This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
At the time I was working for a company called Advanced Computer Systems, an utterly misleading name, but the pay was okay. The company was owned by a crazed Australian who had spent several years in Germany before locating in the Boston area ten years earlier. This globe trotting had created an accent that was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible, and his personal hygiene habits were nonexistent, but he had a knack for hiring strays with great potential. One of these young mavericks was Cynthia Hoolihan. Cynthia, or Cyn'thee'a as she preferred to be called, was a lesbian by principle. She had taken feminism to a level such that she could not possibly rationalize permitting an uncovered part of a man's anatomy anywhere near an uncovered part of her anatomy, but she was generally horny as hell, so she bedded with women from time to time. She hated me because of my gender, but we both smoked cigarettes, so we became friends anyway.
On the Monday before Thanksgiving I invited Cynthia over for dinner, for I knew that she and Laura, our roommate, were considering getting a place together and they would have an opportunity to draw plans. On our way to my house Cynthia suggested we stop to permit her to purchase some beer, and while doing so, in a not atypical attack of extremeness, decided to purchase a gallon jug of pickles and a quart of Peppermint stick ice cream. I had learned not to question her actions, aloud anyway.
When we got to my place, I handed Alice the beer, and Cynthia handed her the pickles and ice cream. Alice had assumed, understandably, that Cynthia and I had learned of the positive results of her pregnancy test that day, and were teasing her about the strange cravings expectant women are alleged to get at odd hours of the night. We had no idea of the results. The ensuing conversation was circuitous, with Alice concluding that we were teasing her by bringing strange foodstuffs and not imagining how we had learned of her pregnancy, and my complete befuddlement of what she was talking about. After sorting out the confusion I found myself thrilled and predictably stunned.
After dinner Cynthia and Laura began sorting through the rental listings looking for a place for themselves. They found one that sounded good, made a call, and soon we all found ourselves packed into Cynthia's car to have a look at it. She stopped at a gas station on Mass. Ave., and as she was waiting to pull into the fill-up island I was shocked to observe that the interior of the station repair shop was engulfed in flames!
I leapt out of the car and discovered that the flames were not in the station at all, but were reflected off of the glass overhead doors. It was the car in front of us that was burning; the entire undercarriage of the vehicle was overwhelmed. I yelled to the woman as she began to pull out from the island, but she mistook my excitement for an attack, and began careening toward rush hour traffic in a car that she clearly did not know was burning. I raced around to her side and screamed "Your car is on fire"!
That worked. She slammed on her brakes and jumped from the vehicle in a state of panic. Unfortunately, the automobile was an automatic and in the excitement she neglected to put it into park. The car took off again on its own, making a beeline toward traffic. Not having much time to formulate a plan, I chased it, opened the driver's side door and managed to flip the transmission into park. While this certainly stopped the car, it also managed to break my left index finger.
The attendant, who had been woefully absent through all of this, finally rushed up with an extinguisher and quickly knocked down the flames, managing to cover me with extinguishing agent in the process. I began to wander back to my companions and was amused to find the three of them frozen in their seats, jaws agape. We went to the hospital to have my finger tended to rather than apartment hunting that night. The next day my boss, the New Zealander, pointed out that while it was one thing to jump into a burning car or a run away car, it was quite another thing to jump into a burning, runaway car. I couldn't disagree.
On Thanksgiving day Cynthia and Laura joined us for a holiday dinner. I made a Turkey, numerous vegetables and several pies, but was sure to set the table with paper plates.
Perhaps I should digress for a moment and explain the relationship between my in-laws and myself. They hated me, every last one of them. They hated me to the extent that they made every attempt to prevent our marrying, including threatening my life and that of the priest who was to marry us. My mother-in-law had even refused to speak to my wife for several years, but upon learning that she was about to become a grandmother, had relented. She even invited us to Alice's brother's wedding, which was to occur on the Saturday following Thanksgiving.
Understanding my in-laws was not difficult. They were all violent, except uncle Andrew who was gay instead, and all alcoholics except my mother-in-law, who was an adult child of / a spouse of / a mother of / a niece of / and a third cousin once removed of an alcoholic. For some reason, that was enough to detrimentally alter her behavior patterns too. I knew that they did not have a very good reputation at weddings; indeed I had been somewhat relieved that they hadn't shown up to ours. The potential for disruption at this event was greatly enhanced by the fact that my father-in-law was going too, and he and Alice's mother hadn't been in the same room with each other since their rather ugly divorce ten years earlier.
Uncle Andrew, on the other hand, was a kindly old man who was as out of the closet as his generation permitted. He lived with his mother, dressed impeccably, and would occasionally slip away to New York City to visit his "friends". He and I got along fine.
Alice's brother Joe had decided to have his wedding in Schenectady New York, in an area that makes most of New Jersey look like a nature preserve. When we arrived at the Motel in which Alice's forty-odd family members were staying, we were scared of the surrounding neighborhood. We headed off to the church and then the reception hall, and things seemed to be running smoothly enough. Alice's parents even danced together a couple of time. Alice thought this boded badly for what was to come, but I was too naive to understand.
We went back to the motel and settled in for the night, trying to shut out the noise from the after-reception party in one of the rooms. Alice's grandmother and uncle Andrew were safely in bed in the room above us. The noise from the party seemed merry enough at first, but the tone slowly began to migrate to a disturbing one, like that of a swarm of annoyed, stinging insects.
Suddenly there was an explosion of shouting as the party blew out of the room and into the parking lot in the form of a gigantic fist-fight. I watched in horror from behind our curtains as all the motel rooms opened up and spewed additional family members into the fracas. Alice ordered me to call the police but I couldn't, as this wasn't the sort of place that had phones in each room, so I pulled on my trousers and headed, barefoot, to the office of the establishment. The clerk was in a very excited state, and assured me that he had called the police already. He referred to the problem as a "riot".
As I picked my way back across the parking lot, occasionally dodging projectiles, I gathered that my father-in-law had, for no apparent reason, knocked together the heads of the bride and maid of honor. Alice's brother, the groom, had leapt at his father with great force but missed, and struck his head on the concrete wall thereby rendering himself, perhaps fortunately for all, entirely unconscious. All the years of hostility and alcohol induced delusion that this family had harbored lashed out in an amazing display of hatred and violence. I decided to get the hell back inside.
As I crossed to our room I saw uncle Andrew emerge from his in a terribly nettled state. He was wearing nothing but a camel hair coat, men's garters (sans socks), and a freshly polished pair of fashionable wing-tips. He clutched his suitcase with white knuckles, and muttered that he had had enough of "these people". I lost sight of him as he reached the sidewalk with a determined gate. I couldn't imagine where he was going, as he didn't know how to drive.
As I reached the security of our room, waves of squad cars began screeching into the parking lot. They seemed to grab people at random until their paddy-wagon was filled, then they went away. A bevy of Alice's cousins, in varying states of dress and injury, pounded on our door, pleading to be let in. I relented, and learned that there was much concern over Andrew's whereabouts. I figured that he was just fine, perhaps better off than myself since he had gotten out of there, but I was talked into cruising around the highly questionable neighborhood at 3:00 AM on a Saturday night looking for him. I didn't find him.
The next morning we started back for Massachusetts before everybody got bailed out of jail. It seemed to be the prudent thing to do. Andrew eventually turned up in a Manhattan hotel room having a grand time.
When we arrived back home, exhausted, Laura was delighted to see us, for she said that she had a surprise. She had labored all Saturday making a Thanksgiving leftover soup. I don't want to be unfair, but Laura's occasional outings in the kitchen had been less than successful. Most notably, there had been a meatloaf that defied all attempts to extricate it from its pan. The cats had spurned it, and I had thrown the whole thing out when one of them appeared to be readying to relieve himself on it.
I joined Laura in the kitchen, and we stood there peering down on the kettle of soup. "There's just one thing," she said. "What's that," I asked. "It's, well, kind of sour." This was an understatement. When I tried a spoonful, it was like drinking straight vinegar. "Good Lord, Laura, what did you put in there?" I exclaimed. She looked crestfallen. She explained that she had put just about everything in: Turkey, stuffing, giblets, ham, potatoes (mashed and sweet), turnips, peas, onions, carrots, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, thyme, sage, garlic powder, rosemary, cloves, powered mustard, nutmeg, and a bay leaf. "No vinegar?" She shook her head in denial. "Are you sure?" "Uh-huh." She looked very disappointed.
I tried to be upbeat. "Well," I said, "we can add a little baking powder, to neutralize it." This perked her up. I took a teaspoonful of the stuff, and gently tipped it in. The reaction of the soup was profound. There was a hissing sound as the soup responded by ejecting a virulent froth from deep within. "Wow" we both said, backing away from the stove. "What else did you put in there?" I asked, a little nervously, as I had never had my food take an offensive posture before, with the exception of an incident with an ornery lobster that had gotten loose in the kitchen, years earlier. It was about then that Cynthia stopped by, and wanted to know what we were doing.
I explained the situation, and she agreed that adding an alkaline was the right approach. She grabbed the baking soda, and dumped in a bunch. The soup responded by rattling around and spewing a gray colored foam all over the place. While the pot had been room temperature when we had started, it now seemed to be warming up with each dose of baking powder. Eventually we ran out of it, but the soup was showing no signs of calming down and nobody was willing to taste it, so, lacking any ideas of what to do with it, I went to bed.
At about 4:00 AM, after having gotten no sleep the previous night, I was awakened by Alice screaming in the kitchen- "It's getting out, it's getting out!" I roared into the room in my underwear to discover that the pot had sprung a leak. Laura came into the kitchen in her robe, highly confused. "Quick!" I ordered, "Someone open the back door!" Alice flung open the door, and I raced outside holding the pot as far in front of me as I could. I dumped it in the furthermost corner of the backyard. When I came back inside, a little breathless, I found Laura and Alice wiping up the pinpoint trail of soup I had left. It made a marvelous linoleum cleaner. The next morning, a close inspection of the pot revealed that the turkey soup had indeed eaten a tiny hole in the wall of the pot. Laura's kitchen privileges were summarily revoked.
The next spring, when the New England snow had melted and the grass and flowers had pushed their way up through the fresh earth, a barren patch could be found in our yard, precisely where I had dumped the soup that memorable night. I can't say for sure, but I highly suspect that to this day, neither flora nor fauna dares tread on that spot. That is why I hate, nay, fear, Turkey Soup.