The Executioner’s Fork 

 

     Five of us roomed in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.
     I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on my eyes, just so, the roses swirled, collided, and turned pink.  
     On the third floor, twin beds were placed separately as possible in a twelve-by-twelve room. Eva and Ladd bunked there, two film editors who were dropped into Charles' art by the public television company that underwrote the voyage to San Francisco and two hundred hours of footage of the Summer of Love. The company was hungry for a return on its money. The film must be cut soon, they insisted. Charles believed the film would eventually bloom from his vision.
      Eva was an editor, a shy crossword puzzle addict, with the professional fingers it took to splice sixteen millimeter film precisely and quickly. She missed her two cats, Honey and Muhammet.  She wanted to finish the film and get back to New York.  She waxed her cordovan shoes nightly and disliked stepping on the leaves that cover everything in Cambridge in October.
      Ladd did not fit well into our mini-commune. He talked loudly, chewed with his mouth open, and limped. He showered Eva with harsh direct commands. He used the triple-negative "No, No, No" when he disagreed with Charles, who considered Ladd to be the antithesis of the film's content but could not bring himself to fire him. The whirling dance of Golden Gate Park rapture had softened Charles' approach to everything.  "Do ants believe?" was the central question of his new cosmology.
     So Charles stewed at the edge of creative pursuits and the film sank slowly into a month of muddy indecision. Eva carried bundles of New York Times crosswords to work. I painted the studio floors. Ladd lived on the phone with New York. Beryl whittled chopsticks from elm twigs with a kitchen knife.
     Until one Sunday morning.............
     We rotated the cooking chores for our Sunday breakfast at the grey and chrome table in our kitchen. It was Charles' morning to cook. He carefully sculpted twenty crepes on an upside-down frying pan, opened a quart of his mother's Indiana apple butter, squeezed a quart of fresh orange juice, whipped a couple of pints of cream, sweetened it with maple syrup, brewed coffee with chicory, then whacked the wind chimes to call us to the table. We all came running, except for Ladd, who was chronically late for everything. Way up in the attic we heard him swing his locked knee off the side of his bed and begin to dress.
     The rest politely sat at attention, sipping coffee, watching the crepes cooling and the cream deflating, while Charles slouched with his chin on his chest, tracing his fingers back and forth along the chrome molding on the table's edge. Ladd thumped down two flights of hardwood stairs and into the bathroom, where he hummed a piano concerto while he operated his electric razor.
     The kitchen air smelled of lightning and aluminum by the time Ladd nudged Eva forward, hooked the crook of his cane over the chair at the small of her back, waved his napkin twice, and declared “Let us eat.”
      When he reached across the table to yard the entire plate of crepes closer to his grasp, a knotted leather button on his camel hair blazer caught in the tines of the fork beside his plate, and it sprang off the edge of the table and down onto the checkerboard linoleum floor, where it rang like a temple bell.
     That tinkle brought Charles to critical mass. He jumped from his chair, pointed at the fork as though it were a viper, and yelled at Ladd, "You are fired, you bastard!" then stormed out of the front door, off the verandah, and into the orange Harvard Square streets.
     Beryl plucked at a crepe with her new chopsticks. Eva took the cane from the back of her chair, leaned it against Ladd's knee, and said "I shall not be accompanying you."  Ladd sat dumbfounded and grave for a few moments, then struggled back up the stairs. 
     I ate a bowl of the whipped cream, then went in search of Charles and found him reading Friday's "Variety" over a bowl of noodle soup in a Hayes-Bickford cafeteria filled with hangovers. We finished editing the film in two weeks.