I think this fat bald man is now yelling “miss” at my girlfriend. He is talking to himself. Now he is talking to some else.
“Welcome to the Esperanto Café ha ha ha. They have really good chocolate cake,” he says to someone seated at the counter. The person seated at the counter laughs in response.
He walks outside and talks to two people seated on a bench. He walks back inside and sits down. He’s sitting in the corner opposite from me. He’s really fat and his head has a lot of rolls. Now that I look not so many rolls but some.
Now with his arm resting on his chair he talks to himself.
“This guy reminds me of The Shining.”
My girlfriend, Laura, might be about to cry. She might be about to cry because she can’t get her resume to meet her aesthetic standards. Her face is flushed anyway. Which is funny because I’ve never known her to have a high barometer for appearances.
Which explains why we are dating. I want to die.
Tom Waits is playing from café’s speakers. The speakers playing Tom Waits are posted in every corner of the room. Tom Waits is playing from all of them.
“The cat got fat, my girlfriend’s cat,” the bald guy tells the guy working behind the counter, who my girlfriend told me is hot. I believe her. He is hot.
“I’m so excited for my friend David to come visit us,” I tell my girlfriend. She isn’t going to cry. That makes me glad because it makes me feel sad when she cries. It's only natural that I should feel happy when she doesn't cry.
“Some guys find me attractive when I’m drunk,” this fat and bald man says. “He said ‘I’m on speed.’ I said ‘Speed it up.’ He bit my lip and smacked it in his jaws. I said ‘What was that for.’”
“Let me tell you something, when I lived with my girlfriend, every time she turned on me, that cat gave me solace. But then that cat got fat.”
“He said it was really philosophical,” the hot barista says. I wish I were the hot barista. The hot barista probably doesn’t wish he were me. This as I look at my reflection in the window and make a face that my girlfriend calls a “rapper face.” I make this rapper face whenever I look at my reflection. I am now looking at my reflection. I want to die and then “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star starts playing from every speaker. Then I don’t want to die as much for the most part.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this reader will tentatively point out that the story's surface-level irony mandates that the story's narrator is far hotter in all the ways--far fleshier, far more personal, far better-made--than the story's superficially "hot" barista, who acts, in the final analysis, only as a foil for the narrator's more original, more fully lovable better-developed personal magnetism, which might be described as superlatively hot if that could ever do him justice, which it couldn't.
ReplyDeleteAnd to suggest a reading of the Laura figure's apparently obscure motives by describing a mechanism in this character that causes her to become doubly-sensitive about aesthetic standards in public--even almost to the point of tears--precisely because this oddball can't be bothered with them for her own sake. At work, perhaps, is a fairly straightforward internalization of social expectations which are perceived to run counter to this character's (notably--to this woman's) personal proclivities. This story offers evidence that self-contradictory behavior might mushroom out of such circumstances, leaving a surface-impression of illogic bordering, ultimately, maybe, on madness. This text presents a relatively benign person, but when we look at her more closely, we ask ourselves: is Laura doomed?
I want to die.
thank you for your comments on my ebook
ReplyDeletewho do you think will break who's heart?
ReplyDeletewhose*
ReplyDeletei don't know
ReplyDeletefuck me
ReplyDelete