Member Bio: Attila Bronsky
Attila Bronsky has been a member of the Markham Village Writers since 2005, writing fiction and currently working on his first novel.
Black Coffee and Flies on the Horizon
By Attila Bronsky
Part 1
Primo Klaxon awakens to the beeps and blue glow of his oversized alarm clock, feels his body under the covers, can’t remember what he did last night, and feels no changes in his life. No cosmic shift had occurred during the night, no realignment of the unaligned, no justification of an unjust world, no godsend revelation that might alter the course of his life. Nothing has changed the truth – he’s still a loser.
By his calculations, he’s fifty-two years from an eternal berth in a cold ground, if all goes smoothly past disease or unfortunate accident. He tries to keep himself fit, but knows he won’t pass the age of eighty because no male in his family has lived to be eighty-one and why should it be different for him? He wakes every morning with this deep emptiness, carrying a long face into his short life. What else was there? What burst of euphoria could catapult him into a different frame of mind and shake off this perpetual funk?
Time. He’s running out of it. He knows there are many things to accomplish yet he can’t think of one thing he wants to accomplish. He believes there must be a purpose, but he doesn’t know what it is. He has no purpose, that’s the problem, and every day staggers on and there’s another day lost. Only 18,900 days left and after tomorrow, only 18,899 and on and on and less and less. Time flies when you want to live forever. He consoles himself with the thought that his suffering job makes the days last longer. Sure, there are probably lots of people who feel like him, but who gives a shit about anyone else? In this universe, Primo struggles alone.
Switching off the alarm, he whispers, “Fuck!” throws off the bedcovers, plants bare feet onto a cold parquet floor and lifts himself into the weekly morning drudgery of getting ready for work. He’s an expert at keeping quiet lest he wake his old mother who, if roused, will surely appear as if from thin air to ask him if he’d like her to make breakfast. He doesn’t understand why his mother still asks this question since for the many years he’s been going to work, he has always responded with, “No, I’m all right, Ma. Go back to bed.” He doesn’t want breakfast or chitchat or pampering; he just wants to get dressed and get out, and grab a coffee on the way to the seat factory, where he’s the relief man and shop Steward. Or, as he often refers to himself, the walking Complaint Box.
As he stares into the bathroom mirror at the face that keeps changing, at the skin around his jaw that appears droopier than the morning before, he thinks he’s turning blunt. He’s losing the sharpness and tightness of youth. Are the folds over his eyes starting to droop? He squints and counts the creases around his eyes. There’s one more crease per eye than there was yesterday, or is there? How many did he count yesterday? He doesn’t remember. He has his father’s eyebrows. He sees them getting bushier and bushier and finally curling up at the ends like an owl’s horns. He looks at the brown mop on his head. Thank God he still has his hair, though his brush likes to collect batches of it every day. He stares at the big picture, the amalgam of all these failings. There he is – Primo Klaxon – going nowhere fast.
He’s always felt that somewhere inside there was an artist trapped in a straitjacket, fitted and buckled by mundane daily ritual and responsibility. At one time, he thought he was a writer. He likes the sound of words, like crux and gist and juxtaposition. He resolved to write a chapter a day. Sounds easy. You set a crisp blank page in front of you, get all relaxed and start writing. But after taking a week to rearrange two sentences – a total of twenty-one words including the title – and not knowing where to go from there, he decided he needed help. He purchased a book that would show him how to write a novel. There were so many of these books at the bookstore that he couldn’t decide which. So he closed his eyes and pulled one off the shelf. Being in possession of this book was like holding the answer to the riddle of life. Knowing this book was in the plastic bag lying on the passenger seat as he drove home infused him with a great enthusiasm. Nothing could stop him now. He settled on the couch and opened the book. Skipping the introduction, because he feels introductions are pointless, as are prologues, he began the book proper with the first sentence of the first chapter. It told him that a novel consists of 55,000 words or more. And there he stopped.
He thought of the twenty-one words he created over the past week, that he still isn’t one hundred percent happy with, and this gargantuan number that seemed to blink in his mind’s eye. How was he going to do it? He doesn’t have that many words in him. Then he thought maybe painting would be better. It looks easier. He’s already fucked up mentally and socially and you really don’t have to know how to draw. A few brush strokes here, a splash or a drip there and maybe one day, a well-connected critic might see his work and declare him a newfound genius. And people would look at his work and see things he’d never intended. And he could stand there, aloof, acting like what he does is no big deal while people tell him he’s great. But then he thought, how could he live an artist’s life? He could never see himself living downtown, looking like a shaggy derelict, riding a rusty old bicycle to the open-air market to buy a pear and a plum because that’s all an artist could afford. Then he thought, even for his own personal pleasure, he could have taken painting lessons at night school or on Saturdays, but he never did. He knows he’ll never do anything to advance his life, but he can complain about it. He says to the guy looking back at him, “Can you save me from myself?”
He sees it all going downhill after thirty. Like a magma flow down the side of a volcano, you can’t run fast enough from it and then it swallows you, and then you’re forty. Step back, your head still spinning from turning forty and you’re fifty, ten years away from being a senior citizen and most of your life is gone. Gone, and all you’ve got is memories. But what memories does he have? He wonders if he shouldn’t just choke his sorry life; end it all.
“What’s the point?” he says, then washes his face, brushes his teeth and prepares himself mentally for the day that will soon accost him once he flips the lock, pulls back the front door and steps out into uncertainty. As he dresses, he wonders what could go wrong today? He knows from experience that it’s never as bad as it turns out to be and at some point in the day, usually by mid afternoon, he’ll look back and think, ‘That wasn’t so bad’ and then he can look forward to a nice dinner and the placidity he feels after five p.m. When the night comes, there are no expectations. No live stresses. Just the memory of a day spent, home and the comfort of all that’s familiar. But now, he asks himself, if I’m so concerned of fleeting time, why the hell am I thinking of night when morning has just broken and why must I think negative so that something positive might happen? He answers himself with ‘that’s just the way I am.’ He was born that way and no lame little resolutions will ever change him, and when he’s eighty, he’ll die that way.
At six a.m., morning breaks cold and windy and instantly freezes his nose hairs once he’s out the door. He hops into his cold van and after a weak but insistent effort, the engine comes to life and as Primo rubs himself into the hard cold seat, he remembers that there’s a new donut shop in the neighborhood. He smiles because now he can get his favorite cup of coffee en route to work without going the long way. Coffee is not all the same. People who don’t drink coffee will tell you that coffee from this place is no different than coffee from that place. But in the morning, if coffee memory isn’t stimulated, you end up having a shitty day.
He approaches the corner and is doubly happy when he realizes his brand of gas station shares the same corner as his brand of coffee. What convenience! There’s a drive-through, but Primo won’t take it. Drive-throughs are for transients and lazy-asses. The servers are rushed and confused and Primo has suffered too many drive-through disappointments.
He’s fifth in line and this allows him time to absorb the atmosphere. He admires the innards of this coffee house; the neatness and cleanliness of freshly finished construction. When the line advances he becomes aware of the server, a lovely girl with auburn hair and brown visor cap. He takes an inventory of the beauty before him.
Small tits.
He lifts himself onto tiptoes and watches her move to the donut rack.
Nice ass.
When it’s his turn, their eyes lock, and in that instant, all Primo’s shortcomings and uncertainties are swept away… then she looks down at the counter.
“What would you like?” she asks. You, he thinks, but says, “Large black coffee please.”
She makes it. He drops exact change into her outstretched palm and as he walks away, he looks back. He’s just seen a goddess.
Within minutes he’s at the plant and as he backs into his reserved parking space, he realizes where he is but can’t remember getting there. It’s Primo’s habit to arrive forty-five minutes before his shift. He spends it quietly in a desolate cafeteria. He’s been doing this since his father got him a job here when he was seventeen, when everyone realized that Primo wasn’t going to college if he was even going to finish high school. Primo argued that what he was learning in school wasn’t interesting, and he could never absorb what wasn’t interesting, yet he was able to absorb everything in this place – every machine, every procedure. And that’s ironic and it makes Primo laugh a little when he realizes that the job he hates the most is the thing he does the best. Here in the cafeteria, Primo is at peace. He sees people arriving at work in the nick of time, donning their work face and then getting right at it. Primo is unable to get right at it. He needs to warm up. He likes to sip his coffee and read the paper but today, he forgot to get a paper. The donut girl has taken over his mind. He thinks about the donut girl all through his shift. She helps him deflect the slings and arrows of his insufferable workday. But there’s hope now. The vision of the donut girl has made him numb to the scourges of time.
Over dinner, his old mother recounts episodes from her youth. She does this a lot, laughs with herself as she remembers and Primo smiles at her, but he isn’t listening. He stares at the kitchen window and thinks about the donut girl. He looks at the clock and knows his morning is eleven and one half hours away. He goes to bed early, tries to bring on sleep amid the blue glow from the clock radio but he thinks about her still and sees her living in his fantasy… her milky skin with a hint of freckles, arriving atop a great white steed, slipping down from that equine back to bathe in a clear lake surrounded by swans. Of course, she’s naked. Of course, he’ll have his way with her. It’s his fantasy. It’s all good now because he doesn’t know her yet. He could go on like this, imagining what it would be like to touch her but eventually, he’ll want to touch for real. But for now fantasy is good. It’s safe. He doesn’t know if there might be a conflict in personalities. She could turn out to be a little bitch, a possessive, conniving little bitch full of attitude and complaint; a gnawing, grating little whiner who’s always telling you what shirt to wear and if you don’t do what she wants, she’ll pout and give you the cold shoulder for weeks. Primo had once had a girlfriend and now her face flashes before his eyes. He shudders. He’d wasted two years of his life trying to make her happy and, in the end, neither of them were happy. He was miserable trying to satisfy someone who couldn’t be satisfied. What if this donut girl was also insatiable? He realizes he’s fondling himself and decides to take it further; he masturbates and comes quickly, then falls asleep, now encouraged by a purpose.
Over the span of a couple of months, Primo is now part of the six-ten a.m. crowd. He sees the same faces every day: the big guy with the red beard, the woman who counts out exact change while she’s standing in line, then counts it two more times. There’s a guy who drives a dump truck and parks his vehicle diagonally across six parking spaces. There’s an old guy with paint-splattered pants and a dark blue jacket with the inscription, ‘Terry’s Interior Design.’ He sees them, they see him, and sometimes nods are exchanged. There’s only a five-minute window here. If you arrive outside that window, as has happened to Primo once or twice, it’s a different group, a different class. Strangers. But what these people have that he wishes he had, after weeks of patronage, is a great rapport with the girl of his dreams. She smiles at them, says good morning. They don’t even ask for their order. She knows what they want and prepares their orders automatically. Then she says, “Bye, bye. Have a nice day.” Primo wants the same treatment. He wants that familiar friendliness. He wants a relationship with his coffee server but it isn’t happening. Every time he steps up, she won’t look at him. He has to ask for his black coffee. It isn’t a difficult order, a black coffee. That’s the first one they learn at donut school, isn’t it?
It has often been said by people who know him that Primo is judgmental. He can be prejudiced by how someone looks, the sound of their voice, what they say, their actions, and this could be compounded with how Primo is feeling when he meets this adjudged person: Is Primo pissed off? Is he feeling happy? Is he in the mood to be helpful? All these emotions influence Primo’s first impressions, which would always prompt his father to say – probably quoting some mystic Indian guru, since Dad never had any original insights – “You can spot a fly on the horizon but can’t see the elephant in front of you.”
Dingo
By Attila Bronsky
I don’t know what kind of dog Dingo was. Depending on the angle you were looking at him, he could have been any black shorthaired small dog: a little bit of dachshund, a little bit of terrier, even a bit of Chihuahua. If the sun hit him the right way, you could see that maybe one of his grandfathers had been a chihuahua. All I knew for sure was he had become a real pain in the ass. At night when I went to bed, he’d follow me upstairs and crouch outside my door. If I moved under the covers, trying to get comfortable in the dark, he’d growl. When I woke up in the mornings, he’d still be crouched outside the door. Sometimes I’d make a fake lunge in his direction and he’d jump back and start yapping. Then I’d hear Nonna from downstairs telling him to shut up, which he did. Wherever I went in the house, he’d be there watching. We’d have long staring matches and neither of us would give in. One day I was lying in bed reading a book called Westward Winds. You’d think a book with a sailboat on the cover would have stories about sailing, or even stories about the sea. But not this one; it was about troubled people taking long journeys and at the end of these journeys, they’d feel better because they’d learned something that changed their lives. I liked it because the stories happened in places I’d never been and created colourful images in my mind.
I heard a grunt and saw movement in the corner of my eye. Dingo was walking into my room. He looked like he was drunk. He staggered over to my jacket on the floor, cocked a leg and pissed on it. I couldn’t believe it.
I jumped up and chased the little bastard downstairs and into the front room, where I cornered him between Nonna’s chesterfield and love seat, pushed the furniture together to block him in and did the only thing I saw fit to do—I pissed on him. He pressed himself against the corner while I showered him good. He started howling and Nonna came running in. She started screaming at me, “Disgraziato!” and went off toward the kitchen. I knew the best place for me at that moment was in my room, and that’s where I was going when I felt a sharp smack against my ass. I turned and saw Nonna standing there with a broom handle, ready to swing again. She hit me across the back before I got away up the stairs two steps at a time.
It was like a nightmare moment with Dingo howling, her screaming and it all being amplified in the stairwell, following me up to my room.
I went to my magic window and sat down, trying to figure out what had just happened. My biggest problem, as I saw it, was how I was going to get downstairs again without having to face that broom handle. After a few minutes, I saw Nonna in the back yard putting a metal washtub on the picnic table. She filled it with water and dropped Dingo in it. She was scrubbing him hard, getting him all lathered up, and he was wagging his tail and looking up at her, acting innocent.
She called me later. I looked over the railing. “Come here,” she said, “I want talk to you.”
I went down to the first landing and stopped there. She said, “Why, why you go pee pee on Dingo? I told you, you no make trouble for me. You say. Yes. Yes. Now you do this?”
“He peed on my jacket,” I told her. “For no reason.”
“Show me,” she said, and I went to my room and brought down the jacket. She took it from me and looked at it. She sniffed it then said, “Okay. Sometime Dingo have accident. He is little dog. But what you do is disgusting. It’s no normal. If you have problem with something, you talk to me. Capito?” I looked at her. I didn’t understand that last part. Cap-?
“Capito? It mean understand, understand?” she said. I nodded. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t an accident, that her pain in the ass little dog didn’t like me but I knew she wouldn’t understand that. Over her shoulder, I saw Dingo looking in through the screen door. I looked at him, he looked at me, then he looked away.
Years later, when I was sixteen and started working for Freddie, on a late spring morning, I was heading to catch my bus when I saw something black at the side of the road. It was Dingo lying on top of a sewer grate. He was still warm, and just looking at him, he looked okay. There was no blood or guts but when I picked him up, he felt broken inside. I took him to the train tracks and laid him down under some brush and covered him with leaves and went back to catch my bus. That evening Nonna asked me if I’d seen Dingo. I said no. She put his food out on the back porch and said, “It is that time of the year. Sometime he go out with other dogs. He come back in the morning.” But Dingo didn’t come back in the morning and as she stood on the back porch and whistled for him, I wanted to tell her he’d never come back. That evening after dinner, she threw on a shawl and went out for a walk. I could hear her in different parts of the neighbourhood, whistling for him. She came back and put out more water and fresh food then went to bed. I decided I was never going to tell Nonna I’d found Dingo. It would have done no good for me or Nonna for her to know Dingo was dead. I wasn’t willing to deal with the emotional hiccups a dead dog would throw into my life with Nonna, so I sat and watched her wonder.
It’s an amazing power to know the truth and not tell. He could have been stolen, or he could have run away and was living with another family; the important and reassuring thing would have been the hope that he was still alive, somewhere.
On the third evening, Nonna stuck her head out the back door and let fly the loudest and longest whistle I’d ever heard. “Maybe he ran away,” I said.
“Dingo no run away. Dingo dead.”
She closed the door and sat in her chair. Then she scrunched up her face and started to cry. Like the many times in my life when I could have reached out and touched someone when they were down, I didn’t move. I just sat there. Not even for Nonna, who I had grown to love and need. In the back of my mind, I was thinking it was only a dog. It was only a dog. And she’ll get over it.
The next morning, Nonna took Dingo’s bowls and his food and threw them in the garbage. She went to the glass case where she kept pictures of her dead relatives, opened it and Scotch-taped a picture of Dingo as a pup in the bottom right corner. I told her I’d get her a puppy. She said,” No more dogs. I have one dog. He die, now no more dogs.”
The Anniversary
By Attila Bronsky
We were waiting for a delivery in the shipping office. Freddie had brought his girlfriend, Gin. They were going out afterwards, but she was already drunk. I was still thinking about Freddie’s problem with Louie. Looking at Gin there, I couldn’t understand if Louie was supposedly fucking Freddie’s wife; why Freddie had a problem with that since he was cheating on her too. I guess it was the way I was looking at Gin and then at him that made Freddie say, “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t ever explain myself to nobody, but I’ve come to really like you David, like you could be my little brother. As far as I’m concerned you’re family now, so I’m gonna tell you a story.” He paused then said, “It was my seven-year wedding anniversary. That’s a big deal right?”
I shrugged.
“Seven years with the same broad? That’s a major accomplishment I think. So I went all out. I talked to her boss to let her out early. I rented a limo. Got tickets to one of those fag shows downtown, got us a room at the Four Seasons, even made reservations at a fancy shmancy French restaurant. That’s class, right? French is class, right? I wanted everything to be classy for my girl. So I show up at her work with a big bunch of flowers. The limo’s parked outside. The girls in the office are all falling over themselves at my thoughtfulness. You know what she did? She rolled her eyes at me.” He shook his head, and repeated, “She rolled her eyes at me,” then paused again. “You want a beer? I gotta have a beer.”
He stood up and walked to a small fridge behind the shipper’s desk. He came back with a couple of beers, cracked one open for me, held it out, and sat there holding his unopened bottle, then continued, “We go to the limo, I open the door, like a gentleman would open the door for his lady, right? But before she gets in, she says, “How much did this cost?” Now I’m trying to keep cool. This isn’t the reaction I was expecting, obviously, but hey, the night is still young and lots more fun to come right? She said she wasn’t dressed to go out. She had to go home and change. Now, you’ve seen her. She’s always dressed to the tits. I told her she looked fine. She said, a little too loud for my taste, “I’ve been wearing these clothes since eight o’clock this morning. I need to change!” The driver looked at us in the rear-view mirror. So we go to the house. You believe it? She wastes an hour getting dressed, and now I got to tell the driver to hurry up or we’re gonna be late for the restaurant. She just sat there, arms folded, looking pissed. You know, I got feelings too. I’m sitting there thinking of all those times she wanted to do things, always telling me that if she didn’t think of it herself, that if she didn’t make the arrangements, we’d always be sitting at home. She told me for once, for once, I’d like you to think of something. She told me she wasn’t going to become a wallflower. So here we are, doing something, and she’s still ticked.” He opened his beer and downed half of it.
“We get to the restaurant. The place had a real romantic lighting about it. I thought, this’ll soften her up. I get the menu but I can’t read a fucking thing on it. It’s all in French. The only word I know is Hollandaise. So I get a plate of some kind of meat with Hollandaise sauce on it, and you know what, I liked it. Very tasty. Different. She ordered some kind of fish. She didn’t like it. She said the food was phony food. Overpriced. It wasn’t real food. It was fake art on a plate. “How can anybody satisfy their hunger by eating some abstract, small portioned presentation?” she said. I never heard her talk like this; like she got smart all of the sudden. Philosophical and like. You know, I heard somewhere that a woman’s brain is smaller than a man’s brain.”
I said, “That’s only in proportion to body mass. They’re no less intelligent than men.”
Freddie thought a moment. “Oh, yeah?” He looked over at Gin who was pushing buttons on the Xerox machine. He said to her, “Watch you don’t break that thing.” He turned to me and shook his head. “So now dinner’s over, and we’re headed for the show. She’s not even a bit curious as to what we’re going to see. But I picked a good one; the one with Donny Osmond in it; the story from the Bible about Joseph and his amazing multicolored raincoat. I picked that one because she said she used to love Donny Osmond when she was a kid. I heard her. I listen. I was getting excited just thinking about seeing her face light up. You think she got excited when Donny came onstage? Nothing. She sat there like a lump on a log; bored. Looking at her watch. But you know, I liked the show; it had funny bits. I didn’t know live theatre could look so polished. Okay, now the show’s over. Now comes the surprise. I said, “You wanna meet Donny Osmond? I made arrangements.” She said, “No.”
I said, “But baby, you loved Donny Osmond.” She turned to me with the sourest puss I’d ever seen on anybody and said, “I was a little girl once, now I’m a woman. I want to leave?” I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned. What the hell did I do this for? Not for me. I could give two shits for Hollandaise sauce and Donny Osmond. I blew a shitload of money for this fucking special occasion, and what do I get in return? You know, the money she makes is her money. The money I make is our money, but that’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that. I’m willing to share. But there ain’t no sharing going on here from her; she’s become a one-way street. When all was said and done, we went to the hotel. I made myself a drink, she took a shower; then she came to bed. We got in bed, and you know what she did?” Freddie was looking at me expecting me to know. I shrugged. “She went to sleep! She rolled over and went to sleep. No goodnight, no thank you, and most of all no sex. It’s our anniversary for Christ’s sakes and not even a blowjob to tie me over. What the fuck? She just rolled over and went to sleep, to hell with me. Not even a peck on the forehead. Nothing. Now you’re saying to yourself, did you expect any sex even after she pretty well trashed the whole evening, and I say yeah, why not? We’re married aren’t we? It’s our anniversary isn’t it? I did my best so how about some wifely duty here? What’s she got to complain about? She lives in a nice house, drives a nice car. She can buy anything she practically wants, and I’m responsible for all that, so how about something for me?” He finished the rest of his beer and put the empty bottle on the floor beside him.
“Now, I got two beautiful little girls and I wouldn’t ever do anything to destroy their sense of security, but I’m a man. The pressures of life build up inside me till I need to explode, and she ain’t helping me explode, so I gotta find another outlet and I end up with this.” He waved a hand towards Gin who had a chair up against the Xerox machine. She said she wanted to Xerox her ass for Freddie; a keepsake for when she wasn’t around so Freddie wouldn’t forget her. As she sat on top of the copier glass, and the beam of light crossed from one side to the other she looked at me and said, “I really do have a nice tushy.”
Freddie laughed and said, “That’s right, if you didn’t have that ass you’d have nothing.” She smiled but I sensed sadness behind it.
I said, “Ginger’s a nice girl. There’s a lot more to her than her bum.” She jumped off the copier and stumbled over to me. “Oh, no,” she said, “no. You’ve got that wrong. My name’s not Ginger.” She whispered in my ear, “It’s Ginesta.” She giggled. “Isn’t that the silliest name you ever heard?” She moved her face close to mine and stared into my eyes. She said, “Do you want me to make you a copy of my bum too?” I looked over at Freddie who shrugged.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “It’s my bum. All of Freddie’s friends have seen my bum.” And then she backed up and fell off her shoes. Freddie stood and helped her to her feet. He said, “Slow down pumpkin, you’ve got the rest of your life.” Then he turned to me and said, “She ain’t no brain surgeon but she gets the job done.”
April 15th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I loved both stories! Your dialogue is spot on and you lift an everyday situation to a new level. I hope you submit on a regular basis ‘cos I can’t wait to read more of your work. Sincerely, Betty