THE KITCHEN

I come out of the bathroom and Erik is still fighting the alligator, right there in my kitchen, just beating it to death with a wooden baseball bat. Everyone else is crouching up on the counters and tables, screaming hysterically, shouting and jeering and punching the air with their fists. Its like church, this chanting rhythm in tongues, this abrasive approval of violence.
I look around the room, cocky eyed and half drunk, flinching as Erik thrusts and jabs the bat with both hands onto the alligators skull.
I sidestep behind him as he brings the bat down again. The sharp violent sound of the wood on the leather plated skin, the dead click of an empty soda machine. The alligator is hissing and sucking, jaws clicking, the heavy skids of its underbelly as it slides around, cracking and moaning.
All of us, about 30 people, crowded into my big kitchen, people up on top the old stove and even the refrigerator. Erik brings the bat down again, slamming, sweating, fighting for his life.
They stand in the doorway eagerly biting their lips; or they watch with their arms folded pretending to be unsatisfied. Erik gets behind the alligator and drags it by his tail, almost lifting it, but the thing is sliding everywhere and snapping, teeth clamping shut like bear traps, wet with drool, disgusting. Everyone is smoking, drinking. The smell of sweat and tarmac. Erik manages to kick it with the heel of his steel toe boots. He spits on it. The alligators skull, if you look close enough, you’ll see the dents and depressions where the bone is starting to cave in.
Everyone crowded around watching, they start to chant as one, screaming for Erik to finish it off. Skinny little white boy Erik who I grew up with. Climbing trees. Building forts. Trying to find girlfriends. Finishing third in his class, dreams of being an engineer. Now he is fighting an alligator with a wooden baseball bat.
I look into the alligators eyes and it is sort of like slow motion how Erik is raising the bat, both hands over his head, and in the alligators eyes I can see the fear, the longing to be free, where he belongs, away from here, in the glorious freedom of its home.
But then the bat comes down and there’s the cracking of bone and a dripping noise like piss except it’s a huge pool of blood coming out from under the alligator and everyone is cheering. The Alligator looks up at me and I kneel down and its like everything else dissolves except for me and the alligator. 

“Please mate,” it says. Its pomp new-wave British accent is barely a whisper. “Please don’t let them take me away.” 

I open my mouth, as if to speak. 

But then the bat comes back down and the room is full of of the screaming and stomping, the blood lust. The Alligator is screaming like a dying man, a man with a piece of shrapnel in him. Screaming out in an English accent. I don’t understand, I open a Heineken and lean back against the doorway. 

The Alligator, he’s dead. The crowd starts coming down from their safe pedestals, their high platforms, everyone smiling and drunk and laughing hysterically. And none of it even excites me anymore. The drama, the blood lust. 

Everyone cheering and laughing and talking about what their favorite part was. Everyone starting to jump off the countertops, poking the dead alligator, laughing, Isaac King even talking about taking a piss on it.
Erik comes over to me, exhausted, bleeding, his life changed and now complete with an amazing story to tell his grandkids. ‘You know one time your granddaddy beat the shit out of an alligator in front of an audience’ but they wont believe it. They will laugh and swear he is lying.
He wipes the sweat of his face and lights a cigarette.
Honestly this whole thing bores me.
You’d think I’d be excited, but it gets boring. After a few times . . . you’ve seen it all.
Ed had to fight a Wolverine.
Isaac King had to fight the Warthog.
For Parker, our friends at the zoo made a special delivery, giving us a black bear.
Most times the human wins.
But everyone remembers Phil, the big black kid from Sloughon Avenue in the projects who had to go up against a bunch of Emperor scorpions, three of them, all about 8 inches long and about 5 inches thick. He got stung after about 30 seconds, and then within the next minute he got stung about 12 more times. Then he went into shock, his body seizing violently, writhing and trembling into the kitchen table, the rest of us holding our mouths until somebody sprayed a fire extinguisher everywhere.
And everyone knows that if you lose your fight then that’s it. No one can help. That’s just how it works. You lose, then it’s your ass.
It was the same thing with that kid from Downtown, near Burgess Hill, the kid with the good sideburns. Good, good sideburns. This kid had to go up against a Gray Wolf. This was in the back of the Zoo transport-semi that Parker drives, and we were all crowded in the back, against the door, Ed with the gun, just in case. The kid did well for a while, he hit it real good across the its head with the bat, but when he turned around to look at us, smiling, arms out, needing to hear more encouragement, and the wolf was on him in a second, the kids’ throat in the wolf’s mouth. Ed waited until the kid was finished, and the he shot the wolf and we all went home
Hector Ramirez stands in the doorway, silent, a copy of Pablo Neruda tucked into the back of his jeans. He watches, arms folded, arms strong from installing fences all day, and this is his great task. His great euphoric idea. His enterprise.
We call it The Kitchen.