Fall 2009

Congratulations to Marianne Weltmann and Kye Alfred Hillig, whose work was chosen at the fall end-of-term reading. Each quarter we highlight writing created in Hugo Classes by our crop of talented students.

Marianne Weltmann escaped Hitler’s Germany with her parents, who settled in Youngstown, Ohio. After completion of her B.A. and M.A. in voice at Juilliard, she  returned to Europe to sing opera in Italy and Germany. She worked as a translator/interpreter and dubbed and converted film scripts into English. On music faculties in the U.S. and Canada, she is a licensed massage therapist. She started writing the day after her son’s suicide.

In her Writing Loss class, Anna Balint addressed writing moments of joy, which stretched to the comedic zaniness of this piece. It may at some point find its way into a memoir of losses and points of light.

Train Wreck

Back in the ‘50s when Joe McCarthy was raging venom, every Friday evening   my group from Juilliard would go slumming downtown to the Jefferson School of Marxist Studies. We all actually believed the Rosenbergs were innocent. Then on Saturday nights, we would join other likeminded individuals in somebody’s living room to practice free love, the pilot for group sex and speed dating. All you needed to bring was a blanket. In a cushy velvet armchair, I found myself between my blanket and a guy named Warren, whose day job was shelving books at Columbia Library. He asked for my address. The next day, I found Warren on the living room couch with my roommate Joan in the apartment we shared. Not even under a blanket. I had always thought of her as mousy, her only talent was drawing horses.

In high school in Ohio, my heart thumped with teen tachycardia when Jackie Matteson transferred in from St. Ursuline parochial school. His eyebrows arched like the tops of question marks up to a head of curly dark hair.

Best of all, he played Chopin Ballades, his tapered fingers cascading down the keyboard in double thirds. And he joined the Rifle Club. So I did too, to watch his piano pointer wrap around the trigger of a 22-caliber rifle, but mostly to lie on a mat next to him in prone position. When it was my turn to bring the rifle home to clean the bore, my mother fainted. I was getting up the courage to ask Jackie to the prom, but after shooting out the light bulb in the firehouse at our first match, I put the idea on hold.  

That’s when Sally Hogan moved to town from Fort Lauderdale with her single-parent mom. No one wanted to be her friend, so I invited her to dinner. We were inseparable till she blew a hole in my fantasy of Catholic-Jewish relations by asking Jackie to the prom, and he accepted.  She was a Southern Baptist.
The love of my life, Robin, the research doctor I met on a blind date, used to pick me up after Martha Graham technique class at the New Dance Group, where Billie Jean would whack me with a stick on my bum at the barre. Robin also picked up one of the narcissistic mirror gazers in black tights and a leotard.  He talked his way out of our relationship:

“My shrink thinks I won’t be ready for commitment until I finish analysis.”
Then he ogled my roommate, a pianist who happened to be blonde. Are we beginning to see a pattern forming?

Max, the psychiatric resident at the V.A., and I spent at least five weekends getting the New York Times classifieds as soon as they hit the newsstand on Friday night at the 72nd Street subway entrance. We would stalk the super of a desirable apartment and bribe him. When we aced the perfect place, Max backed out and stiffed me with the deposit and first and last months’ rent. That’s how I got into sharing Apt. 9A on West End Avenue with Rita, the blonde

Eventually it looked like I might shake the curse of ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID.  Four of us were sharing a 4th floor walk-up railroad flat on East 97th Street. We named the super “Shaky” in the good old days before political correctness about Parkinson’s Syndrome. Nothing that broke ever got fixed.  The two tenants who paid higher shares of rent got the rooms at both ends of the apartment, each with a window to the street and to the treeless courtyard. All the other rooms, including the kitchen and bath, were accessible only from adjacent boxcars with airshafts for ventilation. But then, an East Side address was worth the wheezing.

One evening I was in bed with chicken-pox, culled from a friend’s five-year-old, to whom I had read a bedtime story. The doctor ordered a darkened room and white gloves to prevent scratching scabs in my sleep. But I could still make out standing in the doorway the figure of Joe, the jazz pianist who took me to big time jazz events at the Palladium in Harlem. When he laid a bouquet of roses on my quilt, bent over to stroke my cheek, I knew I was Number One. But when Bob, the pediatric resident from Bellevue Hospital, locale of my most recent tide-me-over-till-I-become-famous day job, entered through the doorway at the other end of the room, I did a double-take. In his best bedside manner, he took my pulse and whispered sweet nothings into my itchy ear, sending Joe careening out his door. My shining hour, two guys fawning over me, ultimate unconditional love, loving me for ME, not the impending opera diva. I never considered what either of them did in adjoining rooms on their ways out. Let’s not go there!

Kye Alfred Hillig is a Tacoma-based fiction writer with a love for the off-color. He draws inspiration from his past jobs performing trauma clean-up and more currently a position at a state institution for the developmentally disabled and the mentally ill. For the last fifteen years, Kye has been the principal songwriter and lyricist for a variety of Pacific Northwest indie rock bands. More recently, Kye has based his studies in creative writing at Richard Hugo House to indulge his obsession with the written word as he completes work on his first novel.

Kye wrote this story in the Introduction to Fiction workshop taught by Karin DeWeille, and it is the opening to the novel he is working on.

Sour Milk

It’s not that it was the first time that the drag queen had seen a man nearly eat himself to death, but more the vicious way in which he ingested, like he didn’t care who was watching. Pig slop and drool ran down the man’s shirt. He simply refused to use a napkin. His fatty jowls slapped around as he tore greasy meat off of a tiny chicken bone. The man never looked up. All of his focus was directed right at the food in front of him. Small droplets of spittle, ketchup and food scraps were raining down on the checkered linoleum.

Gazing in horror from across the room was the middle-aged Chinese manager of the Kentucky Fried Chicken, dressed all in white. He stood closely to the one-armed worker who was stationed at the fries, speaking in a library voice so as not to alarm the patrons. The worker’s nub had skin that was folded up like a sealed envelope where it ended just above the right elbow.  The man looked as though he had given up on the rest of his body because of his handicap. His facial stubble was patchy and subserviced. The worker nodded along to the manager’s concerns while dipping another basket of frozen fries down to their bubbling death. The manager worried that this feasting abomination would send his customers running nauseously for their cars.

The Chinese man’s ulcer stabbed as he noticed puffs of smoke rising over the top of the fat man’s neighboring booth. He urgently approached to discover the chain smoking drag queen piling up butts on his table. The cross-dresser sat there watching the eater as if he were a television.

The manager spoke down to the smoker from his tight little mustache, “Sir…uh..ma’am…this is a nonsmoking establishment, and you will need to please extinguish your cigarette.” The drag queen didn’t even respond and continued to stare forward, transfixed. “Please sir, put out the cigarette or I will be forced to call the police.”

Without even offering a glance, the drag queen replied in a taxed, pseudo-feminine voice, “Sure buddy, I hear ya.”

With fingers full of sloppy red nails, the cross-dresser put the Marlboro out in her Coke with a sizzle. The manager walked away in a huff, stating something about how his parents didn’t move to this country to put up with this shit.

The eater’s gleaming fingers emptied bag after bag of salty, warm fries. His mouth seemed to be a gaping void into which anything could be mulched. The man in the dress imagined a myriad of objects being thrown into the fat man’s mouth as it acted as a sort of tremendous garbage disposal that could take anything that was offered. He pictured couches, blenders, bags of tacks, hammers, hang gliders, widows, hankies and Lincoln Town Cars all being sacrificed through the portal to the gods.

“You could be on ‘Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,’ you know,” the drag queen informed the fat man. The eater’s eyes shifted momentarily over to the drag queen, who reclined in the bright yellow plastic chair across the aisle, but he settled back into his feast. There were easily five trays of food in front of the large man, some of which were hanging over the edge of the table but not enough to tip and fall on the floor.

A young child on his way to refill his Sprite came too close to the table. The eater curled up his lips in a snarl and began barking like a fenced dog. The child cried out for his mother and pattered away. This act only impressed the drag queen further.

“My name is Shady Pines,” the drag queen said, not even bothering to offer a hand that she knew damn well would be rejected. The man just continued to eat, treating Shady like an annoying crow at a picnic.

Shady stood with an unsteady gait adjusting the wig on her head. The fake hair was ratty and smelled like it had been sitting under a couch in a nest of crumbs and batteries for a decade or more. Her red shoes clacked like horse hooves across the tiles to join the eater at his table.

As Ms. Pines went to sit the fat man erupted. “No! Fuck no! Get out of here you goddamn freak!” His eyes were that of a predator.  Shady smiled widely at the fact that she had gotten a response and finished sitting down anyway. The fat man didn’t like work, and he knew that this was going to be work. He put his hands to his head in agitation. “Do you have a mental problem? Are you fucking retarded? I said I don’t want you sitting by me, now fuck off!”

Shady crossed her legs, which were covered in spider-webbed panty hose, and pleasantly replied, “I heard you, Sweetie; I just don’t give a shit. You see, it’s not every day that I don’t have to pay for a show this good.” The fat man was awestruck at the gall Shady had to interrupt him during his fifth meal of the day.

“Listen sister, I don’t know what kind of a crazy horse-fucking town you came from but when I eat, I eat alone. I don’t need some San Francisco cocksucker coming to my table filling my sinuses with whorish perfume. So go get fucked before I get violent and something bad happens.”

“Oh please, Godzilla, you can huff and you can puff but before you ever blow my house down you are going to have a major coronary and wind up on the floor of this grease pit as blue as the sea. So, I suggest that you start using that mouth for what it’s best at and keep sucking at that gristle.” The fat man grew tired, for the longer he spent talking was the colder that his food became.