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By Darren Kaminsky

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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three.  The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C.  As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.

Click here for a Chapter Index.

Chapter Sixteen

June 21, an Overcast Tuesday

I had expected a handshake and a “thank you,” perhaps even a “thank you very much.” At most, I’d hoped for a hug and a “you’ve saved my daughter’s life and now are a member of our family, here is $500.”

Instead, Tiny’s mother slapped me across the face. As if I’d had any part in Tiny’s lying to her, journeying hundreds of miles away from where she was supposed to be, sleeping with a much older guy, joining in a protest that turned inexplicably violent, getting beaten by the cops, etc.

Tiny’s Mom had really startlingly-wide black eyes, but was otherwise a Xerox-with-deeper-laugh-lines version of her daughter. After the slap, she glared at me, her jaw was clenched and she shook her head back and forth like she couldn’t believe she was even looking at me, then she put her arms around me, pulled me down to her and hugged me.

A little spun, I hugged back then worried that I’d hugged too closely. She pushed me out of the hug and looked at me for a long smiling second, then turned to Tiny sitting in her bed and there was a look between them…wary combatants in the midst of a truce, sizing each other up just in case. The question of how to treat me must have inspired a hell of a fight.

Tiny looked great and had her own room. Her arm was immobilized in a long cast that extended above her elbow; there was color in her face, a soap opera on the TV and lime green jello cubes in a plastic bowl on the weird wheelable cart/tables universal to hospital rooms. It’s amazing how even those give off the standard hospital aroma of urine and ammonia.

Tiny beamed up at me and we had one of those cool silent moments where nothing needs to be said.

“So, Tiger, that’s quite a cast ya got?” I said finally breaking the silence.

“It’ll go great with most of my army surplus stuff,” she said and smiled really big. “It’s going to leave a pretty cool scar.”

“Yeah, like you’ve been kickin’ some serious ass.”

I’d brought her a couple copies of Punk Planet and Spin as well as the City Paper, since they had provided the only coverage of the protest. I’d also brought her Bleed Monkey’s new 12 inch, autographed by their lovable asshole of a guitarist, my close friend Kerran.

“Kerran’s the worst,” I tell Tiny “He’s telling everyone that we ARE anarchists. ‘It’s good for the band,’ he says. So now everyone thinks it’s true... I was in Ollson’s records the other day and some guy who works there looks at me and says, ‘Right on, Anarchist Dude.' I was dumbstruck, but finally I managed to say, ‘I’m not an anarchist.’ and he nodded and said, ‘Yeah that’s just what an anarchist would say, even labeling yourself is organization.’

"I was so exasperated that I didn’t even bother trying to explain...Not that that does jack-shit anyway, to keep telling people. No one listens. They like to make up their minds without having to turn off the TV long enough to get any information. Fucking tools...” then I realized how I sounded and I turned on my irony voice, “Down with the Man!...I mean, I’m NOT an anarchist, Up with the Man!”

Tiny started laughing and seeing her laugh spurred me on.

"...OK, sorry, back to our regularly scheduled programming...I’m here with dangerous, broken-armed, 5-foot-tall anarchist, Tina 'Tiny' Jannin, who’s making another set of imminent threats to--Oh My God!--EAT JELLO in defiance of the government!”

“Stop, Nathan, you’re making me laugh. It hurts my head to laugh,” she says.

“Oh come on. Everyone knows that eating jello is a dangerous activity. Anyone willing to consume anything that color and consistency is willing to defy the natural order and do almost anything.”

“What natural order?”

“The natural order that says that Froot Loops can only be eaten for breakfast and that dreaming of Tony the Tiger means you owe a royalty to whatever company makes that strange shit.”

“Don’t say “shit,” my mother might come back.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s OK. People don’t say “shit” in my town. They say “dag-nabit.”

“I’m sure that means something worse than ‘shit’.”

“Yeah, but no one knows what it means.”

“THAT’s WORSE. The meaning is fluid. It could mean ‘your mother dances naked with pythons’ or something.”

“Well, we did find a garden snake in the dining room once and my Dad did say, ‘dagnabit.’"

“I knew it,” I said and there was a pause and we just kinda looked at each other.

“Hey Tiny, that day you got brought in here? Um..I left my bag. Have you seen it? Is it around here?”

“No idea. I don’t even know if my bag is here.”

There was a big pile of stuff in the corner and I rooted through it and felt like a dog searching for a bone or a pig looking for a truffle. There were plenty of snack foods, magazines and girlish underwear in the pile, but no sign of my bag or the bag that Tiny had been carrying the day of the protest.

“It’s not here...We should call for a nurse.” I said and heard the little, “ding,” as she fiddled with the knobby white gizmo hooked to the bed by a thick white wire.

“Have you guys found Nell?” Tiny asked.

For a second, I didn’t even remember who Nell was. All I could think about was having to tell those cops that there was nothing to give them. They’d think I was holding the film as a type of counter-blackmail. They’d never believe that it was lost. I wouldn't blame them. They’d be forced to...what? Take me at my word? They’d already raided our house and confiscated all my stuff. They would have known the film wasn’t there. Maybe they’d get a warrant to search Dani’s? Bella’s? My parent’s? Everywhere? Meanwhile, keeping me in jail? How far would they go, could they go? Could they find a way to kill me?

The nurse walked in, interrupting my increasing paranoia. She was a very thin, mousy, slightly stooped woman looking no older than a student. She made a little clicking pitter-pat when she walked.

And she already looked annoyed, seeming to realize instantly that the patient had not called her in. She turned towards me, crossed her arms, angled her face to look at me from under her brow and set her mouth in a look of fierce and intimidating impatience.

“Uh, I, um...” I said, not sure why I was stumbling, “.... brought Tiny in here on Friday and, uh, um, my bag...was with Tiny’s bag in the emergency room and they aren’t here. Do you know where they’d be?”

“Are you sure?” she said and my discomfort caused her mouth to fold up in a cruel little smile.

“Yes,” I said.

“Your bags might never have been brought up,” she said.

“Where would they be?”

“Beats me.” she said.

“Can someone look?” I asked.

“You can. You’ll need to go down to the emergency room…”

Downstairs, after some stumbling attempts to explain the situation, a shiny-eyed, super-cheery...”I’ve been up for 30 hours straight!”...nurse had led me to a small door, which she opened to reveal a very narrow but very long closet with a floor knee high in bags and coats, some of which had spilled out as soon as the door was opened. A set of shelves on the right was covered in even more bags, packed so tightly that the bags were like stones in a solid wall.

“We give it all away at Thanksgiving,” she said and turned to go. “If you find them, just let me know before leaving. I’ll want you to sign a receipt.”

“OK.”

I was sure that the room had never been cleared out at any Thanksgiving. It reminded me of the trash compactor in Star Wars and I wondered what terrible creature lurked under the bags to grab my feet and pull me in so that I’d drown in nylon and old musty wool and no one would find my corpse. There were probably bodies already in there. I took a deep breath, waded in and...the bags were packed so tight that they were pushing towards the door...I had to fight to remain standing.

There were big bags and small bags. Colorful bags, earth-toned hemp hippy bags, expensive and cheap, at least one Luis Vuitton and a couple of crusty old leather bags that might very well be full of Confederate money, the diaries of Adolf Hitler or lost Spanish gold. Or, more likely, Grandpa Fred’s lost underwear and the urine sample his doctor had asked him to provide, that he’d successfully squeezed out drop by drop over several painful days.

I followed guesswork paths through the piles, found nothing and --suddenly not caring if I drowned in them--sat down among the piles in despair.

I decided to be more systematic; I took the bags out in small clumps and set them in the corridor outside. I lost track of time or started keeping time in terms of bags. After 170 bags, an hour must have passed. The closet was now empty. My bag wasn’t there. Tiny’s bag wasn’t there. The fear made putting them back in seem to take twice as long as taking them out.

When I got back out to the emergency room, the cheery nurse was cheerfully injecting something into an inert wrinkled woman on a gurney. The woman’s loose skin made her look like a bag. “Is there anywhere else it might be?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said and smiled really big, “Must have been stolen. Sorry.”

I went up to Tiny’s room and told her about the bags. “That sucks,” she said, “My favorite hair brush was in that bag,” she said, then, quickly added, “So was my flak jacket.”

Tiny was to be released the next day and we traded addresses and I gave her a partial hug and her mother actually thanked me and it made me feel good when I left despite my being in some shit deeper than the bags in the bag room. As I walked slowly up 18th street, there were all sorts of people sitting outside like nothing was wrong. Meanwhile, I was a dead man.

On the good side of things, the police had returned the house to us this morning so, until I was an actual dead man, I had somewhere to live.

The place a wreck. Trash was everywhere. Everything had been pulled out of the kitchen cabinets and our precious emergency supplies of collector’s edition Tuna Helper boxes had been ripped apart and were all over the floor with the crushed up bits of granola. Whoever searched our house must have really hated anarchy.

Brenna and Jean were in the kitchen sweeping and trying to reorganize the shelves. Kerran looked busy too, but I couldn’t decide whether he was helping or just walking back and forth between the living room and kitchen.

Sitting on the intact little kitchen table was a box with my name on it. ”It was delivered just after the police left,” Jean said as she swept up the kitchen.
I grabbed a knife, cut it open and there were both bags; cameras, film, hairbrush and flak jacket intact.

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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn.  He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.

© 2005 Me Three