Suddenly he’s jerking his head around — and there’s Marta, fat Marta with her two-ton tits and big pregnant belly that isn’t pregnant at all, only just fat, bending over some other guy’s table by the door, flirting with him, for Christ’s sake — and before he can think he shouts out her name, surprising himself by the violence of his voice. Everybody in the place, and there must be thirty of them, half he recognizes and half not, looks up in unison, as if they were all named Marta, and what does he think about that? He thinks, Fuck you, collectively. He thinks he might have to find another goddamn diner where they know the difference between—
And here she is, her face drawn down around a mouth shrunk to the size of a keyhole beneath the flabby cheeks, coming to him as swiftly as her too-small feet can carry her, trying to act as if she cares. “Is everything okay?” she asks before she’s halfway to him so everybody can hear her doing her job, even Ricardo, the cook, who’s giving him a hooded look from behind the grill, a cigarette in one hand, spatula in the other.
“No,” he says, still too loud, and they’re still looking, all of them, because they’re a bunch of sad-assed pathetic voyeurs with nothing better to do, and fuck them. Really, fuck them. “No, everything isn’t okay. Because I come in here every day, don’t I? And you people still don’t know what over easy means? Shit, if I wanted sunny-side up, if I wanted a runny yolk, that’s what I would have ordered.”
She’s already reaching for the plate, already apologizing—“Sorry, sir, I’ll have the cook” and all the rest of the mollifying meaningless little phrases she dispenses a hundred times a day because the cook’s a moron and to call her incompetent would be a compliment — but he can’t help saying, snarling, and why is he snarling? “Take it away and do it right or don’t do it at all.” And, to the retreating twin hummocks of her butt: “And the toast is like that shit they give babies, what do you call it — Zwieback — and I don’t want Zwieback, I want toast.” She’s at the swinging door to the kitchen now, making a show of upending the plate in the trash while Ricardo shrinks into the Aztecan nullity of his face and everybody else in the place pretends to take up their conversations where they left off and he can’t help adding, his voice lower now, the rage all steamed out of him though the heat’s still up high, “Simple toast. Is that too much to ask?”
After breakfast, he heads out into the rain, picturing his umbrella back at home leaning up against the doorjamb, but it’s not a problem because the moisture has the effect of puffing up his dreads, giving them body, frizzing them out — especially on top, at the roots, where he’s been noticing a little too much scalp in the mirror lately — and this is more drizzle than real rain anyway. He pauses a moment outside the diner to shift the newspaper under one arm and pull up the collar of his black nylon jacket, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden, as if the upturned collar were an affectation out of the dim past and an old Clash concert at the Bowl. Which, he supposes, it is. Glancing up, he catches some balding geek giving him a covert look through the rain-scrawled window, but the show’s over and he’s not going to get himself worked up over runny eggs or this jerk or anything else, and yes, he took his blood-pressure medicine and no, he didn’t take — will never take — the Xanax Dr. Reiser talked him into as a tool to combat the rage that seems to sweep up on him inexplicably like a rogue wave on a flat sea, which really isn’t anger so much as impatience with people and the multifarious ways they can and will screw up just about anything, given the chance, over and over again.
The car is two blocks away, down a gently sloping street studded with meters and sloppily parked Volvos and Toyotas, mixed use, apartments and businesses side by side, the odd lawn, street trees, then around the corner to the cross street below. He’s walking now, striding along in his business-as-usual gait, forty-two years old and as fit as the gym and Dr. Reiser’s Lotensin and blood thinners can make him, ignoring the cars lined up at the light with their wipers clapping and the exhaust coiling out of their tailpipes in the last petrochemical gasp of the black stuff pooled up under layers of shale in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and Venezuela, the death of the earth, the death of everything, smelling crushed worm, rotting leaf and the wet acidic failure of the newspapers stuck to the sidewalk where the Mexicans tossed them short of house stoops and storefronts in the grim desperate hour before dawn. He’s walking, thinking he won’t bother stopping in at any of the stores today — LaJoy’s Home Entertainment Centers, with locations in Santa Barbara, Goleta, Ventura and Camarillo — because whatever might be happening or not happening there on a day like this is not so much his worry anymore as it is the problem and responsibility of the individual store managers and Harley Meachum, who’s being paid more than he’s worth to do just that: worry.
Semi-retired. That’s his status and he’s earned it, because he’s done his scrambling and made his bundle and he’s got his house in Montecito and his two cars and his boat and Anise too, time on his hands now, just the way he wants it — just like the bum he finds standing there by the Beemer when he turns the corner, a lean philosophical-looking white-haired bum planted there as if he’s thinking of making an offer on the car.
And that’s an automatic thing with him, calling a bum a bum instead of one of the homeless or less fortunate or needy or apartmentally challenged or whatever the phrase of the week is, Anise forever trying to correct him on that score, because his sympathies lie with the animals that can’t help themselves — the pigs electroshocked into the killing chute, the chickens dismembered on the assembly line while they’re still half-alive and conscious, the rabbits and donkeys and sheep the Park Service slaughtered on Santa Barbara and San Miguel and Santa Cruz islands without batting an eye — and not some white-haired upright primate who’s had all the advantages of living in America instead of some third-world country and still just wants to plant himself in the grass and suck on a bottle all day long in infantile regression. Is this a fundamental inconsistency: pro-animal, anti-human? Let it be, because it’s no worse than the way the eco-cops see things, and with what they’re spending on brodifacoum and the helicopters to deliver it they could put up every bum in town at the Holiday Inn for a month.