ST2.5 | "Alfred"

PROMPT: It’s always been about more than the baskets. For May, we’re looking for stories that feature workers and their bosses, the power imbalance between them, and the desperation or demands that can cause people on either side of that divide to make some very poor decisions.

ALFRED

by John Bovio

Alfred had a New York abrasiveness many took for arrogance. They weren’t wrong. The rumor was that he was freakishly endowed. The outline on his jeans suggested this very well could be true.

Before coming to Amsterdam, I moved from place to place, trying to outrun the feeling that I wasn’t welcome anywhere before realizing I wasn’t. Here, I found a city that embraced people who had worn out their welcome in other parts of the world. Alfred, too, fits in this category. He had a personality that gnawed on people like a rat.

***

Rats' front teeth grow 5 inches a year. They wear them down by continuously gnawing at everything around them.

Alfred had a bar in the Red Light District called the Oranje Krush. I heard he was a bit of a shitbag and had just fired his cook. I knew how to cook and needed a job, having just been let go from the Budget Hotel for my hair.

Yes. I had worn out my welcome again.

The short story is this: Queen’s Day, Koninginnedag, in Amsterdam is a Carnival-like event at the end of April that attracts upwards of a quarter million people. The world's biggest party is a combination street fair, market, and music festival. Orange is the color of the Dutch Royal Family, who hails from the House of Oranje. The color has come to symbolize the country and signify national pride.

I decided to dye my hair orange for the event. Get my hair shaved up underneath, a little orange on top. The chemicals soon cooked my hair to a bone white, creating a fresh canvas for the vibrant color. The stylist mixed coral red and canary yellow Crazy Color and applied it to my head. When the cloud of chemicals cleared, my hair was the bright neon orange of a traffic safety cone. Given my commitment to the holiday, I was pretty popular on the day of the event, but some people can only appreciate this type of dedication at the moment.

The following day at work, the cleaning ladies gave me the stink eye. Then gossiped about me. Then bugged Nick until he had no choice but to fire me. I thought he was kidding, given how long I worked there. Joke was on me. I filled my backpack. Spit out, alone again. On my way out, Nick came through the side door and stopped me at the top of the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I couldn’t . . .” Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he pushed a small roll of bills into my hand.

Loneliness was a companion that got me into more trouble than love.

***

A rat can fall 50 feet and not be injured.

I went to see Hans, who was renting a barge behind Centraal Station. He let me stay in the hold of the big steel beast. No heat, electricity, or water, but it was shelter. I used the money Nick gave me for self-medication medication. I went to see that cocksucker Jimmy who always shorted me. Sometimes you need a crooked guy to get straight.

***

Rats don’t sweat. They constrict or expand the blood vessels in their tails to regulate their temperature.

That’s what brought me to Alfred and the Oranje Krush. Circumstances being what they were, I needed to keep my head afloat.

***

A rat can tread water for three days as well as survive being flushed down the toilet.

“Make me something to eat,” Alfred said when I asked for a job, his crotch bulging at me, a trouser snake of uncharmed vulgarity.

“Nice hair,” Wolfgang, the hash dealer, said from his seat at the end of the bar as I made my way to the kitchen. Hash dealers, like gunfighters, always sit where they can see the whole room and never with their backs to the door.

I found potatoes, butter, milk, flour, and cheese in the kitchen. Of course, there was cheese; it’s Holland, it grows on trees. The potatoes had taken up residency at the bar. They had fewer eyes than a scallop but more than a spider. I detected a slight smell of rot, but it was not from the potatoes. I made a roux with the flour and butter and soon had a cheese sauce for the two small casseroles of scalloped potatoes I made. Alfred said the potatoes were dry but gave me a job anyway.

***

Rats eat their own feces for nutritional value.

Wolfgang was a German hippy, hash-selling gangster. His shoulder-length brown hair found a part in the middle, and a gunfighter’s mustache sat above his thin lips. He wore a white tunic with angel sleeves draped over skinny jeans fastened by a double O-ring studded leather belt. Jeans tucked into fringed suede boots. He carried a leather man purse with compartments like a file folder. Each compartment held a different kind of hash—Afghani Black, Indian Charis, Kashmiri, Red Lebanese, Nepalese Temple Ball, and Moroccan Honey. The only customers were for the hash. People didn’t even stay to have a smoke. They came and went. They liked Wolfgang’s hash but didn’t like Alfred’s attitude. No one tried my food. The potatoes grew more eyes.

***

Rats have belly buttons.

I spent the first three days cleaning the kitchen from top to bottom, chasing an odor that continued to get stronger despite my efforts. It was as if my elbow grease was rubbing a genie’s lamp full of stink. On the fourth day, Alfred confessed. Told me about the rat problem. “It’s why we have no customers.” He had thrown a bunch of poison down in the basement. He wanted me to clean up after it.

I opened the door to the basement and was walloped by the odor. The putrid stink was a nasty mix of sulfur dioxide and methane. The rotting smell of death. It smelled like a box of bad choices.

Down the stairs, there they lay. A mangled mess of dead and rotting rodents. An empire of death that had produced the thick stench hanging heavy in the air. A million years of evolution and a short lifetime of shitty jobs flashed before my eyes. This is what my life had come to.

***

Rats can take three weeks to decay.

I had raised and slaughtered chickens and pigs, butchered beef and lamb, and maybe even stabbed or shot a man, but rats freaked me out. Rodents always had this I’m going to climb on you in your sleep and eat your lips off feel. I am usually ok with dead things. It’s a little weirder when they’re warm. And when there are hundreds of them . . .

***

A female rat can mate 500 times with various partners during the six-hour period of receptivity. This happens 15 times a year. A pair of rats can produce 2000 offspring in one year.

Flies buzzed. So many, they created a hum. They laid their eggs in the dead flesh so it could nourish the newly hatched maggots. Some of the rats seemed to move; they were so filled with wiggling creatures. Many of the bodies deflated like a basketball that would see no more bounce. Others are blown up like a balloon, ready to pop. Maggots eat dead flesh and ignore the living. They begin in the stomach, then move to the head. The head eaten away, a small puddle in its place. The fur becomes matted and lifeless, then seems to float like pussy-willows as the flesh beneath begins to disappear.

I gagged. And gagged.

Back in the kitchen, I fashioned an apron into a face mask. Donned two sets of rubber gloves. Some plastic goggles and a long-sleeve sweatshirt made up the rest of my bio-hazard suit. Alfred burst in with some woman. “Don’t use all of my rubber gloves,” he said, pawing the lady's backside. “He’s my cook and exterminator,” he told her. They laughed at me and went back to the bar.

I went back down into the basement. As I reached for the first body, a cold front stormed through my soul, freezing me as if paralyzed. I hovered above my body. When my courage returned, I took a deep mouth breath and picked up the first corpse. The body broke in half, sending maggots flying everywhere and a shiver up my spine that almost snapped it.

I wretched in a way that summoned the gods of places called Hell, and the bile it produced would have melted steel. I wiped the spittle off my lips and realized half a rat carcass remained in my hand. The first into the black trash bag. Only a hundred or so to go.

Back in the kitchen, I boiled water. Hot water kills maggots. The worst rats got the water, then into the bag they went. I filled bag after bag and then hauled them out to the garbage.

“Where’s Wolfgang?” I asked after eight hours of dead-rat wrangling.

“I fired him,” Alfred said, “I’m going to sell the hash myself.” And he set his new man purse on the bar and groped his lady friend, who giggled.

“Ok.” I ran my hands down my arms and tried to shake the creepy feeling that clung to me like the smell of dead rats.

Alfred grinned and looked down his big nose at me like we were friends. Or like I was his trusty dog. He showed me where he kept his gun, a snub-nosed .38, behind the bar. He wanted me to have his back in case Wolfgang came back.

***

Rat-baiting was popular in 19th Century London and pitted man or dog against hundreds of rats. The champion bull terriers could kill 100 rats in five and a half minutes.

On the way back to the barge, I stopped by the peep show to see the lady on the spinning bed. I called her Mary, but didn’t know or care what her real name was. She was the patron saint of my life; isn’t that fucked yet? Her invulnerable eyes stared into the void as many sorry-ass men fed coins into the slot to keep the curtain from lowering in their booth. Somehow it always cheered me up.

It took me two more days to clean out the basement. On the third day, Wolfgang came back. Alfred greeted him with his stupid overconfident grin. It offered no protection. Wolfgang reached into those hippy boots and pulled out a Walther PPK. He shot Alfred in the crotch. The rumors seemed accurate, although now the infamous python was in two pieces and not in working order.

Wolfgang stuck the pistol into his waistband and grabbed Alfred’s man purse off the bar. He opened it up, grabbed a handful of bags, stuck them in my hand as he passed me, and headed for the door. “Take it easy kid. Love the hair.”

Alfred was crying and moaning rudely like a baby that wouldn’t shut up. I imagine being shot in the genitals hurts, but going on and on about it was tiresome. He urged me to get a doctor and an ambulance and call the police. I wasn’t in the mood for all this drama and being bossed around like this. I opened the till, took the money owed me, and left, careful to step over the piece of his infamous member no longer attached.

I hoped a rat would eat it.

John Bovio (Twitter—@john_bovio) is a writer, artist, and chef. His work has appeared in various publications and galleries around the world. He lives in Oakland, California.