Cruddy - Lynda Barry [36]
The air smell was more powerful, it wasn’t a good smell, not like flowers or food, and it wasn’t a rotting smell either. It was complicated, it had many parts, and one of the parts was a core of coldness, if coldness has a smell. To me it does.
At the next corner the smell was knocked to the side by a different smell, doughnuts, slightly rancid but plentiful. The doughnut shop was on a corner of a street that turned very bummy and skruddy with trash and there were little movie houses with faded pictures that displayed ladies bending and squatting with black tape across their eyes and naked boobs. The pictures were warped and greenish and of course there were the dried-out dead flies laying below them. Flies die in so many lonely places. Across the street from the doughnut shop was a two-story neon clown holding a sign that said AMUSEMENTS! but the windows on that building had the boob ladies also.
There were sailors everywhere. Tons of them dressed in white with little caps and black hanging ties, going in and out of the shops and walking close together and laughing. And I was a little bit dazzled by their actualness, their pure Navyness, their handsomeness, and I was thinking it would be a Navy man I married. Only a Navy man. Navy all the way.
And then two of them came up to me. One said, “You got a friend? Will you do two-sies?” The other said, “Shit, Quiver, he ain’t even ten!” Horrible waves of nasty booze smells came off of them and one had blood on his teeth. I turned and went into the doughnut shop.
If in your mind a doughnut shop is a clean place with a clean paper-hatted man behind the counter and displays of innocent doughnuts and pots of coffee and good cold milk, well, this place was not like that. Not anything like it. There were people on gummy stools slumping and freaking in slow motion over the sticky counters. No-teeth people smoking, and scary teenagers also smoking, some girls with too much makeup and some boys with scars on their faces and hanging hair. And behind the counter the man was little and harassed looking and his apron was filthy with something that could not come from doughnuts and when he saw me he said “What?” and his voice was harsh. It was hot in the doughnut shop. Super-heated rancid grease air blasting out of vents with dust tentacles waving. “What?” he said again, and rapped on the counter when I looked away.
Behind the swinging half-door to the back there was a loud commotion going on. Someone was yelling “Fuck you, motherfucker, no, uh-uh, it ain’t going to be like that, I ain’t playing no games, motherfucker, no.”
There were flies on the doughnuts walking free. The counterman turned his head toward the shouting and then said, “Blooma!” and a big man who had been staring out the window looked up. The counterman tilted his head toward the shouting and the swinging door flew open and a little matchstick person with a greasy ski jacket came stumbling out backwards yanking on a fur coat that someone else I couldn’t see was trying to yank back.
The counterman lifted his eyes and said, “Blooma!” again, and the big guy whose sagging belly was hanging exposed under his shirt, sighed, and got up and walked toward the matchstick man. He had a bulging fat roll on the back of his neck and he looked bored even when he pulled out his sticking knife. When the matchstick guy saw it, he let go of the coat and put his hands up. He said, “Hey! Ain’t no need for Bo-bo! It’s cool! We cool! Shit. Get Bo-bo off my back, motherfucker, and we cool.”
The big man followed him back through the swinging door.
Hardly anyone