At the restaurant I frequent so often that, when I walk in, I'm greeted by my usual drink order as my name ("Passion Fruit Iced Tea!") I hadn't seen Will in months, but we picked up where we left off, even if the topic wasn't the same.
(As an aside, it really is a great feeling - decades ago I regularly frequented Ernie's Taco House even though I lived nowhere near there, and when I walked towards the bar area the bartender would say "there he is: Hollywood's Favorite Son!" - don't know how he came up with that one, but he began getting tips before a drop of liquor was served)
I was also at this restaurant to get takeout for The Big Scoop, due to how often the "there will be lunch provided" for her is pizza, each and every time. He concurred, then took that point to parts unknown. "Yeah, you know, pizza, in certain ways, I don't like what it represents. Here's some shitty thing you gotta do, but hey, I'll get you a pizza." The older one gets, as the Scoop is realizing, the more it isn't the generous gift that's being advertised.
"Pizza, to me, is like coke. I like it, but I hate buying it." That's not a quote I was expecting to hear...ever, really, but I'm intrigued. Please elaborate, won't you, sir?
He then enlightened me of he and his punk-loving friends, in the late 70s, facing down disco. Some, it seems, accepted disco as a way to meet girls. So went the balance between the 2 distinct styles. "These guys, you know, they were making $100 a week working after school and blowing $70 on taking out girls to the disco and buying them drugs." How long was it that "these guys" (hopefully not Will) realized the girls just wanted the drugs? He laughed "It didn't take long. But what were we going to do? It was easier to get weed than beer. All you could do is drive the back roads getting high then go to the donut shop."
I had to interject. "Wait, were there discos in this town?" "Not really" he replied, just 'dance nights' at bars. Ay yingo, what a conquest: needing to find daffy dust and a place playing disco music all to land some girls into both those things in a small town...yeah, I'd get the hell out of there, too.
The thought of his "wandering" stuck with me. I couldn't help but notice how the circle was unbroken. Here he was, decades later, retired and doing the same thing. What is there to do, he wonders. He walks the streets of Dealville, perhaps under some influence, but it matters not: looking for the party is a hell of a lot better than killing time.
It appears that the only obstacle in looking for fun (within the law, of course) is that the Nosy Nancy brigade insist on knowing what's going on and why, but they lack the effort to actually stand in your way. "No reason. I just want to know." Well, Nance, that IS a reason, so I'm afraid you can't know. Is that their version of being an obstacle? Days later, of course, the Scoop will choose to share she ate spaghetti our of a container on the school steps. When this statement causes a commotion, and the response is "no one cared", then it's hard to not to be worked up about that much, certainly not a previous day's lunch.
I once ate a Blizzard while sitting on the hood of the Custom Cruisier in an abandoned Bloomington parking lot. On another occasion, I ate a donut and drank a beer out of the trunk of the Saturn before I went bowling. I didn't think anything of it then and hadn't since those exact occasions until the brain racking occurred in this very moment. I'm sure there are others if I gave it more thought, but those moments, unique as they may sound out of context, are as inconsequential as the very one worried about that I wrote in the previous paragraph.
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