I paced around the room, irritated, then poured myself half a glass of whiskey and downed it in one gulp. What would I do if the club got closed down? With my singing as bad as it was, it was difficult to imagine that any other club would take me on. I wondered if I could sell drugs with Spoon. But I was too gutless for that. I slumped down on the couch, muttering to myself.
Tina Turner was on the radio. I thought about those amazing thick lips of hers, and seeing my reflection in the dressing table mirror, I took out my red lipstick, outlined my lips with a brush to make them look twice as large as normal, and carefully filled them in. Then, over and over again, I applied kiss marks to pieces of tissue paper, and then painted on another layer of lipstick to keep the color from coming off.
When I had finished, my lips looked more like chunks of ripe, red nectarine than cute little cherries, but I was satisfied with my work and lit a cigarette.
Looking in the mirror again, I decided that my T-shirt and the Levi s I was wearing didn’t go well with my new lips at all, so I dragged my black silk nightgown out from under the bed and changed into it. There were claw marks in the silk, and loose threads hung from the places where Osbourne had been scratching. The whole effect made me feel like a dramatic heroine, and I let the cigarette droop from my fingers like some movie star.
The door opened. It was Spoon.
“Hi, honey!”
He stared at me in confusion, then burst out laughing.
“You look terrible! Is it Halloween or something? You look like a canned tomato!”
At first his laughter annoyed me, but then I got his joke: lips often remind people of food.
“You can eat me if you like.”
He kissed me and his lips were instantly dyed red. Then he crouched down, gazing up at me intensely, and began kissing my thigh. He got some lipstick there, too. I could feel its stickiness on my leg, and as I stroked the curly hair on his head with my hand, I was almost in tears.
“Spoon…”
He opened his mouth as if to say something, but I never knew what The phone rang. It wasn’t the police. It was a guy from some embassy. I was so confused that I didn’t really catch the details, but it was a country with an unusual name. He asked if he could speak to Joseph Johnson. This was the first time I had ever heard Spoon’s real name, and it came as a shock.
Spoon grabbed the phone. He spoke to the guy on the other end of the line for a moment, then said to him, “Everything’s all right.”
He replaced the receiver and turned to me with the happiest of smiles on his face.
“Baby, we’ve been very lucky.”
But something made me feel uneasy and I couldn’t return his smile. I just stood and stared at his beaming face like it was some kind of object.
I couldn’t even blink.
The doorbell rang and my heart missed a beat. Anxiously, I looked over at Spoon. He motioned with his eyes for me to open the door. I really didn’t want anyone else to see me dressed like that, looking like a prostitute. I was almost in tears, but pulling the front of my gown together, I reluctantly opened the door.
Five people in suits stood outside. One was a dark-skinned foreign woman, two were older Japanese men, and the other two were young Americans.
One of the Japanese men spoke.
“Do you know this man?”
He showed me a photograph of Spoon. It was a terrible shot and made him look really ugly, so I didn’t answer.
“I asked, do you know him? We know he’s here.”
He spoke quietly, but his tone was menacing enough to make it difficult for me to avoid his question.
“What do you want?”
He opened a small black case holding his ID card. It was attached to his jacket by a piece of cord, and as he pulled it out I could see a gun under his jacket. I was terrified. I just stood there, too frightened to speak, and they all charged past me into the apartment without even taking their shoes off.
Spoon must have known that something was wrong. He was hiding silently in the back room. But the suits were determined, and they kept searching until they found him.
I heard them struggling and then Spoon shouting angrily, “She’s got nothing to do with this! Shut the door!”
Dazed, I stood riveted in the doorway, completely dumbfounded.
When I came to my senses I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My face was deathly white and the lipstick I had painted on so thickly was now double-crossing me. It made me look like I was smiling.
After a few moments the five people came out of the back room. One of the Japanese men said, “He wants to talk to you. You’ve got fifteen minutes. You can go in now.”
I was grateful for his kindness, but I was so nervous my legs were trembling.
“Spoon…”
He was sitting quietly on the bed. That bed had been everything to us. He’d made me laugh and cry there. I wondered if we would ever have the chance to use it again.
It was already night. I had planned to cook ribs for him and I had already put them on the bottom shelf of the fridge to defrost. I liked to roast them in the little oven with tomatoes and red peppers to make them spicy, and add some bay leaves to bring out the flavor. Oh, and plenty of ground black pepper, of course. Spoon had never got around to buying me the garlic press I had been after, so I crushed it with a knife blade instead. Last of all I would add ginger, nutmeg, paprika, and anything else I could find in the cupboard.
As it cooked, the sticky, bloody smell of the meat would gradually change to something much more appetizing as the meat started to brown. And when the bones went a reddish-brown color and glistened with fat, I would turn off the oven and drain the fat. Then I would open a bottle of red wine, put it on the table with a pile of napkins, and call Spoon. There would usually still be a lot of grease left in the bottom of the roasting pan, fat that oozed from the ribs as they cooked, and it smelled so good, I liked to spread it on slices of toast and throw them in a basket to eat with the meat.
Spoon liked to scrape the meat off the bones with his sharp teeth.
Drops of grease would fall from his lips into his wine and float on the surface in little round globules. And sometimes a few of those globules would merge together to form one large one. It was cheap, sparkling, red wine from America, and the grease and tiny bubbles mixed together in the glass made it look like it was moving.
Spoon never bothered using napkins when he ate, so his greasy fingernails shined like ripe chestnuts. By the time I was finishing my first rib, he was usually finishing the very last one on the plate, so I never got full.
“I’m still hungry,” I’d say. “Let me lick your fingers.”
Then, gazing into his eyes, I would suck the grease from his fingers, one by one. I would know he wanted me then. It was written all over his face. And the look in my eyes would say, What do you want to do now, Spoon?
Those dinners of debauchery were our greatest luxury.
“What should I do about the spareribs?”
There were tears in my eyes as I said it.
“I suppose I’d better just throw them away, huh? But it’s such a waste!”
I flopped down on the floor and began sobbing my heart out.
“And I really wanted ribs tonight, too.”
My mind was suddenly flooded with memories of everything we had eaten together. It was soul food, hot and spicy and full of flavor, not mild like Japanese food. Things like ham hocks, a stew made with white beans and a smoked h a m shank, and okra gumbo, a spicy stew with meat so tender it just fell off the bones. Then when you sucked those bones, they were full of thick, tasty jelly. And Spoon just loved Tabasco—whenever we had fried chicken he would pour tons of it all over the dark meat. And of course chitlins—stewed pig giblets. It was the kind of food that most Japanese would never think about eating, but I was happy to eat anything with Spoon. I just thought about how the food would become part of his body, and it made me feel like I was eating part of Spoon himself.