By Maximiliano Guzmán
I’m the only one in the neighborhood who came to this Cheese Day party.
Is it because I’m the only one who doesn’t care about what’s happened these past few weeks?
Oh yes… I can accept a bit of White Cheddar Fondue and blue cheese while Mrs. Cornell tries to fill her stomach with sleeping pills after her husband’s best friend abandoned his kids at her house, leaving her with the responsibility of those children and her own. Or Mr. Norman, juggling so his wife doesn’t see the dead body of the prostitute in the bathtub after celebrating his promotion at the construction company. And his kids… breaking into drugs on saturdays at Ralph’s bar, borrowing money from Collins, that weird-haired guy who murdered his mother to keep the inheritance. And the police?
Better to close the investigation with a heart attack of the old millionaire.
Legal problems with new money should rest in peace in the trash. It’s always a heart attack if you’ve got a knife stuck in your chest.
The sunset is beautiful here. You can smell the perfume of curdled milk, spring flowers, and the smoke from the Cruz family’s house. Why would they burn the house down with the nanny inside? I’d like to know what that freckled red-haired candy knew.
From fire you’re born, to fire you return.
I chew suspecting the event organizer expected more visitors. This will cost him money and I’ll take wheels of cheese home. No one can stop me. If there’s no one else here to have fun and laugh with me or at me. I’m a bald fat man, single, addicted to artistic gay nude photography from internet galleries. And I’m lucky because if I liked women and had met Alfred McCabe’s ex-wife, I’d be buried in the garden. Or I’d have killed myself like the sister of the office boy from the orange house. What a revolutionary idea! Eating seeds and hanging from a tree to avoid paying for cremation with the stupid idea of blooming beyond death. The firefighters pulled the corpse out before it started rotting in the backyard. Flowers never grew on the woman’s skin. A lonely woman with an insignificant fate. Today the house is for sale. And no one wants to buy in this horrible place. I can complain, I live here. Saint Color Street.
This neighborhood is bad advertising for pool paints. You can choose houses in pastel colors, white, blue, red, or with graffiti with disturbing messages denouncing perverts and extravagant neighbors. And the worst part is the pools were shut down since those kids dressed as sea monsters drowned on Halloween. Rumors speak of a gang neck-deep in LSD.
Did they really think they were sea monsters? Little Jeremy Carrigan could barely move in his wheelchair and sank like a stone. My God… they’ll never find the gang because they must be hunting monsters in other cities. They were too fried in their first-person Pulp horror movie.
The event organizer sits in one of the plastic chairs. He looks around, worried. This is a big failure. I wave at him with my mozzarella-stained hand. A portion of buffalo mozzarella on a baguette with mortadella and Italian-style pesto. A bite of paradise. I smile.
The event organizer grimaces. I point to the microphone and the karaoke screen.
The poor guy looks at me without understanding what I want. In this neighborhood you have to explain everything. Like the Lugones, those foreigners who never learned the language and are now arrested for child pornography possession after taking their family computer to be fixed by their missionary cousin. Never trust a computer technician from a church.
“You can play music. I want to sing,” I tell the organizer.
He pretends not to hear me.
Fucking idiot.
“Music,” I repeat loudly. “I want to sing,” I say, raising my right hand, making the gesture of singing over the half-eaten sandwich.
Does he distrust me?
But the snake tongues claim that Rookie girl from the Milmans was with her camp girlfriend when they vanished without a trace.
They disappeared and her mother, a soulless widow, started bringing young people to her house. At first they thought it was to look for her daughter. Yesterday they discovered they were interchangeable lovers. Friends of her daughter! Because humanity and the neighborhood are defined by sex, and if not sex, then loneliness.
“Hey, buddy…” I point to the organizer. “We’re out of ketchup,” but the guy denies my presence. He feels the pressure of having made a mistake. “Why did you move to this pigsty?” I say loudly. The question makes him clench his teeth and I see his right fist closing. Sitting in his chair he’s “The Thinker”… and I, a damned fat man abusing his hospitality.
But a guy like the organizer wouldn’t like to know that house prices are dropping. It’s been rough days. When he decides to sell his house it’ll be too late. And being a good person is complex. He could donate it to charity like a synthetic drug kitchen for the junkies who come from El Paso or New Jersey or Alaska.
The last family from Alaska who lived here suffered the impact of a tree. Trees again as main characters. It’s a neighborhood with lots of trees. Oh yes, it’s funny how it happened.
The father was driving his Ford to his kids’ school. His wife in the passenger seat was going to the supermarket. An argument. Something random. About house chores or masculine responsibilities. But the father went crazy.
He started yelling—maybe I’m making it up—saying that if the argument continued he’d crash the car into a tree.
I heard the crash.
If he’d been a saner man he’d be here with me, his wife and kids eating cheese and the event organizer wouldn’t feel so depressed.
It’s horrible not knowing when to slow down, relax, take off the weight of existence.
The Diet Pepsi is warm and there’s no ice. The sandwich flew from my hands into my mouth. A bit of Spanish ham, olives, and pickled onions.
“Don’t you have wine?” “Beer?” I ask the organizer, raising my voice.
The guy grabs his head, seems to be pulling out his hair. He cries.
What a sensitive man. I could hug him like a teddy bear, take him to my house, sleep spooning. But in my house we worship minimalism. A bed, a computer, a table, a chair, an electric oven with one burner, a mini fridge branded Coca Cola. And thousands of strange memories of people who were once there and left never to return. Sometimes I think like a marginal poet. Those are the real consequences of having made good and bad decisions.
Oh, a drop of rain. I signal to the organizer.
He looks at me with his blue, tearful eyes. He has the lost look of deer staring at truck headlights before the collapse.
I make another gesture with my hands. I’m not sure he’ll interpret it.
The guy gets up from the chair, walks with his head down toward his house. I’m in his yard. The whole event is in his front yard.
The guy opens the door and I think about the rain falling on kilos and kilos of cheese.
I must do something about it.
Should I do something about it?
I’m going to play music, sing a bit. I’ve wanted to do it from the start before stuffing myself with food.
When I was a kid I always dreamed of being on The Voice.
I walk to the little improvised stage.
The karaoke app is activated. On the remote I search for songs on the screen.
HANDS UP – OTTAWAN
Dad liked listening to that song. It was my old man who took me to have my first sexual experience with an African dressed as a woman.
“She’s a good girl, look at those eyes,” Dad told me.
I wasn’t going to tell him that behind the violet wig and makeup hid a satyr.
It hurt… but for Dad it was the opportunity for a real friendship with a real person. He worked in a lighthouse, far from here, in another city, on the coast.
Mom didn’t mind that Dad spent his vacation nights when he came home at the Smoke Hall motel with the African. For her it was a relief. There was never love between them. But my day isn’t gray.
I go back to the screen.
I press play.
¡BANG!
The shot comes from the organizer’s house.
The music starts playing.
END
Maximiliano Guzmán (b. 1991, Recreo, Catamarca, Argentina) Author and editor of the Argentine magazine La Tuerca Andante. He just wants to have fun