BOOK EXCERPT FOR THE ARTISAN MAGAZINE

– From: Cigar City: Tales From a 1980s Creative Ghetto

Fiction Gold Medal, Florida Book Awards

Looking down at the chicken boiling in the stock pot, Katrina thought it could be Brian – if she had tweezed out all his hair and let his severed head soak overnight. The violet Rorschach splotch visible just below the bird’s waxy-white skin was where she cracked his brittle skull with the hardcover edition of The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, ending his shallow, privileged life.

I didn’t smack him. I smote him. 

I visited him disastrously.  

I struck him with passion and emotion.

Smite. Smote. Smitten. 

It was Biblical!

After four years of poetry workshops Katrina couldn’t help herself. And almost eight months after picking up her BFA, definitions and synonyms still ticked through her brain like playing cards snapping against the spokes of a bike tire. 

And she could turn almost anything into a symbol or a metaphor. 

The boiling bird represented the death of her love affair but the diced tomatoes, celery and bell peppers floating alongside, their Crayola colors vivid, were the new life she was cooking up from the old.

“Ola, Katrina! Despierta mi peque so adora! Wake up! Time to skim. Skim!”

Katrina snapped back from her revenge reverie and saw Maria miming a skimming motion with her cupped hand, the tips of her stubby fingers golden from dredging trout filets through flour, egg and spices.  

Trout a la Rusa was the day’s special at La Septima Cafe.

Maria enjoyed it when she caught Katrina disappearing inside her head. After the first few times, she had dubbed her kitchen apprentice Mi Peque So adora, “my little dreamer.”

Katrina picked up the big spoon and began to skim off the mucus-colored bubbles of fat rising to the surface of the pot. 

So much for poetic justice, Katrina thought, as she skimmed.

Brian was alive and probably driving a new girlfriend around the Detroit suburbs in his black BMW while the chicken boiling in Ybor City would soon be deboned and spooned into a pan of rice yellowed with saffron and turmeric. 

Deboned. 

There was a word waiting for a poem. 

Brian, I de-bone you. I de-lete you. I de-stroy you

But there were no new poems.

Since the day she had awakened and found Brian’s goodbye note on her writing desk, along with a small stack of twenty-dollar bills, Katrina believed her muse had left town with him. She refused to write any sad love poems. She’d heard too many delivered by sensitive sophomores who turned a breakup with a horny frat boy into some very painful poetry: 

Porcelain pillow

blue veins drain

love’s red remains 

going south

down a corrugated river 

Not that Brian was a college fling or horny frat boy. 

Together most of their senior year at the University of Michigan, they had taken a post-graduate road trip to the writerly Southern towns of Oxford and New Orleans. As August gave way to September, they found themselves in a rent-by-the-week apartment in Ybor City. 

Katrina imagined them as the Hemingways slumming in Paris. She loved the aging authenticity of the historic district, the poetry scene around the Three Birds Bookstore, and the exotic food, a mix of Spanish, Cuban and Italian dishes that had arrived with the immigrants who built Ybor at the turn of the 20th century.

Part of her had always known Brian wasn’t a forever thing, no matter how many promises he whispered while they made love.  He talked about becoming a writer, but the only thing he wrote were random entries in a journal he left open on the kitchen table: 

October 12, 1985: Warm and windy today. Washed the car. Out of dental floss. 

A finance major, he confessed he had come to her weekly poetry group thinking it would be a good place to meet girls. 

“Will you dump me if I admit I didn’t get that poem you read?” he asked her, on the first night they spent at his off-campus apartment, a luxury two-bedroom he had all to himself. 

“Will you dump me if I admit I don’t really understand men?”

“Don’t worry. I’m not that complicated.” Brian replied. 

She should have taken that as a warning. Instead, Katrina snuggled into him on sheets as crisp as fine parchment. He was tall and funny, and he smelled like a walk in the morning through an evergreen forest.

Katrina realized now that she was his gap year. His artsy experiment. He was always headed back to Bloomfield Hills where his father was a battery magnate. Or was it solenoids? 

And Katrina was always going to be the daughter of a union carpenter and a high school guidance counselor from Flint.  The academic scholarships, the poems and short stories published in obscure literary magazines couldn’t change those facts. 

Brian had said as much in a note that was barely longer than his journal entries: 

It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s the “us” that’s broken. 

He added a shaky metaphor about two planets with briefly overlapping orbits or some crap like that. 

After she tore Brian’s note into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet, Katrina let the shower pound her until the hot water ran out. Then she stood naked in front a mirror, noticing a thickness in her hips, a heaviness in her breasts she had never seen before.

If she had written about herself before the breakup, Katrina would have used a word like “willowy”: tall, slim, slender, svelte, lissome, long-limbed, graceful. 

She wouldn’t use the word “beautiful”: attractive, pretty, alluring.  

Her features were too sharp, her lips too thin for that. But she was long-legged and lean with a high-wattage smile and dark Joan Baez hair she let fall below her shoulders or wrapped in a loose knot around a single chopstick.  She looked like a girl you might spot across the room at a smoky party in an artist’s loft. 

Katrina still fit into her college uniform – vintage cotton dresses with flowing skirts and a sexy scoop at the neck, but the clothes were tighter. The road trip, the hours in bed, the long lunches and dinners, the sheer happiness she had felt with Brian had settled itself on her body. 

What was added by love is now weighing me down. 

There was a poem there somewhere. 

Her college girlfriends swore by a “Heartbreak Diet” that sick-to-your-stomach ache guaranteed to drop all the happiness weight you picked up during a love affair. But after tossing in bed each night, her thoughts shifting from revenge to remorse, Katrina woke up ravenous. 

Instead of paying her rent or buying a ticket home with the money Brian had left, she used it to eat her way through Ybor:  Boliche, from the Colombia Restaurant; Crab Chilau, at the Seabreeze; and Picadillo, a fragrant Cuban stew of ground beef and tomatoes, with raisins for sweetness and olives for salt, from La Septima Cafe. 

Katrina was savoring that dish when she met Santiago.

“I like a woman with a good appetite.”

The man standing over her corner table was tall and swarthy, with the thick curly hair of a teenager, but the fleshy look of a middle-aged man who had never missed a meal. His girth was partly camouflaged by a white guayabera, the loose-fitting Cuban dress shirts, with four front pockets, favored by Ybor businessmen of a certain age. 

Katrina could smell mint after-shave and thought she saw makeup covering the craggy remains of teen-age acne.

“I am Santiago.” he said, his manicured, feminine hand settling on her shoulder. “I like to make up stories about my customers. It passes the time. Want to hear what I came up with for you?”

“I like a good story.” Katrina said, shifting a little, hoping he would get the hint and remove his hand. 

“You are a beautiful young heiress from Manhattan on the run from a domineering father. You are hiding out in Ybor City pretending to be an artist, but secretly hoping you’ll meet the love of your life. How’s that?”

“You could tell all that just by looking at me?”

“It’s a gift.”

Katrina smiled up at Santiago like a teenage girl who had just been asked to the prom by the best-looking guy at school. 

“I’m not looking for love, but I am looking for a waitress job. Any chance I could work here, for you?”

“You’ve waited tables before?”

“All through school.” Katrina lied. 

Aside from keeping the house and making dinners for her dad and her younger brother after her mom died, Katrina’s work experience was wrapping Christmas presents each December at J.C. Penney.

But she wasn’t ready to go home. She needed to eat and pay the rent on her apartment, a light-filled one-bedroom above an art gallery on Seventh Avenue. And these exotic Ybor dishes, so different from any of her Midwestern meals – gave her the only joy she’d felt since Brian left.

Santiago told her to come back the next morning and wear black. 

“If I could, I’d really love to learn how you make this.” she said, lifting her half-empty plate. 

“I can teach you many things.” he said, his hand sliding slowly down her arm.

***

Florida is normally dry in October but 1985 was different. To Katrina the dense charcoal clouds and daylong downpours that arrived the same week Brian left were simply the world bending to her mood.

But as she walked to work her first day, the sky was crystal blue and cloudless, the air cool and lifted on a soft breeze.

Turning slowly in circles to take in the day, as words and images danced in her head, Katrina didn’t notice she had drifted off the sidewalk and into the still-quiet street.

If Ybor City hadn’t existed, she thought, Tennessee Williams might have conjured it. The old world downtown, barely a mile from Tampa’s “American” downtown, was a red brick and wrought iron Belle Reve, clinging desperately to a gilded past, while fraying at the edges.  

She thought of Santiago, a man she didn’t know, offering her a job. 

“I have always depended on the kindness.”

A lone car, cruising slowly up Seventh, honked and Katrina leapt quickly onto the hexagonal block sidewalk. 

Just after eight, she pushed open the heavy wooden door of La Septima Cafe, which took its name from the Spanish translation of Seventh Avenue. The place had plenty of Belle Reve about it Katrina thought. 

Silver shafts of light, slicing through floor-to-ceiling windows, made the room shimmer like the inside of an antique jewelry box. Katrina saw windows framed in carved wood; a fresco of a pastoral Spanish village on the plaster ceiling; and marble floors in a grey and black geometric pattern that could have been lifted from an Escher lithograph.

The morning light also revealed jagged craters in the window frames where termites had dined; the fresco was faded, like a tattoo on an aging sailor; the floor bore the scuffs of a hundred thousand footfalls.

The word that clicked into her mind was “evanescence”: to slowly fade out of sight, memory, or existence.

The restaurant was empty, wooden cafe chairs stacked upside down on the tables, but a harsh fluorescent glare spilled from an open door in back. 

The door led into a narrow galley kitchen where a middle-aged woman was working under the buzz of a fluorescent fixture. Metal countertops ran along both walls, and an old gas stove, heavy as a floor safe, sat at the end, its white porcelain exterior stained yellow.  Burners were lit under a stockpot and a large frying pan filled the room with the nutty aroma of saute’ed garlic and olive oil. A single strand of hot mist escaped from the corner of the oven, rising like campfire smoke toward the pressed tin ceiling. 

Katrina’s mind clicked through adjectives to describe the room: steaming, stifling, suffocating. 

Yes, suffocating:  to feel or cause to feel trapped and oppressed.

The woman at the counter was muscling a carving knife through a fat onion, her simple cotton dress soaked in sweat. Like the stove behind her, the woman was squat and solid. Her dress and stained apron could have been wrapping a block of wood. 

She was quietly crying. 

“Are you okay?” Katrina asked.

Startled, the woman turned suddenly, wiping away some tears with the back of her hand. She didn’t speak, only glared at Katrina, her hair hidden inside a black net, her narrow lips pressed together. 

“I’m Katrina. The new waitress? Santiago told me to be here at 10 but I wanted to come early.”

“My husband says a lot of things.” she said, her words coming out cold and deliberate.

“Your husband?”

“He also doesn’t say a lot of things.”

The woman’s face didn’t soften. Instead, she turned back to her chopping, the flesh of the onion giving way to her silver blade with a moist “KA-CHUNK.”

“Are you the chef? Your food, I mean, I wanted to work here because I fell in love with your food. I’ve never tasted anything like it.”

The woman turned back, fresh onion tears ringing her eyes.

“I’m a cook. Not a chef.”

Katrina flashed her best Midwestern smile. 

“I’d love to know how you do what you do. If you’d teach me.”

“So you can steal mi esposo and take over my job?”

Four years of high school Spanish had been helpful since Katrina had moved to this place. 

“I wouldn’t do either of those things.” Katrina said. “Besides, I’ve sworn off men.”

“Por que?”

“I don’t know, they are, beyond my control. I don’t like that.”

The woman stared for a long moment at Katrina. Her face slowly unclenched and she almost chuckled. 

She picked up a large onion and held it out in her palm.

“Este cebolla is like a man. Thin skin. He thinks he’s deep, but each layer is just like the one before. And he will make you cry, absolutamente!”

She held up the big knife. 

“Mi nombre es Maria. Y tu?”

“Katrina.”

“So Katrina, want to chop up a few men?”

“Oh yes, please!”