband, I’d spent an entire lifetime suppressing my appetites. Well, that would end right here, right now.

  Tonight, I would be the one to gorge myself on chicken and drink pitcher after pitcher of Budweiser. I would revel in gluttony and abandon until I was obese and shit-faced and incoherent and sated. My debauchery, it would be savage. It would be epic. Better yet, it would be for charity. I wouldn’t be surrendering my sobriety so much as donating it—for all the poor kids of western Pennsylvania with hiatal hernias.

  Seizing a drumlet, I leaned in and bit down wolfishly. Almost instantly, my lips ignited. It was as if someone had lit a ribbon of gunpowder along my tongue and down my throat, directly into the pit of my stomach. I nearly choked from the assault of it. Dropping the chicken, I blew rapidly from my mouth the way I had in childbirth. Fanning the air before me, I stabbed a celery stick into the blue cheese dressing and smeared it over my lips like balm. “Oh, God,” I gasped, though it came out sounding like “Aw Gaw.”

  The audience now was cheering: “Eat, eat, eat! Faster, faster!”

  I willed myself to take another bite. Beneath its coating of heat, the chicken was infused with a sort of horrible, tangy deliciousness, oily and succulent, the tender meat near the bone offering a fleeting reprieve from the incinerating chili. I pulled at the wings delicately with my teeth, trying to avoid touching the sauce directly to my tongue. Beer, beer, beer, I thought like a mantra. Just keep chewing, just keep swallowing. The physical distress I began experiencing was dizzying: sweating, tearing, sniffling, all spigots opening, a sort of profound, intense drainage. The biker was wrong; The pain did not feel spiritual, except for the fact that I soon felt myself praying: Dear God, let this be over.

  “Whoa! Check it out! Look at that Asian girl chow down! Totally sick!” I heard a guy shout. “Yo, are you getting this?”

  The rest of the competitors bent over the table as if it were a trough, emitting suction sounds punctuated by the clinking of discarded, gnawed bones hitting the plates. There seemed to be endless heaps of chicken, of fibrous, graying celery. I felt a stab of nausea. My lips felt as if they’d been split open and pumped full of Novocain.

  Marty raised his gory hands high in the air. “Time! Time! That’s it!” he shouted as his phone began bleating. “Hands up!”

  It was over. There was a tide of applause. Around me, people were slumping back, fanning themselves, saying, “Whew, I’m sweating now!” and tearing open lemony wetwipes and twisting them over their hands. Marty was moving from place to place, tallying up the number of bones on each plate. My mouth, however, was still full of flesh from the last wing. I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish chewing or swallow it. I tried to keep the meat tucked in my mouth until Marty passed, then looked around frantically for a napkin to spit in.

  “By only three wings, the winner of this round is team Wings and a Prayer,” Marty announced.

  “We won!” Tina shouted. Pointing to her plate, she stood up and did a little wiggle dance with her fists pumping the air.

  She slid her phone toward the biker awkwardly with her elbow. “Lenny, do the honors? I can’t do a selfie with my hands sticky. Get me with—here—” She picked up her plate of bones and tilted it toward the camera while flashing a thumbs-up. “Make sure they can see how many. Hashtag ‘Speed Queen’! Hashtag ‘We kicked Sammy Ballon’s ass’! Hashtag, ‘Winners,’ people!”

  At last, the waitress banged a mug of beer down in front of me, an entire, shimmering vortex.

  “Aw, don’t worry. We’ll get ’em in the next round,” Leanne whispered to me. “The hotter the wings get, the more Lenny eats. He’s our secret weapon. Plus, you’ll see. You’ll start to build up a tolerance to the heat. In the next round, your endorphins’ll kick in. I tell you. These things are addictive.”

  I nodded robotically, my eyes fixed on my beer. As I grabbed it, though, my hands were so slick with grease, the mug slid into my lap. The contents spilled down the front of my sweatshirt and splashed across the crotch of my pants, down my leg, and onto the floor.

  “Aw, fuff,” I cried.

  It took everything I had not to reach across the table and grab someone else’s mug. In fact, I was just about to lunge for Tina’s when she swiped it up and held it aloft like the torch on the Statue of Liberty. Someone had placed one of the red plastic baskets on her head like a crown. “All hail the Wing Woman! Can you believe it?” she squealed. “Wewonwewonwewon!

  “Get another picture?” she pleaded to Bruno. “For my mom?”

  I stared at the beaming winners. Except for raising our two children, getting sober was the biggest achievement of my adult life. In fact, it occurred to me suddenly, except for our kids, it was my only achievement, really. Two dozen copies of Toxic Shock Syndrome’s unplayed demo sat in a dusty carton in our basement beside a tumbleweed of Christmas lights. Somewhere in my closet was a laminate file full of old xeroxed flyers for our gigs, clippings from the now-defunct Ann Arbor News, as fragile as eggshell, profiling us for their ARTS section. A few black-and-white contact sheets for the “official” band photos taken on a rooftop in Ypsilanti—me closest to the camera, in a ripped tube dress and muddy eyeliner—which my kids, years ago, had studied like an artifact, hooting, “I can’t believe that’s Mommy!”


  What else did I have to be proud of? Joey’s and my now-failed real estate ventures? My earlier stint, just after the kids were born, doing women’s “colors” at Marshall Field’s Department Store? (Well, Jennifer, you’re clearly an autumn. The problem is, you’ve been dressing like a winter.) My years spent pounding out chicken breasts with a mallet in the middle of a shopping mall? Cooking meals for women perennially on diets—policing one another, groaning Ohweshouldn’t! Girlswe’rebeingsobad!—so that my culinary demos often became mere food porn—more voyeurism than eating—with the bulk of what I cooked getting scraped into the trash afterward?

  I thought of myself back in Vegas, standing on that stage beside Colleen Lundstedt like some clueless, middle-aged show pony—with that stupid, hopeful smile on my face—so proud to be there in my brand-new pencil skirt I’d worn for the occasion—because I’d actually thought—my God, I’d actually believed—that I might finally receive some recognition.

  “I’m sorry,” I lisped, pushing back my chair with such violence, it nearly fell over. I rubbed my hands on my pants furiously and tossed two $20 bills onto the wreckage. “For the kids of Kiwanis.”

  Back in the Subaru, hot sauce glistened on my cheeks like blood, my sweatshirt stank of beer, and I looked like I’d wet myself. After mopping up the mess as best I could with some hand sanitizer, I felt around under the backseat for the old can of Febreze I kept in the car for when I transported Mr. Noodles to his doggie shrink. I sprayed it over myself like cologne. The fumes of “Hawaiian Aloha” tropical air freshener didn’t mask the beer nearly as much as I’d hoped—rather, it competed with it—and for a moment I thought I might vomit.