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Coffee.
Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee. Where was the fucking coffee?
We had coffee yesterday, didn’t we? I rummaged through the last cabinet in the kitchen, the one where we kept the dishes, as if the packet of coffee might have snuck under a chipped plate or snuggled down in one of the three mismatched cups. All the other cabinet doors hung open, having been raided, pillaged, and left for dead.
No coffee in the plate cabinet, either.
It’s a law—federal, state, and natural—when in doubt of an object’s location, ask the woman. “Chelle!”
“Joe!” Her voice came through loud and clear from her permanent place of residence in the john. In a three-room government apartment with Xerox-copied walls, we did not need an intercom to communicate.
“Where’s the coffee?” While the question traveled across time and space, penetrated Chelle’s hard crust of annoyance and generated a response, I checked under the sink. Nothing except for a bottle of liquid soap (so old, it had cemented itself to the cabinet floor), some Drano, a can of unopened greenish powdery substance (for cleaning?), and an empty box of scrub pads.
Somebody should throw that out.
I tried the fridge next, in case I missed seeing the baggie of Folger’s pellets the first three times I checked. Two pickles in a jar of green vinegar. Ketchup, nearly empty. Mayo, nearly empty. Can of Diet Dr Pepper, open, half gone. (Gulp. Oops, now all gone.) Package of cold cuts, one left. Takeout Beef with Broccoli in a paper carton that... ew... had more green than broccoli alone could account for.
Chelle’s response pinged back from the bathroom. “Coffee?”
“Yes! Coffee! Where! Is! It?” I scratched my bare chest, followed by a spot on my ass—covered in gym shorts.
The toilet flushed, the tap ran, and Chelle wandered in, naked from head to toe.
“Do you have to yell?” she asked. “Half the fuckin’ building must’ve heard you.”
“I probably wouldn’t yell, but I just got up, I haven’t peed yet because you’ve been in the bathroom, and I can’t find... the stinkin’ coffee!” That last bit was accompanied by me slamming the refrigerator door, cutting off the pleas from the pickles. Eat me! Eat me! the pickles cried. Yeah, well. Me first.
“You drank all the coffee yesterday, Joe.” Chelle used that overly patient tone women employed when they want to fucking piss you off.
“No, I did not.”
“Yes. You did.”
I can recognize a circular argument broiling faster than you can say did not, did too, so I tried a different tack. “Did you buy some more?” Shopping was her chore, as bug killing and cap unscrewing was mine. Which doesn’t sound like much, but hey, in our apartment, bug killing was a full-time job.
“With what, Joe? Your draw doesn’t come ’til Tuesday. Food stamps reload Wednesday. I spent all my paycheck on the light bill. Should I fuck Chang so you can have some coffee?” She spread her arms wide, as if holding up the world. Her small breasts perked up in my direction, which distracted me. A naked Chelle was once the stuff of my late-night, box-of-tissue fantasies. She’d zapped off her pubic hair with a follicular laser and had an arrow tattooed from her navel to the split of her vagina. Over the arrow, in stencil, were the words: Eat Here.
I once believed that was sexy as hell.
“Of course not,” I told her. “I absolutely do not—most emphatically do not—want you fucking the grocer.” I put on a thoughtful expression. “I think just a blow job would do the trick—Wait! I’m kidding!” But I was speaking to Chelle’s jiggling derriere.
Slam!
Bathroom door. I recognized the sound.
“Hey, I still need to pee!”
The love of my life, the woman who once asked if she could hold it for me when I went to the john, voice muffled by one door and six years of emotional insulation, yelled back. “Use the fucking sink!”
“I need a cup of coffee,” I muttered. “It’s too early for this shit.”
I found a use for the empty Dr Pepper can. Ahhh. One problem solved.
We lived in an apartment building off West 23rd Place, south of the Chicago River, in a rectangular block structure stacked between other rectangular block structures that, altogether, formed a mega-block. You put four mega-blocks side by side and you get a “neighborhood filled with diversity.” Which is code for slum. It had been a slum in the latter half of the twentieth century and, through willpower and stick-to-it-iveness, was even slummier in the mid-twenty-first.
It used to be called Chinatown—before the Asians, being smart people, migrated to the North Side—and was within a quarter-hour hike of Lake Michigan. Not that we would hike it. If I wanted to inhale the aroma of dead fish and sewage, all I had to do was hang out in the alley behind the restaurant on Wentworth, the Frying Fresh (and try saying that with a Chinese accent).
My point being, if I wanted coffee, I had to put on clothes, boogie down three flights of stairs (the elevator shaft now being used as a trash chute), haul my ass through my “neighborhood filled with diversity” without getting stomped into glue by the thousand-and-one addicts and street people, make a right on Wentworth—opposite of the Frying Fresh—and waltz into Chang’s store. Chang’s ancestors had either been left behind during the exodus or they were the only dumb Asians in Chicago, remaining in place while everyone else boarded the proverbial Chinese Ark for the North.
No matter how intellectually challenged his ancestors may have been, Chang was sharp enough to demand payment for goods received (treacherous son of the Orient that he was), so of course I wouldn’t be buying coffee once I reached his Asian oasis. Buying required money, and money required either a job, or government unemployment, or food-stamp deposit to my bit-stick.
Or performing oral sex on Chang, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t sink to that level.
News tweets claimed the government threatened to cut off unemployment benefits at two years if Congress couldn’t get another tax increase passed. My unemployment had lasted two years and three months. So far. With no end in sight. If they cut off unemployment, I’d be eating gravel stew between food-stamp payouts.
Evil Joe whispered, You need money. Ding’s offering money.
Shut the fuck up. I’m a working-class guy with no education. I’m not a crook.
If you can’t find a job and have no income, how are you supposed to eat?
You have a point, but think about it. Ding. That dude ain’t right. I get tied up with him...
Derisive laughter echoed in my head. Can you imagine trying a felony on your own?
Can you imagine my life in a detention camp, I fired back at me, huddled with six other guys under one blanket, hoping that thing prodding my butt isn’t what I think it is?
Chelle came out of the bathroom, showered and dressed in ancient knee-length jeans and a split-front T-shirt. She had obviously decided not to press charges against me. Her attitude said, Hey, I’ll forget you’re a jackass if you’ll leave it alone and don’t make me fucking come across this table and rip your nuts off.
I can read a lot into women’s body language.
“Are you going to get dressed?” she asked. The question weighted and freighted a very subtle undercurrent on six tiny words. Chelle busied herself at the kitchen counter, oh-so-very carefully not looking at me.
Tell her to fuck off, Evil Joe urged.
“Fuck off.”
“What?” Chelle asked, a frown splitting her forehead.
“Nothing. Talking to myself. Yes, babe,” I tried, “I plan to. Right now, in fact.”
Chelle dumped her ass at the table, pouring the last of the gluten-free flax cereal in a bowl. I sensed her watching me even though she appeared intent on her breakfast. She appeared pretty pale and shaky.
“You do remember, right?” Chelle asked.
“Sure I do.” My brain’s electronic impulses shorted out in a frenzy of sparks. Oh... wait... “You want me to go with you to the doctor. You’ll get your test results back today.”
A sparkling smile lit Chelle’s lips and touched her green eyes. I tried not to sag with relief. “I’m glad you remembered. We have to be there in an hour, so you might want to get moving.”
“Yep. Will do. It’s been, what? Six months since they sent them in? You’d think they cloned a whole new you to find out what’s wrong.”
I pushed back from the table and stretched. Checked around the kitchen in case I forgot something. Like where I put my balls. Oh, there. Hiding under the table; so small I couldn’t see ’em. I headed for the bathroom.
“Oh, hey, Chelle?” I pointed to the Dr Pepper can by her elbow. “Don’t drink out of that. I didn’t want to have to clean the sink.”