Scary ghost stories and stuff (1)

Hunka, Hunka, Burning Love

All my earthly relationships have proceeded from dinner to drinks, from drinks to desperate groping, from desperate groping  to awkward phone calls, from it’s me not you to it's you not me, or more truthfully, from drinks to desperate groping devoid of the rest of the drama, but I do so adore theater and what could be more theatrical than a man dressed as a woman appearing, as if sent from heaven, in the desperate hour of my need.

“You missed your calling,” Jula always says and shakes her head. Jula is my grandmother, her proper name is Juliet, but I have called her Jula since the age of two. We live together on the first floor of her two-story greystone on Chicago's northside.  She rents the second floor to a Persian couple.  Persian sounds so much more elegant than Iranian, bringing to mind flying carpets above moonlit horizons. Jula will only let me pay the electric bill, “so that I might pursue more artistic endeavors,” she says, knowing that I have dreamed of seducing cabaret crowds with my renditions of Porter and Cobain, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Smells Like Teen Spirit sung to a bossa nova beat. My oeuvre has taken me as far as the Broadway Bookstore where I do the displays and work the register.  I wouldn’t be able to survive on my own, not financially, mentally, or spiritually, Jula is my rock.

"Must have been another disaster," Jula said, the morning  she found me slamming cabinet doors and sighing, sparked by a toaster that had refused to warm my strawberry Pop-Tarts. Sweetest Jula, she knew that my slamming and sighing was so much more than slamming and sighing. "How could a man named Chance find the Titanic Exhibit boring?" I said, as if I were Kate Winslet playing Rose adrift in frigid North Atlantic waters. She rolled her eyes, a subtle technique she often uses to get me out and about.

I found myself at the Li's sidewalk sale, Clark Street has a way of soothing me with little unexpected encounters. The Li's are the elderly Asian couple who own The Happy Wok. The sign on their front window said everything must go, and my first thought mourned the loss of kung-pao chicken with Mr. Li’s guarantee  of eight jumbo cashews in every order.

"A developer paid crazy money to tear the building down, going to make everything bigger," Mr. Li said, his life set before me on wobbly card tables. I pictured a monstrous multi-storied condo building with redundant retail outlets at street level, shops that wouldn’t house a single cashew. They were retiring to Branson, “no snow and Donny Osmond,” Mr. Li smiled. Ever the perceptive businessman, he noticed that a faded box had drawn my attention. The brittle cardboard of it crumpled into dust around my finger-tip when I touched it.

“Ten dollars, a real antique.” Mr. Li carefully picked up the box and waved it in a circular motion through the air, like he was about to perform a magic trick.  “Mrs. Li never used, toast is for the British.”

“Five dollars,”  I countered, wondering how much it would cost to see Donny in Branson. Mr. Li would have been disappointed if I didn’t try to haggle.

“Eight dollars and take this too.”  He held up a black lacquer ring box that I knew Jula would admire.  “Eight is a lucky number,” he added.

I handed Mr. Li a ten dollar bill and, feeling flush with the prospect of luck, told him to keep the change.

Unlucky at love lucky at toast, I thought, as I replaced Jula's broken plastic toaster with something that looked like it came from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, round and chrome with an old cloth power cord. I imagined Tom chasing Jerry into the kitchen, Jerry dashing inside the toaster, Tom getting his four-fingered paw stuck in its wire grill, Jerry squeezing out to the lifter knob, drawing it down with the weight of his body, and Tom pulling out his throbbing red mitt. Pain is funny after all, isn’t it?

Jula kissed my forehead early the next morning when I gave her the ring box.  She gets up at 4 a.m. because she can’t sleep.  I often get up to keep her company before I leave for work.  She reads at the kitchen table, whatever freebies that I bring home from the store, especially faux-historical romances.