•Buy me a beer! •Farmer Bob RSS Feed •Add to Technorati Favorites •Email This •Save To Del.icio.us •Digg This! •Share on Facebook •Discuss on Newsvine •Stumble It!
My cellmate in the slam was a lifer who operated a jailhouse bakery business. He’d been running it since the early 1980s. He bought cans of Coke from the prison store, which he distilled into a syrup that simultaneously sweetened the cookies and acted as a binding agent for the other ingredients: Generic biscuit powder stolen from the kitchen, a mashed-up paste made from paper towels, crushed generic-brand Cheerios, and the rock salt they spread in the yard during the winter. It sounds disgusting, but I swear to Christ they tasted exactly like Chips Ahoy.
He’d built his own oven back during the Reagan era out of scrap metal from the license plate shop. It was heated by an illicit jailhouse lightbulb he made after hours from a screw-thread contact with an electrical foot, a glass mount, a coiled tungsten filament, and a glass bulb filled with argon. The cons on C-block called him Easy Bake.
Easy Bake showed me the ropes of his whole business. Everything from combining the ingredients after lights-out to covert transactions in the yard when the screws weren’t looking. And even if they were, hey, screws like cookies, too. Moving the goods became my responsibility. The cons loved their cookies, and they swapped cigarettes, long-distance calling cards, favors and prisonbucks, which were dollar bills made from pulped milk cartons, spit, and crayolas. Prisonbucks were like money on the inside, but you had to be careful. Passing a kajillion-prisonbuck bill could trigger inflation, and get you iced out faster than a child predator.
The job helped me to find acceptance, although nobody would call me by my preferred street name, “Fo’ Realz.” Instead, they called me “Girl Scout.” When my lawyer finally got my sentence suspended on a technicality, I was able to put “baking” on my Curriculum Vitae. Jill hired me straight out of the halfway house to work in the kitchenette at the Cup and Saucer. She had a weekly meeting with my parole officer, which gave her a lot of leverage in our employee-management relationship.
Jill had been booking a lot of private parties, lately, which meant she was scheduling me to show up at five in the morning to prep and cook, even after I’d closed the store late the night before. The only possible retaliatory arrow in my quiver was passive aggression. While she was at the day spa one afternoon, I canceled her “Word of the Day” email subscription, and started sending her totally made-up words of the day, like
Vas Deferens interj. 1. Mild exclamation. 2. An exclamation expressing surprise or exultation. Synonym: Egad.
But listening to Jill use embarrassing malapropisms didn’t change the fact that I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in two weeks.
“What’s your problem?” said Mark Brooks from the kitchenette. The kitchenette was a closet-sized space at the end of the bar equipped with a convection oven and an ice bath. There was some kind of educational meeting booked for a private event, and we were prepping the food. “You’ve been moping all morning, which who cares, except that I need help cooking.” When I didn’t say anything, Mark said, “It’s that girl, isn’t it? The perfume peddler.” I stupidly elected not to respond to that, and Mark hurled a spatula at my head and shouted, “Goddammit, you passive motherfucker! Do something! Kill yourself! I swear to god, your dramatic suicide would probably be to stop eating.”
“How would you do it?” I said.
“Obviously, I would set myself on fire and plunge from the top of the Liberty Memorial.”
“I knew a kid in grade school who got clotheslined,” Andee offered.
“Clotheslined?” said Chico. “But I thought– isn’t everything on the WWF safe and easily reproduced in real life? Like a cooking show?”
“Actually, he got clotheslined by an actual clothesline,” said Andee. “It didn’t cut off his head or anything. But he died.”
“I am totally killing myself via clotheslining,” I said to Mark. “I’m forming a group clothesline pact with all my friends.”
“Sure!” said Andee. “We can all hold hands and run toward a clothesline. Although the obvious difficulty is that we’re all different heights.” She started writing on the back of a napkin. “Our relative heights are approximately normally distributed with mean 65.5 inches and standard deviation 2.5 inches.” She held up her little ball-point bell graph. “I’m a statistical outlier. I’d live,” she said.
“Did you just calculate the standard deviation in your head?” asked Mark.
“What in the hell are you talking about?” said Jen.
“Dead kids,” said Andee.
“Oh. I thought you were talking about embarrassing ways to die, and I was going to chime in with autoerotic asphyxiation,” said Jen.
Andee, who was taking a class about sexual violence at KU which was somehow required for her dance degree, said, “Insurance companies love autoerotic asphyxiation. The police always list it as suicide instead of accidental death, and the insurance companies don’t have to pay.”
Jen Erickson’s eyes lit up like acetylene torches. “I need to start selling insurance immediately,” she said.
“My professor hosted a series of workshops for police and EMTs explaining the signs of autoerotic asphyxiation,” said Andee. “KU did them every semester for three years. They’d explain why guys get off on it, and show the cops the signs they should look for at the scene of a death. The whole idea was to convince the cops to properly list the deaths as accidental instead of suicide, so the families could collect on the life insurance. But they stopped doing the seminars because after every session, two or three of the attendees would go home and kill themselves experimenting with autoerotic asphyxiation.”
“Wow,” Chico said. “Back when you started that story, I was wondering where it would end up. But I didn’t expect that.”
“Totally surprising dismount,” I agreed. “At my autoerotic asphyxiation seminars, I’m opening with, THREE OF YOU WILL BE DEAD BY TOMORROW MORNING.”
Jen was on the phone to State Farm Insurance. “Where should I send my resume?” she said. “I have some bold new ideas about life insurance coverage.”
Jill Erickson came out of the office. “My accountant is on the way over,” she said. “I’m leaving.” Jill had developed a certain healthy fear of Ira the accountant.
“Isn’t that Ira pulling up outside?” said Chico.
“VAS DEFERENS!” Jill shouted, ducking behind the bar.
Ira came in and said, “I’m supposed to be meeting with Jill.”
“She’s not here,” said Jen.
“That’s a shame,” said Ira. “I had really good news. The Cup and Saucer did not lose any money last month.”
“VAS DEFERENS!” shouted Jill, popping up from behind the bar. “That’s not possible!”
This confused Ira, who was unused to emphatic references to ejaculatory ducts. He looked over at me, and I just shrugged.
“You broke even,” he said. “First time ever. Congratulations!” Jill and Ira disappeared into the office to look at the numbers.
“I’m out,” said Andee. “I need to go work on my treatise on the Riemann hypothesis.”
“Your huh buh whaaa?” I said.
“The Riemann Hypothesis. It’s a conjecture about the distribution of zeroes of the Riemann zeta-function. Gotta run.” She grabbed her bag and left.
“What the hell was that?” I asked Chico.
“I think that was the Mozart Effect,” he said.
The Mozart Effect is a term describing a phenomenon whereby listening to complex music induces a temporary improvement in spatio-temporal reasoning. The original experiments involved destitute college students and Mozart concertos– or to pluralize in the mode elderly persons like William Safire, your grandmother and Michael Douglas, “concerti.” Chico explained that Andee had been conducting scientifically irresponsible experiments on herself, using Mozart.
“She stays up late listening to Piano Concerto 23 on her iPod, and writing up mathematical treatises, and sending them to journals and stuff,” Chico said.
“This totally explains everything. Andee used to hate math.”
“Yeah, but now she doesn’t call it ‘Math.’ She says ‘Maths,’ the way British people and William Safire do. Plus, she only listens through her headphones, so it’s not like I get to hear any Mozart.”
“Which means you’re not getting any smarter.”
“Right. I’m, like, totally outclassed,” Chico said. “Plus, we’re keeping completely different hours, now. She stayed up all night working on…” — here, he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket — “…working on isospectrality proofs for wave eigenmodes.”
“Damn that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” I said.
“What am I going to do?” said Chico.
“Wait — is this a situation where because you’re the man, she’s not allowed to be smarter than you? Because that would be sexist and wrong.”
“No. It’s a situation where I think my girlfriend is actually starting to speak a different language than me.”
“Okay,” I said. “There are two possibilities, as I see it. One: You start listening to Mozart until you get as smart as Andee…”
“Man, I don’t wanna listen to no grandma music.”
“Okay. Option two: when Andee goes to sleep tonight, you put the world’s stupidest song on repeat, so she gets stupider while she sleeps.”
Chico smacked his forehead. “Vas Deferens! Why didn’t I think of that? What’s the world’s stupidest song?”
“Instrumental? That would totally be “Spanish Flea,” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.”
At that point, Mark Brooks flung a spatula at my head, and we had to get back to work prepping for the evening’s private event.
That afternoon, I went over to Chico’s, and we pretended to watch Return of the Living Dead while waiting for Andee to finish her paper.
Around the point in the movie where the zombies jump out and attack the paramedics, and then that one zombie grabs the ambulance radio and says, “Send. More. Paramedics,” Andee slapped her pencil down on the table and said, “Done!”
“You could probably use a nap right about now,” said Chico.
But at this point, Andee had been listening to Mozart for three weeks, and she was way too smart for us: “Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been planning all day?” she said. “You’re going to play bad music while I’m asleep, so I’ll wake up stupid!”
“Whoa,” Chico said. “How did you know?”
“I’m a genius! What were you going to play, anyway? ‘Way Down South on the Chattahoochie?’”
“NO!” said Chico. That was truly offensive.
“Well, whatever it is, you can forget it! Don’t even think about going for the stereo! I have a very important paper to finish on the Hardy-Littlewood conjecture.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Andee said, “It’s a generalization of Euclid’s Twin Primes conjecture: 
Well, that’s the last thing I remember, because Chico and I both instantly fell asleep. Two hours later, when we woke up, “Spanish Flea,” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass” was set to repeat on the stereo. I felt different, and I didn’t know why; all I knew was that I needed to buy some shoes with velcro straps. And I felt like opening one of those year-round Christmas stores in Parkville — it just seemed like a really good idea.
Somehow, I got the idea that I should go to the Cup and Saucer to ask Jill for some business advice. By that time, it was 7 o’clock in the evening, and the private meeting was getting underway. It was some kind of seminar deal. A bald man with a goatee was pointing to a projection screen, and saying, “Three of you will be dead by tomorrow morning!”
Mark Brooks was leaning against the bar, enjoying a post-shift beer and checking out the crowd. “I love paramedics,” he said.
Jill and Diana were in the office. “Chris, I had a meeting with Ira today,” said Jill. “And we’ve totally decided to expand the Cup and Saucer into a full-scale restaurant.”
“Vas Deferens!” I said. At that point, I’d totally forgotten what I wanted to talk to her about.
In retrospect, it was like Andee had turned our brains off. She probably would have left us that way, too, but she couldn’t leave us alone for any significant length of time — Chico, because he kept setting his clothes on fire, and me, because I also kept setting Chico’s clothes on fire. Finally, she put some Mozart on the stereo, and stormed out, saying something about coming back later “when the average IQ was higher.”
Previously:
•Buy me a beer! •Farmer Bob RSS Feed •Add to Technorati Favorites •Email This •Save To Del.icio.us •Digg This! •Share on Facebook •Discuss on Newsvine •Stumble It!
Best birthday present ever! Chico has been conducting scientifically irresponsible experiments on himself using Brutal Truth. That’s probably what gives his art an edge. Packham rules!
Andee actually likes
‘Way Down South on the Chattahoochie?’”
Man, I miss the cup…