Sitting at an open air place, my eyes are bloodshot from internalizing something that will likely seem insignificant in the morning. My eyes are made redder and hotter by the cigarette smoke filling this place, cigarette smoke from those who think that stepping outside to smoke magically prevents their smoke from blowing through the wide open windows and doors that surround the place.
I am watching the breezes play with the open pages of my back-pocket notebook into which I wail about my failures. It is brilliant to see that thicket of tiny pages, covered with hand-written scrawl, flipping in the winds. If only a word from those pages was going anywhere, if only a hot phrase would travel from those pages — then this bit of theater would be memorable.
I intercepted an interesting encounter at the supermarket tonight. Cashier. Station #2. Customer. The cashier looks 17 or18, the customer is a beefy big dude who looks 40 or more. Sexy. As I take my place in line with my bottle of Dran-O Gel I see the lithe cashier smile and I hear her tell the customer “It’s boring. So boring.” Talking about her job, I surmised — surmised itself being too smart a word for this encounter.
The customer signed his credit card receipt and the girl kept smiling, saying to him “Now I can see your name” and she seductively pulled the receipt from his hands. His signature was an unintelligible scrawl but, of course, the customer’s full name is printed on the receipt. The man seemed taken aback. A bit. By the girl’s comment. He left with his bag of chicken and tomato juice.
To the cashier’s certain disappointment I replaced the sexy, beefy dude in line. This is when I noticed that the cashier was drawing on a notepad at the cash register. The drawing was of a nude woman with a shapely ass, an ass a yardstick wider than the ass of the thin cashier artist. I pieced together the missed parts of the conversation, where the man saw the drawing and asked the cashier if it was a self-portrait. She knowingly blushed and said no, but that things get so boring as a cashier…
I hurried home and poured that Dran-O into the standing water of my kitchen sink.
