“The chalkboard propped behind her was lettered in bright pink: “TODAY’S SPECIAL — MEAN ASS RED BEAN CHILI.” Beneath the words, someone had drawn a chalky blue bowl with the handle of a spoon poking out, and wavy red squiggles above to simulate heat. A not-so-fine layer of dust covered the whole thing, and I could tell “today’s special” had been “today’s special” since the nameless “diner” had been (red and white letter) “open.”
“What you want ta drink, honey?” Patsy asked without turning around, breaking me out of my wry meditation. Her accent was fifth generation Cajun, but somehow her unwillingness to face me seemed to stem from shyness not apathy. Then I saw that she was looking at me, in the angled mirror high above the back counter. And I saw myself as she saw me, or as I would have seen me had I been her. And I didn’t blame her for not facing me.
By looking upwards to look down upon me, she had a prime view of the crown of scar tissue David had blessed me with. It was a cross I bore without frequent thought; after all, chefs can wear hats in the kitchen, and whenever the weather permitted I wore a light trench and fedora in the streets. The Quarter is full of freaks who cleave to and rely upon one another like ants in the mound, defending resolutely against outsiders who damn near sample the local culture into extinction. Nevertheless, I would be reminded now and again of my butchered cranium and if it wasn’t exactly a freshly cut wound, it was certainly a handful of salt ground vigorously into the oozy pus of an old one. It was like having your defining moment pinned to the breast of your shirt — I didn’t so much mind other people staring as I did being forced to realize that it was my defining moment.
I ignored the question. “About that special,” I announced loudly, trying to distract Patsy — and anyone else x-raying my soul through my nugget — with a little levity. “What kind of man — knowing he’s gonna be locked up in the ten-square-foot cab of a truck for the next six hours — orders anything with the words ‘mean ass’ in the title?” I grinned Daddy’s crooked smile, and would have arched my eyebrows had they not both been burnt off sixteen years ago.
“The kind what’s hungry, sugar,” Patsy answered sweetly, finally turning to make direct eye contact. “You hungry?” The question and her stare were pregnant with meaning, as though by sighting my Achilles heel so early in our encounter she had been able to discern both its source and its effects on the chain of happenstance that had become my meager existence.
Yes, I should have cried out, Yes I hunger to be loved, or at least to be worthy of love. I long to feel that good things can last, that something gold can stay, and that I don’t have to prove myself every single day. That the people I love recognize and remember my intrinsic value from one moment to the next. I hunger to be sitting home right now with my little girl, watching Lamb Chop’s Play-Along and singing “The Song That Doesn’t End” instead of venturing across state lines to kill a man I don’t know, all so I can keep alive within my arteries a slowly growing cancer (a process which gives a whole new meaning to chemotherapy).
But I held onto all that and shook my head, said “No, just a mug of chicory, if you don’t mind.” Said it to the counter top rather than face Patsy, knowing full well that by refusing to look up I was giving her another dead-on shot of my Daddy’s son’s hellish baptism. It was still better than looking the cunt in the eye. Either way, she was gonna know all about me — she had the knack, it flowed around her like vapor trails when you got too much strychnine — but facing her straight ahead would have forced me to see what she saw. And I already knew what she saw, knew I didn’t want to see the stretched-thin junkie sitting at her counter wearing out an already threadbare joke about her menu. It was like algebra when the teacher would squeak an especially tough problem on the board and we’d all look down so he wouldn’t call on us to answer; if we couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see us. That was my approach with Patsy now because it had always worked in the past: with Faith, with Daddy, with God.
“No appetite, huh?” she joshed, sloshing thick liquid as she slid the mug across the counter and into my hands until we each cradled a half as though it were a chalice and not a nicked enamel crock with loose grounds swimming at the bottom. “The only men I ever seen in here not hungry was love sick,” she teased, making the word love into a several-syllable abortion, drawing out “you love sick?” the same singsong way she’d called out “you hungry?” Yep, saw right through me. Like when you told the man at the deli “thin, for sandwiches,” and he held up the first slice and you could see his questioning glance through it and you had to backtrack and say “uh, not quite that thin, Tex.” Patsy must have come to work every night and built a Dagwood from the little glimpses she stole from her patrons.
“You know how Karl Marx summed up capitalism’s inherent shortcoming?” I asked, knowing full well she’d be trying to puzzle out whether Karl was the one who carried the bicycle horn and never spoke. “He said your employer will never pay you the true value of your work because he keeps more for himself.” I took a mouthful of the rich chicory and swallowed bitterly, even though the liquid was syrupy sweet. “I think love works the same way.”
In retrospect, stopping and chatting was the worst thing I could have done. My stoned intentions were good: be invisible by being brazen. Like an art thief defiantly hanging his booty in the foyer, I gambled that no one would suspect a Das Kapital-quoting would-be trucker of murdering a drug-importing riverboat casino operator. It was naked foolishness, a rash thing that I should believe will bring about my capture. But somehow I don’t. Something about the way Patsy asked her patrons “you hungry?” No, not so much how she asked, or even that she asked, but that having drawn out the confession she already took for granted, she set about satisfying the need.
An hour later I abandoned I-10 for 49, figuring to run south to Gulfport and catch 90 east to Biloxi. My craving was hitting hard and I thought a slightly slower road might ease my anxiety. The distance on 49 between the off-ramp from 10 and the on-ramp to 90 is so short that you couldn’t even play football on it; you’d have to play Arena Ball. Nevertheless, having rounded the spaghetti circle that officially welcomed me to sixty yards of due southerly travel, I managed to incur such a withdrawal-induced cramp that I whirled the car hard onto the soft shoulder, picked up a piece of nail-infected lumber, and spun 180 degrees trying to control the blowout. Facing north on the sideline of a due south highway, I listened to my heart beat out Babalu for a couple minutes before popping the trunk to free the donut. It was sad, really, how badly I was going to limp into Biloxi — strung out, on three-and-a-half wheels, shooting a twenty-year-old pistol — just so I could crawl back home with enough room on my available credit limit to start the process all over again. Once I had the jack on and was working the lug nuts loose, I realized that I could not go on repeating the cycle indefinitely: eventually I would run out of fingers. Maybe next time, I thought ruefully, I could convince Lazarus to settle for a toe.