Saturday, November 11, 2017

Good, the man said, cracking two eggs, one at a time on a saucer, easing them into the pan, yolks complete.  Goodly good.  The burger he'd put on a plate, into the toaster oven, set at broil, low.  Turning from the eggs he remembered now, explaining the quiet, that he'd unplugged the toaster the night before.  He had told the woman proprietor at the local market that the new sausage purveyor was not nearly as good as the old one, politely, as she stacked beer cases near the front, having been rearranging the store since one that afternoon.  His stomach hurt vaguely, sipping the second run green tea he had chilled in a  wine bottle from yesterday, and as he sat at the coffee table looking into the macbook pro he sprinkled powdered ginger into soda water in the mug along with a squeeze of lemon and took in a zantac.  He'd picked up the night shift from the kid.  At least it wasn't as cold as the previous day.


There was a busboy once.  Don Eden.  Built low and broad, from El Salvador.  "The ego is the problem," Don Eden would say, and they both would chuckle.


And this truly is what a writer will come to discover.  And it might well make him a bit queasy.  But it is something he has known within for as long as he can remember, and it is a matter of awakening to it.  Where the knowledge came from, from Big Bang, or something at the cellular, molecular, or atomic level, who knows.  Perhaps the knowledge could be facilitated by good parenting, of a teacherly sort.

But every time the man went out, this is what he saw in the city.  Ego.  And when at night he'd mustered the energy and the courage to go out with his shopping bags for groceries, wine, soda water, green tea and other supplies, some of them medicinal in nature, such as immodium and toothpaste, and looked in the through the windows at bars and restaurants, and encountered people gathered in their little groups, he could not but help seeing it.  And while he wished to have people, pretty girls, yoga people, to talk to, friendly encounters over similar interests, while he wished dearly to be, say, at a bar where he was familiar, he knew it was really not for him to participate in such things, strangely, maybe sadly enough.  But he did derive simple happy animal pleasure going to the local wine shop for an inexpensive Beaujolais.  Brave Sir Bobby, he would say to his friend behind the counter.  All wine people, he regarded as a sort of faux Arthurian type.

Then he would hopefully be able to walk back with his bags full and remember the somber thoughts, the observations that had come to him, but as he ate, these proved to be no longer of the moment, fleeting, elusive, though he knew he had stored them somewhere in his brain and sensed he would later be able to remember them if they were worthwhile.  The main thing was to have the observations.  This was the key thing, having them, and knowing them to be tested, true, and real.

He had to work, he had to show up, for Saturday night at the Dying Gaul.  The shift would be shared with an agreeable person, a young woman, quite pleasant, from Mongolia, who was gracious, efficient, and had a deeper understanding of hospitality that puzzled him almost.  And soon he would be pressed to get ready.  But as ever as he woke, it seemed he was already thinking of the people who might come in.  They might come in early, alone, not in the frame of mind of being able to entertain themselves.  Or they might come in late, after he'd been busting his butt all night with dinner service and drinks for those waiting for tables, thinking that now was the party, just as the man had dragged himself through to the closing of the kitchen and the last desserts and coffee.  There were the people who would come, almost specifically, to see him, and the rest of the staff regarded these people as monsters which he had created and was eternally responsible for, in his effort to build up a steady clientele over the however many years he'd been there.  The thought of them unsettled them, for they were the kind of people who'd been taken over by the mainstream sense of human usefulness, polite, well-mannered, certainly, but feeders of ego.

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