pigeon

...I hanker for a hunk of CHEESE!

Tonight’s pigeon is so goofy, so picayune, I truly don’t have all that much to say about it. It’s just a little clip of a memory of working at Taco Bell on Providence Road in Columbia. I was assembling the tacos. My buddy was on drive thru — a work friend, never saw him or talked to him again outside of that job, but we entertained each other on the long ridiculous evening shifts — and he was singing I hanker for a hunk of CHEESE! Somehow the word CHEESE came around exactly at the right moment to remind me, right before I was about to wrap the tacos up, that I had forgotten (yet again!) to put the shredded cheddar on. He gestured with his eyeballs towards my mistake as he emphasized the word. That was it — no explanation or elaboration necessary. I added the cheese and gave him the order, and whatever happened next happened next, in the heat-lamp glow of that odd little corporate enclave, amid the us-vs-the-zombies bonhomie familiar to anyone who’s worked fast food in a college town.

I will say this, though — recalling this passing moment gives me a feeling of goodwill towards my buddy, don’t remember his name, wherever he is now, whatever he’s up to. I hope he’s doing well. That’s a good feeling — to honestly hope someone’s doing well, even though you’re never going to know one way or another. He was a good guy, and it feels good to have the memory of him living in my mind. He always made me feel, just, I don’t know, okay, kind of warm, like it was okay to be kind of a doofus, it was okay that he was probably more “normal” than I was; we were really nothing alike, had entirely different trajectories and expectations laid out in front of us, and it was — fine. We made each other laugh. There was no drama. It was nice.

I wonder what he remembers from Taco Bell.

Well, I’m gonna leave that one at that for now, and take another little break to work on editing Gwen and Mary.

The plain delight on Mary’s face was Gwen’s payoff. There — it had been worth going through the whole story.

You mean you have this whole fucking place to yourself? And —

You’re not going to tell your mom, are you?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Mary was looking around with new eyes, taking in every scrap of furniture, every mote of dust, the timeless weight of the curtains, the sudden sharp charge of freedom in the vast space beneath the high ceilings. She strode over to the couch, touched the antique afghan absently, lovingly. She took a couple of steps toward the windows, then stopped and turned back around, vibrating in place. The implications were beginning to dawn on her. She stared at Gwen with an all-consuming sense of purpose — and a devilish expectancy.

Can I sleep over?

Gwen tried to parse the simple phrase. The sweetness of it, the comical innocence of it, coming from the dark-lined lips of this girl whose moody superiority she had come to accept as an inalterable fact of existence — it was disorienting. And it made swirly sensations in her gut.

Well, yeah, but —

Fan fucking tastic. Let’s go tell my mom. I mean, not tell her about your parents abandoning you obviously, I mean just about the sleepover. It’ll be like some cheesy movie. We can do homework.

Yes. Homework. People did that, didn’t they? Why was it that this mundane transgression they were about to attempt seemed so much more titillating and preposterous than the long-term deviance of the last few weeks of Gwen’s life?