The Gruddle-Poke Incident: A Savage Bizarro Short Story

Sometimes life presents you with strange moments when the universe taps you on the shoulder and informs you, with perfect clarity, that you’ve stepped directly into the wrong day. This was one of those moments. I found myself standing in the hallway outside my own apartment door, empty‑handed, and roughly forty seconds away from engaging in the type of conversation that ends marriages or opens inquests. Five hours earlier I had left this building on one of the humblest of missions ever conceived by a human mind. What followed was a chain of events involving a shattered windshield, a stranger asleep in an alley, and a safety lecture about sweet corn that I will deliver in due course.

Pull up a chair. Order something with sugar in it. Every course of this day was a sugar-based decision, and you will want to eat along.

Our Story Begins With a Honey-Dipped Doughnut

The coffee shop sat six blocks from my house, a quaint little place with a chalkboard menu and a smell of burnt caramel clinging to the walls like a drunk to a lamppost. I walked there with the loose-limbed swagger of a man who had just resigned from a two-year consultancy at a Micronesian cow-plucking firm. (Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Yap: four states, one federation, and a startling number of featherless cattle. The pension plan was drafted on a banana leaf. Ask me about it sometime.)

My order was already composed, a three-course tasting menu for the recently unemployed. One honey-dipped doughnut. One small bag of pretzels. One large coffee, piping hot, sweetened past the boundaries of known chemistry. Two years of consulting had shrunk my ambitions to the dimensions of a pastry box, and I meant to eat them in sequence, slowly, like a man defusing a cake. Appetite was the plan. Appetite, I was about to learn, keeps its own diary.

Inside, a woman stood beside the creamer station shaking out her arms and neck like a boxer before round one, muttering at a blueberry muffin. That was the whole offense. I watched her with the glazed devotion of a cat studying a ceiling fan. Then a voice rose from somewhere deep in my psyche, a basement tenant I had long ignored, and delivered its bulletin.

“Keep your eye on this one, Jones! I believe she may be about to turn into a gruddle-poke, or something.”

Meet the Gruddle-Poke, Micronesia’s Least Favorite Hybrid

If the word gruddle-poke means nothing to you, you have plainly skipped the northern atolls, and I envy you. Picture a gruddle bug (a beetle with a grievance) crossed with a land-roaming poke-fish (a perch that learned to walk and now lives perpetually in a state of resenting every step it takes). Now hand the offspring a mortgage, a temper, and a taste for the ankles of the innocent. In the northern territories these creatures rank somewhere between monsoon season and a surprise visit from the in-laws. Villages hold meetings about them. The meetings almost always go badly.

So you can imagine what the muttering woman became in my mind. A gruddle-poke transformation carries a person from mildly irritable to mandibles-and-scales in the time it takes to ask whether the muffin contains nuts. I had studied the early symptoms: the loosened shoulders, the spiritual commerce with baked goods. Worry was too small a word for what rose in me. This was terror, glossy and full-fat, a whipped cream of pure alarm, and it left my mouth as a scream pitched somewhere between a kettle and a goose.

I bolted for the exit. Dignity stayed behind, face-down in the pretzel display. I wasn’t about to stick around to witness the carnage a newly morphed gruddle-poke is known to rend, especially when its first instinct is to test out the lethality of its newly formed limbs on whatever happens to be screaming nearby.

The Man With Two Dead Coffees

Panic has terrible aim. At the threshold I struck another customer chest-first, and the two large coffees he had bought just seconds before left his hands in a near perfect parabola, rising toward the pressed-tin ceiling like twin brown comets before returning to Earth in a hot, expanding bloom. He turned the color of a boiled ham. He began to shout.

“Sorry!” I shouted back. “No time! Gruddle-poke transformation in progress! Flee the area!”

“You son of a bitch!” came the reply. “I’ll kick your gruddle-poke-in’ ass, ya bastard!”

Observe his priorities. Behind him a metamorphosis was brewing that had been known to empty entire villages, and he wanted to discuss lattes. One look told me he had never set foot in Micronesia. A man who understands what a gruddle-poke can do to a strip mall does not stop to haggle over beverages.

I reached my car. Doors locked, engine running, curb abandoned, and then the man launched himself onto my hood like a pancake flipped by a furious short-order cook. His face mashed against the glass. “You owe me two coffees! Get out of the car!” He had escaped the gruddle-poke. I had not escaped him.

I weighed my options, which numbered exactly one. The pedal went to the floor. He stayed on the hood, a man welded to a griddle, and my windshield began to come apart under his boots, each kick landing like a mallet on a cutlet. Glass went from clear to crazed to cobweb. You know the sound a freezer tray makes when the ice lets go? Scale that up to the size of a Buick.

On the left I spotted a service alley, the sort with a dumpster for every dream. I swung in. I stopped, climbed out, and shot him with the .38 revolver I carry on my person for exactly this category of emergency. (The cartridge debuted in 1898, fourteen years ahead of the Oreo cookie, and it has been closing out disagreements ever since.) I keep it handy in case I ever meet a fully matured gruddle-poke. A man has to be ready.

He slid off the hood. His shouting downshifted into grunts, then breaths, then the long, soft sigh of a fellow settling into the nap he had needed all along. I let him sleep. Courtesy costs nothing. I climbed back into the car and rolled out of the alley with one eye on the mirror, scanning for any gruddle-poke jogging after me with its mandibles out.

Remorse, if it was coming, had missed the bus. My pulse had barely moved. Panic had spent its entire budget two miles earlier, and what remained was the flat calm of a pantry after a flood.

“Harvey the Party” Answers on the Second Ring

Driving in circles tightens a man like a drum. After twenty minutes of lost bearings and rearview paranoia I needed a pressure valve, and my thumb found the one contact in my phone whose entire personality serves that function. Harvey Rankle. “Harvey the Party”, to the whole town.

“Yo, yo, yo! Wassup? Who’s this? Wassup? Yo!”

“It’s Jones. You would not believe the day I’ve had. I need to unwind. You feel like hitting up a peeler joint, or what?”

“Yo, yo, Jones! You know me and my ways. I is down and I is game, Jonesy boy! Swing by and pick me up.”

Harvey stands four-foot-eleven in his lucky boots and fills a room the way a firecracker fills a mailbox. He waited outside his front door as I pulled up, surveyed my spiderwebbed windshield with the quiet respect of a man who appreciates a good day, and climbed in.

“Wore my lucky blue shirt!” he announced. “Tonight I feast!”

“You always do, Harvey,” I said. “Shirt or no shirt, the ladies go wild for you.”

Club Super-Poon and the Economics of Appetite

We drove to Club Super-Poon on East Gerber Boulevard. You know the place. The bass line reaches your sternum before you reach the door, and the neon sign spells the name with one letter dead and another flickering incessantly, a flaw the owners refuse to repair on principle. Inside, the joint was rocking. Dancers everywhere, lights the color of cough syrup, a floor sticky enough to hold a conversation with your shoes, and the unmistakable funk of spilled beer and fog machine.

Unknown to the bouncers, Harvey had smuggled in a bottle under his shirt: Harvey’s Homemade Kickaboo Boost Juice. The label was lettered in what I believe was crayon. The recipe is a state secret held by one man and his dentist. I have watched that liquid strip paint off of cinder blocks. Two swigs and Harvey enters a condition I can only call mad-man city, population Harvey.

Within minutes the women gathered around him like pigeons on a dropped croissant. I know this film. I have sat through its premiere many times. On Kickaboo, Harvey’s heart goes to market and his judgment stays home, and he proposes (loudly, on one knee, with total sincerity) to whatever stands closest. I have attended his engagements to a mannequin, a mailbox, and two men from a plumbing supply firm. Once it was an ear of sweet corn at a funeral reception, and the corn showed more composure than the widow. Here is the safety briefing, as promised: when Harvey reaches for the bottle, locate the nearest exit and surrender any produce you may be carrying.

I grabbed the nearest dancer who looked acceptable and delivered my standard line.

“Hey baby, I’ve got money. Give me the love.”

We retired to a private room at the back. I laid a hundred-dollar bill on the table beside a line of blow, a transaction as tidy as a restaurant check. She stripped to one song. Another hundred, another line. She danced to the next song. Then we got down to the dirty business, and somebody got fed that afternoon, and for once the chef was not Harvey.

Afterward I cleaned up, wandered back into the bar proper, and found no sign of him. Knowing Harvey, I trusted him to land on his feet, probably in some stranger’s wedding photos.

The Check Arrives at 5:41 PM

The bill, you understand, had been printed hours earlier. Half an hour, I had told my wife. A quick run to the coffee shop for a doughnut and a coffee. Five hours had passed, give or take a gunshot. And my wife possesses an instrument no laboratory has ever measured. She detects, by scent alone, the whereabouts of a man’s pinky finger across the previous afternoon. Mine would be stinky. Soap would only lodge a weak objection. She once identified a cheese I ate at a funeral three counties away, down to the month it was cut.

In her own good time she would also wonder where two hundred of her dollars and her entire stash of powder had gone. A man can outrun a gruddle-poke. This was a different species of predator, one that waits at the bottom of the plate.

Which returns us to the hallway. The key in my hand, the brass cold as a butcher’s scale. Every story eventually has to meet somebody’s spouse, and mine waits behind this door the way a sommelier waits behind a cellar wall, ready to swirl the air, sniff, and name the vintage: Monday, blow, a dancer with a floral name, one-point-four miles from home.

I turn the key. The hinges announce me. She crosses the carpet with one palm turned upward, the way a waiter does when the evening is over and the arithmetic begins, and her nostrils open like two small cathedral doors. Behind her the kitchen light hums. Somewhere in the apartment a smoke detector chirps once, as if to warn me.

You have eaten every course of this day beside me, friend. The doughnut, the pretzels, the coffee with too much sugar, none of which I ever tasted. So you tell me: what does a man say to a woman who can smell the whole afternoon on his hands?