“What’s our gas situation? And by that I mean: you stink.” –Jack
Diners are not all exactly alike anyway, but the ones with some shiny silver surface on the outside seem to absorb or filter cosmic rays in a specific and unique manner. I am always a bit tickled at rolling up to whatever local eatery, ideally in the parking lot of the motel, and seeing the reflective surface gleam, knowing full well that it has deflected away only a bit of the vitamin D and whatever thin cord of sanity binds us together in the ring we trace around the sun. This one has a high staircase, so much the better to toss someone down, and the requisite ancient gumball machines, un-refilled because not requiring refilling for decades. I am alone to begin with, as I often prefer, so that I can get the lay of the land, including all exits and the position of the kitchen cutlery. As for the latter, food is prepared behind a (albeit open) portal, making knife throwing less likely, and as for the former, I think I could get a chair through the window beside my booth with relative alacrity.
I am greeted at the door by a woman who is at least a full foot taller than me, but unlike many people of that stature, has not adjusted her posture to accommodate the expectations of all us shorties, and so instead leans forward on the standard wooden cash register podium to look me straight in the eyes. But boy, she looked right through me, and handed off three menus to another woman who was as much shorter than I as my host was taller. Being looked right through at that hour, in the mental state of an urban survivalist with a penchant for the sanguine and uncanny, was a sensation both unpleasant and foreboding, though not wholly novel in this line of work. The diminutive server smiled a gigantic, gummy smile and gestured, with both hands, to her sides, suggesting, I thought, that the decision of which end of the diner I’d end up at was mine. I slid to the side to clear the podium and the greeter, who just kept on staring, even in the absence of a me to stare through. The server nodded at me and raised one eyebrow, which I took to mean that I ought to, and thus I did, peer at the greeter in profile and then slowly rotate away to follow her sight line out the window of the place onto the mostly empty parking lot and the gas station on the other side of long-grassed berm. I didn’t see anything there, but it got darker for an instant, like a lightening strike in reverse, or a cloud which covered the entirety of the area for just a moment. A duck took off in flight at the dark flash, which is the best I can describe it, for lack of a clearer term.
When I turned back to the server she still had her hands up, which I had clearly misinterpreted as she more recommended than asked: “would you like to take a look around?” It hadn’t really occurred to me one way or the other, as most looking at a diner is done in one of only a few contexts: surreptitiously, from behind a newspaper or a coffee mug, or immediately upon entering, a practice in which I usually engage but had been robbed of by the intensity of the first person I encountered within, or, if, and only if, one is a local, who then can look via a distrustful swivel of the head at each new person entering, particularly though not exclusively if the roster of regulars has already arrived and is accounted for. No one swiveled when I walked in, and as there was absolutely nothing remarkable to see regarding the relatively Spartan décor, the invitation could only be to survey the assumedly local clientele, to drink in the human ambiance. I cannot, in reflecting back, figure how I thought this a reasonable thing to do, but I had already left one person frozen in space, possibly controlling the exterior dimmer switch with her mind, and so it seemed equally strange to pass up the offer.
To the left, the second booth from the door had the requisite elderly couple, though it was encouraging that they were both masc-presenting and holding hands over the table. Each man turned the page of his newspaper with one hand and took drags off of the shared cigarette in the ashtray on the window ledge. They would occasionally look up at one another, but appeared not to be speaking. Whatever their arrangement, the familiarity between them was abiding and evident, and their movements synchronous. They each wore short-sleeved, collared shirts with brown stripes of different thickness. Each was silver-haired, and it was not immediately obvious how handsome they had ever been, but these “golden years” suited them as well as they could anyone. The long bar spanned the length of the place, and at the far left end connected to the back wall, a woman of indeterminate age sat on a rotating stool, spinning herself back and forth at 30 degree angles as she, at regular, methodical intervals, wrote feverishly on a yellow legal pad, looked furtively out the window behind her, then spun back and took bites out of one of the various small dishes and ramekins which surrounded her pad. More than anything else, I wondered what could be on this menu which would make sense of such an array of dishes, but the thought to ask what she was having escaped me as soon as I had it, so generally scattered and enervated were my mental faculties. The thoughts seemed to leave me as soon as they arrived, and the dark flashed again through the front window, which was as off-putting as interesting, as it made me wince in anticipation each time, a tiny storm through my prefrontal cortex passing nauseatingly quickly.
From behind the window, rather than the beleaguered set of cooks in stained white was one rather startlingly attractive—in the sense of being interesting to look at, if not even difficult to look away from—femme, clad in a salmon knit top—totally bizarre apparel to don before the flat iron—and jeans. She had a slight “S” shape to her, back gently arched and hips protruded, and set each dish on the window with a demure lilt to her wrists, coming around from the kitchen side at intervals to add a garnish or some other flourish. Her hair was close-cropped, the work of a Mad Max post-apocalyptic barber, to be sure. Just like the others, she did not look my way, but equally gave no sense of ignoring me specifically, a feeling which is somehow even further displacing. I was absolutely that: out of place, out of light.
The waitress had dropped her hands and gently prodded me with a menu, she clearly had had a spot in mind all along, or else divined one as I gawked around half the place. I would do any further surveying from the comfort of an oversized booth, though as we strolled between the rows, I watched the writer fire a salt shaker almost the length of the bar to a bald man in costumey business attire, thick red braces attached to blue pinstripe pants, jacket slung over the stool beside him. His left hand was braced on a fork, as if holding down the thick, gravy-slathered cutlet below it for fear it might escape, the right cupped slightly in anticipation of the salt, which he caught, though a bit must have jumped out of the shaker upon impact, as he gave a shake over his right shoulder before snowing his plate and sending it back. The man three seats to his right grunted, and spun out to use the facilities. I did not see him again in my time at the diner, other than presumably his feet when I went to wash my hands some twenty minutes later.
I sat and drank my miserable coffee, refilled with a giant gummy smile like clockwork, its hot misery flowing through me, and I sat, drinking in the aura of the place and the rays from space, fighting to avoid looking back over my shoulder, knowing that the dark would flash again and my stomach would lurch in response. The tension was building, despite (or because) the greeter finally disappeared from her post, and the s-shaped cook receded into the kitchen. The only unmentioned person of note in the place was the man directly in front of me, who instructed the server that he was finished, but would not be leaving anytime soon, and proceeded into a barrage of lip-smacking and sucking, voluminous enough that it reverberated off of the walls and directly into the bald businessman’s shiny pate. Whatever accord existed between these people, it could not possibly last, the diner strained against the cosmic rays, and the businessman had to be the first one to succumb. The server came to refill the brown crayon water before me, and I gripped the mug to feel the heat as it rose back to capacity. The rate of the smacking—really well beyond obliviousness; this was either a serious medical condition or designed to instigate some kind of violence—remained steady as the businessman’s dropping of his fork on the ersatz china plate and staring at the ceiling increased in frequency. The server attempted to screen me from the incipient display with gums alone, and preceded to inquire if “y’all were in town for business,” but I really didn’t have time for small talk, and she had to know that.
The writer scratched away furiously, and I could think only of Ally Sheedy a few years after her most famous role, perhaps crafting the next Great American Vampire Novel. The businessman had reached his limit, though to be fair, he appeared to reach the limit of the cutlet as well. There is a balance in places like these, people’s ankles are connected by the same abovementioned threads which keep us sane, the same ones which so impress, awe, and frighten us when we see them weathered, frayed, or broken in others. The businessman had a few different moves available here, and as the clearest one from where I sat was directly to the neighboring table, I slid to the end of the bench in case I needed to react quickly. This is not an action movie, and I had no pretense to unnecessarily intervening nor defending myself, I mostly didn’t want to get any food or bodily fluids on my one clean jacket. Take from that what you will. Another move would be to the restroom, possibly to rescue its current tenant or take a splash of water to the face before departing. He could depart directly, also, as he likely had a tab running at the place, but because he had left his own jacket, that seemed improbable. The route he chose, drumming the fingers on his right hand as he traversed its length, was along the counter and to the writer, next to whom he deposited himself, wagging his finger in the air and gesturing out the window behind them, which again flashed in shadow, causing me to look wildly for the giant woman, who had returned to her original post, upright and vigilant. The movement of the businessman activated some invisible pulley behind the counter, and as he moved away from me, the s-shaped cook strolled out of the kitchen with another, identical plate of food and replaced the finished one. As she again receded into the kitchen, bewitching the room with her posture, the smacking man got up as if to join the party, but instead looked directly at me, the first non-employee to register my presence, and seemed shocked that I was there, turning a bit red. I raised both eyebrows at him, expectantly, but he turned to join the party at the other end of the bar. But these pulleys and winches, especially in such small quarters are very real, and by the time he had just eclipsed the entrance to the place, one of the men from the booth arose, still holding the other’s hand, and put up his free hand in a halt motion. I did not recall him looking so hard in the domestic comfort of the booth, but this place was full up with hard looks. This was a moment of decision, everything was again in balance, but it was a balance of full extension and effort. Every occupant of that room had time to exchange a meaningful look, and the writer fired her pepper shaker down the length of the bar, to release the balance, and allow all to slacken however they might. It was decision time.
The smacking man pushed aside the hand-holding man back into his seat, and the thud of the pepper shaker on the carpeted floor was enough to snap the greeter out of her torpor. Everyone save the shoved man and myself were now standing, his partner having see-sawed up at the affront. But you must recall the throwing stairs, and the businessman had an entirely refreshed meal to which to attend, so the greeter overtook the smacking man in five great steps. The sadness and defeat painted on his face as he was led by collar and belt out the doors, opened by the proportionately large feet of the greeter, was difficult not to relate to. It was a world beyond his control, and even if he had meant harm, and I really think he did, the likelihood of its being redoubled on his own head was almost too much to bear. I gripped the edge of the table and drained the dregs of my mug. The pulley of the greeter and smacking man out the door drew the server back to my tableside, the businessman to his meal, and the writer’s head back into her work and smorgasbord of dishes. The hand-holding man see-sawed back down, and when the other man did not pop up, I looked out the window to see the smacking man stumble down the stairs. When Jack and Moist came through the door there was one longer flash of darkness as I saw the same pantomime reenacted—stared through, offered to look around, to which I am sure Jack had a witty rejoinder, and led to their waiting companion, me. Jack asked if I had seen that, by which he had to have meant the flash, but he was actually referring to some ducks outside who he claimed attacked a tired-looking man with something stuck in his teeth. More than fifteen years I’ve known this guy, and he never met a duck upon which he did not comment.
The server took our order and seemed to be screening me again, so I instinctually ducked around her to see if the s-shaped cook was about to sling a plate across the room or some such thing, but it was just the hand-holding men leaving, obviously still holding hands and lighting each other’s cigarettes. Why she did not want me to witness that, I am unsure. When she wound up the natural question: “Are you all…” I braced myself for Jack’s annoyance, but when it terminated with “magicians?” I was pleased and so was he. We assented, to Moist’s confusion, but the server was obviously pleased, maximum gums reflecting as much, and said: “That’s great! We have some things around here that could really use fixin’.”
