THOMAS MUNDT

THIRTEEN DUDES NAMED ORLANDO


Thirteen dudes named Orlando are skinning fresh halibut right now, each representing his own pushpin on a map of Earth. Some of the Orlandos live in towns and villages and hamlets but most live in cities, residing in studio apartments others find sad and shrinking but the Orlandos consider palatial. They uniformly believe dusk to be the cruelest time of day, the way it drowns the sun in the black waters of the horizon.

I.
One of the Orlandos is Orlando Cepeda, but not the Orlando Cepeda you’re thinking about. This Orlando Cepeda lives in West Palm Beach and while he did play baseball in high school, his madre insisted he’d be a better jazz pianist and made him quit the club halfway through his sophomore year. He is neither a jazz pianist nor a baseball player these days, hasn’t so much as looked at a job posting in the last eight months. He is currently in his friend Raymond’s kitchen, baked off his ass on Maui Times Kush and dragging a very-sharp blade along a fish’s bone structure, starting at the gill plate and following its spine until he reaches the tail.

II.
Orlando Dupree is a sous chef at Xerxes, a Persian seafood restaurant in Rochester, New York. He has just been assigned the task of preparing the Lowrimore family's entire meal and his head is crunching numbers while his hands cut. It is becoming increasingly difficult for him to keep the number of fillets, lemons, and garlic cloves he needs straight in his mind because his thoughts are with his neighbor Don, who is recovering at St. Luke's Presbyterian after being assaulted with a tire iron in a CVS parking lot early this morning.

III.
Eleven-year old Orlando Peña isn't so much skinning fresh halibut as he is jamming a Phillips-head screwdriver into a still-living fish, carving out enough space in its side in which to fit a small explosive. Once he has a cherry bomb securely lodged inside his victim, he most certainly intends to light its fuse and obliterate the very-unlucky piscis in the presence of Mrs. Blum, his neighbor from across-the-way.

IV and V.
Two of the Orlandos (Thigpen and Baker-Meinhoff, respectively) are students at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago, Illinois. They are standing at adjacent workstations, immersed in their current Seafood Basics assignments. As Chef Randy lectures from the front of the room, they independently calculate the odds of two Orlandos from Western Manitoba moving to the same Midwestern city with the same aspirations of landing Second City auditions, only to enroll in the same culinary arts program eighteen months later (and after a few near-callbacks and series of never-stood-a-chances). When they discuss the same over slices at Lou Malnati's after class, they settle upon a billion-to-one.

VI.
Former NBA power forward Orlando Woolridge has invited his friend and former teammate, Bill Laimbeer, over for dinner and is trying out a new seafood recipe he picked up watching Barefoot Contessa. He hopes the meal will help the two mend fences and move past last month's ugly pool party incident. He also secretly hopes he will be reimbursed for the destroyed barbecue pit.

VII.
A self-described romantic, a shirtless T. Orlando Jenks, Esq. is in the kitchen of the Lower East Side efficiency he keeps for the sole purpose of banging his paralegal Kiersten, preparing a post-coital snack to Phil Collins' No Jacket Required.

VIII.
The less said about the pile of putrid fish carcasses threatening to consume Orlando With An O's rumpus room, the better.

IX.
Belgian rapper Lil' Orlando has grown tired of the "thug" label that has prefaced much of his career, so today he is participating in a cooking demonstration with model Ingrid Parewijck on Geraardsbergen Public Access Television, in an attempt to soften his image and increase his marketability to Females Aged Thirty-Five to Fifty. Proving that you can take a man out of the streets but not vice-versa, Lil' Orlando becomes enraged after he catches Ms. Parewijck adding too much fennel to the bouillabaisse, threatening to toss her sorry ass into the Hoëgne River in front of a live studio audience.

X.
Orlando "Big E" Smalls swears he was just trying to do some prep work for this afternoon's fish fry and slipped. No, he would never do anything to hurt himself. Not with the baby due in June. Yes, he should get those wrists looked at right away. And yes, he really should be more careful.

XI.
There is absolutely nothing Whitney can say to her youngest son, Orlando, Jr., to make him feel better right now. He is inconsolable as he examines the mangled fish on the plate, prying its gills back with the dull knife that started all this trouble in the first place, wondering how he managed to botch simple Wikipedia instructions this bad. She wants to tell him that it doesn't matter, that she will still have the best Mother's Day ever, that she will always remember how hard he tried to make his Mama proud with his fancy cooking. But she doesn't tell him any of that, knowing that her words will only drive him to sprint into the living room and take up with that fucking Xbox for the foreseeable future. So, Whitney simply plants a soft, dry kiss on Orlando, Jr.'s head before reaching for the drawer with the take-out menus.

XII.
Tony Orlando, while technically a dude, is more accurately a five-year old shelter cat whose weight has recently ballooned to over twenty-six pounds. He is curled up on the ottoman in his owners' living room, in a deep sleep. He is having a dream in which he obtains a small business loan from JP Morgan/Chase, one that he uses to lease a storefront in a gentrified neighborhood and fulfill his dream of owning and operating Tony Orlando's Quality Meats and Cheeses. He is now wearing a white lab coat, humming as he de-bones today's shipment. He discusses the prospect of socialized medicine with Mrs. Kumar until the vacuum starts up and he's just a morbidly-obese tabby again, yawning and stretching his legs against the loveseat.

XIII.
James "Orlando" McAfee is a native Floridian, now living on Raspberry Island, Alaska. Today he is in nearby Kodiak, getting his picture taken with Kodiak Fish and Game Advisory Committee Chairman Oliver Holm. A staff photographer from The Kodiak Daily Mirror is snapping shot after shot of the duo working a two-man crosscut saw across the great belly of The Largest Halibut Caught in Kodiak, Alaska in Nearly Forty-Five Years. Two days later, when one of the photos graces the front page of The Mirror, Mr. McAfee will deny his wife's allegation that he was fighting tears and instead blame seasonal allergies for the picture's wistful, glassy eyes.