NEEDLING

TO MY DEAR BROTHER TITUS

Early afternoon at my office, the 9 Billiards, after getting off of work. I took a bath last night around two in the morning, but this afternoon it feels as if I haven’t entered a clean body of water in weeks.

Pénible is the word which best describes my morning. Seven rooms out of thirty one, meaning dead, nothing to do, nobody to talk to, no maid, no phone calls, barely any faxes… nothing, just a plain long morning. One of these morning when I keep looking at the clock on the telephone every two minutes hoping at least half an hour has gone by… and invariably it’s always just two or three minutes.

At one point late in the morning getting close to midday [check-out time], one of the two rooms on the first floor started making lots of noise. Usually, the washing machine and dryer are going, the clients in the breakfast room are eating, the phone is ringing off the hook, Clementine the maid is talking my ears off, or mumbling to herself in the kitchen complaining about the dishwasher, or her back-pains, or her ears being too full of wax, or her husband getting on her nerves, or her boyfriend, or the other maids who said this and that and isn’t that just a lot of bull, or how her arm was once broken and couldn’t I carry the clean linen to the first floor… and this morning it was so quiet I could hear the clients fucking.

At first I didn’t know what it was. I was reading the novel L’Evangile selon Pilate, by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, when I started hearing some animal guttural noises. I stopped reading a second and decided it was a woman making the noises. Was she being killed by strangulation after having had her tongue cut off or were they fucking? I went up the stairs and they were definitely fucking and she was definitely screaming her head off, so I went back to my reception area, tried to ignore the clients getting one last fuck before checking out, and tried to concentrate on Schmitt’s imaginary interpretation of Pilate’s rendition of J.C.’s last Passover written in the form of letters from Pilate to his brother Titus in Rome. Did Pilate have a brother named Titus who lived in Rome? I didn’t know that.

OK… I have got some shopping to do, as I’m cooking diner tomorrow night and I’ve decided to do something very simple: Home Made fried chicken and black eye peas & rice with a little tomato garlic salad… god, I could just be insane and ad a little sausage to the black eye peas? Not too much since this is mostly a FRIED CHICKEN thing, but enough to rise the rice & beans out of complete banality… uhm… something to think about. Red Hot spicy corn crust for the chicken. I’m cheating, I ate at my friends’ place the other day and we made some fried chicken and light salad. I’m gonna do the crust a little differently, though, and I’m going for the ALL OUT bourratif yet simple plop down on the couch and can’t move for HOURS meal.

As we all know black eye peas to be what they need to be have to dip in water for minimum twenty-four hours BEFORE you start cooking them. And then you got to get them cooking slowly for a good three or so hours with constant attention so they don’t burn. Which is why I got to get going so I can get those beans dipping in their bath.

Me in along with them.

The rest will be fine... some baby corn, some steamed vegetables and a little brown gravy… simplicity...