Swallow  ~^~

Benny The Doorman / Smitten

by Michael G. Salinger

The first sign of understanding is the wish to die.
Kafka

Benny the Doorman

The girl absent-mindedly opened the glove compartment as they pulled onto the slick streets. She was amused to discover a parakeet perched, head tucked up under a wing soundly asleep, on the looped binding of the owner's manual. She upstate boarding school saddle shoes in hand curfew transgression clicklessly shut the cover so as not to disturb the slumbering bird. Flashes of such consideration came easily to her as long as they were directed toward people or things that didn't challenge her idiosyncratic moral code or test her intellect. In this case, a budgie in the glove box fit into her capricious reality just fine. Conversely the use of a word such as idiosyncratic was, in her wildflower decorated address book, surely the tendril tip of a conspiracy probing up the drain needing to be pruning shear lopped off before the whole damn squid had moved into the claw footed bath tub. The last thing she needed now was another mouth or beak or whatever those things had to feed.

The windshield wipers swiped at the globules of rain unfolding from the center out, flinging sweeping benedictions to the sporadic precipitation, temporarily smearing the entrails of squashed insects into a vision impairing paste. Eventually enough lubrication was provided to render the fog into a single streak two fingers wide arching directly at the driver's level of vision. He jumped out at a red light and attacked the smudge with a wad of newspaper from the back seat, landing quick jabs at the smear between the double time swipes of the rubber tipped blades. The rain flicked a familiar syncopated snare beat against the ragtop of the Packard, reminding her of the weather faded canvas awning outside of the brownstone she lived in.

Benny would be sentry posted under that awning now, brass tarnish button bedecked, a landlocked admiral, listing a bit astern due to a missing epaulet and half a bottle of competitively priced wine. Dragging on a hand rolled cigarette, black coffee flavored smoke rings, escaping halos fading, like a fourteen year old girl's big city dream, into the carbon monoxide and cabby horn blast laced nighttime air. A bugler butt cartwheel launched sparks trailing a lazy arc extinguished in an imperceptible hiss as it mirror reflecting collides into the wet asphalt before catching a ride uptown in the tread grooves of a graffiti camouflaged moving van, at least it was getting out of neighborhood.

Beneath a hard black plastic visor, melted ice blue Aryan eyes watched the traffic roll by from the illusionary grandeur of his doorman's roost, a Naugahyde dentist's chair, a fellow castaway, busying itself with the incremental process of decay. Flaking chromate loops supporting orange Bakelite arm rests dark bubble tiger striped by forgotten left lit smokes while he stayed for cup of hot Joe after carting up groceries or some anonymously brown paper and stringed package for one of the not as transient as they wished to be tenants. A dented stainless steel spit basin telescope attached to the side of the contraption collected his spare change tips, drain blocked by a crumpled Hershey bar wrapper that kept the coins from sidewalk crack rolling into the swirling torrent of water vanishing into the storm drain. Meanwhile the unsolicited advice of "Benny, why don't you get a life" scrolled counterclockwise unimpeded in one then out the other of his cap pinned ears, as if the option hadn't been arraigned, tried and tossed into windowless solitary confinement, meals sporadically slid through a stainless steel doored slit.

The tenants were your basic one Russian Roulette, there but for the grace of God, empty chamber click above flophouse de-jour fare. A gunpowder barrel-chested playwright, sustaining himself through the unread side bar interjection of hot and humid monologues that supposedly drizzled from the moody mouths of soft-core porn bimbettes on the pages of newsprint smut. He was paid 6.5 cents a word. Hey, it was good enough for Mamet. A couple of Da Da throwback artist types inscrutable enough to tread water in the outermost whirlpool rings of semi-legitimacy, avant- garde jazz/noise makers whose axes spent as much time in the pawn shop as they did producing hobo boxcar clacks and atonal squeaks in lower west side clubs. This conglomeration formed a self- evidently indulged societal fringe, a line of demarcation providing the finger bowl of rancid rose water for upper crust digit dipping. They were the art opening crew that piled hors d'oeuvres a little too high on the canary yellow plastic plates while passing a bottle of whatever they could lift from the open bar, their indiscretions tolerated for the color they provided until a fight or conspicuous vomiting erupted.

Benny was never officially hired to the position, he just materialized from the morning mist one crisp falls morning, fingerless gloves, wingtips and all. A novelty familiarized into a landmark like a concrete goose dressed appropriately for each holiday on a right angled suburban lawn, at first unique and cryptically quaint then transmuted into a part of the landscape. He lent a dim integrity to the doorway that the occupants of the building came to rely on. A volunteer sentinel personifying the boundary between the inhabitants of the apartment building and the rest of the world that prior to his arrival had only existed in the crew's collective imagination. Straddling this border came naturally for the doorman, who didn't bother to look up from the wet newspaper he was reading as the Packard blurred by.

The driver of the Packard glanced up into the rear view mirror and flipped the little switch at the bottom of the plastic frame in order to dim the glare of the bright lights that was being beelined through the mist some by some rat bastard tailgating cabby. The image in the mirror switched to a filmstrip, snapshots Edison kinescope flashing progressively picking up speed till the pictures blurred into animation. A birds eye view unfolded, revealing an open sky high above the gray cottonballed clouds that excreted precipitation onto the city beneath.

The terminal velocity of a falling human and the top speed of a 1958 Packard Convertible both max out around 124 miles per hour. The rushing air hissed a seashell white noise as he plummeted downward, the electric jolt that accompanies a loss of balance weaved through his muscles, tendons, and bones in a continual loop. He saw the clouds, and he knew they wouldn't break his fall, but he couldn't help imagining a soft landing enveloped in puffy whiteness. The brain tends to solidify the translucent; it doesn't know any better.

Emerging from the cloudbank he could see the lights of the city symmetrically lain out with the sterilized perspective afforded by distance. He began to search for a soft place to land unable to accept that it wouldn't make a difference. He crashed unimpeded through the canvas awning.

"Y'know," the girl said, "I think that, if a person in your life isn't healthy for you it's your spiritual duty to not associate with them". She had her shoes off and her right leg was propped up against the dash so that her knee was parallel to her chin, the way women do.

Benny went inside to get a dustpan and a broom. He liked to run a tight ship.

Smitten

He drank a concoction of cranberry and orange juice with a dash of grenadine carbonated by a shot of soda from the penguin headed fountain spout behind the bar. The joint was furnished with ancient stained velvet horseshoe booths, leftovers from an – "I'm ready for my close up Mr. Demille" - time that had come and gone, sunset stripped of any purported dignity they had ever pretended to possess. The vinyl and chrome stools didn't spin, they didn't have to when the majority of patrons never turned away from the nicotine stained mirror that reflected their liver death saffron tinged images amongst the bottles on the other side of the rosewood laminate bar where on their rock glasses of zoom-zoom sauce sat.

A languid and humid tango beat single stick snare shuffled from the darkest red draped corner of the stage. He turned around elbow propped and watched her silhouette materialize in a smoke defined midnight blue column of light. The shadow cast by her arms, stiffly held down slightly away from her full cello curved hips hands invisible tabletop leaning bent at the wrists, gave the impression of a giant sleeved choir gown composed of incorporeal blackness. She leaned into the mike, throat bared to serious cleavage tilting her head back, closed her eyes as if waiting for a kiss and began to recite the telephone book. That was this kitty's act , she purred the white pages... Aaban, Aaron 489-9956...

Her hips did a slow base of the spinal ball joint rack and pinion swiveling thing that had been inspired by the grass skirted plastic trinket that was magnetically attached to her father's 1958 Packard convertible's dash: standard issue for a tin man. - Aloha oi sailor boys... welcome to Pearl Harbor. - Detroit just didn't make rides that comfortable anymore. Sitting room sofa coiled springs, amply surrounded by cotton fluff with the consistency of the wadding inside a polished chrome Zippo. The cloth desaturated, tenderized and warmed by sunlight, the upholstery's original color easily accessible beneath the spiderweb lattice of a lace doily. Everything about this doll was just below the surface, a lunar lit underwater flash, subtle and sublime, foreshadowed by the blue sequins reflecting follow spot that nailed her egg cracking ass behind the microphone on the stage.

Yeah she was subtle, about as subtle as the sudden appearance of a terry cloth towel wrapped baseball bat after dinner mint rounding the alley corner toothpick pile driving on it's way to cheek – this is just a warning - bone crushing. The brain will shut down for an instant at this point while the senses have the rug pulled out from under them. Time hesitates in a faulty revolving door, and the boys in the boiler room throw up a test pattern in the form of blazing white light providing cover for the gray matter as it attempts to catch up before the whole shithouse explodes.

The only thing missing were the comic strip X's replacing his eyes, the charcoal scribbled Krazy Kat twisted funnel cloud interspersed with stars and exploding comets emanating at a 45 degree angle from the top of his dome, accompanied by the theme from 2001 a Space Odyssey broken cable elevator ride to the basement piped in on a tin pennywhistle. -"Will I dream Dave?" - A Joe Palooka puffed wheat punch drunk standing eight count, followed by the detached retinal induced clouding of common sense. Mop handle propped, his corporal entity listed against the cracking cinderblock walls of rationality when any reasonable man would have stuck his thumb in his mouth made tiny mammalian suckling noises, lied down and waited for it all to go away.