Finding The Source

When the fridge broke about a month ago much of its contents were placed on the windowsill behind the microwave, atop a rickety steel tube-wire rack thingy that is the home of various cookie sheets, cutting boards, roasting pans, and maybe a toaster. One of those items from the fridge was a freshly roasted chicken, all sliced up and ready to eat. At least I think that's what it was.

The smell started to permeate the kitchen about a week ago. I thought it was Dakota, my best friend, the otherwise fastidious if slightly pudgy Portuguese Water Dog. Sometimes, when her hair gets too long (she's one of those wonder-dogs with hair, not fur, who doesn't shed and supposedly keeps herself impeccably clean) she has a tendency to pee irresponsibly and wee errant streams of wee dribble onto her fluffy hind legs. Yesterday I finally got around to giving her a bath. She was soooo dirty, a strange sort of foamy greasy dirt floated in the fetid bathwater, so I washed her three times for good measure. And then I blow dried her – an ambitious undertaking – and she smelled lovely.

We went out last night, attended for the second night in a row our daughter's high school production of "Ragtime."  I cried at both performances.While I don't quite love the musical, I did love the novel and think I liked the movie, (it was what, almost 30 years ago?) and the kids put on one helluva a show.  The clean dog stayed home and I came home a few minutes past midnight to an even stinkier kitchen.

In the den, on the far side of the apartment from the kitchen, I drank a beer and tried to watch the Altman movie I'd bought a few weeks ago, "The Long Goodbye." Early 70's, Eliot Gould as Raymond Chandler's famous fast talking alter ego Phillip Marlowe, what could be bad? I needed to start getting back into the LA state of mind so I can get back to work on my novel (Part II is set in Chandleresque mid-century SoCal) and I never saw an Altman film I didn't at least appreciate. Until last night. What a piece of shit. Ever wonder why Eliot Gould disappeared into obscurity, or at least into a footnote in the life of Babs Streisand? Watch this movie; it explains everything about the Gould question.

This morning the smell was still there, only, of course, worse. The entire house was vacuumed and the kitchen floor, sink, stovetop and counters scrubbed like a scene from Gattica. I got on my knees and smelled the kitchen rug. The smell was definitely somewhere in the kitchen, but not in the rug. I sniffed and sniffed, like the dog that neither of my dogs are interested in being, the trail hound. Then I looked at the scary wire cart thing by the window. So much grimy dust, thick as topsoil on a landfill, and just as stinky. Had to empty it out to move it, decided to sweep and scrub the floor behind and beneath it. And there is was. A tupperware container, the plastic sarcophagus of a roasted chicken, once delicious, now merely a congealed mass of decaying roasted flesh, dripping its decomposing entrails artfully down masonry wall and across quarry tile floor, perfuming the stale kitchen air with its own fetid message: "I was a chicken, then I was your dinner, now I'm your worst olfactory nightmare. Peace be with you, oh family of wasteful, forgetful carnivores. And the next time the aroma of fresh roasted free-range poultry sets the saliva flowing in your mouth, remember me."