BUD To Get Your Bud Clark T-Shirts CALL (503)293-3400 FOR • Retail Outlets • Mail Order Information ($ IOplus$l Handling-Visa, MasterCard) Get your Tickets Early! Subscribe to KBOO Today. 231-8032 By Rachel Herr Drawing by Andrew Keating r. Pinski the janitor danced with the mop while the sun puddled up on his little bald head. We crept past his apartment after school slurping Diet Pepsi, not wanting to hear fat ladies sing arias as he cried to his dead Maria. A skinny Slovak with a slump, an arm man in a tee shirt, a milk mustacher with tartar teeth smacking and grinding; Pinski waltzed, we skirted. His wife had been an Italian beauty. SHe grew fat and oily and her upper arms jiggled like lazy flowered gliders on a Slovak porch in a Virgin Mary house in a pish pish piroghi part of town. The house rattled empty and weightless without her. Pinski, a thin man, a phonograph fixer, a heel tapper, a cabinet stuffer, reduced to stalking the attic for photographs, eating sardines, seeing Rome in National Geographicon a cold toilet seat, bringing a fat bowser to the great big bed. He was a miracle worker with a toilet tank, made faucets hush, could make a mute doorbell sing like a caged warbler. He lived in 4-F longer than I was alive. Mama said, The last janitor was from Tennessee. His people all had stringy hair. They ate ham hock. Pig, Honey. I brought them half a pie, they left it untouched. They said It's been eaten offa, you dark types might have worms. We s particular ’bout what we might pick up in a dirty city like this heah one. Pinski sucked up Mama’s Russian tea cakes, her borscht, the sour cream left white dots of satisfaction on his hair lip. We snuck by, played invisible ghost, hoped his door would be closed, which it wasn’t. He had a certain look. Paint-by- JDIA number oils of fat ladies with dogs gleamed from his walls. The operas whined on the way to school and still vol- canoed at dinner. We were quick.-If he caught us he’d snatch us into his kitchen, snap open a dusty bread box that smelled like old men in tee shirts with lonely smiles, unwrap a cake with strange lettering on the wrapper that might be thirty years old. My girls, my pretty-wittys, he’d say. You gotta ask your Mama to make you more meat, you need flesh. Girls should have some shake-it if you know what I mean. We clutched our book bags up against our bone chests and heaved up the steps to Mama and Batman, dreaming of boys named Charlie Walker and Eddy Jones, idolizing girl-ladies like Twiggy and Goldie, curling our Lemon-Go-Lightly pigtails around our fingers, snapping our Bazooka Joe, hoping those breasts would never grow. Rachel Herr is a Port Townsend writer who is highly involved in that community. She grew up in Chicago. Andrew Keating is a Seattle artist and professional skate boarder. DOWNEY INSURANCE AGENCY, INC. 520 S.W. SIXTH AVENUE PORTLAND, OREGON 97204 BRIDGET I. DOWNEY 228-8327 AUTO MEDICAL HOMEOWNERS BUSINESS LIABILITY BONDS Clinton St. Quarterly 43
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