AMERICAN PARANOID RESTAURANT
Caleb Hildenbrandt
(CC) BY-NC-SA-3.0, 2013
Also by Caleb Hildenbrandt:
This Is Not the End
Life Is Fragile, Blah Blah Blah
American Paranoid Restaurant and other stories
Be admonished, my son: much study is a weariness to the flesh. Let us have a conclusion to the whole matter. In, out, gone and done.
Steve gestured at me:
“I’m gonna poop in his mouth when we’re done.”
“It’s true.” I said. “We discussed this previously.”
The woman Steve addressed stared on nonplussed. A cook at the periphery of the patio looked over and asked us which strain he was using.
“‘One-Hit Wonder.’” Steve told him, and made a toking gesture with his fingers.
The woman gazed impassively on.
“So how long have you been playing guitar?” The cook asked.
“Thirteen years.” Steve said, and hunched forward. He started to smile at the memory before his mouth froze and he sat, leaning over his lap and with a grin on his face. His head pivoted until he faced me, and then he let out a scream, shrieking in monotone without any change of facial expression from the tight, open-mouthed grin. I stared back at him until he stopped. He laughed and turned his head forward again, this time easily and naturally.
“Since I was eight.” He said.
I had been sitting on the front patio with drink in hand. He had come out and sprawled in one of the rattan chairs, one foot on the edge of the table, the other against the railing surrounding the patio, pushing first against one, then the other, back and forth.
“Need to find some good weed,” he said.
“Eh?” I couldn’t hear over the roar of the traffic.
“Weed. Need to find some.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and cupped my hand to my ear apologetically.
He got up from his chair and sauntered over.
“Mar-i-jua-na.” He said, as if to a child.
“Sorry.”
He smiled easily and slouched back into his seat.
“Can you get some?” I asked.
He scrunched up his face and nodded in small oscillations, mouthing
“Oh yeah.”
We admired the women passing by. He worked at the bar. He lived down the street. His name was Steve. He had slept with half the women here. Did I want another drink?
“Sure.”
He picked up both my glass and his own and carried them inside. My drink came back before he did, carried by a girl I had seen there previously, who had mixed my drinks for me but who did not, I thought, yet recognize me. When Steve returned to the patio he asked what I thought of her.
“Not bad at all.”
“She likes it in the butt.”
“That a fact?”
“Yeah. I’ve slept with, like, half the people here. I really need to find some weed.”
Inside a group of women gathered at a table and spoke loud enough that Steve and I could hear them through the plate glass that separated them from us. On of the women bent over to pick her purse off the floor and her thin skirt moved across her body. The hem of tight underwear bifurcated each buttcheek, rendering her a quad-lobed Callipygos.
“She a dude?” Steve asked.
We both looked more closely. It was difficult to say. I recalled that in parts of the world there existed people groups in which a genetic mutation had resulted in a concentration of intersexuals sufficient to form their own fragile subculture. Perhaps the cleft chin and muscular back of the skirt-wearing person in front of me was nothing more than a genotypical expression of an ethnicity-wide tendency toward androgyny and ambiguity.
“Look at that.”
A woman walked past us in a sleeveless yellow dress. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, or early forties, but from the rear, as we now saw her, she could easily have passed for half the age that became apparent in a close examination of her eyes and hair.
“Yeah.”
“Nice ass.”
“It’s not bad.”
“I’ve slept with her too.”
I nodded, unsurprised.
“She’s director of HR,” he said, “and she smokes weed.”
“Ah.” I said.
“With the result that this particular wining-and-dining establishment--” He did a quick head-roll to emphasize his words “--is completely free of mandatory drug testing. If we did,” he added as an afterthought, “everyone in here would be fired.”
“I remember one of the waiters once saying something to the same effect.”
“Yup.”
It had been one morning when I had come in early for a cup of coffee. Behind the counter, two waiters poured themselves mimosas and the three of us settled down to the business of getting past nine o'clock without incident. Abruptly, another waiter wearing street clothes entered from the outside, swinging the door opening wildly and planting his hands on the counter to assist the hoisting of his legs over it.
“What's neeeewwwww, guyees?”
I cannot recall the face of the man, but he may well have been Steve.
“Not much man.” The female waiter already behind the bar prepared him a mimosa. “What's new with you? Doesn't your shift not start for like another six hours?”
They began talking and laughing all at once and I stayed for a little while longer.
We both swiveled in our chairs before he spoke up again:
“Hey, wanna hear some really offensive jokes? What’s wrong with microwaving a baby? I dunno man, but I just got a boner. What’s the difference between a baby and an onion? No one cries when you cut up the baby. You wanna know what sucks about being a black Jew? You have to stand in the back of the gas chambers. What’s brown and white and rolls around on the beach? A Mexican fighting over a chicken leg with a seagull.”
Was he modulating the offensiveness of his jokes in a gradual diminuendo, the strident repulsiveness of his punchlines fading off like the brass-and-percussion tocsin of some 19th-century French symphony?
It was after this that he took me to the back room and the enclosed porch behind. We wove our way through the kitchens and pantries before reaching the fresh air and shade shared by the cook and the stolid woman, both dressed in the white, double-breasted jackets worn by chefs. When we left we wove through another series of rooms, this time private dining areas and what appeared to be quiet sitting rooms. They looked like perfect miniatures blown up to full-size, like reliquaries turned into chapels turned into cubbyholes, like dollhouse parlors from a hundred years ago, like boudoirs, like harems, like brothels.
“I’m going up to play in a few minutes.” Steve said.
He was alone with a guitar under the spotlight. The bartender who liked it in the butt stepped from behind the counter and began snapping pictures with a Polaroid. I wondered if he had directed her to bring out my drink solely so that I could put a face to a name as he described his conquests.
Earlier he had emerged from the restroom, and, upon returning, had placed on the table behind his elbow and facing me a small white plastic box, smaller than a canister of film. I gestured and mouthed What’s that? and he explained in elaborate pantomime that he had found it in the restroom. Later he dove beneath the table to hide the box, sliding it under one of the feet of the central pedestal, and I held his drinks to keep them from sloshing as I felt him move between my knees. Now he was on stage, singing, striking the guitar like he sought to scrape some offending layer of corrosion from its strings.
After he was done he asked me how I liked it.
&
nbsp; “It was good, man, it was good.”
“Really? Did you listen to it?”
“It was… it was some Inexorable Combustion, right?” I said, remembering what he had told me before he went up. “And some Great Divorce?”
“Did you listen to the lyrics?”
I looked hard at him before gesturing expansively.
“I’m drunk, man.”
“It’s okay.” He said. “Did people seem… into it?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, nodding my head in small oscillations. “They all definitely seemed into it.”
“Good, good. ‘Cause it’s not really the kind of stuff, you know, that goes with a place like this.”
He leaned in.
“The lyrics in the Combustion one were about getting eaten alive. You know, not the kind of thing these people listen to. They're not aware.”
“They were cool.” I said.
“Want some weed?”
“Sure.”
“Now?
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
I wandered around the bar. Jazz quartets and acoustic duos came and went. Steve was in and out, between the inner private rooms and the outer bar, which was filling to capacity. I watched the bartenders. The female would take two shakers, one in each hand, and raise them above her head to shake them, expertly, with nary a movement below the shoulders, but with just a bit of inexorable momentum