All You Can Eat

The palm reader, Madame Lena, wasn't much to look at. I felt sick when we met face to face for the first time because over the phone she sounded attractive and I got a little chub. I thought I'd let just about anyone give me a handy, but not her. Her hand was a wart-riddled claw of sorts that shot from her shirt sleeve ominously like a mangey dog out of its grimey dog box, a bracelet dangling there for a chain. She would make any witch proud and she would most assuredly have been burned at the stake in another time and place on appearance alone. I assure you she was an ugly woman, but I was careful and kind just in case she revealed herself to be a beautiful enchantress because I had seen Beauty and the Beast enough to know better, and to know I could never make it as a wildebeest.

Madame Lena had a 1-800 number that was shut down by the FCC because she was telling too much truth. She'd tell you that your mother was a whore, if it were true. If you wanted to know who killed JFK, she would tell you. If you wanted to know about the aliens in Roswell, and everywhere else, she'd tell you that, too. If you wanted to know who was going to win the World Series this year, or the Super Bowl, or what horse to pick at the Kentucky Derby, she'd let you know. If you wanted to know if your spouse was cheating on you, or when you would die, she would tell you all of that for just $1.99 a minute. Not a penny more. The only thing she could not answer, she said, were questions about God. She described herself as a religious woman.

You could call Madame Lena and get truth for the same price you could jerk yourself off to with the voice of some beige-colored manatee on a sweaty brown suede couch in Arkansas who pretends to be a debutante, or a southern belle, or a bored and horny housewife. The pictures they use on their website aren't the actual operators, though they're never sued for a bait-and-switch deception. They are models and porn actresses who sell photos of themselves for such nefarious things as duping sleezy men out of their money for some weirdo fetish. Guys call those numbers all the time because they have a particular pent-up fantasy no one has ever filled. Because otherwise they are boring people and they have no other outlet for excitement and fun. So it goes. 

I knew a girl who did that sort of work and she made more money than most. She was ugly as sin, though. Fat as a hippo. She said her best customer was a necrophiliac who dreamed of having sex with corpses and who had lost a job as a bodywasher in a funeral home in Peoria, Illinois for doing just that. Well, how the hell did you get him off, I quizzed her, suddenly interested in something she had to say. She claimed she did so by not saying a word. She just sat there on her fat ass and listened to him jerk his junk. Then he said, thank you, meekly, and hung up until next time. She said another guy was the same way, but he wanted her to say that she was dead over and over. So she did. "I'm dead. I'm so dead. I'm dead. Oh, babe. Oh. Oh. Ooh, baby. Dead, baby, dead. Still so fucking dead..." until he ejaculated and there was a dial-tone kiss goodbye.

The FDC shut Madame Lena down because they don't want people knowing too much. A lot can go wrong with too much knowledge floating around, so your probably better off just calling phone sex girls who will bray like donkeys, if barn animals are your thing. Or oink like greasy pigs or take a shit on you, figuratively, of course. The galoop of their deposited excrement right at your eureka moment. They'll bah like a sheep or pretend they've puked on your hairy chest. They'll describe it all in full detail down to the very last chunk. They'll piss all over you and there you'll be, dumb as hell, but in the thralls of ecstatic degenerate bliss.

God knows this because God made those girls who answer and those guys who call. He's taps those lines like J. Edgar Hoover in his haughty omnipotence because he keeps tabs on everyone. God knows this about knowledge, too. That is why he warned Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Yet, like the dumb bitch she was, Eve ate from it anyway and doomed mankind to a life of pain and suffering, though, women's groups will call that misogyny.

The FCC isn't concerned about the pain and suffering of people. They are concerned with civil unrest and national security. If you knew who killed JFK, you might revolt against your government. If you knew about the aliens, you might stockpile weapons and live in a bunker and not pay taxes. If you knew who was going to win every sporting event, the world would be full of Biff Tannons and crooked junkie gamblers, and the mafia would go broke. But if some slob of a woman with a pretty voice just told you a German Shepherd licked cheese whiz off her pink canoe so you explode like a bottle of champagne, so be it. You're being conned and pacified and it is unlikely you care about a government stealing you blind when you are jerking off.

My divorce shocked my wife. I told her one night over a pot roast. I planned the meal that I thought conducive to giving bad news. Comfort food would dull the emotions of such a sudden domestic upheaval, I figured. I thought of telling her that I was cheating on her, but that wouldn't have much mattered. She would have forgiven me as she had a thousand times before because she didn't care who I was with as long as I didn't love them or sleep with them or bring home a venereal disease. So I told her over mashed potatoes and gravy. There was a thick gravy all over the roast and caramelized onions and carrots and beans, plenty of green beans, which offered a pleasing aroma that went well with heartbreak. I made her a big plate, which she said she couldn't possibly eat.

Neither of us cooked, so it was all catered by someone who did. Some functional human-being who served a wonderful purpose in life. Someone who did that sort of thing for a living and who was paid, probably rather poorly, to do so. Who depended upon the generosity of tips. Gratuity, they call it.

She said she didn't see it coming with a spoon full of peas down her pretty trap. The clang of crestfallen silverware falling upon the plate.  She said she never thought it could happen to her. She nearly choked. She agreed to the divorce, but we settled for a disolution because a lot more paperwork and money go into a divorce, and to her core she was frugal and prudent, and she always heeded good advice. If my wife was Eve, she never would have eaten that apple. Not in a million fucking years. It is a funny thing about Eve. It wasn't a next door neighbor that told her not to eat it. It wasn't even her husband, Adam. It was God, for chrissake. I've ranted about this at dinner parties and to friends but none of them seem to care as much as I do. They think I'm a mysoginst. It doesn't help to mention all the different women I've slept with when someone accuses me of being a mysoginist.

It is a silly thing, really. Some judge sits on a bench and he will tell you that your marriage is over and you are free to go be with someone else. He will even sign a paper and they'll give you a copy. Or you can just be alone and fuck yourself all your life. Doesn't matter to him what you do. Or you can go gay and have a month dedicated to your courage and love of driving up old Hershey Highway, or scissoring and carpet munching, whichever applies. Or for being mentally ill and pretending you're a man or woman when you were born the opposite. When you have an inconvenient dick. Dressing up in women's clothes and tying scarves around that Adam's apple which is like lipstick on a pig. It's called a madame's apple, bigot. 

You might march in a parade with a giant brown papier-mâcheté anus on a pink float that men dressed as bedazzled spandexed penises jump through like 3rd grade acrobats in rainbow leotards ejaculating emulsified milky-water from their helmets all over an awestruck crowd of sanctimonious queefs. I wasn't going gay like Buck Rogers. No, sir. There is nothing about a dirty asshole that appeals to me no matter how cool they say it is. Same thing when I refused to wear acid-washed jeans in 7th grade, or to sport a mullet, or to chew tobacco, or to smoke pot. It is queer pressure.

Nor am I the prideful sort. But everyone has to be so friendly and pretend that a man on a menstrual cycle is not as abnormal as a walrus on a pogo stick because the devil is a charmer and he charms us all with our greatest weaknesses. For society, as a whole, that is sanctimony. He is a crafty motherfucker, to say the least. Men can get pregnant, they half-heartedly argue, hoping to admonish any dissent from that absurd proposition by calling someone a bigot. The coup de grâce. Their mouth is a steel trap as the devil chuckles in gross delight.

Everyone who went to your wedding, who remembers going to your wedding, anyway, will either say one of two things about you after your divorce: I can't believe they didn't work out. Or: I told you they wouldn't last. We shouldn't have bought them that expensive juicer. Everyone knows everything all of a sudden. All along, though, only Madame Lena could have told you that you're marriage would fail.

Jen and I didn't work out because I went to that palm reader on a trip with some friends to West Palm Beach that spring, and Madame Lena, who proudly called herself a gypsy, told me that the love of my life was a waitress, of all things, and I would meet her in the bar where she worked. We were on vacation absent our wives and instead of getting hookers or going to the strip clubs as we normally did, we went to the palm reader who was world renowned, according to some newspaper. And I thought it would be fun, being that we were in West PALM Beach, of all places, and that business they told me about the FCC shutting down her 1-800 operation. I was bored of strip clubs and midget bowling and dirty women pussy of every nationality, even women with multiple pussies or trick pussies or two esophaguses, or the double-jointed ballerina who did a porno version of "Black Swan" for me once in The Plaza Hotel in New York for a thousand bucks as large snowflakes fell mesmerically out the window. She danced as she had in the production right there in the room and she never took her ballet shoes off. It went on for hours. She was really good, and more than sex, it was immersive theatre. A once in a lifetime experience.

The devil got me with my lust of women, but he wasn't going to get me anymore. I was wise to him. It all gets old after a while. Midget pussy is just pussy, really. I don't believe in black girl magic, and it isn't true at all that once you go black you never go back. Sure, they're just fine. Like Chinese women are fine. Like Brazillians and Mexicans are fine. But there's no pot of gold pussy out there at the crux of a two-legged rainbow as I always imagined there would be. The grass isn't greener. The older I get, the more important the person attached to it becomes and the more obvious the devil's game has become to me. And so, I was determined to find true love once and for all and to give up sex until I did.

"Of all things to know," my friend, Pete, mocked me, "you asked who your true love is?"

"What better question?" I shot back. He laughed and took a shot of something because liquor kills everything, even a hangover. We were in the airport bar waiting to go home getting our last drinks in. Trying to decide what happened. They dreaded it more than I and I looked at the three of them and realized how miserable they were and how happiness was only temporary for them. They lived almost entirely in the moment. I was them for many years, but I didn't want to be them anymore. So I sat there and drank a beer and wondered who she was and what she looked like. I wondered if she looked like a wildebeest or a manatee. What the hell would I do then? Was it looks I was after as I had been all my life, or was it love? What if she had Down Syndrome or tourettes? What if she was elderly or married to a jealous man? What if she was underage or just too young? What if she never came at all?

They say Madame Lena told President Trump that he would be president back in 2014, which is why he ran in 2016 and won, defeating some curly-toed evil warmonger bitch who ate children — a modest footnote in history. Who else saw that one coming? In her small shop, which disappointedly was not a wagon but rather a shop in a strip-mall that could have been a tanning salon or a smoke shop, there was a picture of her with President Trump. He was smiling, sitting in the same chair I sat in, his tie practically dragging on the floor like a dead dog's tongue. She was holding his hand with that wicked green claw of hers as though his hand was something sacred. Like Charlie once held that golden ticket. His ego was as big as the universe and he looked like a rich tangerine with a wisp of lemon meringue hair.

When I asked her if she was sure about her prediction of my life, she smiled to reassure me with three teeth in her head, and for some reason, I found comfort in the trinity of her dentition. Those three teeth were Shakespearean to me like the three witches in Macbeth. Then she pointed at that picture of her and President Trump, with his orangey-Florida sunkissed sheen and ultra-radiant smile, and I didn't know what else to do but to believe her. My friends ridiculed me with laughter as they went to the strip club and then to fish for tourists at a beach bar (our game had been to see which of us could do the most women from different states and nationalities), but I was convinced and went back to the hotel, anxious to get back home and end it with my wife in pursuit of the holy grail — true and everlasting love. I had treated the world as an all you can eat buffet long enough.

My wife, Jen, was an investment banker and made a lot of money. She was hot. She hadn't lost it over the dozen years we were married where I had lost it and looked something like a doughy graying wombat, or a washed-up child actor who played in some show hardly no one remembers, but who still wears his hair the same way. I was in relatively decent shape still, but I felt dull, whereas, Jen was vibrant and radiant. Maybe it was good genes or the products she used. She was also very good with money, and she was good with my money, which I was not. Everyone told me that I "married up," which sometimes felt like a compliment to her or an insult to me, depending upon who and how they said it. I am a well paid soul-sucking civil attorney, but I spend money loosely. Mostly on hookers or massages or golf clubs or take-out Chinese or my Mercedes or my precious Black Vincent motorcycle. I loved my wife, as things go, but the way Madame Lena said that my true love was a waitress in a bar, I believed her. And for whatever reason, at 36, I was obsessed with finding her like the conquistadors were obsessed with finding gold. So Jen became an Aztec and I was going to genocide her. I did so over a perfectly good pot roast. Maybe I should have chosen meatloaf.

So I divorced my wife and became an accidental drunk. Not a drunk that drinks so much so that his liver shutters up, but a drunk of good caliber. A drunk whose finances suffer because he drinks. Whose belly bulges a little like he might be two or three months pregnant if he was secretly packing a uterus in there, because guys can get pregnant, too, we all know in this society of nitwits and degenerates and incorrigible buffoons, and who has embarrassed himself on a few occasions by saying or doing outrageous things that are funny in retrospect, but not really funny at all. Nothing too outrageous and certainly nothing I remember exactly.

I gallivanted all over town and in several bars and restaurants, and made a concerted effort to get to know my waitresses because any one of them could be the one. One of those grimy bitches, even, who licks her fingers when she counts her tip money at the end of the night, like I don't see her do it. I'm sitting right there. Although it sounds terrible, I didn't realize before then that they existed in a way. If they weren't attractive, especially not. They were sort of an invisible brand of people who came and went and I hardly noticed them at all. There were much like useful ornaments. They got hired and fired all the time, but it was like gaining or losing a sock in a drawer that was full of all the same kind. How quickly you forget them. Poof, they're gone. I was as sentimental about them as I was of farts. The death of a waitress was as casual to me as passing gas.

I've not seen a waitress get fired, but I've heard of it happening. Just as I hadn't seen a bird die or sleep. But I've seen evidence that it was going to happen before it actually did. You can see it on their dejected faces. Both the boss and the waitress. The boss says something like, I got a business to run. And the contemptuous waitress counters with, I got a family to feed. The great precursor being the waitress gets yelled at about something or other. Fucking up an order. Spilling a tray of drinks. Being rude to an asshole bougie customer.

It isn't easy work, with all the indignity one endures, I took note. The swollen feet they must suffer. The bunyans and varicose veins. The back aches. The dreadful hours where they miss their kids' events. Then they get hours or tables cut. No one jokes with them anymore like they used to. No one but the regulars, who don't know anything, and who half think they have a fair chance of getting laid when the dust settles, but all that the waitress is doing is playing them for a better tip. Flirting, a little, making them believe that there is something there that isn't. An impetuous romance to be had that the patron has never known because they've been married for twenty three years out of high school and have kids and go to church and watch golf on Sundays after they mow the lawn. They don't play anything, but they dabble in cornhole and barbecues and fantasy football and they could be a commercial for any product you can think of if called upon because they are just like everyone else. Little different. They don't drink anything, but they sip. They don't love too much or too little. They're okay with anything society says they ought to be okay with and they are outraged by anything society says they ought to be outraged by. They don't rock the boat or challenge authority. They go along to get along. They watch football. Eat pizza. Drink beer. Go on all the typical vacations. Then they die.

But there in that last original frontier of their over-condtioned brain, untouched by the dirty fingers of civilization and commercialization, they long for a seedy affair, just one, with this sweaty waitress before she dies her inevitable waitress death or they die of that heart attack or cancer that's waiting for them one day which stalks them currently like a snake in the grass.

There is a chance in the patron's head that when the waitress's shift ends, if he tips well enough, or says the right thing, that she will go home with him. Well, not home. Maybe in the new hotel across town with fresh sheets, or he'll ask her to meet him somewhere. Perhaps just outside in the car on a rainy Saturday night to meet and greet President Johnson. That'd be fine. A hot dog in the rain. The sausage in the wet bun. Just see if it fits. There's something mesmeric about the rain cascading on the windshield while one is in the thralls of passionate snake charming. It is some kind of new-age love, like turtle-doving once was a coon's age ago when bushes were hairy like empty bird's nests. Now they're bald as babies because they say it's more hygenic. Though she is a little sweaty and smells like pizza and grease, bobbing there, up and down like a greasy pumpjack, praying to St. Peter. Sure. Maybe if he is really lucky, he might get to clean the fishtank, too. The backseat is big enough. The windows are tinted. It's dark. There's a place behind the dumpster if there aren't two raccoons back there beating them to it. Two horny raccoons. Or just one raccoon beating off being that raccoons are scurrilous masturbators.

There are 2,517,793 servers in the United States. This is an exact number, though it fluctuates with every minute because a server will quit or be fired every 2.5 minutes in the US, on average. Don't ask me how I know this, I just do. 62% of those are waitresses, or 1,561,032. So what are the odds that of all those waitresses I would find the one that Madame Lena promised me was my true love? I wouldn't gamble on my odds of finding her, so perhaps it was dumb to divorce my wife when I had nothing else. But I'm not the type to let anything linger. Because even worse than people sneering at you through crooked smiles saying you "traded up" as though they invented the euphemism and they are so fucking clever, is someone asking you what the hell you were thinking when you divorced her. Are you gay? Have you gone Greek? Are you making babies with the moon? Packing fudge on the night shift? No. I don't like assholes, I say bluntly. Hairy brown eyes. It is only by coincidence that my name is Harry and I have brown eyes. Harry Browneyes.

That gyspy prognosticator wasn't the sole reason I divorced Jen. I told myself that she was probably having an affair, but that didn't matter to me because I had treated the world as an all you can eat buffet most of my life. I had banged a thousand hookers and random women from time to time, depending upon my mood. Strippers on days I had the time, hookers when I was in a rush, bar flies when I was feeling social, divorcees and amputees when I was feeling empathetic, single moms when I wanted yoga pants and the smell of peanut butter and jelly, grandmas when I wanted nurturing, co-eds, well, whenever it could be arranged because they fuck like wet rabbits. I was a lascivious little leprechaun and it was a lustful list of women.

But Jen was fucking the devil, or so I told myself, for as debauched as I was, she could not possibly be chaste, as beautiful as she was. We became one after all. Like Adam and Eve were one and the sin of one is the sin of both. She said it was okay that I had affairs because she didn't mind what I do. Men are different animals, she went on, incapable of fidelity. She wasn't the jealous type, she assured me. That sort of thing. She never flatly admitted it, but I knew it was happening out there in the darkness. I knew she must have been cheating on me as well on business trips or girl's nights out. But I found out later that she was cheating on me with with the ultimate man, Jesus Christ. She became a devout Christian and I would burn in hell for my sin unless it was to be believed — that business about forgiveness. I was done with all those plastic women. That parade of pussies. Women who jumped through a papier-mâcheté pink pussy in bedazzled spandex unitards in my over-active imagination.

I sometimes get drunk in a bar and look around at the waitresses and wonder what my ex-wife was doing as I did. Remembering some good time we had somewhere. On some beach. Wading in the ocean which always felt like the ends of the world to me. In a cabin in the woods where it felt we were the only two people alive. But what unlawful, godawful thing was she doing now? Perhaps she fell out of love with Jesus and was now running with the devil as I was for all those years, wasting away a perfectly good marriage. Then I let it go. It was the difference in one drink. I was on a crusade, for chrissake. I was on a goddamn crussade for real love and nothing could get in my way of that. I wasn't having sex with another woman, other than my real love, for I didn't want to cheapen it anymore than I already have.

The caveat of my true love, Madame Lena told me, was that she would be "in a bar marked by a pig, and she will wear all white when almost everyone else wears black." She sounded like a fabled prognosticator from a mystical movie. Her eyes rolled in the back of her head as she offered it. Her throat leveraged a meaty growl in the current of her tone. She said fate draws people together that way sometimes and then leaves the rest up to us. She also said I would know her when I saw her.

There were limited places she could be and I went to everyone of them and talked to every waitress I could talk to. There were a lot of quick hellos and fast goodbyes. Then a new bar opened up down the street. It was an upscale place called Porkopolis, and I knew that must be the place. It was a barbecue place. A hoity gastropub.

So I went. Religiously, I went. So faithful I was, I could have been a monk if it were a monestary. I had a tab, which only one other person was afforded. I knew almost everything about everyone there was to know. I learned how to make drinks by watching. Who drank what. Who ate what. Who was cheating on who around town. And I fell in love with a waitress named Sam, who was nothing like me in any way. Nothing like me at all. Worst thing was she never wore white. She wore black almost every day like a moody goth teenager. I became that man dreaming of having her in the parking lot for tea and crumpets. Biscuits and gravy over my sausage link. And she smiled and grinned and sat next to me when her shift was over, drinking a tequila double, on me. I have no taste for tequila. It tastes like goat piss to me.

I had flirted with her so ceaselessly, everytime she passed behind the bar in front of me I had a one liner ready for her. I fired every flirty torpedo at her with hopes to sink her resistance, though I was twice her age. I wasn't as attractive as her. But I've always believed in magic words that could unlock anyone or anything if spoken properly. They've worked before and they'll work again, for chrissake.

"What color are your panties?" I finally asked.

She laughed, nearly choking on the craft beer she chased her tequila with. It came in a can. The can was colored like cotton candy is colored. It looked like a beer made for a child. Made for Spongebob Squarepants. I wanted to give her a belly full of bone marrow about as much as I wanted to do anything else in this world. So did everyone else around me, but they all acted like they didn't. Like they were decent men. On the inside we are all the same two-eyed horny beasts, though, ready to beat her guts. We were all thinking the same thing. How to fidget the midget into her golden gidget.

"And what does the color of my underwear matter?" she asked. Her eyes full of playful curiosity, floating in tequila. I was sure I wasn't the first person to buy her a drink. She was the fun waitress. The one who did shots with her tables. She was half-sauced after working a double, which just might work to my advantage, I felt.

"Just curious. No matter."

Then she arched her back and reached around to pull out her stretchy black pants to show me she was wearing a black thong. Her arched back looked like a sand dune from Lawrence of Arabia. I thought maybe if her underwear was white, I'd have a claim for her being the love of my life. I secretly checked out her socks while she wasn't looking and they were also black. So were her shoes. Black as a Peruvian hooker's heart who'll cut your throat if you try to cheat her.

"What are you doing Saturday night?" I asked her.

"Commiting suicide," she replied, lethargically downing another shot of tequila — this one courtesy of the old man at the end of the bar who could be her grandfather, for chrissake. She'd seen the same Woody Allen film as me. She wasn't really suicidal, she made known with a giggle.

"What about Friday? I'd love to take you out for drinks."

"Friday?" she considered. "Friday's good. I work until 10. If you want to meet me here, we can go out afterwards."

"That's fine." I was getting ready to tell her something more about me, but she didn't seem interested. She downed her third tequila double and said she had to go home to her kids, so I walked her to her car. It was a gold minivan and it glowed in the moonlight. She told me she had another life before she was a waitress and she wasn't very good at waitressing, but she was pretty good at the other thing until something bad happened and the other thing fired her. I said she was wonderful at anything she did and she laughed, waved playfully, and said, "Fare thee well."

"Fare thee well!"

All week I was preparing for that Friday night. I went to the pool and worked on my tan. Laying out in the sun like a chicken tender in a toaster oven anxious to be eaten. Reclined on those uncomfortable wooden slat chairs that a thousand fat women have secreted their fat juices and oils all over. The liquified souls of every skinny man they have ever eaten. That stunk faintly of a crude concoction of baby oil, sweat and Skittles. Little fat kids kerplunking in the water like fleshy turds in an oversized toilet, making that fateful "galoop" sound as they sink, teasing death with drowning, accidentally swallowing the soup of chlorine, feces, urine and pubic hair, but inevitably bobbing up like buoys, defying natural selection. The sweat and body oil of a thousand other kids and old men with hairy backs and women with open leg sores laying on top like a decadent human oil-spill.

I worked out every night. Did about a thousand bench presses on my seldom used weightbench until my arms felt like steel pipe cleaners rather than wet noodles. My chest reshaped as though I had inflated it with an air pump. Two burgeoning boulders instead of the speedbump of preteen girl tits. I flexed in the mirror. I was lucky to have such nice nipples. I've seen and noted scores of ugly nipples in my time. Both those I've seen in person and those I've seen on TV. Giant pancake-like nipples. Sausage nipples. Nipples that look like sombreros or manhole covers. If the attractiveness of a person was based upon nipples, I'd be Brad Nipple Pitt. I'd enter a pageant, if there was one. I would win first prize. A blue fucking ribbon. 

I was ready for Friday night. I was sure that Sam would wear white and fulfill the prophecy of Madame Lena. Maybe it would be a hair tie, but something of her would be white. It had to be. But I sat there and waited for her to appear through that busy revolving kitchen door, smiling as she did all those times she emerged as Punxutawney Phil emerged on his big day. But that door birthed everyone besides her. Then a new girl, a dopey-faced new girl, shaped like a denim church bell, appeared and my heart sunk and imploded beneath the weight of its despair like that billionaire submarine everyone was talking about. 

"What happened to Sam?" I finally asked, dejected as I was. Nothing to lose. Hoping she had the flu, or that her car broke down. Anything but what I feared most. 

One girl shrugged her shoulders. Another shuttered her windows and gave me the look that I knew all too well. I don't want to get in trouble for saying. Don't ask me. I only work here.

Finally, someone said that she walked out Wednesday night. My heart blew up like the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and all those little yellow people that made up my existence, my hopes and my dreams, my desires and the euphoria of my optimism, vaporized in the blink of an eye. 

She died the way waitresses die. Like butterflies die. Like houseflies die. Like birds and saquatches die. Invisible. Poof, they are gone. I never got her number and had no way of contacting her. She told me she was on no social media. She was gone gone. So I sat there and drank. Heartbroken and miserable. Trying to console myself with the usual things. It wouldn't have worked out anyway. This is saving time in the long run. She never wore white. It's not meant to be. God intervened on my behalf because the next woman will be really something. Because God has nothing better to do than to line up my women like bowling pins. 

What happened to so and so? I don't know. I was so fucking depressed. Too depressed to call anyone for a consolation fuck. I was tired of meaningless sex with meaningless people. Sitting in a bar or restaurant as bait until someone bites or my phone chimes. I was tired of boring one liners and relationships I knew wouldn't last. And then, as I wallowed in my self-pity, she walked in. The new, new waitress. Not the new one who was shaped like a denim Liberty Bell. It was another lady. In a sea of black, she was like a swan. A perfect white swan. The antithesis of that out-of-work ballerina I knew once at The Plaza Hotel. And she was being trained by another of those dying waitresses, who I had heard from someone was not long for this world. She was attentively listening. Then as she wiped the copper bartop down in front of me and made someone a drink, she looked at me and said, "Hello, handsome, my name is Jen."

"Well, hello Jen," I smiled back. "My name is Harry Ruby. No relation to Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Oswald, forever concealing the conspiracy to kill the 35th president of the United States of America for not pushing the CIA's war agenda, and for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, may he rest in peace." Harry Browneye, I wanted to say.

She chuckled a near indiscernible chuckle in her soul. Just as she once did when I said it 12 years ago, word for word. Then she said her bit. As though it was a memorized line in a script.

"Jen and Harry. I believe it has a certain ring to it. Wouldn't you say?"

I looked over and smiled at her. I wouldn't really say that it had a ring to it, but when I wasn't sure about something, I usually agree. My beautiful ex-wife struck again. There she was in white. Reinventing herself. I didn't ask what happened. I didn't need to. She had quit her job as an investment banker to be a waitress because in divorcing her, I had inadvertently inspired her to do something she always wanted to do — waitress. It was a job her father forbade her to do when she was in high school and college. He was afraid she would get stuck and do it all her life. Or he watched too many "Unsolved Mystery" TV shows and it seemed always to be a waitress getting raped and stabbed to death in a K-Mart parking lot in El Paso, Texas or Spokane, Washington. No daughter of mine will sling hash, he used to proclaim.

She was here because the divorce didn't set easy. She was in love with me and I was in love with her and that was all that really mattered. Or so it seemed that night as I watched her, this beautiful white swan, work amongst a gaggle of geese. She seemed like the only one in the room who wanted to be there. It was perfect for a moment in my head that was like a Garden of Eden. Madame Lena was somehwere having a chuckle at my expense. She had told me how it would happen and where and with who and I knew suddenly that my ex-wife was the love of my life, and the reality of it settled over me as I sat there and smiled at myself in a mirror through bottles across the bar.

But as I drank, my mind kept going back to Sam, wondering where she was now. And though Madame Lena had predicted Trump becoming president, and the World Trade Center collapsing, and the death of this person and that person, and the war in this place and that place, all with startling accuracy, it wasn't that way with me. No one was to tell me who my true love was and I wasn't about to follow because that sounded like the most boring thing in the world to me to do. So I finished my drink, paid my tab, and decided to hop around to every bar in town until I found her, hopefully before she committed suicide or got married or fell in love with someone that wasn't me. It was a race against time. A space race and she was the moon.

But I caught myself just as I was about to leave. As I was about to do what I've always done once more. The devil was having his way with me, alright. He was seducing me with that which effectively tempts me. The fallacy of someone being something to me that all others were not. The seduction of a stranger, which usually wears off once I get to know enough about them where there doesn't appear to be anything interesting left. She was yet another of those people. Someone beautiful who would never last.

The devil had seduced me just as he had seduced Eve to eat the fruit of that tree, just as he seduces people to do evil things every day — to kill, to do drugs, to rage, to cheat, to steal, to hurt, to hate, to do all the ungodly things that they do. To be stupid and lack common sense and decency. To neglect children. To disappoint loved ones. To give up.

I've never been, but I am pretty sure that above the gates of Hell there is a neon sign that says "All You Can Eat" and inside there is a buffet of sin. Anything and everything you can think of is there. All to be coveted and consumed and replenished by even greater sin as it is on Earth inside the kingdom of man. The only repercussion is that Hell gets worse and worse just as life worsens for a living sinner. I hope not to ever know that reality, but in truth, I already do.

Upon the realization of this I settled in my seat until Jen got off her shift and we had drinks in Porkopolis and we talked as we hadn't talked in a long time. As two normal people. Things got in the way of our marriage. Of our love. Sin got in the way. I don't know exactly how the God thing works. No one really does. We all have opinions as to how it goes and some of us are more sanctamonious in our profundity. But God is love and love is neither proud nor sinful. We complicate too much. Pollute our brains and souls with too much. God, that is love, is all that is pure.

We went home and made love like we hadn't made love in a long time. Afterwards, we resumed are new lives and wrote a new ending that we wish to postpone in our happiness, indefinitely. Jen didn't last long as a waitress. But she lasted long enough.