Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  Fascinated though he was by the volume, voltage, and velocity of this vermiform verbiage, this symphony of snake eyes, it wasn’t until many years later—in Madison, Wisconsin—that he learned to read it particularly well.

  Although his father was Syrian, his mother, Egyptian, and both, Moslems; although little Abu was made daily to pray, and to study the Koran, emphasis in the Hadee household was upon success in commerce, and to that purpose was he educated by his father’s example, as well as by tutors from Britain and Greece. His childhood circumstances were quite the opposite of Spike Cohen’s. Abu, Roland Abu, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth (an expression that invariably caused our Miss Spoon to quiver with ill-concealed arousal). “In Alexandria,” he liked to say, letting the vowels foam like fizz powder against his palate, “in Alexandria, we lived in the porcine penthouse.” High on the hog. An acceptable arrangement, from the pig’s point of view, since no Hadee ever sank fangs into ham. Oh, there was a period when a rebellious Abu entertained a diet of convenience-store weenies and Miller beer, but that was in Madison, Wisconsin, when his elevator was no longer stopping on the upper floors of the swine.

  At age eighteen, Abu had been packed off to Harvard on an allowance that was probably triple what the college president earned. He fell in with some other well-heeled students, bought a fast car, and soon was spending more time in New York nightclubs than in the classroom. Raised on belly-dancing, it was but a short hop to the hootchy-kootch. He hickied the silhouette of crescent moons on the backsides of shimmy-shammy princesses all over Manhattan. When the dean called him in to inform him that he had flunked out, the tall young Arab was puffing a stogie that cost half as much as the office furniture and weighed more than the phone on the desk.

  Duke University gave him a chance. Duke, after all, had gambled on Richard Nixon and Plucky Purcell. Dressing in zoot suits and sporting a mustache as thin as a crack in an espresso cup, Abu played the fool before bemused southerners, who allowed him to ogle their daughters in exchange for the drops of illegal absinthe he squirted into their juleps. Eventually, he squirted a fetus into a debutante, sealing his fate with the same liquid wax. The sheriff who escorted him to the city limits later referred to wild heathen gibberish and savage gnashing of teeth. Actually, it was merely a severely hung-over Abu trying to translate into Greek and faulty Arabic the musical line, the little poem, “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you in Durham County.”

  Next stop was UCLA, with its proximity to movie-star champagne and swimming pools large enough to drive stolen cattle trucks into, which he did so often he began to list it as a hobby on his resumé. He lasted one quarter at UCLA. Academic responsibilities behind him now, he was at liberty to pursue the course of full-time playboy. Abu and postwar Los Angeles seemed made for each other. One night, in an absinthe, champagne, and cocaine frenzy, he bit the right nipple off a Warner Brothers starlet and spit it into a bowl of blue-cheese chip dip. Even Hollywood was shocked.

  The incident made page one of sleazy tabloids the world over. When the news reached Egypt, Hadee senior settled out of court for eighty thousand 1950 dollars, then cabled his errant son that he was disinherited and disowned. Abu scoffed. Convinced that his father would in time relent, he set about turning his bank account into one more phantom in a community of phantoms (phantom fortunes, phantom fame). As the cash ghosted out, his liver solidified. A dawn arrived when, after spraying a pink stucco duplex, six palm trees, and a passing poodle with a Cinerama of all-singing, all-dancing, Technicolor vomit, he hadn’t enough money left for Pepto-Bismol.

  “Help me,” he cried. It was not a musical line, it was no little poem. And nobody paid attention. Not an Arab in Los Angeles would heed his pleas for aid. He had disgraced the race. His collect calls to Arab contacts around America were declined. “Infidel!” they would shout in the poor ears of the operator. Finally, a distant cousin in an outpost known as Madison, Wisconsin, offered him a job in his French restaurant—on condition that he work three years at minimum wage, during which time he must read the Koran for an hour each day and refrain from alcohol, pork, and the company of women. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  Because he was tall, polished, cosmopolitan, and had studied at Harvard, Abu presumed that he would be made headwaiter or maître d’. He presumed erroneously. Upon arrival (via polished, cosmopolitan thumb) in Madison, he was led through the back door of the restaurant and straight to a mammoth sink full of dirty dishes. “There is a cot in the storeroom,” his cousin said. “You can sleep there. Once the kitchen is spotless. And tomorrow, you shave off that stupid mustache.”

  Water simmered. Drains gurgled. Pipes knocked. Steam rose. Suds bubbled (no elegant Alexandrian vowels these harsh industrial bubbles!). Grease congealed. Scum collected. Islands of lettuce scraps and buoys of duck fat bobbed in the boil. Spatulas were caked with mousseline de volaille, whisks were encrusted with oeufs à la Bourguignonne, bulb basters were plugged with beurre d’anchois, and the dried batters that coated some baking dishes were like hardened deposits of lunar cement. The baking dishes blistered him, skillets blistered the blisters. Poultry shears, cheese graters, broken wine goblets, and metal disks from food mills joined forces with knives of all sizes to hunt down his hands in the murky waters and nick, puncture, scrape, and slice. Should the wounds commence to heal, steel wool and scouring powder ground the lids off of the scabs, exposing pink sores to heat and abrasion. As far up as his biceps, his arms were shiny with grease; his face was steamed as red as a prawn, and his wrinkled fingers that so resembled the foreskins of aged hermits stunk perpetually of residual garlic, rancid oils, and garbage soup. His clothes were soaked with the same smelly brine, and upon any part of his anatomy at any time one was likely to discover soggy warts of cooked stuff, flecks of flora and fauna that no nature goddess would ever bless again.

  For many, just to contemplate those torrid waters with their roiling foams, gobs of goop, organic effluvia, and hazardous mines of metal and glass would be the beginning of a descent into hell (a hell devised by Julia Child to punish Colonel Sanders). Indeed, the first few times that Roland Abu Hadee stared into that blowhole of a sink, he saw the pitiless robs of Satan staring back, and as a sinister shock shook his stomach, he heard asbestos ghouls chuckle and piss. Holding his breath, closing his eyes, he plunged his hands into the mephistophilian broth—and instantly passed out.

  It was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to him.

  After about a week, when the biliousness and swooning spells subsided, dishwashing began to have a calming effect on him; more than that, a purifying effect; more, even, than that, a transformative effect. It was as if the dishwater, as gray and oily as a mobster’s haircut, washed away his arrogant confusion. As he scoured pots, he likewise and unintentionally scoured his conscience, scoured the calluses from it so that he was resensitized to humanity. An alcoholic film dissolved, exposing, first, a layer of guilt, then a layer of dread. The guilt was understandable: nipple-snapping and all that. The dread was a surprise. Until his baptism in the frothy napalm of the sinks, he hadn’t realized how terrible had been his dread of walking in his father’s footsteps, of wearing the starched smile and octopus arms of an international businessman, of going about with a headful of numbers that neither sang nor scanned.

  Slowly, a gentleness, a piety enveloped him. His Madison relatives attributed the change to the Koran, but it was the scalding vats that purged Abu, the sinks seething with submerged cutlery, drowned cockroaches, and floating boogers of sauce béarnaise. Wire brush ritualistically in hand, he would part the soapy veil and enter his underwater grotto in the manner of a pilgrim entering a sacred river to bathe. Beside a greasy Ganges of goose gunk, he laid his burdens down.

  Three years passed. His bargain fulfilled, Abu took his leave of the pots and pans. A monk without a monastery, he wandered Madison, more than a little lost. In a kind of conditioned reflex of rebellion, he embarked on a binge of hot dogs and beer, devoting his ev
enings to largely unsuccessful pursuit of University of Wisconsin coeds. Six months of this failed to provide a single hour of satisfaction. His savings spent, he returned to the restaurant and begged for his job back. “Fine,” his cousin said. “But there are conditions. You must train in my kitchen as a chef. And you must marry my daughter.”

  Nabila was no beauty, true, but take a gander at Roland Abu Hadee. Tall and dark he might be, and he bore himself with quiet dignity, but his nose . . . ! Steam had permanently reddened his big Semitic beak until it looked like the prow of the S.S. Tomato, like a stop signal designed in a wind tunnel. How grand a catch was a bachelor whom the children of Madison had nicknamed “Rudolph! Rudolph! Rudolph!"? Moreover, what bride longed to be fondled by fingers so waterlogged they threatened to ooze cold fishy fluids from a hundred separate crinkles?

  Pushed into wedlock, nevertheless, Nabila and Abu grew to like, and, eventually, to love each other. To become independent of her father, they saved their dimes and opened a falafel stand near the university campus. Profits were small but steady, the couple lived simply but happily. The falafel stand was a window onto the academic world that Abu had previously scorned. From the undergraduates, graduate students, and young instructors who were his primary customers, he picked up little poems of science, musical lines of law and art. In return, he treated them to descriptions, in his own fashion, of the Middle East, a geographical snapping turtle that even then had the American brain stem in its bite and would not let go.

  “Egypt?” he would say, feeding chick-peas to the grinder. “Egypt is as hot as a gypsy honeymoon and as dry as scarab breath. Egypt looks at the world through cat’s eyes. Egypt has a heart of green paste. With crocodile claws and mummy jewelry, Egypt scratched its name into the foundation stone of history. Before Islam, Egyptians thought only of immortality. Since Islam, they think only of life after death. What is the difference? To understand the difference, you must live for many months without moisture. Is the Middle East a matter of climate, then? Perhaps. The moon . . .” With a cucumber the same size but opposite color of his nose, he pointed at the ethnic crescents that decorated his stand. “The moon is no more Islamic than it is Hindu or Eskimo. The lunar mirror simply reflects the hidden poetry in us all. The sun, however, is a Semite.”

  And so forth and so on.

  The falafel stand window also provided a close-up view of the antiwar demonstrations that rocked Madison during the 1960s. Watching his student friends brutalized by police and defamed by politicians in the pay of the military-industrial complex, he soon lost his detachment and sided with the forces of brotherly love. He took to closing his stand during demonstrations and joining the pacifists in the streets, a practice that disturbed Nabila because by then they had two babes to feed. As it turned out, he was frequently gassed (the tear gas usually drifted into the stand, anyhow) but seldom clubbed.

  The Vietnam War ended. The years falafeled by. The children grew up. Abu kept an ear tuned to the music of things, kept an eye on the scoundrels in high places. He had been demonstrating in favor of a disarmament treaty on the day that an official letter arrived from Alexandria. Unbeknownst to him, his late father’s will had set aside six million dollars for Abu, provided that, by age fifty-five, he had settled down and succeeded in business. Relatives contested Abu’s right to the bequest. A falafel stand! After all! His attorney proved that Abu’s stand had made a tiny profit every year since it opened. “Red nose, black ink,” said Abu. He got the inheritance.

  He took his wife to Jerusalem, the favorite city of his youth. They remained there a month and saw many poetic sights and some acts of violence.

  “I will now read books and listen to music,” he announced upon their return. “I will learn to play tennis, and I will work for world peace. For my Nabila, I will hire a maid. Two maids. They will vacuum her carpets and make her beds. I, however, I, Roland Abu Hadee, as usual, will wash the dishes.”

  WHEN THE LIMO DEPOSITED Ellen Cherry at Isaac & Ishmael’s, Abu was in the kitchen inspecting, for the tenth time that day, the dishwashing equipment. It was Spike who answered her rap at the door. “How’s it going, Mr. Cohen?” she asked. “Everything set?” Spike could say nothing. He was too overwhelmed by her shoes.

  It was Spike who had hired her. She had arrived for that interview in penny loafers—sensible waitress shoes—and it’s difficult to say whether or not footwear influenced his decision. More than likely, it was her politics. Or, rather, her lack of them. After interviewing scores of do-gooders—well-meaning but incompetent liberals who wished to be personally identified with his experiment—Spike was refreshed to speak with an experienced waitress who professed to know next to nothing about the situation in the Middle East.

  “I’m an artist,” she explained.

  “And it’s not political, this art you make?”

  “A lot of artists don’t get it yet, Mr. Cohen, but ’political art’ is a contradiction in terms.”

  “What about this guy, Goya? His famous pictures against war?”

  “Goya’s work is powerful because his technique was powerful. It was fortuitous. A bad painter painting atrocities is committing atrocities himself, in my opinion. Besides, what about Rubens? His big, rosy, joyful nudes are just as much a statement against war as Goya’s mutilated victims. Rubens is saying Yes to life. Way I see it, anything that says Yes to life is automatically saying No to war.”

  Spike hired her to wait tables. When he told Abu about her, Abu suggested that they promote her to lunch shift maître d’. And they did.

  Two weeks later, Ellen Cherry was unemployed. On the phone to Colonial Pines, she had said, “If Uncle Buddy’s behind this, he owes me bucks.”

  “Your daddy says no blessed way would Bud go that far,” Patsy replied. “Your daddy says terrorists did it.”

  “What does my mama say?”

  “Ha! Don’t nobody listen to your mama. ’Less she’s offering ’em fried chicken or a piece of you know what.”

  “Piece of what, mama?”

  “Never you mind.”

  “Piece of what?”

  “Hush. I’m not gonna say it.”

  Ellen Cherry hadn’t been overly concerned about being blasted out of a job. That was back in June, when she still believed things would work out with Boomer. Now, with the weasel fart of impending divorce hanging in the air, she needed the income. Boomer promised a generous settlement if his show went well, but she would sell her hair to a museum of natural history before she’d accept a crumb from that foul loaf. In her darker moments, she imagined her hair in a display case alongside a woolly mammoth. Schoolchildren on field trips would compare them in essays and scare their little brothers and sisters with slightly exaggerated descriptions. “In the Ice Age, things had to be real hairy,” they’d explain, brandishing garish postcards.

  She was one of the few employees to return to the I & I for its second incarnation. Most of the others had found work elsewhere or built personal bomb shelters. As the new staff arrived for the grand reopening, Ellen Cherry could tell there wasn’t a food-service professional in the lot. Mainly, they were youthful idealists. Some signed on at the I & I because it made them feel important. Others, she suspected, had suicidal tendencies.

  “Should I check the setups, Mr. Cohen?”

  “No, no, no. Teddy’ll take care of that.” Teddy was the dinner maître d’. “Relax already. Have a little drink, enjoy.”

  “I’ve noticed you looking at my feet, sir. Are these shoes too . . . too loud for here?”

  “No, no, no. Very attractive, very nice. Cassini. I hope you got a bargain. You need more Cassini. I get them for you wholesale.” Spike handed Ellen Cherry an empty glass and nodded at an ice bucket. “You got to admit, though, those shoes of yours are as bright as Hadee’s schnozz.”

  Ellen Cherry laughed politely. She filled her glass. It was the same brand of champagne with which Boomer had surprised her at the Montana drive-in movie. She winced. Sentimental memories we
re like sugar-water icicles. Was she to be poked in the heart the rest of her life?

  Outside on United Nations Plaza, the water was softer, if more sour. The rain was the color and flavor of toad sweat and had been all day. It vinegared the mobile TV units that were beginning to vie for parking spaces near the corner of Forty-ninth Street.

  Media coverage of Isaac & Ishmael’s reopening was even more extensive than it had been at the initial debut. A restaurant dedicated to Jewish-Arabic brotherhood might be good feature material, but a restaurant that could be blown to sesame seeds on camera was potentially hard news.

  Simultaneously with the newsmen, as if choreographed, protesters arrived: small ragtag groups of extreme Zionists and Palestinians. Police officers made sure they kept well apart, although when the colors began to run on their rain-dampened placards, only by their headgear could you tell which was which. “Notice how similar their shoes,” said Spike. “Yes,” agreed Abu, who had been drawn out of the kitchen. “To a bird in the air, it’s beanies versus dishcloths. To a bug on the street, both groups are the same.”

  Then, moments before the doors opened at seven o’clock, a chartered bus pulled up and disgorged a well-groomed mixture of Jews and Aryans, mostly in Burberry raincoats. They were equipped with amplified bullhorns, and the “Redemption Now!” banners their members bore were executed in waterproof paints.

  Through the fogged windows of the I & I, Ellen Cherry thought she recognized her “uncle” Buddy. The man was ordering people about and chatting it up with the cops. As haggard as a prisoner of war, he was a scarecrow whom no amount of Burberry tailoring could make distinguished. It had to be the Reverend Buddy Winkler. When at last he spoke into his bullhorn, broadcasting his vocal saxophone to the neighborhood and, through network mikes, to the nation, identification was positive. At once brutish and soothing, the heavy-toned chords vibrated slowly, turning over in the rain like an Italian stallion turning over in bed.