Hungry

by Daniel Parme

  All at once, I was completely surrounded by bar-friends and the realization that I was drunk. No conversation can survive such things.

  “Holy shit! Travis! Good to see you, man!”

  “How you doin’?”

  “Saw you on the news.”

  “Saw you on Leno. Man, did Penelope Cruz look disgusted, huh?”

  “Saw you on The Today Show.”

  “...on Larry King...”

  “...on Channel Eleven...”

  “...in Time...”

  “...in Newsweek...”

  “...the Post Gazette...”

  “When did you get back?”

  “I’m gonna get you a drink.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Me, too.”

  I don’t know who said any of this, but I’m pretty sure it was all said. It was unrelenting. It was a hailstorm in the middle of the plains and I had no tree to hide beneath. I was assaulted by all these questions, all these people, all at once. All these people knew me through little more than dart games and pitchers of beer, but they still expected me to be glad to see them, to be excited at the prospect of answering all their questions.

  I answered them all at once by dropping the glowing butt of my smoke into the ash tray, standing up, and walking to the bathroom. It may have been more of a mad dash than a leisurely stroll, really, but the bathroom was so far away, and some of them were following me. I mean it. Following me.

  I locked the door and sat on the toilet. I blew my nose and read the graffiti on the stall walls. “Tom gives good head.” “God is dead.” “You are dead!” “Oh, shit! I’m dead?” “This place is shitty.”

  The last one made me laugh. I took a leak, washed my hands, splashed some cold water on my face, and decided to crawl out the window and into the alley behind the bar.

  The window was barred and nailed shut.

  My seat was open and my beer was full and my cigarette was lit and handed to me by some ownerless hand. No one said anything to me, though. They all just watched as I sat, drank, and smoked. They watched. That’s it. Watching and murmuring to each other, like they were all afraid to take that first bite. I got through about half of a cigarette. It was absurd.

  “Will someone play some fucking music already?” I snapped it out there like a whip, and they all jumped, startled, and looked around at each other. Some kid I didn’t know left the back of the crowd – yes, the crowd – and put a five in the jukebox.

  “So,” I cracked my neck and took a sip of beer. “What’s up, guys?”

  Apparently nothing was up. Ten-thirty on a Friday night in the South Side, and nothing was up. The tables were now taken, the fun in full swing, and nothing was up.

  I rolled my eyes and cleared my throat. “Go ahead.”

  After the initial barrage of questions had settled, while they were reloading, I told them this was going to have to be a little more like Kindergarten. I’d call on them, and then they could ask their question. All this mayhem had to stop.

  And it did. One question at a time, they were satisfied. Essentially, all I had to do was repeat everything they’d already heard me say on television. Maybe they needed to hear it in person before they could believe it. It's not like they had to touch the holes in my hands and my side or anything. They just wanted to know.

  Chapter 5

  Virginia poured a cup of coffee and buttered an English muffin, brought them to the table, and set them down next to my head, which was resting on my folded arms and throbbing something fierce. “You really don’t remember anything?”

  I groaned. The speaking was going to be difficult. “I remember answering a bunch of questions and doing a bunch of shots, but that’s about it.” I didn’t dare shake my head. It would have made me sick.

  She stretched her back, hands clasped over her head. I thought she was going to fall over backwards, her back arched so much.

  “You a dancer?”

  She straightened up. “Twelve years of ballet. Of course, you’d never know it to look at me.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Yeah, but you saw me stretch. I mean if you just looked at my body.” She cupped her breasts. “These fucking things ruined everything.”

  “They look all right to me.”

  She rolled her eyes and sat down. Her bottom teeth were a little crooked and her lips were a little thin, but something about their shape was crazy attractive. Her eyes, there in the middle of those super-thick frames, were a light blue/grey sort of color with star-like patterns in the irises. The whites were a little bloodshot.

  She sipped her tea, which she’d found as she was looking for the coffee. “You ever seen a ballerina with tits like these? I don’t think so. They’re all skinny and tiny and flat. Dance companies don’t want my body. Fuckers.”

  “Well, if they don’t want your body, I’m sure they’d kill for your personality. Very classy.”

  “Eat me.” Smiling.

  “It is a shame about your chest, though.” And I meant it. I don’t really understand why women aren’t supposed to be built like women anymore. Think about all those Renaissance paintings of women with their bellies and thighs, their hair hanging down over their breasts. Those are women, soft and soothing.

  I wasn’t about to go into all that with her, though. “So, what did happen last night?”

  She blew steam off the surface of her little Earl Gray ocean. “Oh, nothing really. It was almost two by the time all those assholes stopped asking you about everything. Didn’t they see you on all those shows? Anyway, you were smashed by then. You just sat there smoking, staring at nothing. I told Adam I’d drive you home in your car. Then we came back here and I put you to bed.”

  I tried to take a bite of my English muffin, but there was no way. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t do anything stupid.”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing stupid.”

  There was a quiet, awkward moment, but she figured a way out of it. “You think you can take me back to my car? I have to work in a couple hours.”

  “Sure. At the bar?”

  “No. I tutor math for extra cash.”

  I asked if I had time for a quick shower first. She said there was plenty of time, so I went upstairs and washed the stink of the bar off of my skin, steamed the hangover most of the way out of my head.

  I came downstairs to find her in her own clothes (she’d been wearing one of my t-shirts and a pair of my boxers) and drying the mugs. “You didn’t have to do the dishes.”

  “Eh. I was bored.”

  On the way back to the South Side, I learned that she tutored algebra. She had her Bachelor’s in Higher Mathematics, which she studied when she lived in Florida, “where it’s not so fucking cold all the time.” She lived there with a boy – three years of easy, blissful love – before moving home to Pittsburgh. “Four years and ninety-thousand dollars so guys can stare at my chest while I pour them shots.”

  I thanked her for everything and told her I was sure I’d see her soon.

  “I hope so,” she said. “Maybe next time you’ll do something stupid.”

  I went home and went back to bed.

  Chapter 6

  The thing about spending a few weeks on television is you’re always seeing all these people who know you. The problem is you don’t know them. People on the street, stopping you, taking pictures, shaking your hand, telling you stories about their cousin or whoever, who once saw an avalanche while on vacation in the Alps. People asking for your autograph – yes, your autograph – on the bill of a hat or a receipt from the CBS gift shop.

  The thing about spending a few weeks on the television, and in the papers, and the magazines, is you actually get fan mail. Fan mail. Unbelievable.

  All those boxes from Mr. Hanlon were full of fan mail. There were also, of course, quite a few bills (credit cards, gas, electric, school loans – you get the idea), but mostly it was letters from peo
ple who had seen me that night I was on with Conan O’Brien, doing that sketch when I pretended to be stuck in the elevator with Tom Arnold, and we had to cut off his leg and eat it before we were rescued. Or they were from people who were distant relatives of the Donner Party or some other such nonsense. People are crazy.

  I’m not exactly sure how these people were able to find my address, and I suppose it’s not that important, although it does make me a little uncomfortable in a Big Brother sort of way.

  It was pretty fucking awesome, though, opening all these letters. They all said they’d seen me on television. Most of them said something about me being so brave and they couldn’t imagine. Some of them included phone numbers and “call me” with stars or smiley faces as punctuation.

  There were even a few letters that included pictures, dirty naked pictures. Those were nice. I mean, here I was, just some guy who was in a plane wreck, just some guy with a Creative Writing degree and a few dead friends, just some guy, and I was getting Polaroids of naked women on motorcycles, sprawled over the bed, in interesting positions with showerheads. People are crazy.

  I wasn’t about to respond to any of these people, though. They could have been anyone. I mean, people are psychotic, or they can be. And if you’re crazy enough to track down my address, write me a letter, give me your phone number, or send me dirty pictures, all because I ate my friends and just so happened to be on television, you’re going to have to be crazy on your own time. My life was weird enough already.

  I kept the pictures in a shoe box in my bedroom closet. And a few of the death threats, too. It would appear that there are those to whom cannibalism is, shall we say, frowned upon. But I must say that there’s a certain satisfaction that comes with offending people to the point that they want to kill you.

  I threw the letters away.

  Well, I threw all but one of the letters away. It had no return address and was printed on heavy, high-quality paper:

  Mr. Eliot,

  I am deeply sorry to hear about your unfortunate experience. To lose your friends in such a dreadful manner is something that must be horribly difficult to come to terms with.

  I am the acting president of an organization with great interest in certain aspects of your ordeal, and I would like to invite you to attend one of our meetings.

  I understand that you may be quite busy once you return home, so if you are interested, you will be able to find me at the James Street Tavern every Thursday night.

  I will almost certainly be the only one-armed man in the smoking section, and look forward to meeting you.

  Sincerely,

  Walter Synchek

  I just couldn’t get rid of that one. I read it over a few times and left it on the coffee table, where I’d be able to look at it a thousand times and try to decide whether or not meeting this man would be a good idea.

  I called Adam, who invited me over to his place. “Just me, you, and Dave,” he said. “I think we’ll have a better time that way.”

  “Yeah. I don’t feel like giving another drunken press conference. And I haven’t talked to Dave in a long time.”

  Dave was Adam’s roommate, and another friend from college. He had a penchant for collared shirts that were just a little too tight, and blue jeans that were just a little faded, maybe a hole at the knee. Brown hair that’s been spiky and disheveled since before spiky and disheveled was cool. He could be a little bitter sometimes, but it was really just his sense of humor. Mostly, Dave’s thing was music. Some would call him a snob. He was never one to be shy about a roll of the eyes or a sigh/groan kind of thing if someone had chosen a CD he didn’t agree with. The problem was that most people have never heard of most of what Dave listened to, so you could never make the man happy.

  But it didn’t take much to make him smile; all I had to do was show up at the door with a case of beer and a few of the pictures I’d received from my adoring fans.

  “You have to be kidding. What the hell’s wrong with these women?” Now, just because he was bitching does not mean he wasn’t enjoying the pictures. Quite the contrary, in fact. We had to yell at him to put them back in the envelope I’d brought them in. The envelope also held that mysterious letter, which he pulled out when he couldn’t quite get the pictures to fit. “What’s this?”

  “Read it.”

  Dave read to himself while Adam packed a bowl. If I haven’t mentioned it yet, Adam and Dave both smoked a good bit of marijuana. Adam was the kind of guy who would call it grass, and Dave was the kind who would call it pot. It’s amazing what you can tell about a person merely by how he refers to the reefer.

  “So, is this guy serious?” Dave handed the letter to Adam, who handed me the bowl in the same motion.

  “I don’t know, Dave.” I hit the pipe. It was the first I’d smoked in a really long time, and I took a moment to appreciate how sweet it tasted. Not like cigarette smoke. Not like burning nylon to stay warm smoke. Not like burning oil on the snow smoke. Like reefer smoke. Like candy.

  Adam folded the letter and handed it to me. “You should go.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I can handle any more crazy shit right now. I just want some nice, boring routine to fall into. Nothing exciting. Nothing new. Just, well, auto-pilot, I guess.”

  Dave choked on his cigarette. “Yeah. Right. Wasn’t the plane on auto-pilot when you hit that mountain? Isn’t that what they said on the news?”

  “Fine. But you know what I mean.”

  Adam took a hit, held it, his hands out like he was meditating, and spoke in that holding smoke in your lungs voice. “You should go.”

  Dave chimed in. The thing about being a group of three is that one is easily outnumbered. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes you're just not in the mood to get gang-raped, you know? "You should go, man. Ever since college you've been talking about how you need to get out and experience weird shit. How could you ever be a writer if you just sat around and did what everyone else does, right?"

  I tried to explain to him that I was tired, too tired to mess with some supposedly one-armed man in some tavern on the North Side who wanted me for something he was unwilling to write about in the letter. I also tried to explain that I'd long ago given up any serious aspirations to become a writer, and I hadn't written anything in months and months.

  But he wasn't buying. "So the fuck what, man! How can you honestly say you're not interested in this at all? Not even one tiny little bit? You think anything like this is ever going to happen to you again? Take advantage, man." He took a hit of the pipe Adam had been trying to hand to him for at least two minutes. "I mean, shit. What's the worst that could happen, right?"

  Chapter 7

  I'd been to the James Street Tavern once before, well before I'd ever had any bright ideas about going ice climbing in Canada. This was when I was a counselor at a Lutheran summer camp, teaching Bible studies and conflict management skills to kids. The first time I'd been to James Street, I was leading a group on an urban service mission; helping in soup kitchens, babysitting kids of drug-addicted parents, etc. And no, the kids were not there illegally; the place was just as much of a restaurant as it was a bar.

  This was when I was all gung-ho about helping people. This was when my biggest concern was staying out of the pants of sixteen-year-old girls. This was when my life was relatively normal.

  The story changes, I suppose.

  But not for the James Street Tavern. The place was exactly the way it was when I was there for the first time, seven or eight years prior. The sign on the front wall was the same dim, almost-but-not-quite neon red. The lights inside were just as dim, and had a subtle red tint, as well. The smoke hanging in the air could well have been the very same smoke from all those years ago, for all I know. Even the band was the same (Five Guys Named Moe, although there were only four guys in the band, and none, to my knowledge, were named Moe), playing the same covers of Coltrane and Davis. I was instantly sorry I hadn'
t made a point to hang out in this place more often.

  You could feel the air in this place. As you walked, the sounds of jazz and the smells of various tobacco smokes and expensive French cuisine filled your wake as though you were walking through water.

  I found the smoking section easily, as there was no non-smoking section, and I found Synchek just as easily. He was, as he'd promised, the only one-armed man in the place, and was easily seen as such because of the folded sleeve at his left shoulder. He would have been easy to spot even without his little disability; the man was gigantic. In every way, he was gigantic. Fat, tall, wide. There would have been no way to miss this man, which I found a little disappointing, actually. I'd half-hoped I wouldn't have been able to find him, and would have been able to go back to Dave and Adam and say he wasn't there, but at least I went to check it out. Turns out Adam wasn't the only pussy in our little group.

  I thought about turning around, walking out, and lying to my friends about it, but I thought about it for too long. He turned his head around, maybe looking for the waitress, and spotted me. His right arm shot up, and he began waving me over, calling, way too loudly, "Mr. Eliot! Mr. Eliot!"

  So I went over to him. What else could I have done, right?

  He stood up, way up, and had to tilt his head down significantly to look into my eyes as he spoke. "So good to see you, Mr. Eliot. I was beginning to think you weren't interested in meeting me."

  "Well, here I am." I didn't bother to make it sound like I was excited.

  He offered his right hand and, by the sad state of that handshake, I gathered that he must have been left-handed.

  "Have a seat, Mr. Eliot." He watched as I sat, and then he flagged down the waitress. "I'll take a Grey Goose martini, up and dirty. And for my friend, here..."