It was noon and there was no way I was making it to my first big photo shoot. In two hours I was supposed to be somewhere in the middle of wide open Nebraska, but instead I was stuck in some sort of a gaping ditch. I’ll blame my terrible parking job on Bambi. I went to call for help but of course there was no signal. None, and to be honest, I couldn’t point myself out on a map even if I’d tried. Luckily, there was a pit stop a mile down the road. In high-heeled stiletto boots, the world’s tightest mini skirt, and a chiffon blouse, I began my walk of shame.
God must have known I was going to wreck in that very spot about thirty years ago. Why else would there be a conveniently located repair shop? When I walked in the guy looked at me weird and asked if I was lost. I told him what had happened and from there on out, he told me he would fix my car up and have me back on the road as soon as he could. In the mean time, he advised me to go on over to Moe’s Cafe and wait there while he repaired the damages.
I hadn’t seen the cafe at first. It was hidden behind the overgrowth which consisted of a random patch of dead or dying trees in the middle of a cornfield. Even when I recognized it as a building, I wouldn’t have ever guessed that it was still in use.
When I walked up the rickety old stairs, I heard some old country song playing in the background and an old man wailing along with it. Maybe I was mistaken, but wasn’t karaoke during the night? I ended up taking a sit in the first booth after gambling booth one and booth two. I figured a few crumbs on the table were better than a puddle of dark juice and fly infested after-food.
It wasn’t just the table that was crummy. It was the whole building. Chunks of 70′s wooden panels were falling around everywhere and its friend, the burnt orange paint, complemented its aged appearance by chipping away from the wall. The old wooden floors were faded with wear-and-tear and the smell was of a thick smog of smoke that I’m sure had lingered there from the birth of the building’s existence. I ordered a cup of coffee from Marg, the head and only waiter at Moe’s Cafe, and waited patiently for my drink while the men and woman around the bar stared at me like I was a yellow zebra.
I sat there waiting for my coffee and listening to music. A hunched over man, who I later learned was known as Wallace, stood over by a beaten down jukebox. He didn’t from his place, leaned against the machine, howling to he same Kenny Rogers song again and again. Once the music had concluded, he put another nickel in the slot and the tune repeated. After about en rounds, I couldn’t take it anymore–his howling or his awful taste in music. Aware of my surroundings, I stood up and with severe sense of paranoia, I walked cautiously across the grease slick floors and over to the old man. I asked politely if I could choose a different song. I took his blank stare as a yes.
The nickel fell in and I chose the most contemporary selection by Cher. As I turned away to head back to my seat, a frail woman in her mid-thirties began to began to shriek. At first I thought a bug or something had gotten in her hair because she tugged at her curls as though in search. I walked a littler faster when I realized her slight shrieks had turned into screams of panic. She ran about the cafe, doing nothing but having some sort of freak out I’d never seen before. The only reasonable explanation for her behavior was that she was having a mid-life crisis. No one else seemed to worried about it, so I tried to my best to ignore it. Her scene had lasted the entire song and when Cher had sung her last line, the woman’s panic subsided.
It got eerily quiet. Everybody had quit talking and wasn’t looking at the crazy woman, but me. Wallace turned my way and with a raspy voice of aged man, he said,“You shouldn’t have done that.” Then he inserted his nickel and began his own rendition once more.
At first I thought it was the B.O. ascending from fat greasy man in the corner. To the dismay of my appetite, I found the ripe stench seethed from none other than the coffee the waiter had brought me. Was it poisoned? Who knew?! But I sure as heck wasn’t going to be the first stranded victim to find out.
There was nothing to do in the cafe except listen to Wallace and stare out the finger-printed windows. One thought led to another and soon I found myself contemplating my life, thinking of how just five months ago I was living a dream. I had my own apartment in downtown Chicago, a wonderful fiance I couldn’t wait to be married to, and had just been promoted to floor manager at Vogue’s headquarters. How had everything gone so wrong?
When the waiter to came back over to ask how everything was going, I said, “How everything is going? How does it look everything is going?” That’s when I completely lost it. “For starters, my coffee smells so bad, the Devil wouldn’t drink it. I’m stuck in the middle of what seems to be cannibal country wondering if I’ll make it out alive all because my piece of crap car decided to die on me. I’m going to miss the photo shoot of a lifetime and on top of it all, my fiancé left for a girl who could pass as me if I were nineteen again. So how is it going? It’s going down the crapper, and the longer I sit here the worse it gets.”
He didn’t say anything after my escapade. There’s wasn’t any emotion that flash across his face, not even shock. He just turned and walked back to the kitchen and didn’t return. I pushed him away just like I did with most things in life and at that moment I decided that two is always better than one. Always.
It had been three of the longest hours of my life. I was every mood in the book, from stressed to scared. When the mechanic walked through Moe’s doors, I could have been nothing but relieved.
“You’re car is done Ma’am,” he said in his biker-boy voice. “We can talk business if you come with me.”
I followed him over to the shop and to a cash register to the shop towards a worn-out and dilapidated, which I’d assumed he had been using for decade or two, possibly three.
“I had to replace the rear axle because it had been cracked right down the middle when you backed out of the ravine. From the looks of it, this car has seen a ditch or two.” He gave me a demeaning look and held it for a moment too long.
I smiled and laughed it off, trying to make a joke of the situation.
“Yeah, every now and then it happens. I’m not much a professional driver, especially when it comes to gravel roads.” There was a pause as he scratched away at a receipt for me.
As he went for the hand off, he told me, “Miss, do be more careful. A lady such as you is far too beautiful and much too young to die just because she’s late for something. Life goes faster than you think. There’s no need to rush it.”
