The story thus far: Lee Harris arrives in River Bend after splitting with his wife of eight years. After an embarrassing brush with the law, he discovers he no longer has the financial means to pay for breakfast. If you want the details, the archives are listed over there. (Imagine a little picture of a hand pointing to the left. With long fingers and big knuckles. It's not your hand, Steve.)

Installment Three
There's No Home Like This Place
(Insert humor here)

When Lee came out from the back, Twain was sitting on the edge of the counter reading the newspaper. There were two men sitting at the counter. One wore a John Deere™ hat and was eating scrambled eggs. One had on a fedora, was eating scrambled eggs, and reading Time Magazine©. One wore a beard and was eating cinnamon Pop Tarts®, but that has nothing to do with this story. (That's a reference from the first installment, think they'll get it? You have no faith, Geoff.) Lee caught Twain's attention.

"I'm done," he said. "I'm outta here. Fuck the ticket. Fuck the court date. I'm taking my hangover and driving it the hell out of town."

Twain nodded, and Lee stumbled out of the diner. He opened the car door and defiantly sat, put the key in the ignition and turned it. He pressed the gas pedal angrily to the floor. The engine revved to a satisfying roar which was suddenly joined by a loud chaotic thwacking ruckus emanating from under the hood that shook the seat under him. He turned the engine off quickly and the thunking rumbled grudgingly to a stop. He got out of the car, tripped on the curb, opened the hood of the car and pinched his finger when he put the support rod into its little support rod holder hole.

It was immediately obvious what had caused the thwacking ruckus. A long, black, snake-like belt was entwined and entangled around everything but the pulleys where it belonged. He grabbed it by a frayed end and pulled it up and out. As it untangled from the guts of the car, Lee had an overwhelming sense that he had seen it somewhere before. It actually looked like the snake he had seen on a television show about Jakarta, Indonesia, but that has nothing to do with this story.

Twain looked up as the bells on the front door clanged. It was Lee, standing forlornly, almost in tears, holding a long black thing in his outstretched hand.

"Serpentine belt," Twain said. "That'll cost you."

That did it. Lee let his arm drop, and he turned and walked toward the door, dragging the serpentine belt behind him.

"Hey, Lucky," Twain said just as Lee got to the door. He turned back, the serpentine belt following him dutifully. "Where you going?"

Lee didn't know. He did know he couldn't afford to stay in the motel room for another day, and said so. Twain shook his head in wonder at the extreme patheticness of this guy. (Is that a word? You know what it means, it doesn't have to be in the dictionary.) He looked around his diner for a moment.

"Look, Lucky," he said. "My high school help wants less hours. Band or football or something. Give you a hundred bucks a week."

After cringing at being called "Lucky" for the second time by a guy who didn't even know how to bathe, Lee said he couldn't even afford to eat on that. Twain brushed that off and said he'd give him a discount. He also said that there was a room above the diner that had needed cleaning for a very long time, and Lee could start there. Then, when it was clean, he could stay there. Everybody wins.

Lee was spent. He was numb. His ears buzzed in a strange way, and there was this long thing hanging from his hand. And the serpentine belt. (Steve! I had to. You're thirteen.) He couldn't think. He couldn't decide. It was that or go back to Beverly. Maybe he could call her and have her send enough to get the car fixed. The notion that that thought could even cross his mind made his sorry ass brain hurt.

"Look, I can't stand here all day," Twain said. "Sleep on it." He took him down the hall to the bottom of the stairway that led up to the room. Lee stood at the bottom stair staring up at what seemed to be an utterly insurmountable number of old, dirty steps. He stared numbly at the stairs. The stairs stared back. Twain stared at Lee.

"I have to check out of the motel," Lee said, forlornly.

"So call."

"I left my suitcase there," Lee said, despairingly.

"Have them keep it in the office until you can get it."

"There's nothing on my credit card. I can't wash sheets and blankets," Lee said pathetically.

"Didn't they pre-approve it?"

Yes. Yes, they had. Pre-approved. The night he had rented the room, the night he had actually spent in jail, was already effectively paid for. He'd paid for a room he hadn't slept in and worked for a meal he hadn't eaten. What would be next, renting a video he wouldn't watch? As long as he checked out before noon, he wouldn't go to debtor's prison. For that, anyway. Twain led him to the phone and he made the arrangements with the motel, then he went back to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. He looked back at Twain.

"I'm not like this," he said desperately, trying to convince not only Twain, but himself. "I'm not helpless. I'm not a transient. I'm not a jailbird. I'm a successful accountant. I work at a brokerage firm in Chicago." He sighed despondently. "At least I did. I have a wife." He put his hand on the railing. "At least I did. I have a life." He put one foot on the bottom step. "At least I did." (Stop it, Geoff, art is knowing when to stop. Are you done? At least it was. Art. See?)

Twain shrugged. Lee nodded, sighed again, and climbed the stairs. Slowly. It took a huge effort of will to have the grace to put one foot in front of the other, pushing his weight against gravity to force it up to the next step and again up to the next. When he finally got to the top, he opened the door. If he'd had any energy left, he would have been horrified at the state of the room. Actually, he was horrified right through the buzzing in his eyes. There were boxes and piles and cobwebs and stuff everywhere, and it was all covered with a film of greasy dust. And no where to sleep. Maybe Beverly wasn't really sleeping with the Jerk. Maybe he had left too hastily. Maybe she hadn't meant to clean out his accounts. Maybe she had used the money trying to track him down because she was so stricken with worry. Maybe he could just fall backwards down the stairs and become Martha Stewart.

Despite the energy it took to move his head, he looked around the room again. At the far end, under dusty, cobwebby, greasy boxes, he could see by the thin, dusty late-morning light from the tiny dusty window on the wall, a dusty green vinyl couch. He pushed and tripped his way through piles and boxes and cobwebs, pushed stuff off the couch, and fell into it. As soon as his head hit the icky green Naugahyde™ cushion, there was a loud ruckus from the diner as if a huge party had just arrived with jack hammers and fudge. God, he thought, I can't even sleep!

He tried to lift his head, but his cheek was glued to the couch. There was a puddle of drool on the cushion which was starting to seep over the edge. The room seemed darker. With an effort he pulled his face away. It felt like part of his skin was left behind when he was finally able to separate himself from the vile vinyl with a sound like ripping linen sheets. He sat up to get his bearings. It was darker. Somehow, he had actually slept. Deeply. For hours. And it felt like nothing. The kind of sleep you get from watching The English Patient. Completely non-refreshing. By the gray light from the window, he assumed it must be dusk. He was still exhausted, and now he was famished. Ravenous. Over the gurgling in his gut, he could hear the crowd in the diner, and over the dust in the room, he could smell the comforting odors of sage and ketchup from the baking meatloaf mingling with the margarine in the mashed potatoes and the distinct aroma of boiled canned green beans.

I gotta eat, he thought. If I'm going to eat, I have to work. If I work here, I might as well stay here. But how the hell can I stay here? I have to until I can afford to get my car going. And if I stay that long, I have to pay my ticket. And go to court for being drunk. I should have punched a cop. Or pissed in a bush.

He sat immobile, the twirl in his mind was taking all the energy he had left. He couldn't go down to what sounded like a full diner looking like a three day bender in slept in clothing smelling like a goat who hadn't shaved. (Goats don't shave, Geoff. That's the point. Huh?) But he was so hungry. He looked around the room. There was a lot of junk in it, but there was also, in the far corner, what looked like a metal standing shower stall. The idea of a shower was almost more appealing than the idea of eating. This must have really been an apartment, once. He could shower before he went down, but the thought of having to put the same clothes back on once they were off made his skin recede into his bones. He looked around again. Maybe there were clothes in one of the boxes.

On a pile just to his left was what looked like a cereal box. He picked it up. Wheaties! An open box of Wheaties. He pulled the flap open and unrolled the inside bag. Then he noticed that the athlete on the front was Joe Namath and stopped. He was about to set the box aside when his stomach grumbled again. Namath must be a hundred by now. He wondered what the shelf life of a Wheatie was. He reached into the box and pulled one out. It still felt like a Wheatie. He examined it. It still looked like a Wheatie. He put it to his nose. It still smelled like a Wheatie. What the hell, he thought, I'm hungry, and he put it to his mouth, but the fact that it still looked and smelled new after more than thirty years gave him pause. He couldn't. Not even if he hadn't eaten for a month. He gently put the Wheatie back into the box, rolled the inner bag, closed the top and put it back in its pile. His stomach whimpered sadly.

He looked at the shower stall and sighed deeply. Might as well get to work, he thought, and started to clean his way toward the shower.

The bustle and noise that aroused Lee from his ineffectual slumber wasn't from a full diner. There was one full booth and two men sitting at opposite ends of the counter. The two men were both eating the meatloaf special, one smothered in gravy, the other in ketchup. The meatloaf, not the men. The booth was filled with members of the Willow Lane Theater (foreshadowing) who were on a dinner break from rehearsal. The energy of the group was scattered, but somehow still focused on, or perhaps pulled in, like moons to Jupiter, by a small woman in her sixties. She would have been considered slight were it not for her ample bosom which preceded her in any conversation, and which she still used effectively to hold the attention of those in her thrall. (Ample bosom, I like that. She's sixty, Steve. I just like saying it.)

Matt, the sixteen-year-old who worked part time at Twain's, set the red plastic basket of french fries on the table, the thin paper lining soaked in grease.

"We'll need more napkins, dear," Agnes said, her sixty-year old hand resting gently, perhaps even suggestively on his arm, then she turned back to the group to continue holding court. A sudden loud commotion coming from somewhere above momentarily interrupted their conversation.

"Hey, Twain," the robust man sitting at the table said, "You got rats?"

Twain stood at the grill behind the window and flipped the burger instead of the finger he thought about flipping. A few of the people at the table laughed. The two at the counter didn't seem to notice. Twain set the plates he had been preparing on the ledge under the heat lamp and tapped the stopper on the little dome bell which rang with a high dissonant tone. Matt looked over at him then went around the counter to pick up the order: two burgers, three orders of meatloaf, and a piece of delicately poached sole for Agnes, smothered in a subtle hollandaise sauce with the slightest hint of lemon, accompanied by baby asparagus tips and new potatoes with herb butter. Hungry, yet?

The rat-like noise had been Lee, dropping a box and tripping backwards over a pile of three others when a spider scuttled over his arm. If it had only scurried, he wouldn't have been so freaked. He tried to stand at the same time he was frantically brushing at his arms and hair, then noticed that one of the boxes he had fallen over was full of neatly folded old clothes. Although they smelled a little musty, they were clean. He pulled out a pair of overalls that were, perhaps, a bit big for him, but that would do in a pinch. Just under them was a threadbare tee shirt with a faded picture of the Partridge Family on it. The box under that one was full of flyers for the Willow Lane Theater's 1976 production of Godspell directed by Agnes Livingstone. That stupid Theater's flyers were so ubiquitous they were beginning to haunt history. He closed the box so he didn't have to see them, but one was taped to the box itself to identify the contents.

He turned away from it, and realized he had cleared enough away from the shower that he could finally use it. He had found a case of dish soap and was planning on using that, but there was an old bar of soap-on-a-rope shaped like a worn out, gaunt Fred Flintstone hanging from the shower faucet. It was dusty, but soap is self cleaning, so he shed his rank clothing, wadded it into a knot and hid it under a box before getting into the shower. He turned on the faucet and the spigot squealed, then sputtered and spit and exuded muddy brown water in uneven spurts that smelled and sounded like a rusty Model T engine trying to turn over while going uphill. He jumped out with a yelp and let the water run clear. And warm.

He showered for nearly twenty minutes to get the dust and grease and work and hangover and muddy brown water off, then dressed in the overalls and tee shirt. He took an exaggerated step to make sure none of him was attempting to peek too obviously from around the contours of the oversized clothing, then bent and looked at the open side slits of the overalls to make doubly sure. He remembered seeing a roll of duct tape and considered looking for it again, but thought that might be too much. To ease his mind, he did a jig and a jump just like Fred Astaire. Nothing revealed itself, which made him feel confident. And, yet, strangely inadequate.

He was feeling almost like a human, if a hungry one, and had done enough work to warrant some food. This wouldn't be so bad. He could do this for a few weeks until the debt was paid, the court was satisfied and the car was repaired. Beverly be damned. I might even get to like this town, he thought as he descended the steps.

The fellow who had made the crack about rats went up to the counter. Twain, done cooking, was again perched (gefilte fished?) on the edge of the sink reading the last page of the paper. He looked up as the stout man approached the counter.

"What can I get you, Peter?" Twain asked.

"Change for a twenty?" he said and plopped the wrinkled bill on the counter. There was a phone number and the word "pismire" written in red ink on one corner of it, but that has nothing to do with this story.

Twain reached into the till just as Lee rounded the corner from the hall. Peter looked up and saw him.

"Who's that?" Peter asked Twain, glancing surreptitiously at the side slits of the overalls.

Twain handed him the police sheet from the newspaper. Lee saw the guy glance at the article, then up at him with an odd expression, and knew exactly what must be going through that guy's mind.

"Don't you people have anything better to do?" he said.

The room fell strangely silent. Lee hadn't realized he'd said it out loud. He sighed deeply, and sheepishly turned and went back up the stairs.

Twain took the paper from Peter's hand and threw it in the trash.

Lee lay back down on the ugly green couch hugging the box of ancient Wheaties with one hand while he ate from it with the other.

"Help me, Mr. Wizard," he said around the Wheatie crumbs. "I don't wanna be helpless anymore."

But no one dweezle-dwazzled him home.

Will Lee hide in the attic eating Wheaties until he can afford to leave town?
Will he ever be able to afford to leave town?
Will Peter get his curiosity satisfied?
Will Lee accept Twain's offer?
Will the judge throw the book at him?
Will anyone get the Tooter the Turtle reference?
Will & Grace?
And why the Hell is the bartender called "Headline"? (See installment one.)

To find answers to these and other perplexing dilemmas, tune into our next installment:
"Another Opening Night, and I Ain't Got Nobody"

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