WINNER
PR GRIFFIS (Austin, TX)
It started when President-Probably-For-Life Chavez stole my cab in New York City the day before Thanksgiving. I mean, we made eye contact. He knew what he was doing. You can’t just nationalize a cab, I remember thinking.
And maybe the God that likes democracy was smiling just a little on me that day, because even though my plane had already left by the time I got to the airport, his flight had been canceled, and with the storms socking in most of the Northeast, neither one of us was going anywhere for the time being, which gave us plenty of time to glare at one another while waiting for three Big MacsÒ (him) and a Premium Southwest SaladÒ, hold the chicken (me), trying to plot our respective next moves.
Then some stuff happened, I really don’t remember what. Maybe we rented a car? Does this sound right? We rented a car and drove into the night – me at the wheel, since he doesn’t have a driver’s license and is wildly nearsighted (vanity precludes him, I’m pretty sure, from wearing glasses or admitting he needs them) – debating the relative merits of our political ideologies as we made our way south and west on dark and icy (but almost completely free of pot-holes or broken down buses full of sad people with handfuls of chickens or goats on leashes) highways.
Hugo, as I’d started calling him by then – making it sound as much like “Yugo” (the ultimate expression of what kinds of products communism excretes into the world) as possible – said he’d lost his wallet at a Luv’s truck-stop somewhere in Kentucky. I offered to go back and help him look for it, but no. He was “quite sure some capitalist running dog had absconded with it by then.”
Yeah. Right. More like he-she lot-lizard.
Out of topics that didn’t end up with us going at each other with tire-chocks, we tried baseball. We’d both played some, back when, we discovered. Then he sneered and made this big deal about the Yankees being the ultimate expression of capitalism’s excesses, and… I couldn’t disagree. I guess that was the point where we made a little connection. I remember nodding somberly, and if you’d been there observing, I’m pretty sure you might have thought maybe people aren’t so different after all.
And then he stole my wallet and went partying with some real squalid types while I was trying to catch some shut-eye (he’s hung like a gnat, I couldn’t help but notice, since he didn’t bother to wear a towel coming out of the shower, and I thought you might like to know) in a motel just outside of Fort Smith, Arkansas. One of those real disreputable-seeming ones right by the highway, which, I was just about out of money at that point, between paying for gas and the eight daily Snickers bars Yugo said he required for his blood sugar.
I mean, he kept saying, “you will be a hero of the people of Venezuela,” by way of promising to square us up, but can you pay your mortgage with being a hero? I don’t think so.
When we finally (don’t ask me how, maybe he sold the car for speed) rolled back into Austin on the Greyhound, my lovely wife was there to meet me. She asked me wasn’t I going to introduce her to my friend, whom I’d told her so much about via payphone (don’t even ask what happened to my cell-phone) over the last twenty-four hours. And at first I thought, you know, fuck that guy; let’s see if some governmental agencies are interested in his whereabouts. But then, don’t ask me why, probably because being from a democracy makes you feel more deeply for people who aren’t free – and believe me, I learned that even the president of a communist country isn’t free – I invited him home with us for Thanksgiving.
Which, I mean, they don’t even have Thanksgiving where he comes from.
And later that day, as we sat around the table heaped with the bounty of the season in our great nation – multiple generations of family, lots of friends, and the dictator of a South American country – we all gazed upon the feast before us, thankful for all we have. We cried when my youngest, James, prayed for the safe return of the brave men and women serving overseas. Then we laughed, and laughed hard, when Yugo tried to “claim for the people” both the gravy boat and the entire turkey.
Oh, Yugo.
1ST RUNNER-UP
JUSTIN McBRIDE (San Francisco, CA)
If You’d Like To Make A Call
It was Thanksgiving. Or it was back in the States, at least. Between you and me, I hate Thanksgiving, always have. But it’s a time for family and I don’t like to disappoint my mother or her sisters. Judgmental, all of them.
So I would, I decided, call home and talk to as many people as the phone got passed to, and then I would go on with my life and probably call up Eulalo to see if he wanted to play pool. I had met Eulalo two weeks prior and we had played pool most days since meeting. He was the only person I had met in Munich who wasn’t from Munich. He was from Spain, and like me, he was working for a cable company for three months in Munich. Unlike me, however, he didn’t know the daughter of a major hotelier, and thus he couldn’t get three months of residence in Munich’s nicest hotel for free. I had gotten to know most of the hotel employees, but they remained quite reserved and always overly professional.
I asked several hotel employees how to make an international call from the lobby, but each person simply told me, calmly, that I would not be allowed to make such a call.
“But the price to call from the rooms is astronomical,” I explained.
It doesn’t matter, they told me.
I looked over and saw Hugo Chavez walking by himself across the lobby of the hotel.
“Hugo, what the fuck? La chingada.”
He looked at me as if to say “Now, who are you again?” but friendlier.
“Would you let me use your phone, please? I have to call mi familia back in Peetsborg.” I knew if I pronounced it “Pittsburgh” he probably wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I had read once that his family made its money in steel, and so I figured I could use the Pittsburgh angle to improve my chances.
“Peetsborg?” he said with a smile.
“Claro que si, profesor.”
“Con gusto,” he replied.
He led me up to his room on the sixth floor. No presidential suite, nothing fancy. Just another room in the hotel.
“I like your estyle,” I said. “Humble, yet refined.” I nodded to his suit jacket.
“Carlo Rossi,” he said, jerking on the jacket and nodding back to me.
“Isn’t that a wine?”
“It’s a fucking suit maker!” he screamed. The windows seemed to rattle. Then he smiled a second later. “Maybe wine too, I don’t know,” he said. This guy was a real trip.
“You like turkey, Hugo? Pavo? It’s Thanksgiving.”
“I know what the goddamn turkey is,” he said, apparently enjoying our conversation. He lifted the phone receiver. “What’s the number?” he said. I told him the phone number to my mother’s house in Tampa. There’s no steel in Tampa. What I didn’t anticipate (who could?) was that he would know Pittsburgh’s area code.
“813?” he asked me. “Why not 412? Peetsborg is 412. Where is 813 anyway?” He thought for a second. “En la Florida?”
What the fuck? Who is this guy?
He pressed his index finger down onto the phone, hanging up the call, but he still held the receiver to his ear, waiting for me to answer. His belly looked sort of big as he sat on his bed.
“Umm, no, no,” I stammered. “No, my mother has a Tampa cell phone number still because she lived there for a few years. Peetsborg cold in the winter!” I hugged myself and shook back and forth to show him how cold Peetsborg gets. He seemed satisfied with my answer.
“Okay fine,” he said.
I made my call and didn’t tell anyone that I was sitting in Hugo Chavez’s hotel room, because no one believes a story like that, plus they were about to have dessert. My dad was drunk again and sitting on my mom’s back porch.
I covered the microphone end of the receiver and looked over to Hugo.
“My dad’s hammered again,” I whispered, lifting my thumb to my mouth and tipping my head back.
“Ah, si, si,” he said. “Fucking drunks, huh?”
“I know. I really do.”
“My brother, he is the same,” Hugo said. I nodded.
I uncovered the phone. “Aunt Carol,” I said, “the reception here is terrible. Germans, you know. So I have to go, okay?” My whole family is prejudiced against Germans; you can imagine the uproar when I came to Munich.
I hung up the phone and Hugo stood up to walk me to the door.
“Can I stay?” I asked him. “Do you want me to stay?”
“No,” he said.
“Okay.” I stood still and thought for a second. “Okay.”
2ND RUNNER -UP
MIKE BLANK (Minneapolis, MN)
Mike Pilgrim had become unstuck in time.
Let me back up. Theorizing that one could travel within his own lifetime, Mike stepped into the quantum accelerator and vanished. He woke to find himself stuck in the past, facing mirror images that weren’t his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better.
He woke up. The sheets were cold with sweat. Voices speaking Spanish-accented English came muffled through the walls. Rolling over, he looked for evidence of who – or where – or when – he was. A child’s baseball mitt, Mickey Mantle model. The 1950’s? 60’s? In a child’s bedroom…how old was he?
Peeking into the hallway, he found the bathroom, sneaking now away from the voices. He looked into the mirror, discovering a young Hispanic boy looking back at him. “Oh boy.”
“Oh boy is right.” Al had appeared, clad in his typical striking red suit, Ziggy the computer in tow. “Ziggy says you’re Hugo Chavez, age ten. It’s Thanksgiving morning 1964. Ziggy’s not clear on the details, but apparently there’s a dispute that splinters the family. After today, Hugo’s brother and mother never talk again.”
The voices, louder now – yelling. An undercurrent of anger permeates the house like the aftermath of a tear gas grenade. Mike (Hugo) heads for the kitchen.
“It’s completely wrong!” Hugo’s brother.
“It’s how I always make it!” The mother now. Incredible tension.
Mike rounds the corner, hoping first to figure out what “it” is.
“It’s too peppery!”
A food of some sort?
Finally into the kitchen now, a bubbling cauldron sits, tepid, on the stove. A familiar scent, but Mike can’t place it. Peering over the lip of the pot, and still…questions remain. A stew? Corn? Creamed corn? A creamed corn casserole, the signature thanksgiving dish of Mrs. Chavez.
More arguing. Tension builds. Tension so thick it could be served over tortilla chips as part of a nacho platter.
“Hey, guys…it’s just a creamed corn casserole. Let’s not start a holy war.”
“Hugo! Get out of here!”
It seemed odd that a family could become estranged over a creamed corn casserole. Capulets and Montagues. Hatfields and McCoys. And Chavez vs. creamed corn casserole. Hugo’s brother reached for the stock pot. Instinctively Mike jumped in front of the mother while 5 gallons of peppery creamed corn casserole churned through the air as if in slow motion.
And all 5 gallons landed on him. 42.5 pounds. It was like a mule kick to the chest, knocking him sideways and backwards. All the air escaped from his lungs as his feet kicked out from under him. Creamed corn everywhere. It became his up, his down, his entire world became of creamed corn. Blinded by creamed corn. Choking on cream corn.
Finally the burbling, sloshing sounds of the creamed corn settled. Silence now.
Then laughter. Mike had saved the Chavez family. And just like that, he felt himself leaping once more. Hoping against hope that this leap would be his last, and this leap would take him home.
