Now I’m at Heinemann’s for breakfast, I order breakfast, an Omlette and decline the toast, because I’m gluten intolerant, and as usual, they suggest that I don’t eat the potatoes as well, thinking I’m on the Atkins’s Diet, but I have to insist that “YES, I WANT THE FUCKING POTATOES.” A woman sits next to me, and she’s on her cell phone THE ENTIRE TIME SHE’S LOOKING ON THE MENU, ordering, one call after another. This is her office. I am now eating breakfast in SOMEBODY’S FUCKING OFFICE! She holds the phone aside while she orders, she’s trying to order a CHEESEBURGER at 10:30am, but they say they can’t start making lunch until 11. She argues, she pleads, and I think her strategy would be to argue for a half hour, but there is someone waiting for her on the phone. The waitress goes to check if the cook will do it, comes back, says, okay, the woman gives the waitress some MORE OF HER TIME. “Do you have a low-carb bun?” she asks? The waitress says no, the woman sighs, dismissing her; you just lost a customer, and forget about that TIP! But she’s back to the phone, now talking to her mechanic, they have her car, the AC doesn’t come on fast enough. It works but it don’t come on FAST ENOUGH. Then onto another call, she just found these low carb chocolate chip cookies, sugar free, only 6 carbs… I try to shut her out; I try to shut her out… I concentrate on the music playing, MUZAK, oh no, why did I do That? It’s now going right through my skull, not even bothering with my ears. I can just FEEL the PAIN of these musicians who are playing this, or if they happen to enjoy playing this crap, the pain of their childhoods that made them into a person that could play this, happily. I struggle to shift my attention away from it, back to the woman. She’s on another call. “No, no, no,” she says, “it’s all sugar and carbs!” Then she’s talking about her upcoming vacation somewhere, she’s worried about it, she’s afraid there will be nothing to do. “I just can’t sit and look at the water.”
This is the most horrible dining experience I’ve had in awhile, and I’m only here because earlier I went to Himmler’s Bagels and sat down, and no one waited on me or even looked at me. I just sat and wrote in my notebook for half an hour, until I got sick of hearing the TV and left. I guess I should have asked someone, but I was already in a bad mood about the job. Maybe it’s just me. I’ll go into a place and sit at a table writing in my notebook and the waitperson will say, “Do you need something?” as if it would be okay to just go and sit and not buy anything. I don’t know, maybe it would be? Okay, then two guys eating there got up and left, and then the one guy looked at me like I was a circus clown sitting there or something. Do I look that weird? Do I have MINNEAPOLIS written all over my face, tattooed? Or something, maybe I should get a #4 Packers jersey, just to fit in.
Back at the restaurant, that woman’s VOICE, it just burns through everything, her conversation: “What he does for a living—it’s—not that great…” There is some quality to her voice that’s taking me down a spiral path downward, to HELL, into the television sound coming from the next room. Commercials for tomorrow’s programming, an entire afternoon of “Judge” shows: Judge Judy and Judge Montel Springer, Judge Ratchet and Judge Hatchet and Judge Hang-em-High, Judge Reinhold, and Judge Speen, Judge Rice, Judge Dancing With The Stars, Judge Extreme and Judge bin Laden, Judge Carbohydrate…
It’s too much, I can’t get out of there fast enough, and I stop by the CVS Pharmacy and buy some Peanut Butter Schnapps, because right now I hate myself.
