Twisted

A. F. Cronin

May 2006

"I want those," she growled.

I stared at her in disbelief and we locked eyes in a New York stare down. I have to admit I wasn’t really staring at her in some macho test of wills. I just didn’t know what to do, and couldn’t contrive a retort to her flagrant assault. So, as was to become the norm for our relationship, Beatrice was the first to speak. "You eat flesh. Have the chicken."

Not at my rhetorical best, I countered with, "How do you know I eat flesh?"

"I can smell it," she answered.

That threw me off. Big time. Being told you smell by a snot nosed puffy coated young woman with barbarian boots in a falafel place in the East Village is confounding, to say the least. The first thing I did, I must embarrassingly admit, was to try and catch a whiff of myself; my own bodily odor. I couldn’t, of course. I shower every day and use good soap, deodorants and other toiletries so normally I’m not particularly pungent and my skin that afternoon was buried beneath at least four layers of clothing and I was locked tight at the neck with a massive wool scarf. Air wasn’t flowing in or out of my cold-repelling attire, so any smell I may have reeked was trapped beneath my layers. Besides, Ahmed, while making great falafel and shwarma, has created a restaurant that is redolent with the smoldering aroma of sizzling meats seasoned with every exotic herb known to man. At that moment it didn’t occur to me that even if I had stunk like a mountain man after a long winter of trapping beaver, and if Beatrice had had a nose like a bloodhound, she couldn’t have smelled me in the midst of Ahmed’s super-aroma-saturated environment. But insults hold no logic, just pure hurtful intent. That’s why people use them to such effect.

"Ok." I relented, more out of sheer stupefaction than lack of the backbone to resist. I just couldn’t contrive an effective counter-argument to this assertive, snot-nosed, young woman’s "smell-like-a-flesh-eater" comments. I turned back to the nervous Ahmed and, with calm and great dignity, I magnanimously said, "Chicken for me, Ahmed. She can have the falafel if she wants it."

"Thank you, sir," Ahmed cooed. "I’ll make you great chicken shwarma. Hummus?"

I nodded assent and waited for the chicken shwarma sandwich to be prepared by Ahmed. I had expected Beatrice, then considered by me as "the-obnoxious-snot-nosed-girl", to apologize and thank me for my gallant gesture. Instead she reached past me, pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and blew her nose.

Beatrice can be a real charmer when she wants to be.

She got her sandwich before I did, since Ahmed had it almost done for me anyway. She took the sandwich and her iced green tea and sat at one of the tiny tables and ate in silence. I settled against the opposite wall and tried to check her out with out her seeing me check her out. Lacking x-ray vision, I couldn’t see beneath the stay-puft marsh mellow-man outfit she was wearing. But, as she warmed up, the redness of her cheeks diminished and I noticed a very pale and flawless skin, nice cheekbones and full, black-lipsticked lips. Her exquisite, frigid- blue eyes reminded me of wolf-eyes. She paid no attention to me, of course. This irked me even more. I was pouting and feverishly trying to come up with some hurtful remark to toss at her when Ahmed brought over my sandwich and broke my vengeful reverie.

I would have been a shitty ancient Greek King or Appalachian Clan Patriarch because I can never hold a grudge for very long. Especially if I’m hungry. Ahmed set down the red plastic basket with the chicken shwarma in it and returned to his post. I turned my attention to my steaming sandwich and forgot about the verbal vendetta with my formerly-snot-nosed rival. I ate my food instead.

Ahmed’s chicken shwarma was really good; much better than his falafel, in fact. I loved it. As I relished the spicy flavor of the shwarma, I realized that the only reason I always ate the falafel was because Miranda, a dyed-in-the-wool vegan (except on the big, family holiday feasts, and when she ate pizza with pepperoni), had always made me eat falafel at Ahmed’s, and I had just never changed that habit. Beatrice, exhibiting her almost psychic ability to read people, had simply told me something about myself that was true: I am a flesh eater. I should have been eating the chicken shwarma all along. She, of course, is not a flesh eater, and therefore deserved the falafel. Beatrice can be a bit of a know-it-all-fair-is-fair freak: but at least, unlike Miranda, she’s consistent. And usually she’s right. Sometimes it gets a little annoying.

Beatrice eats quickly. She had finished her falafel long before I was done with my shwarma. I noticed that she didn’t get up right away, but remained at the table bent over some little project she was working on with her hands. By that point in time I just thought she was a weird.

I had finished eating and was reading the menu board, considering the benefits of a second chicken shwarma when something thwacked against my coat and bounced onto my table. It was an origami bird made from an intricately folded postcard. I looked up and Beatrice was standing looking at me with her wolf-eyes. They sparkled like stars on a moonless night. She gave me a little wave then pushed through the door and walked away.

I picked up the paper bird. Come alone. You’ll like it, was written under one of the wings. I unfolded the bird and found an advertising postcard/admit-one-ticket for the Secret, Roving, Magical Burlesque Show of Lower Manhattan. It was scheduled for that night. Beatrice, the puffy-coated-snot-nosed-rude-girl with the wolf-eyes, had asked me go to see naked women dance. I ordered another chicken shwarma and considered the strange invitation.

I went, of course. It’s not often a girl asks a guy to a burlesque show and it’s a pretty good excuse for going. Even women can’t call you a pervert if a woman asks you to go see other naked women prance around shamelessly. Instead the woman who invited you is praised for being so open-minded and uninhibited and progressive. Of course the same women who are so effusive with praise for their open-minded sisters are the same ones who would have called me Taliban-ape-man if I went at my own urging (I know that phrase makes no sense but once, when I pulled a Playboy off a magazine rack at a news stand uptown by Colombia, a large spiky-haired woman in silk peasant garb and an enormous yellow scarf actually called me Taliban-ape-man).

I dressed for the show: black books, black jeans, a black t-shirt with a black v-neck sweater over it, a black scarf, my nice knee length black wool coat, a black wool hat, and black leather gloves; the stereotypical New York City downtown attire. Even my wallet’s black. And I had showered and shaved and made sure I pumped my most expensive cologne all over me to counter Beatrice’s ultra-sensitive nose.

I left my apartment and headed south.

The Secret, Roving, Magical, Burlesque Circus of Lower Manhattan was playing a few blocks south of Houston St., just off of Ludlow. It didn’t seem such a secret. I arrived a few minutes early and there was a mob of men standing on the sidewalk dressed exactly like me– black with black with black with black. The men were of all shapes, races, sizes and ages and they huddled together outside the door to an old, ratty-looking brick tenement building like a herd of cattle in the cold. Steam rose above each man’s head with the exhalation of his breath, and each man clutched a postcard in his black-leather-gloved hand. No one spoke. No one looked at each other. We all just stood stone still and stared straight ahead at a pair of burning white candles in a gothic, metal candelabra that hung on the windowless, black door to the building.

A hundred or so men had a come to see the Secret, Roving, Magical Burlesque Show on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on that freezing January evening, and we all waited patiently in the cold. I didn’t look at the faces of the other men, and I didn’t want them to look at mine. There was a strange, almost religious solemnity to the group; a self-reflective absorption that we all acknowledged and respected in each other. Each of us stood in silence, a part of the group yet alone with our own private thoughts, waiting for the door to open so we could enter and see women willingly and uninhibitedly prance around naked for us. We were all lost in our own thoughts, and mesmerized by the flames of the small, white candles that burned on the door that blocked our entrance to the show.

It began to snow. Big, white, serene, snowflakes silently fell through the night. They landed on the darkened sidewalks and the streets and the roofs and the people of the vast city. Our black wool coats and hats received the snowflakes’ gentle landings graciously, and soon our heads and shoulders were dappled white. We waited and watched the motionless flames.

The door swung open and an acappella chorus of women’s voices broke through the silence in a slow dirge-like chant: sort of Enya with out the synthesizers. It was a lovely sound. Then a light flashed and a beautiful woman in white was there. She smiled at us and said "Welcome to the Secret, Roving, Magical Burlesque Show of Lower Manhattan! I’m Shania." We all surged forward.

Shania was a sight to behold. She was over six feet tall with pure blonde hair that hung down her back almost to her butt. She wore thick red lipstick, like a fifties poster girl and had flawless white skin that stretched over high cheekbones and a fine, long chin. She had frigid-blue wolf-eyes, like Beatrice had, and they sparkled with joy. She wore a pristine white tailcoat-tuxedo outfit exquisitely tailored to exhibit her lean, hourglass figure, a white ruffled shirt, a white cumber bun, a white top hat, white, 6" spiked-heeled shoes, and a red bow tie. She was spectacular. She beamed a smile as each man passed and she whispered "Welcome, thank you for coming."

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