An Umbrian Dinner

The restaurant was loud, with diners raising their vocal ante higher and higher into shrill jackpots of noise. One couple had a table separated from the others by a large nickle and glass refrigerator holding wines best served cold. It was a modern L.A. version of an Italian bistro. Luckily there were no Chianti bottles with candles jammed into the neck, or huge baskets of bread and cups of whipped butter. It was named ONEZ. Not possessive, merely singular and proper.

The couple's meal had been going on for a short while. A first glass of Trasimeno red wine had been consumed and now they were onto the second. The cheese plate had disappeared, replaced by a low bowl of pappardelle pasta with braised antelope ragu, topped with red cow parmesan. The woman's order had also been brought, a plate of spaghetti norcia which contained wild Umbrian mushrooms , sausage, peas, cream with fennel pollen blown across the top. Pleasant and helpful, the waiter refilled their water glasses, and asked if there was anything more he could do. Assured all was well, he disappeared like easy money. The man picked up his plate of pappardelle and smelled it. Normally a shy sort, he enjoyed smelling everything at a meal, even his partner's food and wine. It was an odd kink in his personality, throwing his humble hat in a ring of extroverted derbies. He felt some element of eccentricity would absolve his more self-effacing manners. Though to be honest, he just liked smelling things.

More than a decade before, he'd begun to lose his hearing, and now his left side was almost completely useless. His other sensory organs had also gone South, so that now he relied on bifocals, Viagra, and cheap hard candy to help keep his receptor cells flashing signs of life to his temporal lobes. If someone advanced the theory that he overcompensated his sense of smell because of his other waning abilities, he wouldn't dispute it.

Grabbing his napkin from his lap, he rose and bent over the table to smell his date's spaghetti norcia. It was heady with the smells from sausage which she had opened. The fatted pig had been ground into large diced pieces of meat and fat before being covered in fennel seed and stuffed into its casing. It was lean and smelled vaguely of a small farm, yet without the slightest hint of sea air that identifies most Italian sausage. There was the clear identity of a lower region in a hilly terrain: oaks trees that whisper a ferment of decaying leaves and compost that provide home to regional Prataioli mushrooms. He smelled the dirt of truffles, though not in truffle season. There was some hint of grass-tinged mists coming in unimpeded as if wafting over a gradually rising plain at daybreak. Fennel seeds and its pollen certainly provided a spicy smell like much Italian food, but he thought he could detect cipollata onions, and even black celery. But mostly he caught the cool shade of an oak forest mixed with the burnished aroma of the canopy's top branches being baked in Italy's long summer days. Though fennel was the alpha of spice scents, garlic was certainly holding a role, as was a nip of crushed chili.

His own meal smelled equally as interesting, especially the ragu sauce which held the tender ripped meat of ranch bred antelope. Whenever he lost the thread of their conversation, or became confused at his lack of hearing, he bent to inhale yet another whiff of Central Italy's highlands and the clay earth which has grown so much hearty food for 3000 years of local peasant cuisine. Moreover the prized foods grown in Umbria's soil had also weighed down the tables of Emperors and held the decomposed flesh and bones of citizens, slaves, peasants and their stock-- the offal, scraps, skins, and blood which give the deepest scent and define what we call black dirt.

One of the nondescript but loud tables across the restaurant floor had a small, shivering dog in tow. It was one of those skinny whippety-greyhoundy dogs whose list of antecedents had once probably boasted incredible speed and utility, but had since been shrunken by generations of genetic inner-breeding, so that they now couldn't chase down a homeless man's shopping cart, let alone a feral rabbit. The dog's rhinestone collar was tethered by a leash to the table. All through dinner it had sat obediently and quietly except when it had yelped at an unintentional kick given off my one of the table's party.

During dessert, the man was half way through his lemon panna cotta topped in a chilled mulberry compote, when his nose smelled the dark squishy murk of nature. At first he was afraid the rich foods had relaxed his rectal muscles and allowed a large puff of digestive methane gas to escape his sphincter, clouding their table in an embarrassing moment of very large proportions. Not the stuff of first dates, no siree.

Not wanting to draw undue attention to an already dicey predicament, he tried to quickly grab any conversational life preserver to obfuscate his embarrassment. "What's your favorite porn movie?" he blurted out, hoping to shock his date's attention away from the putrescence which was clinging to their corner of the restaurant.
"Huh?" she replied.
He felt that no matter what he said, it had to be rapid fire. "Oh, you know, porn. Do you prefer the babes with inflated breasts, or the skinny ones that look like they're still in junior high school? The ones with pigtails who call everyone 'daddy'?"
He knew this was all totally inappropriate and wrong, wrong, wrong, but had to keep her attention away from the wretched odor of his current colonic history. "But since you're a girl, I suppose it's a question of girth versus length huh?" Her face was changing from one of confusion at thinking she had misunderstood his comments to the acceptance that he had indeed wanted to strike up a conversation about pornographic preferences. This from a guy who had sniffed her food through each course of their meal and had even stuck his finger in her cream sauce to test its texture. "Like, big guys? Do you like those steroid guys with peckers like lamp poles, or the guys who keep their socks on and have 8 inch tongues?" Oh Christ, why won't that stink dissipate. She was about to shake off her inability to answer when he continued. "I like this older one called SODOMY MOTEL, where a really cute woman is refused a room because of full occupancy and henceforth takes issue with the manager in his office where she proceeds to seduce, fuck, suck and energetically take it in the ass to convince him otherwise."

The woman had had enough. "I'm not sure why you've lost all sense of reason, but this date is over. I implore you to stop your conversation immediately. I'll split the check with you and call a cab, but I suggest you take your medication quickly. By the way, did you fart? Something smells awful?" He sucked his lower lip over his teeth and tried to think for a second. He knew that every situation has a possibility for a good outcome or a bad outcome. Just how to reverse the direction of this evening's outcome was just beyond his current grasp.

The woman rose and looked for the waiter, presumably to ask for the check or a bouncer to subdue her date's weird advances. "Please, let me explain." he said, not knowing what words to use after that initial phrase. "I, uh . . . I was just working on my Buddhist practice of utter disregard for normative experiential thought. It's been used in Japan for centuries as a way to dispel . . . or . . . to expel the ghosts of societal pressure in favor of the ever-expanding freedom of nonsensical thought." He had no idea what he had even said, let alone any possible meaning, but he was becoming sure that silence on his part was going to meet with a bad end.

"Bullshit." She countered. Then as she turned to deliver a salvo of rectitude across the small table, she slipped on something and her feet flew out from under her. For a long second all sound stopped. The floor was black polished cement of a high luster, and she was down for the count.

To recreate a moment is luxurious, but useless. During that short span of time between his nibbling on eggless custard dessert with mulberry sauce, through his discourse on porn dicks, and finally her expected condemnation of his life ( past, present and future), these things happened:
01. The little aforementioned dog slipped out of it's loose collar.
02. The consumptive mongrel wandered unnoticed to under the couple's table and defecated it's holdings of a meal largely consisting of raw meat and cereal products.
03. The resultant smell of loose-stooled miniature whippet shit rose from below to reach the man's sensitive snout.
04. He mishandled the situation.
05. The dog returned to its table and laid down at it's master's feet.
05. The irate woman slipped in the steaming pile of excrement. Then after breaking a heel and beginning the tumble to the unforgiving cement, she grabbed for the table sending their dinner's remnants into a vaudevillian skit of bottles, plates and remnants of saucy foods. A resultant noise and the spectacle of its cause was sizable. The putrid smell only got worse after being smeared over a larger area of floor, shoe, stockinged thigh and the back of her dress.

Subsequently, The employees sprang into action, followed soon thereafter by the Los Angeles Fire Department ambulance attendants, the West Hollywood police department and a valet attendant, amazing in his ability to think quickly and to slip the man a business card of his friend, an attorney, who, upon being assessed of the knowable facts, believed that the injured woman had a very good case against the restaurant's insurer, at least in handling the large hospital bills which would most assuredly be forthcoming.

Afterward, he sat in the hospital waiting room for 4 hours until being told that she had been admitted and scheduled for surgery. She'd left strict orders that he was not to be allowed to visit during her stay. He didn't blame her. Not at all. He didn't even know her middle name.

Funny though, now when he thinks of her and the evening's drama, all he can remember is that hint of chili in her Umbrian sausage. It should have been a sign. Given the head start which had been taken by the tortoise, Zeno rightfully surmised that Achilles would never be able to close the gap no matter how fast he ran. It's math. It's science. It's truth. They don't use chili, ever.
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