"For someone who's constantly moving, I always seem to find you." With no change in expression or posture, or even breaking eye contact with his food, Max replies, "I guess one of us has to try harder." "I was talking to the dog." Max has a Chihuahua mix he named Kerouac. Case and Max are in an arms race of snark; nobody is sure of its sincerity or its origin. Case gives Kerouac a smug victory pet and moves on to order her food and sit elsewhere. The Diner is a restaurant worker's restaurant: open late and you order at the counter, so you can hop tables and stay for hours without driving the servers nuts. Seating is outdoors with covered portions as permitted by the arid climate, with options ranging from picnic tables to furniture likely found at estate sales.
A man approaching middle age wearing a brand name polo shirt that fit well before he lost the weight he previously gained stands before Max in silence for a moment. "Oh hey, cool dog. What's his name?" "Kerouac" said Max, to neither his food nor the man. "Oh, like the author?" Max did not speak. "That's cool, love me some literature. Total book person." Max continued not speaking. "Normally I don't even go out, I just stay in and read a book, but my friends insisted I come meet them here." Max returns to his food then looks up only with his eyes as man extends his hand. "I'm Fred."
Case's approach to the table is heralded by the wobbly yet determined clacking of costume jewelry that could serve as the rhythm section for an avant garde Patsy Cline cover band, for which she would play several instruments if asked. "Sea! I got syphilis!" Meredith is waving her phone around; its case is the second item on her person to feature Pusheen the Cat. She addresses Casey by her name's latter syllable, and likes to invoke marine life because of Case's jewelry and usual color motif. Case fears their friendship has plateaued at Meredith's running joke of sharing her social media updates in person since she avoids social networking with a quiet grace for which nobody compliments her. Case glances at the screen. "Thank you for completing the 'What STD are you?' quiz!'" She giggles with her eyes closed and returns the device. "Well at least read it! I left the tab open all day. Do you know what that does to me?" Turning back to her phone, she says "Dan's here." Dan stopped by Max's table to scope out the dog situation, where Fred has camped out. "Dan, we're over here." Case waves him over. "Don't talk to Max dude." "Why?" "Just... don't."
"I mean, he's best know for his novels, but people often overlook his poetry." Fred was curiously knowledgeable since he got up to order a drink. "One thing you have to think about when you read Kerouac is that he was a devout Catholic." Max finally met his eye and asked, "But how does he make you feel?" Fred searched himself. "Oh, like diners and the open road." Max takes a calculated step back towards indifference. "Yeah, we're
in a diner, he
wrote 'On the Road'. I don't know, those are just facts, are they really important?" Fred tries to dig in, but politely. "Well you have to know the background, otherwise how do you know why you like something?" Max did not speak. "I mean, not that I'm saying your appreciation of him is invalid." Fred continues talking to himself. "But no, knowledge and history are important, you can't just ignore them for feelings and shit." Max uses a socal fry of unknown origin when he says, "Ok." Fred scoffs. "This generation. You can't just live in the now." Satisfied with this as his send-off back into the bittersweet orbit of self-imposed exile, Fred stands as dramatically as one can from a stationary bench to retrieve a take-away container for his formerly crisp meaty fries. Max tosses one to Kerouac.
"What, do I have to participate in your mysterious vendettas?" Dan lights a cigarette, as much for the nicotine as the possibility that someone might ask him to extinguish it. "Max is just a vendetta you don't have yet. Bastard takes up a whole picnic table to himself." Case pauses to check herself, then continues, but repurposes her outrage as recreation. "By the way, I caught you giving me the small town snub the other day." Dan fails at a smoke ring."Eh?" "On 4th, in front of Custard's Last Stand! I totally waved, and you did NOTHING." Dan tries to compose himself but the chair's arms are too low. "Ah, that. I'm just not the waving type of person these days." "But see, I think we get each other so much, all we need is waving." "I am post-greeting." Dan leans back to gloat over that one, but Case doesn't miss a beat. "You mean you're post-politeness, motherfucker!" "Sure! We encounter enough people every day that I think these check-ins are tedious, so I'm not participating anymore" Case pulls a deviant bang from a sweat patch, because it's 91 at 11PM. "You can't just choose to stop participating, the whole thing falls apart." "What, like universal healthcare?" Meredith emerges for a moment. "Holy shit guys, check out these goats!"
A woman sensibly dressed has introduced herself as Amanda and received permission to pet the dog. "I've been meaning to read Kerouac..." Max experienced a single chuckle that barely made ripples on his face but seemed to echo inside him. "Does anybody really mean to do something they don't do?" He spoke with a playful mock-bravado that has all the condescension of regular bravado but without the accountability. "Well I work long hours, then by the time I eat dinner I just wanna curl up, you know how it is. In fact, I am bravely working on a personal project tonight." Max laughed, somehow without acknowledging her comfortable self-deprecation. "Hey, I'm not here to grill you about your routine." "No, but you do have a point. How often do I follow through on what I say I want to do?" Max laughed as though to a highly respectable child. "You do what you want!" Amanda throws up her hands like day old fish. "Ugh! Sorry, I'm over here dredging up all of my bullshit." Amanda apologizes a few more times as her food arrives and she excuses herself to sit alone and work. She will spend at least 20 minutes chastising herself for blowing it with that hot introvert.
"No, it's more like vaccines." Dan dropped his cigarette butt into a nearly empty Mexican coke bottle that was Case's at some point. "You'll have to explain that one." Case fixed her posture. "If enough people opt out of it, we lose herd politeness. Rudeness all around!" "What if I don't want to be part of the herd?" Dan's ironic delivery failed to reach Case. "If you you think being a jackass makes you unique-" "I just want to have more meaningful exchanges. Y'know, like in New York City in the movies." Case leans back in her chair to catch a breeze on her face, only to discover a bounty of sweat on her back. "Have you been to NYC? All the conversations are an excuse for people to talk about their accomplishments. The way french fries are an excuse to eat beef gravy." Meredith rises again. "Poor french fries... don't they know they need no excuses? They can just sit here and talk about themselves all night." Dan shatters his posture, with his neck then with his hands. "Oh come on! You were in New York for a two week design & web development workshop. Of course you met all the yuppies! And anyway, that's happening around here. Conversations are an increasingly elaborate ruse to brag." Case's eyes lose their focus. "Yep. That's why I wave." She takes out her phone and thumbs through her email, entertaining biased thoughts about time zones.
A din of hissing meat on flame radiates from the kitchen as Justin, the only server working tonight, opens the door to deliver drinks to Max and Katherine, his new guest. Justin clearly fancied the girl. She was Judd Apatow movie hot, Wes Anderson movie awkward, and dressed like a Fellini extra. Unfortunately, so was he. "This shit'll melt the balls right off your faces." He was trying remind Max that he thinks he's a piece of shit but he is forced to interact with him twice a week, and he was trying to let Katherine know that even though they've never met, he feels that an authenticity was betrayed by her dialog with Max. Katherine laughed for all three of them. In this moment, both Case and Justin gave her an identical glare of annoyance and patronizing concern. Case tightly mouths "Indie Stepford wife" to nobody in particular.
Katherine is crouched and repeats the name in sensual deadpan, running her hands from his ears downward. "Kerouac... Kerouac. Wow." She lets this soak in and sits next to Max on the refurbished wood bench. "The fifties were just so..." Max said nothing but engaged with her in a deep eye voyage, sharing in the comfortable understanding that the fifties were just so... Sometimes they hardly know what they'd do if the fifties weren't just so...
Katherine asks with a measuring glare, "So what does Kerouac mean to you?"
Max sucks on his sensitive tooth for a moment. "There are two ways to eat mussels. You can embrace the delicious guts in your mouth by name, or you can distance yourself with metaphor." His hand briefly clasps the remote side of her waist then falls back in line as she strums Kerouac's table-tethered leash like a bass and replies, "They don't serve mussels here." "Exactly."
Case's table now resembles a busy petri dish, having annexed all nearby furniture, but Case has paid up and departed. Max and Katherine pass Amanda, asleep at her laptop, several fries and barbecue jackfruit morsels on a plate at her side like bottles of Jack by an aging rock star, as they leave together.
"Wait, where'd the dog go?"
Wrapping the leash around his wrist and hand, Max replies,"Oh, he just wanders the streets. Why else would I call him Kerouac?"
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