When I was young, I learned fast how to be old; I hung out at a diner. My father shipped cargo from system to system, and quite often he left me in the care of whomever he owed the biggest poker debt. A sort of living collateral. You wouldn't believe how many different galactic cultures contain guys named Vinnie, with shirts unbuttoned down to their navels, more than adequately exposing enough hair to clothe a small village.
Of the alternate life forms who gathered at the galactic grease pits loving referred to as "Al's Eat & Gas," a few rose out of the grungy, wandering masses who caught my eye and stained my mind.
Joey the Mass was an odd character. Blind in seven eyes, he had the hearing of a sentient sonar robot and the wit of an adobe brick. Although he couldn't see you, he could tell every move people made in the diner, and somehow managed to keep track of every single individual on the premises. I've never met a more effective bouncer.
The diner was no place for children; I knew this because that's what people would tell me every day when they knocked me down and took my money. Many dangerous elements drank coffee in my home-away-from-noplace. Fried Billy Gater was an out-of-work, washed up bounty hunter who, for some reason, always ended up being hired by old ladies to find lost cats. Perhaps he was listed as a detective of some sort in the Galactic Directory. "Let your sensory digits do the translocation," if their three-foot hair on the commercials wasn't enough, the backup jingle was sure to reel you in.
At any rate, one day Fried Billy came in, looking more frazzled than usual, and demanded a steaming hot cup of Joe. Melva, the waitress, said that they were fresh out, so he tried for a steaming hot cup of Melva instead, which produced even less fruitful results. He was banging his fist on the counter, and I, being a young naive kid, told him that if he kept that up, he'd break it, and wouldn't have a good-luck charm anymore. Well, he whipped out a pistol and turned around, only to stare at me as I stared down the barrel. "Son," he said, "Remember this, and remember it well. You can fight a battle of wits all your life, but I'm one man who's traded in his wits for a gun."
"When I was young, people had respect, it was musical! The air was musical," the old man sighed wistfully, "even Jupiter's Red Eye was brighter." He cast me a defiant grimace, and tightened his grip on his corned beef sandwich. This was a crucial moment, it all hung in the balance now. "It's all a matter of perspective," he said eyeing his sandwich suspiciously. "See this corned beef? You SEE this corned beef?" His voice peaked and cracked like an adolescent lying to his mother. "Well, I can't." he spat, as he wadded up his napkin and shuffled away.
"When I eat a bagel," one trucker elaborated to me, "I like to have cream cheese with it. That's the best application for cream cheese, in my opinion. I once heard that my grandmother, a dear old woman of 80 years old, likes to eat fruit jam and cream cheese on her bread. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the `classic' way to eat cream cheese and bagels." I never saw him again.
"Go stay by that particular river," muttered the man over his bologna (or was it to his bologna?), "the one that isn't blue, the one you almost drown in, with lots of fish in it. You have to, and when you do, you might see that when you are some place else, there are still better places to be." They say he did drugs in the 60's, but he must have done more than drugs.
And so I've unwrapped individually wrapped slices of cheese, and attempted in vain to press them together. And so I've made plastic fork forests; can you honestly say you haven't?