The Bouillabaisse Kid.

Hey. Welcome to Stegosaurus. You got a reservation I hope, because we're booked up 19 months in advance.

Over at the grill, we're frying up some cupcakes. We're frying up some cupcakes and Chef Violet just tossed in some broccoli so it looks like we're frying up some of that too. Mini-cans of soup are zipping through the air. Chef Violet likes to throw stuff around a little before she cooks it; she likes to wing it against a wall, to see if it has what it takes to get thrown in her pot. I scramble around the kitchen unit trying to keep up with her, but I can't lie to you: it's tough, man.

One second I'm taking some crab out of the washing machine, for our stew, I guess/ then the next second she's trying to get me to fillet a stegosaurus so we can bake its short ribs with what appears to be a slice of orange and a semi-flattened half-gallon of milk. I don't ask questions. There's no time for inquiry, for learning her secrets. She looks at you at the beginning of the service, just once, with serious eyes that bitch slap your cheeks a little bit. It's a glare, really. A look of big mistrust; little eyeballs sizzling a laser hole in my forehead saying: you fat bastard: you know nothing of the Parisian school , of perfect reductions, of how the skin of the sublime chicken should snap between your teeth.

She just grabs a hold of her wooden spoon and looks deeply into my soul, four seconds tops; "You have force-fed me fatty inbred turkey nuggets! And ketchup! Since the day I was born!"

I plea with my eyes! Let me make it up to you, Jolly Rancher!

"Step aside, Papa! Let me cook my Foods of Love for the World!"

Ugh.

By now, of course, I'm in a spin/a daze. What the hell is happening?

Chef Violet moves to her sink and pulls out some bright green chili peppers and tosses them in the air so that they land down on the ground with some hot dogs and a goat with its eyeballs open that she has laid out down there. Then, before I can try and be of any kind of pathetic help at all, she just reaches her little fingers down, slinks them around around an edge, and just yanks out the whole damn sink basin and hurls it backwards with an elegant motion: as if that sink were the bane of her very existence and now we could get on with the show.

That costs money, you know?, I say to her. But, nothing.

I move out of tornado alley and try and prepare some wine glasses and a tea kettle on the little table. Still, no sooner have I started pouring out a wonderful Chateau Invisibiliti 1922, when Chef Violet comes  Sasquatching through my set-up: swinging a lion in one hand and a bushel of grapes in the other, talking some crazy kitchen smack, and sending my glasses and goblets in six different directions. I try and pick them up and say something mildly rude but it doesn't matter because she isn't listening to me, she's preparing her legendary bouillabaisse. She slams the head of some kind of a brown fish against the side of the fridge until she's pretty sure it's dead and then she flips it into her big red pot with a bright orange carrot, the hot red crab, and some fried chicken legs.

I attempt to hand her a glass of the wine I managed to salvage. I figure, hey, these big time chefs, they could use a little sandpaper here and there, to smooth out the grit. She takes the glass, looks at it. A long second passes.

Maybe I done good, huh chef? That's what my face says. I'm one of the weaker Muppets, all jammed up against King Kermit in the crowd.

She talks to the wine.

She speaks to the vino.

Fucking genius, I think. Pure genius. Talk to the reds. Encourage them to shine tonight. Who knows who will be out there/ what critics dine among us this evening?

Wine Whisperer!

I stare in awe as she sweet talks the wine then scolds it, all in one breath.

She drops it on the ground without touching it to her lips or dripping it in her magic pot.

My heart thuds down on to the crummy floorboards in my guts; an old stripper dies on the pole.

I watch as Chef Violet flings a fried cupcake into the microwave, slams the door shut, hits some buttons, takes it out again, and drops it straight into the hole where her sink used to be. She cackles at her burners and aims her wood spoon at the boiling crab like Jesse James. I ease her a hard plastic tart. She pings it off the counter top so that it flies off across the kitchen. She speaks in tongues at the brown fish.

She hits the spoon against the faucet and puts a whole eggplant into the dishwasher.

I hand her a cabbage and an ice cream cone.

She plops them into her percolating broth.

I get all giddy.

At three-thirty on a weekday afternoon, a two year old takes plastic food from me and I light up like a  pickle jar of headlights.

Whatever.

To The Kid Shooting Down From The Stars.

Hey, bud. You'll be here soon. Here's a little list I made up, you know, to read on the flight. I love ya.

==========================

A Mom's love, my own anger. Water gushing up my nose. Getting stung by yellowjackets by the tomato plants. My brother slicing open his tongue on a sled blade. My brother getting bashed in the face by an aluminum bat. Kissing a great girl who smelled like cake. My Mom-Mom's love. Getting pepper-sprayed in the eyes. Backing into a dipshit's car in the high school parking lot. The joy of hitting a RBI double. Becoming hooked on sleeping with a vaporizer until it gummed up the finish on the  bunk beds. Standing in line for George Thorogood tickets in the 15 degree pre-dawn darkness. And running from black bear cubs on a trail in the spring forest. And stalactite welts on the roof of my mouth from pizza and impatience.

Someone splitting my head open from behind with a tossed cinder block. Finding my cat smooshed out on 9th Avenue. Kissing a great girl who tasted like Jager. Slowly forgetting what my Dad's voice sounded like. My mom crying/her nose all swollen and red and runny. Fresh bluefish scales all over our back sidewalk. Dogs. A baby chicken in a cardboard box under a lightbulb out on the porch. Knowing I wasn't ever gonna hit any homeruns even before the pitcher threw the ball. Playing the guitar. Playing the guitar on my back on the floor. Playing the harmonica. Playing the harmonica on my back on the floor in a puddle of spilt drinks. Looking at a lily pad on a Mississippi pond and throwing my buzzbait at it and watching the bass erupt. Getting seven teeth pulled at once/passing out in the dentist's parking lot. My Pop-Pop's love. Firing bullets into the slate sky at the end of the day when I didn't care anymore if there were any deer around or not. And meeting an airline stewardess in Chicago and going back to her place somewhere in her city.

Marrying your Mom on a gorgeous October evening. Red Lobster with her two hours later. The flashing cop lights out on Fayette Street when people got hit by cars. Walking around London by myself and happy about it. Trafalgar Square with your Uncle Dave and the pigeons. Pigeons all over your Mom's arm in Venice. My Pop-Pop saying 'nigger' like it was any old word. My Pop-Pop limping up to the streams he drove me to: to see if I caught any trout. Standing on top of the Empire State Building in a thick fog. Violet, your sister. The happiness your sister taught me. And all the happiness you're gonna teach me too, man.

Throwing a chip of rock into Walden Pond. Recording records in a sweltering garage. Inhaling (I inhaled). Watching the magical purple sunset over a west Texas motel parking lot. Getting hoagies and cheesesteaks at the deli with my paper route money. Our first VCR. Video tape spilling out of the VCR/the horrible hissing sound it made. My mom buying me books whenever I asked her too. Charles Dickens. Drinking moonshine with the writer Larry Brown at a house party. Your Uncle Dave beating everyone in the room at arm wrestling til there was no one left. Standing outside the gates of Graceland because it was too expensive for us to go in. Walking right past the ticket counter at The Norman Rockwell Museum and going in without paying. Emily Dickinson's bedroom/ the chest where she hid her poems away. Containers of live rattlesnakes in the back of a Texas liquor store. Pasta in Rome. And looking at the lights of Mexico from an El Paso highway.

Holding your Mom's hand as your sister was born. Throwing tennis balls into rough streams for the dogs. Eating a raw habenero and leaving work early. Getting hit, by men and women. Reading books on hotel bathroom floors. Signing people's yearbooks and never ever seeing them again. German rain. German pilsners. Whispering to my Mom-Mom an hour before she passed. Roller skating at Radnor Rolls. Asking the girl from Spencer's Gifts for a New Year's Eve date to go see my brother's band, Marah, and her saying no. Joining Marah over pitchers of Honey Brown on Spring Garden Street. Making friends/ letting them go. Making memories/ keeping them forever. Looking up at the stars from a rowboat on the Chesapeake Bay at four-thirty am. And playing air drums to entire live Genesis records until I gave myself goosebumps.

Cooking Thai stir-fry for your Mom in Philly. Watching my Pop-Pop's brown junker disappear around the corner. Christmas trees in all their forgotten December glory. Trees out on the January curb. A little piece of holiday tinsel in the front flower bed in July. Standing in the flooding river in Wales. French truckstops. The bored tired eyes of the French truckstop counter girl. Calling your mom from a billion miles away. Riiiiiiiiiiiiing. Riiiiiiiiiiiing. Riiiiiiiiiing.

And never forgetting the lonliness of the ringing when you just can't wait for the pick up.

And smelling pancakes cooking while I was still in bed.

And jerkoff Pete Rose rolling an autographed ball across the table at me without even a glance my way.

Adults screaming at each other.

The first notes of Backstreets rising up out of the humid night.

People waiting at Arrivals, nervous.

Me and your Mom and Violet and the dogs: waiting.

Off A Pigeon Shit Ledge Together.

Two years ago today, we put the duffel bag on the bed and started chucking stuff in it; stuff we thought we'd want. I put the phone chargers in, and my toothbrush. Monica threw in a Chapstick and the camera. I chucked in a Dickens novel. She tossed in some make-up and some shampoo and some toothpaste. I put in my secret flask with red wine in it and my Zoloft. Monica laid in some pjs, some warm socks. I took out the flask and dumped the wine down the drain. My wife threw a thing of granola bars in there. Maybe some cookies. I picked out a shirt or two, I guess. Maybe she packed them for me.

At the hospital we watched the tv a little. We saw the playbacks of the new President being inaugurated on every channel they had in there. He was someone we really love and so we saw it as a cool sign; it seemed really something to us that we would probably have our first kid on the first day of a good man's era. It put a little extra zip in the air of our room. It got us kinda stoned on hope and the future. It was just great.

Nurses popped in and out. I ate cookies and walked around some. Down to the cafeteria, looking at the menus stapled to the cork boards. It was Ethnic Week and there were days listed when they were gonna be serving Chow Mein and Lasagna and stuff. Dinner was over by the time I wandered in though, so I just poked around and bought some more cookies for something to do. In the hallways, I strolled down brighly lit tiles and tried to imagine how my life was about to change.

You can't imagine it though.

You just can't.

I'd been in a rock-n-roll band for over a decade, driving around, playing guitars and drinking late into the night. I'd spent a lot of years doing something wild and free; but down in my guts I was never feeling like this was my world. It was a pretend world: a place where men could pretend to be kids. And after awhile, that got really old and stale. The songs, the musicians in the band, the endless nights in London or Austin, I began to look down at them as if they were a fat rubber-banded wad of old football pool slips; things that had once held so much meaning/so much jittery excitement; things that were now just stuffed into the sock drawer, taking up space I needed.

Life doesn't ever end up how you planned it. Nothing comes rumbling down the pike with the same paint job it was wearing in your 3am dreams. So here I was, severed from my past/ kicking around the halogen halls, waiting on my future; our future.

I ambled back into our room after awhile and had a cookie and asked Monica if she wanted one. She didn't and I was secretly glad because that's the way I think. I got a Cookie Monster mentality and here I am about to become a dad. Whatever. I'd find my way.

It's sort of otherworldly in a way to watch the person you love the most in this world lying in a hospital bed. You sit there on an orange cushioned chair by the window that looks out into the darkness of night and across the air into the slanted glow of other people's hospital rooms, you sit there and you steal peaks at the person, at the tubes in her arms, and you notice stuff you never really bothered to see before. Pin dot freckles on the underside of her pale wrist.

The way her ears attach to her temples.

How she smiles a little without even knowing it when she watches the television, even during the commercials; even during the dumb ones for cars or other stuff we ain't buying.

It throws you for a loop but it isn't a forever loop and sadly it usually slips away when you slide down through the automatic  hospital doors. By the time you get home and park the rig and help the person inside: you're already thinking dumbass selfish shit, like what can I have for dinner/we're out of everything or I wonder if its okay if I just sit on the couch to chill and watch some Seinfeld. Still, it can come back on you, like it's coming back on me today. Watching the person just laying there on the hospital sheets, flipping channels, their heart beats doing electric dances across the monitor over in the corner. It comes back sometimes and you are thumped with a sledgehammer across your facebone. It comes back and for a second you understand everything. Serge, you dumb bastard...look at all this, man.

There were some needles and medicines that Monica had to have to get stuff moving along. Needles for pain too. I kept thinking maybe someone would offer me a needle, just so it might make her feel a little better, like she wasn't all alone with that stuff. Nobody ever offered me anything though.

At some point, between nurses whisper talking to Monica about dilating this and that, I fell asleep on the plastic couch. When I woke up, I peeled my face off the vinyl and rubbed the sand from eyes and I could tell right away we were closer to the new world.

You could just feel it. The coast of life.

You could just barely see the rocky shore getting banged by the waves. From a misty mile out, you could just barely see the jutting cliffs of land hanging high above some beach we'd never seen before in our lives.

I rolled off the couch and looked over at Monica and she was smiling a light smile as the nurses busied themselves clearing a landing strip. In my deepening breaths I let go of everything I had ever known like fresh ballons on a wind. I looked out the window at the gauzy January morning and I saw the mountains over the city and the sky up over the mountains. I turned around slowly, and walked over to her bed.

We looked at each other.

We nodded spy nods.

And when the nurses weren't looking, we grabbed each other's hands and we leaped off yesterday's pigeon shit ledge togther.