Jesus Goes to Jail: Free Lunch (Part 2/9)

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
--Walter Morrow

Part 2
Free Lunch

“What are my options?” I asked. “I’m sure it’s all good, but I just want to make sure.”

“Anything you like, now don’t you worry none,” James assured me. “I got this.” It could have been a trick of the lights, which were hanging low from the wooden panelled ceiling, but the whites of his eyes were yellow and glassy.

“Alright,” I announced. “My predilections are mutable. I’m gonna get one of whatever it is you’re having.”

“Oh yes, yes, let’s see what’s good,” he nodded, looking over the menu. “A steak for me. Yes indeed.” He turned to me, and added, “They’s got good ones here.”

“Sounds juicy and delicious,” I proclaimed, closed my menu, and raised my glass of water for a toast. “Here’s to James: May the kindness of strangers never leave room for doubt about the goodness of the universe.”

“Alright then,” James affirmed, and we clinked our glasses.

Neither of the girls joined in the toast. They were using the menus as shields to hide behind, conferring with nonverbal cues, questioning one another how it was that they had ended up here. James, who was sitting next to me on the red cushioned bench across the table from the ladies, leaned forward.

“Girls, don’t be shy.” He interrupted their silence, and pulled down the menu of the girl across from him. Looking over it, he erupted into a cackling bout of laughter that petered off into a whistling wheeze. “What about you ladies, now? Don’t be shy. It’s on me. Let’s drop the wall, now.”

“Steak, I guess,” mumbled the high cheekboned beauty across from James. She sounded ambivalent and cast a sideways glance to her friend. The other lass nodded, but neither of them looked thrilled to be at the table. After he made sure that they were sure, James took their menus. He exuded a contagious zeal for life, but both of the gals were allergic to his moxie.

So whaddya do for work? Construction?” I inquired.

“I work, son!” James exclaimed, and elbowed me as he laughed. “Steak dinners all around is on me.” Then he looked back across to the girls, and asked, “Y’all live here?”

The wall of their menus had been breached, snatched away by James, and now, to their dismay, he was intent on coaxing them out of their shells of silence.

“Yep,” snapped the one across from him. Her eyes were fixed on the table. Both were fidgeting under the spotlight of his glassy eyed gaze.

“Spokane, what a beautiful city,” James mused, nodding. “You’re friend too? Y’all both live here?” His smile glowed. It bespoke of his excessive amount of energy and shined bright out of his ebony face.

However, completely absorbed in the process, the girl across from me was stirring a red straw in her ice water. She couldn’t be bothered to reply.

“We both live in Spokane,” retorted the brunette across from James. She had delivered the statement in a tone that suggested finality: No more questions, please. I wondered if she were a model, the way a smudge of a shadow was playing in the hollows of her cheeks. Such glorious cheekbones to offset her pout, which was full lipped and feline. She had an aquiline nose, upon which settled a light dusting of freckles which had grown large families under the summer sun. But, it was the way she cut with her starburst eyes that got a reaction. Gold and brown with blue explosions on the perimeter, the daggers conveyed her message. James needed to back the fuck off.

“Alright then. Don’t mind me,” James apologized, palms in the air. He leaned back, chuckling to himself, still looking immensely pleased.

“You eat today?” he asked the brunette. It had only been few seconds of gratuitous silence, but he could couldn’t contain himself. He had about as much a chance of keeping his lip buttoned as a firecracker tossed into a campfire can keep itself from going off.

“A little,” quipped the brunette, and began examining her butter knife. She polished off a few watermarks with her napkin, and looked at her reflection.

“A little huh?” James probed. “I didn’t eat much myself. But I’ll tell you what,” and he launched into a story. If he had heard the aggravated sigh of the brunette, who immediately tuned out, he didn’t let on. And then his story ended up being full of unfamiliar names--impossible to follow. James would ask an occasional, ‘know what I’m saying’, but it was to be taken rhetorically, and he assumed we did.

When I had met the girls an hour ago, they had chatted back and forth, at ease at the bus stop. We were waiting for the bus heading for Manito Park, and they’d been explaining about the Thursday night drum circle held there, when James had ambled up. Without breaking any ice, he invited us to dinner. The girls had stood there, stunned, caught off guard and blinking. I shrugged, and told James that I couldn’t see any reason why not to come along if he was buying. That seemed to give the ladies pause. They silently deliberated by shooting one another meaningful glances. After a few shrugs, hesitant, they consented. They could always take a later bus to the park, and we thought we could make it long before sunset.

I noticed that when James walked up, their demeanors had changed. Their suspicion was a reminder of how close we were to Northern Idaho, home of the Aryan Nations. Then again, maybe it wasn’t his race, but his forwardness, which the ladies found unsettling. James had shaken all our hands, introducing himself as if we had a prior agreement to meet one another. He didn’t beat around the bush, but I was game. Having just hitchhiked into Spokane the night before, a meal in a restaurant sounded much more appetizing than baloney on white bread or whatever scraps the churches handed out.

As we crossed the street, James went on and on about how good the food was, how good the weather was, and how good life was. I caught his enthusiasm bug, but the girls couldn’t be infected. With a resignated plodding, they trailed a few paces behind James and me, immune to the gusto of our outspoken dinner host.

Now, inside the restaurant, they were having none of it. Neither of them were keen on talking to the erratic stranger. Their distrust of James was masked in an apathy which flickered with little ticks of underlying perturbation. Heedless of their discomfort, James prattled on. The brunette, who had spoken earlier, looked beyond James to the wall. The curtain of eyelashes across from me were never raised. They belonged to a dishwater blonde, a silent and brooding young thing. She had given her undivided attention to the rotating ice in her glass. I wondered if she was attempting self hypnosis as a way of mesmerizing herself up and away from the table.

The story ended with a hitch. We had understood none of it, other than it had been a grand old time for James that one night in Detroit.

Neither of the girls indulged him with a question or comment. When I gave a wordless nod of acknowledgment, James dropped something energetically. An intangible vibration of the table shifted, and someone needed to say something.

“All I had today was an abandon mocha.” It was the first thing that popped into my head.

“What do you mean abandon?” James grunted, looking at me with a questioning frown.

“A woman tossed it aside like it was a hackneyed nothing, a tripe bit of sugar water. Can you believe that?” My English accent became more pronounced as I spoke. The brunette graced me with a sympathetic laugh. Her friend was at one with the ice water, unmoving, and James looked offended.

“You can’t mean out the trash?” He turned to me with his face screwed up. “Lawd, but that is disgraceful.” Looking to the brunette, he clucked his tongue in disappointment, as if I had let him down. He had delivered a tale about a glorious night where he’d been the hero. He had everyone laughing in that Detroit bar, and I had gone and spoiled it by following up with a line about trash.

“Yes, I’m a parsimonious cad, when it comes down to it,” I Englished.

“A what?”

“A cheap bastard,” I clarified, and cleared my throat. No one was finding my English accent funny anylonger. “I’m stoned. Thanks for the toke ladies. I like using silly words when I’m high.”

“Yeah, no problem,” said the brunette. “What’s taking the waitress so long? Last week, the drum circle started early.”

“You can’t go around eating out the trash. Mercy!” cried James, still upset about the mocha I rescued.

“But that mocha was still hot,” I reasoned. “I watched the woman toss it out. Well, that’s not quite right. She didn’t toss it. It was set carefully on top of the trash, and I couldn’t stand for that kind of disgrace. To be honest, I didn’t mind saving the day. Sometimes, you gotta do the right thing.”

James shook his head, looking as if he’d just swallowed a bug.

The ice cube stirrer glanced up. I caught a flash of reproach in her blue eyes before she could look back down into her whirlpool of distraction, her icebergs of elsewhere.

“Where’s your dignity, son?” James demanded.

“Sorely lacking, I fear.”

“Your parents done fucked up. Yo mama never slapped you for grabbin thangs out the trash, she done fucked up on that.”

“Are you implying that my mother didn’t raise me right, James? What are you insinuating about my rearing?” It was too hard to resist speaking without an English accent.

James exploded into a raucous laugh that made both girls redden and shift in their seats.

Our waitress returned, her expression flat, looking unamused by James. His jovial antics were getting nowhere with her, and she almost growled as she spoke.

“Made up your minds?” Plastered on her face was a thick base of foundation which did nothing to conceal the coarseness of her fritzed energy.

“Yes indeed, we’s all ready,” James responded. To confirm, he looked to the girls who both nodded. “We’s all getting steaks,” he declared. “And I don’t know about them, but I want mine well done. Burn it up; that’s how I like it.”

“Medium rare and juicy,” I put in.

“Medium,” requested the brunette. Her friend nodded, same.

“Fries or salad?” carped the waitress. Were we somehow testing her patience?

“I’d like a big old mess of fries with mine,” James requested.

“Me too,” I said, sheepish beneath the glowering woman.

The ladies wanted a salad. The way in which the waitress scribbled our orders seemed more than aggressive. It was hostile. Without inquiring what kind of dressing the ladies preferred, she closed her pad with a snap.

Imperturbable, James was still smiling, broad as ever. Was this a kind of bigotry he’d become accustomed to putting up with? Was the waitress a bigot? The jury was still out. Whatever the issue, her darkness hadn’t dimmed the good humor of James one iota.

As she walked away, I thought about our dinner party and how it might appear. There was James, a wiry framed black man, probably somewhere in his mid thirties. He must have looked awfully quirky. Constantly moving around in his seat, his jeans had holes in the knees, and his white sneakers were falling apart. Then there was me with a green bandana loosely gathering a mop of stringy dreadlocks, and a long mess of pubic hair dangling from my chin. In contrast, the two girls were proper, dressed in clean clothes, and well mannered (mousey, if you hadn’t seen the way the brunette weaponized her eyes).

Like an epiphanic bolt of lightning, it dawned on me that I had no idea how old they were. I was about to turn 22. I figured them to be around my age, but something in the disapproving looks of the waitress made me think twice. For all I knew, she could be a mom with daughters the same age as the girls. Whatever the case, she could see that we weren’t supposed to be mixing it up like this. In fact, we had no business dining together at all. James and I were most likely predators. Either that or she was a racist; I couldn’t be sure.

Until our meal arrived, James held a one sided conversation with the table. Any question for the ladies was leveled with a monosyllabic mumble by the brunette. Despite her recalcitrant attitude, James never dropped the ball of his inquisitive gab. He refused to let silence settle in, as if he feared a lull, or simply couldn’t abide in quiet company.

Deciding that the waitress was off base in whatever it was she was thinking about the table, I began to admire the tenacity of James. Just because it was payday, he’d chosen to take us out to dinner. We were strangers, but he didn’t appear intent on seduction. If he was a predator, his methods were spurious, and not at all correlated to anything he said. Not once did he make a personal comment about how the girls looked. Although he might come off as overbearing, none of his cajoling could have been interpreted as perverse. He asked about bus routes, parks, and kept reiterating what a beautiful day it was. He reminded us over and over about what a wonderful time he was having--what fun we were all having. As he laughed, he might elbow my arm for concurrence, or drum on the table with his knuckles for emphasis. He chose to be oblivious of the aloof expressions across our table. Both girls looked increasingly crestfallen, stuck in a soup of agitated malaise.

When the waitress returned, she uttered not a single platitude as she slid our plates in front of us.

“Oh my, oh my,” said James, rubbing his hands together. “Look at this. Will you just take a look at this? Thank you kindly, why thank you indeed.”

The waitress gave a ‘harumph’ in response and walked away.

“James, you Da Man!” I proclaimed.

“Oh don’t mention it,” he replied with a wave of dismissal. “My pleasure, my pleasure. Now you don’t need to find your dinner--” he leaned into me and cupped a hand to the corner mouth, and whispered--”in the trash.” The brunette rolled her eyes as James slapped the table looking at her for a response. “Now let’s enjoy our blessings. These steaks won’t eat themselves. We’s got work to do.”

The steaks wouldn’t have won any medals, but James bit into his as if it had been dropped onto his plate from heaven. His noises of approval, full of smacking and unintelligible mumbles, caused one of the blonde’s eyebrows to raise in disbelief. He went to work on the cut of meat at a ferocious pace. Like a machine on amphetamines, James sliced and stabbed into it. I saw that he was lifting fork fulls into his mouth before having finished with the previous bites he’d been chewing.

The brunette looked across the table with an accusing expression, as if I had been the one to trick her into coming along to witness a fiasco. For her, this was beyond bearable, but I was hungry too. I shrugged and dug in. However, running at a good clip through the feast, I was only at the halfway point, when I saw James dabbing the last smear of ketchup with his final french fry.

“Now that hit the spot,” he declared, rubbing his stomach. “Yes it did, it surely did.” He wiped his lips with a napkin and sighed.

“Thanks,” muttered the blonde, at long last breaking her word fast. She was poking at her salad.

“My pleasure, you know? It makes me happy to be able to take y’all out. Know what I’m sayin? Y’all is good people.” James slapped his stomach twice for emphasis. “Now y’all excuse me, but I feel nature calling. Do you mind?”

I slid out of the booth, so he could get by. He took quick steps headed toward the bathroom in the back of the restaurant.

“Oh… my… God,” dramatized the blonde, when James was out of earshot. “Did you see him eating? That was fucking disgusting.”

“Totally,” drawled the brunette.

“Hey,” I objected, “if he’s going to pick up the tab, then he can eat anyway--” I stopped halfway through the sentence. Both girls frowned and turned their heads to look.

“Oh my God, was that James?”

“No,” I blurted. I didn’t sound convincing, but hoped neither of them had turned in time to see anything but a blue denim sleeve pass outside the front window. James had left the building.