Some damned good pie

Cheap too.

As I went to lunch last week, the odious “Guess Who” was still hanging in the Top 10 Box Office movies. So was “XXX: State of the Union”. The inexplicable “Miss Congeniality II: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea” was hovering at lucky number 13.

Hold that thought.

I go to this kinda divey place for lunch sometimes. Not bad, and they chic it up with old office and cafeteria furniture, and the food’s outstanding. A good place to disappear for an hour when you want no conversation.

I was feeling blue. Started to sketch out a poem, and got as far as this:
“My childhood friends are gone or dead.
The friends of my marriage have cut and fled”

Jeez, not a happy start. When I write don’t fake how I feel, and whatever comes out of my pen is what it is. What would be the point of doing it any other way? So I generate a lot of crap unfit for public consumption, some sad bastard stuff, but this came with this sensation that I’d eaten a cinderblock: overstuffed on dead stone. No room for anything to get in, and no way to get anything down on paper.

So I just listened and watched.

My server’s sitting on one of the tastefully ripped bar stools and talking to some guy.

“Where were you when Grunge kicked in?”
“Trying to convince my Mom to buy me bigger pants that rode lower, but she wouldn't do it.”
“So where do you DJ?”
“All over. I got no ‘residency’ but mostly up the North Side.”
“What’s it like up there.”
“Turned into like a satellite of Wicker Park. I remember when it used to be cool.”

Then a biker family shows. This huge guy, huge beard, carrying a tiny baby. Wife or girlfriend or old lady wearing what looks like used to be the baby's post-partum knit hat. He hits the cell phone to renegotiate a deal. "No. No. I'll be there. No. We agreed on a hundred. We fucking agreed to a fucking hundy." He says this while smiling down at his baby son.

The baby says "da ah ah." clear enough to hear across the room, which I assume is baby talk for, “Fucking-A. Tell that cocksucker it’s a c-note and not a pfennig less.”

Or it could just be could be gas.

The DJ's girlfriend arrives. Cute/nerdy/sexy. She's a J too. Well enough known to be locally famous. I wonder if this is becoming an issue for them? Celebrity couple with dueling careers aren’t just problems for the Afflecks’s & J-Lo’s of the world.

The hoodie couple (both wearing the same hooded tee-s) on my right take time out from talking shoes (“Perfect shoes. They were guy-shoes, but perfect shoes, and just in my size”, she says. “Soooo fresh.” And I am surprised to hear that anyone says "fresh" anymore.) to admire my plate as my server brings it.

"That looks good," she whispers.
"Seven bucks," he says.

She orders pie and after pricing various alternatives, he gets fries, which they split.

The place shares a Dutch door with a bar and the band has gotten here early and are coming and going, doing setup for tonight’s gig. No one really notices, but there's a lot of noise when my server comes back with the check. His tats match his faded Thin-Lizzy tee well enough that if you only glanced you might think it was all one long-sleeved raglan thing, worn through at the elbows..

The place is bustling now, and although there’s no line at the door, the possibility of one spontaneously erupting seems to have grown.

And I find that I’m not dwelling on the sad bastard stuff any more. I'm in a different mood.

I pay my server and slip him an extra ten, and nod at the hoodie couple in the corner who only have eyes for each other...and cool shoes. I give him a little smile and a cocked eyebrow.

He gets it.

The hoodie couple, they'll never know who or why.

I wave by to the biker baby, who is looking at me, amazed, but then again, at that age they stare reverently at their own toes for days. And I leave, smiling.

So why? Because I’m a soft-hearted Liberal? Because my wonderfulness should celebrated in story and song?

Are you fucking kidding me?

I do this because I’m selfish. I give a little to other bloggers, to such charities as I choose to, to StreetWise vendor and to the guy hustling transfers at the El stop who I am absolutely certain is going to go into Buy-Low Liquors for a bottle of Night Train Express because I’m as selfish and hardheaded an SOB as any Ayn Randite libertarian.

Ten bucks can buy me a movie. Let’s say I lose my mind completely and blow it on a forgettable squirt of wee-wee like “XXX – II: The Revenge of the Roman Numerals”. Popcorn, Coke...sit through six or seven thousand commercials (Man, I must be ancient. I remember when movies didn’t have commercials. PBS neither. Now my cats rent out their asses for ad space. Truly “The Space Merchants” have arrived.).

So I while away my valuable time and a little bit of cash on something I am guaranteed to forget three hours later. Like organically-grown beets passing through a biker baby’s backside. You know what I’m talking about, right? Monday morning, trying to account for your weekend, you remember that you saw a movie, you just can’t...quite...recall any details whatsoever at this time, Senator. And that mem-wipe cost you a ten spot.

For the same price, I get walk around with a Clark Kent grin for the whole day instead of dwelling on my losses. The hoodie couple gets a memory that, if they’re together five years from now, they’ll recollect as, “You remember that time when somebody...”.

Thin Lizzy gets to take part in a tiny, benevolent conspiracy. We all get a bounce in our step, everybody gets a little story to tell and most importantly for that meager investment, the stock of happiness and goodwill in the world upticks ever so slightly. Do all the other stuff too (he reminded them nagginly) but don't forget how much sheer fun the anonymous munificent drive-by can be.

So when the bunker-dwelling, knuckle-dragging, humanity-hating conservatives of your acquaintance launching into yet another “fuck the poor” tirade, tell them, screw pity...it's a wise investment. As a realist who steps into the hard world every day just like you to hustle a buck, it’s money I have, and a happier world that I lack (to borrow a line from "Field of Dreams".) And as a smart, hard-nosed consumer, I get some genuinely enjoyable, commercial-free value in exchange for my entertainment dollar.