boxterjulep

We stopped at an all night diner off another highway only twenty miles or so from where we carjacked the truck from the fella who may still be laying back there on the road, unconscious. Not that we really care about the guy. Once the road passes out of our vision, we are only concerned with the next bit of fun. Sound familiar? It should! You know you don't care either. Still, maybe it was dumb to stop so soon afterwards, but my opossum friend insisted that we needed to get a bite to eat.

The roadside dive was Daisy's Country Diner. Open 24 hours...that's about its only allure. The regular crop of stoic truckers and strung out oddballs populated the place. The staff: going through the motions. What they need is a little spice and my opossum friend is the saffron for their dull pepper/salt lives!

My opossum friend loves Jack Nicholson. For late night diner visits his memory bank will instantly bring up The Last Detail or Five Easy Pieces as references. Even you know the scenes we're thinking of here. Jack being rude, being a dick to the waitress, throwing a tantrum...yeah, well with my friend those things are expected. I try my best not to create situations for my opossum friend to react with his slightly manic rage, but I don't mind if he does either. We are best of friends and what he does, I go along with. Nothing really bad ever happens anyway, not really.

So the waitress begins by asking how many to be seated as the two of us walk through the door. Idiot! I had to snicker after this long disturbing pause, where my friend did this very DeNiro like looking behind him and around the diner with his hands out, like "you gotta be kiddin' me?" She saw we were a couple of loonies and took our non-answer as a table for two.

I was not hungry: coffee: black, no sugar, please. He was: sirloin steak: well done.
"I thought you like your steaks rar--"
He gave me the cut off sign.
"That's what I will have."
He closed the menu.
She took it and begin to walk away.
"And a beer!" he stood up and yelled at her.
Dirty look back. Ooh, we love the dirty looks.

While we waited for our order, we commented on how funny nobody seemed to have noticed his opossum features and disposition. The suit pants concealed his tail nicely, but still he had the long snout and beady eyes. He acted like an asshole coming in. Perhaps everyone is like that. I guess they've seen it all. Every disjointed, uprooted, unruly riff-raff has probably passed through Daisy's gates. Desensitized. Better for us. They'd probably throw him out if they knew he was a rabid opossum.

Why the service was slow at four in the morning with hardly anyone around, I don't know, but this fueled my opossum friend's angst after we'd spent all our conversation on lightbulb and redneck jokes.

So then, yippee! The food arrived, my coffee arrived too? I had forgotten about that. Sipped it. Lukewarm...yum. Whatever. Oh, but my friend had something on his mind that he had to get out.
"Waitress!"
He grabbed her arm as she was about to leave. She looked down and saw his tiny, narrow hands. A grimace. Ooh, I love that look too!
"My steak." he says.
"what?"
He raised his fork, staring at her as he did this. Then, he plunged the fork into the steak straight through to the plate.
"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" he bellowed out across the whole diner making eye contact with every weirded out doe-eyed patron standing up on in his seat as he did it. When he was finished he sat down and refused to look at the stunned waitress.
"Take it away, but this time kill it before you serve it."
Let me tell you, we honored all our fallen psychotic henchmen that ever darkened a depressing joint like this in that one minute of silence that followed. I wanted to laugh, but I kept it in, that is until...
"I think you need to leave," the woman warbled out as if maybe my opossum friend's features were suddenly coming to the forefront. The foam on his mouth was a dead giveaway.
"NOT what i wanted to hear!" was my friend's reply as he hammered down on the table with both his fists.

Oh, joy!

To keep this journal entry brief (ha!) as I am feeling a bit woozy with fatigue, I'll just add that my friend set a new personal record for destroying a diner and chasing all its patrons out. The victory celebration took place within the diner with food still dripping from the ceilings and dishes still falling off counter tops. We sang an old nursery rhyme you might remember on top of tables and danced:

Sippity sup, sippity sup,
Bread and milk from a china cup.
Bread and milk from a bright silver spoon
Made of a piece of the bright silver moon.
Sippity sup, sippity sup,
Sippity, sippity sup.

"The beer doth floweth, does it not, my friend?"


[currently playing, o so goo: Like a Girl Jesus by Game Theory]