The Chef Rose Through The Dining Room Like Dough

The chef rose through the dining room like dough, handing out blinis and gold caviar, kissing and bellowing his way towards us.  She called him Andre.  I began to realize everyone was drunk.  Every waiter, busboy, captain, food runner, sous chef, dish washer, expediter, cashier, coat check, bar back and porter was three sheets to the wind.  They had boozy eyes, fingers and noses.  They peed on their feet.  They sneezed on the food and roared and laughed and smooched and tickled.  From the kitchen laughter chased vehement argument in dizzying, dust kicking circles that banged pots, knocked over brooms and blew out pilot lights.  Wine, beer and liquor flowed from beaker, amphora, bottle, jug, jar, cask and bladder into mugs, flutes, steins, goblets, highballs, schooners and shot glasses.  It sloshed over knuckles, dribbled down chins, leaked into panties, soaked beards, shirt fronts and pubic hair.  It salted cock-tips and vulvas.  Alcohol was wept, drooled, blown out the nostrils, perspired, pissed, honked and shitted.  They exhaled it, spat it, swirled it, iced it, salted it, limed it, sugared it, and exchanged it tongue to tongue.  It was in the food and the cleanser, in the mouth wash and air freshener.  They sang about it and fought about it and read books about it.  They did everything but pray to it.

            Over steak and quail club, which looked like road kill, quite drunk, smoking between courses, I pestered her with questions.  But she never let her orthodontic smile perish, even when lipstick rubbed off on her teeth and a flush spread across her chest.  When they brought the chocolate cheesecake, her nipples leapt to attention.

            This dense confection we washed down with Armagnac and espresso.  By then, it was like I was staring at a giant vortex draining into her face.  I struggled to remain conscious but at the same time I had awakened a thirst so powerful, I had to pour in drink after drink.  Soon there were mirrored vortices, the one opening at my mouth, terminating in my asshole, and the other in hers.  Between the two, I felt my brain and skull shatter and mix with hers and in the world of nerveless pictures we sucked each other’s surface down and ground the glass to dirt.

            Next thing I know darkness touched me.  I was being chugged along.  Some impulse was at work.  Some peristaltic process on the surface of the air propelled me through it towards the zone whose light was beyond my ken.  Lacking feelers for this light, lacking rods and cones and simulacra, I was defied by it and cast adrift through grey serenity punctuated by sudden eruptions of vertiginous glare.  I sought the pillow, the moist spare tire, the warm hovel, the patient navel, the soft expanse between breast and arm pit, sought secretion in the neck, pleaded for blanket, for cushion, rug or couch, swimming through this random, vague, slowly dispersing and dispersible element.  

            She elongated stood to my Lilliput.  Her vast elastic carmine hood tacked montane to cloud and snow line brow, denuded, waved over head.  My toes in velvet weed let go.  I forgave the air its mismanufracture.  I forgave her order and sought in the pieces conversation and number.  Blue compensation swelled out like bellying sacks.  The rump surged forward, a yellow surf sucking in the sun’s fire and propelled through sand.  From her lips, a fine asking spray, droplets lit by headlights.

            Back and forth we jerked.  Night time sank to my lower gut, a poisonous, heavy coal.  Now blobs of black and white opened and closed one on top of the other and my topographic face sprang in and out.  Erupting out of my back, a crystalline, needled spine that marched like a slowly assembled gill to my forehead, stiff with erotic promise, strange and translucent, webbed with blood, cold, wet and sharp.  She touched the spines with each finger and licked the septic blood drops off.  My poison burned her lips.  They fizzled into masses of yellow-white grease.  Teeth emerged from the sides of her cheek and fell to the floor with a rattle.

            All dark.  Spinning against time.  Orbiting the wrong planet.  The unsynchronized collapse of every ellipsis into wobbling paths.  Then, corruption.  Static hisses, horns honking, voices like scar tissue thick and unformed.  The boiled off face of the world grows back in fibrous, webbed masses of tender ribbons.

            Through these hanging silk scarves I wandered, picking up words along the way.  Then, it gushed between my teeth.  Bucket upon bucket.  One by one they assembled.  Each contraction forced it up.  Stinging, spraying, washing back, I coughed and spit and choked.  The world started to hang together, loosely.  She said, “Well Mr. Bartell, it’s a good thing you dressed for dinner.”

            I stared up at her from the tile.  The world assembled around her crotch, loosely.  She had planted her feet on either side of my chest.  Her naked legs were like hundred story buildings.  Semen dripped out of her onto my belly.