A Little Tail

Preface

 

I posted this picture on my Facebook page after spending a few days at a writing conference. 

A friend saw my FB post, and challenged me to write to this nonsense prompt:  “So this guy walks into a bar with a salami under one arm and a poodle under the other ....... there is your writing prompt....go!!.” 

 Why not? I thought.  I haven’t written much fiction.  I entered a 100-word story contest a few years ago, and I wondered if this could be another 100-word short story.  It turned out very differently than I anticipated.  It happens.  It happens almost every time I write, but I am grateful for the surprise that always accompanies full engagement in any project, even a project as silly, or maybe as serious as this.   

I ran into my friend later that week at my son’s baseball game, and told him I took him up on his salami prompt.  After all, it’s a good taste of my own medicine.  As an intermediate elementary and former middle school language arts teacher, I assign homework for a living. 

 He said it came from the movie “The Breakfast Club”.  I was curious, so I did a little internet research when I got home and learned that actor Judd Nelson, John Bender in the movie, improvised the joke.   It goes like this:  

“A naked blonde walks into a bar with a poodle under one arm and a 2 foot salami under the other.  She lays the poodle on the table.  The bartender says, “I suppose you won’t be needing a drink.” 

“Naked lady says…….”

     Bender crashes through the ceiling before he finishes the joke.  People have been speculating on the punch line ever since.

 I have no idea what the punch line is, but I do know that in another version of the attached story, Frank undoubtedly is…a naked blonde.   

 

A Little Tail

Shock, horror, disbelief.  Frank stumbled over the threshold of Tiny's Taproom with Roxy, his prized teacup poodle under his left arm, and what moments earlier had been his baby, his beloved Chihuahua Gaucho, under his right.  

 "Hey Frank...good to see ya back, long time no see!”  bellowed Tiny, the big-hearted-soul of a man Frank knew better than his own brother, as he hustled from behind the bar as fast as his hefty frame could humpf over to where Frank stood frozen, blankly staring into the taproom. 

 "Hey...ya got this one with ya!” Tiny said patting the curls on Roxy’s head, “but WHAT the HELL is that?" he blurted, pointing quizzically at the inert object held fast under Frank's right forearm.
                Frank’s eyes rolled between Tiny and the salami.  "I'm...I'm not sure," Frank stammered.  "I…I…think it's...it's a salami."  He could barely speak.  He only knew he held a sausage instead of Gaucho, his favorite companion and best friend during the long evenings and weekends he passed alone, especially now that he had quit coming in here every day.  Desperately, he searched his mind for some rational explanation, but finding none, settled on something he could believe.  This, he told himself, was a hallucination. 

At his last AA meeting they had talked about hallucinations and how they sometimes accompany quitting a terrible addiction to drugs, or in Frank's case, alcohol.  Of course, he was hallucinating.  He stood there in the doorway for the next few moments wrestling his mind to recount his evening, desperate to tether himself to a familiar reality. 

It had been a day like any other.  Frank left work a little early, took Roxy and Gaucho to their grooming appointment, then leashed them up for a leisurely walk home where he anticipated having his frozen fish dinner, chocolate chip cookies and a full night of drinking O'Doul’s while watching “Dancing with the Stars” on television.   Frank looked forward to this plan, and all had gone according to plan until the encounter with ‘Her’. 

He was just six blocks from home when a sinewy hand reached out to him from the edge of the sidewalk.  She stepped in front of him.  He tried to circumvent her, but even with her small stature she somehow blocked the entire sidewalk.  A mass of unkempt, matted hair and layers of worn out clothing gave her the look of a common homeless vagabond, but her eyes elevated her to some unidentifiable status.  The look of them both entranced and terrified him.   And her voice.  Was it real?  It stopped him and he stood momentarily paralyzed in front of her.   She asked if she could pet Gaucho; said she'd had a pup just like him as a little girl, but couldn't afford one now.  Wondered if he'd be so kind as to let her hold him for a moment.  Gaucho, curious about her too, pulled and stretched out on his leash to more closely inspect the hem of her ankle-length skirt.  

 "No way.” Frank grumbled, yanking back too hard on the leash.   "We just left the groomer and you’re not gonna dirty him up!" he snapped.   Something about the encounter set him off, and he reeled up the leashes, gripped a dog under each arm, and stormed past her.  With a taste for good bourbon on his tongue that hadn't been there for weeks, he charged down the sidewalk.  It was all too much.  He was trying to improve his life, but everywhere he went there was someone or something at him, forcing him to defend himself, and giving him a reason to drink again.
                The open sign hanging in the window made a welcome glow on the steps leading into the dank little establishment that had sufficed as his second home and family for the better part of the last decade.  This would be fine.  Just one more drink to calm his nerves.  He could handle it.  Just one and he’d head home.  But on the final step up into the bar, he’d looked down to adjust Roxy who was wriggling under his left arm, and what he saw next caused his stomach to lurch so hard he nearly vomited all over the entryway.  Gaucho’s head and legs were gone and in his place Frank held a long, red sausage.  Catching his balance, he resisted the urge to throw up, but couldn’t move his feet.  Thank God Tiny came to greet him and stayed beside him, blocking the “family” sitting at the bar from seeing him like this.   
     "Frank...you OK?"  Tiny softened.  He took Roxy and lightly caressed Frank’s shoulder with his big round hand-paw.  "Hey, maybe drinkin' ain't what you're supposed to be doin', " he whispered so the rest of the regulars couldn't hear them.  "Maybe you should go on home and get some rest."  

Home sounded like a good place to finish hallucinating.  Frank shook head.  He must look ridiculous standing there.    

                 "Yeah...yeah....you're right Tiny.  I shouldn’t be drinking.” Frank reached and took Roxy back, adjusted the salami under his other arm trying to act like nothing was wrong, and tripped-staggered out into the crisp, cool night air.   Inhaling deeply, he took all the oxygen he could into his lungs in an attempt to find the courage to look back down at himself.  When he did, he saw that he was still holding the sausage.  He wanted to put it down and run, but he couldn’t let go of it.  It was Gaucho.  Wasn’t it?

 Panicking, he was determined to get home, but the farther he went, the more desperate he felt.   Fear weighed him down, weighed down his steps and his breathing.  Just six blocks to go, he could make it, but he needed to lean and clutch to the familiar streetlamp to steady his steps and his breath.  He needed to breathe and calm himself and hang onto everything, including the salami.  
     Resting there, he heard a whisper.  What was that?  Surely it wasn’t a human voice.  Startled by the sound, he looked around frantically, fearful that his hallucinations were now auditory. 

      When he turned back to clutch the lamppost, she was in front of him again in her ragged, layered dress, with her disheveled hair and empty outstretched hands.
     "Sir, if I may ask one more time.  Do you have anything I can eat?  I haven't always been like this.  But I'm hungry and alone and I see that you still have something I could eat.  Will you share it with me?"  She paused, and Frank looked straight into her questioning eyes.  Her voice was like a bell, and he felt it vibrate through his ears and down into his chest.  Hummingbird wings fluttered inside of him where he thought his heart should be.  "I promise to return what I can if you trust me to repay you.”

Why was she asking “one more time” for something to eat?  Had he been carrying the salami all along?  He left the groomers with both dogs...he knew that much, or thought he knew that much.  Had she asked him for food the last time he saw her?  He was sure she had only asked to pet and hold Gaucho.  It was all so confusing.  He put Roxy down and dropped to his knees as his resolve cracked open like the broken up sidewalk in front of him.   
                "You can’t repay me”, Frank screamed at her.  “You have no idea what you are asking of me!”  He was hysterical now.  She continued looking at him, but did not move or speak.  She simply asked again if he would share with her, then looked at him patiently, waiting for a reply.  Her quiet demeanor ruffled him and he screamed at her again. 

                “Here!" He slammed the salami in her outstretched palm, “take all of it!  I don't have anything else." he quavered in a voice so shrill and high-pitched he barely recognized the sound as his own.  
     She examined the salami and put it up to her mouth.  "Thank you sir" was all she said, then consumed the meat immediately and with such hunger that it made Frank cry to watch her.
     He wailed there on his knees, cupping the back of his head with his hands; forcing his face into the ground.  He let go, shaking and sobbing; clinging to the sidewalk as if to keep from falling off of it.  Frank gasped, but did not turn to face her as she touched him and whispered into his ear, “Do not be afraid of what you don’t understand.”  

                Frank felt her hands on him now, and could only assume that she was feeling for his wallet.  He didn’t care.  The pain of losing Gaucho in this weird and horrifying way was too much.  Too much, and he was sure that he would be going away soon too.  Maybe he would turn into a salami, or be taken to the place where they take people who hallucinate, and have nervous breakdowns in the middle of dimly lit sidewalks in silent little towns. 

       He cried for what seemed like hours.  So long that the woman had gone.  She had eaten and left quietly as not to disturb her benefactor.  For whatever it was that had shaken him so badly was no concern of hers.  She knew.  Years of encounters with men of questionable character and emotional status had taught her that much, and she ate, touched him, and silently wished him well as he broke himself down into all of his pieces there on the sidewalk just beyond the neon window light of Tiny's Taproom.   As suddenly as she appeared, she vanished between the rundown buildings behind the familiar streetlamp into the middle of the night.
     Time passed.  Frank wasn't sure how long he'd been there.  He felt empty and exhausted.  He exhaled one long last agonizing wail that echoed off the quiet storefronts, and as he did, embarrassment slithered over him and humiliation turned to fury.  He thought perhaps she was still behind him.   Was she mocking him?  He lifted his face slowly off the sidewalk.  She was the one who should be ashamed, not him.  He knew how to hurt her.  He would ridicule her for her nasty clothes, ugly hair, and begging on the street.  He would put her in her place, and then leave her where he’d found her. 

He pushed up, spun around to face her and readied to fire.   No one.  The first consonant fell from his mouth into the empty air in front of him, and he stood in stunned in the silence.  He surveyed the emptiness up and down the street.  No one in any direction.  Just Frank.  Just Frank and Roxy.  Roxy, who by now had sniffed her way down the sidewalk and over to the garbage can attached to the streetlight on the other side of the road.  She was happily eating garbage that had fallen from the can, and he could see her there sniffing and licking in the lamplight.  Thank God he thought.  She was safe and still with him, and he felt every muscle in his body release.  

Frank walked the few blocks to her, bent over and reached out for her.  As he stooped down to touch her, a quick flash of light reflected back at him and seemed to bounce up off the pavement into his face.  Frank looked for the source of the light.  His eyes followed the refractive glow to the silver side of what appeared to be an aluminum wrapper from a discarded hotdog.  Keeping his hand firm on Roxy, he moved the wrapper around so he could see how the light had bounced from it so boldly into his face.  Again it flashed and Frank could see that the streetlamp and the moon together were illuminating this patch of sidewalk.  The light flicked back towards the sky and upon closer examination he could see that the white underside of the wrapper was covered with little red bloody-looking, ketchupy paw prints leading off the wrapper and on down the sidewalk, into the grass beyond.  

Roxy was spotless when they’d left the groomers, and the prospect of having a ketchup-covered pooch on top of everything else pissed Frank off.  He cursed as he lifted her up and away from his chest in order to clean the inevitable red goop off her paws.  Searching his jacket pocket for the tissues he always kept there, he felt something foreign.  He squeezed his hand tight around whatever it was and tried to identify it within his grasp.  Not able to do so, he pulled out the object and found he held not tissues, but Gaucho’s leash, complete with the little metal bone engraved with his name.  For the second time today Frank was speechless.  He remembered searching himself there in the doorway of the Taproom hours earlier when he realized he was holding a salami instead of Gaucho.  He’d checked his coat, and pants pockets for Gaucho, a leash, anything to explain the unexplainable.  He found nothing then except his wallet and his tissues. 

                He thought of her touch.  Certain that she’d been searching for his wallet; he reached back now and found it undisturbed in his back pants pocket.   Why had she touched him?  Confused, he continued with the task of wiping Roxy’s little feet.  Turning one, then two, then a third and a fourth he discovered she was completely clean.  How is this possible? He thought.  Surely she made the prints there on the sidewalk.  Didn’t she?    

What is going on? He wondered, feeling slightly afraid again that he was losing his grasp on reality.  He looked around, over each shoulder, then back at Roxy.  He didn’t want to allow himself to feel the strange lingering hope that was seeping into the corners of his mind.  He leaned hard on the lamppost.  He closed his eyes and a loud sound escaped from his throat.  He didn’t know what else to do besides yell.  None of it made sense.  Absolutely none of it, and Frank wanted the dark void of night surrounding him to know he didn’t know what else to do.  He yelled, and yelled and yelled into the night, at the moon, and at all the things he couldn’t explain. 

He paused to catch his breath, and before he started yelling again he heard it.  His voice echoing back at him in the form of the faint and familiar howl he loved so much.  Was it?  Could it really be?  

He yelled louder this time, and again a howl came back, this time familiar and unmistakable.  Joy wriggled into Frank’s chest and his eyes came open as he popped up from the lamppost.  He listened now, both ears intent on hearing what he thought he heard.  He couldn't reconcile what he knew, and what he felt.  He knew Gaucho turned into the salami earlier that evening.  He knew the street woman ate the salami under the streetlight.  So how could this be?  Was not one thing transferrable into just one other thing?   His mind held fast to the linear progression of things: a dog into a salami, a salami into dinner, a dinner into a woman who walks away from a man who is broken on the sidewalk over the loss of a dog.  Yet, here was evidence he could hear.  Gaucho’s call.  But could he believe it; could he trust that it was true?  

      The questions were big and unanswerable.  All he knew is that Gaucho was out there somewhere beckoning.  He heard.  He held the leash.  It was enough.  Frank dropped to his knees and looked up at the moon and stars beyond the streetlamp.  He’d never looked that far out into the sky before, and doing so made him feel different.  Bigger and open somehow.  He wondered if he really was hallucinating.  Perhaps this was something else. 

                There he paused.  In this wonderful, awful, half-way world; on this familiar street surrounded by glittering garbage, Frank understood he had been given two choices, each with their own special consequences. 
      He could go back to Tiny's, order that bourbon, bury the salami, and the events of this entire evening forever.
     Or, he could step off the sidewalk, out into this wild and illuminated night, and follow the call.  

He gently swooped up Roxy and started to go.  

 

Just for fun check out the link to the clip from The Breakfast Club (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo21CkoxEmA