This story was written for a reading at the NYU Fales Library in honor of the Unbearables [writing group] deconstruction of the Chicago Manual of Style and the hand off of Ron Kolm’s archives to the Fales library some years back.
This parody-homage was never published – quite honestly, it got lost … until fairly recently, when I rediscovered it and decided to resurrect and re-edit it. Ron Kolm is fairly well known for his Duke & Jill stories that could be described as Lower Eastside Americana. His stories detail the everyday exploits of 2 East Village characters.
Duke waited with clenched teeth for the miracle. But there was no miracle. The alarm. 7 AM. Like clockwork. And even if there had been a miracle, Duke would’ve found a reason to treat it like a trick miracle that would allow him to still curse everything and everybody: Jill, all clock manufacturers, the bartender at Downtown Beirut, his boss, all bosses. Yes, it’s true, he’d only been at this new bookstore job less than 2 months & had already been late a dozen times. Twelve bookstore jobs in 25 years – his resumé in 6 words.
“Maybe your heart’s not in it no more. Whadda you actually know ’bout books anyways?” Jill asked.
“I know how much they cost,” Duke replied.
He had hated that clock ever since his mom had sent it as a gift for him finally getting a “real” job many years ago. Being an airport frisker in an ill-fitting security guard uniform didn’t qualify as real enough for mom.
It reminded him of the annoying alarm clocks in B-movies or school fire alarms in winter. He also resented Jill for being able to always sleep right through it. Like a dog in the middle of a poorly paved but sunny road.
Marriage, he told those he called friends, was simply realizing that god endows couples with special quirks that allow one to irritate the other – and vice versa. Duke remembered when love was blind – for about a week once long ago. If he looked in his diaries he could tell us exactly when Jill began sticking plucked eyebrow hairs in neat rows on the bathroom mirror. She could to the minute tell us when Duke began clearing his throat in the morning: 6:46 AM, June 19, 1980, shortly after he bagged a job as night clerk at East Side Books.
Duke dragged himself like a sack of stones to the kitchen. He had the makings of a martyr. Albeit a martyr who cursed a lot.
“Holy Shit! We’re outa coffee!” And the more he looked – cupboards, fridge, under the sink with the Brillo and Dash, filing cabinet, behind the stove even – the less likely it seemed he’d find any.
In 4 years in their present pad, he had never, as in Fucking Never, left this place without at least two cups of coffee. As essential as a pair of socks. “Duke,” he thought to himself out loud, “its time you got indignant, frantic, demonstrative.” He knew how to make noise because he had once been a member of a highly regarded noise band, the Xtra-Loud Family – for three months once. Hair spray cans, sneakers, records, and cutlery all went flying on a regular basis. It was indeed time almost daily for Jill to share in his apocalyptic anxiety. If religion was good for anything it was in it’s ability to instill guilt at certain key moments in life. But Jill, alas, was an atheist.
Jill said, “Look around some more.” He did and she was right. She usually was – a terribly irritating trait. He found a promo packet of coffee in the bowl with the store coupons. The world of work could now commence until; “Holy fuckin’ shit! It’s De-Caf!”
Jill said, “Just call for delivery.” She was right. They both now had jobs and could afford delivery. In fact, they deserved it!
East Village NewFresh Deli no longer delivered. (All their illegal Haitian help had been floated back to Port Au Prince.) The FirstBest All-Around Deli at 1st Ave. and St. Marks did – but NOT to “Juke And Dill”, as the man referred to them. Bad credit list. “What good’s credit if you gotta pay it back all the time?!” 7:28 AM was not the time for a post-Marxist economics rant.
The UP-N-Adam Deli at 6th and 1st Ave did deliver.
“Great! Send up 4 large black! No plastic stirrers!”
But just before he hung up Jill interjected, “Ask’m what brand it is.”
“Whadda you mean? It’s black, comes in a cup … I asked, It’s Nestle. Why?”
“I don’t do Nestle no more. ’Member?”
“I hate fucking consumer consciousness politics – in the morning!” Duke declared.
“You gotta draw the line somewhere.” Jill responded.
“Can’t you just draw it to the right of Nestle just this once, hon?”
“Just go out, get some take-out.”
“Duh, point is I must have coffee BEFORE I go out.”
And yet, he HAD to have coffee. And so did Jill. She couldn’t even budge her head from the pillow without it. He continued the indoor hunt and finally found an old stained coffee filter full of crude sludge in a forgotten bag of trash.
He added the De-Caf sample packet for flavor. Poured in the hot water. Luckily the roaches – all 6 of them – floated right to the top making it easy for Duke to scoop them out. He served it to her in bed without a word. After all, She’d only been a vegetarian for a month. They drank it together. Nothing!
He went to their next door neighbor’s, the one with a decal of a gun aimed at your face that said NEVER MIND BEWARE OF THE DOG. But the guy refused to unlock his locks (police, chain, pad, Medeco & several others) for so trivial a matter. Duke said, “Put some in an envelope and shove it under your door.” But the guy had stopped listening long before.
Duke called him on the phone & threatened to firebomb his mailbox again. But, by now, Jill had the TV on. Up loud. Louder than usual. & not the Today Show either, but cartoons. “By the way, hon.” (Hon as in jerk.) “It’s Saturday.” Jill said nonchalantly from the inside of a yawn.
“Holy fuckin’ shit! I don’t go in until 4!” Jill suggested calling Cathy, who often came over Saturdays to watch the new Mighty Mouse. But instead, Duke just groaned off back to bed and dreamt of a perfect world: rent control, cupboards filled with Columbian coffee, extended unemployment benefits, the complete Spike Jones, and the abolition, the physical obliteration of all alarms – car, burglar, motion-activated, fire, smoke, personal, clock…
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* This recently unearthed, unpublished, and ruthlessly re-edited story was read as part of the Unbearables “9 on 7” reading on May 7, 1996 at the Fales Library, NYU in conjunction with an exhibition of The Unbearable Manual of Style, the writing group’s deconstruction of the Chicago Manual of Style and to celebrate the Fale’s Library acquisition of Ron Kolm’s archive. Other readers inc. Michael Carter, Ron Kolm, Jill Rapaport, Carl Watson, Carol Wierzbicki, Mike Topp, Bruce Benderson, and Jim Feast.
Duke & Jill, Ron Kolm, Unknown Press, 2015. Accept no substitutes.
This story will be included in the developing story collection The Laugh Track Fails
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bart plantenga
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