Unidentified Funny Objects 2 (21 page)

On Thursday, I inherited my grandfather’s haunted blender. He’d tried to make the perfect basilisk omelet, insisting on gathering his own eggs, and ended up stoned.

And not in a legal-in-Colorado kind of way.

On Friday, I made gazpacho in his memory. Or, I tried to, but the moment I pushed
puree
, all hell broke loose.

It was a minor hell, so reality wasn’t torn asunder, but it made an unreal mess of my kitchen. Ectoplasm splattered across my countertops, and the disposal burped bubbles of sin. This mess wasn’t something I could clean up myself.

I called my girlfriend, Lisa. A fortuneteller by trade, she knew people that dealt with this kind of stuff.

“Try
Glip’s Exorcism and Dusting
. I’ve heard good things,” Lisa said, rattling off a phone number. I jotted it down on the fridge, the numbers burning into the whiteboard with an acrid hiss. “Also, Mother and I are going to the cabin tonight to finish reading our books.”

“What are you reading?” I asked, sulfuric smoke from the charring whiteboard burning my throat.

“Ted, Sunday is book club. You’re hosting, remember?”

The book club. Right. Lisa’s mom’s book club was reading
About a Boy
, and wanted to discuss it in the home of an authentic bachelor. Lisa had volunteered my kitchen. My now-hellish kitchen.

I eyed my microwave. The window showed a looping clip from
Three’s Company
. Every thirty seconds Jack Ritter’s hand got caught in a toaster, and every time it happened my toaster giggled.

“Right. No problem.” Well, my kitchen was a problem, but hopefully Glip would take care of it.

“Also, save some gazpacho for us. It’s Mother’s favorite.”

“Mmmm.” I hoped the sound was non-committal.

“Oh! It’s my turn to suggest a book for next month. Have any ideas?”

“Nothing comes to mind.” I’d just finished
Never Grow Up: Child Athletes Past Their Prime
, but that was more therapy, less entertainment.

“Well, if you think of anything, let me know. Love ya.” She hung up.

I called Glip, the numbers on the fridge bursting into flame as I dialed. He picked up on the first ring.

“Ted! Lisa said you were going to call.” Dating a fortuneteller has its upsides. “She warned me to charge for unexpected extra-dimensional complications.” It also has its downsides.

“How quickly can you come over?” I asked, watching the disposal burp a purplish bubble with a striking red shimmer. Looked fairly carnal.

“I’ll be over in the morning.”

I ate dinner out.

GLIP TURNED OUT TO be a wizened little old man carrying a leather satchel half as big as he was. When I opened the door, he stepped past me, sniffing the air.

“Gazpacho? You didn’t mention gazpacho.”

Apparently, neither had Lisa.

“Can you fix it?” I asked.

Glip ran his finger along my mantel, right below my second-place trophy from the 2002 Little League World championships—or, as my mom called it, my loser’s place trophy.

Glip examined his finger in the light at the window. He frowned. “Gazpacho is a problem you have to fix yourself—I can just tell you what you are in for.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I prefer to delegate my extra-dimensional complications. “What am I in for?”

Glip went back to the kitchen, setting his satchel on the table. From its depths he unpacked a half-dozen pots, a dozen unlit candles, and a red snakeskin purse. From it he withdrew a magic eight ball.

“Reply hazy, try again,” Glip read. He settled into a kitchen table chair. “What makes the blender special?”

“My grandfather always said it was haunted by the ghost of tomato paste.” I retrieved the olive-green blender from the counter where it still sat, full of crushed tomatoes and a mysterious mauve slime, and set it in front of Glip. A piece of masking tape stuck to the back read, For Ted. “But I checked the wiki-daemonum before I started, and tomato paste spirits are benign and non-influential on this plane of existence.”

Glip traced a symbol around the blender’s base, then retrieved a mozzarella stick from the snakeskin purse and waved it over the blender jar. The cheese turned into a mouse and scurried away. Glip shook his head. “Tomatoes
past
. It’s haunted by the ghost of tomatoes past, not tomato paste. One’s benign and non-influential. The other is soul-devouring and poltergeistic.”

Glip repacked his satchel. “I’ll be back tomorrow. You make gazpacho.” He pointed a candle at me. “The ghost is upset, and if I clean this before you work things out, you’ll be calling me in half-an-hour with some new manifestation. You need to make gazpacho again, but this time make it right.” Then he left, leaving a fifty-dollar invoice for “consultation.”

I waved goodbye. I couldn’t afford to hire him, but my faucet had just started to sing the theme song to
Different Strokes
, and the book club was coming in twenty-four hours. I couldn’t afford not to hire him—Lisa’s mother was excited about the event, and Lisa was close to her mother.

When I’d made the offending gazpacho, I’d worked off my mother’s recipe, a terse note typed on a three-by-five card filed in a grey metal recipe box sent with me to 2009 spring training. I’d been cut from the team, but kept the recipes.

Her note read:

(Tomatoes + Bread + Onions + Cucumbers) * Blender + Oil + Vinegar = Gazpacho

My mother was a left-brain thinker.

The blender came from my grandfather on my father’s side, so maybe that side of the family’s recipe held the solution. I dug out my father’s cookbook, which had fallen behind the spice rack and smelled of turmeric. Originally a sketchpad, the book was bound with rough hemp ties, each recipe hand-written and illustrated with a flowing fountain pen. The gazpacho recipe was inscribed in the spiraling petals of a sunflower, the ingredients listed on its leaves.

Fadai Special Gazpacho

Start with tomatoes sliced from the vine with a silver scythe by a full moon. Add bread, baked on the glowing coals of a resurrecting phoenix. Mix in garlic crushed by the weight of humanity. Add onions chopped without tears. Blend. Add diced cucumbers. Add equal parts olive oil, infused with sighs of despair, and vinegar born of sour love. Chill on ice, then enjoy.

My father was a right-brain thinker.

THE GARLIC, OLIVE OIL, and vinegar I found on Craigslist. It wasn’t difficult—there is enough crushing humanity, despair, and sour love on the Internet to go around. The onions and cucumbers I got at Safeway. The bread, available via the Firebird-o-rama phone app, materialized the instant I clicked
buy
.

But the tomatoes required legwork. The celestial bodies were aligned—tonight was a full moon—but I didn’t have a tomato hookup.

The farmer’s market around the corner from my house was famed for its authentic ingredients. I generally avoided the scene, as my life was authentic enough already, but it was my best lead.

The market was well under way when I arrived, a crowd packed along the thirty-odd tables lining the platform of an old railway depot. A light drizzle kept the crowd under the platform’s canopy.

A drooling undead attendant manned (zombied?) the first booth, selling organic compost labeled
Perfume for the Previously-Alive
. I passed up the opportunity, stepping around a young woman pushing a stroller. I pretended not to notice that the child in the stroller strongly resembled a kobold; parents don’t appreciate when you point out things like that.

The second booth sold raw cheese and pickup lines. “Free sample?” asked the young cheesemonger. He wore a black turtleneck and a matching scowl.

“No thanks. I like my lines pasteurized,” I said, elbowing past a teenager dumping change onto the table.

The third booth held more promise. Traditional vegetables lined the table; broccoli, carrots, brussels sprouts, and a whole basket of tomatoes. A note beside the tomatoes read
Certified Humanly Raised and Handled
. A woman in overalls sat in a rocking chair, chewing on a piece of straw and trying a little too hard to be authentic.

Maybe the book club could invite her to read
Catcher in the Rye
—a genuine phony.

“Can you get me tomatoes harvested with a silver scythe by a full moon?” I asked.

She pulled the straw from her mouth and twirled it, her eyes narrowing. “You don’t seem like a silver scythe kind of guy.”

“It’s what I’m looking for,” I said, miffed at her stereotyping. My flannel shirt and jeans were nondescript and timeless.

She chewed on her straw, then nodded. “Well, if you’re into that stuff, I know some folks who’d love to fix you up.”

She scrawled something on a scrap of cardboard. “Meet me at this address at sundown. Bring fifty bucks and your own silver scythe.”

“Thanks.” This gazpacho was getting expensive.

I BORROWED A SILVER scythe from a friend of a friend, whose daughter had been the Grim Reaper in a school play.

“Silver-plated,” the friend of a friend clarified.

“Close enough,” I said, hoping I was right.

The address led me to an abandoned lot squeezed between a car wash and a YummiMart. A spray-painted sign read
Urban Farm and Spiritual Center
. A couple-dozen scraggly tomato plants grew in lines scratched in the dirt.

My new farmer friend pulled up in a pickup truck about an hour after sundown. She rolled down her window to take my cash and wave at the plants. “All yours,” she said as she drove off.

The moon came up. I sliced free a tomato.

Something soft hit the side of my head. “Murderer!” screamed a voice. I turned, and another projectile squished into my forehead. My vision turned red.

“Get him!”

I ducked behind a tomato cage. Someone was throwing rotten tomatoes at me. I peeked. It wasn’t someone, it was a crowd of someones, dressed in flowing silver robes and sandals, bearing signs reading
PETANQUE STANDS WITH THE OPPRESSED
.

I raised my hands. “Wait!”

The incoming tomatoes stopped. I stepped out from behind the cage, hands in the air.

“I think there’s been a mix-up. Who are you?”

A silver-robed man stepped forward from the mob. His bald head gleamed in the moonlight. “We are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Nightshades, Quetzalcoatl, the Undead, and Elephants. We have witnessed your despicable act.”

“I picked a tomato? So?”

The crowd booed, surging forward and surrounding me.

“Tomatoes are the most glorious of the nightshades. They are not for humans to torture and murder for entertainment,” their ringleader said.

“Wait. You’re throwing tomatoes at me because I was picking tomatoes?”

“These tomatoes, picked humanely, are giving their lives for the cause,” he said, gesturing at his basket.

“Willingly?”

He turned and waved me off, saying, “Harvest him.”

Hands grabbed me from behind. I struggled, but my head was wrapped in a towel smelling of camphor, and everything went black.

WET SANDPAPER RUBBED MY cheek. I opened my eyes to a black cat licking my face. I struggled to sit up. The moon hung lower in the sky, illuminating a small, grassy park. I didn’t recognize the neighborhood. A figure, shrouded in dark red, stood behind the cat.

“Are you prepared to play for your fate?”

“Huh?” I scrambled to my feet. “What?”

“You have been delivered for judgment.” The figure opened its palm, revealing a small silver glowing ball. It threw the ball some ten yards into the grass. “We now play petanque for your soul.” Another ball, tomato-sized and glowing red, followed the silver one. The red ball fell a foot from the silver.

A small silver circle appeared around the figure’s feet, and the figure stepped outside of it.

“Your throw.”

Still a little lightheaded from the towel’s fumes, I stepped into the circle. Three green balls sat beside two red ones.

“I’m supposed to toss my ball as close to the silver one as I can, right?” A coterie of old men played petanque, a lawn-bowling game, in front of the railroad depot on Sunday mornings, espressos in hand. Lisa had once asked if she could take a picture of their bocce balls, resulting in an brief education in French swear words and a lecture on the trivial, but apparently vitally important, differences between bocce and petanque.

“One should always strive to be close to the truth.”

Was this game getting metaphorical? That’s why I avoided literature in favor of targeted self-help. Too much metaphor is bad for one’s health.

I picked up and hefted a heavier-than-expected green ball. I lobbed it, overshooting the target by at least two yards. The cat, sitting beside the figure, licked its paws.

“Throw again.”

My next shot, an improvement, dropped beside the red ball and a nose closer to the target. I stepped out of the circle. Maybe I’d get out of this in one piece.

“Who are you?” I asked, as the figure stepped into the circle to throw.

“I am the ghost of tomatoes past. The time has come to end your family’s careless blending of my nightshade brethren.”

The phrase “soul-devouring and poltergeistic” echoed in my mind. What had my gazpacho gotten me into? The second red ball dropped behind the first. My second ball was still a nose ahead.

Then the third red ball dropped, chipping my lead off into a bush.

The cat purred. I shivered.

“I don’t suppose I can cut a deal with you?”

“The time for deals is past.”

I hefted the last green ball. I could do this. I imagined I was re-pitching the final inning of the Little League series, only this time Mom wasn’t signaling me to walk the guy. I could do it my way. I threw my best fastball. The ball hit the target, knocking it up in the air. Clunk. The target ball fell against the green ball from my first throw.

“How about now?”

I WAS ALLOWED TO go home. When I got there, I made gazpacho,
my
gazpacho, not my mother’s, not my father’s. I made it with beets. I didn’t need nightshade oppression in my life. The soup came out great, although a little purple.

With my blender appeased, Glip cleaned the kitchen in no time flat. He finished just as the book club arrived. Glip stuck around, contributing unexpected literary insights. The book club was a success. Lisa gave me a smooch. Her mom asked for my recipe.