I was working the graveyard shift as a waiter and short-order cook at an all-night diner called The Sands when I met that girl from the news this morning. They aren’t releasing it yet, but Elise was her name. Worst tipper I ever met, which is really saying something for graveyard in a joint like that.
I’d been working that penalty shift for a month the first time she came in. It really wasn’t such a bad place on the other shifts, but graveyard was a different world. Despite the fact that it’s illegal to smoke in any restaurant in Washington, the air was pretty much blue from midnight to five at The Sands. I didn’t complain much because my cooking skills could only benefit from dim lighting and poisonous air. Anyway, there’s no management to speak of after ten, and since the place had been made irrelevant by the new jog in State Highway 305, the cops didn’t do drive-bys or come in for coffee and donuts anymore. Our bread and butter was the old-time truckers in their flannel shirts and mesh-back hats who still came in to order breakfast at all hours of the night, along with the bikers and night-owls, who all knew there was no one to put the kibosh on them. As it happens, Elise was one of those night-owls.
I’d landed that shift in punishment for dating, then dumping, the assistant manager’s cousin, Deedee. She was a decent enough sort, but after a couple of weeks she revealed that she was a cosplayer in her spare time, going to conventions in various superhero and videogame getups. Yikes. Not that I didn’t enjoy knockin’ boots with Wonder Woman and Supergirl a couple of times, because I did. But long term? No way. Just because I’m a convicted sex-offender doesn’t mean I have no standards. They’re low, but I have them.
When Deedee told her cousin Burt what happened, he used his considerable scheduling powers to wreak vengeance on me, Doctor Doom style. I stuck it out because I didn’t have a lot of options; since I always have to check ‘yes’ on the convicted felon box on an application, I pretty much take any job I'm offered, which are damned few. Not quite as rare as the number of landlords with units outside the sicko-no-fly-zone around parks and schools who’d be willing to gouge me for the rent, though. Guess I was lucky to find the plumbed shed (with hotplate!) on the rural route that I did, because it meant there weren’t as many neighbors I had to introduce myself to.
“Hi, I’m Monty, your neighborhood sex-offender,” is not a great ice-breaker.
The Sands was owned by an older couple whose kids had no interest in it. With no one to leave it to and no way to sell it after the highway change, their standards were lax enough to let me in the door. I was a solid, Ratpack-style bartender –Martinis, Old Fashioneds, Gimlets etc. – but aside from eggs and sammiches, I wasn’t much of a chef. It didn’t matter, all they wanted was for me to show up on time and work like an immigrant. So at The Sands I stay, come hell or high water. The dim, formica-covered dive wasn’t technically a prison, although Burt would have made a helluva warden if it were.
On the other hand, all Elise ever wanted was a sunnyside egg inside a holed piece of toast, with a river of decaf on the side. Even I could do that, a fact she reminded me that first night.
I sauntered over. “It’s Monty, actually.”
“Of course it is.” She was packing her smokes, scanning the gnarly, laminated menu. “Garçon is French for waiter, though.”
“I don’t speak French, and even I know it means ‘boy’.”
“So you keep saying. Well, Monty, I’m Elise, and what I want isn’t on the menu.”
“You don’t do substitutions?”
“Great. I’ll take a piece of toast with a sunnyside egg in it.”
I looked her over for a second. She was pretty pale, like she’d never been outside. Long, straight black hair twisted up in a frazzled top-knot and held by what looked like a pen. She was late twenties, good bones, kind of regal looking with her burgundy lipstick. Her nose was a little hawkish, but it fit her lean face and offset her bright eyes.
“A One-Eyed Jack?” I suggested.
“That sounds dirty. I’m not calling it that.”
I suppressed a laugh. “Not like that. A One-Eyed Jack is a wild card in poker.”
“Not the way I play it. Suicide Kings rule. Anyway, I think you’re making that up.”
“I’m not, but it wouldn’t matter if I was. We don’t make them.”
She looked around the beige and dirt-colored space, ready to light up. “It’s one o’clock in the morning. You have three customers, one of whom drinks all his meals. Pretty sure you can make whatever you want back there.”
The place was dead except for a mesh-back with a piece of pie and Marv at the bar, stewing over the second of three nightly Gimlets. He’d nurse it another twenty minutes for sure, and she was right, I’d never seen the grizzled old-timer eat anything.
“All right. But you gotta promise not to light up. I get enough of that around here.”
But when I came back with her One-Eyed Jack she was smoking away and there was some random dude sitting at the table, trying to hold her hand and stare earnestly into her eyes. He was meeting with limited success on all fronts.
She looked at the ember on her smoke and back at me. “Don’t hate me. We’re all brothers under the skin.”
To Random Dude I said, “What can I get you?”
“I’ll have what she’s having,” he responded.
“Sorry, this was the last one.” I set it in front of her. “Ever.”
“Uh, OK. Hashbrowns and a short stack, I guess. You want coffee, babe?”
In the eleven minutes since I’d met Elise, even I’d picked up on the fact that she wasn’t going to be called “babe” by anyone, a fact confirmed by the look she shot me, like we were both witness to a crime. Brothers under the skin and all that.
“Sure. Two decafs,” she said.
“Coming right up. Brother.”
I brought back their two regular coffees, having resisted the urge to sneeze in them before passing the counterfeits off. I left the bill, then ignored them the rest of the night. They were there for a while but never got another drop out of me. The place filled and emptied once before they left, the air blue as an old lady’s dye job. After Marv finished his last Gimlet I called him a cab and went to bus their table. The check was neatly stacked with the exact amount owed, no tip. Not that I was expecting one after the cold shoulder routine. Instead there was an unsmoked cigarette with burgundy lipstick on the crisp white filter, placed in the middle of the saucer the mug came on. On the reverse side of their ticket, written in childish scrawl with a black gel pen, were these words:
“If you’re gonna get lung cancer from a place like this, you should enjoy the getting.”
I tucked the smoke behind my ear like a pencil and finished up. I noticed Elise’s mug was missing, then picked up the menu and saw that she’d used the same black pen to make her substitution a permanent addition to our repertoire, patiently etching the laminated surface with bold caps: ONE-EYED JACK. Next to it, a drawing of a disturbingly life-like penis stared back at me.
I helped Marv out to his cab. He smelled the way old drunks do, but he was kind enough to give me a light from his ancient Zippo before I folded him into the minivan to be someone else’s problem. I hadn’t had a smoke since Jr. High. This one had lipstick on it and tasted like a stolen kiss. I had as much as I could without puking, then went behind the diner to pitch it. There was a VW sedan with fogged up windows, just a’rockin’ away near the dumpster. I was pretty light-headed from the nicotine, but I didn’t need to be told that it was hers.
********
When you work eleven to seven you pretty much have mole-people and drunks as friends. The good people of the world are in bed, so only the weirdos and sex-offenders are out and about. Not like my old job running an industrial shredder to destroy sensitive business documents had me rubbing elbows with the cream of society or anything. The fact was, I spent most of my time after hours in pitchers ‘n pinball kinds of places, often staggering home on foot to avoid a DUI. Hard to believe my life would actually have been better if the cops had caught me driving drunk instead of urinating in that particular alley, but there it is.
When Elise came in again a few weeks later I was glad to see her. Her pallor marked her as one of the mole-people, but everything else seemed normal enough. Relative to the leper colony of The Sands at one AM on a Tuesday, that is. I’d stashed her menu under the bar so it didn’t go back in circulation, and I brought it with me to the table. She looked exactly the same as last time, hair spilling from the loosening knot she’d tried and failed to secure with her pen as a piton. Everything about her said she was ending her day, not beginning it.
“Good evening, Montgomery.”
“Monty is short for Montelius, actually.”
“Criminently. You gotta give me something to work with here.” She pulled out a smoke with one wary eye on me. “Did your parents hate you?”
“All signs point to yes,” I said, and put her personalized menu in front of her, opened to the page in question. “Did you bring that mug with you?”
“I kind of thought you might have one I could use while I was here,” she said, blowing contrails of smoke out her nose. “That seems like a restauranty-type of thing. Your end of the social contract, and all.”
I eyeballed her for a minute, and noticed that her dark hair had blonde roots growing out. Which seemed weird. Don’t women usually go the other way, fake blonde hair with dark roots?
“That’s pronounced Uh-leez, not E-lease. Montelius.”
“Let me make a note of that. Got a pen I could borrow?”
“Well, I’ll give you a minute to peruse the menu then, as there have been some changes. Will there be anyone else in your party?”
I went back to make Marv a Gimlet and put on another pot of coffee. When I returned she was out of the booth hugging a guy that had just come in. She was taller than I would have guessed from seeing her seated, long legs wrapped in tight black jeans and wedged into fancy black heels with diamonds on them. All in all she was a little bony for my taste, not that I’d kick her out of bed for eating crackers or anything. They sat at her booth by the window, so I scooped up another mug and headed over. It was Random Guy again, but looking a bit shaggier.
“Hey. Decaf and hash-stax again?” I asked.
“Decaf is for fags.” He didn’t bother looking at me.
I caught Elise from the corner of my eye scratching at her chin with her forefinger, like someone trying to shoosh me without looking like they were trying to shoosh me. I couldn’t figure why, but I rolled with it anyway. I work for tips, don’t’cha know?
“Sorry. Thought you were one of my regulars. What’ll it be?”
“Well, can I at least see a menu?” he asked, kind of huffy.
Elise passed him her menu, and he took one look at her editorial addition and gave me the stink-eye, like I was the one passing dick-pics around. He was doing a decent job of acting like we’d never met, but some people are just that way to anyone waiting on a gratuity. Like we’re beneath their notice. He was definitely getting a sneezer with a side of pubes, no matter what he ordered.
“I’ll have a Suicide King and some decaf.” Elise jumped in with a wink.
“One-Eyed Jack, coming up.” I winked in return.
“Regular coffee and a Reuben, hold the pickle,” he said.
“Pickles for fags, too?” I asked.
He extended the menu to me, then dropped it to the floor the second I reached for it. “Chop-chop, Minimum Wage.”
I picked up the menu without looking at either of them and did an abrupt about-face. His Reuben was gonna get a pickle all right.
The night progressed as they do: a mild swell of truckers, bikers, and weirdos coming to the only place in Poulsbo they could have coffee and a smoke without getting the bum’s rush. I brought Elise and Random Dude their stuff, switching both of their coffee orders just because I could, then tried to ignore them the rest of the night. But as I was calling Marv his cab, I caught Random Dude’s eye from across the smoky room just as he was making a show of peeling bills off a douchey money clip, licking his fingertip to page through a sheaf of dead Presidents. Joanie, Marv’s usual driver, broke the spell as she picked up the line and said she’d be late; lotta drunks looking for rides that night. Between her corralling the career drinkers and the cops rounding up the sickos, Poulsbo was getting better by the second. I’m sure my parole officer would agree.
When I went to bus their table, I found a message written in ketchup across Random Dude’s side of the formica top: “Suck it, Minimum Wage”. Right next to it was their payment, inside a full glass of water turned upside down and magically sealed to the table. The aquarium trick is easily solved using the plastic tub we bus dishes into; it’s mostly annoying because the smug twats that do it are so impressed with themselves. I saw that Elise had left me another Marlboro Light, lipstick and all. This time she left the mug, full of crushed smokes, but took the saucer. Instead, her mug sat on an old Polaroid, like a coaster. I tucked the smoke and examined the photo.
It was faded and there was a ring of coffee stained into it from her mug, but I could still make her out. She was fully blonde, which didn’t go with the pallor of her skin, and wedged between two guys wearing huge grins, both with their arms around her. I did a double take, because both the guys were Random Dude. One slightly shaggier than the other, but obviously twins. As happy as the two of them looked in their preppy Dartmouth cardigans, Elise wore a look only the Mona Lisa could decipher. The shaggier one, whom I’d obviously just met, was pulling her to him possessively, one arm almost yoked around her neck. I turned the Polaroid over and saw she’d scrawled these words in black:
“Never trust anything that bleeds for days, but doesn’t die.”
A short chirp of the horn let me know Joanie was ready for Marv, so I helped him out to his cab and got repaid with a little flame from his Zippo. I walked back to the dumpster to enjoy the smoke, and the taste of Elise, and saw the beat-up old Volkswagon Fox rocking away on its springs. There were two feet up on the dash, fancy heels with diamonds on them catching the light from the security spot over the dumpster.
********
It went on like that for a year, Elise coming in every other week or so for a late dinner and a quickie in the parking lot with one or the other of the Brothers Random. Once I realized they were twins, I could easily tell them apart; Decaf and Homophobe, like a couple of buddy cops, at least one of whom didn’t know they were banging the same chick. I didn’t feel sorry enough to clue them in, or stop switching their coffee orders. Elise never arrived or left with either of them, so I wondered if she was a hooker with a couple of regulars. But that didn’t add up with that polaroid of them, or the time she’d been so worried I’d let the cat out of the bag. Then one night she came in wearing scrubs and a badge from that nuthouse across the bridge out where the highway ended on Bainbridge Island, so I figured her for a nurse or CNA. Which didn’t really solve any riddles, but it made me feel a little better about life all the same.
That year saw business continue to dwindle as the highway traffic passed us by, slowly taking even the regulars with it. The air quality at The Sands improved, but my sense of job security eroded. I had another twenty months on my probation, and I was starting to worry that The Sands wasn’t going to make it that long. As a felon, pretty much every second of my life is chock full of shitty things like restitution payments, weekly phone calls to my probation officer, Deputy Dawes, that consisted of the same three questions about my life, and rehab sessions alongside all the peeping-toms and other ne’er-do-wells in my criminal weight class. But as awful as that was, there were still a lot of ways it could go downhill. Since I’m ineligible for unemployment, it was entirely possible that I’d bounce between municipal jails with open beds or, worse, land upstate to finish out my pre-deal sentence. That was three years if The Sands folded and I couldn’t scare up another job in Kitsap County within a month.
One thing that didn’t change over the year was that Elise never varied in her order, and never once tipped me in cash. Like a Magpie she usually stole something from the table: condiments, dispensers, silverware, salt and pepper shakers, etc. In turn, she left me with baubles and curiosities; Marlboro Lights, cryptic fortune-cookie slogans, and odd little cartoons drawn in black gel pen on the backs of napkins.
A couple of my favorites: “I’m trying to be independent, but no one will help me,” and “Celibacy is not hereditary.” Her drawings were uncanny, almost disturbingly life-like. Famous characters and historical figures saying weird stuff. Captain Kirk with, “Set phasers to obfuscate.” Abraham Lincoln raising a glass, “Four scores and seven beers ago…” My favorite was the bust of Shakespeare saying, “You discussed me.” Say that last one aloud.
There was only ever one night she came in and didn’t sit at her same booth and order a One-Eyed Jack and decaf. That night she bellied right up to the bar, sat next to Marv, slapped her palm down and called, “Barkeep! Sarsaparilla!”
“Sarsaparilla? Sorry, not on the menu. How do you feel about Jaegermeister?” I asked.
“Like everyone who isn’t a frat-boy D-bag feels about it.”
“Let me drop a shot in some root-beer for you. That’s kind of Sarsaparilla-y. If you don’t like it, it’s gratis.”
“I thought you didn’t do substitutions.”
“Now where would you get a crazy idea like that?” I asked.
She tilted her high-ball glass back, draining it in one draught. “Wow, that hits the spot!” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Almost goes down a little too smooth, you know?”
“Unfortunately I do. It’s gotten me in trouble more than once.”
“Wow, you’re kind of a menace.”
“That’s what they tell me. Which is why the good people of Pouslbo employ stand-up guys like DA Hawthorne, to keep the riff-raff in line.”
“You always seemed way too good for this dive, Montelius. Well… maybe not way too good. But a little. I mean, you lose points for having your weiner out in full view of a school, and all.”
“In an alley, at eleven thirty on a Saturday night.”
“Well, you're either the most considerate pervert in town, or the most inept. Still, if it was me, I would’ve peed on that ratty school down on Noll Rd, instead of on Mr. Hawthorne’s kids’ brand new one.”
“I’m a dude, the world is my urinal. What kind of town would it be if I had to pee in approved receptacles?”
“It’s like the terrorists have already won,” she said.
“Damn highway’s changing everything. Town’s getting too gussified for the likes of me.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Brand new schools, better roads, our tax dollars at work. What’s not to like?” she asked.
“Increased police patrols, misdemeanor tickets turning into full-blown felonies to milk five grand out of a five hundred dollar ticket?”
“Maybe Officer Bacon was just jealous when he saw what you’re packing.” She made a show of looking over the bartop at my nethers. Through the dim smoke I wondered if she could tell was blushing.
“Nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day. You’ve never come in for a drink before. Everything OK?”
“Sure. I only use alcohol for medicinal purposes. Like if I’m bit by that snake I carry with me.”
I chuckled. “What’ll it be tonight, Uh-leez? The usual?”
“Not hungry. Just thirsty. You could pour me another of these, though. What are they called, again?”
“Doesn’t have a name that I know of.”
“The Full-Monty it is, then!”
That drew a bark of laughter from Marv, which surprised me. He’d only ever spoken a dozen or so words to me in all our graveyard time together. Ordering a Gimlet or a cab, offering me a light with his Zippo. Otherwise he was a fixture, easy to forget, even when I was collecting his reliable tip every night.
“How long have you had that one in the chamber?” I asked.
“I’ll admit I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it for a while, but not half as long as you’ve been clicking those red heels and wishing for home, brother,” she said, and the trace of humor that had always chased the corners of her mouth went away.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She hit Marv up for a light, which he obliged by setting his Zippo on the bar next to her, never looking over. I’d only ever seen it in the darkened parking lot, and in the dim interior light I saw it was engraved with a circle around a triangle. Took me a second to realize what it meant, and when I did I felt a little worse about life.
“It means you’re getting rolled like a fuckin’ rube and all you can say is, ‘Thank you, sir. Can I have some more?’”
“Tough talk, blondie. What would you do different?” I said defensively, buying time to regroup. Without the familiar wry glint in her eyes, she was suddenly formidable.
“I sure as hell wouldn’t be in this joint, playing by these rules. You already know the dice are loaded, but here you are, still rolling with your fingers crossed.”
“Why are you in this joint, Elise? Is it the ambiance?” I took her smoke and had a drag myself.
“We aren’t talking about me, Monty.”
“Yeah, good thing, huh?” Another drag and I passed it back to her. Marv was trying real hard not to look at either of us.
“I’d have up and split by now. I mean, you lost your shitty job shredding stupid, secret documents because you couldn’t pass the background anymore?”
“Technically, a felon could steal kind of a lot of identities using the info in the documents we managed,” I said.
“Are you defending them, now?” she asked.
“No,” I said. But I think I kind of was.
“Then you had to move. Seriously? And you even have to ask Deputy Dawg-”
“Deputy Dawes. Trust me, he does not like that joke.”
“Deputy Dawg” she continued, “if you’re allowed to wank it with the other hand, and all because you pissed on some shed full of dodgeballs in the middle of the night? You don’t have to stay here and get treated like this. You can go anywhere and get treated like this,” she said.
“There’s nowhere to go. I fought the law, and the law won.”
“Fought? Didn’t you sign the first deal they put in front of you?”
“It saved me five grand, and three years in prison. Lets me off the sicko list in a couple years. That’s usually permanent.”
“I’d say you hit like a girl, but that’d be an insult to girls.” She stabbed her smoke out right on the bar top. “All of them.”
“So in your mind, I should be out on the lam, no useable ID, job history, or credit cards? Great plan. You think that one up while you were working on that dye job?”
“So if not for that, you'd beat feet out of here?”
At that, I poured a Full-Monty for myself and took a long drink, nothing to say. I genuinely didn’t know.
“That’s what I thought.” She shot back the rest of her drink, slammed the glass down, grabbed me by the front of my serving apron and planted a hard kiss on me. It tasted just like her gratuities, but lasted barely a second. As she was pulling back I saw she was wearing a matte wall of cover-up around her left eye, I thought I could just make out the mottled swath of a deep bruise there. When I leaned in closer to see, she mistook it for an attempt at another kiss and slid off her barstool with a shake of her head.
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
She left without another word or paying for either drink. I didn’t see her for over a month.
That night when I took Marv out to Joanie’s cab, he had more to say than in the whole previous year.
“Don’t get ideas in your head, Monty. That didn’t mean nothin’.” His ginny breath was hard to take. There’s nothing I love more than a drunk getting all deep on me.
“I know, Marv.”
“That girl’s a God-shaped hole in the world. You and all the Romeos of town, you’re just square pegs,” he slurred.
I folded him into the cargo door like the old bag of bones he was, then handed him his Zippo. “This from a drunk with the granddaddy of all AA chips. They don’t take those back when you fall off the wagon?”
I immediately regretted the words, and not just because his tips pretty much kept the lights on in my little shed. He pressed the lighter back into my hand and closed the slider in my face. He might have been crying.
Joanie buzzed her window down, “Jeez, Monty. Try to keep the gloves up. He’ll be sober in the morning, you still gonna be an asshole?”
“Well then this won’t matter. Marv has three drinks a day, every day, sure. But only three. That’s a win for a guy like him. How about you?” Her window buzzed back up, and they were off. I thought I’d never see Marv again, but he was back the following night like nothing had happened. I was too ashamed to offer his Zippo back.
When Elise appeared again I was relieved. At first. She was her normal self, although I was surprised to see how much farther her blonde roots had grown out. Her scrubs had Snoopy vs. The Red Baron printed all over them, and with her two-tone hair she seemed kind of punk-rock. It was a good look on her.
“There’ll be two tonight, Garçon.”
“Please. And the gentleman will have the Full-Monty and a basket of fries.”
When I returned there was a younger guy at the table, not one of the Brothers Random, also dressed in scrubs, staring intently at her like someone who can’t believe his luck. I knew the feeling.
I set their order down, then said, “I’m gonna need some ID for the drink, please.”
Waylon Campbell was his name, which sounded made up to me, like a stage-name for a bad country singer. I saw that his work badge from the nuthouse said the same though, so there it was. They stayed a while, her ordering a string of Full-Montys for him, while she stuck to decaf. I was a little over-attentive for once, and when they left he was pretty wobbly. Little pangs of jealousy were stabbing at me, and I couldn’t bring myself to see if he got the full treatment, or if they went their separate ways in the parking lot. Now I kind of wish I had, because the next time I saw her was on the news.
Their table was tidy when I came, everything stacked for easy pick-up. I scanned to see what she’d stolen. Oddly, nothing was missing at all, but under the pepper shaker sat a compact bundle. I dropped into the booth and unwrapped her gift. A single smoke, white and burgundy, which I tucked behind my ear. A napkin with a black message scrawled:
“Stop clicking your red heels and beat feet, brother.”
It was wrapped around a douchey money-clip holding two grand in hundred dollar bills, and three plastic rectangles; Waylon’s ID, Social Security, and a Discover card. I looked around, feeling exposed and guilty as hell. Getting caught with it was an instant ticket upstate, no questions asked, so I pocketed the wad and cleared the table. If I’d paid a little more attention right then I might have been able to stop her. Maybe not, but now I’ll never know.
I shot straight home at the end of shift and laid the contraband out on the table. Unfolding the napkin, I re-read her message and looked at the ID. Our resemblance wasn’t that strong, but still better than some of the fakes that came through The Sands. Then I noticed she’d drawn something on the inside of the folded napkin that I’d missed hours before. It was a disturbingly life-like picture of a girl jumping off a bridge. The caption read:
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
“Dammit, Elise!” I instinctively bolted for the door, but stopped when I realized that over five hours had passed, and it was certainly too late. So flipped on the tube and found they were already talking about her, name withheld. I sat at the table and bawled for an hour.
“Yes, sir, I still work at The Sands. No, sir, I’m not in any trouble. Yes, sir, my address is still 3195 Lincoln,” I said, grabbing every last cent from the Folgers can my tips lived in. I was done packing before the conversation was over. “Everything’s just right as rain, Deputy Dawg,” I said, then dropped my cell into the toilet and promptly took a piss on it.
I left every single thing about my life on that table, slung the light pack over my shoulder, pulled my Mariner’s cap down low, and went out the door, not bothering to lock it behind me. Abandoning my POS Geo Metro where it sat, I beat feet toward the highway. Toward the very next train to Anywhere Else.
Out on the Highway now, Marv’s Zippo is a strange weight in my pocket, unfamiliar as my new name. Come to think of it, Waylon doesn’t sound so bad. I mean, seriously, Montelius? What am I clinging to? Waylon seems like the kind of moniker that’d kill in… Montana, maybe? I could be there by the time he’s done clawing his way out of the sewage pit of a Jaeger hangover. I pull Marv’s lighter out, examining it under the sun. For the first time I see these words etched beneath the AA symbol:
“…and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I take Elise’s final tip from behind my ear and light it, tasting her one last time. I don’t have to stay here and get treated like this. I can go anywhere and get treated like this.
God only knows where kids learn to fear nebulous ghosts, monsters, boogeymen, and all the other personifications of invisible dread. Myself, I think it began when I was taught to pray the words, “If I die before I wake.” Still, those monsters could always be dispelled by a nightlight, a quick check of the closet by Dad, and of course leaving the door open a crack. But when I finally outgrew them and realized that Orcs, Ogres, and slithering tendrils were phobias preferable to sneak attacks from the Red Menace, it was too late to go back and reclaim those kid fears. Instead I was stuck negotiating a world where school showed us "educational" films like “The Day After,” Church proclaimed that Reagan was going to start WWIII to annihilate Mikhail Gorbachev—who was obviously the Antichrist because of that thing on his head—and Pop songs like “99 Red Balloons” and “Forever Young” were thinly-veiled treatises on nuclear terror set to some of the best melodies ever composed.
Of course the Russians still had their nukes, and in fact they were quite a bit more unstable politically and militarily. In fact, they were possibly even selling nukes on the black market, but apparently I didn’t need to be afraid of them anymore? Definitely not. THEY ARE OUR FRIENDS. Overnight the story changed, and everybody just played along with a straight face.
At a certain point—sometime
after Y2K and the Great Flu Vaccine Shortage of 2004 (What’s that, you don’t
remember the Great Shortage? Shame on you!)—it all began to seem like we were
sitting around a campfire telling each other ghost stories for the express
purpose of being afraid of something. Anything. Like maybe I needed my Dad to
do a quick check of the closet before I went to bed, except I was a grown-ass
man now, so maybe I could just do that myself? I mean, how do you stop being
afraid of the boogeyman? You wake up fine for thousands of morning in a row and
begin to feel kind of stupid about the whole thing. I think they call that
"growing up?"
It occurred to me one day that
it wasn’t just us sitting around that campfire telling ghost stories, but a
special class of professionals telling us their tales. For the sake of
discussion, let’s call them “journalists.” These are the people we actually pay
to make us afraid. Angry and horny, too. They tell us the part of the story that
fits into soundbytes and 140 character tweets, interspersed with horrible
images and Sarah McLachlan or U2 music montages. They edit video and audio
recordings so you get the inflammatory part without context. They call them
“rioters” in the burning streets when it’s about racial issues, but
“celebrants” in the burning streets when it’s about a sports team win/loss. 
