****
It was about thirty minutes after midnight when Sean pulled his Blazer into the parking lot of our favorite late-night eatery and general meeting center, the Waffle House. My friends and I had spent many hours, both drunken and sober, in the Waffle House, eating, drinking coffee, discussing life, liberty, and the pursuit of women.
Of course, there wasn’t a lot of competition for our late-night tummy grumblings, as only one other restaurant in the city stayed open past midnight, Mamie’s Café, and the quality of the food there was questionable. My friend Kevin refused to leave his house for three days after eating a giant bowl of Mamie’s chili one night; he claimed he suffered from “diarrhea of Satanic proportions” and if he had ventured more than a hundred feet from his bathroom “hell’s wrath would have been wrought upon the world and my pants.” Once I had ordered a hamburger at Mamie’s at about three a.m., and they served it to me with no meat. A restaurant that couldn’t even master the basic ingredient of the hamburger seemed dubious to me, and the frightening prospect of three days’ worth of diarrhea of “Satanic proportions” sealed our status as permanent patrons of the Waffle House.
I stepped gingerly out of Sean’s passenger seat, carefully working on maintaining my balance. Sean had quit drinking after the first couple of beers; I, on the other hand, had stepped up from beers to Jack Daniel’s and Coke, and I was feeling quite a buzz by the time we hung up our cue sticks and paid the bar tab.
On the drive from the Tap Room to the Waffle House, we were both silent in the car, Sean tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and singing quietly along with the radio, me thinking about Sara. Wanting to see Sara. Wanting to assume the spoon position with Sara and fall into a deep sleep.
“Gonna make it, Fluke?” Sean teased as I walked slowly around the front of his truck, resting my hand flat on the warm hood.
“I’m fine, man. I think I’m more tired than drunk. I just need a heap of hash browns to soak up some whiskey.”
We walked in the door to the greeting of three servers, “Top o’ the morning to you!” How on earth these folks could be so cheery, serving food to drunks into the wee hours of the morning, was a mystery to me and often a subject of our conversations.
“I’m gonna go take a whiz,” I told Sean, heading for the bathroom. Sean nodded and picked our favorite booth…the last one before the bathrooms.
I stood in the dingy men’s room, handling my business and thinking about Sara. I really wanted to talk to her and to see her. I zipped up, washed my hands, and dug my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Sara’s number.
After the first ring, I glanced at my watch and briefly worried that I might wake her up, but let it ring anyway. She picked up after the third ring. I mumbled to her, “Hey.”
“That you, Mister Fluke? Are you okay? Need a ride?” She sounded half-awake, but not annoyed.
“No, gorgeous, I’m fine. I just wanted to hear your voice,” I said, trying not to slur my words. I felt like I was doing a good job of not sounding hammered, but I knew better than to trust my own judgment—I always sounded better to myself.
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” she laughed. “How’s that?”
“Well, it served the purpose,” I laughed back. She was always on, even when I woke her up. “I said, beautiful lady, that I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Oh, well, thank you. Where are you? Still off with Sean?” I heard her lighter flick and caught the faint sound of her exhaling.
“Yeah, we just stopped to get some grub at the Waffle House,” I said. “You were sleeping, weren’t you?” I asked, still feeling slightly guilty.
“I nodded off on the couch about fifteen minutes ago, I think. I was watching Letterman. That guy is hilarious, but I fell asleep when some country singer came on,” she said. “Waffle House, huh? That sounds good…I’m hungry.”
My eyes lit up. “Why don’t you come down and meet me and Sean? We’ll have some coffee, a bite to eat, and you can give me a ride home instead of Sean.” I joked, “I’d much rather have a beautiful woman take me home, as opposed to Sean.”
“From the way you talk about Sean, he’d probably much rather be taking a beautiful woman home than you,” she countered, and we laughed. “Okay, I’ll come down. I just need to put on some pants.”
“Ah, pantsless, are we?” I said in a mock suave voice.
“Well, I am. We hopefully aren’t, however, since you’re out in public,” she laughed again.
“But the night is young, Miss DuBeau,” I responded. “There are plenty of opportunities for me to get pantsless.”
“Yeah, like when I give you a ride home,” she said coyly. Wow. “In about fifteen minutes, order me a cheese omelet and a big old cup of coffee. See you soon.”
I hung up and slid into the booth across from Sean, feeling invincible. I rested my hands on the table, feeling tiny sticky spots. The hard wood of the booth was uncomfortable immediately, and the shiny silver ashtray was nearly full already. It was exactly as I expected it, and just how I wanted my Waffle House booth. Sean stared at me as I lit a cigarette and picked up a giant plastic combination placemat/menu.
“What’d you do? Take another famous Fluke dump in a public bathroom?” he joked, sipping a glass of iced tea.
“I called Sara,” I told him. “She’s going to meet up with us and have a bite to eat.”
He raised an eyebrow and said, “Ah, so I can meet the lovely Sara, huh? Well, that’s good. You’ve been talking about her so much, my curiosity meter is redlined.”
The waitress came to the table and looked at me, as if annoyed. She wore the trademark brown, orange, and yellow polyester of the Waffle House employee, and the trademark surliness of a tired, tired woman forced to serve food to drunken idiots in order to survive. Her nametag read “Yvonne,” and I ordered in as nice a way as possible.
“Well, Yvonne, I’ll take a cup of coffee and a glass of water to drink, and a double order of hash browns, scattered, covered, smothered, chunked, and topped.” I smiled sweetly at her.
“Sure, just a minute,” she said after jotting our orders down on a yellow pad. She walked away, and I heard her call the order out to the cook.
The food and drinks came, and Sean and I ate hungrily. I watched Sean and thought back to the multiple occasions he and I had ended up at Waffle House with some woman he had met, some stranger who wanted nothing more than to get into bed with Sean. Tonight was my turn to have the woman on my side of the booth, and it wasn’t some nameless drunk floozy. It was Sara.
Yvonne wandered by, and I ordered the food that Sara had asked for to a puzzled look from Yvonne. She glanced at Sean’s empty plate, then at mine, and asked, “Are you still hungry?”
“No,” I laughed. “A friend is joining us any time now, and I figured I’d have her food waiting for her.”
Yvonne, the cynic, nodded her head slightly and said, “Sure thing.”
I was tidying up my mess when I heard Sean say, “Shit, Fluke, is that Sara?”
I looked out the big plate glass windows, and saw Sara, locking the door on her Golf. She had on a lavender-colored, flowery-print skirt and a white sleeveless T-shirt, and she looked beautiful. I looked at Sean, who was staring out the window at her.
“Hey, there she is,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. The truth was, however, that I was as struck by her beauty now as I had been the night I handed her a medium cheese pizza. A brief thought passed through my head, but was short-lived: it’s a fluke for you, Fluke. Just a fluke.
“Wow. She’s hot, man. If that’s really her and not some chick you paid to hang out with you, I’m impressed,” he laughed.
She came in the door, smiled at the workers who shouted out the greeting, and looked at me. I stood and met her beside the booth, wrapping my arms around her waist and giving her a small kiss. She returned the kiss and turned towards Sean.
“You must be the infamous Sean,” she said, holding her han
d out. “I’m Sara.”
Sean smiled and shook her hand and said, “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Sara.”
We all sat down and she told me about her night, rearranging furniture in her apartment, doing laundry, cleaning.
“I washed some of your clothes, too. Hope you don’t mind,” she said.
“Not at all,” I said, and Sean just smiled at me. “Thank you.”
“You wash Fluke’s clothes? Oh, man, it must be love,” Sean said. This brought a slightly uncomfortable chuckle from both Sara and I. That was a word I had flirted with in my mind recently, but hadn’t wanted to consider seriously due to my prior track record, and how quickly this had all come about. I had resolved myself to just go with the flow until more time had passed, and this had indeed proved itself to not be just a fluke.
Sean gulped down the last of his tea and started crunching the ice in his mouth. He stared at me intently, as though trying to place me, and I responded with a confused look at him. Sara watched Sean and I, and said, “What are you guys doing? Staring contest?”
“Nah. It’s just that Fluke over there reminds me of an actor. That guy…shit, what’s his name?” Sean sat back and appeared to give up. “I can’t think of his name.”
I glanced over at Sara, and saw her staring at Sean. “He’s kind of a nut, in case you hadn’t noticed,” I told her.
She didn’t respond. She didn’t look at me. I followed her gaze and realized that she wasn’t staring at Sean. She wasn’t staring at anything; she was just staring. Statue-like. In one hand she held a napkin, and with the other hand she tore small pieces of the napkin off and let them drop onto her plate.
Shit, it’s happening again, I thought. I felt the first bristles of panic in my stomach, pushing aside the previous feelings of heartburn from the hash browns. I moved my hand to Sara’s back and said, “Sara? You okay?”
I got the response I had feared, but expected: nothing. She continued staring off, back in the foreign zone, far away from me, far away from Sean, far away from the Waffle House. Suddenly, horribly, it was that first night all over again.
Sean waved his hand up and down in front of his face, his palm about six inches from his nose. “Sara?” She continued to stare, and he looked at me. “Is she okay?”
Ignoring Sean, I said, “Sara, honey, let’s pay and go home.” I rubbed the palm of my hand up and down the slight bumps of her spine. She didn’t move, though, and I looked at Sean, who looked back at me, helpless. I didn’t know what to do, so I started telling Sean about the first time it had happened. I looked at her one more time to make sure she was still gone, and spoke.
“She did this our first night together, man. I don’t know what it was, but she wouldn’t look at me or talk to me for a half hour. All she did was sit and smoke,” I whispered to him, mindful of Yvonne and the rest of the staff, as well as the two other customers inside the restaurant.
“What did you do?” he whispered back. He seemed nearly as desperate as I did.
“Actually,” I started, thinking about how ridiculous it was going to sound, “I made breakfast.”
Puzzled, he said, “What?”
“I just went about my business, you know, whipping up some grub at her place, and she snapped out of it after a little while. She actually did speak to me once while she was like this. She told me ‘don’t go’.”
I held back the comment she had made about me looking “so much like him,” though. I didn’t want to open that can of worms with Sean, not with my already doubtful thoughts on that subject. The last thing I wanted to hear was Sean sounding rational with his theories about the comment.
I suggested to Sean that we just relax, and when she was back with us, we’d leave. The jukebox was quietly playing “Caught Up In You” by .38 Special. I lit a cigarette and we sat quietly. Yvonne, by the register, called to us, “Ya’ll need anything now?”
I started to shake my head no, when Sara called to her, “Can we get our check?” I felt her body moving under my hand; she was back.
Sean and I both shot our eyes to her, and she said, “I’m tired. What do you guys say we get out of here? Adam?”
“Sounds good, Sara,” I replied. Sean agreed, staring at me, confused.
So, we got our check, and Sean offered me a ride home as we stood in the parking lot.
“Sorry, Sean, he’s mine for the night,” Sara giggled, wrapping her arms around my waist, pulling me towards the Volkswagen.
Sara, back to normal. Distant Sara had made her appearance, enough to amplify my confusion and initiate Sean’s.
“Nice to meet you, Sara. You kids have fun,” Sean said, waving. A stern glance my way from him was his way of saying, “Are you gonna be okay?” I answered him with a nod.
“Let’s go get pantsless,” Sara laughed.
And the night ended with Sara and me pantsless, shirtless, underclothes less. We made love and fell asleep, and another night was over.
8.
The “magic” that came from Sara began to leak into other parts of my life. I started writing again while she was at work. I wrote until my fingers began to hurt, and then I typed, after that. Magic? Is it magic or that I’m in love? I wrote in one of my many notepads, Maybe “love magic,” a subtle, albeit a bit cheesy-sounding, combination of the two.
Whatever it was, it was all around me. In just under three weeks, we were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in my mind, and everything was singing and dancing in my life now. But, Fred’s dancing shoes were wearing thin, and he no longer had the means to go pick up some more. I thought about the conversation we had that morning while we were both waking, for some strange reason, before the sun had time to send its rays to penetrate the window.
“I need to find a J-O-B. Argh,” I bemoaned, the words moving down and around her beautiful head while it rested on my chest. I tried to make the daunting task sound dreadful. I enjoyed exaggeration and milked it for comic value as often as possible. “I wonder if the city is hiring any garbage men. Then you could meet me at the curb each morning, give me a peck on the cheek, and hand over your Hefty bag full of trash for me to throw in the truck and squash with that big squasher thing.”
“I hear they make pretty good money. And, a medical and dental plan, 401K, the whole bit,” she replied. “Seriously, though, maybe you could work with me?” she had said. We were both quiet for a bit while I mulled over this. I just didn’t know if I could handle a hand-me-down job from my perfect girlfriend. Something in my mind whispered that accepting a job that Sara got me would decrease me in her eyes, reflect poorly on my manliness.
“What would I do in a museum, Sara?”
“Well, you could be a tour guide, or work in ticket sales, maybe. I don’t know. I’d have to talk to Mike. He does all of the hiring. I am sure there is something. And, besides, we could work together!” She lifted her head, and kissed me on my chin.
“Okay,” I told her. “I’ll think about it if there aren’t any openings as a waste management technician for the city of Hazel Beach.” I laughed at my own joke, and she gave me a couple of playful punches in my side, which only made me laugh harder. Finally, I conceded, and said I would think it over if today didn’t go well.
Sara was the assistant curator at the City Museum of History. It just so happened that she had spent several weeks traveling around Florida, trying to procure some historical items for the museum to display, right before we met. She had flown back home from south Florida the afternoon before I delivered that fateful pizza to her. When I thought about all of this it made my head spin at how much she was doing, and how little I had done, and how quickly my life was changing.
“Or,” she said, turning her head to look at me, “you could go back to school if you wanted.”
“Ahhh, but I never let schooling interfere with my education,” I said to her, using the only words of Mark Twain’s that had ever caught my attention. This was likely because they were so fitting for an underachiever like myself. “An
yway, how would I pay my bills?”
“Well,” she said, drawing in a breath, “you could move in with me. Here.” I wondered if she could feel my heart leap against my chest when she said that. If I had been standing up, I might have been thrown backwards and forwards with the movement of my heart. I certainly would have dropped anything in my hands, and probably would have toppled over. Thankfully, I was already lying down.
Three weeks ago I was kicking a dirty magazine under my couch.
“And then,” she continued, “you can quote Mark Twain to me every morning…if you want to.”
I had agreed to think about that, too. I admitted that to myself, now home in my recliner, as I perused the classifieds…again. I wanted to live with her. She excited me every day. I had never been with anyone like her. On top of being incredibly sexy and incredibly fun, she was intelligent. I had never been with a woman that could recognize anything I quoted except for movie lines, and occasionally, song lyrics that weren’t too obscure or off the beaten popular music path. Sara amazed me.
So that morning I gave the big effort. I made phone call after phone call in my quest for employment. After feeling out the possibilities of everything listed in the newspaper, I made some calls to places that I thought I might like to work that weren’t listed in the paper: Library, The Tune Hole, even one of the clothing stores in Oakwood Mall that I liked. I couldn’t see myself actually working in a mens’ clothing store when I thought about it; they seemed to hire only beautiful women, even though it was men’s clothing. Oh well, it would be worth it if I could get some employee discount, I thought as I spoke to the girl on the phone. “We always take applications!” she told me cheerily, right before we were done. Great.
I showered, shaved, and threw on some khaki pants. Browsing through my shirts, I decided that looking for a job was a good reason to wear a tie, so I chose a white Ralph Lauren button-up. I loved wearing ties, and tried to make an excuse to throw one on whenever I could. I felt a person could rarely be too overdressed. Back in the day (just a few weeks ago) Sean and I had a theory about how wearing khakis increased your odds of picking up a woman by about 50%. “They love that shit,” he would say, “You stand out. You appear to be exactly what they want…as if khakis, and maybe a tie, mean that you are going somewhere with your life.” We always laughed at that. Sean was the same guy that would get sloppy drunk, stand up next to the bar, and announce to all the women in the room, “All right. Now, who’s coming home with me?”
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