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I stare into the kitchen sink as high priest once gazed upon the sheep’s glistening liver, hot-wrenched from the steaming entrails of the lucky sacrifice. According to the Upanishads, the pure heart of the naked sadhu may glimpse the entire veiled Penetralium of life within the slightest mote of dust hovering in the sun beam. The Chinese crack their cookies, the cackling witch rolls her rattling knuckle bones, and Greenspan consults his eight ball. But I believe, if only I can disembosom its gorgeous mystery, that the long-sought secrets of the Illuminati lay nestled before me, like sturgeon’s bright roe, within my own kitchen basin’s silver strainer.
Drain salad: banquet’s detritus, fortune’s medley, flotsam’s koan. Distracted by life’s gaudy, capering clowns and piping calliopes, how blind we are to the glorious salmagundi of esoteric knowledge, which sits subtle and self-effacing before the sour sponges of our hungry hearts. Human machinations hold little sway over this cryptic art, this moist, miniature ikebana arranged by Greater Hands than ours.
I glance up to make sure the pool guy isn't watching through the kitchen window: “What are you trying to tell me?” I hiss into the sink.
Stop! This can’t be forced. I blink, shake my head, and slap my face with the wet, rancid clean-up rag to clear my mind of passion’s red haze. “Calmly now, calmly,” I mutter. I must play patient horse-whisperer to drain salad’s willful mustang. It must come to me, when it is ready. I toss back my thicket of coarse, black hair, whinny and close my eyes to meditate on the effulgent pearl of nothingness, and only when yogic self-control is regained, do I refocus on the mystic antipasto before me. Another deep, shuddering breath. Now, let us see what there is to see by those who have the piercing blue eyes and dimpled chin to see it. Yes, yes … a vibrant shred of verdant lettuce … the whorish flash of crimson tomato … a fluffy mote of ocherous egg, garbanzo bean, cat crunchy, potato bug, but … What the fuck is this? Ugh, my stomach churns and heaves, a low moan leaks from my slackened lips. It looks like…a warty clot of dismembered frog flesh! Sweet Christ, I wasn’t prepared for this. I want to turn away. Like wing-footed Phidippides, I want to run until I can run no longer.
But, as with so much of life -- MTV, commercials in movie theaters, Sarah Palin -- I force myself to face the abomination; I swallow back the half-digested lumps of horror. I think: this is the first test. Nobody said it was going to be easy, though, personally, I’m fond of easy, and would like to see a lot more of it. Wait! That’s not the necrotic tissue of the croaking amphibian: it’s only an innocent isle of pickle piece from Newman’s Own Thousand Island dressing! That makes sense. It’s all coming together!
“Give it to me, big boy!” I whisper, my twisted, empurpled face mere millimeters from gutter grate’s ripe compost.
I slump, exhausted from the superhuman effort, not to mention the emotional rollercoaster of the toad/pickled cucumber foofaraw. Sheer willpower alone allows me to concentrate once more upon this Lilliputian enigma. There can be no turning back. Only two options remain: breakthrough or … breakdown. God help me, it could go either way. And I don’t want to be trussed up like a cheap pot roast by the minimum-wage mental health professionals employed by my HMO. I push away ghastly memories of the pot roast years: the mouth plug, the electrodes, the Beanie & Cecil twirl-a-gig cap! Heavens to Betsy, man! If you love life and freedom, you must focus!
Lettuce, tomato, scrambled egg, frog meat: it all fits. But what are the other pieces of this inscrutable jigsaw? What am I missing? I glance anxiously at the clock. Time is running out!
I’m fading, I feel like Hercules battling the hydra-headed lizard; like Sigourney Weaver with always one more, toothy, drool-dripping jaw lunging from the alien’s monstrous head! I have nightmares where the thing with the dribbling, triple-jointed maw is Mitt Romney! He wants to fill me with his Mormon eggs! Aiyee! I don't love him (in that way)! And I’m not ready for children!
These will be Pyrrhic victories, all for naught, a charity marathon ending with defibrillators, unless I soon decipher the drain salad code.
Staggering now, thick, spotted tongue lolling out, I clutch at sink rim, drooping forward, to squint again at the sphinx-like mélange. Oedipus slew the sphinx after answering its riddle, some nonsense about legs as I recall. And then he married his mother, killed his father and went insane: bad boogie all around. This is a dangerous business.
My mind is doggy-paddling in slowing circles like a winded Chihuahua in stormy, wine-dark seas. From the murky recesses of my subconscious broaches a Delphic verse: Methinks, the sink’s sphinxian sphincter winks behind a squid-like ink.
I slap my face a few more times with the rank dishrag.
I must do this! Jesus, it’s disheartening to see all this nutritious slag go to waste. How much swill does the average American home feed to the greedy, gurgling Charybdis (an elegant, if pedantic, reference to the common sink disposal)? Kilos, perhaps tons. A crying shame, what with the situation in the Sudan and all.
I’m wheezing now, and slurring my Homeric soliloquies; my vision is beginning to blur. Being a human pot roast in Bedlam isn’t so bad really: like anything, it has its ups and its downs. If one goes into it with a positive attitude … My eyelids crack open for what will probably be the last time before the nets, the tranquilizer guns and the discount sanatorium. As if from far away, I hear a whisper: “Noodle.”
Say what? Did someone say … noodle?
My eyes jolt open to stare transfixed at the food-clotted navel of our once-joyous home. My gnawed and grimy fingernail pokes and stirs the slimy, sibylline debris. Yes, there, peeping coyly from beneath the wilted arugula … “Peek-a-boo!” I thunder. “I see you!”
Much as the One Ring slipped from over-proud Isildur’s finger to seal his doom, this snow-white snippet of semolina has slipped through the colander to betray its haughty mistress. I straighten up to behold my prize; a glutinous sweetness fills my mouth; my sinews tauten with exhilaration; the fluorescent lights are edged with flame. Slowly, I turn to eyeball the jury, and enumerate the proofs in my guttural rumble:
“1) Noodles are carbohydrates. 2) But Jeannine has imposed upon our home the cruel, no-carb diet of that fat doctor who died of clogged arteries. 3) Thus eliminating all caloric joy in life (specifically my Barbara’s Cheese Doodles). 4) Nonetheless, Jeannine’s sturdy, Botticelli avoirdupois is undiminished; she remains as glossy and voluptuous as a snack-fed sea lion at Fisherman's Wharf. 5) But I’m down to ninety-three pounds and, in my diaper-like underwear, have an uncanny resemblance to Sméagol. 6) There is a pearly gobbet of macaroni snuggling in the sink residue.” I pound the banister like Khrushchev with my Hush Puppy, and complete the ruthless syllogism: “7!) Jeannine had been gorging on plump, slippery noodles smothered in thick, buttery, cream sauce—while I starve, hallucinating of crisp, cheesy doodles performing their salacious caracole a hair’s-breadth out of reach.”
“Quod erat demonstrandum!” My lips draw back in a heinous, rictal leer of triumph; my head tilts back in the poignant yowl of the unconquered yeti. Amid the bitter smoke and spattered gore of battle, the crusty crew of scrofulous seadogs—good English lads all—swing their pikes and sabers and greasy pigtails, and raise their lusty cheer: “Huzzah for Lucky Cap’n Jack!”
I had gambled everything on deciphering the drain salad code...and won.
By Henry E. Panky
"the desperate struggle to amuse"
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