Installment Two
No Shirt, No Shoes, No Kidding
(How original, Geoff)
(It was your idea, Steve.)
(Brilliant.)

Lee needed a shower to wash the jail off of his face. Looking through the cab window at the drizzle only made him feel dirtier. It was depressing, but at least it wasn't perky. A perky sky would have sent him over the edge. A perky cab driver would have been worse, but this one was mercifully grim. Lee was tired. Hung over. Angry. And he had a court date in a week and a half. And he hadn't eaten. For a very long time. And he probably couldn't if he tried. And he was hung over. And tired. He needed coffee. His mouth tasted like an English kitchen. He reached into his shoe to get the twenty he kept there as "inebriation insurance". Lot of good it did him; he still ended up in the hoosegow. When he found ten toes but no twenty, he had a vague recollection through the lace doilies in his brain of putting the twenty into the police station cuss jar for expressing the vulgar form of two separate bodily functions in rapid succession. He looked around the cab to see if there was a cuss jar here. There didn't seem to be.

"Shit," he said.

The cabby reached under the seat and pulled out a jar.

"No, I spent all my ready cash at the police station last night," Lee said. Or at least he hoped that was what he said. His mouth and brain seemed to be going through an ugly divorce and weren't talking to each other. "Could you maybe swing by an ATM?" he added slowly, then waited for the cabby's response to make sure he understood.

The cabby made a sudden turn. He understood. Either that, or he was bringing him back to the police station. That didn't make any sense, but the sudden turn made the juices in his stomach lurch so he didn't think about it much. The cab driver came to a sudden stop which made the churn in his stomach swirl. He was also hoping the motel wasn't far. The motel bathroom. The toilet in the motel bathroom. Lurching churning swirling juices could erupt in either direction without any notice. He looked in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of him for a barf bag, then remembered he wasn't in an airplane. He shut his eyes to calm the swirling lurch, then looked around to get his bearings and saw the ATM machine.

He groped for the door, stumbled out, and tripped over the curb. He stood in front of the machine, focusing hard to aim the card into the slot. He wasn't used to drinking, and really wasn't used to a hangover on no sleep. The card slipped out of his hand as the machine accepted it, and the brightly colored readout perkily asked for his PIN. Lee looked up, bewildered. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the machine in order to think. The lens of the little security camera was right at eye level, so he pushed away. The drizzle started to seep into his hair.

Come on, he thought. I've used that stupid number a million times. Maybe if I just let my fingers go for it. He lifted his hand and let it hover above the keypad, but nothing happened.

"Damnit, damnit, damnit, damnit, five two six . . . (Geoff, don't give out his PIN! It's fiction, Ishmail.) one." He punched the numbers and it beeped perkily, then the perky options appeared. It took a moment to process his request for sixty dollars. Finally, the readout said "Unable to process your request at this time. Please enter a smaller amount," which really means "Just walk away, loser."

Lee tried to remember if he'd taken out the maximum the night before. He hadn't even gone to an ATM the night before. He asked for forty and got the same message. He panicked. How was he going to pay the cabby? In twelve hours, he'd been arrested for the first time in his beige life, and, because he couldn't get any money out of a stupid ATM, was probably going to die in debtor's prison, and, even worse, was going to do it in underwear he'd worn for more than a day. He breathed in to calm himself and then thought to check his account balance.

Nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. He could almost hear the machine laughing at him. He started to hyperventilate. There was at least two thousand dollars in there.

"Any trouble?"

He whipped around to the sound and almost fell over from dizziness. The cabby was right behind him. Lee stuttered and tried to make his hungover mouth form an intelligent sentence at the same time that his hungover mind was trying to figure out what had happened to all his money. The result of this effort was a strange sound coming out of somewhere near his mouth.

"I," he said. "It . . ."

The cabby glanced at the monitor on the ATM and saw what the balance was, reached into his pocket and handed Lee a dollar bill. Lee was confused.

"Deposit it," the cabby said very slowly as if talking to a child. "Then you'll have enough in there to take out twenty, and you can add the one to what you owe me when we get to the motel."

Lee did as he was told, and held the resulting twenty tightly in his fist as he numbly stumbled on the slick curb and fell into the back seat of the car.

"Eighteen-fifty, plus the buck," the cabby said as he jerked to a stop in the motel parking lot.

Lee handed him the precious twenty, telling him to keep the change, and blundered across the parking lot to his room.

"Tart," the cabby said to him. (Stop it, Steve. You never let me have any fun.)

"Hussy," Lee shot back. (I mean it, Steve.)

Lee flopped down on the bed, exhausted, but the night played too loudly in his mind and he couldn't sleep. He stripped and went into the shower, but while the soothing hot water was streaming down his body, he suddenly remembered his bank account. Where the (he looked around the shower for a cuss jar) hell did two (again) fucking thousand fucking dollars fucking go? Fuck. Beverly. She cleaned him out. No. She just needed to pay bills. For once in her stupid life, she paid her bills on time and left him penniless. Well, not really penniless, she did leave him nineteen ninety-nine. Kind of like leaving a dime tip. That had to be on purpose. No, just because she was in love with the Jerk, didn't mean she would flick him quite that hard in the Dockers™.

He dried himself and tried to sleep, but the buzzing in his mind and body made it impossible. He was so exhausted and hung over and angry that his adrenalin had kicked into overdrive. I'm supposed to be TIRED, he shouted to the inside of his face. After several minutes he lurched out of bed, stubbed his toe, pulled some clothes on, stubbed his toe again, went out and hopped into his car, bumping his head. His wallet pressed into his rump in a very uncomfortable way, so he pulled it out of his back pocket and threw it into the glove box. The wallet, that is. He thought he remembered seeing a diner on the way back from the police station, and drove in that direction.

He'd remembered correctly. The diner was called "Twain's". He parked and sat in his car leaning against the steering wheel trying to calm the buzz in his limbs. It didn't work, so he went in and sat on a stool at the counter. There were tall booths along one wall with impossibly red leather or leatherette vinyl set off by little silver upholstery tacks along the seams. If Lee hadn't been trying so hard not to vibrate off the stool, he would have found them fascinating. He would have found the little raised platform with a microphone and stand on it in one dark corner of the room just plain weird.

A very disheveled guy was sitting on the edge of the steel sink behind the counter reading the newspaper. He looked like he hadn't washed his hair or changed his tee-shirt or apron in days. He seemed annoyed. The place was quiet except for the sickening gurgling sound of the coffee brewing. The fresh smell of the perking coffee both enticed and nauseated Lee. He chose to listen to the part that was enticed and was about to order some, when he remembered his present financial embarrassment.

"Do you take credit cards?" he asked.

"Five dollar minimum," the guy said brusquely. It was almost as if he was annoyed that someone had come into the diner before he had had his first cup of coffee. "No American Express. It's a stupid card."

Lee sighed. "All right. Coffee. And I guess I'll have two eggs, over easy, toast and bacon. How much is that?"

The guy pointed to the menu on the wall above his head. It was three forty-five. And coffee was ninety-five cents. Lee was much too hung over to add that in his head, but was fairly sure it wouldn't come to five. Juice, he thought. He searched the breakfast menu. Okay, Tang, I guess, he thought, and ordered. The coffee was still brewing, so the guy quickly replaced the pot with a white industrial coffee cup, let that fill, then put the pot back. He set that and a glass of tap water in front of Lee, then leaned down under the counter and produced a single-serving packet of Tang and dropped it next to the glass.

Lee shook his head. "You must be Twain," he said, making one of those spontaneous connections that only an exhausted, pickled, adrenalin-filled brain can make. He figured no one would hire the guy, he must be the owner.

Twain nodded brusquely.

"Named after Mark?"

"My grandfather."

"Your grandfather was Mark Twain?"

"No, Twain Newton. Just like me."

Even in his present state, Lee couldn't help laughing. He did have the good graces to be embarrassed about it, though. Twain went back into the kitchen. Lee could see him through the serving window as he scratched his butt and sniffed his fingers, (Steve! Sorry.) fired up the grill, then came back out, sat back down on the sink and picked up the paper. Lee watched the cream swirl into the dark liquid in his cup wondering if he would actually be able to drink it. He stirred it, then carefully brought it to his lips, ready to set it down if his gorge rose. He sipped it. So far, so good. He swallowed the sip, then, when he was sure it wasn't going to react exothermically with the gastric juices and gin, actually allowed himself to taste the coffee. He was shocked. It was really wonderful coffee. In a place like this. He was about to comment on it when Twain spoke.

"Hey," Twain said. "Is this you? Lee Harris?"

Lee scowled inquisitively, and Twain handed him the paper. It was open to the police log. There, in black and white, was his mug shot and the details of his arrest including the fact that he had used his one phone call to call the fax machine at the Willow Lane Theater. And it called him a transient.

"Transient!" he said through the Rayon-Dacron blend in his head. "My God, this must have been printed before I even got out."

"Public intoxication," Twain said. "Should've taken a cab."

"I . . ," Lee said emphatically, which made his stomach slap his brain upside the head. He sighed painfully. "How long is the food going to take?"

"It's an old grill."

Lee asked where the men's room was. He found it and stood leaning against the wall. He found himself in this position all too often of late. When he looked around the room, the first thing he noticed was a poster for the Willow Lane Theater. Was that all there was to do in this stupid town? The next thing he saw was a poster of the Partridge Family autographed by Danny Bonaduce. The "Danny" effectively hid David Cassidy's face. The "o" in "Bonaduce" neatly encircled Susan Day's belly button.

"I'll be damned," he said, and looked around the bathroom for a cuss jar.

When he got back to his stool, Twain was breaking eggs onto the grill. They hit with a satisfying sizzle, and the smell of them cooking made Lee's mouth water. The aroma of bacon was heavenly, and the smell of the toast was almost more than he could stand. He tried to remember the last time he had eaten. Did they have peanuts at the bar? That would have been it.

Twain set the steaming plate in front of him. He picked up a fork full of egg and put it hungrily into his mouth. Big mistake. The taste was an out of control Winnebago rumbling toward the nitro in his stomach. A roadblock formed in his esophagus to derail it. The ball of yarn in his head began to unravel. He chewed the egg laboriously, not wanting to spit it out, unable to swallow. It just changed in his mouth. It actually got bigger. He finally forced it past the roadblock before it was able to expand beyond the boundaries of his mouth. The yarn strangled him. He pushed the plate out from under his nose. He felt as if his neck and face were slowly turning pale green and cold damp sweat broke out on his forehead. He breathed in and out several times very deeply, trying to convince his body that it wouldn't be a good thing to throw up right at this particular moment in this particular place. Water. He needed to sip water. He picked up the glass of Tang and brought it to his lips. He couldn't bring himself to put the foul liquid in his mouth.

His body convulsed. He breathed it back down by force of will. His heart beat frantically, trying to get out of the way of the coming conflagration. Finally, somehow, he gained some mastery over his rebellious gut. He sat for a moment to be sure this wasn't just the tremor before the main quake, then reached to his back pocket for his wallet so he could pay and leave with the last few atoms of his dignity. It was, of course, in his glove box. The wallet, that is. He told Twain he needed to go out to get it.

"Uh, huh," Twain said.

"I'll leave you my keys," Lee said, dimly aware that he had just been suspected of running out on a five dollar tab by someone who had just read empirical evidence that he couldn't be trusted. "Oh," he said meekly. "I need them to open the car."

"You locked your car?"

"I'm from Chicago. I'll leave my . . . uh . . . "

Twain just waved him out. Lee tripped over the door jam as he left the diner. It was still drizzling, just to annoy him. He unlocked the driver's side door, and leaned across the seat to open the glove box. As he placed his hand on the wallet, out of the corner of his eye he saw a piece of paper on the windshield. It was a flyer for the Willow Lane Theater that had been stuck under the windshield wiper, glued to the glass with the drizzle. And under the other wiper was another, larger piece of paper, perfectly dry. He extracted himself from the car and extracted the paper from the windshield. A ticket. A parking ticket. For twenty-five dollars. For parking in a red zone. He looked down and focused his blood-shot eyes on the curb. The zone was, indeed, red. His front tire was a foot into it.

"Fuck!" he shouted. He was getting very fond of that word. He tried to think of another one that would work, but that was the only one. He said it again. (We won't.) "Fuck!" (Steve! I can't help it, Geoff. Yes you can, you just don't.) He was used to watching things happen, not having things happen to him. He threw the ticket onto the floor of his car, got in and put the keys in the ignition, then sat contemplating starting the car and getting the hell out of this town. He thought about it for a very long time, but he had a breakfast bill to pay. He really wished he could be bad. Just once.

"Fuck," he said for good measure (and for Steve), got out of the car, slammed the door and went back into the diner, tripping over the jam.

"Poor feet management," Twain muttered.

Lee calmed himself, pulled a card out of his wallet and very carefully handed it to Twain. Twain swiped it through the slot on the reader. Lee listened to the little electronic squeal as Twain's card reader talked to some bank somewhere out there. Then there was a strange beep. Twain looked at the little LED readout.

"Declined," he said, looking back up at Lee, whose face turned red and whose eyes grew ten sizes and filled with water.

"BEVERLY!" Lee shouted in anguished rage.

How will Lee pay for his eggs?
How much will he pay for his hangover?
Will we ever actually visit the Willow Lane Theater?
Why is there a microphone in the corner of the diner?
Will we ever find out why the bartender was named "Headline"? (See episode one.)
Will Lee say f**k again?
Will Smith?
Or Wesson?
And who will buy the pink tutu?

To find answers to these and other brooding mysteries,
tune in to our next installment:
"There's No Home Like This Place"