Futile Horn

07.27.2003 - 5:18 pm (in a galaxy far far away)

This morning around 7 or 8 am I found myself in a familiar booth of a diner I felt I couldn’t have been in before. Then Mike, one of the guys I was with, said, “I miss when the used to have the jukeboxes here. I remember one morning I played three versions of ‘Danny Boy’ just to annoy the piss out of the guy I was with.” That’s when I remembered I had the same story about the place, except instead of “Danny Boy” it was the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”. It was New Year’s Day I’m guessing no less than four years ago. The best friend of my then girlfriend was seeing a guy who lived in northern Jersey, and he had a party with no less than one billion guests (China had in fact been drawn across the see for the occasion by a fleet of unicorn whales). When we finally stumbled out of the house for food late in the afternoon, we all piled into a truck the size of a Winnebago for breakfast. I think it was my girlfriend who started the jukebox, which nearly got us into a fight with the punks in the booth across from us. And now here I was, same diner, same booth, entirely different set of circumstances. I thought it was kinda eerie, but no one else thought anything of it.

The four guys I was with were entirely raptured by an adorable nineteen-year-old waitress who works at the restaurant where most of us do. After the bar closed we had sat in the back singing mostly Irish songs, and she was there with her father, having showed up after closing. The entire thing was quite surreal, because the first song the father sang was about a mother censuring her too young daughter for a love affair, and the song actually had his daughters name in it (her name is a Scrabble friendly word, but not an everyday one). And then she answered back with a quite similar song, except from the point of view of and sympathetic for the young girl. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I suddenly wished I wasn’t sitting next to her, because last Sunday she stayed for after hours until about 6:30 in the morning, and showed up a zombie for work around 9 or 10. Although I had spent most of the night being grilled for being the owner’s somewhat bookish and usually quiet son (and perhaps making someone cry in their alcohol destabilized emotional state, I’m not sure) despite the fact there were about ten to fifteen people there, the rest of the wait staff that hadn’t been present decided that this was somehow my fault. I guess one of the things I was least prepared for in taking this job was the level of small town idle gossip. Most of it is joking and teasing, but sometimes it’s not, and sometimes they start believing their fictions. I think last night I actually got yelled at about it, and I’m not sure yet, but one of the other waitresses might even be not talking to me (although I couldn’t tell you if had something to do with this or a different otherworldly neurosis). I don’t like this situation because it’s no secret that everyone is taken by her (and no secret from her father, who can I only imagine how nuts he must be worrying about daddy’s girl) despite the fact that she seems physically and emotionally younger than she is, and she hangs out and drinks in a room of older men till six in the morning. And because I haven’t got a moral leg to stand on if I try to say that I consider her too young for me, I have to recognize there could be a world of mess I don’t want if someone should make a wrong turn. Probably nothing will happen, but I have to remind myself to pay attention.

The bar has been pretty quiet since the smoking ban went into effect. Not so quiet that the bar is empty, but quiet enough that they pretty much don’t need me. I’m partially wondering if I should quit or be let go first, but I was only supposed to stay till Labor Day anyway, and I don’t know where I could get another reasonably decent paying job where I was only scheduled to show up two days a week.

I need to head to the guitar shop for strings and harmonicas, but I am too lazy to go today.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn