1

Sam was sitting at a table at the twenty-four hour restaurant eating a miniature pizza. The tables were close together, and soon two people he had never met came along and had a seat next to him. A waitress wearing an oversized red bow came along to take their order.

"Can I get a beer?" asked the man, who stood out to Sam because of his shiny, shorn head.

"Huh?" said the waitress. "Not at this hour."

"Jackie!" laughed the woman, who was paging idly through a free-alternative-weekly paper.

"After six?" said Jackie. He gestured at the rising sun.

"Okay. Whatever." said the waitress. "I don't know the rules." Jackie's friend seemed to shiver every few seconds and whenever the waitress came out, she had a fresh complaint about the food.

"It's cold," she said. "I've been in here five times and they've made it five different ways."

Each time the waitress left, Sam got distracted by his miniature pizza, got distracted by eating and stopped paying attention to his neighbors of convenience. He felt as though he was continually pressing 'Snooze' on an alarm clock, sleeping ten minutes each time but feeling as though he had hopped forward in time by ten minutes at a hop, because he was always awakened from eating pizza by the woman again talking loud and complaining to the polite, beleaguered waitress that the dish was too sour. Ten minutes later it was too salty.

Finally Sam stood up and walked to the bathroom, hoping that leaving for a minute would wipe the whole slate clean and something else would be the center of attention by the time he came back.

"Scary Movie Twelve," Jackie was saying just as Sam returned to his seat.

"Oh," said the woman. "What's that."

Jackie read some chunk of prose out of the entertainment paper. "A scary horror movie directed by Sam Raimi. A side-splitting Marx Brothers movie directed by Sam Wood. A gluttonous restaurant movie--"

"What did you just say?" asked Sam.

"A scary horror movie--" Jackie started again.

"No, the part in the middle," Sam said.

"Here," said Jackie. "Take a look for yourself."

As Sam was reading, he saw Jackie quietly admonishing the woman. Since Sam had gone to the bathroom and back, she had pulled a polka-dotted shawl up over her head. She looked withdrawn, hung over, in dark sunglasses.

"--So negative," Sam caught a glimpse of Jackie talking. "Jeez, Merry."

Sam went out of his way not to eavesdrop and not to listen.

I'm just going to eat pizza and go, he thought.

He idly flipped the pages. At Sloan City University this weekend there was a lecture series all about a writer called Dreiser. "Why does he bring out the good in bad writing," asked the blurb in the paper. "The patron saint of clunky."

It sounded a little too academic to Sam so he kept flipping pages. Scary Movie Twelve. Exact Wizard Star Four. Sam shook his head, annoyed that the Wizard Star steamroller was so unavoidable. He shuddered at his attempts to find something in the weekly worth being interested in.

Jackie was raising his voice. "Rude, Merry! Why do you have to be so nasty to everyone all the time?"

Merry said something Sam couldn't make out about "... scabbard ..."

Sam thought about moving to a table further away.

I'm almost finished anyway, he thought.

"You know that's not true!" Jackie was speaking much more loudly now. "They're not dead, we just saw them today!"

Sam's pizza was gone, so he left the money on the table and split.