biscuit on the skids

peggy jean has left the biscuit.

after a year at the cook stove with a finger in the pot, i have packed my knives and taken my place in the long line of erstwhile kitchen managers and executive chefs.

any romaticized visions i may have held unto myself about the flame and crumble of the biscuit in the wake of my departure have evaporated. i sit here in the fall out of my leaving, knowing that the biscuit will continue even in my absence.

it is always this way: no matter how hard you work, how much you care, you are never indispensible. the great lurching machines of industry continue on their sightless tracks, geared and powered by the great fuel of inevitability.

it nearly flies in the face of the 4th law of thermodynamics (or whatever number it is): a system left unto itself will decay. well, apparently the law never counted on such contradictory beasts as evolution and the biscuit.

and i must say it feels like a terrible break up. i drive by and wonder who the new manager is, are the employees as fond of him/her as they were of me? i feel raw and rejected. i want to burn my pile of biscuit shirts and caps. i want to keep them forever.

i have been gone three weeks. sometimes i wake up in a panic thinking i have forgotten a task or a chore, some scheduled event i had not prepared for. the thin film of sweat makes me shiver and i turn in bed and look for comfort in the thought that i no longer am responsible for all those little details.

it used to be that the comraderie and the infamy of working at the biscuit was enough to feed my courage to enter that maelstrom on a daily basis. and then, one day, there was not enough of anything that could convince me it was worth girding up my loins for and walk through that door. neither love nor money. baby girls, i was spent.

i could say to you (and indeed would be the party line of the company) that i left because of health issues. a recent diagnosis of an aggressive bone disease and the opinion of three doctors that to continue to cook would cripple me did throw a rather large monkey wrench into the works. the pain was/is intense. yet the recent acuisition of the biscuit by a corporation and the tension, tempers and uncertainty was too much. they say i quit. i say i was fired. in the end, it was just too painful to stay. for both of us.


i loved the biscuit. and i hated it. every day was a compromise and a pep rally to get me to work and back home again. i drive by and feel that i have become bone and blood of the building. but to the biscuit and the current employees, i am a ghost. no more than the brush and echo of the long dead. like, bunny, who died there and still whispers to those who walk the kitchen floor, i pass by and feel the connection slip from me as quickly as it came. i am static and snow. a grainy image of the latest casualty.

good bye, biscuiteers. i am slowly leaving the building.

veteran

i never met my uncle w.o., a great uncle, an only son who disappeared inthe burning oil fields of normandy. I have pictures. he is posed with a set of weights. or swimming at the Y. he is balancing a man on his hands, juggling the human body, his focus and his stance unwavering. he is wearing an old fashioned swim suit and smiling. he is sitting on the floor in a tank top, smoking cigarettes and reading a letter from home. a young man is stretched across a cot, looking over my uncle's shoulder. i believe, like me, my uncle is gay. and that's where the pictures end. the rest of the album shows a telegram. a box holds a folded flag and a handful of medals. nothing says he died. the telegram reads "missing". and my grandmother says "last seen". W.O. was a belly gunner. he would lie face down in a bubble at the bottom of an airplane and shoot a gun at enemy planes. i imagine him flying over the ocean, the world, with just a contoured piece of glass between him and all the spaces between. one minute he is dozing, watching the earth curl away beneath him. the next minute, he splits his reverie with the rapid fire of machine guns and the explosions of engines giving up their own fight to stay aloft. i like to think there was silence as they did their slow tumble to the ground, my uncle watching the ground rise and swell, the first of the crew to kiss the earth as the plane plunged its belly into the oil soaked fields of normandy, the jolt and scream as they came to a stop breaking the silence and drift of disbelief. Noise rushes in and time careens forward. the crash has ignitied the oil and flames shoot 15 feet into the air. W.O. crawls out as the fires spread. he is surrounded. not by german soldiers but by a ring of fire. the pilot is alive but the rest of the crew is dead. he kneels next to his friend, the young man who read letters over my uncle's shoulder, and cradles his head in his lap. a plane roars low overhead, attempting to land, a treacherous rescue mission. the telegram reads that W.O. pulled off his shirt and waved them away. it was too dangerous. we all imagined he shouted, the black, oily heat searing his lungs. he coughs and tries to remain standing. the plane passes one last time. the telegram reads: "missing. last seen alive on a burning oil field in normandy." last seen bent over a young pilot, face down and staring into clear blue. adrift in the space between heaven and earth, snug in the belly of time.