After the kiss, Rosie turned and asked, “Wanna pet my tail?” They were alone in the kitchen and Bill had no indication that his partner would be joining him there soon.
“Why not?” he said. He stepped close to her reached down. Of course the tail was not what he went to pet and Rosie, not shy with him at all anymore, leaned a little forward to make his petting her a bit easier.
“It’s gonna be really slow,” she said. “Wanna meet up? It is Christmas Eve.”
“Sure,” Bill said.
He took only a quick feel, an inside, intimate one, one to let him know that Rosie was already expectant. Primed might be another way to have thought about it, or, the well was already running and all he had done was kiss her and prime it a bit.
“I have to finish setting up,” Bill said. “Have to make a couple more trips to the kitchen. Jimmy doesn’t look like he’s gonna be helping any.”
“Well, I’ll see you in a bit,” Rosie said.
Bill’s espresso was waiting for him when he went back out to the truck and where Kalista was. His partner, he saw, was fast asleep there by his aunt and when Bill went to take up his coffee, Kalista gave him a look.
“What am I to do?” she said.
“It’s okay,” Bill said.
“Is not okay,” said Kalista. “Is anything but okay.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. But it does get tiresome, and I’ve only been here two months now.”
“Yes,” Kalista said. “Sooner or later, the chef has to do something. I tell Victor and my other Jimmy to talk to him, but this one,” she said nodding toward Jimmy G, “he don’t care and he’s lazy.”
“There was a time not too long ago I’d have killed for a job,” Bill said. He sipped his espresso quickly, finished it and put the cup in the bus box.
“I have to go back to the main kitchen,” Bill said. “Let him sleep.”
Edelgarde was waiting for Bill down the ramp where no one from The Falstaff Room could see them. She surprised Bill and he was startled.
“Rosie said you petted her tail,” Edelgarde said. “Mine is just as soft.” She smiled at Bill and turned so he could see the tail attached to the uniform.
Bill locked the wheel on the truck and stepped away from it. He took a moment to look all around them. Not only were they alone and isolated, but from what he could see and understood, it was like a ghost town there.
He did not pet her tail. He pinned Edelgarde against the wall and kissed her. He did not kiss softly or easily or even passionately. He kissed roughly, forcefully, a kiss that was meant to tell her he was taking control and she should yield to him, which she did and not unhappily.
He pressed her there, kissing her all the while, forcing her tongue to do what his wanted her to. As they kissed he reached between them and let himself inside her skimpy uniform bottom and her panties underneath.
Edelgarde kissed back now more greedily, more hungrily. She moved gently with his fingers as they manipulated her. “Don’t stop,” she whispered.
“Say please,” Bill said.
“Please.”
He didn’t stop. He kept on until it was done, fait accompli, le petit mort.”
“I’m breathless,” Edelgarde said. “I need a moment to recover.”
Bill stepped slightly away from her and lit a cigarette. He took a long drag on it and held it out to her. She puffed it from his hand.
“My God,” she said leaning heavily into the wall.
“Merry Christmas,” Bill said.
“It’s not Christmas yet.” Eddie smiled at Bill. “Not by a long shot,” she said.
By Peter Weiss
an outtake/excerpt from I See My Light
Sometimes the best wins out, Murph thought. Most often the most corrupt does. Or the most dirty.
Politics of the day caused him to be thinking this.
So he remembered Isaac Logart, a Cuban welterweight in the 1950s. Logart was on the Cuban Olympic team and jumped off the truck in the United States, in New York, where he defected. He promptly became a pro fighter.
Murph met Logart in the 1970s in the hotel at which he started working. Logart was a pantry man there. He made coffee and toast and did a few other things, but not much more. He didn’t have much of a brain left and his speech was all slurred. He wore thick black-plastic eyeglasses that were always loose on his face so one of his regular motions was to keep pushing those glasses in place on his nose.
One thing about Logart, he had muscles. He had muscles like no other person Murph had ever known. He had muscles in places other people didn’t even have places, Murph used to say when describing him,. That’s how strong he was. Murph also kidded him all the time saying the coffee tasted like he’d put his socks in it.
Logart was one of several people personally responsible for making Murph a distance runner, the last one actually. Murph had just started running, not so much because he wanted to as much as because his wife, a modern dancer, had told him she didn’t want to be married to a fat guy and that he’d better start doing something about himself.
So it goes.
He started by walking in place in the apartment. Then he was running in place for more than half an hour at a time and then one time when he and his wife were up on the boulevard, out of the blue Murph just felt like running so he told his wife he’d meet her at home. He took off and ran all the way home.
That’s how it happened, straight up.
From there, Murph started going out to run, and one day when he’d run two miles he happened to mention it to Logart. Logart looked at him through those thick eyeglasses and said “Run four miles tomorrow.” Then he added, “In boots.”
That was how Logart was. You could ask him anything about boxing and he would teach you anything you wanted to know. But you could never fool around with him by faking going to hit him. If you did that, he was apt to knock you out straight.
They were talking in the kitchen one time about his career. Logart was a top contender, number one contender for almost two years but he never got a title fight. Murph was asking why.
“It’s all fixed,” said Logart.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“They wanted me to go down and I wouldn’t.”
“So what did you do?”
“I waited. I trained. I took lesser fights.”
“Why wouldn’t they give you a fair shot?”
“Cause I’d a beat them. I was better. They made me get out of fight-shape and get older and slower. And then they were dirty.”
Truth was that later in his career he fought and lost an elimination bout for a chance at the title. He lost, he said, because of the unwanted layoff.
Next Murph thought about a woman in his Master’s program. She really had little talent but she had really big tits. Turns out she screwed the professor and published a novel because of his backing.
Going way back was the head of the creative writing program where Murph did his undergraduate work. He got his job because of paternalism, not talent or qualifications.
It’s a complicated world, Murph thought. He could remember some of the rules of leadership. Most of them weren’t too pretty. And then there were our leaders, the American Politburo, liars, thieves, extortionists. Their major MO: spend other people’s money indiscriminately and promise anything to stay in power.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
By Peter Weiss
If he hurried, he had just time enough for a quick shave and shower. He turned on the news and set the TV loud enough to hear it with the bathroom door open and the shower running.
News of the day, like the news every day now, was another addition to his depression, but at the same time it was a strengthening factor. Illegal immigration and the costs of it in terms of free medical care, free legal care, free education, Social Security, welfare, enhanced and enlarged police forces and correctional facilities, homeland security, airport security, etc. etc. etc. were the top stories. The impotent Congress and self-serving politicians who came out with their streams of broken promises and unashamed admissions to lies were doing their normal everyday dance feigning care and concern for the American public and yada yada yada, more depressing stuff. It was common now to hear the commentators preface a remark with is it just me or… and then go on to ask if all of what was going on didn’t seem kind of crazy. It was crazy. It was crazy, stupid crap that didn’t seem to be this way thirty or forty years ago.
But there was some harsh reality, Murph thought as he shaved quickly in the shower. Not long ago a girl had been shot to death by an illegal alien while strolling with her father on a San Francisco pier. That perpetrator had been deported five times and had come back to San Francisco because he knew it was a sanctuary city. That was real, Murph thought, and Murph could not dismiss from his mind the girl’s last words to her father: “Help me Dad.”
How does a father live with that? This was Murph’s question to Carla when they were talking about the incident, when Murph had gone off on the politicians all of whom traveled with bodyguards and lived in gated communities or areas for the rich and famous that were policed very differently from where the commoners lived. Pieces of shit, Murph had called the politicians, but on some level the immigration problem and runaway freebies the immigrants, legal and illegal, were now getting made Murph remember his father would be wanting him to live a long life being supported by his city pension and Social Security. His father who only got the shit end of the stick would want them to pay and pay and keep paying as long as Murph could make them pay.
There was a lot more reality too. The country was going broke and the train to bankruptcy had shifted from the local to the express track. The kids we educated were barely functional illiterates whose main concern was their Facebook page. Our morality was in the toilet, but that was a whole other issue.
Murph guffawed, half to himself, half out loud. He remembered the conversation he’d had with Carla about redefining marriage and the consequences of such a move.
“Two women and a horse,” Murph said. “That’s what I want my marriage to be.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You watch. If they legalize same-sex marriage, polygamy and whatever you call marrying an animal is next.”
“I’ll do a three-way with your other wife,” Carla had said, “but forget the animal unless I get to pick the dog of my choice.”
“You’re a sick person,” Murph had said.
Carla just laughed. But now that was happening. Since they had legalized same-sex marriage, Murph had read about a push to polygamy—after all it was a God-given right, right? A new term had recently popped up, a throuple, which was being defined as a three-parent couple. Now that was cool! Murph couldn’t wait to see how our brilliant leaders fixed health insurance and Social Security to cover everyone. And then just the other day a sixty-four year old woman, a Veteran, died after eight days in the hospital. She’d been raped and beaten to near-death with a hammer by another illegal-alien with a long record that local authorities had refused to hold for ICE. Surprise, surprise.
Murph dressed quickly. The seeming absurdity of the world around him was simply unbelievable.
