Pete's Breakfast House

[s~Z]

I order huevos rancheros with corn tortillas and am immersed in a re-read of
Gravity's Rainbow so the broader context will be intact when I catch up with
GRGR. (pant, pant) A large dark-skinned man pulls up to the counter next to
me, refuses a menu and says he'll take the Saturday Special Omelet sans the
sour cream. This special order upsets the waitress until she figures out
this means he doesn’t want sour cream, then she returns from clipping his
order to bring mine. The weekend crunch renders dining while reading
impossible, so I place my heavily taped copy of GR atop the missionarily
positioned saucers designed to preserve the warmth of the tortillas. I gaze
at the wall as I eat, surveying a vast expanse of hometown paraphernalia,
including but not limited to a notice that the customer’s lack of planning
does not constitute an emergency for the restaurant staff, a suggestion to
visualize whirled peas, a gross overgeneralization about the psychosexual
fixation of mean people, a plaque half-filled with metal nameplates
designating the still growing Pete’s Breakfast House Football Hall of Fame,
an entirely too large framed photograph of a section of the Wall Street
Journal on which rests an almost empty glass of milk and a plate with a
Hostess Twinkie one-quarter eaten, two pages torn and completed from a Miss
Piggy coloring book, two awards from the city, a tattered yellowing poster
advertising the movie Cafe Hostess starring Preston Foster and Ann Dvorak, a
sales tax chart, postcards from across the country as well as the ages,
photos of family pets and friends, and front and center an eNORmous
photographic recreation of Rockwell’s ‘The Runaway’ with Pete as the soda
jerk. The waitress swivels GR to face her asking the dreaded question, “What
’s this about?” I mutter something about people still trying to figure
that out as she follows with, “The end of the world?” (Perhaps...) I tell
her about the Pulitzer fiasco, and while slapping my check on the counter
she declares she’s going to have to pick up a copy. Sans dustcover I’ll bet.