Jody padumachitta Goch
Warrant Officers and Sergeant’s Mess or The Biggest Change I Ever Made Was
For a three bit glass of beer from
a hundred dollar bill.
I struggled to make the correct change,
ended up tipping over
my tip jar, writing IOUs
I got it done and then the fool
came back twenty minutes later and ordered
a round for his table of fifteen staff sergeants.
I got my change back but he didn’t tip me.
The black hearted son of a gun.
The corporal who bussed tables
while playing bouncer
watched the whole thing go down.
She shook her head and wasn’t sure
about Civilians who worked the
bars on the Base. But took
me home that night to her
tiny off base apartment and pulled rank.
Leaving me to walk home in the middle of the might
swearing never to get tangled
with any more Armed Forces
even if they were cute, even if they tipped.
The next day before work
I bought a roll of quarters.
I’m Just the Neighbor Retired in the Countryside
Someone left the gate
Open again
I pull on my boots
Search and count
Hoping I got all the cows
I don’t call the farmer
He’s at work on a construction site
His wife in her town job
Both working until they come home
To work on the farm,
I count again and come up
Short one
It’s the young cow
Heavily pregnant
I hold my phone to text
And then hold off
I hear her
Tucked in by the log pile
Scared into delivery
By the hiker’s dogs
There’s nothing to do
But fumble for the farmer’s number
I hold the phone to my ear
Deliver the calf by FaceTime
Thomas
Tom Dukowski speaks fluent Japanese, he didn’t always
and I missed him so much the years he was away learning.
We ate sushi together before he left, years before
we knew he’d follow a tall man back to Tokyo,
one time a hundred bucks worth in the early 80s. And we ate
chicken cacciatore; I cooked for a day before
I’d let anyone even taste it.
Tom made my life bearable; we lived in student basement suite,
a hovel where we huddled under blankets drinking anything
I brought home from bartending on the military base,
end bottles bought as tips by the watch sergeants and noncommissioned officers. Sometimes it took me hours to tally up the night, until Tom would come and check my math. We’d grab the tips and walk home, sitting under big-ass elm trees, winding our way past million-dollar homes to our basement haven,
My bedroom, a mess of female bodies trying to get under my comforter.
Tom wandering out to the steam baths, pre-AIDS. Who worried? We had
a memorable two days one evening lying on the kitchen floor, the cabinets pulsing bright yellow. We hadn’t painted them, dead Nina did it,
Before the Brahms requiem, shit don’t you know someone always dies within a year of playing the requiem? Nina played the bass.
That was later.
That night we did poppers and tequila, unable to stand we crawled or sort of scooted to the can and back, eating old potato chips and cheeseys, two washed up 20-somethings, already jaded with bars and gay bashing and not being loved the way we loved each other, I don’t know how I lost him, how he was gone for almost 30 years, when every day was a Tom sized ache that – even when I ate sushi –never quit.
We’d spent a weekend together baking cookies and hash brownies trying to make a child, wanting to co-parent and have something from our friendship, but it didn’t work. Maybe it was the brownies, maybe it was just the failure of two gay friends not being up to it.
And years later, eating pasta and loneliness, a tentative like appeared on my FB feed, and it’s taken six more, but we are friends again, sharing snapshots of our lives. All the things we ate together are on the forbidden list.
And I don’t know when I will fly home again. He moved back almost to the day I headed to Europe. Now it is me learning a strange language and trying to remember old recipes while Tom eats alone at our favorite restaurants.
Jody padumachitta Goch is a Canadian living in the German Black Forest. She writes poetry and short fiction, chops wood for the stove and wanders or rides in the forest. Her jeans and shirt pockets are full of stories and poetry. It’s hell on the wash machine. She rescued a short story, from the lint catcher and it was published in an anthology. Since then Jody checks even when there’s no laundry. Jody has stories and or poetry in Wild Word, ComLit, 50 Word Stories, Co-Op Poetry, Does It Have Pockets, Poetically Yours NPR, and Strasbourg Short Stories 2021.
