Ah, narrative in the modern era.
But I can tell you the type of restaurant I’m talking about. It’s the sort of joint that always springs up in that special kind of strip-mall hell you find in the suburbs. The kind you find next door to the mini-golf course, where they play bad classic rock and serve fajitas and triple cheeseburgers and other things sure to kill you before you start collecting Social Security.
They’re also the kind where there isn’t a square inch of wall that isn’t covered in some old piece of random junk. Pair of snowshoes, washing board, stuffed wolverine, Alaskan license plate. You know the sort. They always have a cute name, like J.P. Fern-stubble’s Goode Tyme Emporium, or Holy Crap, It’s Still Thursday’s. You’ve probably eaten there, then spent the evening scrounging for antacid.
Anyway, I used to work about half a mile from a place like that. Little startup company, sold baby products online. I’ll spare you the glamorous details. This was back in ’99, before the tech bubble popped, and half of America was made up of little places like that, with way more venture capital than clue. Since Footwell McBucketfish’s Olde-Style Roadhouse was just down the street, my team went there for drinks after work. A lot.
So there we were, five of us. There was me-I’m Jered, by the way-and the rest of my crew. Rick was one of the company founders, a burnout who didn’t get any work done. Gabby was the best user interface programmer I’ve ever met, but she hated her job and spent half her time using the office copier to make dupes of her résumé. Ravi did server work; he moved to Canada last year after some drunk morons who thought he was Iraqi set fire to his lawn.
And then there was Alex Quigley. We called him Quig. He was our project lead, and he was older than us-fiftyish, a bit fat and nerdy (in a tech company, you say? Egad!), on his second career. Good guy to work for. He used to be an actor, when he was my age; he even did a little off-Broadway before he got tired of being poor.
We were regulars at the Muggawugga Gulch Saloon, which meant we had a regular booth, with a waitress named Donna. She brought us oversized margaritas and their special chili-cheese-’n’-bacon fries (“They’re Defibrillicious!”) and kept the families with shrieking babies at least three tables away. We never tipped her less than twenty percent.
“Rough day?” she asked that rainy night, setting down our second round of drinks. “You all look like you just found out Jar Jar Binks was going to be back in the next Star Wars.”
Nerd humor. Usually it got a laugh, but all we could manage were pained grimaces.
“God,” said Ravi. “Don’t depress us even more.”
“Quig got yelled at,” Gabby said, and shrugged. “But what else is new?”
Rick took a long pull off his beer. “Nah. It’s bad this time.”
We all looked at Quig. He and the CEO had had a blowup that afternoon. See, the CEO thought we should all be working sixteen-hour days until we shipped our product. Quig thought that was just going to make us tired and sloppy, which meant delays. It got to shouting, and Quig lost. Now he looked as though someone had stolen his car in order to run over his dog.
“You gonna get fired?” Donna asked.
Quig shook his head and sighed, watching his margarita melt. “That’d be too merciful.”
“They’re setting him up to fail,” I said. “They want someone to blame.”
“I told them from the start: Fast, Cheap, Good-you only get to pick two,” Quig said, and shook his head. “But these guys have MBAs, so they knew better.”
“So now we’re gonna work our asses off on something we know is gonna fail, and Quig’ll take the fall,” Rick said. He raised his drink. “To the New Economy.”
That got a few morbid laughs. We toasted with Rick-everyone but Quig. He just sat still, moping.
“Jeez.” Donna touched his shoulder. “You should just quit. Life’s too short for that crap. I’ll get you some Alamo Massacre Wings. You eat ’em, the pain’ll take your mind off things.”
Quig looked up at her and managed a smile. “Thanks, D. You’re a peach.”
Off she went, dodging a table of half-drunk biker-looking dudes a short way away. There was a lot of shouting, and one of the bikers tried to grab Donna’s ass, but she escaped and vanished toward the kitchen.
“Jackasses,” Gabby muttered, giving the drunks a dirty look.
“Donna’s right,” Ravi told Quig. “You should walk.”
“I can’t do that to you guys,” Quig replied. “They’ll ride you into the ground without me there.”
Rick finished his beer. “It’s happening anyway. It’s not like you’re protecting us from anything.”
“Jesus, Rick,” Gabby said.
“What?” he shot back. “It’s true. Or are we not staying for ‘Productivity Nights’ starting next Monday?”
“All right, enough,” I said. “We talk about work any more, I’m going to jam this fork in my eye. Who’s up for a game of Spot the Tchotchke?”
I’d come up with Spot the Tchotchke one day after realizing the stuff on the walls of Q.T. von Thunder-pants’s Publick Haus wasn’t always the same from one week to the next. Believe it or not, they add and remove things on a regular basis-I don’t know if they rotate it between restaurants, or buy new junk, or what. I suspect magic gnomes are involved, but that’s just a guess.
Anyway, in Spot the Tchotchke, you take turns trying to find stuff that wasn’t there last time you visited. Whoever finds the weirdest thing gets their meal paid for by the rest of the table.
“I’m in,” said Ravi, and pointed across the room. “New traffic sign over there. Armadillo Crossing, I think.”
“That’s an aardvark,” Gabby said, squinting.
“Even better. Beat it.”
“Easy,” she said. “There, behind that flock of teenagers. That’s an old medieval instrument called a serpent.”
I looked. The teens were busy throwing food at each other and generally acting like idiots. Hanging nearby, smeared with ketchup, was a wavy thing that looked like a clarinet that had been in an accident.
“Advantage: Gabby,” I said. “Obscure musical instrument beats road sign.”
“Does not!” Ravi protested.
“It’s in the rulebook.” There was no book, of course, but as the game’s creator, I made the call. “Anyone else?”
“Got you all beat,” said Rick. “Look up.”
I did, and flinched. Poised above me, like I was Damocles or something, was a huge pair of old, rusty blades. I mean, the suckers were big. “What the hell?” I asked.
“Gelding shears,” Rick said. “They used to use ’em on horses.”
There was a moment’s silence. I shuddered.
“… annnnnd I’m vegetarian tonight,” said Ravi.
Everyone accepted that Rick had taken the lead. “I’m not even going to try to top that,” I said. We turned to Quig, who was still poking at his half-thawed margarita. “How about you, boss? Can you beat the Amazing De-stallionizers?”
“Hmmm?” he asked.
“Come on, Quig,” said Gabby, shaking his arm. “We’re trying to cheer you up. Can you see anything stranger than those godawful things?”
Quig sighed, glanced at the shears, then started scanning the room. He usually won the game. He had a good eye for weirdness. I watched him go from wall, to wall, to…
“Mother of God,” he said.
“What?” we asked.
Saying nothing, he got up and went over toward the bar. There was a ghastly old puppet that must have provided nightmare fuel for kids fifty years ago, and I thought he was going for that, but instead he reached to the right and picked up something else. He brought it back to the table.
It was round and wide, a tarnished disc of brass with a deep bowl in the middle and what looked like a bite out of the rim. He held it up.