Summer Sausage – or – How to Tune a Guitar

“Sixteen years, Dick. Sixteen goddamn years.”

“I know, I know. And you’ve been a fine cop the whole run.”

“And I’ve been a fine cop the whole run.”

Charles Swein exhaled loudly, leaning back against the padded emerald vinyl of the booth. Sick of this diner, sick of this heat, sick of the sweat on his back soaking through his shirt, pasting him to the cracked and worn upholstery. Sick of the force and sick of this prick of a captain sitting across the table, smiling like some Susie waiting to show off her new pony. It wasn’t necessary to take him down here, away from the rest of the guys, like he’s some child’s going to cry when he doesn’t get his way.

Not like he’d been spared embarrassment before. Not like he’d been spared embarrassment when some highschool quarterback hero realized he was small potatoes in the game and life and joined the force with an All-American smile and wits dim enough to woo a ten-years-married woman into a house and ring bought by his daddy. Not like he’d been spared when the whole PD was invited to the wedding and the whole PD attended the wedding. Or when the newlywed was promoted shortly thereafter to sit pretty with the precinct higher-ups, the newly-divorced demoted to some rookie’s beat for “disorderly conduct” towards his “fellow” officer.

So Charles was working alone, conducting his investigations alone, eating dinner and sleeping alone. Being alone isn’t lonely if there isn’t anyone you want to be with.

“I just think you could use some support. You’ve been out of Homicide for some spell now, and it may take a bit to get your sealegs back.”

“Don’t bullshit me. This isn’t a favor. This isn’t you caring. It’s you not wanting to care.”

“Chas, really –”

“I do my goddamn job. Last thing I need is some easytown greenhorn with a gun for a co–”

“Gun for a what?” Easytown greenhorn stood at the end of the table with a shit-eating grin, hands at his hips. You could call it a Superman pose; Charles thought Wonder Woman.

“Excuse us a minute, Chas.” The captain took the napkin from his collar and rested it on the table next to his plate. Diner gravy, thought Charles, will be that man’s undoing.

Dick and easytown greenhorn walked toward the bathrooms, speaking quietly to blend with the din. They must’ve been talking about Charles, Charles thought. Talking about his poor attitude, his distaste for authority. Dick was sharing the story about when he found him passed-out in a chair outside a motel room with a suffocated prostitute and an overdosed youth minister inside. And/or the one about his intoxicated stumbling-through of an elementary school substance awareness assembly. And/or the one about his pre-op transsexual son being stabbed four times on his way home from school, paralyzing him from the waist down. Dick was sharing stories and strategies, dictating Charles’ dossier. As if it needed further distinguishing. The two shook hands with solemnity and returned to the table, easytown greenhorn occupying Dick’s place in the booth while he remained standing.

“Chas, this is Jack Coban. He’s your new partner. Jack, this is Chas. He’s your new.. partner.” Charles grunted. The grin returned to Jack’s face as he extended his well-manicured hand. Fingernails clean and filed, healthy cuticles, and none of those streaks you get from a lack of calcium. The man stunk with a musk that assumed a two-block downwind would be as pleased with his presence as he was. Why was he so pleasant?

“Why’re you so goddamn pleasant?” Charles fidgeted in the booth, skin peeling from the vinyl. This heat made him uncomfortable and ornery.

Chuckling, “Friends call me Jacky.”

“I ain’t your godda–”

“You ain’t my goddamn friend. Right, right. Friends and you call me Jacky.” Some kind of amused, Jack straightened his posture, propping himself on the table with his elbows. Still grinning, he glanced to Dick. “I think we’ll be fine. This is fine. This’ll go well.” Dick sighed his heavy, fat man’s sigh and reached for his wallet. Halting his sweaty sausage of a hand, “It’s on me. You’re fine.”

Dick nodded a heavy, fat man’s nod. “Don’t dilly-dally. You’re both on duty. Get to know each other, share a milkshake, then back to work.” A heavy, fat man’s laugh at his own joke as he shuffled out of the diner, eyeing the waitress on his way.

“Dick.”

Pleasantly, “So let’s open a dialogue, huh? We’re going to have to get to know one another to make all this go smoothly. Personally, I work better when I have a more.. informal relationship with my partner. I find that my partner often handles his or her tasks with a more efficient adequacy as well. It’s important to be close. If we’re close, we’ll be fine. Just fine.” The waitress came and filled Dick’s coffee cup. Jack smiled at it, pulled it close, and began sipping. “So what do you think, partner? Tell me something about yourself.”

“No.”

Jack knew enough already. Probably knew that Charles vomited on himself and his wife while they took the first dance. That they’d tried to have four kids, but Charles’ sterility prevented the conception of even one, eventually turning them to a surrogate father.

The afternoon sun was unbearable. Charles could taste the sweat on his lips.

Probably knew about his eleventh toe. The time he broke into his ex-wife’s new home to bring her a cheap grocery store bouquet of week-old Easter flowers. She’d been kind to not tell her former highschool football hero husband.

“Well that’s fine then, partner. We’re fine. Do you have any questions for me?” Jack sipped Dick’s coffee. To his credit, the man took heat well. Not a bead on his brow. Pleasant.

Charles thought: Two kids. Cookie-cutter home in a mid-80s suburban development. Attractive, but aging, wife. Staling but existent sex life. Quality, but not flashy, sedan for himself. A station wagon for the wife and kids. Dog. Gym membership, but old aerobic equipment at home in the basement. Sports-watching, beer-drinking friends, also married. Father or grandfather was a cop, maybe both.

You’d think the diner’d have an air conditioner or a fan or something.

Shifting his weight, feeling the cool of his sweaty shirt on his back, “No.”

“Well, I was raised mostly by my uncle. He was a police officer. I don’t have much time for friends or recreational activities because of work, but I try to get a workout in at a gym when I can. Or just freeweights at home. My wife and I got our daughter a golden retriever for her birthday last year. She named him after her goldfish, Sammy. I like to do my commute by bicycle, but it’s rather impractical living out in Rosewood Hills, so I usually just drive my truck.” Apparently pleased with his summary, Jack finished Dick’s coffee with a smile, looking out the window towards the sun, half-descended. “Well, I think this was just fine. I’ll get the tab.”

Charles had suffered a heatstroke at a Boy Scout camp when he was younger. He’d refused to drink any water or wear a hat during a long hike, trying to make himself look tougher than the other Scouts. He fainted near the top of the trail, knocking two of the other boys over. Charles and one of the boys were cut and scratched, the other boy broke his wrist in the fall.
Charles looked at Jack and drank the glass of melted ice water the waitress’d filled when Dick arrived. “I didn’t get anything.”

“That’s fine.”

After paying for Dick’s twelve-dollar chicken fried steak and one-dollar coffee, Jack approached the jukebox. After a minute or two of flipping through the forty-fives while Charles peeled himself from the booth, Jack put his quarter in and made a selection.

“I’ll walk you to your car, partner.”

The interior of Charles’ car was sweltering. The dark leather seats and steel buckles burned his exposed skin. “It was fine meeting you, Chas. Really a pleasure.” Charles rolled his windows down, expecting his silence to serve as the rude goodbye he was too warm to emphatically gesticulate.

Lee Hazlewood introduced and drawled an old Spanish lullaby in the diner.

Why was he so pleasant?



Charles “Chas” Swein is survived by his son, Lyle, 18. The memorial service will be wheelchair accessible.

Wonder Woman/Lie

We’re sitting at a round table, almost directly centered in the main dining room of the Peking Dragon, when Pam Stewart unbuttons her paisley blouse and, as if it were a minotaur-hide water pouch, dislodges her left breast from its white cotton holster, (sacrificially) offering the war-weary nipple to her daughter’s gummy maw. Holly is six months old, and, of the Stewarts’ five conceptions, she is the second to find a place in the family (the other three were healthily-born boys, immediately put up for adoption per their mother’s insistence), preceded six years by her sister, Xena. Seated, their father, George, is a head shorter than Pam, a disparity doubled when the two’re standing. Smiling meekly as he spoons the last of the sweet and sour chicken onto his plate, he is evidently accustomed to his Amazon wife’s maternal exhibitionism. The Stewarts are one of an increasing many modern families founded and matriarchally dominated by women hailing from the warrior nation.

Growing up in a state most of us have been fortunate enough to forget about (Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia?), George was raised by the perverted union of two broad-shoulder, corn-fed Midwestern autonomous lesbian hermits who contributed nothing more to the world than a distasteful mental image and his failing whimper of humanity (I won’t patronize the reader with the obvious Freudianism at play here). As if it were in contention to his unapologetically corrupted upbringing, George Stewart, following in the footsteps of most men with two first names that came before him, directed himself a life of unremarkable banality (so unremarkable, it seems, that it is remarkable). Until, of course, he met Pam (her name, I later sleuthed, is an appropriation of the Amazon Penthesilea).

The Stewarts’ premarital courtship is a testament to the Amazon queering of interpersonal relations. The two’d been climbing ladders at separate corporate dot-coms and reached the tops around the same time. While George’s company was content to exist and excel in its generalized content and business approach, Pam’s soon found itself to be too niche, unable to self-sustain without exploiting a foreign seed of inspiration and (pro)creativity. The actionable woman that she is, Pam (and her company) made George (and his company) a collection of offers he (it) could not refuse, resulting in the outright acquisition of all assets, both monetary and masculine. The established contract of collaboration is consummated annually, both protecting George’s company’s relevance in the market as well as fertilizing Pam’s company’s fecund soil. Though there have been dissenters in the tribe, George holds that his repeat submission is willful and wise, even with six years’ hindsight.

While her relationships may be need-based and calculated, Pam’s nursing is to her like a yawn. The physiological urge to do so comes unexpectedly and, just as it’s not uncommon for one to yawn when not especially tired, Pam nurses her daughters (Xena, at six, is still breastfed) even when they are not especially hungry or thirsty or whatever bestial compulsion you’d credit it to. (Let us hope that yawns aren’t actually contagious.) This unhealthily aggressive femininity is overtly manifest in every aspect of her life – so much so that one is almost blind to her crippled right breast. (From birth, Amazons are trained and prepared with a perfected skill set designed to give them an advantage against any opponents they may face. One such preparation is the scalding of the right breast to prevent its growth, which can be assumed to facilitate better handling of a mouse and keyboard in clerical and secretarial work.) A deliberate symbol of cultural sedition to disparage the docile, dual-breasted woman, the slack of cloth over Pam’s chest affronts the honored image of motherhood.

Not sated by her own unwitting mutilation, Pam scalded the right breast of both of her daughters within three months of their births, damning them to an existence of meaningless loneliness in which they will be evaluated by the quality of their character and nothing more. A parent myself, I can’t help but express my concern for the girls’ well-being. The following chart (Figure 1) details the daunting disproportions the Stewart girls face.

Figure 1 - Fun Levels of Modern Women


Statistics paint a troubling, but not surprising, picture. While single, dual-breasted women (who shall henceforth be referred to as “normal”) express nine Cindy Laupers of desired fun, and actually have an often-overwhelming ten Sheryl Crows of actual fun, single mono-breasted women (henceforth “Amazonormal”) not only “just wanna” have fewer Cyndi Laupers of fun, but they actually only experience a fraction of the Sheryl Crows as normal women. Amazonormal women find themselves too bogged down with aesthetic, social, and work-related stresses their lifestyles exacerbate to even wish for more fulfilling lives. This so bitters them that by the time they’ve found a mate of sufficiently diminutive character, their Amazon nature becomes their family’s nurture, and no one has any fun.

As she swallows whole her seventh eggroll and brushes the crumbs off of the still-suckling Holly’s fontanel, Pam eagerly summarizes home life under her lordship.

The sole provider for the family, she works an overloaded schedule running her own company, as well as her husband’s, while he idly lazes around the house in faded flannel pajama pants and a bleach-stained Olympics t-shirt (it should be noted that she describes his slovenly lifestyle with pride; his compliant sedation is a battle won). Her daughters (of whom she insists she is extremely proud and dedicated to, despite the suspicions raised by my earlier analysis) are kept in strict discipline. In addition to her schooling, Xena (whose namesake is simply a patient indulgence allowed of George’s unhealthy obsession with the eponymous television series) is held to a tight practice agenda with lessons in equestrianism, archery, and fencing thrice a week. Similarly, Holly (derivitive of Hippolyta), who’s been walking for a month now, has begun her toilet training and development of color and shape cognition. Though this rigorous approach to raising a child could be seen as progressive and productive, it is little more than Pam’s unchecked, conniving lust for falsely-exalted feminine empowerment at the cost of her family’s lives, dignity, and image. Running the home as if it were her dictatorship, the Amazon is a domestic despot who will stop at no end to uproot and subdue any force reaching to the sun of his own volition.

Throughout the course of the dinner, George’s contributions are insubstantial at best. Rather than a collected parental unit, bouncing stories and memories of their children’s rearing off of one another, he and Pam conjure Hemmingway’s Henry and Catherine, though with inversed gender roles. George is a pathetically simpleton nurse, agreeable and submissive in every way to his warred wife and her questionable motives. The man of the house is not only robbed entirely of a relationship with his children (both daughters and sons), but of wearing the (figurative) pants as well.

The Stewart nuclear is, if nothing else, a testament to the early stages in the gradual decline of familial order and natural hierarchy. Proponents of Amazon integration, though global in their representation, remain an esoteric fringe for now. Advocating awareness and tolerance as the keys to what they call a “successful collaboration and collectivization of cultures,” they consider the Amazon household the next step towards what they call “true sexual equality.” Not surprisingly, most funding for the propaganda and disinformation about supposed “genderless birthrights” comes from wealthy Amazon glitterati who, after migrating from their riverfront properties along the Thermodon, have found themselves in the self-perpetuating cycle of hawking one’s own culture as a defense against alienation in another. At present, it’s an easy problem to ignore, but choosing to do so will surely result in the assimilation of the modern family until entire generations are founded in pseudomachismo and sexual flippancy and every living room’s davenport, portraits, coffee tables, and fine china are replaced by bows and arrows, swords, crescent shields, and anatomically-lewd armor.

Apparently satisfied, Pam allows Holly to cease her guzzling, tossing her to Xena like a bow-legged medicine ball. After issuing a handful of stern orders to her subordinates regarding their chores for the evening, she breaks open every cookie and reads the fortunes in silence before deciding to whom each should belong.