Eggs and Sausage

Your ordinary walk is as if you were performing some religious ceremony: you come up to my table of a morning, when you merely bring in the tea-things, as if you were advancing to the altar. You move in minuet-time: you measure every step, as if you were afraid of offending in the smallest things.

— William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, 1823

Emma’s Forty-Niner Diner sat at the corner of Heart Attack and Vine, like a half-remembered dream bleeding out under the harsh neon lights. The place had all the charm of green lipstick on a soggy cigarette butt and the class of a broken-down Ford Pinto in a junkyard. You couldn’t trust it and you sure as hell didn’t want to be around for the rear-end fireball, but you couldn’t stop coming back either. It had that kind of pull.

It was where the night’s last embers of remorse came to start out slow and fizzle out altogether like one of those bottle rocket fireworks that make a pffffft noise as the propellant burns out and the last glimmer of hope disappears. The ones that burn, burn, burn like fabulous Roman duds. Busts. Losers. Disappointments. The regulars in this dive, my fellow refugees from disconcerted affairs.

Paid a dime and only farted.

Failure to raunch.

The jingle of the bell above the door transported me back for a moment to one of those toy stores from our childhoods that sold beanbags and baseballs and marbles and roller skate keys, back when the girls threw jacks and the boys played stoopball on the stone steps of the public school at recess, but the smell of burnt coffee returned me to the present like a slap from an old lover with a porcelain doll head.

Hell, it might have been an old lover who’d brewed it.

The joint was lousy with zombies, people who wore their sleep disorders like Cub Scout merit badges, the gypsy hacks and the insomniacs in a graveyard charade, a late-night masquerade. The kind of people you meet in the darkest corners of the city, when the lights are low and the night has had enough of pretending and just given up. Beware when the so-called sagely men come limping into sight.

Behind the counter was the proprietress, Emma, the kind of blonde who could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. Ahenh. Stop me if you’ve heard that one.

Her eyes were tired, sure, but they still held the kind of sharpness that could cut a man down to size before he even knew he’d been sliced open. She was putting on a show with that goddam Bide-a-Wee-Home heart of hers, but it wasn’t for anyone here. It was mostly for herself and partly for Fred Astaire, gliding behind the counter the way Ginger Rogers had taught her how to face the music and dance.

I slid into a booth like a man with nowhere else to be. There was nowhere else for me to be. Or not. She looked over at me in that wavering light beating the pulse of the night, then back at the coffee urn, like I was just another shadow in her life. I wasn’t the first and sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.

Like Goethe says somewhere, everything near becomes distant. Great physiognomists turn into interpreters of fate. She studied the lines of my face.

Now the register rings, now the waitress sings:

Eggs and sausage and a side of toast. Coffee and a roll. Hash browns over easy. Chile in a bowl with burgers and fries. What kind of pie?

She rattled it off like she’d done it ten thousand times. And maybe she had. Certainly she had. The menu was as tired and defeated as the half-cut grubbers who eyed it. This stuff will probably kill you. Let’s do another plate.

“Yeah,” I said, leaning back in the booth and lighting a cigarette. “What kind of pie?”

She glanced at me, her eyes cold.

“The kind that kills you slow.”

I didn’t argue. I wasn’t here for the meringue. Hell, I wasn’t here for food at all. I was here because this was the only place that didn’t ask too many questions. But I must admit I felt a little uneasy when she bent down to tie the lace of my shoe.

A walleyed man in the back corner dropped a quarter into the jukebox, and the sad hum of just an old-fashioned love song filled the air. And wrapped around the music was the sound of someone promising she’d never go. You swear you’ve heard it before as it slowly rumbles on, but it was the kind of song that made you remember things you’d forgotten on purpose. Things you’d wished you could forget. I tried to ignore it. But I couldn’t. You never can. No need in bringing ’em back ’cause they’re never really gone.

Some of these days you’ll miss me honey.

The waitress — she had a name, but I couldn’t remember it — Ethel or Margo or Grace or something — moved around the diner like a phantom in a cheap dress. Woolworth’s rhinestone diamond earrings and a sideways glance.

The earrings caught the light as she shuffled past, casting fractured reflections. She didn’t know I was watching her, but I couldn’t have cared less if she did. She was a part of the ambience now. Like the cracked linoleum and the half-spilled salt shaker on the table in another melodramatic nocturnal scene.

A white-haired guy in a white shirt gave me another light. I took a drag, letting the smoke curl in my lungs like it was doing me a favour. The kind of favour that will come looking for a return on its investment in mortality in 30 years or less.

She walked by, close enough that I could smell the bourbon on her breath. Close enough that I could feel the heat of her skin, but not close enough to touch. That’s the way it always goes with women like her. Too close not to matter, never close enough to make a difference.

Her fingers brushed mine for a fraction of a second, burning into the cold caffeine in the nicotine cloud of memory.

That’s all it took.

A jolt of heat shot through me, and I damn near burned my cigarette down to the filter. She had no idea what she was doing. Hell, I wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing. But that touch — it had a way of sticking to you, like gum on a shoe.

She moved past me, her hips swaying like a dance from a dream I shouldn’t have had. I could’ve followed her. I should’ve followed her. But I stayed put. She was a riddle with no answers, a dead-end street with no exit. A cul-de-sac with Cutty Sark.

The lights flickered, and the jukebox spun another sad tune, the kind of music that made you feel like you’d been cheated on while flipping aimlessly through a discarded newspaper. The classified section offered no direction.  My waitress, my waitress, my waitress said it was comin’ down.

(Snow.)

Who am I kidding? Yeah, I damn well remembered her — who she was, what she’d been. She’d walked away. Left me to drown in this place, in this goddamn city that never let anyone breathe. Eighty-sixed me from her scheme like yesterday’s news. Like DiMaggio and old Drysdale, Mantle and Whitey Ford, too. How small everything had grown. How terrible the deterioration in myself.

The lead pipe morning slipped through the cracks in the blinds, cold and grim, like everything else in this place. The waitress — she was still singing, but it wasn’t a song anymore. It was just noise, like everything else here.

Eggs and sausage and a side of toast. Coffee and a roll. Hash browns over easy. Chile in a bowl with burgers and fries. What kind of pie?

A la mode, if you will. With a sprinkling of creepy liber amoris.

I took my last drag, ground the cigarette under my heel, and slid out of the booth. The walleyed man was leaving a tip — barely. The sort of chintzy gratuity old people leave at all-day Chinese buffets. A quarter and a trey of nickels. Loneliest money in the world.

You see, I had just come in to join the crowd. Had some time to kill. And then I walked out into the cold morning air, my coat collar turned up against the wind, resuming my calling as a flâneur. As Pygmalion, freshly caffeinated connoisseur of sidewalks.

The streets were waiting.

Waiting for the next sucker. The next heart to break. The next goodbye.

What kind of pie?