digital pen, digital paper.

“Routine”

My dog has a Ph.D. in Astro-Physics. Although it was embarrassing to have a pet with a higher level of education than myself, I had to give him credit for all the hard work he did and everything he’d accomplished. He’s also a great fan of Shakespeare, and even enjoys reading plays aloud, personifying each character’s voice as he best saw fit. This was the reason that I didn’t get much sleep last night.

It was around 11 P.M. and I was lying in bed trying to ignore the thick British accent coming from my living room. This was difficult however because my dog had taken various acting classes while studying for his masters degree. I got up and walked to the living room and asked him politely to stop for the night. All he did was shoot me an icy stare. To be honest, I did feel a little bad about asking him to stop, because I knew how much he loved theatre and literature from that time period, but it was getting late and I needed sleep. He spoke to me in bad middle English.

“Willst thou maketh me supper?”

I couldn’t believe he was asking me to make supper. I was dead tired. But I knew better than to argue with him, so I put on the waitress uniform that I found outside a truck-stop, popped a piece of gum in my mouth, and took his order. He enjoyed the realism.

“What’ll it be?”

“I believeth I’ll have the steak, medium rare, with a baked potato, and a salad.”

He’d forgotten to tell me what kind of salad dressing he wanted.

“And the dressing for your salad?”

“Oil and vinegar will be fine. Oh, and for dessert I’ll have two slices of apple pie, and a glass of your finest Chardonnay.”

Damn. I knew he’d want something complicated. I spent the next hour preparing his meal. When it was finally done, he sent it back claiming there was a hair in it. Again, I didn’t want to argue, so I cooked him another meal. Around 1 A.M. my dog finally fell asleep. Wine always made him drowsy.

I lay in bed the next morning trying to think of what could keep me occupied for the day, but I couldn’t think of anything in particular I wanted to do. Breakfast would probably be a good kick-start to my day. After showering, I got dressed and went into the kitchen where I fried four strips of bacon. Each was then carefully inserted into my wallet making sure to separate the pieces with at least two crisp new dollar bills. This soaked up the grease and insured that my pants would stay dry for the duration of the afternoon. I was then out the door and on to the local diner.

As I walked through the double doors of the eatery, I sensed a number of people paying attention, too much attention, to me. For some reason this seemed to happen wherever I went, but I still had to figure out why. The hostess politely asked me how many were in my party, so I said, “Four.” I’d always been afraid of answering that question truthfully, because the building was rather large and I was sure that they had single seats with miniscule tables somewhere in it, and a booth was just more comfortable. If there were such a thing, I’m sure the service in that wing would have been terrible, because everyone knows that single men aren’t in a hurry to go out and do anything, ever. Trained monkeys probably cook their meals, because of the smaller size of the orders, and ever since I was a little kid I’d been afraid of monkeys. When I was ten, my parents were fortunate enough to be able to afford to buy me a pet, so they got me a pet monkey. I was completely terrified of it, because all it did was sit there with a blank stare on its face, and play the cymbals, hour after hour. One time my brother accidentally dropped a book on its head, and the way its bloodshot eyes bugged out frightened me to death. I was sure that one night I’d wake up to find a monkey strangling me with a piece of fishing wire, screaming “Hasta la vista, baby.”

Needless to say, the singles section was out. When I finally sat down, I paused for just a second to wonder if I’d be single for the rest of my life. Only one woman had ever asked me out. It was a few years ago; I was sitting on a park bench when a red-haired, sort of short and stocky middle-aged woman wearing an unusually small amount of clothing approached me.

“Hey Tiger, do you need a date for tonight? You have a unique look, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. That’s a nice hat you’re wearing.”

I guess that I panicked, because all I said was “You can’t have it!” I jumped up and walked away. Slumping back into the soft vinyl of the booth, I took my wallet out of my back pocket, laid it on the table, and took the Jeweler’s Eye I had in my right front pocket out. As I clenched the Eye between my cheek and my brow, I carefully unfolded my wallet, and proceeded to surgically remove each piece of bacon, making sure not to chip any off. For some reason I felt sorry for the bacon that would crumble back into my wallet, like it was getting torn from it’s bacon matriarch, so I had devised this method to keep my conscience clear. My bites were small and gentle, making sure that each bite broke the strip at a perpendicular angle to the side of the table. This of course was for good luck. When I finished, I dabbed the corners of my mouth with a napkin. There was a waitress approaching my table as if she were in a hurry; her hips were shifting back and forth faster than anything I’d ever seen. I noticed right away the gum she was chewing was green; I made a mental note.

“What’ll it be?”

It was kind of an odd question, because I had already eaten.

“Oh, I’ll just have the check, I’ve eaten already.”

Her left eyebrow raised noticeably higher than her right, and she sort of inched away, eventually reaching the kitchen. I waited for her to return for about fifteen minutes, but she never did, so I got up and ran as fast as I could out of the diner. I had a busy day ahead of me.

As I walked down the sidewalk, I noticed that people were looking at me, and it still made me uncomfortable. It was rude too; whenever I saw someone on the street that had a funny looking face, or clothes that didn’t match, I made a conscious effort not to stare. But I guess ogling is the American way. It was hard to believe sometimes that I was born in the same country as most everyone else walking next to me. Finally I reached the liquor store, where I’d have to make perhaps the most difficult decision of the day. After about half an hour I decided that since my American history was a little weak, Jim Beam bourbon would be the thing for me. The clerk at the liquor store was a nice man, he usually let me have my purchases for free because he claimed to be not much of a conversationalist, and I find it hard to buy alcohol, something with a distinct American history behind it, without trying to sound intelligent about it to him. I walked to my usual park bench and stretched out on it as wide as possible, so nobody would try to steal the conversation away from me. With six generations of the Beam family smiling at me, I decided to ask Colonel James B. Beam himself a question that had stimulated my curiosity on a number of occasions.

“Mr. Beam, did prohibition nearly destroy your family distillery?”

Well, he seemed to enjoy the question. We talked for hours and hours about the early years of the business, and how an American thirst for liquor was the only thing that kept his business alive in the 1920’s. I found it amusing that his family even owned one of the most profitable speakeasies of the prohibition period. After a few hours of brilliant conversational exchanges between the both of us, I got nostalgic for the taste, and for the feel of the alcohol in my mouth, so I decided to break my AA promise and take a sip. I guess that I didn’t realize how much I was drinking because the world started to fade in and out, not like usual, but instead accompanied by nausea and headaches. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a pile of trash in an alleyway, minus my wallet.

Blackouts were common for me so I wasn’t particularly worried, I’d just have to buy another wallet from the corner store. As I walked to the nearest subway terminal, I noticed a taste in my mouth, sort of like a fried egg, and couldn’t help but wonder what I’d be throwing up later. The subway came after a few minutes, so I got on and ended up having a car all to myself. At the next stop, two dogs sporting monocles boarded, followed by who were presumably their owners, a young, clean-cut Jim Morrison, and an older, fatter Jim Morrison. How bizarre. Dogs don’t wear monocles unless they’re play-acting. Young Jim didn’t waste any time in propositioning me for a poker game, so I asked him if my dog could get in the action too, because I knew that he’d jump at the chance to make the money back that he’d lost to my credenza. Jim didn’t mind, so I called him on my cellular phone. He said that he’d meet us at the next stop, but had to get a pouch of pipe tobacco first.

Since my wallet had been stolen, I had to live vicariously through my dog as he sat and played five card draw. He was up seven-hundred dollars after an hour, and I could tell that the Jims and their dogs were getting worried. I watched the smoke roll out of my dog’s pipe as the two monocle-dogs folded because they were clean out of money. The Jims were raised bankrupt and eventually had to fold on the last hand of the evening. He won with a seven-high. Not too many people can say that they bluffed two Jim Morrisons and their dogs out of cash. I was damn proud of him. I convinced my dog that I needed a new suit, so we went to an all-night grocery store and got the biggest roll of scotch tape they had, and about three thousand packs of Dentyne. The smaller Dentyne wrappers provided for a tighter weave, and a cleaner, more sophisticated look. He worked on the jacket while I made the pants. We must have been folding and taping for hours, because I noticed the reflection of the sun coming up in his glass eye. After finishing, he trotted along towards home to get some sleep to be fresh for an audition later in the day. I ducked into an alley and slipped on my new clothes. It was a new day, and what better way to start my day than with breakfast…

[Written by my brother as a creating writing class assignment.]