At this Japanese restaurant, my wife Cece and I made ourselves comfortable in these massive wooden chairs carved with ancient dragons while we waited for a chef to cook and serve food on the fryer directly in front of us. I grabbed my glass of water and squeezed a few drops on the fryer, but the heat from the metal frame melted it away simultaneously. Recently whenever we went to those restaurants, Cece always got hit on by the chef and always managed to get extra rice with her meal while I got the angry glances from the other six people who didn’t get their fair share of the puffy white substance. I noticed that the other people who sat next to us were obese and their fat managed to lean itself on the dining table like it needed an extra seat or something. Cece noticed as well and looked down at her own stomach, gripping her extra skin and wagging it a little. Like a pulsing being, our fat carefully watched for the chef to arrive. I started looking at the other guests underneath my sunglasses. A small guy who wore a stripped suit much too long for him sat next to me and he couldn’t seem to keep his leg from twitching up and down. I started to feel the need to grab a knife from the chef’s table and slice his foot.He was talking on his cell phone, switching eye contact between his menu and the ceiling and his free hand kept pulling at his hair. “Is he an architect?” He said as he tapped his finger on the tablecloth a couple times, “So this is how he spends visitation days with his son?”
The Asian waitress walked up towards me with a tray full of empty Budlight bottles and a big smile, but her eye slits started to freak me out and I just flinched away. She stood there for a few more seconds and turned her head towards Cece, “Wud’ya want?”
“Do you want this?” Cece pointed to a section in the menu and I glanced at it for a second. Steak & rice. I nodded at her. “Him and I will share that. Thank you. Oh, and a martini for me. Two olives,” Cece looked at me with her eyebrows arched as if I could change her mind, but I shrugged.
“Yeah, make that two.” I rested my hand on Cece’s shoulder and squeezed.
“We’re going to have to go to the gym later tonight.” Cece whispered to me as the waitress walked away.
“It’s already ten o’clock, but whatever.” I unbuttoned my new suit jacket, stuck my hand in the inner pocket, and pulled out a couple of cigarettes. No lighter. What kind of fool forgets their lighter?
The guy who sat next to me shut his cell phone in a swift move and lowered his head. He looked like the kind of guy I had read a story about. The kind of person who would stick his hand in dirty toilet water to reach for something he dropped. His yellow fingernails were caked in what looked like a little dry blood, as if he had been scratching at his scabs. He lifted his head a little and began to massage his neck, wiping away a layer of sweat on his darkened brow. Then he looked at me.
“It’s a bit nerve racking.”
It was a shock to hear him speak because for some reason I had forgotten about my staring problem, and it took me a second to realize he was talking to me. “Nerve racking? What’s nerve racking?” I scratched at my ear as if I had not heard him correctly.
“I got a guy who takes his kid to a tennis match, his own tennis match, and leaves the kid in the bleachers without anyone to watch him. And the kid is six. Six!” He lifted up six fingers and nearly shoved it in my face,” Then he doesn’t feed the kid ‘cause he thinks the portly child needs to lose some weight. But it doesn’t matter ‘cause the kid ran away to his mom while the dad was reading the newspaper.” He had a lisp, but it was barely noticeable.
“He ran home? Wouldn’t he have taken a bus or something?”
He looked at me a little confused, then said, “Yeah, a taxi,” he lifted up his glass, which I couldn’t seem to tell what it was specifically, and sipped, “Well, tonight is so strange already,” then he looked across the room and blurted out, “I nearly ran over a lion with a Volkswagen.”
“What?”
“It was a lion. A big ass cat. It just stared at me as I drove along the road. I didn’t want to stop because it was a lion. I thought I would have gotten killed.”
“This is Boston. Lions don’t roam the back roads.” I tried to interject, but he shrugged.
“So I kept going and by the time I got to him, I managed to swerve the car a little, trying to warn him, you know? And he stood on his hind legs and balanced for the longest time. I didn’t think he wanted me to go by or something, but I just sat there at a complete stop in my car, the engine running and the air vent groaning,” He reached in his leather jacket and pulled out a pack of foreign cigarettes and a lighter, “Smoke was blowing out of his nostrils, bellowing actually, he stood on his hind legs. Then he just let me go. I just drove by him. By then though, he had just laid down in the middle of the road, you see, I had waited quite a long time. No cars were driving by either, I didn’t get it. I thought it was supposed to be a busy intersection and all,” he hit the bottom of the pack of cigarettes, then pulled one out and put it between his lips, another behind his ears and mumbled, “Damn lions. Damn lions and their hind legs.”
The whole time he talked, he leaned his full weight against the table as if he couldn’t hold his body up properly.
“Yeah. Damn lions. I’ve only seen them on the television.” I took the lighter from his hand and the pack of cigarettes from the table to light my own, “Thanks for the cigarette.”
“I’m Patrick.” He moved to put his hand out, but looked at me a little up and down and decided against it.
“Patrick, huh? That’s my name.” I told him as I poured tea into Cece’s glass. He looked at me like it was some big coincidence, his eyes wider than saucers and his face contorted. He must’ve thought no one in the world had such a name, such a name as ‘Patrick’ only serves those who have no other name to get, I always thought.
“What’s your last name?” He asked.
“Hills.”
“Patrick Hills?”
“I changed it when I was younger, used to be Port.”
“Patrick Port. Patrick Port…” He kept repeating it with his finger stuffed into his ear and his gaze upon the ceiling. His mouth was open, his chin bent towards the right side of his cheek.
I put my hand on his chair, “Tell me, Patrick, have you ever seen your grandma scream at the dying patient across from her hospital bed? Or have you ever pretended like you belonged to someone who was gone? Have you ever stuck a firework up a cow’s ass to see how far it would run?”
He shook his head.
“Well then, we don’t have much in common now do we?”
He shook his head and I poured myself a cup of tea.∗