Tzatziki – RG Vasicek

July 27, 2020

Easy on the tzatziki, she says. Not so easy, I say. My Greek wife and I eat Greek yogurt. We live in Astoria, Queens. Earrings like Thassos olives. Newspapers terrify me. Especially the electronic kind. <Meta> is a Greek word. Like metafiction. I keep learning. Keeps me alive. Bartók by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Hungarian is an interesting language. Something like Finnish. I am trying to learn Icelandic. I want to read the Sagas. Orange crane in the parking lot of Astoria Park. Nobody knows why. Construction on the Triboro Bridge? When are people going to stop driving automobiles? I guess never. Fossil fuels. Bang bang kerbang. Charlatans UK played New York in the late 90s. Now what. People are everywhere. So many people. Billions and billions of people. Searching for a habitable ocean planet in outer space. A nice exoplanet. Astronomers are eyeballing TRAPPIST-1 e, f, g, and h. Yippee! When do we launch? Only 39 light-years away. I like fucking. Did I tell you? Sometimes my wife and I get it going on in the backseat of a Buick. Nothing else to do on Shore Boulevard. East River. Tugboats pulling UFOs to New York Harbor. The blue lights at the Con-Ed plant freaked people out. I thought it was the Russkies. The underwater missiles. Or an asteroid. Turns out it was just extraterrestrials. We got it good in Queens. People are not too arrogant. Speak two hundred languages. I am trying to learn them all. Czechoslovakian is the weirdest. The Ř is something else. Dare you to pronounce it. Destroys minds. I am eating a lot of souvlaki lately. Sipping Greek frappés. Nookie is consistently good. The economy is a little wobbly. Everybody might have to declare bankruptcy. Nothing a little beach time at Sunken Meadow cannot solve. It is that time. The longest day of the year. I am sweating like a pig. Sipping from a can of Sapporo. I like the can. Such a beautiful can. Nobody can design a better one. Sleek. Silver. Something mechanical about the design. I expect a Transformer to emerge from it. Where is Shia LeBeouf? He did a flick here in Astoria called A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints. Teenagers smoking marijuana up on a swimming pool high-dive diving board and whatnot. Used for trials by the US Olympic team in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. A lot of history in this little old neighborhood. Christopher Walken used to walk around here. Tony Bennett was a singing waiter at Ricardo’s. Sang as a kid for Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia at the opening of the Triboro Bridge in 1936. Tony was age ten. Now he is in Vegas, I think. Tzatziki gets you thinking. Am I right? I have not thought this much in a very long time. Thoughts in this city disappear too easily. Fog. Mist. Vapor. Piano keys on a keyboard. Thelonious Monk. McCoy Tyner. The empty vacuum of Manhattan. A venue. A shell. Sea walls are too low. We await the tsunami. Balls like overripe plums. I was coming and coming into her pussy. She might get pregnant, I thought. This was not my wife. This was somebody else. I forget her name. No, I do not. It is a common name. Whatever that means. An exotic name. I am distracting you. I think it is working. At any rate, there I was, pants down, clenching and unclenching my buttocks. You have such a nice ass, she said. I felt her left hand on my right buttock. Long thin fingers. She was a violinist. Or a viola player. I forget. There are so many musicians in New York City. It is not even funny. I was not laughing. I was coming. And she expected something in return. That I could see. She wanted tzatziki. I am not kidding you. That is what she said. So it really got me thinking. Special sauce. For a long time I tried to be normal. That was a mistake. I looked for myself in others. I was not there. The swelter of Queens. New York is burning up. More A/C please. More fossil fuels. Get those oil barges through the Strait of Hormuz. We drove the Toyota to the Fire Island Lighthouse. There was nothing else to do. Kids yelling at me from the backseat. Throwing popcorn. Demanding ginger ale. My wife in the passenger seat. Listening to a podcast about slavery. Pitchpines and sand dunes flying by the window. A rabbit. A deer. Swerve. A jeep zigzagging past me on Ocean Parkway. This is the life. Splashing in the Atlantic. Getting sunburnt. Screwing the umbrella into the sand. Checking out bikini asses. Sipping S.Pellegrino dark Morello cherry & pomegranate seltzer. I grew up in a dysfunctional family. I mean, I thought everybody did. Turns out there are almost normal families. Shocked whenever I visited one. You mean, you talk? I was a silent brooding creature in school. Or so I seemed to myself. I tried to fly under the radar. Remain perfectly average. Nobody will notice. But they do. There must be a supercomputer that collects all the data because they find the anomaly. This kid is way too average. They tell everybody. Yeah, now I see it, too, people say. I had to jump from situation to situation. Escape. People start asking questions. Questions are dangerous. Chaos. Uncertainty. I tried to camouflage the Unpredictability of my environment. I thought, if I drove my Volkswagen Beetle fast enough, I could defect. I fled to Albany. I fled to Prague. I fled to New York City. I did not escape. Not enough escape velocity. I spiraled through the void. This is just a first stage. A rocket has many stages before it reaches space. There is no space elevator. Not yet. Did you see that Swedish sci-fi flick Aniara? So depressing. I recommend it to everybody. Puts your mind in the right perspective. The new Superreality. We are all aboard a spaceship. Teaching each other new things. Making love. Desperately trying to be a human being.