Lynn

I'm a food-crazed wine loony with an uncontrollable lust for the outdoors and an unquenchable jones for boats. Since I'm also a penurious novelist living near Philadelphia's Italian Market, I convert most of that energy into urban pasttimes like long walks, lifting weights and having drinks on the deck.
My current novel, bang BANG , is the story of a young woman who gets really pissed off at the culture of guns in Philadelphia and decides to take radical action. When she's done, she's outraged some, encouraged others, had some fun, fallen in love, changed the country and transformed herself.
Her story features Clint Eastwood, Oprah, rampaging nuns, a remarkably sexy use of fine old Sauternes, a pellet pistol put to unusual use, a D.A. who looks the other way and some rap music that you can't buy on iTunes.
Here's a piece of the book-it's semi-true and it's the reason I wrote bang BANG in the first place. If you like Chapter 25, you may want to read the rest.. . or you may just want to skip right to the chapter with the sex and Sauternes, which follows it.
Chapter 25. The people inside Bethany Baptist Church seem anxious and awkward, in their places and out of place. As a rule, they are here to celebrate or be soothed, to wrap themselves in the holy and to touch God and let him touch back. They are church-going people and this place is theirs but today they are not quite at home. There is no patting of sleeves, no bobbing of heads, no little winks and grins.
Today there is desolation, they are gathered for a funeral. Beneath the grief, there is horror and it hangs from the walls and clings to the benches. The tiny white coffin in the front of the church holds the body of 7 year-old Michelle Cutner, shrouded in the blue and white tartan uniform of the St. Martin de Porres School.
Four days ago, Michelle was with her Mom and sister buying peanut butter candy in the variety store on the corner of 20th and Christian. It was the last day of school before Easter vacation.
Michelle saw her friend Jasmine walking by the store and went out to join her. The two first graders started to walk east on Christian towards 19th. They walked past the vacant lot next to the variety store, waved to Jasmine's sister who was sitting on a stoop across the street in the sunshine of the first warm day of spring.
Six doors down from that stoop, Ronald McGovern was standing in his half open doorway, shouting into the street. The 16 year old boy was yelling at a friend of his who was lounging against a car. Ronald wanted his friend to drive him a few blocks south to a playground. He had been in a fight there just a few minutes before. Ronald wanted to find the boy he fought with and 'fuck him up'.
Ronald's friend wasn't in a driving mood, so Ronald drew a .22 caliber Ruger KP-4 pistol from his back pocket and fired a shot, originally intended for playground use, at his friend. The bullet missed the friend and struck Michelle in the side and spattered Jasmine with her blood. The little girl lay on the sidewalk, licking her lips, her eyes wide and staring until the paramedics arrived.
They took Michelle to Children's Hospital where she was pronounced dead at 3:36 pm.
The mourners who can bear to think about what has happened are struck in the side themselves- blinded silent by it. The rest are quiet with the effort to not see.
Organ music trails off, and a man walks to the pulpit. He is carrying a small soft bound black book, his finger marking a page. The man is short and bald. He is The Reverend Telly Henderson, 48 years old.
He has a mildness, a clarity about him. He looks like a preacher who breathes heaven, whose home may already be there. He tries to speak, his lips move, no sound comes out. He pinches the edges of his eyebrows, head down. Then.
"My dear brothers and sisters, I hope you will forgive me. I have no prayer in my heart right now, I hope God will forgive me."
"Young Michelle, who we are saying good-bye to today played with my daughter in front of this church. Many of you knew her, a happy little tomboy climbing on fences and running, always running in the streets."
"I..I .." He stumbles. This is not a failure of rhetoric, there is a crack forming in a solid soul and something is leaking out. "I know that the timing of life and death is in the hands of the Lord. I know that the Christian offers up his pain as a sacrifice in honor of the sacrifice made for us on Calvary. What chokes my prayer today is not Michelle's death. It is the monstrous evil that has overtaken us and killed her."
He pauses, looks up. His chest heaves in short breaths. He continues in a voice that does not soar above the congregation, but grinds its way to them through the stones beneath their feet.
"Our streets are flooded with guns--guns like the one that killed her. When we try to get the guns from our streets, from our lives, we are told that the law protects the guns. We are told that there are people who like to hunt and play with guns and who don't feel safe without their guns. They worry, we are told, that if you take away Ronald McGovern's gun, the next thing we'll do is sneak into their safe suburban houses and try to take away theirs."
"They say that freedom's price is the necessity of owning guns, any guns. What they don't say is that the price of all these guns is being paid today by seven year old girls on their way home from school."
"Not too many years ago there were groups of people who were willing to make us pay the price for their feeling safe and good. They were called the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan. From 1865 to 1957, the Klan was responsible for the lynching deaths of over 9000 black people in this country. Last year, the guns so lovingly protected by the United Gun Association killed 3,000 black people. Five children a week are killed by guns. It took the Klan, with their ropes and their torches almost a century to do what the UGA accomplishes with its lawyers and lobbyists every three years"
He draws in a sharp breath through his nose. The snuff of indignation has pushed him across some spiritual boundary. Where will he go from here?
"It was this monster as much as any demons in Ronald McGovern that took Michelle from us. It used to be the KKK who sowed the seeds of death among us, today it is the UGA. We fought the KKK and we won.
We stood up for justice and our courage brought us allies and all of us with God's blessing slew that old monster. Do we have the courage to fight again today? I pray to the living God that we do."
"Dear Lord, ignite us with your spirit. Let the flames of passion for goodness rise up and consume the monster that threatens our children. Comfort us that the life of this little girl shall not have been lost in vain. Turn us away from despair and towards the light. In Jesus' name. Amen."
The congregation amens him back, a soft breathy amen of relief. They were praying for his soul and it seems that their prayers were answered.
And having prayed, the Reverend Henderson is animated again. He opens his prayer book and begins to read from the 23rd Psalm of David.
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...."
Dinner at Emanuel Cardoso's
The Sensitive Guy Course
Pentagrammatical Scallops
in Lobster Buerre Blanc
with salmon roe and Ossetra caviar
Belgian White Ale
The Metaphor Course
Asparagus yearning for Pepper-cured Breast of Duck in a Port and Veal Reduction Citrus confetti
Chateau Haut-Brion 1989
The It's Not Dessert Course
Savory Mango Pennants
Chateau d'Yquem 1982
•   •   •   •
22. Connie and Cardoso are seated opposite each other on the long ends of a small six-top dinner table, off-white damask cloth. A red rose, its lower stem wrapped in a linen napkin is beside Connie's plate. Their plates are separated by just a few inches and their wine glasses have overlapped into each others' territory.
Cardoso's back is to the kitchen. They have both worn black and white. Cardoso's shirt has a long-point collar with three button cuffs. Connie's is silky and is open in a thin vee to a spot between her breasts. She has a dusting of makeup on her eyes and her lips are bare. She is reading the menu which Cardoso has printed on a four by six inch card.
The music is a Brandenburg Concerto, it ends and the only sound is the click of a fork on a plate. Connie pulls a scallop away from the pack, it hangs limp and barely cooked; a disk of sea-wet tissue. She waves the scallop under her nose, inhaling, smiling, tongue meets fork halfway, folds the slice in half, makes a tiny pair of lips that are slowly drawn to the center of her mouth and then disappear.
In profile, her nose is a Semitic Sicilian scythe, her eyes are hazel predatory secret-snatching eyes, focused, working, glad to be, knowing all about you buddy eyes.
Cardoso, pouring beer from a 16 oz. brown bottle. The beer is cloudy, the head is imposing, a lacy white mane.
He stares at the foam, pretends to be studying its fractal complexity. He's really trying to find some words for what she is to him. She is a force of his nature. She is the other half of the broken tile that admits him to the banquet. He wants in and all he has left is faith and maybe this woman.
She knows all about her power and wonders how he got to be like this. She knows she should be careful and she isn't sure what careful is.
Connie blots her lips and reaches for the glass. She brings it to her nose and breaks the silence with a big snorting inhale. Her chest swells, shirt darkens at the nipple spots as her skin presses against the fabric, lightens again. Did you see that? The gesture is feral, wild, sensory leopard dragging off her kill. Unladylike don't ya know.
"Mmmm Wheat beer?...is that coriander? You make it? Here? In one breath, gestures with her head toward the kitchen.
"Yes, yes, yes and no. I made a batch over at the U-brew with our mutual friend Mr. Long. Each of us ends up with 2 1/2 cases, enough to get us through spring."
"It's really good. You turn the orange rind up a notch?" "Right, it sets up seafood tastes better" Connie reaches for another scallop. Cardoso watches her tongue in profile, follows the scallop in.
"Hmm...'Yes, yes, yes' I like all those yeses in a row, it's got a good beat. . ." She snaps her fingers, yes, yes, yes. Connie has forgotten, or maybe she has ignored his final 'no'. She is smiling, her mouth wide and her lips parted. Her eyes are pointed dead ahead, straight into the future.
"Yes" she says again, maybe just for the pleasure of saying it, and adds the smallest noticeable laugh. To hell with careful.
The plates of Yearning Asparagus come swooping from the kitchen, balanced on Cardoso's hands. He has never been a waiter, but he has watched one or two. He's got the move.
Connie looks at her plate, fingers the menu card by her plate and giggles. No, not giggle this woman doesn't, couldn't giggle. It's the special small laugh of someone who hears a very old story cleverly retold. Her laugh is praise for the joker, not the joke.
Her face retreats, arranging itself to hatch some Private egg. She glances down to the menu card and then:
"Confetti! I thought maybe you got those stupid Jordan almonds in...
"Nono, coriandoli... È in inglese la carta, no?" And they smile together, leaning back simultaneously in their chairs. Their forks dip to the plates together. No subtitles run beneath their screen.
Cardoso reaches for his plate, forks a slice of duck into his mouth. A drop of the reduction sauce escapes from the fold and runs down his chin. He touches it, touches his tongue, smiling. Connie smiles, squeezing her lips, pointing her smile at the very spot he just touched. She tastes her wine, swirling it in her mouth, chewing on it, parting her lips to draw a breath across it, carbuerating the aroma inside her. She puts the glass down and leaves it and her right hand on Cardoso's side of the table.
"I wondered if that O'Brian of yours was gonna stand up to the duck..." "It doesn't have to stand up to anything really, I just wanted it to hang out, pass the time of, be sociable."
Dishes cleared, table swept of crumbs, Cardoso from the kitchen again, two small plates in his hand. Connie is about to wave him off when he lowers her plate. He has taken a block of mango about an inch square and three inches long. At one end he has carved a 'V'. Then he sliced the block into thin strips, each one looking like a pennant. He threaded a toothpick through the uncut ends to act as a little flag pole and laid four of them out on the plate, the tails of one slightly overlapping the flagpole of the one behind. Looking down on the plate, we see that there is a sprinkling of red dust over the whole composition.
Connie laughs. She picks up a pennant and slides the mango slice off the toothpick and into her mouth. She slurps it in like linguini. For a moment the notched end dangles from her mouth.
Cardoso returns to the kitchen, brings back a half bottle of honey colored wine. The metal capsule around the top has been cut away and he quickly spins a waiter's corkscrew down into the cork. Two small glasses are filled and Connie eyes her glass but doesn't touch it. She eats the last slice of mango, lingering over it, she seems ready to speak.
Instead of speaking, she takes her glass and stands up, pushes her chair back and walks away from the table to a short couch. The framed picture on the wall behind the couch is of a bottle of 1873 d'Yquem. Connie smiles at the picture and spins herself down onto the couch with her legs extended. Her posture is not exactly come-sit-by-me, but as she leans back she takes a stuffed animal, a long tailed monkey that had been perched on the couch's back and tucks it under her arm. She has, you see, a certain langur about her and Cardoso cannot fail to notice.
She sniffs and sips, the taste of honey and apricots washing over her, she closes her eyes and she sees for a second a summer meadow, backlit by a low golden sun, all bees and butterflies. There is perhaps a tablespoon of wine left in her glass and Cardoso approaches her with the bottle.
"Hey Manny, if you drooled a drop of this, would you suck it up like you did that sauce?"
"You bet. Didn't Mozart say something about wine being so precious that not a drop should be wasted?"
"It was Bach, but I know what ya mean" Connie moves the glass away from her face, studies the amount, takes another small sip, tongue tip, flick lip. Studies again, seems to agree to something. She doesn't offer the glass for a refill. Instead she unbuttons one two buttons on her blouse, leans back and pours a dribble of wine between her breasts. She looks down at the wine running, mad with the gravity of the situation.
Cardoso pauses to put the bottle down carefully. She likes him for that. And then he is on his knees beside her, his cheeks brushing the plaquet of her shirt apart. His left hand goes gently to her covered left breast and he rolls her nipple delicately between his index and middle fingers. His tongue is making circles of the spot where the first drops of sauternes landed.
He is in danger of licking her clean when she arches her back and sends a rivulet of d'Yquem down her chest. With balance and muscle she maneuvers a reservoir of sauternes right to her navel, her hand unbuttoning and unclasping and down pushing the black skirt. She is wearing nothing underneath it.
Cardoso is remembering things he thought he had forgotten. His lips and tongue follow downstream; he stops to nibble and suck an inch of flesh- makes a dry township in Torso County-he moves, he smells the wine and the dark sharp smell of her. Salty food and good sauternes, my kiddush cup runneth. He flicks his tongue around the rim of what has just become his favorite goblet. Over. Connie arches her back again and the few drops of wine remaining slide down her belly into the tangle of dark black hair tastefully trimmed and Cardoso falls with the drops along her bellydown down.
Somehow, miraculously the music has started again. Brandenburgs. Good Old Don't Waste A Drop Bach. And as the violins kick in, Connie's long soft moan is followed by three sharp indrawn breaths.