By now Roz was bringing food to the big mouth. She had set the plates before him on the table, and now the guy was saying something to her. He was saying something low-- I couldn't hear it-- but I could tell it wasn't good because I noticed the stiff way Roz was just standing there and listening. Maybe the guy was complaining about something. I didn't much like it, though, and I didn't much like the way the guy kept fingering the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. Everything about the guy seemed to be mocking me.
I tried to ignore it all. I sipped my coffee, but it was getting cold. My nicotine fit was raging worse than ever.
I asked Bob to watch my seat, told him I had to get some fresh air.
He just grunted, not looking up from the obits.
It seemed colder outside than I had been when I first entered the diner. Maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe it was just from having dealt with people.
The snow seemed unnaturally white now, and I found I had to squint to protect my eyes. I walked round the corner to the side entrance of the building and went inside. The stairwell was narrow and too warm and the air inside it was musty. Every one of the stairs creaked as I ran up to the second floor.
My place was a study of personal economic decay. In the living room, there was a small sofa and chair, but they didn't match. A wooden orange crate standing on its end next to the chair acted as an end table, on which was set a garish green lamp that I had found in an alley. The orange crate held my record collection-- real albums made of real vinyl that I couldn't play anymore because the motor of my phonograph burned out a long time ago. I kept the phonograph in the bottom of my closet, next to a box of eight-track cassettes that were awaiting the day the superior audio medium was again in favor. There were no dishes in the kitchen; whenever I ate at home I either ate directly out of the can or off paper plates. In my bedroom there was an old mattress and a dresser whose drawers were cracked and saggy. There was a large pile of dirty clothes in one corner, waiting for me to come up with enough money to take them down to the laundry mat. There was a five-gallon plastic bucket in the other corner. It was half filled with copper joints I had snagged little by little when I had done some temp work at this plumbing warehouse. The copper had to be worth about thirty, forty bucks at the going rate, but somehow it seemed I never had a chance to lug it down to the scrap yard.
I sat on the mattress and held my head and tried to clear my mind. My life was just so messed up. I couldn't understand how it got that way. I'd started out just like everybody else, but I ended up here. How? Why? Everything bad that could happen, always happened. It simply wasn't fair. It seemed like a cruel magic trick. And now I had to suffer it all without the comfort of a single cigarette.
I stood up, suddenly antsy, the way a person gets antsy when they know they have to do something but don't know exactly what to do.
I pulled out one of the saggy dresser drawers, and fished out a white tube sock. I went to the plastic bucket in the corner. I grabbed a handful of copper elbows and sleeves, and dropped them into the tube sock until the end of the sock bulged with a good pound of copper. Then I balled the sock up, and shoved it into the pocket of my army jacket.
Not having a clue what I was doing, I headed back down to the diner.
Bob was still sitting at the counter and reading the obituararies, and Roz was standing behind the counter and staring through the window. She didn't give me a second look as I walked back into the place, but when I sat down again, I discovered that there was fresh hot coffee in my cup.
I sipped coffee, Bob read obits, and Roz stared outside. Nobody said anything. We could have been three people trapped in a painting, or something.
Then Bob, suddenly, folded up his newspaper and jammed it in his coat pocket. He tossed a couple singles on the counter.
“Have to get to my doctor,” he announced. “Have him count the nails in my coffin…. Think about what I said.”
