Excerpt: The Chili King

CHAPTER 5 // The Chili King Cafe

This man named George who rescued me from my panicked paralysis sat me down in the first booth by the window. The red vinyl was ripped, and I felt the springs adjusting under my haunches. What I assumed to be a cheek print smudged the window over my shoulder, and for a moment I thought I might lean into it, just to see if it matched my own.

“Here you go, Lady,” he said, setting a large red plastic cup of water in front of me. “It’s straight from the tap, so it’s full of all kinds of extra minerals.” He chuckled without showing his teeth.

The plastic around the rim of the cup was scratched and rubbed opaque.

“Now, how about some soup. Chili? It’s a little hot out for chili. Can I make you a sandwich?”

I shook my head, no, kneaded my hands together in my lap.

“No no no.” He clucked his tongue and moved behind the counter to the open grill. “Skinny lady like you needs to eat something.” He pulled open a stainless steel drawer and presented a loaf of bread. The white band of his underpants snuck over the waist of his jeans as he bent over and pulled eggs from the cooler under the counter.

The color of my cheeks had evened by then. The trembling had subsided. My breath came normal. It was my pride that continued its injury. There is a thing that I do, that I have done since I was a teenager, I call Bird’s Eye. I can separate; I can pull myself out of my body and hover, the invisible parts of me fly north to the ceiling or to a tree, and adopt an aerial view. And I did this then, at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, as I found myself flying without nets and entrusting myself to a jolly Black man in an empty café. George turned on a small radio resting high on a shelf, and the stove clicked on in nearly exact synchronicity with Dusty Springfield’s Preacher’s Son.

I slid out of my skin and drifted to the only dark corner of the restaurant, above an open archway into a back room. I could not see my face, only my slouching shoulders, my thin hair – too much like my father’s, not the curl of my mother’s – hanging like frayed draperies to my shoulders. I had never seen such a specimen of defeat, so pitiful and small. I was a smart woman. How had I let this happen?

My eyes grew warm and when the tears appeared, I lost my hover and fell back into the skeletal cage that was me. I let my chin drop to my chest, and I cried for my home. When George deposited two napkins and a fried egg sandwich on a plate in front of me, he delivered a small box of tissue, as well. He said nothing, and I was grateful.

The sight of food made my stomach rumble. I had not known I was hungry. I blew my nose, put a napkin in my lap, and ate.

CHAPTER 3 // An impatient queue

The traffic felt thick. My chest strained. The woman honked again. And another horn from somewhere behind her. The steering wheel grew in my hands, the entire car swelling, the world engorged and about to swallow me where I sat in a hand-me-down Ford Focus, a bulldozer in my bathroom, in my kitchen, ripping roosters from my sunshine walls. I had not forgotten the curtains, had I?

The curtains. Where were the curtains? I imagined myself leaping into the back of the car and pulling item after item from box after box. I would find the curtains and I would fold them neatly in my lap, and everything would be fine. But this air, turned gelatinous, held me. It turned me to wax, and I could not move. My throat grew tight and began to constrict.

The light turned red again, and a man in the car freshly pulled to my right, rolled down his window and gestured with his chubby hand for me to do the same. I could not; and when the light turned green again, he left, pulling a whole line of traffic with him, each swiveling to peer at me, the lady who is paralyzed by light.

The blonde in the SUV found an open pocket and swerved around me, passing furiously and waving her middle finger out her open window.

Just as my breath became disjointed and loud, barreling through my lungs, through my esophagus, out of my open mouth, a man’s thick black knuckle rapped on the passenger’s side window. Again. My shoulders shook as I moved my hand to the window switch and pulled down.

“Hey there,” the man said. His eyebrows were a thick and unruly black, concerned. “Do you need some help?” Another horn erupted from the impatient queue behind and he waved dramatically with his arm, pointing drivers in an arc around my motionless car.

“I can’t.” My voice sounded strange. It wasn’t mine. My tongue was thick, and I longed for my living room, for the safety of my kitchen, my bedroom, my bathroom. Angelo Jr.’s tricycle lay in a heap under debris. Why is the world so impossibly big?

A car slowed to the side of us, and the man told the driver, “It’s okay. Just go around.” His face was friendly and calm, boasting a mole under his eye. I thought of Stanley from The Office. “Lady, we got to get you moving. The car is on. Are you in gear?”

The car hummed and vibrated through the floor under the pedals, under my seat. The sole of my right shoe felt thin and the machinery pressed through my bones. I nodded.

CHAPTER 1 // Someone else’s metaphor

I wish they’d torn the sign down first. None of the trailers were worth moving, so when the bulldozer pulled in late Friday afternoon, it ate up half the park, left its greedy mouth in my bathroom, and took off for the rest of the weekend. The sign stood in the middle of rubble: PARADISE PARK. The irony was unforgivable.

I have never liked being someone else’s metaphor.

...Mick was right about the park: It was rubble before it was clawed to the ground. I’m sure it was quite nice back in the sixties when they cleared the lot, moved in state of the art mobile homes with fresh paint and shutters that hung at perfect 90-degree angles. I imagine it wasn’t ironic at all when they put up the sign welcoming you to Paradise Park.

But that was forty years ago. If there is one thing I do know -- and with stunning clarity, too – is that if you leave a thing in the weather too long, the wind and rain will rip it to hell.

...I remember this as a child. Grandma Betty and Grandpa Lee took us to Barnum & Bailey’s. A small, shirtless man in silver tights walked forward and backward at least fifty feet above the ground. He held a long bendy pole perpendicular to the ground, and I doubted its ability to keep him from plunging to his death. He did not use a net; I couldn’t watch.

I buried my face in Grandpa’s arm and pressed it there so long that the scratch of his flannel shirt left my cheek speckled and pink. He laughed, and DeeDee called me a baby. I didn’t care. I wondered then – and maybe that’s where it started, this fear of unprotected mobility – why anyone would leave a perfectly fine platform to dangle themselves off the edge of the universe so carelessly.

That is what it feels like when I walk out the door. I feel that I am shoved off a perfectly fine platform to tiptoe across a fragile, thin wire hanging fifty feet above the earth. The farther I get into the abyss, the harder it will be to return to safety. I do not understand people; I do not understand the world; I do not understand the intentions of God. The uncertainty of it makes me feel like prey in the wilderness, and I just can’t tolerate it.