ABSTRACT YOU MY HONEYBEE, I’M YOUR FUNKY BUTT by Jeremy J. Miller The following is a collection of love stories, not stories of “traditional love”—the characters often have no conception of what love is supposed to be—but of love on the fringes, or love that acknowledges the unimagined possibilities of identity. The author attempts to locate unexpected acts of love: among giants, between a disillusioned collegiate and a middle-aged fish cook, between long-lost relatives, and between a transvestite angel and her beleaguered policeman. YOU MY HONEYBEE, I’M YOUR FUNKY BUTT A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English by Jeremy J. Miller Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2006 Advisor _________________________ Brian Roley Reader __________________________ Margaret Luongo Reader __________________________ Gwen Etter-Lewis TABLE OF CONTENTS The Mentor 1 The Eulogy Artist 14 Value 34 You My Honeybee, I’m Your Funky Butt 44 Remedy 58 Wrapped 72 Holding a Baby: Damage Control 90 Mouseboy the Miraculous 101 Mataviejitas: A Love Story 114 How to Publish in The New Yorker Or, The Viking 125 ii THE MENTOR 1 The last thing my mentor said to me was this: “The Cold, the lip-curling nastiness of it, never sends you a postcard before ripping into you. It will sack you with a quiver so bad you’ll want to gnaw through your leg and set fire to the stump.” She said it with as much tenderness as you’d expect a mother of three to possess, as if she were singing a lullaby while whacking you upside the head with a shovel. It was one of her most endearing qualities—abstractness, countered by the silly urge to paint a clear picture. I told her once that a genius never has to explain herself, that perhaps the real beauty of a thought is the way it floats just beyond our fingertips. She looked at me with a slow, meaty eye and told me to chop the onion, don’t cut it. I stared into the creamy-wet heart of that onion and whispered, soft as foam, I love you. * * * I was a student at a small, conservative university just north of Columbus. Change was hush-hush and carried around in sacks like fidgety weasels: the newspaper still reported on bingo night, the arts consisted of ballroom dancing and traditional performances of Shakespeare, and only recently did the campus retire its mascot, the Big Red Indian, after years of protest from Mohican Valley natives. A couple friends of mine, along with myself and a Finnish guy named Lars who made a bad habit of rubbing his cuticles along his lower lip, lobbied the administration with a spirited presentation to fund our revolutionary new publication. We had decided before entering the boardroom that Plan A was to make an appeal to logos—to reason, as cogently as we could, that the university was incomplete without a publication independent of certain ideological trappings. We made acute references to Professor Johanek (pronounced yo-NICK), who oversaw the campus newspaper with an iron fist. Quickly, we reverted to Plan B, an appeal to pathos, which meant that 2 we babbled about how we were disenfranchised, how we deserved a break, and couldn’t they please just lend us a used computer, maybe a room to call our headquarters? We bought an old Macintosh from a kid with acne scars and ponytail and placed it on the floor of our new office, a storage space in the basement of Barney Hall reeking of disinfectant and something like burnt flapjacks. The Hall was said to be haunted by innumerable ghosts, one of whom was Eliam Barney, a young scholar pushed down a flight of stairs by his apprentice, described as wicked, jealous, and clumsy. Barney had flailed down the steps and collided with the 7th edition of Moby Dick. The shelf then tumbled on top of him. That very copy of Moby Dick, which had grown jaundice-yellow and crisp with age, was locked away in a glass case. The case was in a library, on the third floor. Our first task as the staff of The Bullsheet was to liberate the book and publish a ransom note from an anonymous group of vigilantes calling themselves the Winged Angels. Our relationship with the Angels allowed our fan base to swell, although our pockets remained shriveled. Once a week, each of us would canvas the university for obscure copy rooms, where we illegally printed our quota of Bullsheets. Alongside news of the latest vandalism abuses, I had a running commentary in which I would assume the rhetoric of a political insurgent. One week I wrote as Gandhi and promoted Gurukula, an ancient type of school in India where pupils lived with their teachers. Another week, I was Nawal El Sadaawi in women’s prison (all-female dormitory) detailing the abuses of a patriarchal administration and arguing for a new co-ed policy. Our publication, in its pubescent stages, quickly grew beyond our means. While the demand for a new Bullsheet fattened and spilled over its belt loop, we were suffering malnutrition, subsiding on quick caffeine fixes and occasionally, aderol pills, which we bought out-of-pocket. We brushed off the lint before tipping our heads back. Forced to take drastic measures, The Bullsheet began soliciting advertisements. We lacked all business know-how. Our charges, as well as our selection of sponsors, were arbitrary. Next to the local grocer’s buy-one-get-one-free was a shaggy dog with a caption reading, “I need a groooom, ruff ruff.” The local merchants seemed even less able to market their services than we were of printing them. To keep our sanity, we offered the nearest tattoo parlor a half-page spread for free. Sometimes, we would alter pictures of produce, such as cantaloupe, so that it resembled certain areas of the human form. One late evening, while smoking away Lars’ stash of marijuana, we injected a new catchphrase into the shaggy dog’s voice box: “I sniff butts, ruff ruff.” One of our proudest moments. * * * 3 I was introduced to Michelle in the kitchen of a bistro called O Cintilante. The owner was a Portuguese financier with a taste for seafood. The restaurant was cradled on the Upper East Side of Columbus between a coffee shop and an abandoned schoolhouse, less than twenty minutes from campus. I had been writing reviews for over a month. In exchange for free food, I was allowed to say anything I wanted about the quality of service, the décor, and the restaurant’s previously uninvestigated connections to organized crime. I persuaded the hostess to give me a tour of the place, where, in the kitchen, I saw Michelle lopping off shrimp heads with concentrated bursts. She flicked the exoskeletons with a slender thumb, dipped the shrimp into an orange sauce, and patiently rubbed herbs into the pink flesh. She then layered the shrimp onto a crispy sheet of seaweed and steaming rice, and with a twist of the wrist, she rolled the sushi into a long cigarette. I was certainly awestruck. Throughout my meal—ginger-crusted salmon with stir-fried vegetables—I could think of nothing other than those hands, soft and dangerous. I slowly turned the salmon with my tongue, squeezed it against my pallet and wondered if she had rubbed the ginger into the fish with as much care as she prepared the shrimp. Within a week, I had done a follow-up review, applied for a busser position carting off dirty plates and discarded shells, and broke the news to my girlfriend of four months. My new occupation, I told her, was going to require my full attention. The fish were frozen with shock or heavily sedated. Their gaping mouths and cataract eyes reminded me of my first encounter with Michelle, a moment accented by its juicy texture and bold smell. I rolled up my white T-shirt sleeves over my shoulder bone and carried fresh grouper and tuna from the freezer box to the cutting board, cradled the soft bodies and laid them carefully on the oak. The flesh was a welcome cool on my skin. Before being promoted to courier, I was a hectic, clumsy busser and a picky dishwasher, mostly since I refused to use a hairnet. I wore hot-yellow rubber gloves and scrubbed with complete ingratitude. I couldn’t see Michelle beyond the tiled wall. I imagined her stained apron folded over her waist, like unbuttoned overalls. She would wipe her hands with the flap, take a deep breath and look toward the ceiling, not exhausted but in a whimsical way, as a philosopher would when dismissing an ignorant question. “Are you from around here?” I asked her. I couldn’t think of a better icebreaker, although I had previously introduced myself on all fours, poking under a shelf of spices for a slippery piece of salmon. I had said, Watch your step. I meant it with all my heart. “You could say that.” 4 “I’m not really familiar with the area.” She dropped three mussels in a pan along with some peri-peri pepper and waved steam toward her face. Tilting the bottom end of a gold bottle, she released a thin line of oil with a dramatic swoop of her arm. “Did you just move here or something?” she asked. “Yeah.” I hugged a pile of tuna fish. My arms were heavy and both the fish and I were sweating, showering the floor with salty goblets.