This cafeteria, one of America’s loneliest inventions. Scavenger types everywhere, bald heads, pointed chins, they pay for their seat, but sometimes with no more than a cup of black coffee. She’s glad she isn’t a waitress in a place like this. Anyway, everyone dances naked in a service economy, whether they realize it or not – it’s just some places the light is easier on our imperfections.
A TV hangs in the corner of the room. Is anyone paying attention to the news? Wildfires can pop up anywhere.
She used to date the cashier’s brother in high school, she only has to drop a tip. Tomorrow’s her only night off this week, and today, she had the lunch shift.
Take a nip off the half pint in your purse, pour a shot in your coffee. A side of dead meat on every plate – she’s got the blue plate blues. An imaginary fog emanates from the speakers where the warm dampness of the music mixes with the dull white cold of the fluorescent lights. It’s a wonder you can’t see your breath in here.
Then, the jingle of Please Call Again.
You’re drunk, she says, to no one in particular. In junior college, she wrote poetry in black and white composition books. She never graduated, she no longer writes, but the impulse is still there.
It’s a quiet night, the summer of some year that ends in six. The call of night birds down the strip. A telephone wire or two skips blindly across the street, but there’s nothing coming. A street lamp, kind of like an opening in the heavens – but more like a mirage. Stab out a still burning cigarette with a stilleto, who couldn’t go for a drink right about now.
After all, this is the land of the divorced and widowed. It was never always such a long walk home before. And one day soon, there will be no more potable water.
A man, standing at what has to be the last payphone in the Midwest – the last payphone in America – talking so you can hear him down the street. I’m thinking maybe I should call my ex-wife, the mother of my oldest, he says sadly into the phone, then hangs up the receiver. There’s a strange light in those dark eyes when he looks up at her, but it could be the light from the neon sign of a beer joint, reflected in the glass.
It was never always such a long walk home, at least not back when she still had a car note and was shacked up with the high school science teacher.
Nightcap? he says to her, the guy who was just talking on the last payphone in the Midwest. He’s clearly drunk, looking at her with the lukewarm look of leftovers in her dead eyes.
Sure, she says. I could go for a drink right about now.
Wherever you are in America, don’t go to bed tonight, at least not alone. Whatever you do, do not say goodnight at the door – don’t ever say goodbye.
