Green Eggs And Man
Now that I'm freelance I have to start cooking for myself and not spend so much money on delivery and dining out. Problem is, I don't really cook. I mean, I can cook when forced to. I do have a couple of dishes up my sleeve. Today I made a huge and delicious omelet. It was seriously, really, quite good. I put onion and salmon in it and I baked it in the pan the way my dad does and then I toasted a bagel and put cream cheese, lettuce, tomato, and capers on the bagel. I put it on a big plate next to my beautiful omelet, and there I had something I made. And then I ate it.
One of the best omelets I've ever had was certainly not one that I made, but one cooked up for me by Ziggy.
We were both in Boston the summer before my senior year of college. My father had gone to California for two weeks with his girlfriend for some thing or another and I spent a glorious 14 days mostly smoking cigarettes in front of the TV in the living room, dancing up and down the first floor hallway to "Dream Come True" by the Brand New Heavies, and having a lot of sex with Ziggy who, when my dad was around, only snuck in and out of the front or back door not because he wasn't allowed, but because it was sexier that way.
One night I swear I summoned him. My dad had left the day before and I hadn't told Z. I wanted to surprise him. I wrote him a postcard and planned to send it to his house the next day, but he showed up at my door before the night was through. I screamed and hugged him and told him he was about to get really excited. We went into the kitchen and surveyed all of the food that was stocked in the fridge by my father before he left. And then I handed Ziggy the postcard which read:
Z--You know that guy who sleeps in the house while we're going at it until the wee hours of the morning and trying to keep our voices down? He's away. Two weeks. California. Imagine the damage we could do. The butterfly chair in the living room. The sturdiness of the banister. The depth of the bathtub. I've left a key for you. See you soon, I imagine.
He got hard right there reading it by the open door of the cold refrigerator.
The first thing we did after making out was get high in the living room. Ziggy always came equipped with the chronic.
This might have been the night that we went to the nearby park and had sex on a bench under a colossal willow tree. That was a great night. A mutual memory that, years later, we both admitted looking back on fondly and often.
One thing that definitely happened on this night however, was a total maryjane-induced moment. We were lying around on the bed when I decided to get us munchies. We'd turned off the lights in the whole house and had lit candles all over my bedroom. In the dark kitchen, by the entrance, I noticed something. A strange light emanating from the basement. I walked over to the door and my jaw dropped. I didn't know what to make of what I was seeing, or if I was really seeing it. I needed Ziggy.
I ran back to my bedroom where he lay sprawled across the mattress playing with a lock of his curly strawberry blonde hair. "Ziggy! You have to come here," I said from the doorway.
"What is it?"
"Please. You have to just come into the kitchen." There was no way I could explain. Ziggy didn't move but he said okay as though he was coming in a minute even though he wasn't doing anything but lying there and he really didn't comprehend what I felt to be the urgency of the situation and I didn't know how to get that across to him so I just burst out laughing, holding on to the side of the door to my room.
"Please," I managed. "I can't. You have to. I need. Please, can you come now?" I was laughing in tears by then and doing the pee pee dance even though I didn't have to pee.
"Okay," he said and finally stood up and walked over to me. I took his hand and led him down to the kitchen. As we got closer to the basement door I started pointing and whispering, "Just look, just look, look, look..."
The locked door to the basement was glowing. A flourescent green light shone through cracks in the wood. Now, intellectually, I knew that a light must have been left on in the basement and it appeared to be glowing because there were no other lights on in the house. But the greenness of it I cannot explain, nor can I explain the intensity with which the light was glowing. Except for all the pot we'd been smoking.
"Holy shit!" Ziggy said. I couldn't stop looking at it or doing the pee pee dance and now I was biting my nails. I thought of something just then and started laughing again and I blurted out the words: "Behind the green door!"
Of course, I'd originally gone into the kitchen to get us some food. But an hour later we were back in my room and had forgotten all about it. I was still rambling on about the green door, asking how it could possibly be, while Ziggy sucked on my fingers. By the time I'd remembered that I was hungry, I was near faint. We went to the kitchen together, the green light gone now that the sun was coming up. That's when Ziggy made me one of the best omelets I've ever had. He put cheese and onion and sundried tomato in it and put it on a big plate and brought it back into my room. And then I ate it.
