Gramma K’s Apocalypse
I would have rather been anywhere other than where I was, sprawled on the olive shag carpeting of Gramma K’s efficiency apartment, cringing beneath the beatific gaze of Pope John Paul II peering down from a three-year-old calendar tacked to the nicotine-stained wall.
A Love Boat rerun played on the television. It was all that ever played on the television. Two islands and a boat. Fantasy Island. Gilligan’s Island. The Love Boat. I’d have given one of my ten-year-old testicles for an episode of Fall Guy or Knight Rider. Hell, I’d have settled for T.J. Hooker, but this channel seemed intent on delighting grandmothers and torturing grandchildren.
It didn’t matter which room I entered, I couldn’t escape the stench of boiled cabbage. I paced from the maize-colored walls of the living room to the institutional green walls of the kitchen. Everywhere, pictures of history’s first Polack Pope, and, inexplicably, a couple action shots of Ricardo Montalban from Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan.
“Why you keep wandering around?” Gramma K asked, emerging from the closet-sized room where my cousin, Bernard, stayed the summer before “going away” which I believed to be parent speak for serving one to three years at Joliet for breaking and entering.
Gramma K was my father’s mother. Her kinky gray hair was fashioned into an X-Wing pilot’s helmet around her incredibly Polish face. Her mail order dentures would have been two sizes too large for a horse. Her thin lips peeled back like foreskin over those gray slabs. She came at me wearing a pink, white, green, and orange striped muumuu, all frazzled hair, loose skin and tombstone teeth. Worst of all, her head was distorted on account of the massive, swollen lump deforming the left side of her face where a wasp had stung her two days before.
When I didn’t answer her immediately, she added “what’s wrong with you? Speak!”
“Ah, I can’t stand this stupid Love Boat.”
Her eyes narrowed behind her freakishly large, blast shield glasses.
“I don’t know how you speak at home, but that sort of language ain’t tolerated here.”
What did I say? For the life of me, I couldn’t exactly recall the words I had just spoken. Please God, I thought, surely, I didn’t say “fucking Love Boat.” I wouldn’t be able to survive the repercussions of that if my father found out I said those words to Gramma K.
Gramma K was a flurry of motion. Her skeleton appeared to move a beat faster than the flesh clinging to it. The skin of her forearm oozed over her elbow as she reached above the icebox, grabbing a ceramic bulldog head. She set the knick knack down on the Formica kitchen table near where I stood rooted to the lime green linoleum.
Closer inspection of the piece revealed it to be a cuss bank. A glazed yellow bee rested on the bulldog’s jowl. The bee’s stinger was frozen mid-prick, leaving the bulldog on the verge of launching into a torrent of cussing. I wondered how many coins Gramma K’s wasp sting set her back.
A few lines of doggerel printed across the top near the coin slot listed the monetary punishment for slips of the tongue. A nickel for mildly offensive words, a dime for midlist curses like “shit” or “bitch.” A quarter was reserved for all the variations of the word “fuck.”
I might not have the capital to cover my ass, I thought, bleakly. It seemed entirely likely, she’d expect my father to cover the damages.
“What are you looking at? Pony up your nickel.”
Oh, thank Christ. I fumbled a hand into my pocket. My fingers found a significantly lesser number of coins than when I arrived a few days ago. Last night, Gramma K taught me the ins and outs of penny ante poker to the tune of a buck, fifty. I withdrew a nickel, one of the last of my coins not of the copper-colored variety and plunked it through the coin slot.
Gramma K’s smile stretched from the pope to Khan.
“Now, be a good boy and sit on the couch and Gramma will fix you a nice grilled cheese sandwich.”
I’d eaten enough grilled cheeses the last few days to keep me off the toilet for a month. And I hated the couch. It didn’t seem to serve any practical function. You sure couldn’t sit on it. Damn thing looked to be a throwback from the reign of King Kubiowski XIV, shrink-wrapped in a six-inch-thick plastic burial shroud clouded with age. I had to keep a death lock on the arm rest to keep from slipping off and landing in the shag carpeting.
“Ten years old and I’m already sick of living,” I mumbled to myself.
“What are you whining about, now?”
It occurred to me, I didn’t care much for Gramma K. On the heels of that came the realization she probably didn’t like me very well, either. My presence here likely kept her from attending Thursday night bingo at St. Casimir’s recreation room where fifty old ladies wearing babushkas of varying shades of green got tanked up on peppermint schnapps and dolefully eyeballed each other’s bingo cards while Monsignor Sendaryk called out the numbers.
“Why don’t you get Bernard’s movie machine out of his room and set it up out here.”
“Really?”
“Just put it back where you found it when we’re finished.”
I’d never been allowed in this room before. It was roughly the size of a prison cell, conveniently enough for Bernard. The walls were the color of corkboard, the carpet a dazzling shade of sunburst orange. Atop a narrow dresser perched a thirteen-inch television. A massive VCR crowned the television like a ten-gallon hat on a midget.
A quick search of the room revealed no movies. I was hoping for Flash Gordon, Buckaroo Banzai, Megaforce. But there was not so much as a Time Bandits to be found. Before giving up hope, I flipped open the VCR flap and saw a videotape wedged inside. I couldn’t quite make out the title. Apocalypse something or another. I could say with certainty it wasn’t Krull. Regardless, it had to be better than Gilligan’s latest boneheaded exploits.
I lugged the VCR into the living room and hooked it up to the nineteen-inch TV set on top of the dead console television. After wrestling with the plugs and wires, I had the movie ready to go. I pressed play and sat on the floor.
A desert wasteland appeared on the screen. Monolithic pylons loomed in the background. A dusty Camaro pulled into the foreground. The car door opened, and a man stepped out. He was leather-clad except more Rob Halford than Mad Max, and this joker sported thinning hair and a terrible Magnum P.I. mustache.
“I can’t believe it,” he intoned woodenly. “It’s gone. All gone. We’re finally destroyed ourselves.”
The passenger side door opened. Another dude with a silly mustache obscuring his upper lip extricated himself from the vehicle. He went shirtless and wore what looked to be spandex shorts where he kept his cudgel to fight off the bandits of the wasteland.
“Yes,” he said. “The world as we know it has passed away. Whatever shall we do, now, Claude?”
“We must find others like ourselves and rebuild society the way it was meant to be.”
The acting’s a bit stale, I thought. And the production value leaves something to be desired. Still, if it’s a quarter as action-packed as Road Warrior, I’d be satisfied.
Gramma K entered the living room holding aloft a grilled cheese sandwich. Even the sandwich looked liver-spotted. I accepted it, nonetheless.
“What are you watching?”
“Some kind of Mad Max movie.”
“It’s not too violent or foul-mouthed, is it?”
“One can hope.”
Gramma K played her dentures out and mulled this over. On the television, the road-battered Camaro pulled alongside the single pump of a last chance gas station.
“It appears to be deserted,” Claude said.
“Perhaps we should investigate.”
As they entered the gas station, Claude’s hand brushed across his friend’s ass. This struck me as kind of hinky. It didn’t seem like accidental contact. If it set off any alarms in Gramma K’s mind, she kept her own counsel.
She worked the dentures around her mouth like a melted candle cow munching a porcelain wad of cud.
Claude and his friend cautiously minced into the gas station. First thing noticeable to me, the interior looked to be three times larger than the exterior led one to believe. Also, it was entirely too well lit. Another thing I couldn’t help but notice were the two heavily muscled men lounging on a bed where the cash register should have been. The men were naked and even their cocks had muscles.
“Hello, I’m Claude. This is my life partner, Etienne.”
“I’m Lance. This is my special friend, Harley. Would you like to join us in a vigorous workout?”
Gramma K’s dentures popped out of her mouth and landed in her lap.
I jumped off the floor and hit stop on the VCR. The screen went mercifully dark. I couldn’t make eye contact with Gramma K. I looked at the picture of the Polish Pope. The picture of the Polish Pop looked at me with an expression that said, “if only those post-apocalyptic lads were your age.”
Finally, Gramma K said “why don’t you go outside and play for a while.”
The yard was the size of a Volkswagen, mostly dominated by an elm tree. Also, it was drizzling. Still, I didn’t argue. I didn’t complain.
“Watch out for the wasps,” Gramma K warned as I headed out into the cold rain. “I’ll call you when you can come back inside.”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
