THE MAD COOK

BY CHRIS KOZAK

The mad cook is altering the very purpose of sandwiches from an efficient protein delivery system into a malevolent tool of anarchy. In a kitchen with gleaming white Porcelain tiles on the walls he is hunched over a wooden chopping block. He is inserting some type of gleaming, futuristic device into a four foot long hoagie. There is the smell of vinegar and smoked meats in the air but a whiff of ozone and sulphur intrude on this scent almost immediately. He is breathing heavily, almost gasping for breath as he plunges the metal device into the hoagie. I am hiding in the second freezer which is broken. The latch is also broken so I am afforded a vertical view slice of him at work. Suddenly he shouts at the hoagie – “Do These Photos Make You Angry?” Then he is crying and the crying becomes an ungodly wail. It is echoing around the tiled room like the cacophonous drone of a cyborg climaxing to expiration. “I am producing matadors! I am transforming lunch into a revolution!” he screams up at the ceiling. He rushes over to my freezer. I crouch down and hold my breath. He stops suddenly and there is the sound of paper sliding off of a magnet attached to the freezer door. “Do these photos make you angry, you tit-less horse?” he shrieks, craning his head back towards the hoagie. Then he nods slowly with a proud smile on his face. I get a better look at him. He resembles Walt Disney with one of those pencil thin mustaches – a pince-nez I think it’s called. Initially I would have referred to him as the mad chef as he is adorned with a chef’s hat in the mushroom shape of a nuclear explosion and has an elegant white jacket with black buttons as shiny as a dead fish’s eyes. But he behaves like a mad cook. He is sloppy and upon further scrutiny the white jacket is stained with mistakes, failures and moments of poor choice. His movements are erratic, lacking any of the style or grace of a chef in full mastery of his kitchen. The spastic motions are not representative of a mere lack of confidence – a trembling hand tethered tenuously to a mind consumed with fear and self-loathing. No. The movements are erratic because they are devoid of any sane impulse. The hands do not so much tremble as they resonate internally with manic rage. Like a compass pointed north, these hands summon, direct and introduce madness. I must have fallen asleep in this damned appliance last night. I was drinking at one party then we all drove to another house then another. I don’t know where I am. This happens from time to time. I’m confident that I could handle the mad cook in hand to hand combat. Despite his behavior I have yet to see a knife or any other object that he could use as a weapon substantial enough to overwhelm my pugilistic know how. But this is a kitchen and he is some type of cook and kitchens store more weapons than any other room in the average house. A work shop or tool shed would probably have the most potential weapons but I would no define either of those places as a “room within a house” by definition. I’m thinking about all this like a day dream and realize I’m not watching out of the sliver of open door. I don’t see the mad cook in the room anymore. He is extremely loud and talks almost constantly to himself or his deli creations. That is how I woke up. Now it is silent. I open the door and slip quietly out into the kitchen. The kitchen is immediately replaced with the backyard of my childhood home in Upstate New York. There is a small hill (just long and steep enough for a winter sled to glide down for a duration sufficient enough to mildly entertain a six year old boy) and the summit of the hill is lined with ripe blackberries that I would pluck in late Spring to enhance my morning cereal. I am standing on the backyard patio and can hear Yul Brynner’s voice on the television inside. He is commanding people to wear more stylish hats. “Not those god-damned baseball caps…I’m talking about Bowlers, Fedoras – that sort of thing” he says in a booming voice. I look down and observe the backyard patio is a semi-circle made up of pumpkin colored concrete. I began to get an anxious feeling, as if there is no one else in this world but myself and the sound of Yul Brynner’s voice. “This sucks,” I declare, kicking a patio pebble into the overgrown grass. Just then the mad cook slams into the glass patio door behind me, shattering it into 5,327 pieces. He must have been in the house and heard my voice. He is lying on his back on the linoleum in the combination kitchen/dining room covered in shards of blue-edged glass. I sprint for the woods. A leaf blur of maple and birch trees in the full fire of autumn’s blazing colors goes by until I am standing at the edge of a rock quarry at least 6 stories deep. I am an 80 year old Armenian woman grasping the thin metal handle of a galvanized pail of semi-precious stones in the rough. I lose my balance and free fall towards the quarry bottom below. The quarry is filled with water from underground springs and it greets my frail body with a hard slap. The water is glacial cold and I am unconscious immediately. I drift to the bottom where the hands of bioluminescent mermaids in ever changing hues of green and blue guide my limp, floating body along the quarry floor and into a perfectly square opening in the side wall of the quarry. A conveyor belt littered with fist-sized chunks of dark, wet rock carries me into a pretty decent room at the Howard Johnson’s in Lubbock, Texas. After being unceremoniously dumped onto the floor I immediately sit up and demand hot cocoa. I hear myself bark as I petulantly demand hot cocoa and realize I am now an Afghan Hound. This is where things get weird. Two very tall women with matching red blazers and tan pants with jet black hair pulled back in severe pony tails and fire engine red lipstick burst into the room and interrogate me for three hours, speaking in some type of east European language I do not understand. I can only make out three words; horseradish, Visine and Ibiza. They ultimately become frustrated with my lack of response and throw mini bagels at me while I bark incessantly, stopping now and then to scarf up a mini bagel from the cherry-colored Berber carpet. I didn’t think they had Berber carpets at Howard Johnsons. There is so much I don’t know. “This is no good – he dog now,” one finally says to the other who nods in approval. They leave the room. There is a public access channel on the television and I have no way of changing the channel in my canine form. The current show involves a hefty young man in an ill-fitted suit who sneaks up behind authority figures (police, political leaders, CEOs of top corporations, military personnel, etc.) and attempts to tickle them with a long, white feather. Almost all of the attempts end with a savage, brutal attack on the husky fellow and then the apparent catch phrase “We should have never bought so many tomatoes from that farmer’s market” which springs forward diagonally on the screen followed by a “boing” sound. Then there is a man who does an abridged, spoken word performance of any and every Lifetime Movie in 15 seconds – “15 minutes in flirtation, 30 minutes in cursory investigation on a laptop computer or in a library, 1 hour in death of nosy person, 1 hour 35 minutes in chase through woods or mansion, 1 hour 45 minutes villain dies or escapes revealing slightly disguised features.” Then a used car commercial comes on with a dealer who has a spiral of metal coils around his elongated neck like the Padaung women of the Kayan people except the dealer looks like a third generation Texan and is wearing a cowboy hat with a toy SUV hanging off the brim. As it turns out there has been a recent and significant migration of Padaung women into Lubbock, Texas for reasons unknown and this guy is just trying to capitalize on the opportunity. For a moment less than a nanosecond I contemplate what Yul Brynner would say about the used car dealer’s hat or his lack of cultural sensitivity. I look back down the conveyor belt and make the decision that no other Afghan Hound could make. I scamper back through the conveyor belt and morph back into the elderly Armenian woman as the cold water shocks my skin. The mermaids are displeased with my return but cannot keep a grip on my legs as I frantically kick upward until I emerge from the icy water of the quarry in a gasp and clamber up on dry land. I lay down on a gray slab of sun warmed rock, exhausted. After some rest I climb out of the quarry and run through the woods until I’m in my backyard again. Yul Brynner (wearing a scarlet fez which really mocks the machismo and regal stature of Yul) and the mad cook are fighting on the patio. I am ecstatic as the fez topples off of Yul’s bald head – he has now regained my childhood admiration. While I am explaining this to Mr. Brynner the mad cook reaches behind his back and pulls out the largest pastrami on rye I have ever seen. Even Yul is taken back by the immense proportions of the sandwich. He furrows his brow as he examines some type of metal protruding from the sandwich. Without looking at me he motions for me to back away. “Do these photos make you angry?” the mad cook shouts with a smile then points the sandwich at Yul and squeezes it. At first just a dollop of mustard drips onto the patio. I realize I have not moved away. I am almost directly behind Yul Brynner, standing halfway up my small sled hill. A radiant projection of images emanate from a gleaming metal orb at the tip of the pastrami sandwich. I, like Yul, am frozen in place, unable to look away. They are indeed photos. And they make me angry. Very angry.

The End

Editor’s note: Your bio describes your works nicely. Indeed — Hallucinatory prose. Thank you! Best, Anita T.